Donna Haraway and the Cyborg Manifesto

See also: The Cyborg Manifesto, “The Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) and Cyberfeminism (YouTube essay)

Who is Donna Haraway and What’s her Deal?

Donna Haraway (1944-) is a feminist scholar and philosopher who became famous for her 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto.

Haraway has a unique and interdisciplinary background, she earned her PhD in biology before turning to philosophy. Her work is an eclectic and inspiring mix of science, philosophy, feminism, and storytelling.

Haraway was writing during the second-wave, when feminists were pushing back against rigid ideas about gender and identity—ideas that often put people into neat boxes. Haraway wanted to offer a new vision altogether.

Her Cyborg Manifesto broke down the traditional ways of thinking about identity categories. Instead of seeing categories as fixed opposites (man/woman, human/machine), she wanted us to see them as fluid and intertwined. She said we should embrace the idea of being hybrids.

Context: 1985 Social and Political Environment

Politically, the the mid 1980s was defined by a hard-right turn: Reaganomics in the US and Thatcherism in the UK rolled back welfare states, attacked labor unions, and championed free-market capitalism. The Cold War was still in full swing, and military technologies—from nuclear weapons to “Star Wars” and early computer networks—loomed large. In the United States, feminist and civil rights gains of the 1970s were facing conservative backlash. Academically, second-wave feminism was at a crossroads. Many feminist scholars were frustrated with the limitations of both Marxist class analysis (which often ignored gender) and what Haraway called “goddess feminism”—strands of 1970s feminism that idealized a mythical feminine essence or a return to nature. As Haraway later noted, by 1980 even the old public/private divide felt “old-fashioned,” as women’s work and bodies were increasingly entangled with global markets and technologies.

Haraway was deeply influenced by socialist feminism and by emerging critiques of science and technology. She had been part of a Marxist-feminist circle (including scholars like Nancy Hartsock and Sandra Harding) developing standpoint theory, which argued knowledge is always socially situated. Feminists at the time were also challenging what one scholar calls “classificatory gender essentialism,” the notion that there is some universal female experience or essence that defines all women. Women of color feminists (e.g., bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis) were forcefully pointing out that mainstream (“hegemonic”) feminism was neglecting race, class, and imperialism.

A Cyborg Manifesto was first published in 1985 in the Socialist Review, a venue signaling Haraway’s commitment to a leftist, anti-capitalist feminist politics. Yet her approach would be anything but orthodox Marxism or orthodox feminism.

Casual Explanation

The Cyborg Manifesto isn’t about literally turning us into robots. It’s a creative way to talk about identity, feminism, and how we think about ourselves in a world full of technology. Haraway uses the idea of the cyborg—part human, part machine—as a metaphor to challenge the old ways we divide things into rigid categories, like man/woman, human/machine, or nature/culture. As technology blends into our life, those old boundaries don’t apply anymore. For example, smartphones have blurred the line between human and technology.

Main Thesis: The Cyborg as a Hybrid Identity

Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985) proposes the cyborg as a metaphor for rejecting essentialist categories and rigid boundaries, such as human/animal, human/machine, and physical/non-physical. The cyborg is a hybrid, embodying fluidity, interconnection, and the collapse of traditional binaries.

