This week’s set task was to read Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Haraway is a celebrated feminist theorist and author. Editing this review with hindsight, I marvel at her prescience. I located the reading in her collected work, Manifestly Haraway, that includes The Companion Species Manifesto. We were asked to consider the following question: ‘What sort of cyborg does Haraway describe’? Haraway’s style was a little impenetrable until, while briefly procrastinating, I took a short detour into the watery-world of Astrida Neimanis’ Hydrofeminism. It was this excursion that helped me understand Haraway’s thesis is a heavyweight feminist manifesto that cleverly uses the ambiguity of ‘cyborg’ as a definition to address a number of topics relating to gender, power relations, technology and to challenge various dualisms.
Haraway’s definition of ‘cyborg’ is not fixed or stable but leaky, porous and fluid. While at times considering the ‘standard’ sci-fi depiction of cyborg as human/machine hybrid, Haraway situates this definition alongside many others. Haraway’s cyborg(s) also exist at the blurred boundaries between human/animal, organic/inorganic and the physical/non-physical. An illustration of a Haraway-cyborg can be located in her description of microelectronics mediating the human/animal hybrid of ‘Baby Fae’ hosting a transplanted baboon’s heart (Bailey, 1984). Haraway’s cyborg is not fixed in time; it takes into account cybernetics and systems theory which allows for the non-augmented human body to already be considered a machine. This is where Haraway comes closest to a stable definition, describing the cyborg as ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality’.
Read through the lens of critical posthumanism I was drawn to one quote in particular:
Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos.
Much of this thesis, per my reading, lays out the need for interspecies-intersectionalism where Haraway calls for a ‘coalition of affinity, not identity’. I am aware that I probably missed much in this initial reading so I have started to read some other reviews. I was drawn to this modern summary which argues that Haraway’s Manifesto foresaw genetic engineering, bro culture, precision marketing and sex tech. As a dog lover and advocate for interspecies thinking, I am currently enjoying Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto.
