Donna Jeanne Haraway was born in 1944 in Denver, Colorado. Haraway's father was a sportswriter for The Denver Post and her mother, who came from a heavily Irish Catholic background, died when Haraway was 16 years old. Haraway attended high school at St. Mary's Academy in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado. Haraway triple majored in zoology, philosophy and literature at the Colorado College.

In 1985, Haraway published the essay "Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s" in Socialist Review. Although most of Haraway's earlier work was focused on emphasizing the masculine bias in scientific culture, she has also contributed greatly to feminist narratives of the twentieth century. For Haraway, the Manifesto offered a response to the rising conservatism during the 1980s in the United States at a critical juncture at which feminists, in order to have any real-world significance, had to acknowledge their situatedness within what she terms the "informatics of domination." Women were no longer on the outside along a hierarchy of privileged binaries but rather deeply imbued, exploited by and complicit within networked hegemony, and had to form their politics as such. According to Haraway's "Manifesto", "there is nothing about being female that naturally binds women together into a unified category. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices". A cyborg does not require a stable, essentialist identity, argues Haraway, and feminists should consider creating coalitions based on "affinity" instead of identity. To ground her argument, Haraway analyzes the phrase "women of color", suggesting it as one possible example of affinity politics. Using a term coined by theorist Chela Sandoval, Haraway writes that "oppositional consciousness" is comparable with a cyborg politics, because rather than identity it stresses how affinity comes as a result of "otherness, difference, and specificity". Haraway's cyborg is a set of ideals of a genderless, race-less, more collective and peaceful civilization with the caveat of being utterly connected to the machine. Her new versions of beings reject Western humanist conceptions of personhood and promote a disembodied world of information and the withering of subjectivity. The collective consciousness of the beings and their limitless access to information provide the tools with which to create a world of immense socio-political change through altruism and affinity, not biological unity. In her essay Haraway challenges the liberal human subject and its lack of concern for collective desires which leaves the possibility for wide corruption and inequality in the world. Furthermore, the cyborg's importance lays in its coalition of consciousness not in the physical body that carries the information/consciousness. A world of beings with a type of shared knowledge could create a powerful political force towards positive change. Cyborgs can see "from both perspectives at once." In addition, Haraway writes that the cyborg has an imbued nature towards the collective good. Haraway explains that her "Manifesto" is "an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism." She adds that "Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves." Haraway is serious about finding future ways towards equality and ending dominating behavior; however, the cyborg itself is not as serious of an endeavor for her as the idea of it is. Haraway creates an analogy using current technologies and information to imagine a world with a collective coalition that had the capabilities to create grand socio-political change. Haraway's "Manifesto" is a thought experiment, defining what people think is most important about being and what the future holds for increased artificial intelligence.

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