A Cyborg Manifesto

A Cyborg Manifesto is heavily influenced by the politics of the 1980s. Haraway wrote the essay as a response to a request from the Socialist Review (in which A Cyborg Manifesto was first published) asking for opinions on how socialist feminism would change under the Reagan administration. 

The administration of republican president Ronald Reagan, which ran from 1981 to 1989, had a major and lasting impact on American society and world politics. Reagan’s presidency coincided with a major decline in liberal politics. Before his election, the American people were caught in a culture war due to the rise of, and pushback against, the New Left. The New Left was a political movement emerging in the 1960s that advocated for feminism, gay rights, drug policy reform, and socialism in some cases. Conservatives didn’t agree with these ideas, nor did traditional liberals, whose leftist views were generally focused on economics. 

The culture war continued through the 1970s. Political and social unrest increased, as did rates of violent crime. The economy sometimes slowed and struggled, particularly during a major recession from 1973 to 1975. The United States had also been in the midst of the Cold War for decades, with the presence of the Soviet Union as a rival superpower stoking distrust of movements aimed at economic reforms and social progress, which in turn affected the reception of the New Left’s ideas.