A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

1. Introduction

Donna J. Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (first published 1985, revised 1991) is a seminal intervention at the intersection of feminist theory, Marxism, and science and technology studies. Written as an “ironic political myth,” it introduces the figure of the cyborg—a hybrid of machine and organism—as a tool for rethinking politics, subjectivity, and embodiment in an age shaped by computing, biotechnology, and global capitalism.

Haraway frames the essay as an internal critique and reinvention of socialist-feminism, arguing that traditional appeals to a unified category “women” and to a pre-technological “nature” are no longer analytically or politically adequate. The manifesto situates contemporary struggles within what she calls the integrated circuit, a world of electronically mediated production, communication, and warfare.

A central aim of the text is to question inherited dualisms—human/animal, organism/machine, nature/culture, male/female—and to show how they are destabilized by late twentieth-century technoscience. Rather than lament this destabilization, the manifesto explores how it might open alternative forms of coalition and resistance. Haraway’s cyborg is neither a simple celebration of technology nor a straightforward warning; it is an ambivalent figuration that both registers domination and points toward new kinds of socialist-feminist politics.

The essay is also notable for its experimental style: it mixes theoretical argument, political analysis, science-fictional imagery, and ironic humor. This distinctive mode of writing has made A Cyborg Manifesto a touchstone not only in feminist theory but also in cultural studies, posthumanism, and debates about the politics of digital and biotechnological futures.

2. Historical and Intellectual Context

A Cyborg Manifesto emerged from the political and theoretical conjuncture of the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States and Western Europe. Several overlapping contexts are commonly highlighted:

Intellectually, the manifesto is often situated at the intersection of:

• Marxist and socialist-feminist theory, which provide tools for analyzing labor, reproduction, and class, yet are criticized in the essay for residual humanism and reliance on a unified historical subject.
• Science and technology studies (STS) and history of science, fields in which Haraway herself was active, stressing the social construction of scientific knowledge and the co-production of nature and society.
• Psychoanalysis and critical theory, particularly in discussions of subject formation, desire, and ideology, though Haraway often treats these traditions critically or playfully.
• Feminist engagements with cybernetics and information theory, which provide the conceptual backdrop for her discussion of communication, coding, and feedback systems.

Commentators differ on which context is primary. Some emphasize the Cold War military-industrial complex; others foreground intra-feminist debates or postmodern theory. Most agree, however, that the manifesto responds to a moment of perceived crisis in both socialist and feminist politics amid rapidly transforming technoscientific environments.

3. Author and Composition

Donna J. Haraway (b. 1944) is an American scholar trained in biology, philosophy, and the history of science. Before A Cyborg Manifesto, she was known for work on primatology and the social construction of scientific knowledge. Her interdisciplinary position—moving between biology, philosophy, and feminist theory—shapes the manifesto’s characteristic mixture of empirical reference and theoretical speculation.

Haraway’s Intellectual Background

Haraway studied zoology and philosophy at Colorado College, biology in Paris, and completed a PhD in biology at Yale with a dissertation on developmental biology and philosophy. She later taught at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins before joining the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her earlier essays, such as “Situated Knowledges” and work collected in Primate Visions, share with the manifesto a concern for feminist re-readings of science and nature.

Composition History

The manifesto took shape in the early 1980s, in the context of debates within U.S. socialist-feminism about the failures of traditional left politics and the rise of high technology. Haraway was engaged with networks of feminist science scholars, West Coast activists, and Marxist theorists. The original version, titled “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” was written for a special issue of Socialist Review focusing on women and technology.

Scholars note that the essay was composed alongside Haraway’s work on primatology and reproductive technologies, and many see the cyborg as continuous with her broader interest in “naturecultures” and the mutual constitution of organisms and machines. The text’s dense allusiveness—drawing on computer science, popular culture, Marxist theory, and feminist debates—reflects Haraway’s broad reading and her position within a multi-disciplinary intellectual milieu.

Revisions made for the 1991 book version are often interpreted as Haraway’s response to early criticisms and as an attempt to clarify some of the theoretical stakes of the cyborg figure, though the core arguments remain consistent with the 1985 composition.

