Donna Haraway

Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. 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.^[2]

Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway (2006)
Born	Donna Jeanne Haraway (1944-09-06) September 6, 1944 (age 79) Denver, Colorado
Spouses	Jaye Miller ​ (divorced)​ ^[1] Rusten Hogness ​ (m. 1975)​
Awards	J. D. Bernal Award, Ludwik Fleck Prize, Robert K. Merton Award, Wilbur Cross Medal
Academic background
Alma mater	Yale University, Colorado College
Influences	Nancy Hartsock, Sandra Harding, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Robert Young, Gregory Bateson
Academic work
Discipline	Zoology, Biology, Science and Politics, Technology, Feminist Theory, Medicine Studies, Animal Studies, Animal-Human Relationships
Main interests	Feminist studies, ecofeminism, posthumanism
Notable works	A Cyborg Manifesto, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Staying with the Trouble, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective"
Notable ideas	cyborg, cyborg feminism, cyborg imagery, primatology, cross species sociality

Haraway has taught women's studies and the history of science at the University of Hawaii (1971-1974) and Johns Hopkins University (1974-1980).^[3] She began working as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1980 where she became the first tenured professor in feminist theory in the United States.^[4] Haraway's works have contributed to the study of both human–machine and human–animal relations. Her work has sparked debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology.^[5] 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.^[6][7] She was also awarded the Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology's Robert K. Merton award in 1992 for her work Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science.^[8] In 2017, Haraway was awarded the Wilbur Cross Medal, one of the highest honors for alumni of Yale University.^[9]

Biography

Early life

Donna Jeanne Haraway was born on September 6, 1944, in Denver, Colorado. Her father, Frank O. Haraway, was a sportswriter for The Denver Post and her mother, Dorothy Mcguire Haraway, who came from an Irish Catholic background, died from a heart attack when Haraway was 16 years old.^[10] Haraway attended high school at St. Mary's Academy in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado.^[11] Although she is no longer religious, Catholicism had a strong influence on her as she was taught by nuns in her early life. The impression of the eucharist influenced her linkage of the figurative and the material.^[12]

Education

Haraway majored in zoology, with minors in philosophy and English at the Colorado College, on the full-tuition Boettcher Scholarship.^[13] After college, Haraway moved to Paris and studied evolutionary philosophy and theology at the Fondation Teilhard de Chardin on a Fulbright scholarship.^[14] She completed her Ph.D. in biology at Yale in 1972 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.^[15] Her dissertation was later edited into a book and published under the title Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology.^[16]

Later work

Haraway was the recipient of several scholarships. In 1999, Haraway received the Society for Social Studies of Science's (4S) Ludwik Fleck Prize. 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.^[17] Haraway's most famous essay was published in 1985: "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s"^[18] and was characterized as "an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism".

In Haraway's thesis, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" (1988), she means to expose the myth of scientific objectivity. Haraway defined the term "situated knowledges" as a means of understanding that all knowledge comes from positional perspectives.^[19] Our positionality inherently determines what it is possible to know about an object of interest.^[19] Comprehending situated knowledge "allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see".^[20] Without this accountability, the implicit biases and societal stigmas of the researcher's community are twisted into ground truth from which to build assumptions and hypothesis.^[19] Haraway's ideas in "Situated Knowledges" were heavily influenced by conversations with Nancy Hartsock and other feminist philosophers and activists.^[21]

 

Haraway in 2016

Her book Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989) critically focuses on primate research through a feminist lens in order to understand how heterosexual ideology is reflected in primatology.

Currently,^{[as of?]} Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States.^[22] She lives North of San Francisco with her partner Rusten Hogness.^[23] Haraway has stated that she tries to incorporate collective thinking and all perspectives into her work: "I notice if I have cited nothing but white people, if I have erased indigenous people, if I forget non-human beings, etc. ... You know, I run through some old-fashioned, klutzy categories. Race, sex, class, region, sexuality, gender, species ... I know how fraught all those categories are, but I think those categories still do important work."^[24]

Major themes

"A Cyborg Manifesto"

See also: 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 the 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, to have any real-world significance, had to acknowledge their situatedness within what she terms the "informatics of domination."^[25][26] 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.

