Definition
 A cybernetic organism: hybrid of machine and
organism
 Creature of social reality as well as of fiction
 An imaginative resource; Utopian
 Ontology and politics
Challenges
 --imagining a world without gender
 --confusion of boundaries/a border war:
 --to biological essentialism and patriarchal control of nature
 --to heterosexism
 --to polarities of public and private
 --no origin story (against historicism)
A new political solidarity
 Need for connection without vanguard politics, at a time when it is
hard to see (invisible workers, hard to see materially and politically;
unlike the older working classes)
 Affinity: not by blood but by choice
 Identities: partial, strategic, contradictory
 Affinity, not identity
 Oppositional consciousness: from contradictory locations, not about
cultural relativisms and pluralisms
 “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities”