The Cyborg, its Manifesto and their relevance today : some reflections

The mere presence of adoring fans has been insufficient to entice Donna Haraway to visit Australia. Only Helen Verran and postgraduates at Melbourne University’s History and Philosophy of Science department managed to interest her once in the late 1990s. So as the first Australian with a doctorate co-supervised by Haraway at the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I have occasionally been called upon to speak when the doyenne of cyborg feminism was, as usual, unavailable down under (Sofoulis 2003). The role of antipodean Haraway always made me uneasy. It is a mistake to project patriarchal (and oedipal) traditions of scholarly filiation onto feminists. In my observation, feminist supervisors rarely seek to turn out clones of themselves and feminist students do not usually aspire to replicate/replace their professors. Like cyborgs, feminist students can be “exceedingly unfaithful to” and quite uninterested in their origins (Haraway, 1991, p.151).