The Cyborg Manifesto

The Cyborg Manifesto critiques essentialist feminist frameworks and identity politics, arguing that reliance on shared biology, experience, or stable categories like “woman” is politically and epistemologically limiting. Haraway proposes the cyborg as a political fiction: a hybrid figure that defies binary logics (human/machine, nature/culture, male/female) and enables new forms of coalition, built not on identity but on affinity—chosen, partial, and strategic connections. The manifesto is both a critique of domination and a speculative myth for feminist survival in the age of technoscience.

An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in The Integrated Circuit

Three key boundary breakdowns have destabilized Western metaphysical categories and enabled the rise of the cyborg. These ruptures are not just technological—they are political, epistemological, and ontological, disrupting the very foundations of Enlightenment subjectivity and feminist essentialism. Cyborg subjectivity emerges from these cracks as a way to think and act beyond binaries:

Human/Animal
Animal-Human/Machine or Organism/Machine
Physical/Non-Physical or Organism/Technology

Breakdown one: Human / Animal

Advances in evolutionary theory and biology have destabilized the boundary between humans and animals, showing that traits like tool use, communication, and sociality are not uniquely human.

By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached (p. 151). […] Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modem organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science (p. 152).

Example: Chimpanzees challenge the idea that tool-making and complex social behaviors are uniquely human traits.

Breakdown two: Organism / Machine

Machines have become more autonomous, self-replicating, and integrated into human bodies. The fantasy of a “ghost in the machine” has collapsed; humans and machines are now entwined in feedback systems. Organisms, likewise, are increasingly seen in cybernetic terms—as coded, programmable systems.

The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. (p. 152)

Example: Brain-computer interfaces or robotic prosthetics that adapt to neural signals collapse the idea of the body as purely organic.

Breakdown three: Physical / Non-Physical

Miniaturized, invisible technologies (e.g., microelectronics, wireless communication, cloud computing) render the boundary between the tangible and intangible deeply unstable. The illusion of disembodied information reinforces political dangers—suggesting detachment from material consequences.

The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. […] Modem machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modem machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality.

Example: Fitness trackers, biometric wearables, and cloud services embed physical life into data flows, creating a false sense of immateriality.

Haraway’s cyborg blurs dualisms of mind/body, animal/machine, idealism/materialism. Meanwhile, she critiques feminist and socialist thought for reinforcing these, romanticizing a pure, “organic” unity to resist technology. (p. 154)

Haraway argues that embracing a “monstrous,” hybrid, and politically complex cyborg vision—uniting contradictory identities and perspectives—is crucial for resisting domination and building effective, inclusive political alliances.

The cyborg world can be seen in two perspectives: negative (tech, military domination) and positive (freedom, hybridity, possibility.) We should hold both perspectives, technology can be both negative and positive. (p. 154)

Cyborg unities are “monstrous and illegitimate:” disruptive hybrids without official sanction. Affinity politics are cyborgian: broad, diverse coalitions based on shared goals and values. (p. 154-155)

Fractured Identities

There is no stable, essential identity that can ground feminist politics—not “woman,” not “worker,” not “human.” Gender, race, and class are historically constructed, fractured categories. Haraway argues that feminist theory must give up the search for purity, unity, and fixed subjects, and instead organize through affinity: flexible, chosen, and partial political alignments built across difference.

There is no essential or inherent source of unity. Gender, race, and class identities are historically and socially constructed, not natural categories. Rather than seeking a stable, essential identity to rally around, we should embrace affinity politics. “affiliation not identity” (p. 155)

Feminism is fragmented among numerous fault lines. Race, class, sexuality, political ideology have made the category “woman” problematic.
Recently, feminism has responded by continuously splitting and searching for a new essential identity to united around, but this always fails.

Chela Sandoval (n.d., 1984) argues that “women of color,” formed explicitly through historical experiences of exclusion, offer feminists and progressive politics a strategically power model—oppositional consciousness. (p. 156)

Oppositional consciousness rejects essentialized identities and universal revolutionary subjects. Instead, constructing conscious political unity through strategic, deliberate affinities.

