For the Love of Lab Rats: Kinship, Humanimal Relations, and Good ...

affinity and identity. Feminists cannot use an imagined organic ontology as a point of politics because there simply is no such ‘natural’ self.

The cyborg has important implications for kinship and the ways people think about and conduct it, and it has particularly significant implications for human-animal kinship. Haraway detailed three major boundary breakdowns in the formation of the cyborg, including those between an organism and a machine (i.e., those between the human and the pacemaker or the dialysis machine) and those between organic matter and inorganic matter (i.e., the rise of ‘ethereal machines’, such as the tiny chip, which can carry an almost infinite amount of information and is more about consciousness than it is about grinding gears and heavy machinery). But the first boundary deconstruction she turned her attention to is the one between humans and animals. She noted that

And, the development of transgenic organisms of course calls the whole idea of the genetic integrity of the single organism thoroughly into question. Haraway used her cyborg to represent ‘lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints’ (p. 154). Such a view of kinship is not based on descent or relatedness by blood, and it is not limited to the world of humans; it is more encompassing of the ways in which relatedness is made and experienced in a more-than-human world.

Butler (2000) asked how flexible kinship can be, too, by looking into the ways in which incest taboos have been conceptualised in anthropology. Kinship has been reckoned in ways that are outside of the generational, too; Butler, for example, in her Antigone’s Claim (2000), reconceptualised the incest taboo in relation to kinship and opened up the concept to cultural change. Such a view is not