A Cyborg Manifesto
Published in Socialist Review in 1985 and collected in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), the Manifesto was a deliberately blasphemous intervention into socialist-feminist debates about identity and technology. Haraway did not predict robots or implants. She proposed the cyborg as a figure — a provocation aimed at anyone who located authentic humanity in some pre-technological state of nature and measured subsequent entanglement with machines as a fall from grace. The cyborg was her instrument for dismantling the myths of purity that had been used, for centuries, to enforce domination: nature/culture, human/animal, self/other, organism/machine. The essay has become one of the most cited texts in late-twentieth-century theory and arrives again in 2026 as a framework the AI discourse cannot avoid.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Manifesto's specific target was the feminist tradition that located women's authenticity in nature, the body, or the pre-industrial home — a tradition that, Haraway argued, ceded to patriarchy the terrain