Reviewed by Linda Henderson
Content Warning: Eugenics, violence
I chose to review Dave Brennan’s A Cyborg’s Father because, years ago, I studied communication and cybernetics in graduate school. I was curious—almost pulled—toward how cybernetic thinking might manifest in a memoir about disability, care, and a father’s love. What I found was not a technical treatise but a deeply human book that made Haraway’s ideas alive for me.
I had not encountered Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto before reading Brennan’s work. The reference in his title sent me to her essay, which I read first—slowly, working my way through her language, letting it settle—before returning to A Cyborg’s Father. The pairing changed how I understood both texts. What I offer here is the path I followed as a reader finding her way.
Brennan’s book is a rare hybrid—part memoir, part theory, part lyric excavation, part visual field. What he offers is not simply the story of a father caring for his daughter, Syl, who has lived with Type 1 diabetes since infancy. It is a lived demonstration of what Haraway meant when she wrote that “the cyborg is our ontology”—our way of being in the world.
Brennan writes from within a life shaped by glucose monitors, insulin pumps, alarms, data streams, and the unrelenting math of survival. But the true force of the book comes from his effort to metabolize the emotional weight that shadows that machinery: fear, vigilance, exhaustion, awe, grief, and the pressure of loving a child whose life depends on continual calibration. He does not reveal these emotions directly. Instead, he channels them through recursive forms—poems, “Exemplum” monologues in the voices of diabetic relatives, a Turing test stitched from Franny Choi’s lines, meditations on Björk’s Homogenic and Robyn’s “Fembot,” even architectural visions for the “house” his daughter must live in. A father translating terror into art, so he does not transmit fear into his daughter’s nervous system. Cyborg communication at its most humane.
Reading Brennan through Haraway feels fated. Haraway rejected the Western myth of the self-contained individual (“I think, therefore I am”) and replaced it with a relational way of being. I connect, therefore I become.
Brennan enacts this truth on every page. His daughter’s cyborg body demands connection—to devices, to data, to care. His own identity becomes partially braided with hers through co-regulation. And his own father’s profound stoicism in the face of Type 1 diabetes—a refusal of connection—becomes the third node in this intergenerational circuit.
Yet Brennan refuses any simple dualism of openness versus containment. He inhabits the space between—the place Haraway calls partial connection, where the human stays human by staying porous enough to feel and bounded enough not to dissolve. Reading him, I was reminded of once standing on the sandbar at Grenen, the northern point of Denmark where the Baltic and North Seas meet. The waters collide, refract, touch—but do not fuse. Their movement creates and sustains the sandbar itself.
His book sits there: between his father’s severe containment and his daughter’s radical openness. It is the dynamic boundary he keeps through hybrid form—flexible but not crumbling, held in motion like the seas.
The structure of A Cyborg’s Father is itself a cybernetic realization. The cycling between “Polemic,” “Exemplum,” “A Cyborg’s Father,” and the returns to Björk, Robyn, Naomi Wu, Mary Shelley, and Holly Herndon function like feedback loops—negative feedback restoring emotional homeostasis after spikes of fear or guilt, positive feedback amplifying meaning through art, and feedforward imagining Syl’s future relationship to her cyborg self. The rhythm is uncannily familiar: a recursive calm that echoes the small, continual corrections of the devices that keep Syl alive.
Threaded through these recursive returns is Brennan’s ongoing dialogue with women artists. Björk, Robyn, Naomi Wu, Mary Shelley, and Holly Herndon become partial connections that widen his feminist borders, each offering a different insight on embodiment, autonomy, and imaginative force. He honors their work with genuine attention and shares the shifts it sparks in him. What emerges is an evolved feminist imagination—one sturdy enough, and spacious enough, to offer his daughter as she grows into her own cyborg identity.