Cyborg feminism

Main article: Cyberfeminism

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.^[25][27][28] The manifesto is also an important feminist critique of capitalism by revealing how men have exploited women's reproduction labor, providing a barrier for women to reach full equality in the labor market.^[29]

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".^[30] 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 revisions 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.^[31]

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".^[32] Haraway presents an alternative perspective to the accepted ideologies that continue to shape the way scientific human nature stories are created.^[33] 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.^[34]

Make Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations

Haraway created a panel called "Make Kin not Babies" in 2015 with five other feminist thinkers. The panel's emphasis was on moving human numbers down while paying attention to factors, such as the environment, race, and class. A key phrase of Haraway's is "Making babies is different than giving babies a good childhood."^[24] She and another panelist, Adele Clarke, later published the corresponding book Making Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations.^[35]

Speculative fabulation

Speculative fabulation is a concept that is included in many of Haraway's works. It includes all of the wild facts that will not hold still, and it indicates a mode of creativity and the story of the Anthropocene. Haraway stresses how this does not mean it is not a fact. In Staying with the Trouble, she defines speculative fabulation as "a mode of attention, theory of history, and a practice of worlding," and she finds it an integral part of scholarly writing and everyday life.^[36] In Haraway's work she addresses a feminist speculative fabulation and its focusing on making kin instead of babies to ensure the good childhood of all children while controlling the population.^[24] Making Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations highlights practices and proposals to implement this theory in society.^[35]

The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

The companion Species Manifesto is to be read as a “personal document”. This work was written to tell the story of cohabitation, coevolution and embodied cross-species sociality.^[37] Haraway argues that humans ‘companion’ relationship with dogs can show us the importance of recognizing differences and ‘how to engage with significant otherness'.^[38] The link between humans and animals like dogs can show people how to interact with other humans and nonhumans. Haraway believes that we should be using the term "companion species" instead of "companion animals" because of the relationships we can learn through them.^[39]

Critical responses to Haraway

Haraway's work has been criticized for being "methodologically vague"^[40] and using noticeably opaque language that is "sometimes concealing in an apparently deliberate way".^[41] 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.^[41][42]

A 1991 review of Haraway's Primate Visions, published in the International Journal of Primatology, provides some of the most common criticisms of her view of science,^[42] and a 1990 review in the American Journal of Primatology, offers a similarly dismissive commentary.^[41] In reviewing the book for the Journal of the History of Biology, sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, who has written extensively on the social construction of gender, sexual identity, gender identity, gender roles, and intersexuality, wrote that the book is "important," though she wished it "were easier to read."^[43]

In 2017, ArtReview named Haraway the third most influential person in the contemporary art world, stating that her work "has become part of the art world’s DNA".^[44]

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
• 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
• 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
• The Haraway Reader, New York: Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0415966892.
• 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
• Making Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations, Donna J. Haraway and Adele Clarke, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018. ISBN 9780996635561.

See also

• Cyborg anthropology
• Postgenderism
• Postmodernism
• New materialisms
• Sandy Stone
• Techno-progressivism
• Feminist technoscience
• Judith Butler

