IS BLASPHEMY STILL POSSIBLE in the age of shitposting? We are surrounded everywhere by sanctimony, but very little is sacred. One exception is Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” which called itself a work of blasphemy but has become, in the forty years since it was published, as close to holy writ as any piece of feminist theory. Haraway’s “ironic political myth” is required reading in undergraduate anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and queer theory seminars, and has inspired subbranches of feminist thought (cyberfeminism, xenofeminism). Allusions to the manifesto have become so pervasive in contemporary art that not long ago, ArtReview named Haraway the third most influential person in the art world.
Haraway published the essay, commonly known as “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in 1985 as a response to The Socialist Review’s call for reflections on the future of socialist feminism. It was composed during the dregs of Ronald Reagan’s first term: a Hollywood star had secured the presidency with a nostalgic platform that promised to Make America Great Again, while an enervated left lapsed into infighting and identitarianism. Christian fundamentalism was on the rise. The American military was investing prolifically in wasteful technological expenditures, such as the Star Wars program, and popular films (Blade Runner, Terminator) dramatized dystopian fears about the merging of human and machine.
At the time, American feminists tended to see science and technology as tools of patriarchal oppression and often favored sentimental, essentialized connections between women and nature. Into this Earth Mother kumbaya, Haraway brought a new feminist icon: the cyborg. Part human, part machine, Haraway’s cyborg was the “illegitimate offspring” of patriarchal technocapitalism: genderless, fragmented, parent-free, socially constructed, and enmeshed in networks of others, “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self.” The old binaries (human/machine, human/animal, nature/culture), Haraway argued, were no longer relevant, and rather than hoping for a return to some mythical organic wholeness, it was time to embrace a “confusion of boundaries” and our “joint kinship with animals and machines.”
