Abstract

Feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway’s 1983 “Cyborg Manifesto” contributed to innovative thinking across a wide range of humanities and social-scientific disciplines. Its conceptual vocabulary and theoretical framework directly informed one of the founding works of transgender studies, “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back: A Possttranssexual Manifesto,” by Haraway’s doctoral student Sandy Stone. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange. The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artifact, member of a race, individual entity, or body.

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