Cecilia sberg: The Arena of the Body: The Cyborg and Feminist Views on Biology,

Cybernetics, the science of feedback and regulation, of engineered control and communication in living organisms as well as in stealth airplanes, was applied to the human body and to society in general. The term cybernetics is derived from the Greek word for pilot, rudder, or steersman: kybernetes. The term 'government' is also rooted in kybernetes. Cybernetics then is about steering genetic or computer generated information. Kline and Clynes envisaged the cyborg as a body containing an integrated

artificial feedback system. The feedback system was the key to controlling these
cyborgs, these man-machines or animal-machines that incarnated the super-enhanced hybridity of flesh and technology.

In short, cyborg technology is life-prolonging and maintains the rickety structure of the human body (zelfde als humanisme?).
The cyborg vision has led to a radical redefinition of bodies, identities, and the scientific discourse of biology in general. Feminists have high stakes in such changes and the cyborg, consequently, came to represent a gamut of possibilities in academic feminist writing.

gender as a social construction in order to counter the blatant biological determinism that held sway. In de Beauvoir's famous words, 'One is not born a woman, one becomes one' (1988 [1949]). As Donna Haraway observed, 'all the modern feminist meanings of gender have [their] roots' in this famous phrase (Haraway, 1991b: 131).
The culture of modern science that originated in seventeenth-century Europe did not simply exclude women as subjects of knowledge production in research, it was defined in defiance of women (Noble, 1992: xiv). Commentaar op Habermas? The control of and power over women's bodies, especially with respect to fertility and sexuality, was a fundamental issue in Firestone's thinking. The problem was located within women's own bodies and the application of a neutral technology would bring an end to biological motherhood. Sexual equality would become a real possibility. Dit maakt een vrouw tot een man. Een vroege radicaal feminist: Radical feminism posits the theory that, due to patriarchy, women have come to be viewed as the "other" to the male norm and as such have been systematically oppressed and marginalized. They also believe that the way to deal with patriarchy and oppression of all kinds is to address the underlying causes of these problems through revolution. Geen voorbeeld van vrouwendenken, een eigen manier van zijn (Cultureel feminisme). It is an ideology of a "female nature" or "female essence" that attempts to revalidate what cultural feminists consider undervalued female attributes.[1] It is also a theory that commends the difference of women from men. Is Firestone een transhumanist? Transhumanisme is een recente vorm van speculatieve filosofie die probeert om de door de natuur gestelde grenzen van het menselijke bestaan te doorbreken.

Feminists thus tend to approach the sciences either as a determining force (ecofeminists and FINRRAGE) or as neutral and value-free (Firestone).
Haraway's cyborg signals more than just the joint merging of biology and technology. The cyborg bridges the illusive distinction between the human body and other biological organisms, between the virtual and the real (Haraway, 1991a; 1992). There was a potential

in the figuration of the cyborg. Haraway held that it was impossible to sustain the
nature/culture dichotomy, due to the cyborgian nature of lived everyday reality. Other dichotomies, such as the feminist sex and gender distinction, would collapse along with it. In that sense, Haraway's cyborg signalled an immense feminist challenge, because it provoked social constructivist assumptions about gender. Haraway's cyborg brought on a merge of 'hard' science and 'soft' scholarship. Her work is a serious effort to move beyond assumed disciplinary distinctions in order to deal with hybrids, complexities, and border zones. Imagination is reality production in process (33). Ironic manifesto. For Haraway the cyborg was not so much about the visible technological appendixes of a body, as about the way in which science and technology had managed to become such an intricate part of the way we live and make sense of our lives. The cyborg provided the possibility of getting around romantic ideas about the natural and women's alleged relationship to nature as an unquestioned given. the cyborg emphasizes the connection between technology and women as- already made. Technology in this respect is understood to encompass more than just hardware and metallic machinery: it also includes the discursive modes of production and complicated ways of living. Conventionally, scientists should deal with real nature and scholars with culture. But feminists such as Haraway mess things up to the dismay of both traditional scientists

and disciplinarity puritans in the humanities.