Katie King criticizes feminism for creating rigid taxonomies, like “radical,” “socialist,” and “liberal” feminism that misrepresent the history and ideological terrain and marginalize alternative feminisms. (p. 156-157)

Neatly defined categories are defined in such a way so as to position the author as having the “true” or “final” form of feminism. (a telos)
These taxonomies establish boundaries that epistemologically legitimate or undermine certain ideas. (e.g. Defining womanhood through biology so as to exclude trans women.)

King and Sandoval criticize rigid and narrow taxonomies. They argue instead for feminist solidarity built consciously from diversity and chosen alliances. (p. 157)

Trying to build political power from identity (e.g. “as woman,” “as worker”) revealed contradictions in those identities. Our shortcomings and lack of innocence have been exposed. This is not cause for political surrender, but rather, a call for accepting and working with and around messy selves. (p. 157)

Postmodernist critiques of the coherent subject of Enlightenment reason, and socialist-feminist critiques of the revolutionary subject, might seem opposed—but both work together to dissolve the Western, innocent, individual subject.
We must stop dictating reality to others. White feminists in particular cannot claim moral authority anymore.

Marxist/socialist feminists advanced politically by organizing women around the experience of alienated and exploited laborer (domestic, reproductive) under capitalism, not essentializing the category of women according to their biology. However, they still inherited “Marxian humanism”—the idea of a universal, abstracted “human subject” typical of Western thought. This marginalized experiences and struggles outside of this framing. (p. 158)

On Catherine MacKinnon’s radical feminism

Catherine MacKinnon’s version of radical feminism is totalizing, authoritarian, and reductive. MacKinnon’s theory constructs women’s identity not around their own agency or diverse experiences, but exclusively through sexual violation by men. While Haraway agrees MacKinnon rightly exposes weaknesses in Marxist/socialist frameworks (which don’t fully ground feminist unity), she argues MacKinnon’s solution is even worse: it deliberately erases difference, silences diverse feminist voices, and ultimately claims women don’t genuinely exist as subjects at all. (p. 158-159)

Haraway argues that both Marxist/socialist-feminism and radical feminism have historically been problematic because they claimed to offer totalizing explanations—attempting to explain all forms of oppression (gender, race, class, sexuality) through one dominant analytical framework. Feminist theory must instead embrace partial, flexible, and accountable ways of connecting different struggles without erasing their differences.

The Informatics of Domination

We’re a fundamental social shift from industrial capitalism to an informatics of domination, moving from a society defined by hierarchical, stable, and “natural” categories (such as gender, race, class, labour) to a fluid, information-driven society. This new system doesn’t rely on stable “natural” identities, but rather treats everything (including humans, organisms, and identities) as interchangeable, reconfigurable coded information. Consequently, feminist politics must respond by rejecting “natural” categories and stable binaries, and instead actively construct new identities—like the “cyborg”—that embrace partiality, hybridity, and constant reconfiguration. (p. 161-165)

Consider biometric health tracking: a woman’s menstrual cycle, heart rate, sleep, and stress levels are monitored in real-time by wearable tech, uploaded to the cloud, and analyzed by corporate algorithms. Her body becomes data—not a private, natural entity but a digitized site of surveillance, marketing, and optimization. She is no longer just “a woman” but an informational subject.

Categories traditionally codes as “natural” (gender, race, reproduction) are now explicitly revealed as informational constructs.
- Biological sex, reproduction, and racial identities explicitly become understood as coded information, subject to tech manipulation, economic valuation, and reconfiguration.
Earlier feminist frameworks assumed stable, hierarchical binaries but these have now collapsed or been “techno-digested” by the informatics of domination.
- Feminist analysis must abandon stable categories and acknowledge fluid, partial, and hybrid nature of identities and systems under this new global informational order.
- Feminists must embrace flexible, broad alliances.
Communication tech (internet, data processing, ai) and biotechnologies become crucial tools for reshaping bodies, identities, and global social relations.
- These tech erase boundaries between human/animal, organism/machine, public/private, and mind/body/tool.
Feminist must embrace cyborg politics. The cyborg symbolizes partiality (no fixed identity), hybridity (blending biological, technological, informational identities), and flexibility (explicitly strategic identity formation through chosen affinities, not natural essences).
Traditional feminist epistemologies implicitly assume stable, hierarchical categories from Western philosophy. Instead, feminists must shift towards understanding identities as flexible, hybrid, informational constructs and recognizing how new tech reshapes bodies, social relations, and identities.
Haraway urges socialist-feminism to adapt to the informatics of domination, explicitly building flexible, accountable, and intersectional alliances resisting IT domination.

