957891

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MCS0010.1177/0163443720957891Media, Culture & SocietyDeCook

SI: Encounters with Western Media Theory

Media, Culture & Society

A [White] Cyborg’s Manifesto:

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DOI: 10.1177/0163443720957891
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ideology driving technofeminist journals.sagepub.com/home/mcs

theory

Julia R DeCook
Loyola University Chicago, USA

Abstract
‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ is a required reading in many graduate programs to explore
technofeminism, transhumanism, and studies of science and technology to explore
notions of gender, race, and other minoritized identities. However, in this essay, I note
the ways that Haraway’s piece still exacerbates categories of difference, and my own
difficulties and critiques of the cyborg identity. I encourage readers to not only consider
its importance, but also the limits of the cyborg identity, and how the concept of
cyborg itself is fraught with a Western, patriarchal violence that cannot be ignored
in the greater context of technology and technological innovation. Although useful in
imagining a departure from traditional categories of difference, I inquire as to whether
it upholds the very things it purported to dismantle, and explore other scholars’ works
in challenging the concept. Ultimately, ‘cyborgs’ are not outside of the politics within
which they exist, and must be interpreted in relation to other identity categories
without upholding whiteness and Western epistemologies as the center.

Keywords
cyborg, gender, haraway, race, sexuality, technofeminism, whiteness

‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’, Donna Haraway famously said in her 1984
essay, A Cyborg Manifesto, and in the years since (and even prior to this infamous state-
ment) we have seen the rise of a distinct form of inquiry that is often referred to as

Corresponding author:
Julia R DeCook, School of Communication, Loyola University Chicago, 51 E. Pearson Street, Chicago, IL
60611, USA.
Email: jdecook@luc.edu
2 Media, Culture & Society 00(0)

‘cyborg feminism’ or ‘feminist technoscience’ or even, ‘technofeminism’. Stepping over

traditional disciplinary boundaries, the exploration of the woman and the femme within
the rise of the network society and within the technological imaginary positions and
historicizes the femme body in a mechanistic lens. Indeed, a cyborg, according to the
Merriam-Webster dictionary, is simply a ‘bionic human’, one whose body contains
mechanical or electrical devices and whose abilities are often greater than that of a nor-
mal, biological human. In medical definitions, it is also a bionic human, qualifying it as
a human that not only is a combination of biological and mechanical parts, but in this
definition, it specifies that the parts are artificial. Carrying over from these definitions, it
is important to note that the view of cyborg feminism is not that women and femmes are
robots, but rather that they are a conglomeration of the biologic and technologic.
But what is it about the technological turn that has captured the imagination of writers
like Haraway and others in conceptualizing the femme body as cyborg? Questions like
these always haunted me during graduate school – If the cyborg was originally a military
invention, a project that held in its very essence the idea of war, then what was I? A
mixed-race, military child that biologically was borne out of the violence of the indus-
trial war machine? Not just nay war machine but the very modernist one that replaced
imperialism with the military, being a product of an American GI and a Korean woman.
How was I to understand my place and existence within the confines of this metaphor –
the mechanism of war is what allowed my parents to meet in the first place. We, the
mixed-race children of American servicemembers, are even referred to as ‘GI Babies’,
(Government Issued) and my father would always half-jokingly say that the Army would
issue soldiers a family. Although Haraway claimed that the cyborg body is one that tran-
scends boundaries, the boundaries of my existence couldn’t be explained or defined by
these Western ideas and notions of identity and selfhood.
I anticipated much about reading A Cyborg Manfiesto before I ever did. I understood
it simply as conceptualizing the femme body as cyborg, dismantling the confines within
which these categorized bodies have bene controlled and defined. Cyborg, in Haraway’s
conception, blurs the lines of all of these boundaries of identities and will no longer think
of itself or function in a society of other cyborgs being confined to these categories of
difference and distinction. Notably, the rise of technological networks in the 1980s and
beyond made some theorists hopeful that this would signify an end to sex differences
being defined within the realm of embodiment (Puar, 2012; Wajcman, 2004, 2007), and
the transhumanist movement started to formally organize and attempt to disseminate its
ideology into the world during the same period (Bostrom, 2005). It was not necessarily
the promise of machines, per se, that began peeling away the very definitions of what it
meant to be human, but rather the sophistication and intelligence of the machines them-
selves and their capabilities that started to break down the idea of bodies ‘ending at the
skin’ (Wilkerson, 1997). However, instead of shifting away essentialized notions of gen-
der and sex away from the body, the technological revolution of the late 20th and early
21st century may have further reified and cemented these differences rather than usurp-
ing them – and, as recent conversations have begun to point out, this extends beyond
gender and affects subjectivity and embodied notions of sexuality, race, and ability.
Although Haraway famously made her claim that she would rather be a cyborg than a
goddess to mark the departure of the idea of the woman being a natural, biologically
DeCook 3

