The aff’s evaluation of technology IS THE PATRIARCHY!!!!

**the thing about women and machines is probably a link ab innovation

Akin to posthumanism is the discourse of cyberfeminism, which challenges androcentric readings of technology as well as “disembodied notions of what it means to be human in a virtual age” (du Preez 74). Posthumanism and cyberfeminism supersede the Cartesian notion of an Enlightenment humanism that proposed a default vision of the human subject, devoid of identity features such as race, class, sex, and gender. Critics such as Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Anne Balsamo, and Sadie Plant, among others, have tried to assess the relationship between the (female) body and technology, stating that the body is not an essence but a surface on which cultural meanings and discourses are inscribed. In “The Promises of Monsters,” Haraway claims that biology is not a given, but a discourse, and demonstrates it by focusing on the emergence of an “inappropriate/d other,” the cyborg (The Haraway Reader 67). Braidotti argues in favor of the notion of “feminist figurations,” defined as “politically informed images that portray the complex interaction of levels of subjectivity,” and explores the figure of the nomadic feminist (Nomadic Subjects 4). Plant explains that women and machines are recurrently represented either as subjected to or as produced by men, and that, as such, they share a common history: Women, nature and machines have existed for the benefit of man, organisms and devices intended for the service of a history to which they are merely the footnotes. The text itself is patriarchy, the system within which women occupy a world of objects, owned by men and exchanged between them. (“Beyond the Screen” 503) In the end, the three critics demystify the natural and immutable originality of the body, and in so doing they reinforce its reproducibility, performativity, and artificiality, “a surface of intensities, pure simulacra without originals” (Braidotti, Metamorphoses 21). Haraway’s cyborg and Braidotti’s nomad are two figurations that stand for the posthuman in contemporary critical discourse. As will be shown, apart from these two models, Lai’s novel proposes a third one: the status of nonhuman animals, excluded from the moral community and regarded as exploitable resources in the capitalist mode of production (Taylor 177). Haraway refers to them in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” situating the discussion in the context of posthuman criticism: By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted, if not turned into amusement parks—language, tool use, social behavior, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. [: : : ] Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. (Simians, Cyborgs and Women 151–52) Animal studies engage in the task of legitimating them as subjects and not conceiving them merely as objects of exploitation. The ethical challenge proposed by the posthuman in this light, whether machine or animal, does not invalidate or threaten the human but helps to blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial and the mechanical and the organic, making binaries overlap (Taylor 185). In Hayles’s words, [the posthuman] signals [: : : ] the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice. (286) The hybrid figures of the cyborg and the human–animal clone are featured as creatures “in transit” and in continuous reconfiguration of their own physical boundaries, paradoxically associated with fracture and fusion. Both are intertwined with social reality and constitute ethical models that stand for valid representations for women and minority groups in technological societies (Plant, “Coming across the Future” 461). They also implement political tactics, sometimes resorting to open confrontation, and at other times choosing more subtle practices such as irony and coalition (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects 106). In the two novels studied here, Lai and Winterson propose the acceptance of the materiality of the body, and specifically of those bodies enhanced by technology, either as half-human and half-machine or as half-animal. Thus technology is understood from a twofold perspective: as a tool at the service of individual enhancement and the liberal market and/or as an instrument of social rebellion. In the pages that follow, technological bodies will be analyzed, taking into account the perspectives of medicine and biology, focusing on the figurations of the cyborg and the clone, and, finally, pondering the influence of technology on sexuality and reproduction.