| Donna Haraway | |
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Donna Haraway with Cayenne, 2006; photograph by Rusten Hogness |
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| Born | September 6, 1944 Denver, Colorado |
| Occupation | professor |
Donna J. Haraway (born September 6, 1944 in Denver, Colorado) is currently a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. Haraway has been described as a "feminist, rather loosely a neo-Marxist and a postmodernist" (Young, 172).
Haraway has taught Women's Studies and the History of 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 (4S), 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.[1] 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).
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Donna Jeanne Haraway was born in 1944 in Denver, Colorado. Her father was a sportswriter for The Denver Post and her mother, from a heavily Irish Catholic background died when she was 16.[2] Haraway attended high school at St. Mary’s Academy in Denver. After high school Haraway moved to Paris and studied evolutionary philosophy and theology at the Fondation Teilhard de Chardin on a Fulbright scholarship.[3] Haraway then did a triple major in zoology, philosophy and literature at the Colorado College[4] She completed her PH.D. in the Biology Department at Yale in 1970 writing a dissertation about the use of metaphor in shaping experiments in experimental biology titled Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology[5] . Haraway was the recipient of a number of scholarships which she attributed 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."[6]
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).
Haraway urges feminists to be more involved in the world of technoscience and to be credited for that involvement. In her 1997 publication FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience, 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 technocience studies (396).
In 1985, Haraway published the essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" 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 came 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.” [8] Feminists must, she proclaims, unite behind “an ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit.” [9] 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.
In "A Cyborg Manifesto", Haraway deploys the metaphor of a cyborg to challenge feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialism. She also uses the cyborg metaphor to offer a political strategy for the seemingly disparate interests of socialism and feminism, writing, "We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs"(p. 150). A cyborg is a:
Haraway's cyborg is an attempt to break away from Oedipal narratives and Christian origin myths like Genesis. She writes, "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."[10]
As a postmodern feminist, she argues against essentialism, which she defines as "any theory that claims to identify a universal, transhistorical, necessary cause or constitution of gender identity or patriarchy" ("Feminist Epistemology"). Such theories, she argues, 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" (p. 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" (p. 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" (p. 156).
In her updated essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century",[11] 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. "A 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", to the extent that such ideology can be referred to as such. 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 Haraway believes 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.
According to Krista Scott:
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.[12]
According to Marisa Olson:
Our life force flows through us and out into the objects we make, she reasoned; thus there ought to be no distinction between the so-called real or natural organisms that nature produces and the artificial machines that humans make. Her conclusion: We are all cyborgs.[13]
According to the article Cyborgs:
Cyborgs not only disrupt orderly power structures and fixed interests but also signify a challenge to settled politics, which assumes that binary oppositions or identities are natural distinctions. Actually those oppositions are cultural constructions. Haraway underlines the critical function of the cyborg concept, especially for feminist politics. The current dualistic thinking involves a "logic of dominance" because the parts of the dualisms are not equivalent. Thus, the logic produces hierarchies that legitimize men dominating women, whites dominating blacks, and humans dominating animals. Instead, Haraway suggests that people should undermine these hierarchies by actively exploring and mobilizing the blurring of borders.[14]
"Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective[15] 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" (p. 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 (p. 578). 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.
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). In spite of this phrase Haraway also wishes to not completely disassociate herself from ecofeminist values (3).
Haraway was referred to indirectly in Mamoru Oshii's film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, when a cyborg version of Haraway appeared as a forensic scientist in a police station. While inspecting the body of a "dead" gynoid, she speaks of humanity's desire to recreate themselves as robots being similar to the desire to procreate biologically. She suggests that the dead gynoid had a ghost itself. The cyborg refers to herself as "Haraway" and bears a remarkable resemblance to the real life professor.[16]
Haraway's work has been criticized for being "methodologically vague"[17] and using noticeably opaque language that is "sometimes concealing in an apparently deliberate way."[18] Several reviewers have noted that her understanding of the scientific method is questionable, and that her explorations of epistemology at times leave her texts virtually meaning-free.[19][20]
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 deconstructionist view of science:[21]
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:[22]
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.