Donna Haraway's Cyborg Touching (Up/On) Luce Irigaray's Ethics and the Interval Between: Poethics as Embodied Writing

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical writing, that is, as a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice.

Writing materiality into management and organization studies through and with Luce Irigaray

“…It might, for instance, be concerned with rethinking our own embodied presence and how it impacts on our teaching, research and theorizing about management and organization studies. It could perhaps be extended to examining changing material interactions in organizations through an Irigarayan-inspired ‘poethics’ (Toye, 2010, 2012) that would enhance working lives. We start by exploring how the researcher’s reflexivity could or should be influenced by Irigaray’s writings and then move on to discussing the concept of a poethics of relationality in organizations inspired by her work and the relevance of her ideas for understanding intersectionality in organizations.…”

Cyborg Writing as a Political Act: Reading Donna Haraway in Organization Studies

“…Integrating the ideas of Haraway and Irigaray, Margaret Toye () considers the political and the ethical dimensions of cyborg writing. Toye's point of analytical departure is Irigaray's notion of écriture féminine , which translates to ‘feminine writing’ or, to expand its definitional scope, ‘writing the body’.…”

“…Indeed, cyborg writing commences from the epistemological foundation of feminist objectivity; at the same time that feminist objectivity rebukes extreme interpretations of cultural relativism that can be manipulated to sustain and perpetuate the disenfranchisement of Others by shielding problematic ideologies from critique, it resists in affording any credence to universality or to totalizing knowledge systems such as through the reified articulation of cultural meta‐narratives. Cyborg writing, as grounded in and read through feminist objectivity, is écriture féminine in action; wherein there emerges the subversion of Cartesian ethics to such a radical degree that there subsequently exists not even the remnants of the (artificial) distinction between knowledge and the knowledge creator (Toye, ).…”

Writing Now

“…Margaret Toye argues that contemporary feminist theory should revisit Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg, particularly in relation to how women SF writers use the cyborg to 'help us to rethink embodiment'. 42 Much of British women's post-millennial apocalyptic writing does this via what Stacey Alaimo refers to as 'transcorporeality', her term for the interconnections, interchanges, and transits between human bodies and non-human natures. 43 A return to the maternal body, or mater, as a source of imagery and narrative structure is also important.…”