Making a Deal with the Patriarchal Devil: Cybernetic Feminism on the Global Stage

Richards’ analysis of cyborg identities on the global political stage helped illustrate just how broadly we can construe the cyborg ontology. Even though the theory was precipitated by the 20^th Century proliferation of computers, Haraway points to how humanity has blended with our technologies—something that began when we first developed writing systems. But Richards isn’t directly concerned with technology as much as she’s concerned with how our political systems

have been a) instantiated by technology, b) imbued with power dynamics, and c) privileged male power. Thus, American presidential politics represents patriarchal technology as it has shunned the body and vaunted a cult of masculinity; subsequently, when women enter into this realm, they must become cybernetic, adopting the cultural scripts of technological patriarchal politics, fulfilling the trope of the “iron lady,” a term that simultaneously evokes the machines of war and a feminized body. However, where this gets complicated is the fact that this isn’t a zero-sum game—a female politician isn’t required to evoke this trope, as much as she has the autonomy to exercise this trope at will depending upon the rhetorical situation. This, of course, can have positive and negative consequences—female leaders are required to maintain fractured identities and held to a mythical male standard of a unified, solitary identity. But ultimately, Richards is hopeful that the use of cyborg identity by female bodies can be liberating and empowering. In a sense, the cyborg identity allows cybernetic individuals more liberty to act both within and against the system—seeing how the incorporation of the dominant discourse can ultimately be beneficial for the cause of feminism. Put succinctly, the cyborg feminist must make a deal with the patriarchal devil in order to defeat him.

We see this deployment of cybernetic feminism in Kuehl’s article on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UDHR is a document that was approved by the United Nations and a division of the UN is devoted to investigating human rights violations—meaning that a lot of the discourse on human rights has been instantiated by masculinist political technologies, and as such has mitigated the importance of bodies and the social rights of individuals, critiques of the document that Kuehl mentions. But, Keuhl’s overarching goal is to show how the document might actually be working within a feminist paradigm. For one, Eleanor Roosevelt—an iron lady in her own right—was influential in the creation of the document. But what Keuhl ultimately focuses on is how the social rights of individuals are framed in the metaphors of procreation and family—metaphors that seems much more focused on the biological, despite being housed in a “technological” context. We see this cybernetic juxtaposition in the second stanza of the UDHC that contrasts the “barbarous acts” of the early twentieth century (conducted via masculine political technologies) with the overarching goal of “the advent of a world” that abhors such atrocity (172). This advent of the world represents the feminist liberatory goal of the UDHC that is couched in a biological metaphor in stark juxtaposition to masculine atrocity. Keuhl also points to the subordinate metaphor of the “Human Family” as another biological metaphor that is operating within this international logic, re-framing the nations of the world as engaged in more than just civic relationships. Keuhl reminds us “People do not belong to a family because of rational thought, but instead, because of ethnic ties, [or] blood relations…”; bringing in the idea of family pushes us beyond the cold mechanisms of politics and gets us to biology. In that way, we are seeing how both technological and biological discousres are at play on the global stage, illustrating the cybernetic frame put forth by Richards in her analysis of the Iron Lady trope.