Wherein Haraway's Cyborgs Outbreed Rosin's Plastic Women

Donna Haraway
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (orig. 1985)
in Manifestly Haraway (2016)

A definition:

Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity. (16)

Actually, the "chemical nuclear" sense of "affinity" has for me connotations not of choice but of absolute (or perhaps simply intractible) physical laws. The opposite approach would mean ascribing free will and consciousness to inanimate molecules. But as for human politics, the word and usage seem quite apt.

Once again, it is awfully hard to ignore Fromm's insight into the matriarchal origins of Blood-and-Soil affinities. Perhaps then affiliation by choice (hence entailing conditional rather than unconditional affinity) is one patriarchal value worth salvaging?

The feminization of poverty—generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by the expectations that women's wages will not be matched by a male income for the support of children—has become an urgent focus. The causes of various woman-headed households are a function of race, class, or sexuality; but their increasing generality is a ground for coalitions of women on many issues. That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new. (39-40)

A missed opportunity, as is customary in all things Feminist, to deconstruct/interrogate this notion of "sustain[ing] daily life," which would of course immediately render it a far less appealing reference to drop in the heat of rhetorical battle. This is because sustenance-as-cross-to-bear is also integrated, but in a decidedly NOT-new way, with natural/singular identifications (i.e. Blood and Soil) as given on p. 18. Willfully-chosen affinity group parenting of an optimally scaled cohort is an obvious solution to the burdensomeness of one- or two-parent household-based arrangements, which even when perfectly equitable impose an unacceptable sacrifice on both parents. But this presupposes an affinity, a will, a choice, and so forth; i.e. a rejection of the "naturaliz[ed] matrix" on both the level of the big tribe (race/nation) and the little one (family).

In light of various "integrations" of feminized home life with feminized work life, and of the overall "redefini[tion]" of work "as both literally female and feminized," is it not telling that the precious few ascendant "new areas of high skill" are marked by a near-obsession with collaborative structures, maximally open physical work space designs, etc.? Certainly there is a sort of total availability associated with such Creative Class sectors, which indeed dovetails with the wider postindustrial "mockery of a limited workday," but the turnover seldom betokens "vulnerability" (in fact the job-hoppers customarily have the leverage). This is the mediation that the children of the liberal high-bourgeoisie have effected with the postindustrial new-normal; we know that historically this demographic may have an inconsistent moral compass, but also very good taste and a keen eye for their own self-interest. Hence while I myself am not too inclined to work in groups, as a matter of Affinity and willfullness, it seems to me that the system gain of small-group organization as against Going It Alone is the clincher in favor of group parenting. But in how many cases even among the High Creatives does domestic life mirror/"integrate" with work life? Is this perhaps a bridge too far, even for them? Here is either a test of or a crack in this notion of "integration" of post-industrial and (post-?)domestic production.

The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image. Feminists have recently claimed that women are given to dailiness, that women more than men somehow sustain daily life and so have a privileged epistemological position potentially. There is a compelling aspect to this claim, one that makes visible unvalued female activity and names it as the ground of life.

But the ground of life? What about all the ignorance of women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and skill? What about men's access to daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to take them apart, to play? What about other embodiments? Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. (66)

This is the only passage here where the cyborg trope seems essential to the broad objectives of the essay; otherwise it seems decidedly inessential, ham-handed, and attention-seeking; perhaps at once an adademic branding maneuver and an opening for a Theorist to play at Writing. There is, having said all of that, a certain logic in the metaphor as it applies to questions of daily competences and their residual+ongoing genderedness. To fully self-actualize, we must actively construct ourselves.

[from a notebook, probably late 2017]