Donna J. Haraway (born September 6, 1944)
is a Distinguished American Professor Emerita
in the History of Consciousness Department
and Feminist Studies Department at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, United States.
She is a prominent scholar in the field of
science and technology studies, described
in the early 1990s as a "feminist, rather
loosely a postmodernist". Haraway is the author
of numerous foundational books and essays
that bring together questions of science and
feminism, such as "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the
Late Twentieth Century" (1985) and "Situated
Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective"
(1988). She is also a leading scholar in contemporary
ecofeminism, associated with post-humanism
and new materialism movements. Her work criticizes
anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing
powers of nonhuman processes, and explores
dissonant relations between those processes
and cultural practices, rethinking sources
of ethics.Haraway has taught Women's Studies
and the History of Science at the University
of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University. Haraway's
works have contributed to the study of both
human-machine and human-animal relations.
Her works have sparked debate in primatology,
philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway
participated in a collaborative exchange with
the feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990
to 1996. Their engagement with specific ideas
relating to feminism, technoscience, political
consciousness, and other social issues, formed
the images and narrative of Haraway's book
Modest_Witness for which she received the
Society for Social Studies of Science's (4S)
Ludwik Fleck Prize in 1999. In September 2000,
Haraway was awarded the Society for Social
Studies of Science's highest honor, the J.
D. Bernal Award, for her "distinguished contributions"
to the field. Haraway serves on the advisory
board for numerous academic journals, including
differences, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society, Contemporary Women's Writing,
and Environmental Humanities.
== Early life ==
Donna Jeanne Haraway was born in 1944 in Denver,
Colorado. Haraway's father was a sportswriter
for The Denver Post and her mother, who came
from a heavily Irish Catholic background,
died when Haraway was 16 years old. Haraway
attended high school at St. Mary’s Academy
in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado. Haraway
triple majored in zoology, philosophy and
literature at the Colorado College, on the
full-tuition Boettcher Scholarship. After
college, Haraway moved to Paris and studied
evolutionary philosophy and theology at the
Fondation Teilhard de Chardin on a Fulbright
scholarship. She completed her Ph.D. in biology
at Yale in 1970 writing a dissertation about
the use of metaphor in shaping experiments
in experimental biology titled The Search
for Organizing Relations: An Organismic Paradigm
in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology,
later edited into a book and published under
the title Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors
of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental
Biology. Haraway was the recipient of a number
of scholarships, to which she wittily accepted
(alluding to the Cold War and post-war American
hegemony) saying, “...people like me became
national resources in the national science
efforts. So, there was money available for
educating even Irish Catholic girls’ brains."
== 
Major themes ==
=== "A Cyborg Manifesto" ===
In 1985, Haraway published the essay "Manifesto
for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the 1980s" in Socialist Review. Although
most of Haraway's earlier work was focused
on emphasizing the masculine bias in scientific
culture, she has also contributed greatly
to feminist narratives of the twentieth century.
For Haraway, the Manifesto offered a response
to the rising conservatism during the 1980s
in the United States at a critical juncture
at which feminists, in order to have any real-world
significance, had to acknowledge their situatedness
within what she terms the "informatics of
domination." Women were no longer on the outside
along a hierarchy of privileged binaries but
rather deeply imbued, exploited by and complicit
within networked hegemony, and had to form
their politics as such.
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". 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".Haraway's cyborg is a set
of ideals of a genderless, race-less, more
collective and peaceful civilization with
the caveat of being utterly connected to the
machine. Her new versions of beings reject
Western humanist conceptions of personhood
and promote a disembodied world of information
and the withering of subjectivity. The collective
consciousness of the beings and their limitless
access to information provide the tools with
which to create a world of immense socio-political
change through altruism and affinity, not
biological unity. In her essay Haraway challenges
the liberal human subject and its lack of
concern for collective desires which leaves
the possibility for wide corruption and inequality
in the world. Furthermore, the cyborg's importance
lays in its coalition of consciousness not
in the physical body that carries the information/consciousness.
