Zugl.: Frankfurt (Main), Univ., Magisterarbeit, 2002

This thesis uses Cybernetic Fruit: A Posthuman Fairytale (a show directed by Shauna MacDonald and Nico Wood) to explore notions of posthumanism. The thesis of this project is that every being possesses beingness (one could say, a soul), be it raccoon, raspberry, or rock; that nothing is perfect or ever can be, for perfection and imperfection (like order and disorder) are human constructions spun from human vantage points and seen with a human-level of resolution; that collaboration fosters propagation of a posthuman discourse and compassionate behavior; and finally, that staging philosophical inquiry, in the flesh and for the community, is a potent methodology for germinating new theoretical fruit.

As science races to keep up with science fiction, many scientists are beginning to believe that the next step in human evolution will be a combination of human and machine and look a lot like something out of Star Trek. The constant pursuit of perfection is a part of the human condition, but if we begin to stretch beyond the natural human form can we still consider ourselves human? Transhumanism and posthumanism are only theories for now, but they are theories that threaten to permanently displace the human race, possibly pushing it into extinction. This thesis will look at the theories of transhumanism and posthumanism through the lens of science fiction and ask the question of whether or not technology holds the key to humanities next evolutionary step or its demise.

This dissertation is a performative exploration of experience within our technoscientific--that is, technologically and scientifically saturated--world. Drawing upon posthumanism and cyborg studies and working through specific, mutated versions of performative inquiry and phenomenology, I aim to encourage creative public participation in technoscientific discourse. That is, I apply an adapted method (cyborg phenomenology) to my own staged personae performances of nonhuman entities in order to investigate technoscientific experience from a less anthrocentric perspective. My goal is to interrogate my performance experience in order to better understand the dynamics of agency and relationship within our technologically infused world, and to employ performance and performative writing as pedagogical tools for educating others about these dynamics. This document might be best read as an example of performative inquiry as a useful approach to the study of technoscience and its consequences. As a whole, this dissertation is a call for, theorization with, and performative demonstration of artful participation in the multi-layered discourses of technology and science that impact the lives of all beings in our world. It is an experiential experiment, an exploration of possibility, and a beginning.

In this thesis, I examine traditional philosophical arguments concerning the disabled body. I contribute to disability theory by focusing on disabled individuals who employ the use of advanced prosthetics, and by looking at the implications of said prosthetics on disabled individuals’ lived experiences and the ideology of disability. I join other thinkers in finding current disability theory inadequate in its attempts to accurately describe disability and aid disabled individuals to flourish and resist discrimination and marginalization. I suggest that advanced prosthetic use by disabled persons results in the overt cyborgification of the disabled body. Furthermore, I suggest that the cyborgification of the disabled body requires us to re-evaluate the binary of ability vs. disability, and requires us to stop essentializing the disabled body as disabled. I suggest therefore, that these new technologies should be considered morally permissible, and respond to possible objections from the standpoints of fairness and from concerns more broadly regarding transhumanism. Ultimately, questions remain as to any regulatory schemes that should possibly be put in place regarding advanced prosthetics to either limit or promote access to advanced prosthetic technologies for various groups, and to what degree disabled persons should be able to draw on medical resources to access advanced prosthetics. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / In this thesis I aim at unpacking the ways in which traditional theories about disability fail to view the disabled body in an accurate way. I examine the advance of prosthetic technologies as they relate to disability and suggest that in this way the disabled person is a very good example of a cyborg. I then apply cyborg ideologies to ideas of disability and suggest the cyborgification of the disabled body is beneficial both from a flourishing and an ideological standpoint. I finally consider and respond to some objections against advanced prosthetics and transhumanism more broadly.

No description available.

