Cyborg and The American Feminist

What I find interesting about this article is the cyborg metaphor, referring to women as cyborg was very interesting. I mean if you think about it women were cyborgs in their pasts. They were half machine-the part of them that did everything that they were told without question, and half human –the part of them that took the time out to enjoy the little pleasures in life. This for to think about everything we’ve been learning in class this semester. And I can see how the cyborg metaphor could be interpreted into every reading we’ve done thus far. In 1984, the people were a product of their society, not the other way around. In Planet of the Apes, the humans had become the monkeys and the monkeys had become the “humans”. No one expressed the true essence of the human revolutionist.

“But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it.” The emphasis here is on the machinery of one person, not giving a true essence of “a dream,” take the marriage between a man and a woman. The man walks around as the head of the household and the woman his puppet, he believes that he really is the man of the house but only because the woman won’t reach for the suppressed feelings. But once she, once the cyborg diminishes and the woman break loose the man’s “dream” will all have been in his head.

I think that’s what I found more interesting about the cyborg metaphor, the mixing the mixing of human and machine, the emptiness that brings to social beings. This got me to think of the factory in that youtube clip we were watching a couple of weeks ago. The way the men were hurdled into whatever factory position they had and just stayed there, doing whatever it was they were doing for however long they did it for. Just like the woman of the past. The woman who were the mantelpieces for their husbands, the ones you looked at but never spoke to directly, those sentimental cyborgs.