A Cyborg Manifesto

Donna Haraway, the author of A Cyborg Manifesto, was born in 1944 in Denver, Colorado. She went to Catholic school as a child, which has influenced her ideas and writing, though she has never been religious as an adult. Haraway attended Colorado College, where she studied zoology, philosophy, and English. She went on to complete a PhD in biology at Yale in 1972. Haraway’s PhD thesis focused on metaphors in organic biology.

Donna Haraway has had a long career in academia. She became a professor of women’s studies and the history of science at the University of Hawaii in 1971, and then moved on to Johns Hopkins University in 1974. In 1980, she became a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is currently a professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments.

Much of Haraway’s writing focuses on gender bias and feminism within science. A Cyborg Manifesto discusses feminism in a more political sense, though it often uses scientific concepts as metaphors and examples. The author’s interest in biology and the sciences in general is very evident in the essay. A Cyborg Manifesto is Haraway’s most famous essay and has come to be seen as an important contribution to feminist theory. It is often part of university curricula, particularly for courses in feminist and gender studies, and is noted for its optimistic outlook on future technology and politics. The essay is also regarded as being quite dense and challenging to read, reflecting many of the stylistic trends of postmodernist academic theory.

Haraway has also written seminal articles about feminism in primatology, population reduction strategies, and the coevolution of dogs and humans. She is known as an ecofeminist, which means she explores the crossroads of ecology and feminism. An idea central to much of Haraway’s work is the rejection of anthropocentrism—the idea that humans are the central and superior entity on the planet. Haraway urges her readers to challenge this cognitive bias.

Haraway is the first professor of feminist theory in the United States to receive tenure. She received the Ludwick Fleck Prize in 1999, the J.D. Bernal Prize in 2000, and in 2025 she received both the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and the Erasmus Prize. Haraway lives in Northern California with her partner and dogs.