A world of beings with a type of shared knowledge
could create a powerful political force towards
positive change. Cyborgs can see "from both
perspectives at once." In addition, Haraway
writes that the cyborg has an imbued nature
towards the collective good.
Haraway explains that her "Manifesto" is "an
effort to build an ironic political myth faithful
to feminism, socialism, and materialism."
She adds that "Cyborg imagery can suggest
a way out of the maze of dualisms in which
we have explained our bodies and our tools
to ourselves." Haraway is serious about finding
future ways towards equality and ending dominating
behavior; however, the cyborg itself is not
as serious of an endeavor for her as the idea
of it is. Haraway creates an analogy using
current technologies and information to imagine
a world with a collective coalition that had
the capabilities to create grand socio-political
change. Haraway's "Manifesto" is a thought
experiment, defining what people think is
most important about being and what the future
holds for increased artificial intelligence.
==== Cyborg feminism ====
In her updated essay "A Cyborg Manifesto:
Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century", in 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.
Haraway's "Manifesto" has considerably influenced
the fields of feminism, science studies, and
critical theory since its original publication.
The manifesto is also an important feminist
critique of capitalism.
=== "Situated Knowledges" ===
Situated Knowledges: The Science Question
in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
sheds light on Haraway's vision for a feminist
science. The essay originated as a commentary
on Sandra Harding's The Science Question in
Feminism (1986) 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". At the other are those interested
in a feminist version of objectivity, a position
Haraway describes as a "feminist empiricism".
=== Primate Visions ===
Haraway also writes about the history of science
and biology. In Primate Visions: Gender, Race,
and Nature in the World of Modern Science
(1990), she focused on the metaphors and narratives
that direct the science of primatology. She
asserted 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". She contended
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 questioned the most fundamental constructions
of scientific human nature stories based on
primates. In Primate Visions, she wrote:
"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".
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". Haraway presents
an alternative perspective to the accepted
ideologies that continue to shape the way
scientific human nature stories are created.
Haraway urges feminists to be more involved
in the world of technoscience and to be credited
for that involvement. In a 1997 publication,
she remarked:
I want feminists to be enrolled more tightly
in the meaning-making processes of technoscientific
world-building. I also want feminist—activists,
cultural producers, scientists, engineers,
and scholars (all overlapping categories)
— to be recognized for the articulations
and enrollment we have been making all along
within technoscience, in spite of the ignorance
of most "mainstream" scholars in their characterization
(or lack of characterizations) of feminism
in relation to both technoscientific practice
and technoscience studies.
== Criticisms ==
Haraway's work has been criticized for being
"methodologically vague" and using noticeably
opaque language that is "sometimes concealing
in an apparently deliberate way". Several
reviewers have argued that her understanding
of the scientific method is questionable,
and that her explorations of epistemology
at times leave her texts virtually meaning-free.A
1991 review of Haraway's Primate Visions,
published in the International Journal of
Primatology, provides examples of some of
the most common critiques of her view of science:
This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred
times; but that is not a criticism of it,
because its author thinks contradictions are
a sign of intellectual ferment and vitality.
This is a book that systematically distorts
and selects historical evidence; but that
is not a criticism, because its author thinks
that all interpretations are biased, and she
regards it as her duty to pick and choose
her facts to favor her own brand of politics.
This is a book full of vaporous, French-intellectual
prose that makes Teilhard de Chardin sound
like Ernest Hemingway by comparison; but that
is not a criticism, because the author likes
that sort of prose and has taken lessons in
how to write it, and she thinks that plain,
homely speech is part of a conspiracy to oppress
the poor.
