In this episode, we re talking about Cyberfeminism, Black Cyber Feminism, and xenofeminism, which are terms I had never heard before. They all apparently stem from a foundational text, which is so foundational that people have forgotten to mention it in academic contexts, and so everyone thinks that everyone knows it but they don t know it.
00:04:11.920I have like three more written that we haven't done yet.
00:04:14.280I know. Well, maybe we can, we can work on those over, over this, this sort of winter break that
00:04:19.200we have with the kids. Yeah. But so back to the Cyborg Manifesto, this particular foundational
00:04:24.380text, basically like the gist, if you don't want to listen to this, argues that the cyborg, a hybrid
00:04:30.860of machine and organism is a powerful metaphor for breaking down rigid boundaries, like human versus
00:04:36.960animal or organism versus machine or physical versus non-physical male, female, nature, culture.
00:04:42.780And it rejects essentialist identity politics and traditional socialist feminism in favor of affinity
00:04:49.660politics, like coalitions based around shared interests rather than fixed identities. And it also embraces
00:04:56.560irony and partiality and blasphemy against origin stories, both religious and secular, which is really
00:05:03.080interesting. And then some key quotes that are endlessly repeated from this are, I would rather be a cyborg than a
00:05:09.460goddess. And the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world that is no truck with bisexuality, pre-edible
00:05:16.580symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness. Also, we are all chimeras theorized in
00:05:24.940fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.
00:05:27.280This sounds like it was actually written in like a fever dream. Like, honestly, I'm going to go into the origin stories of this and you're going to, like, everything's going to fall in place.
00:05:38.320It sounds like one of our female listeners wrote this. Is this, like, not that dissimilar?
00:05:42.480Because our female listeners are freaking awesome. I love this. But no, trust me, when I get into the origins,
00:05:48.400this is, it will all be explained. But this, this manifesto gave birth to cyber feminism, which gave birth to xenofeminism and black cyber feminism. And when I heard about that in the thread where Grimes brought this up in the first place, I was like, okay, this is so intriguing. We have to dig in.
00:06:09.440So we're going to start with the Cyborg Manifesto and then, you know, explain to you, so that you are an informed citizen of the world, what this manifesto, this foundational text is about, because people have forgotten to explain this Rosetta Stone of culture and philosophy. And also, cyber feminism, xenofeminism, and black feminism.
00:06:28.280Xenofeminism and black cyber feminism.
00:06:31.020So, hold on, but you liked xenofeminism, which I think our audience is going to have a problem with, because those xenos need to be burned in their name.
00:06:56.640No, I think, no, you'll see, xenofeminism is my feminism. I've decided.
00:07:01.720No, hold on, actually, I'm going to, I'm going to make an argument. Actually, we should do a separate episode on this, because I think it's a great idea.
00:07:06.840The concept of globalist nationalism, or what's a better way to say it? I call it Terran nationalism.
00:07:17.480So, Terran nationalism is what you see in something like Starstrip Troopers, where you have this idea of, we as humans are great, I love humanity, I love the species, and the other is aliens or machines or something like that, right?
00:07:37.360And in our fab, I have one of my favorites.
00:07:41.760Oh, yeah, Terran empire is one of the contexts.
00:07:44.040Terran empire is one of the presets, or the sons of man, where, you know, it's humanity and all the things that have come from our species, whether it's AI.
00:07:50.400And for context, in reality fabricator, that the AI, like narrative engine and chatbot platform that Malcolm has built with, with Bruno, friend of the pod, Bruno, is, you can go through, like, if you don't want to sort of create your own prompts for stories or characters, these amazing menus that Malcolm has created, where like, you can choose the settings and the tropes.
00:08:11.980Like, do you want Isekai? Do you want vampires? Do you want, like, this kind of dynamic, like a power dynamic or whatever?
00:08:17.520And like, yeah, one of the settings is Terran empire.
00:08:20.380Like, some other weird settings you have in there, like, like, like, my favorite game to play is Terran empire versus gay space communism.
00:09:28.700So, so to me, personally, and I think anyone who knows Santa Cruz will probably agree with me, Santa Cruz epitomizes a culture that is unmoored from history and origin stories, which is kind of a core point of her manifesto here of, like, origin stories.
