Reading Response on Harraway and Halberstam

One of the main points Harraway makes in her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” is how gender has too much to do with our identity. There is nothing that means “being female”. Rather than picking what they like, people are being forced into preconceived notions of what being a female should be like. She brings in the cyborg by comparing these previous statements about feminism to how nothing is truly “organic” or “artificial.” With all the medical and technological advances out there, the natural and the metal goes hand in hand to help us progress as a society. To make a similar point, Halberstam analyzes the analogy of Eve and the apple. The forbidden fruit has provided Apple with the perfect logo to represent power and network. Eve taking a bite, has turning into “byte” as in computer units of data, which is what Eve sought after originally to quench her curiosity. While eve and the apple represent the relationship between man, woman and god originally, the female cyborg now represents “a mass cultural composition.”

I intend to be a doctor and Harraway’s analysis really stuck with me. She is right in saying that with technology and humans working so closely together, one cannot say which is which anymore. Components of both work together towards a common goal and the strengths of both help achieve that goal. People once used to be afraid of having technology more powerful than us but we are slowly letting go of that fear of lack of control and embracing the future. Similarly, we must not be afraid to drop labels just because it is all we have ever known. We need to see what we like, what we are good at and let that determine our choices, not taking a specific path because that is what has been done in the past.