Bennan’s hybrid experimentation deepens that effect. Blank pages, blackout blocks, and displaced fragments of Naomi Wu’s words first frustrate, then reveal themselves as mimetic: the repeated hunt for a viable patch of skin for Syl’s glucose monitor, the irritation of failed attempts, the psychic noise of caregiving. These textual interruptions mirror both the surveillance that structures diabetic life and the interruptions Wu experienced as a hyper-visible maker in China. Empathy without sentimentality—a landscape marked by strain, care, and refusal.
One of the most unsettling moments in the book recounts the 2016 Sagamihara stabbings in Japan—an act of eugenic violence in which nineteen disabled residents were murdered as they slept, the attacker claiming they had “no hearts.” The inclusion is jarring but deliberate. It names a shadow that haunts disabled lives: the persistence of purity fantasies, ableist hierarchies, and utilitarian logics that make certain bodies disposable.
Haraway urged us to write as cyborgs—to resist origin myths and refuse the split between body and meaning. Brennan does this not through theory but through syntax and embodied attention. His writing pulses. It flickers between lyric and machine, between signal and noise. It lives inside the care system that structures his days and interrupts his sleep. In his world, affect, sensing, embodiment, device, language, and lineage are inextricable. Nothing stands alone, which reflects Haraway’s notion of partiality. We are part of loosely coupled networks where each element is connected, but not fully fused. Partial, permeable, relational.
This is selective permeability. Brennan must remain porous enough to receive what Syl’s body communicates—yet bounded enough not to collapse under the pressure of constant care. His creative work becomes the membrane that allows feeling in, metabolizes it, and lets something else—meaning, steadiness, imagination—flow back out.
One thread that lands with devastating clarity is the economics of cyborg existence. Survival becomes entangled with the cost of insulin—its privatized distribution, its staggering price, its structural inaccessibility. Brennan quietly reveals the economic skeleton beneath diabetic life: that technological dependency is also financial dependency; that survival is shaped by systems of inequality and profit. Haraway warned that cyborgs are born into domination systems, not outside them. Brennan makes that warning concrete.
In the latter part of his book, Brennan includes early sketches and a final mixed-media rendering of a tubeless insulin patch pump—the device his daughter must wear. The finished piece appears on the cover: fragmented, precise, tender. Its broken lines function as portals—revealing the device at multiple scales, echoing how meaning comes into focus only through attention and time. I spent long pauses with these images, reminded of my own skin cancer vulnerability—the sites of freezing, biopsy, and surgical removal. Brennan’s art meets the body where it remembers.
As I read, I realized that while Brennan lives daily in the relentless tick of chronos—measuring hours between boluses, responding to alarms—his creative work unfolds in kairos, the Greek notion of “time out of time,” the time of opportunity. A Cyborg’s Father feels written from that suspended interval where meaning can emerge, where contradiction can be held rather than solved. Kairos becomes its own form of care, allowing Brennan to balance the hypervigilance of survival with the spaciousness of imagination. It is not an escape from chronos but a counter-pressure that keeps him upright, steady, and able to return to his daughter with presence rather than depletion.
Near the end, Brennan writes:
“I am the timekeeper. Measuring out days between device changes.
Measuring out hours between insulin boluses…
I have never loved time; now I find myself acutely attuned to it.
I have never loved numbers; now I find myself always counting.”
This is what makes A Cyborg’s Father far-reaching—not because it theorizes the cyborg, though it does; not because it updates Haraway or cybernetics, though it does both; but because it shows what cyborg theory looks like when it is lived. When it keeps a child alive. When it transforms a father. When it reveals the stakes of disabled life in an unequal world. And when it becomes, quietly and insistently, a new way of being human—a gift to his daughter, Syl.
Title: A Cyborg’s Father: Misreading Donna Haraway
Author: Dave Brennan
Publisher: Punctum Books
Date: 2025
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About the Reviewer
Linda Henderson is a writer and emerita professor of organizational communication based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems and flash memoirs explore disability, embodiment, memory, and return. Her work appears in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, with a poem forthcoming in Psychological Perspectives.