“Woman has won”; “(Venus won)”: On Donna Haraway’s Goddess

Abstract

The concluding words of Donna J. Haraway’s essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ read, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”. In this article, I aim to determine the extent to which that declaration implicates the question of the female body in representation—particularly, the goddess’s. Building on existing work that examines the female body in relation to the tradition of the nude in painting, I explore the possibility of assigning an identity to the goddess that Haraway chooses the cyborg over—specifically that of Venus, the mythological goddess of love and beauty, which I further read within the framework offered by the collaborative exchange between Haraway and the artist Lynn Randolph. In light of this, I position the cyborg and goddess within a certain vision of the relationship between women, nature and technology. In my conclusion, I call for a consideration of the possibility of a posthuman goddess.