Some of those who enthusiastically invetigate the cyborg in contemporary culture resist the idea that the paradigm is itself liberatory, empowering, or politically resistant. For example, near the close of his examimation of a movie comedy featuring a robot, Hugh Gusterson, argues that
We can have unabashedly military cyborgs, liberal cyborgs, and feminist cyborgs just as easily as we can have cyborgs that undermine such categories. To think otherwise is to underestimate the power of the grand narratives of Western thought and to substitute a romanticized vision of the cyborg (based, paradoxically, on its supposed immunity to romance) for older romantic salvation narratives organized around either a return to nature or a surrender to technology. Just as nature cannot save us, technology cannot save us, and the working class cannot save us, so also the cyborg cannot save us. We created the cyborg, just as we created nature, technology, and the working class, and only we can save ourselves. ["Short Circuit: Watching Television with a Nuclear-Weapons Scientist," Cyborg Handbook, 116]
Valuable as is Gusterson's reminder that one must labor to shape cultural constructions, has he misunderstood Haraway's assertions about the cyborg?
