A Cyborg Manifesto: Digital Health Technologies and Socialist Feminism

Author: Maxx Kaufman

Book Cover: A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway Published by Anarres Infoshop, 1983

“The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics” – Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto

In her essay originally titled Manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology and socialist feminism (1985), scholar Donna Haraway uses the concept of the cyborg to analyze interactions between humans and technology. She points to the ways the cyborg may enable a broadened feminism than that which was envisioned by her Marxist feminist contemporaries in the 1980s. Haraway’s writings in the late-twentieth century were influential in the realms of socialism, feminism and technoscience studies, but also particularly in the emergence of the posthumanities, which interrogate the non-human and more-than-human influences of nature and technology. Posthumanities deal with the constantly eroding boundaries between humans and alterity in the forms of technology, and questioning “what it is to be human in an age of rapid technological, scientific, cultural, and social evolution” [1].  

Haraway’s manifesto outlines three collapses of boundaries across dominant society that have enabled her cyborg theory: human and animal, human and machine, and physical and non-physical. Evolution and changing relationships between humans and non-human animals enabled a breakdown of the first boundary. Technological development led to a hazier border between humans and machines; prior to the late-twentieth century, “machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous” but per Haraway, “now we are not so sure” [2 p. 152]. The prevalence of technology and our reliance on it blurs the line between what is ultimately human or machine. Finally, the physical and non-physical became increasingly less distinguishable; Haraway describes microelectronics and electromagnetic waves as “everywhere” and “invisible” [p. 153]. Modern machinery is composed of signals and waves, defined by portability and mobility, qualities which are in direct opposition to the materiality and rigidity of humans. In short, our everyday reliance on technology via phones, smart watches, or medical implants (to start), indicates for Haraway, that we are all cyborgs already. She points to how the figure of the cyborg deconstructs essentialist ways of being and seeing the world as strictly natural/unnatural, material/immaterial or human/non-human. The cyborg is all of these things and none of them. Cyborgs are a liberatory concept, which stands for the rejection of binaries across identity and power dynamics. Cyborgs are a fusion of the self and Other, consequently destabilizing oppositions which have sought to assert inequality and hierarchies of being across race, gender and culture. This is imperative to structuring an inclusive and comprehensive feminist politic.    

To Haraway, ignoring social relations and concerns of exploitation in the development of technology leads to a world of cyborgs analogous to the dystopian, controlled mechanical power grids of science fiction films which further binary oppositions of social positionality. Conversely, a cyborg world could also be seen as one “where people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” [2 p.154]. Each perspective indicates a variety of possibilities that seem impossible from the other viewpoint. All this to say, technology and machinery are not apolitical. Development, funding and access to forms of technology, as well as who benefits from it, are all a product of various power dynamics. The world we live in is dependent on how we engage with it. 

Contemporary scholars have looked at cyborg theory and its application to new digital health technologies, healthcare delivery and everyday interactions between individuals and medical technologies. Deborah Lupton (2015) explores how phone apps and smartwatches, for example, are wearable means of tracking and interacting with health data in the form of heart rate monitors, sleep trackers, breathing rate, mood, pain levels, medication records and more [3]. This data can be reinterpreted into graphs and visualizers and shared with healthcare providers, friends and family. Our devices are an extension of us in means greater than solely communication or social practices; they are a part of our bodies and our health to a degree beyond even what Haraway imagined 40 years ago. Proponents of wearable or implanted diagnostic technologies suggest this may enable those with limited access to traditional healthcare to understand irregularities or changes to their health. Long-term records over decades could enable personalized care based on an individual’s baseline of their “best” health rather than generalized metrics [4].  

Haraway indicates the potential dangers of overreliance on bioinformatics. Issues of surveillance and privacy breaches arise. But especially notable is how medical digitization dehumanizes the body. The world and the body become mere data, and disease is “a subspecies of information malfunction or communications pathology… a process of misrecognition or transgression of the boundaries of a strategic assemblage called self” [5 p. 212]. Disease becomes knowable before even physical symptoms may arise, viewed through the ostensibly objective and all-knowing health technologies that know more about our bodies than our doctors or our ourselves. The cyborg body as assembled by digital health technologies allows us to look inside the body more easily than ever and leads to a cycle “in which data are produced which then affect behaviours that then create further data and so on” [3 p. 575].  

This also facilitates a form of health agency that prioritizes one ideal form of health and embodiment as superior to any other [3]. One type of body that has been synthesized and understood as data is idealized, and other unruly, unknowable, transgressive or disabled bodies are further alienated as problems to be solved. The digitally engaged patient, with their diagnostic technology metaphorically grafted to them, now have the onus of their own health placed on them, not just their healthcare providers. One idea of what it means to be healthy is promoted, and every individual has the tools to know exactly how they meet or deviate from this. Beyond the grander systemic issues of healthism, it also contributes to an additional burden on the chronically-ill and disabled to always being made aware of their own conditions, and that they may never be seen as whole or acceptable.  

Maintaining an understanding of Haraway’s cyborg can help us avoid the essentialism of healthism and a reductionist view of what it means to be healthy. Health technologies are not value-neutral, yet they should not be condemned or valorized either. Medical digitization can allow us to be more informed, especially for those with socioeconomic and geographic barriers to healthcare. But it also must be approached critically, with an understanding of how power structures enable some to benefit from technologies more than others. The increasing inevitability of a both physical and figurative blend of human and machine points to the need for cyborg politics. To embrace technology with the intentions of justice and accessible knowledge requires us to engage with critical discourse surrounding technology. Science and technology will not save us alone. Building the future we want insists on our involvement, and Haraway’s cyborg theory is simply one way in which we may envision a broadened view of the body, encompassing a multiplicity of ways of being.  

References 

[1] Sorgner SL, Shin S. Journal of Posthuman Studies: Philosophy, Technology, Media n.d. http://www.psupress.org:443/journals/jnls_JPHS.html (accessed February 19, 2025). 

[2] Haraway DJ. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Routledge; 1990, p. 149–81. 

[3] Lupton D. Donna Haraway: The Digital Cyborg Assemblage and the New Digital Health Technologies. In: Collyer F, editor. The Palgrave Handbook of Social Theory in Health, Illness and Medicine, London, UNITED KINGDOM: Palgrave Macmillan UK; 2015, p. 567–81. 

[4] Reed D. The Wearable, Implantable, Personalized Future Of Medicine. Fast Company 2013. https://www.fastcompany.com/2681965/the-wearable-implantable-personalized-future-of-medicine (accessed February 20, 2025). 

[5] Haraway DJ. The Biopolitics of Postmodern bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Routledge; 1990, p. 203–30.