Published in Platform Journal of Media and Communications Vol. 6.2 – A manifesto for cyborgs thirty years on: Gender, technology and feminist-technoscience in the twenty-first century, edited by Thao Phan.
From Thao’s introduction to the issue:
It has been thirty years since Donna Haraway’s iconic essay A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s (hereafter Manifesto) was first published. Broadly acknowledged as the text that first introduced the cyborg into feminist theory, the Manifesto has had an influence and impact on feminism and other scholarship far exceeding its original contexts and intentions… Anna Helme’s creative/essay contribution is a fusion of queer politics in artistic practice. A contribution that has been lovingly put forward in two parts: the first is Helme’s short film MyMy (2014), a consciously queered science fiction narrative produced with an aesthetic of mystic technology; and the second is an intimate essay on identity, artistic process and queer politics. As a film, MyMy is a fantastic exploration of the aesthetics of alterity. Written and produced with the Manifesto in mind, MyMy similarly reimagines tropes of technoscience outside of the language of cold rationality and humanist progress. When tropes such as these are blended with human flesh in embodied visions of cyborgs—for instance, James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), or David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) or Existenz (1999)—they become necessarily abject. They are dehumanising, monstrous and violent. MyMy, however, posits an alternate cyborg fantasy, a fantasy which is intimate, affectionate, and that eschews essentialist tropes of gender and master/slave dialectics of technology.