lacks in literacy she makes up by rewriting the dualisms of male and female, mestizo and white, feminism and other partial and limited identities. The cyborg body both writes and is written and in the process learns and changes. For Haraway, cyborgs are then subjects who make statements that transform themselves and the boundaries of the way things are. Cyborgification is subjectification. Nonetheless, this cyborg is as vulnerable as she is terrifying to entrenched beneficiaries of the way things are. Consider, for instance that Sister Other has been murdered by the hundreds without penalty in Juarez and Chihuahua City [3] and that she is sold into sex slavery with impunity in Cambodia and other lands. She needs alliances, affiliations and tools of survival—but she is more than a victim, she is a subject. It is often said that literacy and economic autonomy of women of color is a key to rising living standards and the quality of life in the poorest countries and neighborhoods throughout the world, but lack of progress toward that goal is seldom linked to self-defeating patterns of thought. By introducing a counter-image and ambiguity into a term that had been a univocally male and

relentless corporate and militaristic exponent of science and technology, Donna Haraway created an enigma, a site of cultural contradictions and contestations, an aporie or signifier of what is hard to imagine or think beyond—the cyborg.

We also know that the writing and written cyborg body is a «monster». «Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations», (180) Haraway tells us, suggesting the creatures that inhabited the edges of unknown territory on maps in a world undergoing European colonization. [4] Studies of ritual also tell us that monsters mark the middle or liminal stage in a rite of passage, for instance, between childhood and woman- or manhood, bachelorhood and marriage, and between being and non-being, birth and death. The body at the threshold of change is in-between categories and thus is neither/nor and both/and male/female, child/adult, animal/human, living/dead, etc. Thus each creature undergoing passage is precisely monstrous—a mixture of the incongruous and incommensurable—that is, «illegitimate» in a specific way unique to its time and place. For Victor Turner the monstrous body