00:09:46.260No, like, what are we even in any way?
00:09:48.140And, and here's the thing is, is in, in Santa Cruz, especially in California in general, you've got modern and historical transplants of people who repeatedly rejected and importantly forgot the cultures of their homeland.
00:10:05.100So consider my family's history by way of California, like twice over, I mean, different, you know, branches, but like one branch moved from like Norway to Germany, to Ireland, to New York, to Chicago, to California, and then multiple locations in California.
00:10:24.160Every time they're getting up and moving, they're kind of reinventing themselves and kind of intentionally unmooring themselves from their historical inherited cultures and roots and past.
00:10:33.800They're like, they're like, they're not trying to bring it with them.
00:10:36.520Like, I think that the Collins family is different.
00:10:38.820Like your family seems to have really clung to a very strong sense.
00:10:42.120Yeah, we lived in the same area for seven generations.
00:10:44.600So my family, like very intentionally, like laundered its self and identity in California as a place in America.
00:10:55.620People need to understand, like, you know, we've talked about the role of these foundational cultures, like the Scots-Irish versus the Quakers versus the Cavaliers.
00:11:05.380What we haven't really talked about is the way that certain behavioral bottlenecks have played in informing some types of Californian culture.
00:11:16.760And Bay Area culture is, and that is to say San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Bay Area culture is uniquely one of people who have really intentionally kind of a flashback to themselves so many times that they've forgotten where they've come from.
00:11:31.200And that makes them a very interesting kind of cultural blank slate that is exactly the kind of cultural blank slate that would produce this manifesto.
00:11:41.080So I just, I just want to, but what makes Santa Cruz unique, even within this ecosystem of people who have like warped and completely cleaned away multiple times, laundered their, their culture and identity.
00:11:54.620Is that it's also, it is crunchy, very crunchy.
00:11:59.040We're talking like, you know, you're wearing socks under Birkenstocks while walking through the Redwood forests and then surfing in the morning, et cetera.
00:13:14.700As of 2025, like I said, she, she's not an active professor anymore.
00:13:18.160She's an Amerita Distinguished Professor of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, UCSC.
00:13:26.560She looks very much like a Santa Cruz lady.
00:13:29.580I had, I spent a lot of time in Santa Cruz as a kid because my grandparents and I, and, and aunt and cousin were there and we're, we spent tons of like all my holidays were there.
00:13:40.280But what's interesting about her is she trained in biology.
00:13:42.920She has a PhD in biology from Yale and zoology and philosophy.
00:13:48.920And I think this is, you can kind of see, I think some of the most interesting thinkers philosophically have backgrounds in biology, like you, like her, because they're able to think in a cross-disciplinary fashion.
00:14:00.060That's really, that challenges a lot of the really trite norms.
00:14:04.340And that is genuinely novel because when people have backgrounds in, in philosophy and then they contribute to philosophy, they're really just kind of copying and pasting with slightly different words.
00:14:14.120You know, whereas like someone with biology is going to come in and be like, well, I don't know, like based on the way that like DNA double helixes work, you know, like, I think that, you know, what I did not have a background in biology.
00:14:27.520But she, she was also deeply influenced by Marxist feminism and science fiction and Catholic symbolism.
00:14:34.400Because she grew up Irish Catholic and post-structuralism.
00:14:38.220So you just got like the perfect storm of a good manifesto in there.
00:14:42.360And so we also need to think about the context of this piece, because I think a lot of people are like, well, this is amazing, like great poetry.
00:14:49.860Like, but no, like we have to, it just, to quote one Kamala Harris or, you know, paraphrase, it didn't just fall out of a coconut tree.
00:14:58.740You have to consider it within the context of the world in which it exists.
00:15:02.120So the essay originated in response to a 1983 call from the Socialist Review, which is a West Coast leftist journal, asking feminists to reflect on the future of socialist feminism amid Ronald Reagan's presidency and the rise of the new right and the decline of traditional leftist movements in the U.S.
00:15:21.920and escalating Cold War tensions, including the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars program.
