A Cyborg Manifesto

Definition

A Cyborg Manifesto was a groundbreaking essay written by Donna Haraway in 1986. The essay explores the concept of the cyborg and it's ramifications for the future, and effectively inaugurating the academic study of cyborgs. The manifesto uses gender as its central example in explaining the power of the cyborg. Haraway attacks the "goddess feminism" movement ("an American attempt to reject things technological and return women to nature" and instead offers the model of the cybernetic woman: that of machine and human, a co-created techno-social assemblage with the capability of transcending the polarizing binary notions of gender. Technologies such as sex-change operations and virtual avatars undermine the traditional symbols by which we use to determine gender, thus destabilizing the binary by which we traditionally understand gender.

Haraway defines the cyborg in four different ways in her essay. The first is as a "cybernetic organism." The second is as "a hybrid of machine and organism." The third is as "a creature of lived social reality", and the fourth is as a "creature of fiction." Haraway points out that "the border of the cyborg is an optical illusion", and that "the struggle to define and control the cyborg amounts to a border war". Ironically enough, she adds, this war is fought on a terrain that is largely an optical illusion: the space between science fiction and today's fact. Anyone who believes cyborgs are things of the future is mistaken. Modern medicine is full of cyborgs already, as is modern reproduction, manufacturing and modern warfare. In short, "we are cyborgs", whether we know it or not, if only because it is the cyborg which "is our ontology, it gives us our politics".