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. In an attempt to end the Cold War, Reagan invested a huge amount of funds into developing the military and its technology and weaponry. The Cyborg Manifesto repeatedly expresses fear of a militarized state, in which citizens are controlled and under surveillance. 

The Cyborg Manifesto alludes to this political shift towards Reagan’s conservatism in many ways. Haraway writes from the perspective of the New Left. The loss of faith in liberalism felt threatening at the time to the New Left, and especially to marginalized populations like women, Black people, and LGBTQ+ people. Haraway also mentions the AIDS epidemic, which began in the early 1980s, coinciding with this political shift and causing a culture of fear and shame in the LGBTQ+ community.