Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) has become

a legend of late 20th-century scholarship. Cited thousands of times

and translated into a dozen languages, it has achieved monumental

status, especially when juxtaposed against statistics from the Citation

Index indicating that well over 90 percent of articles in the humanities

are not cited even once.1 While Haraway’s own interests in the last

few years have turned away from the cyborg and toward companion

species, the project she outlined in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” remains

vitally important, perhaps even more so than in 1985, the original

publication date. The issues have morphed in significant ways, but

the ethical drive and social commitment that galvanized readers

then were never more necessary. With the hindsight of twenty years

later, the wonder is not that the article appears dated but rather that it

remains remarkably prescient in many of its concerns.