POSTMODERNIST CYBORGS
AND THE DENIAL OF SOCIAL LOCATION
In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Donna Haraway figures Chicanas as exemplary cyborgs and, as such, prototypical postmodern subjects. She identifies two paradigmatic “groups of texts” that she sees as constructing cyborg identities: “women of color and monstrous selves in feminist science fiction” (216). Although Haraway usually employs the generic term women of color, she accords Chicanas a privileged position within her framework. According to Haraway, the primary characteristic of the cyborg is that of a creature who transcends, confuses, or destroys boundaries. Chicanas, as the products of the intermixing of Spaniards, Indians, and Africans, cannot claim racial or cultural purity. Their neither/nor racial status, their unclear genealogical relationship to the history of oppression (as descendants of both colonizer and colonized), and their ambiguous national identity (as neither Mexican nor fully “American”) give Chicanas their signifying power within the terms of the cyborgian myth. To demonstrate that Haraway does, in fact, figure Chicanas as
Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. (217)
Malinche was the mother here, not Eve before eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms Sister Outsider, not the Woman-before-the-Fall-into-Writing needed by the phallogocentric Family of Man. (218)
A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generates antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted… (222)
Cherríe Moraga in Loving in the War Years explores the themes of identity when one never possessed the original language, never told the original story, never resided in the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural names, mother's or father's. (217)
Writing is preeminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. (218)
Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the struggles of women of color, and stories about language have a special power in the rich contemporary writing by U.S. women of color…. Moraga's writing, her superb literacy, is presented in her poetry as the same kind of violation as Malinche's mastery of the conqueror's language—a violation, an illegitimate production, that allows survival. (217–18)
Haraway claims that “women of color” can be understood as a “cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities” (217). She bases her claim, in part, on her appropriation and misreading of the Mexicano/Chicano myth of Malinche—a misreading that allows her to celebrate the symbolic birth of a new “bastard” race and the death of the founding myth of original wholeness.
For example, retellings of the story of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of the mestizo “bastard” race of the new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortés, carry special meaning for Chicana constructions of
[4] The name “Sister Outsider” derives from Lorde's book of the same name. Haraway's easy substitution of the name “Sister Outsider” for that of “Malinche,” and her conflation of Chicana with Malinche with Sister Outsider signals her inattention to the differences (temporal, historical, and material) that exist between the three distinct constructions of identity.
La Malinche, also referred to as Doña Marina or Malintzín Tenepal, was the Indian woman who served as translator for Hernán Cortés during the decisive period of the fall of the Aztec empire. According to the memoirs of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who participated in and chronicled the conquest of the Aztec empire, Malintzín was born the daughter of caciques (Aztec nobility) (85). After the death of her father, and while she was still a young girl, her mother and stepfather sold her into captivity, ostensibly to leave the succession to the position of cacique free for her younger half brother. According to Díaz, she was sold to Indians from Xicalango who then gave or sold her to the Indians of Tabasco (85).
After the battle of Cintla, which took place shortly after Cortés landed at Cozumel, Malintzín was given to Cortés by the Tabascan Indians along with nineteen other women as a part of the spoils of war. From the Tabascans she learned to speak Chontal Maya, and it was her bilingualism that made her invaluable to Cortés. Cortés was able to speak Spanish to the Spaniard Aguilar (who had spent several years as a slave to the Mayan Indians), who then spoke Chontal Maya to Doña Marina, who translated into Nahuatl for Moctezuma and his numerous vassals (Diaz 86–87). It was in this manner that Cortés effected the communication that was so critical to his conquest of Mexico.
Today, La Malinche lives on as a symbol of enormous cultural significance for Mexicanas and Chicanas. As the mother of Cortés's son, she is figured as the symbolic mother of mestizaje, the mixing of Spanish and Indian blood. As the “dark” mother, the “fucked one,” the “betrayer of her race,” she is the figure against which women of Mexican descent have had to define themselves.
[5] See Paz, “Sons of La Malinche.” In the process of describing her in his essay, Paz has served to confirm Malinche's position as the “Mexican Eve.”
As the whore of the virgin/whore dichotomy in a culture that reveres La Virgen, she has been despised and reviled.From the 1970s on, Mexicana and Chicana feminists have addressed the myth of Malinche, and several have attempted to recuperate and revalue her as a figure of empowering or empowered womanhood.
