Saverio Cantoni ~ The Cyborg, the Slash, and the Dildo. Cripping Chronopoetics.

Thesis supervisor: Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro

Thesis: The Cyborg, the Slash, and the Dildo. Cripping Chronopoetics.

June 2024

Abstract  

The Cyborg, the Slash, and the Dildo interrogates these figures as epistemic tools in the context of activism and the growing field of crip studies: a politically active segment of disability studies concerned with the intersections of disability with questions of race, gender, and class. This research’s prodrome is Donna Haraway’s "A Cyborg Manifesto:” an essay published in its firstversion in 1985, the year I was born, and a topical text in cyborg anthropology. Haraway is widely acknowledged as a scholar whose work contributed to defining the field of anthropology of nature, science, and technology. Her essay opened the field of cyborg feminism, with many elements in “A Cyborg Manifesto” reinforcing stereotypical assumptions regarding the lived realities of the negatively racialized working class of the world’s majority while simultaneously reproducing ableist assumptions in the lived experiences of disabled people. While my research does not expand the work of the many scholars in radical Black studies and disability studies that already exposed the gaps and the oppressive narratives in Haraway’s text – this is a work that the American feminist, queer, and disability scholar Alison Kafer did in her Feminist, Queer, Crip – in my research, I welcome the offers that Kafer published at the end of the chapter “The Cyborg and the Crip,” to evaluate the figure of the cyborg in disabled life, testing its political tenets. As a cyborg and working on the cyborg, I use an annotation methodology that mixes theoretical investigation with lived reality, allowing me to also document the work some of my disabled comrades are doing in our communities. The annotation system does not obey linear time but responds to the dynamic fluctuation and pauses of crip time; the reader is welcome to engage with the arguments exposed here in asynchronous sequence, cripping the annotations while I am cripping the cyborg.

Author Saverio Cantoni