Key Ideas

• Cyborg Politics: Rejects the quest for perfect or innate unity. Instead, it advocates building political solidarity through affinity—conscious coalition around chosen goals—rather than through identity based on some shared, often biological, essence (e.g., race, gender).
• Informatics of Domination: The shift from hierarchical, industrial capitalism toward a decentralized, global system driven by information technologies. In this new regime, traditional categories (human/machine, public/private, male/female) blur and become sites of control and commodification.
• Homework Economy: The emerging economic order characterized by flexible, precarious, and feminized labor, often performed at home or remotely via information technology. This shift dissolves clear boundaries between work, home, and leisure, disproportionately impacting women and marginalized workers.
• Challenges Essentialism: Critiques traditional feminist approaches focused on identity politics, suggesting instead a coalition through “affinity” rather than shared identity. Haraway dismisses fixed identities, emphasizing the fluid, constructed, and multiple nature of the self. Haraway famously proclaimed, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
• Critique of Dualisms: Haraway identifies problematic Western dualisms—like self/other, culture/nature, male/female, and mind/body—as tools of domination. She argues for transcending these oppositional frameworks through the cyborg as a unifying figure that embraces multiplicity and contradiction.
  • Organism vs Machine: The cyborg merges living flesh with circuitry. Haraway pointed to tech like prosthetics, implants, and computers to argue that the line between organism and machine was increasingly porous. This isn’t a dehumanizing threat; rather, it represents an opportunity. If we are part machine, we can no longer sustain ideologies that treat humans as separate from or superior to the material world.
  • Physical vs. Non-Physical (Nature vs. Culture): The manifesto shows how biology is permeated by culture and technology. Haraway quipped she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, rejecting the idea of an untouched “natural” femininity in favor of a constructed, technological identity. Childbirth, for instance, was no longer purely “natural”—with IVF and contraceptive technologies reimagining reproductive roles.
  • Human vs. Animal: Advances in the biological sciences were increasingly erasing the boundary between human and non-human animals through the study of evolution, DNA, and recognition of non-human intelligences. This undermines human exceptionalism and the concomitant hierarchy of domination.-

The Manifesto’s Contribution and Influence

Haraway’s cyborg struck a chord across disciplines, giving rise to what came to be known as cyberfeminism and influencing later theories of the posthuman. She injected feminist theory with a radical imagination and a willingness to engage with science and technology rather than shun them.

Challenging Essentialism

By declaring she’d rather be a cyborg than worship some mythical feminine essence, Haraway helped bury the notion that feminism should be about recovering an original “female nature.” This was liberating for many theorists, especially those working on queer and trans issues who saw gender as mutable. Philosopher Paul B. Preciado, for instance, has lauded Haraway’s manifesto as “an antidote to the taxonomies of modernity”— a text that helped him and others break free of rigid categories of sex and gender¹. Haraway made explicit that our bodies and identities have always been shaped by tools and artifice. This insight fed directly into third-wave feminism and queer theory in the 1990s, which embraced fluid identities and rejected the idea of a singular “women’s experience.”

Embracing the Positive Potential of Tech

At a time when much feminist writing on technology was pessimistic (often for good reason, given the male domination of tech fields and the use of tech for warfare), Haraway dared to suggest a more ambivalent, even optimistic, stance. She wasn’t blind to how technology is used oppressively—her essay explicitly links the cyborg to militarism and capitalist exploitation—but she refuses to cast technology as inherently patriarchal. Instead, her cyborg is a trickster and “illegitimate offspring” of the military-industrial complex that might “subvert its parents”. This willingness to appropriate and repurpose technology for feminist ends was inspirational for many. It influenced artists and writers in the cyberpunk and cyberarts scenes, who saw in the cyborg a symbol of subversion. By the 1990s, cyberfeminist art collectives and theorists (e.g. VNS Matrix, or later the Xenofeminist collective Laboria Cuboniks) were explicitly drawing on Haraway to imagine feminist hacks of digital culture. Haraway’s work became “a reference worldwide inspiring artists, feminists, queers, and hackers,” as a 2025 interview with Preciado noted¹.

Interdisciplinary Bridge-Building

Haraway wrote from within the history of science, and her manifesto is steeped in references to biology, informatics, and science fiction. This was a breath of fresh air in feminist theory, which had sometimes been accused of being too disconnected from material science or too idealistic. Her famous line about the cyborg being “a creature of social reality and fiction” opened the door for scholars to treat science fiction and pop culture seriously as sources of insight. It also presaged what we now call STS (Science and Technology Studies) and new materialism in feminist theory—approaches that see science and tech as arenas of social struggle and meaning-making. In later works (like her 1988 essay Situated Knowledges), Haraway would further argue for a feminist empirical approach that recognizes the partial, biased nature of all knowledge claims. This has parallels with Sandra Harding’s idea of “strong objectivity” and has influenced fields from anthropology to AI ethics.

