The Salience of the "Cyborg Manifesto": A Reboot

Donna Haraway undertakes the task of reappropriating the figure of the cyborg from patriarchal, capitalist power structures in her watershed publication, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985). This process of deterritorialization forms part of the feminist tradition of taking control of the tools that previously hampered and fleeced women. Haraway’s mode of feminist theorizing has resonated across a variety of disciplines favourably, cautiously, and also contentiously. This paper investigates critically the blasphemous power of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” specifically through the lens of cyberfeminism, a term coined by Sadie Plant in 1994 to describe the feminist approach that illuminates the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. Additionally, this paper contemplates the salience and reliability of the cyborg as a mode of feminist theorizing as we grapple with challenge and change in the digital age, where the division between the online and offline is rapidly merging.