00:15:26.840And Haraway aimed to revitalize socialist feminism by addressing what she called the informatics of domination, how new technologies of communication and control and production, which is really what, you know, anyone in Silicon Valley, which is roughly where Santa Cruz is, is experiencing, were reshaping power and labor and gender and identities in ways that older feminist frameworks just couldn't grasp.
00:15:51.900And so she, basically what happened though, like, just to break it down for you, a Marxist publication wanted feminists to butthurt about conservatives.
00:15:59.460And instead she like, went off the reservation and it was glorious.
00:16:05.060Like instead of Reagan wants me to become a housewife and spoon feed jelly beans to my husband.
00:16:09.880She's like, let's become cyborgs and form special groups around our artistic special interests.
00:16:51.660No, I mean, I'm already seeing why it feels like Grimes wrote this to be honest.
00:16:56.020No, but also like the way it played out and was interpreted and was appropriated is also like the same struggle and unfair treatment that Grimes has undergone.
00:17:07.300So just so, so people understand, cause not a lot of our, more than half our audience is outside the U S I just want to make it clear the context of this.
00:17:15.540It's the eighties when this was written.
00:17:17.360It was, it was written one year before Malcolm was born two years, two years before I was born.
00:17:22.220This is the Silicon Valley Bay area at the very beginning of this period of biotech and personal computing, just having an insane upswing.
00:17:30.320And these are the first people who are smelling it.
00:17:32.760These are the canaries in the coal mine who were like, Oh God, the whole world is about to change.
00:17:38.760And there's this crisis also at the same time on the left as the 1960s and seventies, social movements are beginning to fragment.
00:17:46.060So for example, second wave feminism, which emerged in the 1960s and peaked in the seventies was, was starting to falter.
00:17:53.980It was often called the women's liberation movement as well, if that's how you've heard of it more, it grew out of experiences in civil rights and anti-war activism.
00:18:02.120And then by the eighties, it fractured due to what people call the feminist sex wars, which were debates over pornography and sexuality and power.
00:18:10.040And there were also critiques of white middle-class dominance, excluding women of color and lesbians.
00:18:15.300And there were splits between liberal and radical and socialist branches.
00:18:18.560And in her piece, in her manifesto, Haraway explicitly critiqued how taxonomies of feminism policed official women's experience, leading to endless splitting.
00:18:29.700Like she really, really, really hated identity politics.
00:18:34.120But so the, also in another movement that was sort of falling apart.
00:18:37.340And this is one thing that the, the socialist magazine that prompted this essay wanted to see addressed was the new left, which was this broad student and youth driven movement encompassing the anti-Vietnam war protests and free speech campaigns.
00:18:51.400Like at Berkeley, like my dad went to those protests.
00:19:13.180And that's so funny that you, oh my gosh, your dad's.
00:19:15.620The only reason for people to know my dad actually got out of the war by being too eager to go into the war, which is he applied really early in the war process, like before they needed a draft or anything like that.
00:19:28.460So they were actually still incredibly selective with who they were taking.
00:19:31.580And this was to, during like the ROTC and stuff, but he had a, a, a medical issue tied to his leg.
00:20:13.500Anyway, but then like basically after there were a lot of clampdowns on these protests and like there were the Kent State shootings.
00:20:20.740And then the Vietnam War ended in 1975.
00:20:23.860And the whole movement kind of fragmented into a bunch of sectarian groups and identity-based politics again.
00:20:30.760And then of course, then there was the civil rights and black liberation movement in the 50s to the 70s, which also fell apart in the 80s because it sort of transitioned in the late 1960s into black power, like the Black Panthers.
00:20:43.860And it emphasized racial separatism and pride.
00:20:46.240And by the 80s, there were all these internal divisions over integration versus nationalism.
00:20:51.100And external oppression contributed to a more fragmentation.
00:20:57.940And it just sort of became like messy.
00:21:01.480So how is this piece framed by academics today?
00:21:04.720Well, they frame it as a canonized but contested classic, which is telling because it's required reading and women's gender studies and science and technology studies and media studies and literary theory and philosophy and anthropology and art theory.
