A Cyborg Manifesto

Introduction

The essay first appeared in Socialist Review in 1985 as “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” and was revised for Haraway’s collection Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991). Haraway, a historian of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, uses the cyborg – a hybrid of organism and machine drawn from science fiction and military research – as a figure for the collapse of boundaries between human and animal, organism and machine, physical and non-physical. Feminism, she argues, should not rest on a shared female nature or an innocent closeness to nature; she calls for coalitions based on affinity rather than identity, with attention to the women who assemble electronics in the global economy. The essay is a founding text of feminist science studies and of posthumanism.

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