Donna Haraway 233258 224837251 2008-07-10T17:14:04Z 124.169.128.37 {{Essay-like|date=December 2007}} {{Infobox Person | name = Donna Haraway | image = Donna_Haraway_and_Cayenne.jpg | image_size = 270px | caption = Donna Haraway with Cayenne, 2006; photograph by Rusten Hogness | birth_date = [[September 6]], [[1944]] | birth_place = [[Denver, Colorado]] | occupation = professor }} '''Donna Haraway''' (born [[September 6]], [[1944]] in [[Denver, Colorado]]) is currently a professor and chair of the History of Consciousness Program at the [[University of California, Santa Cruz]], United States. She is the author of ''Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology'' (1976), ''Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science'' (1989), ''Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature'' (1991), ''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse'' (1997), ''The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness'' (2003), and ''When Species Meet'' (2008). Haraway earned a degree in [[Zoology]] and [[Philosophy]] at the [[Colorado College]] and received the Boettcher Foundation scholarship. She lived in [[Paris]] for a year, studying philosophies of [[evolution]] on a [[Fulbright scholarship]] before completing her Ph. D. from the [[Biology]] Department of [[Yale]] in 1972. She wrote her dissertation on the functions of [[metaphor]] in shaping research in [[developmental biology]] in the twentieth century. Haraway has taught [[Women's Studies]] and General Science at the [[University of Hawaii]] and [[Johns Hopkins University]]. In September, 2000, Haraway was awarded the highest honor given by the Society for Social Studies of Science, the [[J. D. Bernal]] Award, for lifetime contributions to the field. Haraway has also lectured in feminist theory and techno-science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Haraway is a leading thinker about people's love and hate relationship with machines. Her ideas have sparked an explosion of debate in areas as diverse as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology (Kunzru, 1). ==Haraway's books== ===''Primate Visions''=== [[Image:primate visions.jpg|thumb|left|''Primate Visions'']] When reading Haraway’s books, it is clear that her writings are predominantly grounded in her knowledge of the history of [[science]] and [[biology]] (Carubia, 4). In her book, ''Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science'', Haraway explicates the metaphors and narratives that direct the science of [[primatology]]. She demonstrates that there is a tendency to masculinize the stories about "reproductive competition and sex between aggressive males and receptive females [that] facilitate some and preclude other types of conclusions" (Carubia, 4). She contends that female primatologists focus on different observations that require more communication and basic survival activities, offering very different perspectives of the origins of nature and culture than the currently accepted ones. Drawing on examples of Western [[narratives]] and [[ideologies]] of [[gender]], [[Race (classification of human beings)|race]] and [[social class|class]], Haraway questions the most fundamental constructions of scientific human nature stories based on primates. In ''Primate Visions'', she writes: <blockquote>My hope has been that the always oblique and sometimes perverse focusing would facilitate revisionings of fundamental, persistent western narratives about difference, especially racial and sexual difference; about reproduction, especially in terms of the multiplicities of generators and offspring; and about survival, especially about survival imagined in the boundary conditions of both the origins and ends of history, as told within western traditions of that complex genre (377).</blockquote> Haraway’s aim for science is "to reveal the limits and impossibility of its '[[Objectivity (science)|objectivity]]' and to consider some recent revisions offered by feminist primatologists" (Russon, 10). An expert in her field, Haraway proposed an alternative perspective of the accepted ideologies that continue to shape the way scientific human nature stories are created. More importantly, Haraway offers inventive analogies that reveal whole new vistas and possibilities for investigation (Elkins). ===''The Modest Witness''=== <!-- Image with unknown copyright status removed: [[image:Lynn_Randolph_Cyborg.jpg|thumb|''A Cyborg Manifesto'']] --> ===A Cyborg Manifesto=== Haraway has been described as a "[[feminist]], rather loosely a [[neo-Marxist]] and a [[postmodernist]]" (Young, 172). In 1985, Haraway published the essay ''A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century'' in "Simians, Cyborgs and Women". Although most of Haraway’s earlier work is focused on emphasizing the masculine bias in scientific culture, she has also contributed greatly to feminist narratives of the twentieth century. In ''A Cyborg Manifesto'', Haraway deploys the metaphor of a cyborg in order to challenge feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialisms. She also uses the [[metaphor]] of the cyborg to offer a political strategy for