In her book ‘The Cyborg Manifesto,’ Haraway says that the relationship between people and technology is so intimate that it is no longer possible to tell where we end and where machines begin. It is ironic that the cyborg, an icon of war power, has been turned into a symbol of feminist liberation.
The opposition between nature and cultures is destroyed because we are a fusion of animal and machine. Women have been told for generations that they are the weaker sex, and that this natural and unchangeable. Though, like a cyborg, we are constructed; therefore, we can all be reconstructed, says Haraway.
In Ancient Europe and Africa, women were taught to develop their powers of perception, intuition, and how to refine their emotions, and to awaken nature and enhance their feminine gifts. They maintained harmony and balance in the natural world and their communities.
The archetypes of the priestess, the wise woman, and the goddess runs deep in women, but it is buried beneath the demands women put on themselves.
Humanity has lost connection with our feminine qualities. There is a deep disconnection with the Earth. Unjust gender relations, violence against women, loss of access to community resources and political power perpetuated by men who are motivated by self interests in order to maintain gender privilege.
The collaboration between different sciences and forms of culture, between organisms and machines, who lives, who dies, and at what price, are all questions which are part of our techno culture: The Natural versus the Artificial.
Ecofeminsm seeks to strengthen the bonds between women and nature by encouraging politics of solidarity, but the cyborg engages nature from a postmodern persepective exemplified by the cyborg. By glorifying Mother Earth and ecofeminists, are we just heeding the patriarchal society and creating divisions between nature, culture and technology?
In her book ‘Women and Nature,’ Susan Griffin draws from myth and literature to show how the patriarchy has often connected women with nature, and tried to dominate them. She says that since at least the Middle Ages women have often been identified with nature, and closer to the Earth; therefore are more like animals. In her book she identifies a division between spirit and matter, that those who are more of the Earth, have less spirit, and in some cases no soul, and are less intelligent. This is a justification for the control of white men over society.
Éilis Ní Dhuibhne re-writes women’s history through folklore stories. The mutable protagonists breakdown the logic of patriarchy, reverse the controlling of women as objects, and position them as subjects in their own stories. Ní Dhuibhne’s retelling of the Mermaid legend, ‘ The Man Who Married a Mermaid,’ explains everything that the original, silent, captive mermaid does not. The folk mermaid is held in the power of a man, and in the contemporary retelling, told from a woman’s perspective, the mermaid adds sexual expression and pleasure to her relationship, in contrast to the folk mermaid’s muted sexuality.
The contemporary mermaid, who is a barmaid, feels trapped between family and the freedom she craves, she wants to “get up and go, desert the sinking ship.”
The narratives of trapped mermaids highlights the disregard for women’s rights. Just like fairies that have been described in folk tales as marginal, dangerous creatures who speak the unspeakable.
Ní Dhuibhne’s ‘ Midwife to the Fairies,’ explains the historical reality of illegitimate pregnancies for women in rural Ireland, and the fact that the church and state ignore the issues of women’s bodily and reproductive rights
The myth that women in our society are symbols of sacrifice has been perpetuated from generation to generation, and in the interest of a patriarchal society for their hidden agenda.
Susan Griffin says that the defense against mortality is to look at the spirit as immortal, and separate from the body, so the spirit lives on. She says it is a kind of delusion, so that if we burn up the whole earth, well, we will still have a spiritual realm. Many on the right wing are under that delusion.
The inability of the far right to grasp climate change and burn the Earth, is on par with how women all over the globe are being mistreated. Women must fight to deconstruct our gendered conceptions of the Earth, and embrace the Cyborg in all of us.
If we destroy the Earth, we destroy ourselves and our capacity to support all forms of life. We cannot sacrifice our Mother Earth for the greed of powerful men and large corporations.
Sexism affects our daily lives. It’s our responsibility to get behind a bigger change and raise our consciousness to identify the problems of power, patriarchy, gender inequality and the objectification of women. It is our moral obligation to fight against anything that upholds misogyny and impedes female empowerment.
Empowerment is the the power to manifest ones dreams. Anybody who denies these fundamental human rights to women, has no right to any dialogue at all.
