Rewriting Humanism:

Donna Haraway's famous posthuman work A Cyborg Manifesto develops the concept of a cyborg, a new mode of existence she claims extends to all of us. "A cyborg is a cybernetic organism," she writes, "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction (Haraway 5). Caught between our flesh-and-bone organic structure and the omnipresent forces of technology, we have become something Other to ourselves: the cyborg, "simultaneously animal and machine" (Haraway 6). This is not limited to the more obvious technologies of electronic prostheses and VR headsets; it marks a shift in our fundamental existence.

Cyborgs are creatures of posthumanity who reject the limitations of humanist thought. For the cyborg, "whatever 'human nature' may be, it is hybridized, more to do with boundaries than essences" (Graham 228). There is a fundamental rejection of essentialism, holding instead a belief in the total mutability of being. The cyborg "thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born...[it] configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines" (Hayles 3). Boundaries over essences; anything can be changed, the question is how much and where to start.

In its rejection of essences, the cyborg also rejects notions of gender. "The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world," writes Haraway, existing beyond the essentialist, humanist rigidity enforced through gender (Haraway 8). It is from this viewpoint that we are able to approach gender accelerationism (a.k.a. g/acc), the movement towards abolishing gender entirely as quickly as possible. As The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto puts it:

The idea here being that abolition of gender is the ideal end goal, so we ought to do what we can to abolish it as swiftly as possible. There's a general view that gender is already on the way out; we're all already cyborgs. Yet, we're still far from reaching a post-gender future, haunted as we are by the humanist specters still embedded in culture and society. G/acc sees this state of things and calls for a radical rebellion against gender to oust these ghosts. However, it's not quite as simple as acting outside of gender norms. G/acc theory holds a rhizomatic view of the way gender is connected with other humanist, capitalist, patriarchal structures of oppression. Gender cannot be abolished alone; the others must go with it:

So, how do we do this? Storm's manifesto calls for a Marxist-Leninist-inspired "Dictatorship of the Queer" to build dual-power networks that challenge existing power structures, ultimately calling for "Gender Communism" which, it turns out, is just regular communism (Storm). But that is not relevant to the topic at hand. Rather, I will focus on the avenue of constructing new bodies of culture and myth which ameliorate and encourage post-gender existence. The posthumanist condition necessitates that "an alternative religious symbolic system...be articulated in order for different kinds of relationships to the material world to be enacted, ones which value different kinds of scientific epistemological and technological endeavors" (Graham 232). This act of creation, I argue, is what Arca is doing through her art.

Arca's owning of nonhuman identity is what makes her work posthuman. She doesn't care how you identify or how human you might be; in this space, we're all mutants.