"Forgetting about the body [in cyberspace] is an old cartesian trick", says Sandy Stone. She is referring to numerous cyber-utopianists who claim that the mind can be uploaded into cyberspace (see for instance the novels of William Gibson) and that the body becomes obsolete.

The cyborg metaphor is an excellent concept to challenge these patriarchal ideas which emphasise the mind over the body (and then relegate the bodily to the feminine) and forget that, as Michel Foucault put it, "the body is the material location where power is excerted".

The cyborg metaphor makes us aware of how our bodies are closely integrated with technologies, and how these inetgrations are entangled with gender, ethnicity, class and geographical location. I am a cyborg not only in using the computer and the Internet to empower myself and spread my ideas, but also in using book technology, in wearing contact lenses, in cycling into university, in using the ATM to obtain the money from my scholarship. The heavily underpaid female workers on the other hand in the macquiladoras on the Mexican-American border are cyborgs in their close contact with chips, wires and other pieces of hardware, using other technological devices to put computers together so that me and others in our information society can use them.