Donna Haraway: A Feminist Analysis

Introduction
A feminism critique of science and technology springs out from the Foucauldian insights of the intimate relations between knowledge and power. Knowing the world is, through naming it, a way to control it, and it has real effects of oppression and control. Representations work on the represented, and thus, epistemology not only to an extent determines ontology, but by the same token it is a tool to change a world of inequalities.
A feminist critique seeks both to unveil actual structures of inequality, such as underrepresentation of women in important and world-shaping disourses of science and technology, and to criticise the culture of it, or the ideology, that invests it with meaning and hides power relationships. It is a project
A movement from an organic, industrial society – or the “White Capitalist Patriarchy” – to a polymorphous information system entails fundamental changes. Boundary-keeping absolute dualisms have been replaced by boundary-transgressing, relative positions in information systems. Science and technology lie behind blurrings of boundaries; biology and evolutionary theory questions the rigid division between human and animal. Information processing and reproductive technologies brings organism and machine, the physical and non-physical closer. These are deadly machines, because they are about the simulation of consciuosness. A crucial feature of biologics and communications sciences in the informatics of domination is their “translation of the world into a problem of coding” (164), parallel to the general trends of world economic systems who depend on uninterrupted circulation of
But these boundaries are, ironically, themselves blurred. The cyborg as it is found in medicine and military technology and in popular culture (e.g personalities of science fiction such as Terminator, Robocop and the like) are quite different from Haraways ideals, and give rise to speculation. One is the fetishistic use of body- or vision-enhancing technology, reinforcing a hierarchical relationship between self and other (Kember 1996:240), and intensifying the old opposition between mind and matter. For cyberpunks, it is a matter of “getting out of the meat”, the complete opposite to embodiment of female experience. The breakdown of boundaries is at issue here as well, but results in a pleasurable reinforcement of them instead of transgressing them to redefine difference. That “[the simultaneity of] the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structure in the Western self [...] cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities” (Haraway 1991:174), that is somewhat inherent contradictions and paradoxes in the informatics of domination, give rise to speculations of a feminine revenge of technology on human patriarchy. Associations of the female to the technological matrix (which is the word for the webs of interconnected pieces of information technology as