Tag Archives: Donna Haraway

Saviour Syndrome: thoughts-in-process

14 November 2022Academics, Climate, the future, &tcanthropocene, apocalypse, apocalytpticism, capitalism, Chthulhucene, climate change, Donna Haraway, doomerism, existentialism, fascism, Frank Kermode, global weirding, hopium, literary theory, political strongman myth, religion, renewable energy, Rosi Braidotti, saviour syndrome, silver bullet, work in progressAriel Kroon

I’ve noticed a trend, lately, in a lot of the circles I move in or at least brush against, and it’s something I’m starting to label, since I’m coming across it so often. Help me think through this?

I’m calling it “saviour syndrome” because I’m coming across a lot of religious language and mythos from sources I would expect to be fully secular, or atheist, or at least agnostic or pagan or heavily critical of the Christian narrative. It’s frankly pretty puzzling at first, but given more thought and what I know about the origins of settler society on Turtle Island, it comes clear after a bit of thought. At least, to me. I want to know if I’m off-base or what I haven’t thought about, since this is grounded in my own experience as a cis, white, 3rd-gen Dutch settler woman who grew up in the Christian Reformed Church ethnoreligious community. So there’s a lot I might not be seeing. But this is what I have seen.

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Musings

13 November 2018Writing Processacademia, blogging, Donna Haraway, graduate school, hope, Robin Wall Kimmerer, theoryAriel Kroon

Typing posts up is exhausting and takes my mental energy away from where it needs to be (e.g. my thesis, maybe), so I’m not going to be making any more gigantic posts about theory – or, well, I won’t be pushing myself to do so, at least until my dissertation is over and done with. Life is too short to hold oneself to academic standards for writing that is non-peer-reviewed – and, let’s face it – that isn’t generally even considered by a hiring committee for a traditional academic job, or tenure review board.

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On Cyborgs, part 2

11 September 2018Academicsassemblage, Deleuze, Donna Haraway, Guattari, Jasbir Puar, Kimberlé Crenshaw, slashficAriel Kroon

Cyborg theory, in its ability to work across oppositional binaries like technology/human, culture/nature, constructed/given, helps philosophers (and thinkers in general) in forging a way forward beyond what Donna Haraway called the “informatics of domination” back in 1985: self/other, masculine/feminine, white/black, subject/object, real/virtual, heterosexual/homosexual, etc and the implicit hierarchy of the first term over the second.* Going beyond binaries, refusing to devalue integral aspects of our being, realizing that parts of our selves that we thought were inherent are actually constructs / the result of cultural forces, and then working to move forward with that knowledge. Pretty nifty, right?**

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On Cyborgs, part 1

4 September 2018Academics"A Manifesto for Cyborgs", Donna Haraway, feminism, Simone de BeauvoirAriel Kroon

So, cyborgs. If you grew up in the 90s like me, you probably get an image of the Terminator, or the Teen Titans character, or Neo. That’s where I started, but not exactly where the theory of cyborgs started, and that’s the theory I wanna talk about in this post.

Warning: I’m pretty steeped in feminist writing praxis of framing arguments with personal experience so it may or may not get personal up in hurr.

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