“The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.”

Ontology in this context means a manner of existing. Haraway will later explain that the cyborg is a metaphor for a society made up of interconnected networks, where there are no impermeable boundaries. This is a basic ontology, and most of the essay is dedicated to explaining all the social and political implications of this way of being.

“Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.”

Haraway justifies her proposal for erasing the distinction between human and animal by citing evolutionary theory. From an evolutionary standpoint, the line between human and animal is blurry and arbitrary. Haraway takes a controversial stance here on Christianity, which reflects the emotionally charged and politically tumultuous culture at the time she is writing.

“Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”

Haraway argues that there is no real boundary between human and machine, and that these categories should not be viewed as two separate ontologies. Personal computers were not yet widespread among average consumers in the mid-1980s, so this statement seems quite prophetic. Television, however, was a main source of entertainment for most Americans at the time. Her assertions about the increasing prevalence of machines in human life speak to Restructuring Social Relations in the Digital Age.

“[A] cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies.”

After explaining her basic idea of a cyborg society, Haraway explains why her argument is important. In the 1980s, socially liberal people such as Haraway felt under attack by an increasingly conservative public as well as a Republican government led by President Reagan. “Star Wars” refers here not to the film franchise but to Reagan’s initiative to end the Cold War by focusing on military strategies to prevent nuclear warfare. Haraway’s statement reflects the widespread fear among liberal Americans about not only nuclear warfare, but also political attacks against women and feminism.

“It has become difficult to name one’s feminism by a single adjective—or even to insist in every circumstance on the noun.”

Though Haraway herself is known as an ecofeminist and a socialist feminist, she argues against the use of terms like these, arguing instead for Feminism as an Intersectional Alliance. She believes that adjectives like “socialist” in the label “socialist feminism” end up isolating women who don’t identify as socialist. She even expresses doubt about using the term “feminism”— “the noun”—which she explains is because it’s not helpful to define oneself by an identity, like “feminism.” It’s more helpful to simply unite with other women who have similar experiences and fight against oppression as a group.

“The category ‘woman’ negated all non-white women; ‘black’ negated all nonblack people, as well as all black women. But there was also no ‘she,’ no singularity, but a sea of differences among U.S. women who have affirmed their historical identity as U.S. women of color.”

This quote is a concise summary of the need for Feminism as an Intersectional Alliance, which Haraway argues for. The idea is that feminism must expand to include women who are discriminated against in other ways, like for their race, in addition to being women. These women have a completely different experience of womanhood than white women do. Haraway points out that there is “no singularity” among Black women to reiterate her point that Black women never created a singular identity to bind them together. Instead, they unite through their shared experiences. This exemplifies Haraway’s proposal for affinity over identity politics, which recognizes differences among individuals.

“We are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game.”

Due to extreme advancements in science and technology, society is in the process of a fundamental upheaval. Haraway writes that every conceivable aspect of life will transition from having an organic or natural basis to being based in informatics. This premise plays into her argument in favor of disregarding preconceived societal boundaries, arguing for Restructuring Social Relations in the Digital Age. Since nothing in the new information-based world is organic or natural anymore, then dichotomies like nature and culture, human and animal, or male and female are no longer rational or relevant.

“It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess.’”

This is a playful allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous philosopher who declared “God is dead” in reference to the widespread disbelief in God in Western cultures. Haraway is making a parallel point: Society is on the brink of another mass disbelief, this time in the pre-information age ideas of natural and organic hierarchies like nature/culture and male/female.

“The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engineering.”

Part of The Cyborg Manifesto’s case lies on the premise that there is no true boundary between material and immaterial, reflecting The Rejection of Rigid Boundaries and Identities. This quote equates physical objects to communications engineering. Haraway is saying that in the age of informatics, the flow of communication and information will hold just as much integrity as a physical object.

“No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other.”

This is part of Haraway’s argument against essentialism. She believes that nothing, not even humans, has essential qualities that make it what it is. This is a hallmark of postmodernism.

“The actual situation of women is their integration/exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and communication called the informatics of domination.”

Much of A Cyborg Manifesto is dedicated to disproving “natural” dualisms like male/female and public/private, as typical conceptions of feminism rely on those dichotomies. This quote explains how women are oppressed in the new information-based society instead. Haraway argues that feminist theory must be restructured to fit this new model, reflecting both Restructuring Social Relations in the Digital Age and Feminism as an Intersectional Alliance.

“The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, the military’s symbol for its operations theory.”

Haraway explains that the new cybernetic world operates by communicating information between and among networks. This system is powerful when it functions properly, but if it is stressed and communication is interrupted as a result, then the system can fail. The allusion to a military strategy is another example of how influential the Cold War and the Reagan administration were on the general culture of the 1980s. The military was seen as a hub of the most advanced science and technology systems in existence.

“A stressed system goes awry; its communication processes break down; it fails to recognize the difference between self and other. Human babies with baboon hearts evoke national ethical perplexity—for animal rights activists at least as much as for the guardians of human purity.”

