Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto is a key postmodern text, widely taught in many disciplines as one of the first to embrace technology from a leftist and feminist perspective using the metaphor of the cyborg to champion socialist, postmodern, and anti-identitarian politics. She criticized traditional notions of feminism, particularly its emphasis on identity rather than affinity, and explored the potential of the cyborg concept in order to construct a postmodern feminism that moves beyond dualisms and the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics. Until Haraway’s work, few feminists had turned to theorizing science and technology and thus her work quite literally changed the terms of the debate. This article continues to be seen as hugely influential in the field of feminism, particularly postmodern, materialist, and scientific strands. It is also a precursor to cyberfeminism and posthumanism and perhaps anticipates the development of digital humanities.
