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One of the things I want readers to know about the Cyborg Manifesto is that it's mostly about mundane technologies and modes of organizing work + family that hugely predate the 1980s
The paper is often taken up as being about futures, acceleration, new modes of technological enhancement and achievement and the dangers they pose.
But also!
But also!
It's about being a feminized secretary and vulnerable to a boss's lewd gaze; about the re-establishment of gender roles in the home among white, US engineering elites; about women and girls oppressed by global capital + intimate patriarchy doing hazardous industrial work by hand
None of these things are new! C3I provides new tools for enforcing the power dynamics that make patriarchy, racism, and uneven distributions of wealth + capital seem *natural*. But it didn't invent these ideologies.
The language she is trying to invent about how to talk about technology without falling into binary thinking about male/female, self/other, god/man, material/immaterial, etc, is confusing and I think that often leads to a reading that the paper is just about novel technology
I think that reading is supported by paying more attention to how she outlines the stakes at the very beginning and end of the paper and less to the examples -- sketchy though they sometimes are -- that come in the middle sections, where there is less sexy language
But I find it most useful as a "plus ca change" story that points to material and embodied histories that cyborgs should know for getting by in the world today.