00:21:16.760It's often paired with Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, which I've also never read, but it's considered one of the twin pillars of 1990s anti-essentialist or post-structuralist feminism works.
00:21:28.040And it has like a lot of sort of contradictory interpretations.
00:21:33.620There are lots of post-humanist and trans-humanist readings, and they celebrate it as this early manifesto for leaving humanity behind.
00:21:40.640And then there's some critical race and decolonial scholars who both use and criticize it for its relative silence on race and colonialism.
00:21:52.760But here's where worlds collide, right?
00:21:54.840You're talking about Mom Donnie's dad.
00:21:57.300And here we have the, you know, decolonial scholars being like, well, I don't like that she doesn't talk about identity politics in her anti-identity politics manifesto.
00:22:05.640But again, it like, like I sort of going back to the premise of this, it is framed as the origin text of cyber feminism and xenofeminism, which really rose in the 90s, sort of five years after this was originally published.
00:22:20.020It was republished again in 1991, and then it sort of picked up from there.
00:22:23.440And it has genuinely inspired shifts and course adjustments in various fields.
00:22:28.680Like in feminist theory, it shifted feminism away from women's experience or biological essentialism toward constructivist coalition-based affinity politics.
00:22:38.400Like we don't need a totality in order to work together.
00:22:41.360From post-humanism and critical animal studies, it was one of the earliest and most poetic arguments that the boundary between human and non-human is politically constructed and historically contingent.
00:22:53.900And then when it comes to queer and trans theory, this also really played a foundational role because it prefigured the sort of concept of being non-binary and fluid in terms of your understanding of identity.
00:23:06.460And to be clear, Carraway was not herself writing from a, an LGBT perspective in 1985, but it would be obvious why people who were gender fluid would see what she's talking about and be like, oh, this can apply to me.
00:23:21.580Like that, and, and, and I think this is where a lot of people may kind of misunderstand like grime stance vis-a-vis like trans and everything.
00:23:32.480It's not about identity politics. I think it's more rhymes with, I'm not going to put words in her mouth though, but like, I just feel like she, she more has the, the, this manifesto in her heart than like any particular, like, I like this group.
00:23:46.080I like this group. Let's all do identity.
00:23:47.980But anyway, let's, let's talk about the actual text, which is fascinating.
00:23:51.200I'm not going to go into it because it's long and poetic and a little convoluted, but the chapters provide a peak, right?
00:23:57.900So here are the chapters of it. One at first chapter, an ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit, and then fractured identities, and then the informatics of domination, and then the homework economy outside the home, and then women in the integrated circuit, and then cyborgs, a myth of political identity.
00:24:18.300Then there's bibliography, and then there's bibliography, but I have to say it starts, oh God, it starts with this illustration that it's like, part of me was like, I just opened the URL.
00:24:32.880Okay, yeah, I'll send you a link, and I will describe it for those who are listening, audio only, so don't worry.
00:24:39.720My, my description is going to be highly accurate. So Malcolm, actually, I'm going to have you listen.
00:24:43.280You can tell me how accurate I am, and then, and then the audience can either feel comforted or not, but I'm just going to, I'm going to give my best here.
00:24:50.040So, oh God, it is a picture of a woman who's sitting in space with her back to a framed grid displaying galaxies and mathematical equations at a 3D digital map, and she is on her head wearing a white, a white, I'm going to send it, but you get to hear my description first, because you can tell the listeners how accurate I am.
00:25:10.820On her head, she's wearing a white, glowing tiger cub, and its arms are draped over her shoulders with its arm bones glowing through its ectoplasmic flesh, and on her chest sits a circuit breaker with green lines emanating from it, and they sort of terminate in blue nodes.
00:25:28.760And then her fingers are lying on what look like typewriter keys, maybe like super old school computer keys, set atop a diorama of an Egyptian desert, complete with pyramids in the foreground.
00:25:42.540There's a blue mountain range in the background, and her face, get me, get me here, because we're in, it's, it's holiday time over here right now.
00:25:48.920Her face strikingly resembles that of Neil from the movie The Santa Claus, like the new husband. Picture Neil.