[6] Alarcón, in “Traddutora, traditora” and “Chicana's Feminist Literature,” provides a useful analysis of some of these attempts, as does Moraga in “A Long Line of Vendidas,” in Loving. See also Candelaria; del Castillo; Gonzales; Phillips.
Such recuperations are generally problematic, inasmuch as attempts to absolve or empower the historical figure can result in reductive interpretations of what is a very complex situation. Cherríe Moraga's treatment of Malinche is neither naive nor reductive; she confronts the myth and examines its implications for the sexual and social situation of Chicanas today. In her essay “A Long Line of Vendidas,” she looks carefully at “this myth of the inherent unreliability of women, our natural propensity for treachery, which has been carved into the very bone of Mexican/Chicano collective psychology” (Loving 101), and addresses the continuing painful effects of the Malinche myth.The potential accusation of “traitor” or “vendida” is what hangs above the heads and beats in the hearts of most Chicanas seeking to develop our own autonomous sense of ourselves, particularly through sex and sexuality. Even if a Chicana knew no Mexican history, the concept of betraying one's race through sex and sexual politics is as common as corn. As cultural myths reflect the economics, mores, and social structures of a society, every Chicana suffers from their effects. (Loving 103)
Haraway's reading of the Malinche myth erases the complexity of the situation. She concludes her discussion of Malinche by claiming that “stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of color have transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear into the originally literate mother who teaches survival” (218–19). With this statement, Haraway conceals the painful legacy of the Malinche myth and overinvests the figure of Malinche with a questionable agency. Moreover, Haraway uncritically affirms a positionality (the margins) and a mode of existence (survival) that actual Chicanas have found to be rather less (instead of more) affirming. I do not mean to suggest that marginality and survival are not important and valuable. Certainly survival is valuable wherever the alternative is extinction. And, as I will argue, the experience and the theorizing of marginalized or oppressed people is important for arriving at a more objective understanding of the world. But I would suggest that neither marginality nor survival is a sufficient
Haraway's conflation of cyborgs with women of color raises serious theoretical and political issues, because she conceives the social identities of women of color in overly idealized terms. As previously noted, Haraway's conception of a cyborg is that of a creature who transcends or destroys boundaries. It is “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,” “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self,” a being “committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity,” who is “not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” and who is “related [to other cyborgs] not by blood but by choice” (193, 205, 192, 196, emphasis added). The porosity and polysemy of the category “cyborg,” in effect, leaves no criteria to determine who might not be a cyborg. Furthermore, since Haraway sees a lack of any essential criterion for determining who is a woman of color, anyone can be a woman of color. Thus all cyborgs can be women of color and all women of color can be cyborgs. By sheer force of will (by “choice” as Haraway puts it) and by committing oneself (or refusing to commit oneself) to “permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints,” anyone can be either one or the other—or neither.
[7] Alcoff has suggested to me that Haraway might not intend to imply that “all cyborgs can be women of color”—that she means only that “women of color” is one particular kind of cyborg identity. If so, we are left with “women of color cyborgs” and “white women cyborgs” (and perhaps other kinds of male cyborgs, as well). In that case, of what use is the figure of the cyborg? Unless the figure of the cyborg can effectively dismantle “difference” (and the effect “difference” has on our experiences of the world), it is at best innocuous and at worst quite dangerous. We must acknowledge that a cyborg identity has the potential to become simply another veil to hide behind in order not to have to examine the differences that both constitute and challenge our self-conceptions.