The Cyborg as Cultural Icon

Haraway was not the first to notice humans merging with machines (Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics work dates to the 1940s, for example), but she gave it a distinctly feminist and socialist twist. Today, it’s almost taken for granted that our lives are “cyborgian.” When we speak of prosthetic memory (outsourcing memory to Google), or say “the smartphone is an extension of the self,” we are echoing Haraway’s once-radical point.

Critiques of Haraway’s Manifesto

For all its creativity, A Cyborg Manifesto has been critiqued on multiple fronts—especially by those who argue that Haraway’s metaphor, if taken uncritically, can obscure real social hierarchies.Key areas of critique include the manifesto’s handling of race and intersectionality, its accessibility and tone, its treatment of capitalism, and the applicability of its metaphors to concrete political action.

Race and Intersectionality: Who Gets to Be a Cyborg?

Perhaps the most discussed critique is that Haraway’s cyborg, despite her intentions, did not adequately reckon with race and difference. Haraway certainly tried to be anti-racist, explicitly noting herself as a white American woman and praising the potential of coalition politics modeled by women of color feminisms. In fact, she suggested that woman of color is a cyborg identity in that it’s a consciously constructed political grouping. Chela Sandoval (a Chicana feminist who Haraway praised for her “oppositional consciousness”) argues that Haraway symbolically and superficially draws from women of color feminism². And Malini Johar Schueller critiqued Haraway’s cyborg for universalizing women of color without adequately addressing the specificity of race and colonial histories.³. The cyborg is a “colorblind” metaphor that can overlook the specific material dynamics of racial injustice.

Materialism and Political Economy

Haraway insisted her cyborg myth was faithful to socialism and materialism, but many Marxist or materialist feminists were skeptical. To some, A Cyborg Manifesto exemplified the postmodern turn in feminism—lots of play with language and identity, but less attention to concrete political economy. Indeed, socialist-feminist Nancy Hartsock famously criticized Haraway’s cyborg as an incomplete strategy, arguing that abandoning the category “women” (even if philosophically flawed) could undermine real-world feminist solidarity. Hartsock and others rooted in Marxist tradition worried that Haraway’s embrace of irony and affinity politics might lead to political fragmentation at a moment when women (and men) needed unity to fight the Reagan-era assault on labor and welfare. Haraway’s contemporary, historian Ellen Meiksins Wood, for example, cautioned against postmodern theory that obscured class and capitalism.

Nancy Fraser acknowledges that by the 1980s, capitalism itself was transforming—moving into what we now call neoliberal or late capitalism, characterized by flexible accumulation, globalization, and the commodification of knowledge and life itself. Haraway captured some of this in her “informatics of domination” tableau. But Fraser argues that neoliberalism has a way of co-opting precisely the things Haraway celebrated. She notes, for instance, that neoliberal ideology promises to “blur the nature/human boundary” through biotech and cyborg imagery, and to liberate individuals from old constraints. Silicon Valley too talks of a post-gender, transhumanism, without the socialism of course. Under capitalism, breaking a boundary often just opens up a new frontier for commodification. For example, breaking the barrier between human and machine enables corporations to literally integrate workers with digital systems (think of gig workers managed by apps, or Amazon warehouse workers guided by algorithms). It also enables commodifying the body in new ways (consider the trade in reproductive surrogacy or human biomaterials). Fraser observes that 21st-century capitalism has moved from merely mining nature to actively rewriting nature’s “internal grammar” via tech—a process she likens to a new wave of “enclosures” more invasive than anything Marx or Polanyi witnessed⁴. In this view, Haraway’s manifesto underestimates how deeply capitalism can absorb and repurpose radical ideas.