This is a book that clatters around in a dark
closet of irrelevancies for 450 pages before
it bumps accidentally into its index and stops;
but that is not a criticism, either, because
its author finds it gratifying and refreshing
to bang unrelated facts together as a rebuke
to stuffy minds. This book infuriated me;
but that is not a defect in it, because it
is supposed to infuriate people like me, and
the author would have been happier still if
I had blown out an artery. In short, this
book is flawless, because all its deficiencies
are deliberate products of art. Given its
assumptions, there is nothing here to criticize.
The only course open to a reviewer who dislikes
this book as much as I do is to question its
author’s fundamental assumptions—which
are big-ticket items involving the nature
and relationships of language, knowledge,
and science.
Another review of the same book, appearing
in a 1990 issue of the American Journal of
Primatology, offers a similar criticism of
Haraway's literary style and scholarly methods:
There are many places where an editorial hand
appears absent altogether. Neologisms are
continually coined, and sentences are paragraph-long
and convoluted. Biography, history, propaganda,
science, science fiction, and cinema are intertwined
in the most confusing way. Perhaps the idea
is to induce a slightly dissociated state,
so that readers can be lulled into belief.
If one did not already possess some background,
this book would give no lucid history of anthropology
or primatology.
However, a review in the Journal of the History
of Biology disagrees:
Primate Visions is one of the most important
books to come along in the last twenty years.
Historians of science have begun to write
more externalist histories, acknowledging
the possibilities of a science profoundly
integrated with ongoing social agenda. Haraway's
history of primatology in the twentieth century
sets new standards for this approach, standards
that will not be surpassed for some time to
come. The book is important to students of
science, feminists, historians, and anyone
else interested in how the complex systems
of race, gender, and science intertwine to
produce supposedly objective versions of the
"truth." This analysis of primatology is at
once a complex, interdisciplinary, and deeply
scholarly history and an imaginative, provocative
analysis of the working of science in late
twentieth-century Euro-America.
== 
Publications ==
Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of
Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental
Biology, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1976. ISBN 978-0-300-01864-6
"Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology,
and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s", Socialist
Review, 80 (1985) 65–108.
"Situated Knowledges: The Science Question
in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives",
Feminist Studies, 14 (1988) 575–599. doi:10.2307/3178066
Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature
in the World of Modern Science, Routledge:
New York and London, 1989. ISBN 978-0-415-90294-6
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention
of Nature, New York: Routledge, and London:
Free Association Books, 1991 (includes "A
Cyborg Manifesto"). ISBN 978-0-415-90387-5
"A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies,
Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies", Configurations,
2 (1994) 59–71. doi:10.1353/con.1994.0009
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™:
Feminism and Technoscience, New York: Routledge,
1997 (winner of the Ludwik Fleck Prize). ISBN
0-415-91245-8
How Like a Leaf: A Conversation with Donna
J. Haraway, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, New York:
Routledge, 1999. ISBN 978-0-415-92402-3
The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People,
and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press, 2003. ISBN 0-9717575-8-5
When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN 0-8166-5045-4
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the
Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press,
2016. ISBN 978-0-8223-6224-1
Manifestly Haraway, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0816650484
== See also ==
A Cyborg Manifesto
Cyborg anthropology
Democratic transhumanism
Ecofeminism
Postgenderism
Posthumanism
Postmodernism
Sandy Stone
Techno-progressivism
Technoscience
Feminist technoscience
== 
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on Cyborg Manifesto", 17 September 2000.
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in the World of Modern Science", American
Journal of Primatology, 22 (1990) 139–142.
Campbell, Kirsten, "The Promise of Feminist
Reflexivities: Developing Donna Haraway's
Project for Feminist Science Studies", Hypatia,
19:1 (2004) 162–182.
Cartmill, Matt. "Book Review - Primate Visions:
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doi:10.1515/fs-2014-0109
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== Footnotes ==
== 
External links ==
Donna Haraway Faculty Webpage at UC Santa
Cruz, History of Consciousness Program
1997 Interview in Wired
Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival,
a film by Fabrizio Terranova