the seemingly disparate interests of [[socialism]] and feminism. Firstly, she introduces and defines the "[[cyborg]]." A cyborg is (see also [[Cyborg theory]]): *[[Cybernetic]] [[organism]] *[[Hybrid (biology)|Hybrid]] of [[machine]] and organism *Creature of both fiction and lived social reality As a postmodern feminist, she argues against [[essentialism]] – which is "any theory that claims to identify a [[universality (philosophy)|universal]], transhistorical, necessary cause or constitution of gender identity or [[patriarchy]]" (Feminist Epistemology, 2006). Such theories, argues Haraway, either exclude women who don’t conform to the theory and segregate them from "real women" or represent them as inferior. Another form of feminism that Haraway is disputing is "a jurisprudence model of feminism made popular by the legal scholar and [[Marxist]], [[Catharine MacKinnon]]" (Burow-Flak, 2000) who fought to outlaw pornography as a form of [[hate speech]]. Haraway argues that MacKinnon’s legalistic version of [[radical feminism]] assimilates all of women's experiences into a particular identity, which ironically recapitulates the very Western ideologies that have contributed to the oppression of women. She writes: "It is factually and politically wrong to assimilate all of the diverse 'moments' or 'conversations' in recent women's politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon's version" (158). According to Haraway's ''Manifesto'', "There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women together into a unified category. There is not even such a state as '[[being]]' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices" (155). A cyborg does not require a stable, essentialist identity, argues Haraway, and feminists should consider creating coalitions based on "affinity" instead of identity. To ground her argument, Haraway analyzes the phrase "women of color," suggesting it as one possible example of [[affinity politics]]. Using a term coined by theorist [[Chela Sandoval]], Haraway writes that "oppositional consciousness" is comparable with a cyborg politics, because rather than identity it stresses how affinity comes as a result of "[[other]]ness, [[difference]], and specificity" (156). ===Cyborg feminism=== In her essay ''A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century''<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html |title=''A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century'' |last=Haraway |first=Donna |accessdate=2007-01-17 }}</ref> , part of her book ''Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature'' ([[1991]]), Haraway uses the cyborg metaphor to explain how fundamental contradictions in feminist theory and identity should be conjoined, rather than resolved, similar to the fusion of machine and organism in cyborgs. The Cyborg Manifesto is also an important feminist critique of capitalism. The idea of the cyborg deconstructs binaries of control and lack of control over the body, object and subject, nature and culture, in ways that are useful in postmodern feminist thought. Haraway uses the metaphor of cyborg identity to expose ways that things considered natural, like human bodies, are not, but are constructed by our ideas about them. This has particular relevance to feminism, since women are often discussed or treated in ways that reduce them to bodies. Balsamo and Haraway's ideas are also an important component of critiques of [[essentialist feminism]] and [[essentialism]], as they subvert the idea of naturalness and of artificiality; the cyborg is a hybrid being. An interpretation of the Cyborg Manifesto: {{cquote2|Haraway feels that the cyborg myth has the potential for radical political action as it frees feminists from a desperate search for similarity with one another, since physical/epistemological boundary breaks can be extrapolated to political boundary crossings.}}<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.stumptuous.com/comps/cyborg.html |title=Haraway, Donna |last=Scott |first=Krista |accessdate=2007-01-17 }}</ref> ===''Situated Knowledge''=== ''Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988)'' sheds light on Haraway’s vision for a feminist science. This essay originated as a commentary on Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism (1987) and is a reply to Harding’s “successor science”. Haraway offers a critique of the feminist intervention into masculinized traditions of scientific rhetoric and the concept of “objectivity”. The essay identifies the metaphor that gives shape to the traditional feminist critique as a polarization. At one end lies those who would assert that science is a rhetorical practice and, as such, all “science is a contestable text and a power field” (577). At the other are those interested in a feminist version of objectivity, a position Haraway describes as a “feminist empiricism”. While the constructivist position, informed by Post-Structuralist theory, served as “a strong tool for deconstructing the truth claims of hostile science by showing the radical historical specificity, and so contestability, of “every layer of the onion of scientific and technological