I was just wondering what people thought of Haraway's discussion of Richard Gordon's concept of the "homework economy" and what it means to be feminized and if anyone thought it paralled to any other concept we've talked about before.
Gordon describes the female, or being feminized, as anything "made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex" (166).
Earlier, Haraway describes the cyborg as "a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self" (163). But since the cyborg is something that Haraway argues to be gender-neutral, I found this somewhat confusing that he intertwines part of his depiction of the cyborg with what it is meant to be feminized. Any thoughts?
I was also a bit confused by the blurred lines of feminism/feminizing vs. gender-neutral issues in the Haraway, but I think I may have sorted through it. See if this makes sense:
I think Haraway uses the cyborg as a way to transgress the traditional dichotomhy of the male/female world of the pre-postmodern. She--as someone else said in another post--is very open and upfront about the flaws of her blasphemous theory, perhaps in the way that other authors have discredited the system of their writing and then wrote it anyway. Because Haraway is interested in approaching feminism with a totally new slant, it makes sense that she would turn to something--like the cyborg--which has no roots or origin in the "Western sense" ("myth of original unity," "psychoanalysis and Marxism," etc.) I saw connections here to the "metanarrative of the end of metanarratives." This paradox seems to be ok with Haraway, in that while the cyborg is gender-neutral, it IS more feminized due to its "disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self" (163).
Where to go from here? I think Haraway wants to, as she concludes, (a) escape the dualism (of the totalizing theories), and (b) acknowledge the social responsibilities of science and technology. Haraway writes that she would "rather be a cyborg than a goddess," which points to the "break" to something new (or else, a desire for that break) that we have debated in previous classes.