A Cyborg Manifesto

Haraway concludes this final section of her Manifesto by thanking the thinkers and writers who inspired her. She first thanks a series of science fiction writers, most of whom are known for using their fiction to comment on social issues. Among these names are Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Octavia Butler. Haraway doesn’t expand on exactly how each of these writers inspires her, but she comments that they are “storytellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” as well as “theorists for cyborgs” (52). 

Joanna Russ is best known for her science fiction novel The Female Male, which is about women who visit parallel universes to see how different models of gender roles function from the outside. The title refers to a character who has both male and female characteristics, and so is a sort of cyborg. Octavia Butler wrote a number of novels, such as Adulthood Rites, and short stories, including The Evening and the Morning and the Night, many of which focus implicitly on gender and race relations, and intersectionality specifically. A typical reader of either science fiction or feminist theory may be unfamiliar with the intersection of these two very different genres of writing. Including examples of other writers who combined them serves to ground and clarify A Cyborg Manifesto.

Haraway also thanks several French feminists and American radical feminists, such as Susan Griffin and Audre Lorde. Susan Griffin is best known for her work of feminist psychology, A Chorus of Stones. Her writing focuses on the topics of sexual violence, ecofeminism, and pornography—three of the most central issues to second-wave feminism. Again, Haraway writes from a third-wave feminist perspective, but she bridges the gap between the two movements. The time between second and third-wave feminism (the mid-1980s, the same time A Cyborg Manifesto was written) was marked by the “Feminist Sex Wars,” which refers to a deep divide among feminists regarding the morality of pornography. Griffin is staunchly anti-pornography. 

Haraway doesn’t explicitly state her opinion on the matter, but while thanking these American radical, second-wave feminists for their contributions, she remarks that they “restricted too much what we allow as a friendly body and political language. They insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological” (53). This could be read as a rejection of Griffin’s views on pornography. Haraway’s views tend to accept technology, discomfort, and change, so she is more likely to be labeled “sex-positive” as opposed to anti-pornography. Even though Haraway disagrees with some of the radical feminists’ ideas, she thanks them for offering “oppositional ideologies” due to which “they are part of the cyborg world” (53).

Haraway shifts her focus to writers who center two very specific topics: “[C]onstructions of women of color and monstrous selves in feminist science fiction” (54). She refers to Audre Lorde’s collection of essays, Sister Outsider. Lorde, who spoke openly about identifying as a Black, gay, socialist woman and mother, often wrote about intersectionality. Haraway uses Black women earlier in her essay as an example of “cyborg identities.” A cyborg identity is analogous to an intersectional identity—they are “synthesized from fusions of ‘outsider’ identities” (54). 

The title of Lorde’s collection, Haraway writes, is the perfect summary of this kind of identity. Within the “political myth” of a cyborg identity, the notion of a “Sister Outsider” represents foreign women outside the US who threaten the safety of Americans. Within the US, women of color are preferred within certain markets of the workforce. For example, Korean women are often employed in the sex and electronics industries. Black people in America have a long history of literacy, as learning and teaching how to read and write have been vital to their history. Works published by Black women, according to Haraway, often focus on writing as a skill that is necessary for survival.

Within this discussion of writing as a useful tool for Black Americans, Haraway repeatedly mentions “phallogocentrism.” The well-known postmodernist French Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida coined this term to refer to the bias towards men that is inherent to language, and thus to meaning. As Haraway sees it, female writers, and especially Black women, are always fighting back against this inherent bias when they write. Phallogocentrism is not just present in written language, but is now also a part of the “technologies that write the world” (56).

A parallel phenomenon, Haraway points out, is the writing of Cherrie Moraga, who writes about “Chicana” identity and its Indigenous origins in works such as The Hungry Woman. Moraga never learned the original language of her ancestors. Rather, she writes in both Spanish and English, two languages imposed on her ancestors by colonists. It is this “illegitimate production” (56) that led to Moraga’s success. This complex amalgamation of identities, combined with Moraga’s “willingness to live on the boundaries” (57), epitomizes the cyborg identity. 

