Make me a (Wo)Man. Make me a Cyborg. An approach to the political power of mythic fictions from the feminist art

Abstract

What is possible in contemporary identity construction from a mythical fiction such as the Cyborg? What is possible from the idea for new forms of production and subjective emancipation? This article proposes a critical and feminist approach to the dimensions and political powers of mythic figurations in the Western culture brought into conversation with Donna Haraway's fictional Cyborg. From materialist myth, a productive feminist, socialist, and desiring creature emerged, the Cyborg operating as political-poetic fiction, as a creature of social reality (symbolic) and fiction (invented) that acts as an ecstatic speaker that allows us to speak next ourselves. For this discussion we propose different lines of argument from philosophy, anthropology and especially artistic practice, comparing Western mythic figurations that supported the symbolic creation of the material and the human, and under the implicit motivation of "pain" that operates in our cultural myths and constrained identities. This reflection will be organized on the following ideas:

1. The male as human and the female sexed in mythic figurations.

2. The technical design of the human and the mythical construction of the abject.

3. Posthuman construction and the rhetorical cyborg from feminist art.

It is in this last section where we want to suggest the usual ways of doing feminist art and identify the mythic ideation of figurations among them, from the consideration that creative and technological spaces of representation and artificiality, are like art and fiction which allow us to visualize better, but mostly live the contradictions of enunciation and dynamic instabilities, as when we face stereotypical identity. To tolerate and reflect on these contradictions is possible in the territory of artificiality. And it is in this privileged setting of art and technology where feminist artists have acted as prominent iconoclastic interpreters of these times and culture.