driven ‘goddess’ of the Earth and to embrace the potential of science and technology in
what it could provide in shifting the idea of woman as a naturalized, essential concept,
the issue still remains that technology is shaped by human factors, and that in turn, it
shapes us and our humanity. Further adding to this entangled shaping and shifting that
occurs is the rejection of the nature driven idea of the woman (the goddess) and replacing
it with the cyborg. Is this desire to replace the concept of woman as goddess with the
identity of the cyborg an indicator of washing away humankind’s need to tame nature?
Or does it merely replace one technology of control with another? Indeed, the idea of the
cyborg is a seductive one because it would potentially replace all of the fragile parts of
our humanity with artificial and indestructible ones, but the epistemic groundings upon
which much of science and technology are built upon and of which the cyborg is built
upon are fraught with violence.
I will never forget the first time I read ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ and felt completely and
utterly overwhelmed with a certain brand of imposter syndrome reserved for first genera-
tion women of color in the academe. Rather than feeling liberated, I felt I was introduced
another definition of being through ‘cyborg’ that seemingly served to further privilege a
certain kind of body above others (i.e., a white, able-bodied one). As Wajcman notes,
‘the possibility and the fluidity of gender discourse in the virtual world is constrained by
the material world’, (Wajcman, 2007: 292), and when technology is predominantly con-
trolled and made by men, this further adds material constraints to what technology is
capable of in granting the agency to redefine race, gender, and sexuality for those that
seek to reconfigure themselves by their own terms. As Puar notes by citing Currier, ‘the
theorization of cyborgs winds up unwittingly ‘reinscribing the cyborg into the binary
logic of identity which Haraway hopes to circumvent’ (Currier 2003: 323)’ (Puar, 2012:
56–57). Although Haraway’s intention with A Cyborg Manifesto was to break new
ground in conceptualizing about bodies during the transhumanist turn, the cyborg does
not necessarily represent a breakaway from essentialized and dichotomized notions of
identity, but exists in the liminal space not oppositionally but frictionally against other
subjects and identities (Puar, 2012).
The concept of the cyborg has been fundamental in informing multiple fields – most
notably, science and technology studies, women and gender studies, communication,
postmodernism, digital culture, and more (Glazier, 2016). Haraway’s influence on these
fields and even beyond them is irrefutable – however, the ‘universality’ of the cyborg is
the issue at hand. The concept of the cyborg has continued to allow for the centering of
whiteness and white identity and a techno-utopic worldview where technology is seen to
be emancipatory, rather than oppressive. Indeed, many problems in our society in the
20th and 21st century in particular have all had technology thrown at them as a way of
‘fixing’ the issue – everything from climate change to racism to even pandemics
(Benjamin, 2019; Engler, 2020; Eubanks, 2012; Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011). But
time and time again, all of these ‘fixes’ have rather revealed the limits of technology in
solving human problems – however, this has not stopped the slew of apps, devices, and
other technological attempts in an attempt to do so, with no regard for the people behind
the screens. In studying global digital cultures, Haraway’s notion of the cyborg is deeply
Western in its theorization, and leaves behind those who do not exist in Western concep-
tions of personhood.
4 Media, Culture & Society 00(0)

