Donna Haraway’s Utopian Promise

IS BLASPHEMY STILL POSSIBLE in the age of shitposting? We are surrounded everywhere by sanctimony, but very little is sacred. One exception is Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” which called itself a work of blasphemy but has become, in the forty years since it was published, as close to holy writ as any piece of feminist theory. Haraway’s “ironic political myth” is required reading in undergraduate anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and queer theory seminars, and has inspired subbranches of feminist thought (cyberfeminism, xenofeminism). Allusions to the manifesto have become so pervasive in contemporary art that not long ago, ArtReview named Haraway the third most influential person in the art world.