This is a reference to “Baby Fae,” an infant born in 1984 who, in need of a transplant, received the heart of a baboon instead of a human. Haraway cites this as an example of how humans and machines are one and the same—just as computer systems can go awry, human biology functions in the same way. The example also speaks to Haraway’s point that the boundary between human and animal is illusory, invoking The Rejection of Rigid Boundaries and Identities.

“To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers.”

Haraway discusses the economic implications of the informatics era, in which labor and poverty are both feminized. Labor is “feminized” even for men, as they are now being taken advantage of by a larger system, which was previously an experience in the workforce reserved for women.

“That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new.”

In her discussion of the economic implications of the age of informatics, Haraway focuses on how changing labor dynamics will unfairly disadvantage women. The fact that women are forced into the unpaid labor of childcare is a longstanding tenet of feminism. Now, even more pressure will be placed on women as capital is funneled away from citizens and into the military instead.

“Black women in the United States have long known what it looks like to face the structural underemployment (“feminization”) of black men, as well as their own highly vulnerable position in the wage economy.”

Throughout A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway calls for a restructuring of feminism based on the fact that current conceptions of feminism don’t leave room for individual differences among women, especially Black women, who are disproportionately exploited. With the change in economic structure, white women are about to experience the same issues Black women have always faced. This is one reason among many to form interracial feminist alliances and to embrace Feminism as an Intersectional Alliance. This type of alliance is an example of affinity politics—two groups unionizing over a shared experience despite differing identities.

“Among the many transformations of reproductive situations is the medical one, where women’s bodies have boundaries newly permeable to both ‘visualization’ and ‘intervention.’”

Most of Haraway’s arguments about boundaries becoming permeable refer to ideological boundaries, but here she makes the case that even physical, bodily boundaries are breakable with the advent of imaging technologies like the ultrasound. She implicitly compares the ultrasound to the speculum, a tool used in the 1970s to supposedly (erroneously) “check women for chastity.” Haraway’s fears about the ultrasound being used as a surveillance tool to police and intervene in women’s bodies stem from the conservative government that was in power at the time. Though Reagan was more concerned with economics and the military, his administration was socially conservative, and in 1983, he signed a bill to prevent funding for abortions.

“A major social and political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of color, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance.”

Haraway lays out the worst-case scenario outlook in an argument to implore her readers to begin changing their mindsets about Restructuring Social Relations in the Digital Age. The mention of “surveillance and disappearance” again elucidates the fear of the government that was widespread among liberal communities at the time. This quote also reiterates the idea that everyone will suffer if they don’t reshape their mindsets, but that inequality will grow even greater as marginalized communities become even more oppressed.

“Many scientific and technical workers in Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys included, do not want to work on military science. Can these personal preferences and cultural tendencies be welded into progressive politics among this professional middle class in which women, including women of color, are coming to be fairly numerous?”

A Cyborg Manifesto depicts a bleak future of what the future could look like, but Haraway remains optimistic. Despite the numerous economic disadvantages the information age has on women, it is still also true that more women are employed than ever before, and that many people are invested in social progression over military dominance.

“There are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender, and class.”

A Cyborg Manifesto is overall optimistic about the future, despite its myriad warnings. The deconstruction of boundaries that once separated people based on race, gender, and class grants potential for alliances across communities that have never before united. The new ultra-interconnected cybernetic society, composed of networks, communication, and information, could also be an advantage in forming coalitions. This is another prophetic prediction of Haraway’s, as the widespread use of the internet has been instrumental in building communities and progression within the political left.

“American radical feminists like Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich have profoundly affected our political imaginations—and perhaps restricted too much what we allow as a friendly body and political language. They insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological.”

Haraway is intentionally vague here. Though she does not explicitly state it, her criticism of these radical feminists is their advocacy for the censorship of pornography. This is the main divisive factor among feminists of the 1980s, and it is the central argument of the “Feminist Sex Wars,” which marked the transition from second- to third-wave feminism.

“But their symbolic systems and the related positions of ecofeminism and feminist paganism, replete with organicisms, can only be understood in Sandoval’s terms as oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century.”

This quote directly follows Haraway’s criticism of the radical feminist view in opposition to pornography. Even though Haraway disagrees with radical feminists on this point, she acknowledges the validity of their view as a communal response to their shared experiences. Earlier in the essay, Haraway comments on the radical feminist perspective that sexual objectification is the experience that binds all women. Haraway disagrees, but she accepts that women who have experienced oppression due to sexual objectification may band together (this is a perfect application of oppositional ideology) and come to a logical conclusion that pornography should be censored.

“Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”

In the final section of A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway cites some of the feminist and science fiction writers who inspired her via The Rejection of Rigid Boundaries and Identities. She specifically mentions Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, which is a fictional novel about cyborgs in the traditional sense, but it’s written from a feminist lens and has a similar central idea to A Cyborg Manifesto. Haraway also mentions Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, a collection of essays on Lorde’s personal intersectional, or “cyborg,” identity as a Black lesbian mother, cancer survivor, and feminist. Haraway praises the power of writing as an effective means to recoding society and enacting change.