Le cyborg est un avatar de ce que permet la science-fiction lorsqu’elle s’offre comme terrain où développer une heuristique des identités genrées. Donna Haraway, dans le Manifeste cyborg, a relevé le potentiel de liberté discursive que promettait cette figure romanesque. Il m’apparaît que, depuis sa fictionnalisation puis sa théorisation dans les années 1980 et 1990, le cyborg a muté au sein de l’entreprise science-fictionnelle littéraire. Le Silence de la Cité d’Élisabeth Vonarburg et Le Goût de l’immortalité de Catherine Dufour présentent des personnages dont la cyborgitude problématise les questions identitaires du genre humain, à travers une écriture spécifique, affectée par les technologies. Mon analyse des procédés scripturaux s’effectue de pair avec une analyse gender, ce qui me permet de mieux saisir la fictionnalisation toujours changeante des cyborgs dans les oeuvres de Vonarburg et de Dufour. Ces cyborgs déconstruisent les frontières des systèmes binaires traditionnels, en explorant les possibilités trans-genres et trans-espèces que permettent les métamorphoses de leurs corps excentriques. En tant que représentations fantasmées de désirs autrement inavouables, les cyborgs science-fictionnels témoignent du malaise inhérent de couples comme homme/femme, humain/animal ou organique/artificiel. / The cyborg is an avatar of what science fiction can produce as a territory where heuristics of gender identities are developed. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway reveals the potential of discursive liberty provided by the cyborg’s narrative figure. It appears to me that since its fictionalization as well as its theorization throughout the 1980’s and the 1990’s, the cyborg has evolved within science fiction. Élisabeth Vonarburg’s Le Silence de la Cité and Catherine Dufour’s Le Goût de l’immortalité present characters whose cyborg nature explores questions of humankind’s identities through a certain writing affected by technology. My study of these writing processes is conducted through the analysis of gender. This allows me to better understand the ever-changing fictionalization of the cyborgs found within Vonarburg’s and Dufour’s work. These cyborgs deconstruct the borders of traditional binarist systems by experimenting the trans-genders and trans-species possibilities their excentric bodies enable. As fantasized representations of desires otherwise unmentionable, the science fictional cyborgs attest the inherent uneasiness of couples such as man/woman, human/animal or organic/artificial.

Orientador: Danilo Saretta Verissimo / Banca: Leonardo Lemos de Souza / Banca: Josiane Cristina Bocchi / Resumo: A presente pesquisa investiga a noção de corpo que perpassa os trabalhos de Donna Haraway a partir do seu conceito de ciborgue e suas implicações no campo dos estudos feministas e de gênero. Ao explorar a lógica do mito do ciborgue, Haraway propõe a superação das aporias relacionadas às dicotomias do pensamento ocidental. Donna Haraway apresenta novas faces das tecnologias do corpo que estão sendo substituídas por arranjos completamente diferentes e que provocam profundos impactos, por exemplo, na cisão tradicional entre corpo e mente. O ciborgue, na qualidade de organismo híbrido entre máquina e humano, confunde as fronteiras do orgânico e inorgânico, situando o corpo como estrutura pós-gênero. Nessa relação corpo-máquina de Haraway, é indiscernível o papel do agente e do receptor: não está claro o que é mente e o que é corpo. A tecnocultura vem transformando corpos, na mesma medida em que estes modificam os artefatos da tecnologia. É nessa dinâmica que Haraway propõe a necessidade de compreender a complexidade do ciborgue / Abstract: The present research investigates the notion of body that pervades the works of Donna Haraway from its concept of cyborg and its implications in the field of feminist and gender studies. In exploring the logic of the cyborg myth, Haraway proposes to overcome the aporias related to the dichotomies of Western thought. Donna Haraway introduces new aspecs of body technologies that are being replaced by completely different arrangements which cause profound impacts, for example, in the traditional division between body and mind. The cyborg, as a hybrid organism of machine and human, confounds the boundaries of organic and inorganic, placing the body as a post-gender structure. In Haraway's body-machine relationship, the role of agent and receiver is indiscernible: it is unclear what is mind and what is body.Technoculture has been transforming bodies to the extent that they modify the artifacts of technology. It is in this dynamic that Haraway proposes the necessity in understanding the complexity of the cyborg / Mestre