Haraway is focusing here specifically on the cyborg identities of women of color, but Moraga’s circumstances illustrate one of Haraway’s key arguments. Moraga embraces the new ideas and identities imposed on her, even when they are at odds with each other as well as with her origins. Even when her new circumstances were foreign and unsettling, accepting them and using them as tools turned out to be the path to her advancement and contentment. In Haraway’s view, this is the attitude that everyone should adopt when faced with the difficult uncertainties of the new cyborg society.

Haraway writes that phallogocentrism imposes a single code that is meant to translate every aspect of the world perfectly. It is not fully inclusive, though, so it imposes black-and-white ideologies about gender while silencing and oppressing populations that don’t fit into this structure. A simple example of phallogocentrism in English is the default to the pronoun “he” when referring to a group of mixed-gender people or when the gender of a person is unknown. For example, “Each student should turn in his paper.” This is problematic for feminists because it assumes the centrality and agency of men while disempowering women. It also fails to acknowledge the differences between men and women. For Haraway, this is why it’s so important for women to write. It’s especially important for women of color, whose multifaceted identities are even more buried. Writing can be a way to reclaim language conventions and, thus, to subvert problematic cultural trends.

Haraway reiterates her rejection of the dualisms that have dominated Western culture, invoking The Rejection of Rigid Boundaries and Identities. These include self versus other, mind versus body, culture versus nature, and male versus female. These conceptual dichotomies are ways of controlling and overshadowing all that is seen as “other,” including “women, people of color, nature, workers, and animals” (59). This dualistic way of thinking dictates that all of these entities seen as “other” exist only insofar as they can “mirror the self” (59). The “self” refers in this case to the counterpart of the “other.” Women must therefore try to imitate men, nature must try to imitate culture, etc. 

The “self” pretends to be autonomous: As Haraway puts it, the “self” purports to be God. This is illusory, as the “self” cannot exist without the “other.” In other words, for example, “male” as a category does not exist without “female” as a counterpart. This format of looking at things, by comparing or converting one idea or entity into another, is called dialectics. A Cyborg Manifesto often uses this tactic. The lengthy chart at the beginning of “The Informatics of Domination” is one example. It helps explain the complex and broad concept of Haraway’s cyborg by illustrating various ways in which it could be applied.

The next premise of Haraway’s main argument is that a new culture emerging from advanced science and technology calls these classic dualisms into question. Again, the distinction between human and machine is no longer clear, nor are the distinctions between mind and body, male and female, or whole and part. Much of the Manifesto thus far has been dedicated to illustrating exactly how these lines are now blurred. Haraway returns to some of the writers she thanks at the beginning of this section to illustrate how the cyborg features in their stories. 

Joanna Russ’s The Female Man “refuse[s] the reader’s search for innocent wholeness” (62). The four characters in Russ’s novel are four distinct versions of one organism, but there is never any “whole” person—even the amalgamation of the four incomplete characters does not add up to a whole. This exemplifies Haraway’s rejection of dualities such as part versus whole. Readers of The Female Man may expect the parts to come together neatly, but the book forces them to adjust their expectations. This adjusting of expectations—and reframing of reality as we know it—is the critical move in Haraway’s cyborg society.

Cyborgs of different sorts have always defined the limits of human society, even in ancient times. In ancient Greek mythology, Centaurs (half-man, half-horse) and Amazons (female warriors) defined by opposition what manhood was. In 17th-century France, intersex people and conjoined twins were involved in constructing the delineation of gender identity and medical pathology. From a scientific standpoint, genetic differences among the great apes defined what being human was. These are more examples of dialectics.

Haraway concludes the essay by once again summarizing its two key arguments. The first is that “totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality” (67). Everything is nuanced, and many social and political theories don’t account for nuance. The second main point is that “taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology” (67) is a crucial task. To neglect to reframe social and political theory around this profound change in society would be ignorant. Haraway again acknowledges that this task is daunting, but she assures readers that it is worthwhile.