A Cyborg Manifesto

A long essay first published in Socialist Review in 1985 as a contribution to socialist-feminist debate, and revised for Haraway's collection Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991). Haraway offers the cyborg, a hybrid of organism and machine, as an ironic political myth for feminists living in a world remade by science and technology. She argues that late twentieth-century science has broken down three boundaries: between human and animal, organism and machine, and the physical and the non-physical. Rather than appealing to a shared female nature or an innocent origin, feminists should build coalitions on affinity rather than identity, learning from women of colour's experience of shifting, multiple identities. She maps a move from older hierarchical dominations to an 'informatics of domination' run through communications and biotechnology, and describes a global 'homework economy' in which work is made cheap, flexible and feminised. The essay closes by declaring that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

It is a founding text of posthumanism and feminist science studies, and a sharp prompt for thinking about bodies, identity and politics in a world of networks, biotechnology and machines.