To be a Cyborg or a Goddess?

Abstract

This article confronts North American feminist biologist Donna Haraway's recommendation of the cyborg (cybernetic organism, i.e., a creature of the modern high-tech world) as a locus of identification for feminist critiques of current social relations of science and technology, with the strategies advocated by the Indian physicist and ecofeminist Vandana Shiva. The author discusses the opposition between Haraway's cyborg ferminism and the spiritual ecofeminism of Shiva, who links her critique of global power structures and the destructive logic of techno science to a (re)claiming of the sacred feminine principle prakriti, nature, of ancient Indian cosmology. A deconstruction of the dichotomy between the cyborg and the goddess as critical figures is suggested, based on the argument that feminist critics of the current technoscience-power nexuses need both.