Haraway’s later writings and interviews show that she is not, in fact, naive about these issues—but the Manifesto’s tone sometimes is so exuberant that it glosses over suffering. She speaks of the pleasure of fusion and transgression more than the pain of exploitation. One telling example is her brief discussion of the “homework economy,” where she cites women in semiconductor factories in Asia as cyborg laborers. While she acknowledges their exploitation, she quickly moves to how these women might be forging new identities. This harkens back to a central tension between metaphor and materiality in Haraway’s work.

Technophilia and Ethical Ambivalence

Finally, some critics charge Haraway with a whiff of technophilia—a naive enthusiasm for technology’s liberating possibilities. This is somewhat ironic, since Haraway was critical of naive techno-utopianism (“the technofix”) in other writings. But the manifesto’s rapturous language about transgression and fusion can sound uncritically pro-technology. The idea of embracing the cyborg could be co-opted by Silicon Valley as a convenient narrative. In the current era of Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, and AI ethics crises, some of Haraway’s 1985 optimism does seem dated.

Ethically, Haraway’s work has always sat at an odd angle – she’s pro-technology but not uncritically so. In Manifesto, she deliberately shocked sensibilities (for instance, positively citing science fiction cyborgs and even monsters like Frankenstein’s creature) to break taboos. Today, in an era of CRISPR gene editing, AI decision-making, and climate engineering, we still wrestle with the question: Should we enthusiastically embrace these new cyborg powers, or approach them with deep caution? Haraway’s more recent focus on “multispecies livability” and the Chthulucene (her term for a less techno-centric future of human-nonhuman kinship) suggests she has herself shifted somewhat. She criticizes “techno-fixes… tied up with huge amounts of technocapital” that are abstracted from community needs.

Today’s Relevance

Feminist Politics and Gender Liberation

Modern feminist politics has largely moved in the direction Haraway advocated: it is overtly trans-inclusive, anti-essentialist, and coalition-based. The idea that gender is socially constructed (and even technologically influenced) is mainstream. Campaigns for LGBTQ+ rights, for trans healthcare, and for diverse representation all resonate with the cyborg ethos of blurring and reconfiguring identity categories. Haraway’s rejection of the “goddess” archetype and fixed womanhood seems prescient in light of contemporary gender theory.

However, the manifesto’s relevance is tempered by its omissions. Issues of race, class, and global inequality in feminist politics are now addressed more directly through the framework of intersectionality (coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, just a few years after Manifesto). Intersectional feminism might arrive at some of the same coalition politics Haraway envisioned, but via a different route – one that foregrounds the specific experiences of Black women, Indigenous women, disabled women, laboring women, etc., rather than subsuming them all under a clever metaphor.

One area where Haraway’s influence does explicitly show is in academic feminism and queer theory. Terms like posthumanist feminism and new materialism draw heavily from her. Scholars such as Rosi Braidotti have proposed the “posthuman feminist subject” as an heir to the cyborg—emphasizing our embeddedness in technology and ecology. These theories inspire conversations about, for example, care robots and how to ensure they don’t reinforce gendered care labor expectations, or how biotechnology might help queer family-making (e.g. uterine transplants for trans women, or three-parent embryos) in ways that challenge heteronormativity.

AI, Posthumanism, and Tech Ethics

In the realm of AI and digital technology, Haraway’s cyborg has dual relevance: it anticipated the conceptual moves of posthumanism, and it offers a metaphorical lens on today’s tech-saturated self. On one hand, fields like AI ethics, human-computer interaction, and cyberlaw recognize that humans and algorithms are now tightly interwoven. Think of how social media algorithms shape our thoughts, or how wearable devices track our biometrics – our agency is entangled with machine processes. Haraway’s insistence that “there is no clear division between human and machine”  is almost a truism in these debates. She would certainly urge us to abandon any fantasy of returning to a “pure” human condition separate from technology.

