“A Manifesto for Cyborgs”

Written in 1985, Donna J. Haraway's “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” is a key text for those studying the politics of technoculture. Haraway, a feminist biologist and historian of science, later updated and revised the “Manifesto” (renaming it “Cyborg Manifesto”) for her 1991 book, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.

In an interview, Haraway described the genesis of her essay: “In 1982,” she relates, “I was asked by the editors of the journal Social Text [to] describe what socialist-feminist priorities [would be] in the Reagan years.” Among the many issues in the news at the time was the so-called “Star Wars” defense system, an $84 billion item in the U.S. defense budget. Meanwhile, many women at that time were advocating what became known as goddess feminism, which advocated, among other things, a celebration of the “essentially feminine body,” and which exhorted women to “return to nature.”

Although she was no fan of the military-industrial complex, Haraway was troubled by the notion of opting out of technological life entirely. As she explained it, at least three “contemporary border crossings” mixed nature and technology to such a degree that it was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended. The first border crossing was the breakdown between humans and animals, occurring as a result of things like pollution, tourism, and medical experimentation. The second boundary transgression was between humans and machines. Without ever citing the Internet or virtual-reality technologies, Haraway described our machines as being “disturbingly lively,” while we are “frighteningly inert.” The third boundary crossing was the erosion of space between “the physical and the non-physical,” caused by the ubiquity of microprocessors in contemporary life. “Small is not so much beautiful,” observed Haraway, “as pre-eminently dangerous.”