Donna Haraway: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 21:54, 21 March 2006
Donna Haraway, born in 1944 in Denver, Colorado, is currently a professor and former chair of the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. She is the author of 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 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).
Primate Visions: Haraway’s Contributions to Science
When reading Harway’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).
The Modest Witness: Haraway’s Contributions to Feminism
Haraway has been described as a “feminist, rather loosely a neo-Marxist and a postmodernist” (Young, 172). Playing on the pun of Marx’s famous The Communist Manifesto, Haraway published A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century in 1985. 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.
Haraway takes from her scientific background and becomes the observer and witness of bias in today’s society and cannot be silent about what she sees. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway 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” in a four-part definition. A cyborg is (see also Cyborg Theory):
- Cybernetic organism
- Hybrid of machine and organism
- Creature of lived social reality
- Creature of fiction
In this essay, Haraway is also addressing a couple of forms of feminism popular during the mid-80s. As a postmodern feminist, she argued 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 in the mid-80s, which she considered a form of hate speech. Haraway argues that MacKinnon’s radical feminism assimiliates all of womens’ experiences into a particular identity that incorporates the Western ideologies contributing 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 in her Manifesto, "There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women. 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, on the other hand does not require a stable, essentialist identity, argues Haraway, and women should consider creating coalitions based on “affinity” instead identity. To ground her argument, Haraway analyzes the phrase "women of color," suggesting it as one possible category of affinity politics (Senft, 2001). 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).
The idea is to shift one’s thinking of isolated individuals to thinking of people as nodes on networks. In this sense, a kinship can be developed that has nothing to do with Western, patriarchial ideals. Haraway’s ideal “cyborg world” consists of people living together, unafraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines. “The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters”(155).
“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 the 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 |
Works Cited
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. p.149-181.
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 Feburary 2006.
Young, Robert M. “Science, Ideology & Donna Haraway.” Science as Culture. 15.3(1992): 165-207