Key Transformations (Abridged)

Old Industrial/Organic Society	New Informatics of Domination
Representation	Simulation
Bourgeois novel, realism	Science fiction, postmodernism
Biological determinism	Evolutionary inertia, constraints
Public/Private	Cyborg citizenship
Nature/Culture	Fields of difference
Labour	Robotics
Mind	Artificial Intelligence
… (many more examples)	…

The ‘Homework Economy’ Outside ‘The Home’

The “homework economy” describes a new global economic structure in which work becomes increasingly feminized, precarious, and technologized—dissolving traditional boundaries between home, factory, and market. This restructuring disproportionately burdens women (especially women of color and those in the Global South) while transforming gender roles, labor, reproduction, and community life through the mediating force of high technology.

In Silicon Valley, women—especially racially and ethnically diverse women—work in electronics-related jobs that are precarious, underpaid, and isolated from traditional kinship or community support. As these jobs become the norm globally, they exemplify how feminized labor (vulnerable, flexible, deskilled) becomes the structural foundation of a new global capitalist order.

Named metaphorically, not literally; it’s about feminized conditions. Work is feminized whether done by men or women—marked by vulnerability and disposability.
Work is no longer masculine, unionized, or stable by default. Even men now face conditions once reserved for women: part-time roles, temp work, surveillance-heavy service jobs. Feminization here means extreme vulnerability, ease of exploitation, and devaluation of labor—no longer exclusive to women but still disproportionately affecting them.
Women of color in the U.S. and teenage girls in the Global South often become sole breadwinners under these conditions. Race and colonial legacies shape who bears the brunt: Black women in clerical jobs, migrant women in electronics assembly, and rural women with diminished access to land—all form the backbone of this economy.
Haraway doesn’t blame technology in a vacuum but shows how it enables capital to decentralize labor while retaining control. Communications and surveillance tech fragment workplaces, dissolve unions, and allow corporations to govern a dispersed, replaceable workforce with precision.
As state protections erode, women—especially single mothers—are expected to make up the gap without male incomes or social safety nets. This deepens the “feminization of poverty,” making survival labor-intensive, unpaid, and gendered.
Haraway maps three historical family forms linked to capitalism’s phases:
1. Patriarchal nuclear family: tied to early capitalism and separate spheres ideology.
2. Modern welfare-state family: upheld by male wages and state support.
3. Cyborg-era family: fragmented, woman-headed, and economically precarious under postmodern multinational capitalism.
Women globally continue to bear primary responsibility for food production and daily survival—even as land becomes privatized and agricultural labor is mechanized. High-tech farming benefits corporations, not the women who feed families.
Technologies developed for war and surveillance bleed into domestic and economic life. Policies promoting family values, state authority, and private property combine with militarized tech to control both public and private spheres—especially women’s bodies.
Video games, surveillance tools, and personal screens promote competition, isolation, and war-as-entertainment. These technologies erode public life and encourage escapist fantasies of planetary destruction and techno-utopia—reflecting a masculinized, militarized, high-tech worldview.
Women’s bodies are increasingly subject to invasive visualization and control (e.g., ultrasounds, surgeries, fertility tech). Feminist struggles over bodily autonomy now confront a medical-industrial complex that maps and regulates the body like a data system.
Haraway warns of a society split into two groups: a high-tech elite (often white and male) with knowledge and agency, and a vast underclass of mostly women and people of color relegated to fragmented, unstable labor—disempowered yet essential.
Haraway ends with a challenge: feminist politics must engage directly with science and technology. Women in technical fields—especially women of color—should shape the production of knowledge and tools. She imagines alliances between feminists, anti-military scientists, and labor activists to resist the militarized, corporatized trajectory of current techno-capitalism.

Women in the Integrated Circuit

Women’s identities and positions in the late-capitalist, high-tech world are shaped by dispersed, contradictory, and networked relations across various domains of life—home, market, labor, state, education, medicine, and religion. These sites are interwoven through what Haraway calls the informatics of domination, producing instability and fragmentation, but also new potentials for feminist coalition-building, resistance, and redefinition beyond essentialist frameworks.