The key theoretical problem here is Haraway's understanding of identity as a willful construction, as independent of the limiting effects of social location. Because she lacks an analysis of how the social categories that make up our social locations are causally relevant for the experiences we have, as well as of how those experiences inform our cultural identities, Haraway cannot conceive of a way to ground identities without essentializing them. Although she correctly ascertains that people are not uniformly determined by any one social category, she wrongly concludes that social categories (such as gender or race) can be irrelevant to the identities we choose. Haraway's refusal to grant women of color
From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground politics in “our” privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities…. With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile “masculine” separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognize “oneself” as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of color have transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear into the originally literate mother who teaches survival. (219)
By freeing herself of the obligation to ground identity in social location, Haraway is able to arrogate the meaning of the term woman of color. With this misappropriation, Haraway authorizes herself to speak for actual women of color, to dismiss our own interpretations of our experiences of oppression, our “need to root politics in identification,” and even our identities. Furthermore, she employs several rhetorical strategies designed to undermine “identity” as a concept and “identity politics” as a practice. First, she (incorrectly) implies that players of identity politics necessarily claim the “privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations”; she then impoverishes the discussion by linking identity politics to naive forms of essentialism that base themselves in “vanguard parties, purity, and mothering.” The fact that most women of color (including Moraga) continue to organize and theorize on the basis of their identities as women of color—and that their identities as women of color are intimately tied to the social categories (race, gender, etc.) that make up their individual social locations—completely drops from sight in Haraway's representation of their work. It is worth noting that even within the terms of Haraway's cyborgian myth, the “bastard race” is not “stripped of identity” inasmuch as “bastard race” is itself a term of identification.
Although far more cursory, Judith Butler's treatment of Moraga's writings is also a highly questionable attempt to enlist women of color for a postmodernist agenda. In her early and highly influential book
The opening discussion in this chapter argues that this globalizing gesture [to find universally shared structures of oppression along an axis of sexual difference] has spawned a number of criticisms from women who claim that the category of “women” is normative and exclusionary and is invoked with the unmarked dimensions of class and racial privilege intact. In other words, the insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social and political intersections in which the concrete array of “women” are constructed. (14)
Butler's response to this critique is not to rethink her understanding of the category “women” but rather to radically undermine it as a valid political or analytical category. Underlying her logic are the assumptions that because the varieties of oppressions cannot be “summarily” ranked, they cannot be ranked at all; because epistemological projects have been totalizing and imperializing, they are always and necessarily so; and unless a given category (such as “women”) is transhistorical, trans-cultural, stable, and uncontestable, it is not a valid analytical and political category.
[8] In her more recent work, Butler has shifted her position slightly on the question of identity. Whereas in Gender Trouble she argued for a subversion of identity, in The Psychic Life of Power, she figures identities as unavoidable, if pernicious, facts of social existence. Although I would find it interesting to detail the points of convergence and divergence between Butler's reformulated thesis on identity and the realist theory of identity, I will not take the space to do it here. In this chapter, I focus on Gender Trouble because it is Butler's argument in this book that continues to influence current debates about identity.
It should be emphasized that the passage in Moraga that Butler cites provides no actual support for Butler's argument. To read Moraga the way Butler reads her is to ignore the italicized statement that immediately follows the caution against ranking oppressions, namely, “The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression,” as well as to ignore the statement that immediately follows that one, “The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base” (Bridge 52). When Moraga talks about ranking the oppressions in the context from which this sentence is extracted, she is referring to the necessity of theorizing the connections between (and not simply ranking) the different kinds of oppressions people suffer.
[9] See “A Long Line of Vendidas,” in which Moraga talks about the necessity of theorizing the “simultaneity of oppression,” by which she means taking “race, ethnicity and class into account in determining where women are at sexually,” and in which she clearly acknowledges that some people “suffer more” than others (Loving 128).
More specifically, she is referring to the situation in which militant women of color with feminist convictions often find themselves. Militant men of color claim their first loyalty on the basis of race and disparage their involvement with feminism, which is, the men insist, a “white women” thing. Meanwhile, their white feminist sisters claim their first loyalty on the basis of gender, urging women of color to see the way in which they are being exploited by their own fathers, husbands, and brothers.[10] For a more developed explanation of this phenomenon, see the section “Who Are My People” in Anzaldúa's essay “La Prieta.” Anzaldúa writes of those who insist on viewing the different parts of her in isolation: “They would chop me up into little fragments and tag each piece with a label.” She then goes on to affirm her oneness, “Only your labels split me” (Bridge 205). Rather than giving way to fragmentation, she insists upon holding it all together: “The mixture of bloods and affinities, rather than confusing or unbalancing me, has forced me to achieve a kind of equilibrium…. I walk the tightrope with ease and grace. I span abysses… I walk the rope—an acrobat in equipoise, expert at the Balancing Act” (209).
