Are clones cyborgs?
I'm working on my last and fifth chapter, and recently gave a presentation on it at a Children's Literature PhD day at Roehampton. I'm looking at a range of YA books about teenaged clones, and the paradox they create for adults: while adults enlist technology in order to reinforce their control over the unpredictability of having children, the products of this technology, the clones, exist outside the family structure and thus have the potential to disturb one of the main institutions that perpetuates the adult-child power hierarchy. I used Dona Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto where she suggests that a cyborg has no myth of origins. I claimed in my paper that clones are a kind of cyborg as they are 'made' rather than 'born'. This argument was seriously criticised, and my colleagues claimed that a cyborg does have 'parents' be it the scientist or the person from which the original DNA was taken. I wanted to ask what you thought of this.