Citations

1. Vasseghi, Laney. "Haraway, Donna". encyclopedia.com. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
2. Connolly, William E. (2013). "The 'New Materialism' and the Fragility of Things". Millennium: Journal of International Studies. 41 (3): 399–412. doi:10.1177/0305829813486849. S2CID 143725752.
3. "Donna Haraway". The European Graduate School. Retrieved 2021-03-03.
4. "Feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway: 'The disorder of our era isn't necessary'". The Guardian. 2019-06-20. Retrieved 2021-03-03.
5. Kunzru, Hari. "You Are Cyborg", in Wired Magazine, 5:2 (1997) 1-7.
6. Randolph, Lynn (2009). . lynnrandolph.com. Archived from the original on 2014-11-13. Retrieved 23 December 2016.
7. . www.4sonline.org. Archived from the original on 2017-10-09. Retrieved 2017-03-16.
8. "Science, Knowledge, and Technology Award Recipient History". American Sociological Association. 2011-03-08. Retrieved 2021-10-20.
9. . Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. 2017-10-24. Archived from the original on 2022-10-11. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
10. Haraway, Donna J., How Like a Leaf: Donna J. Haraway an interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. Routledge, 2000, pp. 6–7.
11. Haraway, Donna J., How Like a Leaf: Donna J. Haraway an interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. Routledge, 2000, pp. 8-9.
12. Lederman, Muriel (March 2002). "Donna J. Haraway; and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna J. Haraway". Isis. 93 (1): 164–165. doi:10.1086/343342. ISSN 0021-1753.
13. Haraway, How Like a Leaf (2000), pp. 12, 175
14. Haraway, How Like a Leaf (2000), p. 18.
15. Library of Congress, Catalog of Copyright Entries Third Series: 1973: January–June
16. Haraway, Donna Jeanne, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology. Yale University Press, 1976.
17. "4S Prizes | Society for Social Studies of Science". www.4sonline.org. Retrieved 2017-03-16.
18. Haraway, Donna H., "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s" https://egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway (Socialist Review, no. 80)
19. Williams, Rua M.; Gilbert, Juan E. (2019). "Cyborg Perspectives on Computing Research Reform". Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. pp. 1–11. doi:10.1145/3290607.3310421. ISBN 978-1-4503-5971-9. S2CID 144207669.
20. Haraway, Donna (Autumn 1988). "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective". Feminist Studies. 14 (3): 575–599. doi:10.2307/3178066. JSTOR 3178066. S2CID 39794636.
21. "Feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway: 'The disorder of our era isn't necessary'". The Guardian. 2019-06-20. Retrieved 2021-03-02.
22. "Donna J Haraway". feministstudies.ucsc.edu. Archived from the original on 2017-03-17. Retrieved 2017-03-16.
23. Haraway, Donna J., How Like a Leaf: Donna J. Haraway an interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. Routledge, 2000, pp. 2-3.
24. Franklin, Sarah (2017-07-01). "Staying with the Manifesto: An Interview with Donna Haraway". Theory, Culture & Society. 34 (4): 49–63. doi:10.1177/0263276417693290. ISSN 0263-2764. S2CID 152133541.
25. Haraway, Donna (1990). "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century". Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge. pp. 149–181. ISBN 978-0415903875.
26. Glazier, Jacob W. (2016). "Cyborg Manifesto". The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. pp. 1–2. doi:10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss318. ISBN 9781118663219.
27. Andermahr, Sonya; Lovell, Terry; Wolkowitz, Carol (1997). A Glossary of Feminist Theory. Great Britain: Arnold, London. pp. 51–52. ISBN 978-0-340-59662-3.
28. Glazier, Jacob W. (2016). "Cyborg Manifesto". The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. pp. 1–2. doi:10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss318. ISBN 9781118663219.
29. Ferguson, Anne and Hennessy, and Rosemary and Nagel Mechthild. “Feminist Perspectives on Class and Work.” Edited by Edward N Zalta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/feminism-class/
30. Carubia, Josephine M., "Haraway on the Map", in Semiotic Review of Books. 9:1 (1998), 4-7.
31. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Routledge: New York and London, 1989. ISBN 978-0-415-90294-6
32. Russon, Anne. "Deconstructing Primatology?", in Semiotic Review of Books, 2:2 (1991), 9-11.
33. Elkins, Charles, "The Uses of Science Fiction", in Science Fiction Studies, 17:2 (1990).
34. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: feminism and technoscience, New York: Routledge, 1997. ISBN 0-415-91245-8.
35. Clarke, Adele; Haraway, Donna, eds. (July 2018). "Making Kin not Population". Chicago: The University of Chicago Press Books. ISBN 9780996635561.
36. Truman, Sarah E. (2019-02-01). "SF! Haraway's Situated Feminisms and Speculative Fabulations in English Class". Studies in Philosophy and Education. 38 (1): 31–42. doi:10.1007/s11217-018-9632-5. ISSN 1573-191X. S2CID 149969329.
37. HARAWAY, DONNA J.; WOLFE, CARY (2016). Manifestly Haraway. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-5048-4. JSTOR 10.5749/j.ctt1b7x5f6.
38. Nast, Heidi J. (2005). "Review of The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness". Cultural Geographies. 12 (1): 118–120. doi:10.1177/147447400501200113. ISSN 1474-4740. JSTOR 44251023. S2CID 144472509.
39. Vasseghi, Laney (2022-02-25). "Donna Haraway". Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona. from the original on 2020-11-07.
40. Hamner, M. Gail (2003), "The Work of Love: Feminist Politics and the Injunction to Love", in Rieger, Jeorg, ed. (2003-09-11). Opting for the Margins: Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198036500.
41. Cachel, Susan (1990). "Partisan primatology. Review of Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the world of Modern Science". American Journal of Primatology. 22 (2): 139–142. doi:10.1002/ajp.1350220207.
42. Cartmill, Matt (February 1991). "Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the world of Modern Science (book review)". International Journal of Primatology. 12 (1): 67–75. doi:10.1007/BF02547559. S2CID 30428707.
43. Fausto-Sterling, Anne (June 1990). "Essay review: Primate Visions, a model for historians of science?". Journal of the History of Biology. 23 (2): 329–333. doi:10.1007/BF00141475. S2CID 84915418. Retrieved January 3, 2024. I see Primate Visions as a challenge.
44. "Donna Haraway". ArtReview. Retrieved August 23, 2023.

External links

 

Wikiquote has quotations related to Donna Haraway.

• Donna Haraway Faculty Webpage at UC Santa Cruz, History of Consciousness Program
• Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival, a film by Fabrizio Terranova