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grotesque. Imagining the relationships between people and things such that they are truly interpenetrated means rethinking human nature itself. It is reminiscent somehow of bad science fiction. Yet analytically, it is a crucial notion for understanding technoscience and classifications as artifacts. |
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How can we think of cyborgs in the analysis presented in this chapter? The mapping among things, people, and membership provides a way in. Anzaldúa's work on borderlands rejects any notion of purity based on membership in a single, pristine racial, sexual, or even religious group (1987). Haraway's work pushes this analysis a bit further. In speaking of borderlands, both those concerning race and those concerning the boundaries between humans and things, she employs the term ''monsters." |
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A monster occurs when an object refuses to be naturalized (Haraway 1992). A borderland occurs when two communities of practice coexist in one person (Anzaldúa 1987). Borderlands are the naturalized home of those monsters known as cyborgs. If we read monsters as persistent resisters of transparency-naturalization within some community of practice, then the experience of encountering an anomaly (such as that routinely encountered by a newcomer to science, for instance most women or men of color) may be keyed back into membership. A person realizes that they do not belong when what appears like an anomaly to them seems natural for everyone else. Over time, collectively, such outsider experiences (the quintessential stranger) can become monstrous in the collective imagination. History and literature are full of the demonizing of the stranger. Here is what Haraway (1992) has called "the promise of monsters" and one of the reasons that for years they have captured the feminist imagination.
54 Frankenstein peering in the warmly lit living room window; Godzilla captured and shaking the bars of his cage are intuitions of exile and madness, and served as symbols of how women's resistance and wildness have been imprisoned and reviled, kept just outside. |
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In a more formal sense, monsters and freaks are also ways of speaking about the constraints of the classifying and (often) dichotomizing imagination. Ritvo (1997) writes of the proliferation of monsters in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, linking it to a simultaneous increase in public awareness of scientific classification and hunger for the exotic. As classification schemes proliferated, so did monsters: |
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Monsters were understood, in the first instance, as exceptions to or violations of natural law. The deviations that characterized monsters, however, were both |
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