From cyborg to companion species: readings of fictions by Jeanette Winterson and Karen Joy Fowler
Keywords:
Cyborg, Companion species, Posthuman ontologies, Jeanette Winterson, Karen Joy FowlerAbstract
This paper is centred upon two key figures in Donna Haraway´s critical thought: the cyborg (1985) and the companion species (2003). Coming up in her famous “A Cyborg Manifesto: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century”, and effecting a continuous impact in contemporary debates, the former helped shape a utopian posthuman ontology, thus contributing to the advancement of feminist thought beyond cultural essentialisms and binarisms, in an ironic and critical attitude, aligned with the emphasis on diferences which characterized feminisms in the 1980’s. The limits of her theories on the cyborg are pointed out by Haraway herself, when she justifies her second manifesto, The Companion Species Manifesto – whose ideas are resumed in When Species Meet (2008) – by the perception that the cyborg could no longer, by itself, carry out the feminist task it aimed to. In the readings of the novels The Stone Gods (2007), by Jeanette Winterson, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013), by Karen Joy Fowler, I analize fictional figurations of those metaphors, pointing out continuity and rupture lines, with a focus on the question of posthuman ontologies, and exploring the possibilities of strengthening the dialogues between the field of literary studies and the provoking thought of this feminist scholar and activist.
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