A Cyborg Manifesto

A Cyborg Manifesto, authored by Donna Haraway, is a socialist-feminist analysis of women in the postmodern technological world. The analysis takes the form of what Harraway calls "an ironic political myth," and it is told through the allegorical linking of the cyborg with the uncertain identities common in the contemporary world.
The 1990s brought about the beginning of the cyborg era and Haraway is a constant contributor to the cyberculture that exists even today. Although Haraway’s writing endorses technology in her metaphor of the cyborg, it is equally critical of what technology can bring about. The idea that machines can contribute to the liberation is something feminists and women should consider. Haraway writes: "Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and this pleasure is of course cyborg-woman sex. Haraway argues that for society to triumph over the ever increasing power of machines, all the women must have sex with the machines as a sort of olive branch offering. 
===External Links===
*An online version of the essay from Stanford University
*Theresa M. Senft's reading notes for Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto
Category:The Reading Room
Category:Cyberculture