DH > boundary objects

Donna Haraway herself is the object of the semiosis of others, of longings and passions, positive and sometimes negative. Oddly she and the Cyborg have both become interrelated boundary creatures, moving between worlds claiming and disavowing them. By way of Haraway and the Cyborg cyberfeminism and feminist technoscience studies overlap. Cyberfeminism is especially lively in European and in non-U.S. English-speaking locations around the globe, and is inextricably connected with arts of all kinds but especially avant-garde performance and computer art in a range of new media.

The Cyborg in this context is more and more clearly a boundary object, sometimes less the post-WWII entity Haraway herself finds worth scrutinizing, and more a wild amalgam of goddess imagery and technophilia performing a range of new historical and artistic connections across centuries and across generations. In this context the Cyborg performs the work of connecting women and technology through and within many pasts.
Cyberfeminism shares enthusiastically Donna's poetic passions and evocative analytic and performative language, while feminist technoscience studies shares her fascination with concrete historical specificity and theories of complex agencies of materialization. The Cyborg performs boundary work across various communities of practice embodied in ranges of either technoscience or cyberfeminism, working because it is, as Geoff Bowker & Leigh Star describe, "weakly structured in common use" and "strongly structured in individual-site use." (Bowker & Star 99/297)

Interdisciplines shaping and reshaping require new academic formations and practices. Donna tells us "[f]eminist technoscience really means going beyond the kinds of institutions we have now. It's filled with different kinds of work processes and knowledge-practices, including reshaping time and space. For example, to interact effectively at work, to work with people, really involves rethinking time and careers and the speed of research." (p. 157 Leaf)

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