In the very second stanza of The Cyborg Manifesto (1985) — her game-changing thesis about feminism and identity politics — American feminist philosopher Donna Haraway claimed that the boundary between social reality and science fiction is an optical illusion. Late 20th century capitalism, she contended, had made human identity unstable and unsustainable and pushed humans — in life as in labour — into a war with machines. Her counteroffensive was in bringing forth the idea of the cyborg — “creatures simultaneously animal and machine” — a species without gender, without history and without an originary mythology. Not that this idea
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