According to Donna J. Haraway,
Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centred polis of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases -- all crucial to establishing modern identity.The evolutionary and behavioural sciences of monkeys and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late twentiethcentury industrial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.[Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, 177]
From what qualities does the monstrousness of the cyborg derive?
How do the cyborg of recent theory and cyberpunk sciencve fiction difference from the figure in Mary Shelley's Frankestein?
What are the implications of using a monster as a figure or paradigm for all people?
Why should it appeal to theorists of gender and sexuality?
