Precis: Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto"

Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”, written in 1986 and expanded for publication in 1991, addresses the radical feminist movement that gained popularity in the 70’s and 80’s in the US and Europe. As a component of “second wave” activism, radical feminism attempted to analyze the roots of gender oppression and the impulses that propelled it. As a philosopher of science, Haraway takes issue with the idea that socially constructed problems like patriarchy could be challenged with extensive research and interrogation. Throughout the piece, she concerns herself with rejecting masculinist histories, and embarks upon writing a “political myth” for today’s times that is faithful both to feminism and materialism in a blasphemic and ironic manner.

Haraway begins her manifesto by introducing and defining her main metaphor, the cyborg. She mentions that part of the reason she is attracted to the metaphor of the cyborg lies with its ability to help her reconceptualize socialist feminism in a “postmodernist, non-naturalist” mode. She claims that cyborgs are “outside gender” because they do not depend on reproduction for existence, and can be represented via: the blurring of animal and human, human and machine, and the physical and non-physical.

Much of Haraway’s piece deals specifically with the issue of feminist political organizing in light of cyborg politics. She counsels against identity politics, noting “there is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women”, and feminists might better be served by considering “woman” to be a socially constructed category along the same lines of “homosexuals” and “youth”. Haraway vocalizes her contempt against the notion that feminist politics, like cyborg ontology, works as a series of partialities rather than a totalizing whole.

Haraway argues, feminist science fiction’s reconceptualization of the cyborg shows readers that “the machine is not an ‘it’ to be animated, worshipped, and dominated”. Rather, the machine represents our processes and aspects of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines, and they do not dominate or threaten us. Haraway finishes her manifesto by restating three crucial arguments of the essay:

1. “The production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now.”
2. “Taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology." Haraway adds that taking responsibility also means "embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts."
3. Cyborg imagery suggests "a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves."

Obviously, the scope of this piece is directed toward women, and I saw this most vividly demonstrated in Haraway’s description of the “New Industrial Revolution” and its world-wide working class. She argues that women produce the majority of its labor, which is feminized in the context of the new economy. Nevertheless, the fact that cyborg science fiction blurs the boundaries between the status of men, women, and humans in general makes for a better understanding of the piece as a reconstitution of a utopian world without gender.