4. Publication and Textual History

The manifesto has a relatively clear and well-documented textual history, though there are notable differences between versions.

Main Publication Milestones

The 1991 version is generally treated as the standard reference text. It streamlines some arguments, sharpens terminology (including the phrase “informatics of domination”), and slightly reconfigures the structure. However, commentators note that the 1985 text retains historical interest, particularly for understanding the essay’s initial political reception in socialist and Marxist circles.

Revisions and Variants

Analyses of the two main English versions emphasize that:

• Certain formulations are toned down or clarified in 1991, arguably in response to critiques about ambiguity or perceived technophilia.
• Some specific references to 1980s U.S. politics and organizing are updated or reframed as part of a broader “late twentieth century” context.
• The change of title from “Manifesto for Cyborgs” to “A Cyborg Manifesto” is read by some as underscoring the text’s self-reflexive, rhetorical character.

Beyond these, there are no competing “editions” in the strict textual-critical sense; the work survives in its authorially sanctioned forms. Translations into multiple languages—Spanish, French, German, Polish, and others—have slightly different paratexts and interpretive emphases, but they all derive from the 1991 English core text.

Because the author is living and the rights controlled, there is no established critical edition with apparatus. Scholarly citations typically reference the 1991 Routledge edition and occasionally note divergences where comparison with the 1985 Socialist Review version is relevant.

5. Structure and Organization of the Essay

Although Haraway’s writing is often described as nonlinear and associative, A Cyborg Manifesto has a discernible structure, especially in the 1991 version. It is organized into titled parts that guide the reader through successive layers of argument.

Major Parts

Organizational Features

Across these parts, Haraway weaves theoretical exposition, political commentary, and metaphorical elaboration rather than isolating each to a discrete section. The essay repeatedly circles back to key motifs—the cyborg, boundary breakdowns, informatics of domination—developing them incrementally.

Commentators note that the structure mirrors the essay’s content: it resists linear narrative or systematic philosophical argument in favor of a more “cybernetic” pattern of feedback, recursion, and partial connections. Nevertheless, the progression from contextualization (Parts 1–2), through critique (Parts 3–4), to more constructive political and methodological reflections (Parts 5–7) is widely recognized as the guiding organizational arc.

6. The Cyborg as Theoretical Figure

The cyborg is the central conceptual device of the manifesto. Haraway adopts the term from cybernetics and science fiction but reworks it into a figuration—a semi-fictional construct used to think with, rather than a literal technological artifact.

Characteristics of the Cyborg

Haraway describes the cyborg as:

• A hybrid of machine and organism, embodying the collapse of distinctions between natural and artificial.
• An illegitimate offspring of militarism, technoscience, and patriarchal capitalism, lacking any innocent origin.
• A being that “does not dream of community on the model of the organic family,” troubling genealogies, motherhood, and lineage.

The cyborg thus condenses multiple themes: embodiment, technology, power, and identity. It is not proposed as a future evolutionary stage but as a way of naming contemporary conditions in which humans are already enmeshed with machines and codes (e.g., in workplaces, medical technologies, and media networks).

Theoretical Functions

Scholars identify several functions of the cyborg figure:

Some interpreters emphasize the cyborg’s emancipatory potential as a symbol of new forms of agency and embodiment; others stress its ambivalence, noting that the same technoscientific networks that produce cyborg subjectivities also sustain intensified control, surveillance, and exploitation.

The cyborg is therefore best understood within the essay as a deliberately unstable theoretical figure: simultaneously a symptom of domination and a resource for reimagining socialist-feminist politics in an informatic age.

7. Boundary Breakdowns and Technoscience

A key analytic move in A Cyborg Manifesto is the claim that late twentieth-century technoscience has eroded three foundational boundaries. Haraway argues that these boundary breakdowns undermine hierarchies built upon earlier notions of fixed, natural difference.