constructions”, it also resulted in a dismantling of any apparatus that might be used to effectively talk about the “real” world. Making use of the history of feminist standpoint theories, Haraway suggests that there may be a way to reconcile what has been accomplished by the radical constructivist critique of the historical social implications of the [[rhetoric of science]] with a specifically feminist positioning with regards to the practice of science. To do this Haraway leaves aside the polarizing metaphor to explore the possibility of a metaphor of vision as one that might see us clear of an agonistic methodology and conception of objectivity in science. ==="I’d rather be a Cyborg than a goddess"=== The [[1990]]s brought about the beginning of the cyborg era and Haraway is a constant contributor to the [[cyberculture]] that exists even today. Although Haraway’s writing endorses [[technology]] in her metaphor of the cyborg, it is equally critical of what technology can bring about. The idea that machines can contribute to liberation is something feminists and women should consider. Haraway writes: "Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females" (180). ==Footnotes== <references/> ==References== * Burow-Flak, Elizabeth. "Background Information on Cyborg Manifesto." [[17 September]] [[2000]]. http://faculty.valpo.edu/bflak/seminar/char_har.html, [[30 January]] [[2006]]. * Campbell, Kirsten. “The Promise of Feminist Reflexivities: Developing Donna Haraway’s Project for Feminist Science Studies,” in ''Hypatia'', 2004, pp.162-182. * Carubia, Josephine M. "Haraway on the Map." ''Semiotic Review of Books''. 9:1 (1998) 4-7. * Elkins, Charles. "The Uses of Science Fiction." ''Science Fiction Studies''. 17:2 (1990). * "Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science." ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy''. [[30 January]] [[2006]]. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/ * Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives,” in ''Feminist Studies'', 1988, pp. 575&ndash;599. * Haraway, Donna J. ''Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science.'' Routledge: New York and London, 1989. * Haraway, Donna J. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." ''Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature''. New York; Routledge, 1991. pp. 149&ndash;181. *Haraway, Donna J. ''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience''. New York: Routledge, 1997. ISBN 0-415-91245-8 *Haraway, Donna. ''The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness''. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ISBN 0-97175758-5 * Kunzru, Hari. "You Are Cyborg." ''Wired Magazine''. 5:2 (1997) 1-7. * Russon, Anne. "Deconstructing Primatology?" ''Semiotic Review of Books''. 2:2 (1991) 9-11. * Senft, Theresa M. "Reading Notes on Donna Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto.'" [[21 October]] [[2001]]. http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/writing/manifesto.html [[1 February]] [[2006]]. * Young, Robert M. "Science, Ideology & Donna Haraway." ''Science as Culture''. 15.3 (1992): 165-207. ==See also== *[[Cyborg theory]] *[[Democratic transhumanism]] *[[Postgenderism]] *[[Posthumanism]] *[[Techno-progressivism]] *[[Postmodernism]] *[[Technoscience]] == External links == *[http://humwww.ucsc.edu/HistCon/faculty_haraway.htm History of Consciousness Program Website] *[http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donnaharaway.html Donna Haraway Faculty Website European Graduate School] *[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway_pr.html 1997 Interview in ''Wired''] *[http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. ''Socialist Review'' 15, no. 2 (1985).] *[http://thegrza.googlepages.com/haraway'scyborgmanifesto Cleaned up copy of Stanford hosted version, with typographical and formatting errors corrected.] *[http://www.cla.purdue.edu/blackmon/engl360k/2003_05_18_2003archive.html A discussion of cyborg feminism at the Purdue University website] == Further reading == * O'Riley, Patricia Ann. "Technology, culture, and socioeconomics: a rhizoanalysis of educational discourses". New York: P. Lang, c2003. * Flanagan, Mary and Austin Booth. ''Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture''. 2002. * Sandoval, Chela. "New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed." In The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York: Routledge, 1995. {{University of California, Santa Cruz}} {{DEFAULTSORT:Haraway, Donna}} [[Category:1944 births]] [[Category:American academics|American academics]] [[Category:Feminist scholars]] [[Category:Female philosophers]] [[Category:Primatologists]] [[Category:Historians of science]] [[Category:Living people]] [[Category:Posthumanists]] [[Category:Transhumanists]] [[Category:University of California, Santa Cruz faculty]] [[Category:Yale University alumni]] [[cs:Donna J. Haraway]] [[de:Donna Haraway]] [[es:Donna Haraway]] [[fr:Donna Haraway]] [[id:Feminisme bionik]] [[it:Donna Haraway]] [[nl:Donna Haraway]] [[ja:ダナ・ハラウェイ]] [[pl:Donna Haraway]] [[pt:Donna Haraway]] [[fi:Donna Haraway]] [[tr:Donna Haraway]]