The cyborg is a ‘cybernetic organism’ that enhances human capabilities. First defined in the US in the 1960s in a context in which cybernetic thinking was being applied to the space race and Cold War concerns, the cyborg participated in wider cultural and political trends by combining individualism with control, and helping to erode fixed categories between human and nonhuman. Since then the cyborg has become an important figure in both technology and culture, dramatizing the hopes and fears that follow the erosion of taken for granted boundaries and categories in science fiction and film. Very recently the cyborg has been used in parts of social science including feminist theory as a tool for understanding a world that is taken to be relatively non-coherent at both individual and collective levels, and yet filled with systematic inequalities. In this incarnation the cyborg becomes a hybrid figure that is only partially coherent. It blurs the boundary between reality and fiction, thereby acting as a vehicle for radical political agendas.