pleasure. But also, beginning with Cyborg, 1989, she and I have found ourselves joined in a common project that is at once analytical, spiritual, metaphoric, and narrative. Randolph painted her Cyborg in conversation with my 1985 essay "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" providing a feminist portrait of the dangerous machine-human hybrids that populate our political, technological, corporeal, and imaginary landscapes; The painting maps the articulations among cosmos, animal, human, machine, and landscape through their recursive sidereal, bony, electronic, and geological skeletons; Their combinatorial logic is embodied; analysis is corporeal; The painting is replete with organs of touch and mediation, as well as with organs of vision; Direct in their gaze at the viewer, the eyes of both the woman and the white tigress shrouding her head and shoulders center the composition; The stylized DIP switches of the integrated circuit board on the human woman's chest are devices that set the defaults in a form halfway between hard-wiring and software control--not unlike the X-ray-stripped, echoing, homologous bones of the feline paws and human hands; Beneath the woman's fingers, a computer keyboard is jointed to the sandy desert-skeleton of the planet earth, a pyramid rising

in the middle ground to her left. The spiraling skeleton of the Milky Way, our galaxy, appears on a screen behind the cyborg figure in three different graphic displays made possible by assorted high-technology visualizing appara-tuses. The fourth square charts the gravity well of a black hole. Three tantalizing signs lace the space between the astronomical graphics: a tic-tac-toc game played with the European male and female astrological signs (Venus won); an equation from the mathematics of chaos, and a calcu- lation found in Einstein's theory of relativity. The math-ematics and games are logical skeletons in a painting intent on structural inquiry. The whole painting has the quality of a meditation device. The large cat is like a spirit animal. The woman, a Chinese student from Beijing residing in the United States in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square protests, figures the human, the universal, and the generic: a particular and recognizable person resonating with local and global conversations built into the skeleton of the earth and its galaxy in the late twentieth century. In this painting, she embodies the oxymoron of woman, "Third World" person, human, organism, communications technology, mathematician, writer, worker, engineer, scientist, spiritual guide, lover of the earth. This is the kind of "symbolic action" transnational feminisms have made legible. This is the kind of action that animates Randolph's work for me.

"Cyborg" and "The Passion ofOncoMonse" are important