Further research on my part revealed that the love affair with A Cyborg Manifesto had
been fraught earlier than I had imagined or seemed to perceive within my own graduate
program and peers – in an essay from 2001, Maria Fernandez and Suhail Malik wrote,
‘Cyborg theory is mostly a self-serving sexying up of critical liberalism through great
gadgetry and concept-busting movements in the technoscientific organization of living
material and extended systems. Tie-dye T-shirts are swapped for leather deathpants and
ethnic beads for prosthetic hardware in a desperate bid for contemporaneity’, (Fernandez
and Malik, 2001). Even going so far to refer to the notion of the cyborg as a form of
dogmatism, Fernandez and Malik note that the concept itself is hypocritical. Haraway
did encourage the embrace of new technologies as a means of liberation – however, time
and time again we have seen the ways that technology only continues to reify existing
power structures, notably white supremacy and misogyny (Benjamin, 2019).
Cyborgs, then, useful as they are in conceptualizing a departure from traditional
notions of identity, reify the very technological institutions which they were meant to
disrupt – one that privileges certain bodies and identities and embodiments above others.
Even the idea of the cyborg itself is borne out of a Western philosophy of selfhood and
technology, further adding to its limits in dismantling categorical conceptions of the self.
As Holland notes, we are not capable of living without categories of difference (Holland,
2012), and perhaps although the cyborg metaphor holds so much potential in breaking
down our ideas of how the body – and the self – are constructed, this reconstruction of
the embodied self through the metaphor of technology indeed has its limits. The purpose
of this essay is not only a collection of my reflections, but serves to point out the limita-
tions in conceptualizing cyborg as identity category and form of embodiment, and pro-
vides some directions in which we can begin to build upon and challenge the potential
– and the potential of its limits – of the cyborg.

Potentials of its limits: who gets to be a cyborg?

The identity of cyborg is indeed a privileged one that invokes certain issues surrounding
categorization and of embodiment. The cyborg body is one that is littered with not only
epistemic violence in regard to the foundations on which it is grounded (a Western phi-
losophy of the self as well as Western views of science and technology), but also in
regard to class, race, sexuality, and ability. Technology and the desire to create and con-
trol machines is a realm dominated by Man, and thus technology itself may inherently be
patriarchal (Wajcman, 2004), yet women have always been present and have indeed
always had a presence in the design and use of these technologies as well. In particular,
the rise of the networked society and the ability to shift and shape identity in cyberspace
as well as the rise of the Internet of Things makes the idea of the cyborg woman more
possible than ever before. However, is women’s participation in cyberspace and the tech-
nological sphere disruptive of the very basis on which technology is built? Or is it merely,
as Audre Lorde puts it, a futile attempt to ‘dismantle the master’s house with the master’s
tools’? (Lorde, 1984). How much potential do science, technology, and the cyborg iden-
tity really hold for women, for people of color, for the disabled, and for queer persons?
Another question of the cyborg identity is the access to technology upon which the
identity is built. Currently, in the United States, there is a severe divide between those
DeCook 5

