ABSTRACT
New digital and biogenetic technologies – in the shape of media such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, genetic modification and technological prosthetics – signal a ‘post-human’ future in which the boundaries between humanity, technology and nature have become ever more malleable. We are more aware than ever that what we call ‘nature’ is open to manipulation by varieties of biotechnology such as gene therapy. Computer-assisted technologies transform perceptions of body, time and space. Dreams of merging humans and machines into new intelligent cybernetic organisms leave the realm of science fiction and enter everyday reality. As the taken-for-grantedness of what it means to be human shifts and blurs, we might consider how myth, literature and popular culture have furnished the western imagination with a gallery of fantastic and monstrous creatures on the margins of human and non-human. One contemporary example is that of the cyborg who serves as a metaphor of the various ways in which the contemporary west is currently experiencing the hybridization of human nature. One version of the cyborg popular with cultural theorists – especially feminists – has been the vision articulated in Haraway’s ‘A manifesto for cyborgs’ (Haraway 1991a). Termed here as Haraway’s ‘cyborg writing’, it expresses important values about gender, politics and technology; but while the cyborg subverts many of the dualisms of western culture, Haraway’s comment that she would ‘rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ inadvertently reinforces one final, often unspoken dichotomy of modernity: that between religion and the secular. Therefore the implications for feminist theory and praxis of a recovery of the goddess are explored. To concur with Haraway, such a project is prone to an inversion of traditional gender stererotypes, enclosing women in a 303realm of unreconstructed ‘nature’ at the expense of empowering them to engage with new technologies.
Other models of ‘becoming divine’, however, promise more radical reconfigurations of the religious symbolic of western modernity, a symbolic that has sanctioned the equation of technology with the disavowal of embodied finitude in the name of a quest for transcendence. Irigaray’s concept of the ‘sensible transcendental’ (1993b) refuses the simplistic distinctions between sacred/secular, spiritual/material and divine/human. Far from representing a female version of the patriarchal sky-god, or even a bucolic, romanticized ‘mother-goddess’, therefore, Irigaray’s model of ‘becoming divine’ offers an exciting addition to the critical and reconstructive resources of cyberfeminism.