Commercial gestational surrogacy, also called contract pregnancy, involves privately contracting a biogenetically curated pregnancy using IVF. It distinguishes itself from what is commonly considered 'natural' in procreation, in that the human fetuses it produces are formally entered into a legal unit other than the family of the gestator. My work here contends that this practice is best thought, not in isolation, but in the context of social reproduction more generally and as a central component of future geographies of fetal manufacture that would treat (all) pregnancy as work. This project demands, for me, a critical revisiting of theoretic texts like Mary O'Brien's The Politics of Reproduction (O'Brien 1981). But, in my reading, O'Brien's race-blind gynocentrism doomed her to miss the ensemble of practices - forms of surrogacy among them - that have already long been engaged in the sublation of reproductive labour she professes (yet defers until after the revolution). In geography as in O'Brien, the political horizon of reproductive justice theorised by Black and/or Marxist feminists since the 1970s (Davis 1981; Ross et al. 2016), has been neglected. In assembling materials for a future rewriting of "The Politics of Reproduction" in the context of geography -a trans-inclusive uterine geography- I draw on this canon of reproductive justice first. I question the assumption that there can ever be an absence of surrogacy (i.e. an absence of assistance, co-production, or "sym-poesis" (Haraway 2016)) in babymaking. Thus I explore the synthetic substance of surrogacy synthetically, using a lens I call 'gestational labour': a conceptual hybrid of the postwork perspective on care (Weeks 2011; Federici 1975), the Marxist-feminist concept 'clinical labour' (Cooper and Waldby 2014) and cyborgicity (Haraway 1991). Deploying 'gestational labour' together with a commitment to solidarity vis-à-vis surrogates, I analyse recent events, pro- and anti-surrogacy discourses (both clinical-capitalist and activist), and trends in critical literature that illuminate an immanent 'uterine geography' (or fail to). I aim to demonstrate that the technophobic anticommodification critique of surrogacy's detractors is ultimately as insufficient as the class-blind ('philanthrocapitalist') feminism of surrogacy's sales representatives. My point is that so-called natural forms of the family are themselves already 'technologies of reproductive assistance' differently mediated in the market. Our task is unfortunately neither a matter of simply saying 'stop', nor of pretending that the satisfaction people feel in "mutually advantageous exploitation" (Panitch 2013), on such an unequal playing-field, is somehow 'enough'.Surrogate gestators sometimes show us glimpses of 'mothering against motherhood'. They expose gestation as a cyborg form of labour-power, which is to say, collective human activity always already mixed up with 'technologies' on the one hand and strange more-than-human organisms on the other. Pitting surrogacy against surrogacy, I propose keeping our understanding of what surrogacy could mean radically open. On this basis, I point readers and potential future collaborators towards new kinds of sym-poetic geographical practice: surrogacies - or, engagements with reproductive politics in the broadest sense - which I think our historic moment urgently requires.

During the last thirty years, millions of Americans have come into contact with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), if not through their own diagnosis or the diagnosis of a friend or family member, then through the perennial and occasionally passionate debate this behavioral disorder has inspired in U.S. popular culture since its inauguration in 1980. The competing claims of this debate are many and varied, and they revolve around a number of subtle distinctions that have emerged from diverse discourses and institutional histories. It is among the aims of this project to excavate and clarify these multiple, often contradictory and disjunctive claims by resituating them within their disparate (indeed, still emerging) rhetorical and historical contexts. The central questions animating this debate tend to advocate for one position or another, within the limitations of a single field and its defining questions, making it nearly impossible to gain a balanced or nuanced understanding of ADHD. Moreover, dominant accounts fail to consider the diagnosis within a wider socio-cultural and historical context. This project therefore analyzes this under-theorized behavioral disorder from a rhetorical and cultural perspective. In doing so, it aims to go further than other critiques or defenses of the diagnosis and its chemical therapies. It does so by bringing discourse analysis to bear on ADHD, thereby illuminating how this assemblage of rhetorics and questions - centered as they are on the Mind/Body continuum - constitute what Michel Foucault refers to as biopower - or a process of social control exercised on and through the technological manipulation of life itself. Considering it from such a perspective will allow us to situate ADHD within modern debates over the definition of consciousness, a debate that is inseparable from the history of technology and the technological systems in which minds and bodies are thoroughly implicated. This dissertation demonstrates that a biopolitics of consciousness structures the emergence of and the debate surrounding ADHD and the administration of stimulant drugs for the purpose of managing attensity.