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.

Cette dissertation porte sur les liens entre les pratiques politiques et la construction des savoirs, académiques et scientifiques, explorés dans le mouvement féministe et les « Études féministes » contemporains, notamment anglo-américaines (women studies), depuis les années 1970. Dans la première partie, après avoir introduit le sens que donnent à la pratique « politique » certaines traditions féministes, nous présentons différentes entrées des critiques féministes des savoirs scientifiques : la critique de l'exclusion historique des femmes de la production des savoirs et des sciences et l’examen critique des préjugés sexistes intervenant dans les contenus et les critères de validation des connaissances (théorie de la connaissance ou épistémologie). La deuxième partie de la thèse propose une lecture d’auteures anglophones qui ont abordé les sciences à partir d’une perspective féministe et qui ont développé des propositions qui encouragent à la reconnaissance active du caractère partiel et situé de toute construction de savoir. Nous abordons, plus précisément : les théories sur l’incidence épistémologique de points de vue et positionnements féministes (standpoints) ; le travail de la philosophe Sandra Harding spécialement sa conceptualisation d’une « objectivité forte » ; et la conception des « savoirs situés » dans le travail de l’historienne de la biologie Donna Haraway. Ces propositions de politiques du savoir sont aussi abordées dans l’optique de montrer les problèmes spécifiques qu’elles rencontrent quand elles s’adressent aux savoirs de la tradition scientifique expérimentale. Une question traverse la thèse : Comment ces critiques et propositions tiennent-elles compte de la diversité des pratiques spécifiques de construction des savoirs ? Alors même que le cœur des propositions féministes qui nous intéressent est de situer les savoirs dans leur spécificité reste à savoir comment ces mêmes politiques féministes résistent à se désituer à savoir, à emprunter les formes d'une théorie générale pour aborder les pratiques singulières. Prendre en compte de la spécificité des pratiques exige en outre d’envisager les auteures féministes au travail dans les pratiques et problèmes singuliers qui les intéressent, et ainsi montrer la richesse de ce courant de pensée.

I propose a theoretical framework that describes how avatars incorporate media as an inherent part of their nature and find a hosting body in cyborgs to navigate and spawn in media. I propose the birth of a new scion that combines avatar, medium and cyborg into a conceptual being that I call “ICEVORG.” The ICEVORG expands beyond representation into the actual physical world by means of media transgression—more specifically, by the use of the Strange Loop also known as Metalepsis ICEVORG find an effective soil to thrive and interrogate our ideas of reality by means of iteration, expansion, fragmentation and naturalization. The development of the framework that explains the concept of ICEVORG happens in the interstices between fiction and reality. The ICEVORG transgresses boundaries to reach and transcend the concepts of the avatar and cyborg in order to generate meaning and pursue relevance in contemporary society. By dissecting the ICEVORG under the light of metalepsis that I am able to elaborate a framework to explain the world of post-hyperrealism and how ICEVORGS have become agents of change. Finally, in order to construct my argument, I employ autoethnography, a research methodology that allows for a more personal voice to be included as part of the research process.

This thesis problematizes early cyberfeminist claims that heralded the Internet as a liberating space for women. Cyberfeminism emerged in the early 1990s, at the dawn of the “Internet Age,” and is heavily influenced by Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway theorized a new way of looking at the nature of female identity, using the figure of the cyborg found in science fiction literature and films. Traditionally, women have been explained in terms of sexual difference and have been forced to uphold a gender binary that privileges men. By contrast, Haraway argues that the cyborg, a hybrid of human and machine, escapes binary logic, thereby resisting categories and hierarchies, and embraces a more fluid understanding of identity. This model contains powerful ramifications for women. Every day, we become more like Haraway’s cyborgs as our physical bodies become increasingly intertwined with modern technologies, specifically in our ever-growing relationship with the Internet. In online interactions, users are no longer confined to their physical bodies and are free to play with identity. Early cyberfeminists believe that this leads to a more fluid understanding of identity and, more importantly, allows for the deconstruction of gender. These claims, however, do not apply in practice as well as they do in theory. From the anonymous text-based spaces that early cyberfeminists describe to social networking sites like Facebook, Internet spaces tend to polarize the gender binary rather than blur it, and women are now colonized on a new front. This becomes increasingly dangerous as the boundaries between our virtual and real lives continue to blur.

The purpose of this thesis has been to explore in what ways Franz Kafka’s ”The Metamorphosis” can be read as a story of gender. By bringing together Judith Butler’s theory of materialization and Lennard J. Davis’s crip theory I have spoken of Dismodernity as the domain of abject bodies that have been repudiated by (post)modern societies as untintelligible and dysfunctional. From this vantage point ”The Metamorphosis” can be seen as an allegory of Dismodernity and the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, can be seen as a political figure of Dismodernity. Therefore, I have tried to draw a feminist insect politics out of his metamorphosis from (hu)man into insect. By doing a close reading, through the theoretical lenses of Judith Butler, Lennard J. Davis and Donna Haraway, Gregor Samsa can be read as an abject non-masculinity which is both produced and made impossible by a heterosexual matrix’s need of intelligible genders and a capitalist system’s need of functional workers. As an abject non-masculinity Gregor Samsa works as a queer (unintelligible) and dismodern (dysfunctional) trickster that both disturbs and makes visible the established gendered norms of (un)intelligibility and (dis)ability through a blurring of the boundaries between human/animal, public/private and masculinity/femininity. As an involuntary trickster he also challenges gender studies and its seeking for ultimate representations for oppositional consciousness pure in their radical potential.

In this thesis I aim to examine the ways in which cultural beliefs and norms about gender and sexuality are shaped by discourses on animals and nature. I have done a participatory observation on two different guided tours of animals and analyze some information about the animals at a Swedish zoo. With a discourse analytical approach, I analyzed transcribed material from the guided tours of animals and information about animals from a gender and queer theoretical perspective, based on Judith Butler's understanding of the heterosexual matrix and her performativity theory. In my analysis, based on my chosen theoretical framework and with support of previous research, I have seen that the way people talk about animals is characterized by human notions of gender and sexuality. In addition to human notions of gender and sexuality, I have seen human notions of ethnocentrism and the division of labor between male and female. Furthermore, I have seen that some of these texts about animals challenge ideas about the division of labor in the home between male and female.

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An interrogation of architecture's prevailing myths, and a practice for how to live and die well as an architect in the Anthropocene epoch.  It is an effort to combine joyful representation and speculation (because architecture is both too serious and not nearly serious enough), with philosophy, for still possible pasts, presents and futures. For this it leans mainly on the ideas of Donna Haraway, Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, to present a methodology called Nomad Storytelling. A methodology that aims to move between a multiplicity of adjacent sites as to care for them in appropriate ways, with the intention of contributing to the idea of relationally unmaking the environmental urgencies of the 21th century. It consists of 8 chapters dealing with juridical care, letting be as care, humour and shaming, fabulous speculation, non-quantifiable architecture as dissent and graphic design as a crucial part of remembering what the cost of architecture is beyond the monetary, in the end suggesting the idea of architect-as-worm and compost architecture. It’s about not telling another killer story, because they always end with apocalypse or dystopia, and instead tell stories of gathering and fabulous futures, as Ursula K. Le Guin called it. Because it matters which architectures architect architecture and which lines line lines.

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