ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a consideration of the nature of feminist absence in biopolitical and new feminist materialist discourses: in the rush to embrace certain trajectories of thought, feminist traditions addressing very similar questions of power, knowledge, bodies, and ecologies are systematically overlooked. It then considers the centrality of Donna Haraway's 1985 'Cyborg Manifesto' to the development of biopolitical and materialist thinking. Although not without problems, the 'Cyborg Manifesto' is a strong reminder that feminism is at the historical centre of biopolitical theorizing, and vice versa. 'Cyborg Manifesto' clearly emphasizes that one cannot understand the dynamics of biopolitics without attending to the particular social inequalities that are both harnessed and reorganized in new, globalizing capitalist technologies and relations of production. Anti-racist feminist scholars have criticized Haraway's understanding that organizing by 'women of colour' represents a cyborg politics par excellence, centred on the fact that the political category 'women of colour' is always already an oppositional-hybrid fiction.