On the other hand, the specifics of AI and data-driven technology raise issues that Haraway’s cyborg doesn’t automatically solve. Bias and discrimination in AI is a hot topic: for example, facial recognition software disproportionately misidentifies women and people of color, and machine-learning models used in hiring or policing can reproduce bias from their training data. The cyborg metaphor might imply we (humans) are partly technological, but when technology is deployed by powerful companies or governments, who controls the cyborg? That question brings us back to classic issues of accountability and governance. Scholars like Kate Crawford emphasize the material and political dimensions of AI: the data centers consuming energy, the mining of minerals for hardware, the gig workers labeling data behind the scenes. This is a very materialist turn in tech ethics, focusing on labor and environmental costs. Haraway did speak about “the translated world” of global circuits and labor, but current researchers have far more data on these inequalities.

Yuk Hui challenge the universality of Western posthumanism. Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics argues that technology is always grounded in a culture’s cosmology. Haraway tended to speak of technology in a broad, Western-scientific sense, whereas Hui reminds us that not every culture views the human–machine relationship in the same way. For example, approaches to AI in China might be informed by different values (collective harmony, etc.) than in the U.S. The cyborg as a myth may thus need pluralizing – perhaps cyborgs of many kinds, integrated into different cosmologies.

Political Economy and Labor

If we cast an eye on today’s political economy—the gig economy, surveillance capitalism, biotechnology industries—we find both the realization of Haraway’s predictions and a stark reminder of the manifesto’s shortcomings. The boundary between human labor and machine system is thoroughly blurred; the worker is part of a cybernetic “man–machine system” optimized for productivity. Haraway anticipated this with her discussion of women working at home on personal computers and Third World women assembling microchips—she foresaw a feminization of labor where work is precarious, electronically mediated, and distributed.

Haraway optimistically suggested new forms of unity might arise from these conditions. Today’s reality, however, shows that technology has often been used to weaken labor’s power rather than strengthen it. Traditional labor organizing, government regulation, and international solidarity campaigns are battling these issues – not under the banner of cyborg theory, but under the old banners of labor rights and human rights. This suggests a gap between the metaphor and the praxis.

Another concrete issue is reproductive technology and biopolitics. Haraway’s manifesto mentioned new reproductive technologies (like IVF, surrogate motherhood, genetic engineering) as boundary transgressors. Fast forward to today: IVF is common, commercial surrogacy is a global industry, and CRISPR gene editing in embryos is a real (if controversial) possibility. The Xenofeminist Manifesto (2018), by the collective Laboria Cuboniks, echoes Haraway in its slogan “If nature is unjust, change nature,” meaning feminists should hack biological processes to overcome inequalities (e.g. eliminate the physical burdens of pregnancy). This is very cyborgian. Yet, there are also feminists raising alarms about the exploitation inherent in things like transnational surrogacy (typically poor women of color bearing children for wealthier clients) or egg harvesting (risky to donors’ health). These critics might say: just because a boundary can be crossed doesn’t mean the crossing is happening under just conditions. A materialist feminist lens demands we ask who benefits and who pays when we embrace a technology. Haraway’s metaphor doesn’t answer that; it simply encourages boundary-crossing as inherently subversive, which isn’t always the case.

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Humanism

”Reason, Learning, Growth.”

tl;dr

• Humanism places humans at the center of the intellectual universe, emphasizing reason, autonomy, and individual potential, rejecting medieval scholasticism’s focus on divine authority.
• Emerged during the European Renaissance.

Elaboration

• Emphasized individual agency, self-expression, and secularism, a radical shift from the collective mindset of feudalism and medieval Christianity.
• Championed the idea that rationality and empirical evidence could lead to progress, laying groundwork for the Scientific Revolution.
• The term humanism was applied retrospectively by scholars in the 19th century. However, humanist ideas and practices were self-consciously developed during the Renaissance.
  • Renaissance thinkers referred to their studies as studia humanitatis (studies of humanity).

Legacy

• Education: The liberal arts tradition originates from humanist curricula.
• Secularism: Humanism helped decouple science and philosophy from theology.
• Individualism: The Renaissance humanist emphasis on personal achievement influenced the Enlightenment and modern notions of rights and autonomy.

