A Poststructural, Feminist Critique of Posthuman Genderlessness in Haraway’s Cyborg
Journal cover Journal of Gender and Power, volume 21, no. 1, year 2024
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Keywords

cyborg
posthumanism
Haraway
poststructural critique
discourse/power

How to Cite

Bierdz, B. (2024). A Poststructural, Feminist Critique of Posthuman Genderlessness in Haraway’s Cyborg. Journal of Gender and Power, 21(1), 9–26. https://doi.org/10.14746/jpg.2024.21.1.1

Abstract

In this article, I want to begin to question the grammar, the understanding, the illocution, and the theoretical nature of genderlessness, in Haraway’s posthuman turn. Furthermore, I want to bring to the surface a complication of the understandings of power within Haraway put into a more significant and more critical conversation with poststructural work that more fully grapples with productivity and comes to understand the discursive insinuations of gender and sexuality as simultaneously productive and violent - a mixture that should not be reduced to liberation or justness as a procession of/with the negation of gender. Even more so, within the same form of critique, I will also make the argument that specific posthumanisms such as Haraway’s invocation not only disregard the productivity of gender as an essential critical space to grapple with but also that posthuman literature remands a reality yet topples the very concept that imbibes reality with substance. In particular, once we name gender, there is not only violence in imagining the nonexistence of gender (the absence of gender as a means of realizing/being), but also such imaginings and impossibilities descend further into a conundrum of attempting to realize a reality that no longer holds any substance of reality qua reality. 

https://doi.org/10.14746/jpg.2024.21.1.1
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