44 pages 1 hour read

A Cyborg Manifesto

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1985

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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2 Summary and Analysis: “Fractured Identities”

Though Haraway is a feminist, she criticizes the radical feminism that most political leftists support. Since gender, race, and class are social constructions, she argues that there aren’t any essential qualities that join people together within these categories. Since gender is not a natural or inherent quality within people, then “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women” (16). Haraway doesn’t believe in the reality of even “being female.” She thinks that the term “female” is a harmful way of categorizing people, as the modern conception of what it means to be “female” was born of the immoral practices of patriarchy and capitalism.


Different groups within the political left constantly try to create new identities by searching for “a new essential unity” (17). The movements Haraway refers to here are things like radical feminism or ecofeminism. Equivalent movements today might include those within fourth-wave feminism, such as transfeminism. Haraway argues that instead of forming political identities like these, people should form political affinities instead. 


Haraway cites the work of Chela Sandoval, who coined the term “oppositional consciousness.” Sandoval exemplifies women of color as a group of people who have no “essential” trait that binds them. American women of color simply found that they were not typically included or heard in political conversations about women, nor in those about Black people.

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