Significant Contributors

• Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) The “Father of Humanism.” Revived classical ideas, emphasized individual intellectual and moral growth, laying the groundwork for the Renaissance.
• Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Advocated for the study of the humanities to reform religion and society; wrote In Praise of Folly.

Criticisms

• Eurocentrism: Humanism focused narrowly on Greco-Roman heritage, marginalizing non-European cultures. • Anthropocentrism: Humanism’s exaltation of humans as the “measure of all things” has been critiqued by posthumanists for ignoring interconnections with non-human life and systems.

Intellectual Connections

• Both posthumanism and transhumanism later emerge as critiques or extensions of humanism.

Transhumanism

”Transcending biology with technology.”

• Feminists and posthumanists critique transhumanism’s focus on individual enhancement, advocating for ecological and social justice.

Posthumanism (1970s-1980s)

“Networks, not individuals.”

• Emerged as a critique of humanism.

Perhaps the name is unfortunate, but the “post” does not indicate a sequencing in an epochal sense. Rather, posthumanism is challenging the very idea of humanism itself.

Fundamental to posthumanism is that human exceptionalism (i.e. anthropocentrism), the idea that we are unique and special, is a conceit, an artificial distinction.

• Nietzsche (1844-1900) is the first proto-posthumanist (excepting perhaps Spinoza).

  • The Übermensch challenges humanist ideals and envisions humans transcending current limitations. (Posthumanists: will to power isn’t unique to humans, but a feature of life itself.)
  • Critiques Enlightenment rationality and the centrality of “man.”
  • Focuses on power dynamics and the fluidity of identity.
  • Key difference: focuses on individual transcendence and human agency, rather than the decentering of humans within larger systems.

• Deleuze (1925-1995) is a more contemporary philosophical precursor to humanism.

  • Critiques the humanist subject as stable, autonomous subject. (Critiquing posthumanism.)
  • Assemblages: dynamic networks of humans, non-humans, and system, where no single element dominates. (Inspires posthumanist relational thinking.)
  • Proposes becoming as a process of continuous transformation, rejecting fixed identities. e.g., becoming-animal, becoming-machine. (Parallels posthumanist fluid, hybrid identities.)
  • Key difference: doesn’t directly address modern technological contexts like AI or cyborgs.

tl;dr

• Posthumanism critiques humanism’s anthropocentrism, binary thinking (e.g., human/animal, natural/artificial), and emphasis on human exceptionalism. It challenges the idea that humans are autonomous, self-contained agents distinct from their environments, technologies, and other species.

Core Themes

• Decentering the human in favor of interspecies, intersystemic relationships.
• Exploring the ethical, ecological, and cultural implications of emerging technologies (but not focusing on enhancing humans).

Philosophical Foundations

• Draws from poststructuralism (Derrida, Foucault), feminist theory (Haraway, Braidotti), and ecological thinking.
• Focuses on relationality, assemblages, and networks rather than individualism.

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Cyborg Feminism

• Cyborg Feminism, while influential, remains a source of inspiration rather than the basis for a formalized movement.

The cyborg…

• embodies hybridity and interconnectedness, symbolizing a way to rethink politics and identities in a world shaped by technology.
• rejects essentialist identity of a “pure” or “natural” woman.
• represents boundary-crossing, embracing the fluidity of identities shaped by technology, culture, and biology.

Influence on Feminist Theory

• New Materialism: the main idea is to erase the dichotomy between the cultural and the natural.
• Affect Theory
• Queer Theory

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Donna Haraway

• Originated the cyborg as a feminist figure, using it to critique essentialist notions of genders and the boundaries that define identity.
• Haraway’s work has inspired theorists in feminist technology studies, queer theory, and new materialism.

User kage-e in r/AskFeminists:

In contemporary feminist theory, science and technology studies and general critical theory Donna Haraway is very well received at the moment. She is seen as one of the central figures of New Materialism…

In popular discourse Haraway’s cyborg manifesto is however frequently misunderstood. Her central thesis is that the divide between nature and technology is an arbitrary divide. She argues for the cyborg as a feminist image that overcomes this divide.

