Posthuman Dimensions of Cyborg: A Study of Man-Machine Hybrid in the Contemporary Scenario

Abstract

Cyborg theory offers perspectives to analyze the cultural and social meanings of contemporary digital health technologies. Theorizing cyborg called for cultural interrogations. Critics challenged Haraway’s cyborg and the cyborg theory for not affecting political changes. Cyborg theory is an intriguing approach to analyze the range of arenas such as biotechnology, medical issues and health conditions that incorporate disability, menopause, female reproduction, Prozac, foetal surgery and stem cells.Cyborg is defined by Donna Haraway, in her “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1986), as “a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.” A cyborg or a cybernetic organism is a hybrid of machine and organism. The cyborg theory de-stabilizes from gender politics, traditional notions of feminism, critical race theory, and queer theory and identity studies.  The technologies associated with the cyborg theory are complex and diverse. It valorizes the “monstrous, hybrid, disabled, mutated or otherwise ‘imperfect’ or ‘unwhole’ body.” Scholars have founded it useful and fruitful in the social and cultural analysis of health and medicine.