The Three Boundaries

Haraway links these breakdowns to developments in fields such as molecular biology, computer science, and communications engineering. She suggests that in an era of integrated circuits and genetic coding, entities are increasingly understood as systems of information and feedback, cutting across older ontological divides.

Technoscientific Context

The notion of technoscience is crucial here: science and technology are viewed as inseparable, co-producing not only new devices but also new forms of life and subjectivity. The cyborg emerges from and exemplifies this context.

Proponents of Haraway’s account emphasize that these boundary breakdowns illuminate how social hierarchies—such as those that positioned humans above animals, men above women, or Western reason above nature—lose their purported natural grounding. Critics, however, sometimes argue that actual material differences and asymmetries of power persist despite these conceptual shifts, warning against overstating the degree of ontological dissolution.

Within the manifesto, the breakdowns function less as empirical theses about the complete erasure of boundaries and more as a way of conceptualizing the conditions in which new forms of identity, labor, and politics are forged under contemporary technoscience.

8. Critique of Essentialism and Identity Politics

A major focus of the manifesto is Haraway’s critique of essentialism in feminist and left politics, particularly the reliance on “woman” or “women” as a unified political subject. She argues that under conditions of global capitalism, racialized divisions of labor, and diverse cultural histories, such unity is both analytically misleading and politically limiting.

The Problem of “Woman” as a Category

Haraway contends that:

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“There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women.”

— Donna J. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1991)

She maintains that appeals to a shared feminine essence risk masking differences of race, class, sexuality, colonial location, and technological embodiment. According to her analysis, categories like “Third World woman” can reproduce homogenizing, neo-colonial perspectives.

In this context, identity politics—understood as organizing around fixed group identities—comes under scrutiny. Haraway does not reject all forms of identity-based mobilization but warns that conceiving identities as coherent and pre-given can obscure the complex, constructed, and often contradictory positions individuals occupy.

Affinity versus Identity

In response, Haraway introduces the notion of affinity: connections chosen and forged across differences, rather than discovered in a supposed shared essence. This distinction underpins her proposal for cyborg subjectivities and coalitions.

Some feminist theorists welcome this critique as a precursor to intersectional and anti-essentialist approaches. Others argue that rejecting strong identity categories may undermine marginalized groups’ ability to mobilize politically or to name specific forms of oppression. Debates also concern whether Haraway sufficiently acknowledges the continuing material force of categories like race and gender, even if they lack a biological essence.

Within the essay, this critique of essentialism is central to the move toward cyborg politics, which seeks new forms of collective struggle that are accountable to difference rather than grounded in an imagined common nature.

9. The Informatics of Domination and Global Capitalism

Haraway’s term “informatics of domination” designates a historically specific configuration of power in the late twentieth century, centered on information technologies, biotechnologies, and globalized economic structures. It is presented through a comparative chart contrasting older “modern” arrangements with newer informatic ones.

The Informational Turn

In the manifesto’s chart, pairs such as “representation / simulation,” “factory / home, market,” and “public / private” are juxtaposed, suggesting a shift from industrial, nation-state-centered capitalism to dispersed, networked, and information-intensive forms of control.

Haraway draws on Marxist and poststructuralist analyses to depict how labor, reproduction, and everyday life are reorganized through microelectronics, telecommunications, and biomedicine. Workers and consumers are increasingly treated as nodes in digital networks, and bodies themselves become sites of information processing (e.g., through medical monitoring, reproductive technologies).

Domination and Possibility

The phrase “informatics of domination” underscores both continuity and change: domination persists, but its mechanisms are transformed. Control now functions through databases, codes, and interfaces rather than solely through factories and assembly lines.

Commentators highlight different aspects of this analysis:

• Some see it as an early diagnosis of what would later be called neoliberal or digital capitalism, emphasizing flexibility, precarity, and the commodification of information.
• Others stress its affinities with Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentality, noting how life processes and populations are managed via technoscientific regimes.

Critics sometimes argue that Haraway’s portrayal risks technological determinism or underplays ongoing forms of material exploitation, especially in the global South. Supporters counter that the manifesto insists on the ambivalence of informatic systems: they enable both intensified domination and new transnational alliances, hacktivism, and alternative knowledge practices.

