Haraway wrote it in 1985. She was not describing a machine. She was describing a politics.
Literal meaning: In Donna Haraway’s 1985 Cyborg Manifesto, a cyborg is a hybrid of organism and machine — a figure that refuses the boundary between human and animal, human and machine, physical and non-physical. For Haraway, the cyborg is a political metaphor: the boundary that defines “the human” is not natural but constructed, and its construction serves particular power interests.
Origin: Haraway’s essay — originally published as “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” in Socialist Review — is one of the most cited texts in feminist science and technology studies. She argued that the late 20th century had produced a blurring of three boundaries previously treated as fixed: human/animal, human/machine, physical/non-physical. The cyborg was her figure for this blurring — and a political opportunity: if the boundaries are constructed, they can be contested.
Haraway’s political figure for refusing clean categorical boundaries — human/machine, natural/artificial, self/other — as a strategy for feminist politics.
The Appeal: The cyborg offered a way out of two traps: the trap of biological essentialism (women are naturally X) and the trap of social constructionism taken to immateriality (everything is discourse). The cyborg is both material and symbolic. For feminist science studies, it opened a productive middle ground.
The Friction: The same vocabulary migrated. Cyborg Musk — Elon Musk’s deployment of cyborg imagery through Neuralink and human-machine fusion rhetoric — uses Haraway’s frame while inverting her politics. Where Haraway’s cyborg is a figure of boundary disruption that challenges hierarchies, Musk’s is a figure of enhancement that concentrates power. The word travelled; the politics did not. Transhumanism is the ideological ecosystem that absorbed cyborg imagery without its feminist critique. Situated Knowledge is Haraway’s methodological complement: the cyborg refuses the view from nowhere, just as situated knowledge refuses the claim to objectivity.
Why This Matters: Cyborg makes visible how a critical concept can be aesthetically absorbed while its politics are discarded. The boundary-crossing imagery survived. The challenge to power did not.
Related terms: Cyborg Musk · Situated Knowledge · Informatics of Domination · Cyberfeminism · Transhumanism · Digital Libertarianism
Read more:
- A Cyborg Manifesto — Haraway, D. (1985). Socialist Review — later in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), Routledge
- Staying with the Trouble — Haraway, D. (2016). Duke University Press