Meredith's Week 4 Post

 I really liked Donna Haraway’s metaphor of a cyborg and how she used it to establish another way of thinking about feminism as we go along through life. Especially with the development of technology and the increasing interconnectedness of the physical world and the digital world, the cyborg framework gives a more fluid way to explain our existence and experiences. I still would like to read deeper into how the cyborg metaphor applies to different intersectional identities, especially female ones, because I feel like the cyborg metaphor could be applied to us all at least on the surface level. Thinking about our development as “cyborgian” (if you can call it that) rather than a rigid perspective like all flesh or all machine, feels like a parallel to combining electronics + literature. It also made me think of how attached we are to our phones; they’re pretty much glued to our hand or pocket at all times and we’re not really ever without our external form of digital communication.  

I looked at My Body a Wunderkammer by Shelley Jackson. I thought it was super intimate and raw and I really enjoyed clicking through the different links to see which body part I would get transported to next. I was almost cringing a bit at some moments because I felt like I was in her personal journal and invading a bit too far, especially when she talked about bodily functions and stuff that people don’t normally share in a typical conversation. I also think it’s interesting that googling these sorts of digital literature pieces don’t automatically come up; I don’t think I ever would have stumbled across this piece if not for this class. I would be interested in creating my own sort of literature where you could follow links to different pieces of my life.