who have access to technology and those who do not, and this unequal access exacer-
bates the social inequalities that they have often created (Shapiro, 2010). Indeed, tech-
nology cannot exist outside of the material confines of space, and places like Silicon
Valley are a stark reminder of the social inequalities and divides that technology and its
creation simultaneously disrupts yet reifies. Even those who do not participate in the
same uses of technology and who are unable to experience its benefits and thus, its
potential, are affected by the changes in behavior, social norms, economics, and identity
that it produces (Shapiro, 2010).
Thus, the question must be asked of the cyborg identity – in what ways does it help to
dismantle traditional confines of identity and categorization, and in what ways does its
very identity category (cyborg) continue to uphold social institutions that rely on the
oppression of others – particularly the poor, racial and sexual minorities, and the disa-
bled? These questions may illuminate the potential of the limits of the cyborg and its
theorization and proliferation in many disciplines, from philosophy to women and gen-
der studies to science and technology studies. Indeed, Wilkerson notes how the cyborg
mythos seems to evade the very issues it claims to dismantle and challenge, and names
the appeal in which Haraway’s cyborg has had for white feminists – ‘It is, nonetheless,
worth asking whether many white feminists have enthusiastically taken up the cyborg
myth precisely because of what it does not say about race’, (Wilkerson, 1997: 170).
The concept of the cyborg is a freeing, revolutionary identity for some, and to others is
an essentialized, apolitical, and according to ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, promote a
‘reductionist constructivism’, (Lykke, 1997: 6). Indeed, the concept of the cyborg is one
that is not fraught with controversy due to its application and use to support white feminist
thought and theorization of the world, despite Haraway’s intent to call for more integra-
tion of feminist theories of women of color in analyzing identity and difference. Lykke’s
essay calls for an integration of both views – the cyborg and the natural – in critically
analyzing the body and ways of being. Lykke compares the feminist theories and ideas of
Haraway, whose desire to be a cyborg is abundantly clear, with the non-Western ecofemi-
nist theories and perspectives of Shiva, and artfully demonstrates how the cyborg and the
goddess (science/technology and nature, respectively) are not as dissimilar as they may
appear, and have much in common. Further, Lykke makes the case for feminist critiques
of technoscience to incorporate both perspectives, as opposed to privileging one above the
other (Lykke, 1997). Cyborgs, despite the technological progress the world has made, do
not exist outside of it, and cannot dismantle or wipe away nature from existence.
Schueller notes in their essay that indeed Haraway’s Cyborg is in itself within a body
of work that are the dominant paradigm in which ‘imperialist incorporation of women of
color in contemporary gender and sexuality studies: incorporation by analogy’,
(Schueller, 2005) and the divide between white feminists’ desire and work on universal-
izing the concept of woman and women of color’s work focusing specifically on particu-
lar groups of women. The cyborg, in its application and conceptualization, is not a
universal concept, and Schueller critiques the use of ‘woman of color’ as an analogical
framework within which to view the cyborg identity, and notes that: ‘Cyborg identities,
mediated through the politics of women of color, help defuse – or to use Wilkerson’s
terminology, deny the responsibility of working with – whiteness and white feminist
social location’, (Schueller, 2005: 82). Halberstam’s 1991 essay provides an analysis of
6 Media, Culture & Society 00(0)

these later critiques and the critiques presented early on the subject of cyborg women,
and notes that the potential of the cyborg identity is that it enables femininity to be con-
ceived of as a ‘coded masquerade’, (Halberstam, 1991). Despite Halberstam’s disagree-
ment with the claims that postmodern feminist thought and the idea of cyborgs, their
essay introduces the concept that we may have already always been cyborgs – but fails
to address who has always been a cyborg. Schueller’s critique of cyborg identities and its
universalism in its application holds true, and as noted earlier in this essay, cyborg may
exacerbate the differences and categories it seeks to dismantle.
Indeed, there have long been scholarly attempts to dismantle the cyborg and its applica-
tions in research and critique, or at least to challenge and renegotiate its concept. Scholars
like Kavita Phlip, Suchitra Mathur, and Irene Gedalof have all challenged and even
attempted to negotiate the ways that identities like goddess, nomad, and cyborg can be
reimagined as identities for women (Gedalof, 2000; Mathur, 2004; Philip et al., 2012). In
particular, bringing postcolonial sensibilities to feminist technoscience and its related fields
has been crucial in not only broadening Haraway’s concept and definition of cyborg, but
bringing in another dimension of biopolitics unique to the colonized body. Philip’s work in
particular noted the need to consider all of the narratives of race, class, gender, nation, and
scientific progress from a postcolonial lens (Philip, 1998), something Haraway’s initial
concept fails to do. Caught between worlds, and caught between varying promises of pro-
gress and definitions of science, deviant bodies struggle then to negotiate belonging within
these realms (Mathur, 2004). In addition, recent works by scholars like Ruha Benjmain,
Safiya Noble, Kishonna Gray, and Simone Browne bring in Black feminist perspectives to
technology that demonstrate the shortcomings of the cyborg concept and show the ways
that race, class, and gender all inform practices of surveillance and oppression that have a
long historical past (Gray, 2020; Benjamin, 2019; Browne, 2015; Noble, 2018).

