Cyborg Manifesto

In 1985, the Socialist Review published the “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” an article authored by feminist theorist Donna Haraway. A fundamental contribution to the technoscientific turn in feminist theories, Haraway's watershed essay has been reprinted in at least 16 journals and anthologies around the globe. Often referred to simply as the “Cyborg Manifesto,” its impact on the feminist study of gender is profound. Following its publication, the cyborg, a fusion of machine and organism, has become the center of a number of approaches to the study of gender relations. Indeed, an entire body of “cyborg feminism” has consequently emerged as an interdisciplinary project that focuses on how technological and scientific (technoscientific) transformations are restructuring gendered power relations in contemporary societies. This entry describes the cyborg and examines the theoretical and political project of the Manifesto.

Haraway draws the image of the cyborg creature from contemporary science fiction. The cyborg, a “cybernetic organism,” is a hybrid entity, or a fusion of machine and organism. It is an intermediary entity made possible by transformations in science and technology. As an intermediary, it disrupts the purity of previous separations between machines and humans, fact and fiction, natural and artificial, and pure and impure. It is, therefore, always a partial being with a dual nature. Paradoxically, the cyborg is always simultaneously two seemingly opposite things. It is in this disruption of polarized binaries and in its partial state of being that Haraway sees possibility and revolutionary potential. Therefore, the cyborg's duality and disruption of dualisms is centered in the Manifesto as a metaphor that if applied to socialist feminism can allow for a re-visioning of a feminist socialist politics.

The Cyborg Manifesto constitutes a theoretical intervention and attempt at reinvigorating socialist, materialist feminist approaches to understanding gender in contemporary society. Haraway argues that existing feminist socialist paradigms do not take into account the emerging technoscientific era, an era that she calls the “informatics of domination.” The “informatics of domination” is described as the late phase of capitalist expansion that follows the white, capitalist, patriarchal domination of the previous era. In this new era, Haraway argues that patriarchy is equally as pervasive and problematic; however, it is more deeply embedded and covert and therefore more dangerous. Technoscience plays a key role in reconfiguring the way in which the intersecting dimensions of race, class, and gender operate in this late capitalist era. The Manifesto seeks to conceptualize how gender and other relations of power operate in light of this contextual shift. In other words, Haraway argues that the rising centrality of science and technology in everyday life is also changing the way in which patriarchal (and racist, classist, heterosexist) power relationships play out.

Haraway's goal is not merely to describe these changes but also to construct possibilities for dismantling patriarchy and other modes of domination in the emerging technoscientific era. Yet Haraway finds feminist political practice unsuited for this task. She argues that feminist scholarship has either tended to ignore the different experiences of women across various dimensions of power and difference, particularly race and class, or it has fallen into the trap of essentialism. That is, she contends with perspectives that focus too much on the differences between people and argue that coalition can come only through similar biological, racial, and class identities. The contradictory position-ality of the cyborg serves as a metaphor for feminist unity in the informatics of domination. It is the common goal of maneuvering in oppositional ways through the new social order that can bring people together, not necessarily identity. In other words, coalition need not be based upon one's race, class, sexuality, gender, or any other natural identification. The goal of opposition to the informatics of domination, not essential sameness, should serve as the basis for coalition. The cyborg, like Haraway's vision of coalition, is filled with difference. This need to push beyond unification based on identity is urgent in the informatics of domination because oppression extends (although differentially) to all women and men regardless of one's gender, race, and class identity.

...