Within the essay, the informatics of domination provides the structural backdrop against which cyborg identities and politics must be theorized.

10. Cyborg Politics: Affinity, Coalition, and Partiality

Cyborg politics refers to the forms of collective action and subjectivity Haraway envisions as appropriate to an era of informatic domination and boundary breakdowns. These politics emphasize affinity, coalition, and partiality rather than unified identities or appeals to origins.

Affinity and Coalition

Haraway proposes that political alliances should be formed through affinity—chosen, contingent connections—among heterogeneous actors: feminists, anti-racist activists, environmentalists, labor organizers, queer communities, and others. Cyborg politics, in this sense, is a model of coalition-building that:

• Accepts that agents are multiple and contradictory (e.g., simultaneously privileged and oppressed in different respects).
• Foregrounds strategic connections over essential similarity.
• Encourages alliances around specific issues (such as reproductive technologies, workplace automation, or environmental hazards) rather than a singular overarching identity.

Partiality and Situatedness

A defining feature of cyborg politics is partiality: political positions are understood as incomplete, situated, and revisable. Haraway links this to her broader epistemological stance that all knowledge is “partial perspective.”

Some theorists interpret cyborg politics as an early articulation of what later becomes known as intersectional or coalitional feminism, though Haraway’s vocabulary and emphasis on technoscience are distinctive. Others criticize cyborg politics for its lack of a concrete program or for seeming more attuned to symbolic and discursive struggles than to traditional forms of class organization or state policy.

Within the manifesto itself, cyborg politics remains deliberately open-ended: it is sketched as a horizon for reimagining socialist-feminist practice in fragmented, technologically mediated conditions, rather than as a prescriptive blueprint.

11. Famous Passages and Key Formulations

Several passages from A Cyborg Manifesto have become widely cited, serving as entry points into its themes and controversies.

“Rather be a cyborg than a goddess”

Near the conclusion, Haraway writes:

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“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

— Donna J. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1991)

This line encapsulates her preference for hybrid, technoscientific, and non-innocent figurations over spiritualized or essentialist images of femininity associated with goddess feminism. Commentators differ on whether this is a wholesale rejection of spiritual or ecofeminist approaches or a strategic provocation meant to unsettle complacent invocations of “Mother Earth” or a primordial feminine.

Three Boundary Breakdowns

Early in the essay, Haraway lists the now-famous trio of boundary breakdowns (human/animal, organism/machine, physical/non-physical). This formulation has been widely referenced in discussions of posthumanism and technoscience, often as a succinct summary of the ontological shifts the manifesto addresses.

Informatics of Domination Chart

The tabular comparison between earlier modern structures and the informatics of domination is another key feature. Although not a passage in the narrow sense, this chart is frequently reproduced in scholarship as a visual condensation of Haraway’s account of late twentieth-century capitalism.

Critique of “Woman” as a Unified Subject

Haraway’s declaration that there is no single “woman’s experience” and that “women of color have insisted on the inadequacy of ‘woman’ as a category” has been influential in feminist debates. Some read this as an early articulation of anti-essentialist and intersectional concerns; others emphasize that women-of-color feminisms were independently developing similar critiques.

Together, these formulations have shaped how the manifesto is remembered and debated, often standing in for broader arguments about technology, identity, and feminist politics.

12. Philosophical Method and Style

Haraway’s philosophical method in A Cyborg Manifesto is eclectic and anti-systematic. The essay does not present a linear argument or a set of formally derived theses; instead, it blends genealogy, semiotic analysis, political economy, and speculative figuration.

Methodological Features

• Figurational thinking: The cyborg operates as a figuration that condenses conceptual, political, and aesthetic dimensions. This method aligns with feminist and poststructuralist approaches that use images and narratives to rethink ontology and politics.
• Situated knowledge: Even though the manifesto predates Haraway’s explicit essay on “situated knowledges,” it already enacts an epistemology in which all claims are partial, located, and self-reflexive.
• Genealogical critique: The text traces how categories such as “woman,” “nature,” and “labor” have been historically produced within technoscientific and capitalist practices, echoing Foucaultian genealogy.

