Traditional feminists have criticized "A Cyborg Manifesto" as anti-feminist because it denies any commonalities of the female experience.[3] In the "Manifesto", Haraway writes "there is nothing about being 'female' that naturally binds women",[1] which goes against a defining characteristic of traditional feminism that calls women to join together in order to advocate for members of their gender.
Criticism and controversy surrounded the essay's publication history: the East Coast Collective of the Socialist Review found the piece "a naive embrace of technology" and advocated against its publication, while The Berkeley Collective ultimately insisted that it go to print.[8] The essay has been described as "controversial" and "viral" in its circulation through multiple academic departments and disciplinary boundaries, contributing to the critical discourse on its claims.[9] This controversiality was matched by its omnipresence; Jackie Orr, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs Syracuse University, writes, "It is hard to be a feminist graduate student in the U.S. humanities or social sciences after 1985 and not be touched in some way by the Cyborg Manifesto."[10] The rapid adoption of the article in academic circles also increased the pace of the critical conversation surrounding the work, and in 1990, Haraway felt that the essay had "acquired a surprise half life," which made it "impossible to rewrite" and necessitated revisiting the topic in her subsequent publications.[11]
Many critiques of "A Cyborg Manifesto" focus on a basic level of reader comprehension and writing style, such as Orr's observation that "undergraduate students in a science and technology class find the Cyborg Manifesto curiously relevant but somewhat impenetrable to read."[12][13] This is corroborated by Helen Merrick and Margret Grebowicz's observation that scientists who reviewed Primate Visions had similar issues, particularly as related to Haraway's use of irony.[14] Judy Wajcman, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, suggests in TechnoFeminism that "the openness of her writing to a variety of readings is intentional," which "can sometimes make Haraway difficult to interpret;" however, it does not seem that Wajcman critiques Haraway's tone for its capability to encompass more possibilities, rather than limit them. Wajcman concludes her chapter "Send in the Cyborgs" on a critical note, claiming that "Certainly, Haraway is much stronger at providing evocative figurations of a new feminist subjectivity than she is at providing guidelines for a practical emancipatory politics."[15]
Critiques[16] of Haraway have also centered on the accessibility of the thematic topics she discusses in her writing, and according to third-wave feminist readings, her work "assumes a reader who is familiar with North American culture," and posits that "readers without the appropriate cultural capital are...likely to find it infuriatingly obscure and impenetrable."[15] Therefore, Haraway's symbolism is representative of North American culture symbolizing a "non-universalizing vision for feminist strategies" and "has been taken up within cyberfeminism as the symbol of an essential female being."[15] Considering the question of accessibility more broadly, disability studies have focused on Haraway's essay, noting the absence of "any kind of critical engagement with disability...disabled bodies are simply presented as exemplary...requiring neither analysis nor critique"—a gap which Alison Kafer, Professor of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University, attempts to address in Feminist, Queer, Crip.[8] Wajcman also argues that Haraway's view of technology in "A Cyborg Manifesto" is perhaps too totalizing, and that the binary of "the cyborg solution and the goddess solution" ultimately "caricatures feminism" by focusing too readily on a dichotomy that may in fact be a false one.[15]
In Unfinished Work-From Cyborg to Cognisphere, N. Katherine Hayles questions the validity of cyborg as a unit of analysis. She says that because of the complicated situation of technology and media, "cyborg is no longer the individual person – or for that matter, the individual cyborg – is no longer the appropriate unit of analysis, if indeed it ever was."[17]
As for the relationships between cyborg and religion, Robert A. Campbell argues that "in spite of Haraway's efforts to move beyond traditional Western dualisms and offer a new hope for women, and by extension of humanity and the world, what she in fact offers is a further legitimation for buying into the not so new American civil religion of high technology." He says that "in spite of what some may view as a radical critique of the present and a potentially frightening prescription for the future, the stark reality about Haraway's 'postmodern reality' is that there is no such thing."[18]
Beyond its presence in academic context, "A Cyborg Manifesto" has also had popular traction including Wired's piece by Hari Kunzru[19] and Mute,[20] BuzzFeed, [21] as well as Vice.[22] Retrospective articles consistently mark its anniversary.[23]
In 2018, the disability rights activist and self-described cyborg Cy argued that "A Cyborg Manifesto" erased disabled people and appropriated the aesthetic of disability.[24]
Sonographic fetus as cyborg
Scholar Marilyn Maness Mehaffy writes that the "sonographic fetus is in many ways the ultimate cyborg in that it is 'created' in a space of virtuality that straddles the conventional boundary between an organic body and a digital text."[25] Yet it is this cyborg that presents a limit to Haraway's posthuman theory. The sonographic fetus, as posited by scholar Heather Latimer, "is publicly envisioned as both independent of [its mother's] body and as independent of the sonographic equipment used to read this body. We know that fetal images are depictions, yet the sonogram invokes a documentary-like access to fetuses that makes it easy to ignore this, which in turn can limit the authority and agency of pregnant women."[5] In positioning the fetus as independent, and consequently oppositional, to the pregnant mother, these reproductive technologies "reinscribe stable meanings to the human/machine dualism they supposedly disrupt."[5] Valerie Hartouni argues, "most reproductive technologies have assimilated into the 'order of nature'"[26] which would make Haraway's vision of a regenerative species, unrestricted by heteronormative conceptions of reproduction, unattainable in the sonographic fetus.
