The Theory Card Featuring Donna Haraway Is the One Feminist Tech Studies Programs Are Waiting For

There’s a good chance someone has photocopied the same essay if you walk into nearly any graduate seminar on gender and technology this spring. The copy on the table belongs to the person who arrived at the library first, and the pages are typically dog-eared and occasionally annotated in three different colors of ink. This year marks the strange 40th anniversary of “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a piece of writing that still seems to have been submitted just a week ago.

After the Socialist Review asked American socialist feminists to publicly consider the direction the movement was taking under Reagan, Haraway started writing it in 1983. The East Coast collective rejected the initial version because it was allegedly too European and disorderly. Two years later, Berkeley picked it up. An essay about hybrid identities and rejected boundaries is bounced between coastal editorial committees before finding a home, which is a small irony.

It made an argument that was surprisingly straightforward. Pretending otherwise was a form of nostalgia because the cyborg, that hybrid of organism and machine, was already here. Science fiction was not what Haraway was writing. She was gesturing to her audience. The welfare database, the pacemaker, the keyboard, and the contraceptive pill all sewed bodies into systems in ways that the earlier feminist vocabulary was unable to adequately describe. She might not have realized at the time how literal her metaphor would become.

She continues to be approached by tech-studies programs for reasons that are more methodological than prophetic. She declined the simple jobs. Unlike some ecofeminists of her time, she would neither celebrate technology as liberation nor denounce it as patriarchal machinery. Reading her gives you the impression that you are witnessing someone’s thoughts in real time as they hold two opposing ideas and won’t let go of either.

The criticism has been valid and deserving of serious consideration. In her 2005 essay, Malini Johar Schueller questioned Haraway’s use of analogy to incorporate “women of color” into cyborg theory, reducing situated experiences to a single symbolic figure. Donna Reeve and Alison Kafer, two disability scholars, opposed the casual use of disabled bodies as the archetypal cyborgs, which marked those bodies as distinct rather than erasing it. More recently, Julia DeCook described the entire framework as Western-centric, which it most likely is.

However, the syllabi continue to list it. It’s difficult to ignore how frequently Haraway’s questions come before the technologies that prompt them as you watch this develop over the past few years—through the AI boom, the surveillance debates, and every discussion about who gets to count as fully human in a system optimized by someone else. Today’s students aren’t reading a work from the past. The discomfort they are attempting to identify is already explained by what they are reading.

It’s a different matter entirely whether that warrants making a single essay into a sort of credential or a theory card that can be inserted into curriculum after curriculum. Some younger academics believe that the manifesto has been read too many times and that repetition softens its boundaries. That might be reasonable. Forty years later, however, the essay continues to accomplish the goal of sound theory. It won’t settle. It maintains the debate. And that may be the reason why programs continue to wait for it to be added to the reading list year after year in a field that frequently rewards certainty.