She very much recognizes gender as an important category in contemporary society. Rather, l’d say that she argues that the distinction between gender essentialism and gender constructionism is flawed, because it is based in that nature/technology divide.

Overall she does not argue for transhumanism so much as she argues that we are already transhuman. Or maybe that there can be no such thing as transhuman.

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Posthumanism Explained - Nietzsche, Deleuze, Stiegler, Haraway

• Donna Haraway claims that humans are already cyborgs. There’s never been a human that was distinct from the non-human world, particularly tools and machines.

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Timeline of Humanism, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, and related Feminist Thought

15th–17th Century: The Rise of Humanism

Renaissance humanism focuses on human reason, autonomy, and potential.

18th Century: Enlightenment

Science and reason are tools for human progress.

• Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792): Advocates for women’s equality through reason and education.

19th Century: Challenges to Human-Centered Thinking and Early Feminist Movements

• Charles Darwin (Origin of Species, 1859): Decenters humans in natural history.
• Karl Marx: Humans shaped by social and economic systems.
• Friedrich Nietzsche (Übermensch): Prefigures the idea of transcending human limits.

Mid-20th Century: Theoretical Foundations

• Martin Heidegger (The Question Concerning Technology, 1954): Critiques human control over technology.
• Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1949): Feminist existentialism—“one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Critiques fixed identity categories.
• Julian Huxley coins “transhumanism” (1957), envisioning science as a tool for transcending human limits.
• Cybernetics (Norbert Wiener) and AI research influence ideas of human enhancement.

1980s–1990s: Posthumanism, and Transhumanism Emerge

• Donna Haraway (A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985): Introduces the cyborg as a metaphor for hybrid identities, challenging gender binaries and essentialism.
• Hans Moravec: Advocates for mind-uploading and machine consciousness.
• Ray Kurzweil (The Age of Intelligent Machines, 1990): Explores technological singularity.
• Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990): Introduces gender performativity, arguing that gender is constructed through repeated actions rather than biologically determined.
  • Butler critiques the techno-utopianism of transhumanism.

2000s–Present: Expansion and Convergence

• Rosi Braidotti (The Posthuman, 2013): Advocates for ethical relations with non-humans and critiques technocratic progress narratives.
• Ecological feminism grows, emphasizing interconnectedness with nature.
• Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence, 2014): Explores risks of AI and human enhancement.
• Continued advancements in biotechnology, AI, and genetic editing spark debates.
• Feminists critique AI bias and biohacking, highlighting how technological advancements can reinforce inequalities.

Footnotes

1. Paul B. Preciado: “Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ is an antidote to the taxonomies of modernity” ↩ ↩²

2. Sandoval, Chéla. “RE-ENTERING CYBERSPACE: SCIENCES OF RESISTANCE.” Dispositio 19, no. 46 (1994): 75–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41491506. ↩

3. Johar Schueller, Malini. “Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Thinking Race and the Color of the Cyborg Body.” Signs 31, no. 1 (2005): 63–92. https://doi.org/10.1086/431372. ↩

4. Fraser, Nancy, and Rahel Jaeggi. Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Polity, 2018. Pg. 37. “At the same time, neoliberalism is also proliferating new technologies that promise to blur the nature/human boundary – just think of new reproductive technologies, the bio-engineering of sterile seeds, and the various “cyborgs” that Donna Haraway has written about.36 Far from offering a “reconciliation” with nature, however, these developments intensify capitalism’s commodification-cum-annexation of it. Certainly, they are far more invasive than the land enclosures Marx and Polanyi wrote about. Whereas those earlier processes “merely” marketized already-existing natural phenomena, their 21st-century counterparts are producing new ones. Penetrating deep “inside” nature, neoliberalism is altering its internal grammar. We could see this as another case of “real subsumption,” analogous to the real subsumption of labor we discussed earlier.” ↩