A Cyborg's Father: Misreading Donna Haraway

Abstract

When his daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as an infant and became dependent on technology to stay alive, Dave Brennan set off in search of a vision: what does it mean to live as a cyborg? And how might he best help his daughter navigate the relationship between machine and flesh? Beginning with a line plucked from Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” — “Their fathers, after all, are inessential” — A Cyborg’s Father blends memoiristic poetic fragments with lyric essays that look toward music and literature by women artists who have embraced the technological as a metaphorical or literal means of investigating and owning their experience as women. Traversing the intersecting paths of feminism, chronic illness, disability studies, transhumanism, interdependence, and more, this is the tale of a father whose greatest hope is to be rendered inessential.