A woman working from home in a telecommuting, low-wage tech job is simultaneously embedded in market logics (as a consumer), subject to state surveillance (via welfare or electronic monitoring), raising children in a solo household (due to serial monogamy and absent partners), and targeted by religious ideologies promoting conservative gender roles—all while interfacing with high-tech tools that define her labor and body.

Haraway insists that old binaries like factory/home, market/domestic, and personal/political no longer make sense in the current technosocial landscape. Instead, she proposes a networked model of identity, where boundaries are permeable and sites of power are interconnected. The network, not the boundary, becomes the key analytic unit. For women, this means their lives are distributed across domains once held separate, and their political subjectivity must reflect this multiplicity.
In this system, there’s no singular or unified “woman’s experience.” Rather, women’s positions are contradictory, contingent, and dispersed. Haraway frames this as a kind of feminist diaspora—where survival requires building coalitions across difference, not assuming sameness. Identification is no longer a stable ground for politics; contradiction is the new terrain, and navigating it well demands strategic adaptability.
The home is no longer a private refuge but a contested, technologized site: woman-headed households, domestic violence, homelessness, and the return of home-based labor under digital capitalism all signal its transformation. The rise of telecommuting, electronic cottages, and modular domestic life intensifies both surveillance and isolation. Traditional kinship structures break down while simulated nuclear families are reinforced through conservative ideology and consumer culture.
Women are central to global consumerism, targeted both for their purchasing power and their role in circulating commodities and labor. Markets become abstract and sexualized, with consumption practices increasingly intertwined with gender and identity performance. Informal labor markets expand alongside elite consumption niches, and digital finance technologies enforce surveillance and exclusion while masking them as convenience and empowerment.
Labor remains intensely divided along gender and racial lines, but technological restructuring has allowed some women and people of color into elite occupations, especially in biotech, service, and electronics sectors. Nonetheless, most labor is now “feminized”—precarious, low-status, and flexible. Concepts like “flex time” or “no time” reflect capital’s need for 24/7 responsiveness, undermining stable employment and deepening class divides globally.
The welfare state is in retreat, replaced by high-tech forms of surveillance, militarization, and privatization. Citizenship itself is becoming digitized and stratified, with access to resources and recognition determined by data visibility and tech access. Civil service jobs—often occupied by women of color—are reduced through automation. Meanwhile, privatized ideology and paranoia about “abstract enemies” fragment social understanding and solidarity.
Education is increasingly dictated by the demands of high-tech capital, especially in science and biotechnology. Elite technocratic classes grow, while most students—especially women and people of color—are left scientifically illiterate or ideologically alienated. Public education is repurposed for control, not liberation, and resistance is stifled either by corporate control or anti-science mysticism in radical movements. The result is a deeply unequal and politically repressive learning system.
Religious institutions are paradoxically both sites of resistance and enforcement. On one hand, evangelical movements align with digital capitalism to produce reactionary politics and patriarchal ideology. On the other, churches can also be community centers of resistance, especially around women’s authority and spiritual health. Haraway sees spirituality as inseparable from health and sex, making it a critical node in feminist and political coalitions.
Haraway warns against both nostalgia and political purism. The collapse of older forms of unity (e.g., family wage, clear class lines) is not simply a loss—it’s also an opportunity. Feminism must learn to embrace contradiction, ambiguity, and partiality rather than longing for a singular truth or total critique. The desire for a “common language” is itself a totalizing fantasy. Instead, we need new ways of making meaning and acting collectively amid complexity.
Haraway’s final gesture is toward the cyborg: not as a literal machine-human hybrid, but as a metaphor for living within contradiction, for surviving fragmentation, and for building pleasure, solidarity, and politics across boundaries. The cyborg embraces its fusion—of body and machine, of woman and technology—and in doing so, refuses the colonial logic of “Man” and “Truth.” In this figure lies the speculative hope for a feminist science, one grounded in experience, contradiction, and imagination rather than purity or origin.

Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity

The cyborg is a political myth for the late twentieth century—a hybrid figure that dismantles the dualisms (self/other, human/machine, male/female) foundational to Western identity. Rather than seeking wholeness, origin, or purity, the cyborg embraces contradiction, fragmentation, and illegitimacy as sites of power. Through this figure, Haraway imagines a feminist politics rooted not in essentialism or victimhood, but in boundary transgression, technological embodiment, and the subversion of identity myths.

In Loving in the War Years, Moraga writes from a place of linguistic, cultural, and sexual fragmentation—she’s Chicana, queer, raised in English but deeply aware of Spanish, descended from both colonizer and colonized. Her writing doesn’t try to return to some pre-colonial, whole identity. Haraway highlights this as cyborg writing—not innocent, not unified, but born out of violation, conquest, and survival. Moraga’s choice to write in a bilingual, hybrid form is political: it refuses the purity myth (of language, of nation, of gender), and instead turns the tools of domination (English, literacy, authorship) into weapons of resistance. She rewrites the figure of Malinche—not as a traitor, but as the first translator, a cyborg mother who uses language to survive and transform. In Haraway’s terms, this is cyborg politics: refusing to seek identity in a mythic past, and instead constructing it from the fragments of a damaged present.

Haraway situates feminist science fiction writers—Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Monique Wittig—as the mythmakers of cyborg identity. These authors imagine bodies as fractured, reassembled, and technologized. They challenge traditional narratives of selfhood, reproduction, and humanity, offering speculative visions where boundaries blur and new political configurations become possible.
While acknowledging the contributions of ecofeminist thinkers like Adrienne Rich (centering the female body, birth, and motherhood) and Audre Lorde (metaphors of sacred, natural essences), Haraway critiques their reliance on “organic” metaphors and essentialist ties to nature. She argues these frameworks, while oppositional, still reinforce the very dualisms they seek to resist. Cyborg politics, in contrast, embraces the “pollution” of machine-organism hybrids and calls for new mythologies that reflect the complexities of technoculture.
The identity “women of color” functions as a cyborg assemblage—an identity forged through colonial histories, literacy struggles, labor exploitation, and boundary-crossing survival. Figures like Sister Outsider embody this hybridity: offshore and onshore, marked and marginalized, yet powerful in their illegitimacy. Writing becomes a technology of survival, a means of recoding histories, disrupting dominant myths, and asserting agency without origin or innocence.
Haraway frames writing—especially the hybrid, multilingual, fragmented writing of women of color—as the quintessential cyborg tool. It does not aim for perfect communication or original truth. Instead, cyborg writing marks, mutates, and refuses the phallogocentric logic of the singular, authoritative voice. Stories like those of Moraga or the retellings of Malinche resist the myth of the Fall; instead, they craft new fusions from violated lineage.
Science fiction becomes the field where cyborg identities flourish. Works by Tiptree, Delany, Varley, Butler, and McIntyre invent figures whose very embodiment challenges the categories of male/female, human/machine, self/other. These narratives revel in hybridity, showing how survival and desire are rewritten at the intersection of genes, circuits, and stories.
Cyborg monsters follow in the lineage of mythic figures (Centaurs, Amazons, hermaphrodites) who define and destabilize community boundaries. But unlike earlier monsters, they reject the innocent, unitary body; instead, they live in partiality, irony, and constructedness, showing that boundaries are made, not given—and thus can be remade.
Cyborg politics rejects grounding in victimization, origin myths, or a privileged standpoint of oppression. It refuses both totalizing theory and moral innocence. Haraway critiques feminism and Marxism when they rely on essential subjects or revolutionary purity. Instead, she embraces partial connections, ironic solidarities, and coalition without identification, rooted in the real, messy conditions of technopolitical life.
Cyborgs reject metaphors of organic wholeness and reproductive purity. Rather than longing for rebirth into a perfect world, they embody regeneration: the messy, monstrous, but functional re-growth after injury. Like a salamander’s twisted limb, the cyborg’s new body is not original but potent. Feminism must move from dreams of immaculate wholeness to realities of situated survival and speculative recomposition.
Haraway ends with a provocation: she chooses the cyborg—ironic, fractured, embodied in technology—over the mythic, organic, spiritually whole goddess. The cyborg is not pure, but it is possible. It offers a way to live and act politically without the illusions of innocence, nature, or total unity. In a world of violent ruptures and global circuits, this fractured, dirty, potent identity might be the only one left with any real power.

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