Not One of One, One of Many

Twenty-five years after the publication of Donna Haraway’s seminal “A Cyborg Manifesto,” and feminist scholars are still grappling with the concept of the “cyborg” and its predisposition for “coalition-building.” Rebecca Richards, then, elucidates the performance and the function of the cyborg in her reconfiguration of Haraway’s concept for the twenty-first century as feminists continue to heed the call “to actively reclaim cyborg identities through the use of irony and blasphemy for their own political purposes” (4). Language, as a technology, affords women the ability to metaphorically disassemble and reassemble their bodies in their ironic attempts to achieve status in a male-dominated political public sphere. Citing Queen Elizabeth I of England as a prototypical iron lady, Richards demonstrates how the Queen “reconfigures herself from female to male in order to rally the troops,” engaging “in a rhetorical performance that uses the technology of language and naming to create herself into something that she does not embody” (5): A King, a male.

Thus, like all of Richards’s archetypal “iron ladies,” Queen Elizabeth I becomes “both a part of the dominant structure of patriarchy and an active political agent” (6). Through language, she blasphemously reassembles herself into a man, and, if Richards had cited more of the Queen’s famous speech at Tilbury, one could see that the reassembly does not cease with her claiming the crown of the King. In her last line to her subjects, Queen Elizabeth I reclaims her status as Queen and its inscribed gender in her use of the pronoun “We:” “I know already, for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and We do assure you on a word of a prince, they shall be duly paid.” Thus, the Queen’s linguistic blasphemy manifests itself not only in her masculinized reassembly of herself, but also in her integration of her newly acquired male “parts” with her extent female “parts.” Acting as both King and Queen, Elizabeth was both complicit with dominant structure and acting against it.

However, as this case and Richards’ reflections signify, “[r]econstructing the feminine body through ironic language in order to become a qualified leader is not a new rhetorical construct” (8). An unfair historical precedent has been set; “women are always already a hybrid identity when they enter into political space” (8) because this space has predominantly been occupied by men. Women, then, must, through language, enter into a transgender discourse of complicity that transmits them through the glass ceiling so that maybe they can attempt to break it from both sides.

The political sphere, though, is plagued with homogenization. The electorate do not want a multifaceted leader. They want a strong leader, but, ironically, they want that strong leader to adhere to a milquetoast, hackneyed archetype: a genderless man. The heterogeneous electorate, then, can imbue this political figure with their own qualities and desires in their pursuit of a fallacious coalition-building.

As Keya Maitra notes, the Feminist struggle for agency has encountered a similar problem. Historically, feminist rhetoric has essentialized struggle and choice, fixing the terms to notions of “women’s consciousness rather than a woman’s consciousness” (368). Solidarity is a great goal, but not when it erases difference. For a time, Haraway’s cyborg operated negatively. It erased difference in that all socialist-feminists technologized their bodies. However, Maitra’s discussion of  “The anatman or no-abiding-self theory” helps one to see how the reclamation of a cyborgian identity can lead to authentic coalition building through “the application of the reasoning about the impermanence of everything to the realm of individual selves” (363). Always in a state of disassembly and reassembly, always in a state of becoming, the cyborg ontology allows feminists to achieve a solidarity in similar struggle, but to build a multifaceted coalition that does not reduce Feminism to the same struggle.

For that is not true coalition-building, the kind for which a cyborgian consciousness allows. However, as Richards concedes, “Haraway’s cyborg identity” has the potential to both “trap women within the real, lived contradictions of identity and also obscure difference” (20). Thus, despite its ability to ameliorate the restrictive double-bind, claiming a cyborg identity can lead to homogenization—of one’s own difference and the differences of others. In line with Jarratt’s thinking, the cyborg does not operate like a metaphor of substitution, one cyborg standing in for the entirety of women; it instead operates metonymically, many cyborgs contributing to the ultimate reality of the socialist-feminist cyborg ontology of every woman.