the cyborg in sabina berman's me, who dove into the heart of the world: a harawayian reading

The devastating damage done by dual, discriminatory oppositions has been enormous. throughout history, numerous groups of people have suffered from discriminatory behavior due to a hierarchical system of thinking which privileges one group over another. for example, people of color or the disabled are taken as ‘other’ and have always been victimized in the human society by those who believe they are superior. the foundation of such doctrines rests not on the deviated humanism, but on the prehistoric anthropocentricism, embedded mostly in western cultures: a worldview which considers human beings, as the most important entity, to be superior to nature. non-human entities, like animals, are then seen as resources for humankind to exploit and consume as they wish. in a moral attempt to prevent such maltreatments of both human and non-human others, donna haraway introduces a concept known as cyborg in her much-discussed “a cyborg manifesto” (1985). cyborg figure, according to her, is a hybrid body that is untouched by polar dichotomy and is capable of ‘becoming’ animal or machine. as if following in haraway’s footsteps, autistic people – who are labeled/ stigmatized as intellectually disabled – have started to write autobiographies, projecting images of themselves in form of a body sharing close affinities with animals, robots, nature, and environment. likewise, playwright and journalist sabina berman, in her 2012 debut novel me, who dove into the heart of the world presents an autistic character karen nieto who emerges in the book as a feral child unable to speak, but becomes an engineer in slaughtering tuna fish. this study, henceforth, attempts to apply haraway’s theory of cyborg to her novel, drawing an analogy between a cyborg figure and an autistic body to bring to light the necessity of inclusion as prescribed by post-humanism.