In 1991, Donna Haraway proposed “Cyborg Manifesto” in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women The Reinvention of Nature which challenged contemporary politics tremendously. In “Cyborg Manifesto”, Haraway intends to use technoseience to establish ironic myth which breaches “western” science and polotics: the tradition of racist, male-dominat captalism, progess, the appropriation of nature as the resource for reproduction of culture, and reproduction of the self from the reflection of the other. (150) That is to say, she tryies to break traditional dualism to create brand new boundaries discourse. She claimes that we should enjoy the pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and take the resposiblity to construct new politics. The critical concept proposed by Haraway to breach such convetional dichotomy is a cyborg. What is a cyborg? According to Haraway, the cyborg is “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” (148) The reason why cyborg can break the traditional dualism is its hybridity, the hybridity of organism/ machine, reality/ fiction, or even any possibility, just like her said:
Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and ours tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel of heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the super-savers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machine, identities, categories, relationship, space stories. (181)
It is the hybridity that renders infinite possibilities to breach limit of present politics, creating a new identity that gets rid of the trap of dichotomy.
If we want to investigate further how Haraway’s cyborg discourse brings new opportunity for the otherness in present politics, I think Saint Orland’s The Bride of Frankenstein is a relevant work that perfectly presents cyborg discourse. The reason why Orlan’s The Bride of Frankenstein is an appropriate example of Haraway’s cyborg is that the text of bride of Frankenstein itself is hybridity of otherness: a woman, a monster, or even, in Orlan’s performance, a machine. Originally, the bride in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is a repressed other in text, but Orlan converts The bride of Frankenstein’s hybridity of otherness to potent momentum, breaking the frame of politic. Another reason is that Orlan’s way of performance successfully utilizes the bride’s hybridity demonstrates changeability, assemblage, and continuum which diverse from the traditional western value which pursues wholeness. Because Orlan uses plastic surgery to represent the bride, her face is no longer innate but like a detachable mask which can be varied and manipulated. It seems that Orlan falls to the object, just as Orlan’s view that female beauty is defined by men for their own pleasure. (Orlan, 1990) However, Orlan reverses such disadvantage to create a new opportunity for a woman.
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