The limits of the cyborg and the human

The cyborg does not come without baggage, and in fact comes with its own value codes,
which is perhaps amplified by our increasingly data-driven society that is run by algo-
rithms and other agents that exist in technological infrastructures. Atanasoski and Vora
discuss in their essay how these technological, networked infrastructures have begun to
bring into question not even who counts as cyborg, but who and what even qualifies as
human (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015). Their essay illustrates the limits of posthumanist
fantasies of surpassing the boundaries of humanity, and how the views of this techno
utopia formulate the ‘surrogate human’. Further, the fantasy that humans can be freed by
technology from labor has perhaps collapsed in the age of the networked society, and
although surrogate humanity may mark a shift away from capitalism, ‘it does so by reaf-
firming existing paradigms of racialized and gendered value through the figure of a sur-
rogate human who performs degraded work that is always already meant to be invisible’,
(Atanasoski and Vora, 2015: 7). Although not dealing with the concept of cyborg per se,
this essay marks the introduction of the concept of the transhuman, the posthuman, and
the surrogate human that technology has promised to create – and its failures to transcend
identity in the form of gender, race, class, and ability, and rather continues to function
and uphold in a colonialist, historical, capitalist power structure. Technology, the Internet
DeCook 7

of Things, data, and algorithms that enable the structure of modern day society are never
neutral, and in fact all of these data-driven practices further ‘materializes assumptions of
what constitutes a human . . .’ (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015: 13).
‘Techno-utopics surrounding big data, smart objects, and internetworking of humans
and machines, however, do not dwell in the vitality of matter, but rather propose the thing
as a surrogate human. In this way, they replicate the violent neoliberal impetus to enfold
difference into sameness – into a shared space and time’, (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015:
16). However as Holland notes in their work The Erotic Life of Racism, there are beings
that exist in time (white people) and beings who exist in space (Black people) – and when
these two beings collide, there is an affront to the material and societal order within
which they exist. The idea of technology, the cyborg, the transhuman and the posthuman
as identities that exist in a utopia, in a beyond, is a myth that is being perpetuated and
shifted by those who already benefit from hegemonic paradigms of what counts as being
human in the first place. Bhattarai’s essay then further illustrates these concepts in their
essay discussing algorithmic value, and how even investments in algorithms that seem
benign are in fact reproducing a certain cultural logic of power in terms of knowledge,
labor, and bodies (Bhattarai, 2017). The idea of source code, of algorithms, of data being
the genesis of action is naïve – ‘because their agency is enabled and constrained by a
larger network of cultural and economic encodings that render them executable’,
(Bhattarai, 2017: 21), illuminating again that attempts to make technology and the tech
world more inclusive and diverse as well as the attempts to use the category of cyborg as
transcending difference are merely the master’s tools disguised as revolutionary action.
Technology (and thus, cyborgs), since it is created by humans, carries with it the
same limitations as humanity in terms of its ability to provide transcendence of our
categorizations of race, class, gender, and ability. In effect, the ‘source code’ is already
imbued with certain assumptions of all of these categories of difference, since it is writ-
ten from the epistemological standpoint and values of those who create it (Benjamin,
2019; Noble, 2018). If the tech industry and tech world is heavily dominated by white-
ness, by maleness, then in what capacity do those who do not fit into hegemonic notions
of humanity (white, cis, hetero, male) figure into these infrastructural equations?
Epistemic sites of thought in the theorization of the transhuman, of the posthuman, of
the cyborg all exist within the same epistemic paradigms upon which all science and
technology are built upon – colonialist, Western, white – and thus are limited in fully
conceptualizing a beyond.
In thinking of a beyond, how do we reshape epistemic foundations of who or what is
human? How do we incorporate other intellectual and epistemic traditions to disrupt the
Western, Enlightenment notion of humanism? Indeed, postmodernist feminism in the
likes of cyborg feminism and others had and still do have a utopic vision of where these
moments of difference do not exist, and yet over 30 years after Haraway wrote that she
would rather by a cyborg than a goddess, the current political climate seems to indicate
that instead of dismantling identity, technological infrastructures and ‘cyborg’-ed bodies
have instead further cemented categories of difference. Instead, the identity of cyborg is
perhaps more performative (as all identity categories are) rather than a transcendental
state of being, which Carlson discusses in his essay exploring the Gay, Queer, and Cyborg
in the transglobal age (Benjamin, 2019). They write: ‘For although identity may still be
8 Media, Culture & Society 00(0)