When Moraga writes that the “danger lies in ranking the oppressions,” she is warning against the reductive theoretical tendency (whether it be Marxist, feminist, or cultural nationalist) to posit one kind of oppression as primary for all time and in all places. She is not advocating an admission of defeat in the project of trying to figure out how the varieties of oppressions suffered by the woman of color intersect with, or are determined by, each other.Common to both Haraway's and Butler's accounts of identity is the assumption of a postmodern “subject” of feminism whose identity is unstable, shifting, and contradictory: “she” can claim no grounded tie to any aspect of “her” identit(ies) because “her” anti-imperialist, shifting, and contradictory politics have no epistemic basis in experience. Ironically,
[11] As long as our world is hierarchically organized along relations of domination, categories such as “us” and “them,” or “oppressed” and “oppressor” will retain their explanatory function. This is not because any one group belongs, in an essential way, to a particular category, but rather because the terms describe positions within prevailing social and economic relations.
Distinctions dissolve as all beings (human, plant, animal, and machine) are granted citizenship in the radically fragmented, unstable society of the postmodern world. “Difference” is magically subverted, and we find out that we really are all the same after all!The key theoretical issue turns on Haraway's and Butler's disavowals of the link between identity (with its experiential and epistemic components) and social location (the particular nexus of gender, race, class, and sexuality in which a given individual exists in the world). Haraway and Butler err in the assumption that because there is no one-to-one correspondence between social location and identity or knowledge, there is simply no connection between social location and identity or knowledge. I agree that in theory boundaries are infinitely permeable and power may be amorphous. The difficulty is that people do not live in an entirely abstract or discursive realm. They live as biologically and temporally limited, as well as socially situated, human beings. Furthermore, although the “postmodern” moment does represent a time of rapid social, political, economic, and discursive shifts, it does not represent a radical break with systems, structures, and meanings of the past. Power is not amorphous since oppression is systematic and structural. A politics of discourse that does not provide for some sort of bodily or concrete action outside the realm of the academic text will forever be inadequate to change the difficult “reality” of our lives. Only by acknowledging the specificity and “simultaneity of oppression,” and the fact that some people are more oppressed than others, can we begin to understand the systems and structures that perpetuate oppression and thereby place ourselves in a position to contest and change them (Moraga, Loving 128).
[12] For a compatible critique of how Butler and Haraway use women of color to justify their postmodernist theoretical projects, see Homans.
Until we do so, Cherríe Moraga, together with other women of color, will find herself leaving from Guatemala only to arrive at Guatepeor.
[13] The Spanish-language proverb “Salir de Guatemala para entrar en Guatepeor” plays with the word fragment “mala” in “Guatemala” to suggest the dilemma of a person caught between a bad (mala) and a worse (peor) situation. The proverb roughly approximates the English-language proverb “To go from the frying pan into the fire.”
She will find herself caught in the dilemma of being reduced to her Chicana lesbian body or having to deny her social location (for which her body is a compelling metaphor) as the principal place from which she derives her insights. Moraga's dilemma appears as a contradiction to the theorist who recognizes a choice only between essentialist and postmodernist accounts of identity and knowledge. On the one hand, Moraga is articulating a “theory in the flesh,” derived from “the physical realities of [women of color's] lives—[their] skin color, the land or concrete [they] grew up on, [their] sexual longings” (Bridge 23); on the other hand, she reminds us that “sex and race do not define a person's politics” (Last Generation 149). How can a theory be derived from the “physical realities of [women of color's] lives” if “sex and race do not define a person's politics”? When we examine this paradox from a realist perspective, the contradiction is dissolved. Theory, knowledge, and understanding can be linked to “our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings” without being uniformly determined by them. Rather, those “physical realities of our lives” will profoundly inform the contours and the context of both our theories and our knowledge.[14] At the risk of stating what should be obvious, this is as true for the white hetero-sexual politically conservative antifeminist as it is for the radical feminist lesbian of color. And yet, it is primarily women who address gender issues, and primarily people of color who address racial issues (both inside the academy and out). The unspoken assumption is that only women have gender and only people of color are racialized beings. This assumption reflects itself in the work of many male academics who only talk about gender when they are referring to women, and in the work of many white academics who only talk about race when they are referring to people of color. A manifestation of this phenomenon can be found in Butler's book Bodies That Matter, where she only theorizes race in the two chapters in which she discusses artistic productions by or about people of color.
The effects that the “physical realities of our lives” have on us, then, are what need to be addressed—not dismissed or dispersed—by theorists of social identity.