ABSTRACT
“A Cyborg Manifesto” aims to present a “myth” that affords a new perspective on the relationship between animals, humans, and technology. The first distinctive aim of Donna Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” is to change the tone of academic debate from one of earnest seriousness and faithful commitment to one of irony and blasphemy. The main philosophical underpinning of Haraway’s argument is her sense of collapsed dualisms or boundary breakdowns between animal/human, organism/machine, and physical/non-physical. Perhaps the most important context for Haraway’s distinctive political argument is anti-colonial and post-colonial perspectives on feminism, such as those that were being advanced by other feminist writers including bell hooks, Bernice Reagon, Barbara Smith, and Chela Sandoval. The philosophical underpinnings of Haraway’s argument build on ideas that were, by 1985, quite familiar from postmodern and post-structuralist theory.
