Vicky’s Reviews > Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience > Status Update

science ossified notions of gender (the colonial binary) as much as gender created science: the abscence/prescence of women is aptly felt in the history of rationality. to illustrate her point, harraway explains that science, in part, became a discipline in order to counter the femininized practice of paganism, and thus bring about the intellectual and spiritual dominance of man. despite this shift in axis, technoscience is just as tropic as woman's heretical screechings. like gender, technoscience is a cultural practice, forged out of the intersections of economic, biological, political, mythic, and gendered interests. in understanding this, harraway proposes the notion of cyborg practice: the embodiment of hybridity. To be a cyborg is to stand "between the standardized technologies and local experience, where one falls between the categories yet is in relationship to them."

points of interest:
1. technoscience parallels christianity in the sense that both rhizomes are concerned with the 'salvation' of man. in technoscience, transgenic practices aim to turn man into a superhuman with eternal life; in religion, a vested faith in and devotion to god promises satisfactory eschatological outcomes. harraway does an interesting 'material-semiotic' analysis of the language used in academic papers and finds that the authors, intentionally or not, borrow heavily from a christian lexicon.
2. technoscience has an erotic undertone. searching for answers to the secrets of life, as laid out by god, is an act of transgression.