constructed as a relation between self and Other, the current categories of identity are not
permanent fixtures on the cultural landscape, and self and Other can move toward a more
equitable recognition. Given all this, it seems likely that sexual identity, along with gen-
der, race, and class identities, will continue to play a part in constructing the postmodern
self’, (Carlson, 2001: 308). Thus, in graduate programs, I implore scholars who teach A
Cyborg Manifesto to challenge the universalism of the concept of Haraway’s cyborg, and
suggest instead to attempt to view it in relation and against other identity categories and
performances.

Coming home: the cyborg returns

Sundén’s essay on the she-cyborg juxtaposes conceptions of the cyborg with the virtual
bodies that are present on cyberspace, and how these virtual spaces that are free from
material bodies with issues surrounding access – thus, some people get to be cyber-
femmes and express femininity and sexuality on their own terms, whereas others do not.
Their essay also further illuminates that just because a place exists virtually and not
materially does not release it from colonial logics or practices – in fact, as noted earlier
in this essay, technology and virtual worlds are merely reflections of the ‘physical’,
material world, and thus carries with it the same historical baggage of material spaces.
Sundén writes: ‘the material body marked by gender, race and class not only forms the
physical ground for the cyberspace traveler, but is also clearly introduced and repro-
duced in the new electronic spaces it inhabits. Even though the virtual world might pro-
vide a workshop for explorations in identity politics, these experiments remain an
alteration serving white, male subjectivity and identity’, (Sundén, 2001). However, the
cyborg identity and its possibilities help to aid in the new creation of meaning. Despite
all of its criticisms and its limits, perhaps part of its enduring mythos is the idea that there
is a beyond, a space that is both material and virtual, and one where identity is not neces-
sarily dismantled but rather exists in relation to the technological. Although it may be a
controversial statement, we can perhaps best understand the concept of Haraway’s
cyborg within which the context it was written and by whom it was written by: in some
way, the cyborg concept itself may be a symptom of the pervasiveness of the ‘California
Ideology’ that permeated all aspects of the tech industry and continue to do so today,
shaping our understandings of the world with it (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996). Driven
by capitalism, the cultural bohemianism of California (which is palpable in A Cyborg
Manifesto) entangled itself with the new and emerging tech industry, creating a form of
cyber-liberalism that has allowed for the emergence of the ‘Big 5’ tech giants that have
become more powerful than governments (Benjamin, 2019; Manjoo, 2017).
Readers of this essay will hopefully come away with an understanding of the possi-
bilities and the limits of possibility of the cyborg. Machines, and the cyborg, can only
take us so far in conceptualizing about bodies in an increasingly networked infrastructure
driven world. What the critiques in this essay illuminate are the ‘heart’, the intimacy, the
erotic lives of identity categories of race and sexuality and ability, and conceptualizing
cyborg on different terms not polluted with Western epistemologies of humanism. The
material, the virtual, and the technological all collide into one another, but this does not
help us transcend our humanity nor our human identities. Perhaps, the larger question is
DeCook 9

what motivates us to be cyborg – is it the ego driven need for immortality? The desire to
escape hegemonic paradigms of humanity and knowledge and performance of identity?
Maybe there is no one answer, but the cyborg is not outside of the politics in which it
exists, and thus if we interpret it in relation to other identity categories, it exists in a pre-
dicted, unpredictable future, and its mythogenesis will be disrupted and reshaped.
Technology will not save us. Cyborgs will not save us. But there is hope that in challeng-
ing these notions, our humanity will.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Julia R DeCook https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2704-1318

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