Donna Haraway

Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway with Cayenne, 2006; photograph by Rusten Hogness
Born	September 6, 1944 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), and Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™ (1997).

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

File:Primate visions.jpg

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 and class, Haraway questions the most fundamental constructions of scientific human nature stories based on primates. In Primate Visions, she writes:

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).

Haraway’s aim for science is “to reveal the limits and impossibility of its '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).

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 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 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 "otherness, difference, and specificity" (156).

Cyborg feminism

In her essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century , 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:

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.

“I’d rather be a Cyborg than a goddess”

The 1990s 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).

The following table is taken from Simians, Cyborgs and Women and illustrates various facets of society, concrete and abstract, that Haraway believes will eventually change. The left column lists the old components of hierarchical dominance; the right column lists the alternatives that will be supplied by a network of equally-valued individuals.

Representation	Simulation
Bourgeois novel, realism	Science fiction, postmodernism
Organism	Biotic component
Depth, integrity	Surface, boundary
Heat	Noise
Biology as clinical practice	Biology as inscription
Physiology	Communications engineering
Small group	Subsystem
Perfection	Optimization
Eugenics	Population control
Decadence, Magic Mountain	Obsolescence, Future Shock
Hygiene	Stress Management
Microbiology, tuberculosis	Immunology, AIDS
Organic division of labour	Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour
Functional specialization	Modular construction
Reproduction	Replication
Organic sex role specialization	Optimal genetic strategies
Biological determinism	Evolutionary inertia, constraints
Community ecology	Ecosystem
Racial chain of being	Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism
Scientific management in home/factory	Global factory / electronic cottage
Home / market / factory	Women in the Integrated Circuit
Family wage	Comparable worth
Public / Private	Cyborg citizenship
Nature / Culture	Fields of difference
Co-operation	Communications enhancement
Freud	Lacan
Sex	Genetic engineering
Labour	Robotics
Mind	Artificial Intelligence
Second World War	Star Wars
White Capitalist Patriarchy	Informatics of Domination

References

• Burow-Flak, Elizabeth. "Background Information on Cyborg Manifesto." 17 September 2000. http://faculty.valpo.edu/bflak/seminar/char_har.html, 30 January 2006.
• 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 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. 149-181.
• 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 01 February 2006.
• Young, Robert M. "Science, Ideology & Donna Haraway." Science as Culture. 15.3 (1992): 165-207.

See also

• Cyborg theory
• Posthuman (critical theory)
• Democratic transhumanism
• Postgenderism
• Posthumanism
• Techno-progressivism
• Postmodernism
• Technoscience

External links

• History of Consciousness Program Website
• Donna Haraway Faculty Website European Graduate School
• 1997 Interview in Wired
• A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review 15, no. 2 (1985).
• 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.