… laughter in the face of serious categories is indispensable for feminism—Butler (Gender Trouble, viii)

Situated within the historical context of postmodern culture in transnational corporate capitalism, feminism(s) have had to reassess all-encompassing theories about ‘women’ and their ‘oppression’ in ‘patriarchy’. The totalizing claims of the ‘information society’ over all aspects of lived social relations make it nearly impossible to find discursive spaces from which to argue oppositional politics. Russ's fiction seeks precisely such discursive spaces. As my readings have demonstrated, her work shows an uneasiness with stable identities and sweeping, monolithic political claims from her beginnings as a writer in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Russ shares this searching uneasiness with a number of feminist critics, who have articulated feminist political positions which do not solely rely on the integrity and homogeneity of the category woman.

One of these critics is Donna Haraway, whose cyborg myth, carefully constructed in her classic essay ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (1985), illustrates this particular deconstructive stance and as a point of intersection highlights the political significance of non-human or partially dehumanized characters in Russ's fiction. Analysing the complex workings of power and exploitation in what she calls the ‘Informatics of Domination’, Haraway builds ‘an ironic political myth faithful,’ as she says, ‘to feminism, socialism and materialism’ (190). Her eiron, her dissembler in this constructed mythical story, is the cyborg, a hybrid creature who takes pleasure in the confusion of boundaries between machine and organism, between human and animal, and indeed between social reality and fiction. Merging human organisms with sophisticated machinery is an invention of science fiction, but also part of social and bodily reality at the end of the twentieth century. Silicon breasts, artificial hearts, prostheses of all kinds, titanium teeth implants, contact lenses and other artefacts have become part of human bodies to the point of being indistinguishable from the ‘original’. The cyborg did not choose to become such, but s/he consciously uses this position as political ‘myth’ which makes possible the weaving of oppositional networks of partial affiliations.

In articulating this destabilizing political concept, Haraway criticizes earlier socialist and radical feminist perspectives—Kristeva's first and second moment—for claiming the status of complete explanation. Both feminist positions in the heat of their revolutionary fervour totalized their own (white, Western) concept of ‘woman’ as an essentially homogenous group of innocent victims.