Stylistic Traits

The style is highly distinctive:

Supporters argue that this style is itself political: it disrupts academic conventions, resists closure, and performs the hybridity it describes. Critics contend that the opacity, neologisms, and rapid shifts of register can hinder comprehension and make the text less accessible to activists or non-specialist readers.

Methodologically, the manifesto is often situated within postmodern or poststructuralist currents while also drawing on Marxist critique and feminist standpoint theory. It exemplifies a mode of theory that treats style and rhetoric not as mere ornament but as integral to philosophical and political intervention.

13. Reception and Major Debates

From its first publication, A Cyborg Manifesto generated intense discussion across feminist theory, cultural studies, and STS. Its reception is marked by both enthusiastic uptake and pointed criticism.

Initial and Ongoing Reception

Early readers in socialist-feminist circles were divided: some welcomed the essay’s challenge to essentialism and its engagement with technology; others viewed it as too playful, abstract, or insufficiently grounded in material organizing. Over time, the manifesto became one of the most cited texts in feminist theory and a foundational reference for cyberfeminism and posthumanism.

Major Debates

Debates also concern the text’s legibility: some herald its stylistic experimentation as intellectually generative, while others regard it as unnecessarily opaque. These divergent responses have themselves become part of the manifesto’s legacy, shaping how subsequent scholars and activists approach questions of technology, identity, and feminist theory.

14. Influence on Feminism, STS, and Posthumanism

The manifesto’s influence extends across several fields, where it is often treated as a formative or catalytic text.

Feminist Theory and Cyberfeminism

In feminist theory, Haraway’s critique of essentialism and advocacy of affinity-based politics have been widely taken up, intersecting with and sometimes prefiguring intersectional approaches. The figure of the cyborg became central to cyberfeminism, a heterogeneous set of theories and practices engaging with the gender politics of digital technologies and cyberspace. Some cyberfeminists adopt the cyborg as an icon of transgressive femininity online; others develop Haraway’s skepticism toward liberatory technological fantasies.

Science and Technology Studies (STS)

Within STS, A Cyborg Manifesto is a key text for understanding how scientific and technological practices shape bodies, identities, and social orders. It complements actor-network theory and related approaches by emphasizing gender, race, and power in technoscientific assemblages. Haraway’s notion of “natureculture” (developed more fully elsewhere) and her attention to informatics of domination have influenced research on biotechnology, military technologies, and digital media.

Posthumanism and Critical Theory

The manifesto is widely cited as an early and influential contribution to posthumanism, challenging human exceptionalism and stable human nature. The cyborg figure has informed later work by theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti, who develop different versions of posthuman subjectivity and ethics. Some adopt Haraway’s emphasis on hybridity and relationality; others modify her framework to stress environmental entanglements, non-human animals, or new materialisms.

Despite divergent trajectories, most discussions acknowledge A Cyborg Manifesto as a touchstone in rethinking the relations among humans, machines, and other living beings within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century critical theory.

15. Legacy and Historical Significance

Over several decades, A Cyborg Manifesto has come to be regarded as a landmark of late twentieth-century critical thought, with a legacy that spans academic disciplines and cultural practices.

Canonical Status

The essay is frequently included in anthologies of feminist theory, cultural studies, and postmodern philosophy. Its concepts—cyborg, informatics of domination, affinity politics—have entered the vocabulary of multiple fields. Many commentators regard it as a key document in the transition from second-wave feminism to more anti-essentialist, intersectional, and technologically attuned feminist currents.

Long-Term Impact

Assessments of its historical significance vary. Some scholars emphasize its prescience regarding digital capitalism and biotechnologies. Others suggest that aspects of its analysis are dated, tied to specific Cold War and early microelectronics contexts. Nonetheless, the manifesto continues to serve as a reference point for discussions of how to theorize and contest power in technologically saturated societies, and it remains a subject of ongoing reinterpretation by feminist, queer, decolonial, and STS scholars.