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so various and in some cases, so subtle as significantly to complicate this stock account . . . . As a group, therefore, monsters were united not so much by physical deformity or eccentricity as by their common inability to fit or be fitted into the category of the ordinarya category that was particularly liable to cultural and moral construction. (Ritvo 1997, 133134) |
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In a practical sense, this is a way to talk about what happens to any outsider. For example, it could refer to experience in the science classroom when someone comes in with no experience of formal science, or to the transgendered person who does not fit cultural gender dichotomies (Stone 1991). It is not simply a matter of the strangeness, but of the politics of the mapping between the anomalies and the forms of strangeness-marginality. |
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In accepting and understanding the monsters and the borderlands there may be an intuition of healing and power, as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) shows us in her brilliant and compassionate writing. In her essay, "La conscientia de la mestiza," the doubleness and the ambiguity of the male-female, straight-gay, Mexican-American borderland becomes the cauldron for a creative approach to surviving, a rejection of simplistic purity and of essentialist categories (1987). At the same time, she constantly remembers the physical and political suffering involved in these borderlands, refusing a romanticized version of marginality that often plagued the early sociological writers on the topic. |
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The path traced by Anzaldúa is not an easy healing and certainly not a magic bullet but a complex and collective twisted journey, a challenge to easy categories and simple solutions. It is, in fact, a politics of ambiguity and multiplicitythis is the real possibility of the cyborg. For scholars, this is necessarily an exploration that exists in interdisciplinary borderlands and crosses the traditional divisions between people, things, and technologies of representation. |
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Engineered versus Organic Boundary Objects |
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Would it be possible to design boundary objects? To engineer them in the service of creating a better society? On the surface, this idea is tempting. In some sense, this has been the goal of progressive education, multiculturalism in the universities, and the goal of the design of information systems that may be accessed by people with very different points of view. |
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Most schools now are lousy places to grow boundary objects because they both strip away the ambiguity of the objects of learning and impose or ignore membership categories (except artificial hierarchi- |
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