Donna Haraway
Encyclopedia
Donna J. Haraway 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. 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).
and her mother, from a heavily Irish Catholic background died when she was 16. 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. Haraway then did a triple major in zoology, philosophy and literature at the Colorado College
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 . 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."
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:
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
. 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.” Feminists must, she proclaims, unite behind “an ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit.” 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."
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).
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:
According to Marisa Olson
:
According to the article Cyborgs:
'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.
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).
, 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.
History of Consciousness
The History of Consciousness program is an interdisciplinary graduate program in the humanities with links to the sciences, social sciences, and arts at the University of California at Santa Cruz....
Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz
University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public, collegiate university; one of ten campuses in the University of California...
, 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
Women's studies
Women's studies, also known as feminist studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field which explores politics, society and history from an intersectional, multicultural women's perspective...
and the History of Science
History of science
The history of science is the study of the historical development of human understandings of the natural world and the domains of the social sciences....
at the University of Hawaii
University of Hawaii
The University of Hawaii System, formally the University of Hawaii and popularly known as UH, is a public, co-educational college and university system that confers associate, bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees through three university campuses, seven community college campuses, an employment...
and Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
. In September 2000, Haraway was awarded the highest honor given by the Society for Social Studies of Science
Society for Social Studies of Science
The Society for Social Studies of Science is a non-profit scholarly association devoted to the studies of science and technology. It was founded in 1975 and has, in 2008, an international membership of over 1200....
(4S), the J. D. Bernal
J. D. Bernal
John Desmond Bernal FRS was one of Britain’s best known and most controversial scientists, called "Sage" by his friends, and known for pioneering X-ray crystallography in molecular biology.-Origin and education:His family was Irish, of mixed Italian and Spanish/Portuguese Sephardic Jewish origin...
Award, for lifetime contributions to the field. Haraway has also lectured in feminist theory
Feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...
and techno-science at the European Graduate School
European Graduate School
The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland is a privately funded graduate school founded by the non-profit European Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies. Its German name is Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien...
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).
Early life
Donna Jeanne Haraway was born in 1944 in Denver, Colorado. Her father was a sportswriter for The Denver PostThe Denver Post
-Ownership:The Post is the flagship newspaper of MediaNews Group Inc., founded in 1983 by William Dean Singleton and Richard Scudder. MediaNews is today one of the nation's largest newspaper chains, publisher of 61 daily newspapers and more than 120 non-daily publications in 13 states. MediaNews...
and her mother, from a heavily Irish Catholic background died when she was 16. 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. Haraway then did a triple major in zoology, philosophy and literature at the Colorado College
Colorado College
The Colorado College is a private liberal arts college in Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It was founded in 1874 by Thomas Nelson Haskell...
She completed her PH.D. in the Biology Department at Yale
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
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 . Haraway was the recipient of a number of scholarships which she attributed to the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
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."
Publications
- Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology, 1976. ISBN 978-0300018646
- "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", 1985.
- "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives", in Feminist Studies, pp. 575–599, 1988.
- Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Routledge: New York and London, 1989. ISBN 978-0415902946
- Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, and London: Free Association BooksFree Association BooksFree Association Books is an innovative project started in 1980s London. It arose as the brainchild of Bob Young and colleagues, who, disillusioned by the decline of the liberatory movement, began a search using psychoanalysis to understand the problems of liberation...
, 1991 (includes "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century"). ISBN 978-0415903875 - Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience, New York: Routledge, 1997 (winner of the Ludwig Fleck Prize). ISBN 0-415-91245-8
- How Like a Leaf: A Conversation with Donna J. Haraway, Thyrza Nichols GoodeveThyrza Nichols GoodeveThyrza Nichols Goodeve is a writer and interviewer active in the field of contemporary art and culture. She is on the School of Visual Arts faculty, active in the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Program, the art history program, and the masters computer art and film programs...
, Routledge, 1999. ISBN 978-0415924023 - The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ISBN 0-9717575-8-5
- When Species Meet, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. ISBN 0-8166-5045-4
Primate Visions
When reading Haraway’s books, it is clear that her writings are predominantly grounded in her knowledge of the history of scienceHistory of science
The history of science is the study of the historical development of human understandings of the natural world and the domains of the social sciences....
and biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
(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
Primatology
Primatology is the scientific study of primates. It is a diverse discipline and researchers can be found in academic departments of anatomy, anthropology, biology, medicine, psychology, veterinary sciences and zoology, as well as in animal sanctuaries, biomedical research facilities, museums and zoos...
. 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
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
, race and class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
, 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
Objectivity (science)
Objectivity in science is a value that informs how science is practiced and how scientific truths are created. It is the idea that scientists, in attempting to uncover truths about the natural world, must aspire to eliminate personal biases, a priori commitments, emotional involvement, etc...
' 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).
"A Cyborg Manifesto"
In 1985, Haraway published the essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" in Socialist ReviewSocialist Review (US)
Socialist Review is a left-wing political and cultural magazine published in the United States since 1970...
. 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.” Feminists must, she proclaims, unite behind “an ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit.” 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
Cyborg
A cyborg is a being with both biological and artificial parts. The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline used it in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space. D. S...
to challenge feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism
Naturalism (philosophy)
Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...
and essentialism
Essentialism
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...
. She also uses the cyborg metaphor to offer a political strategy for the seemingly disparate interests of socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
and feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
, writing, "We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs"(p. 150). A cyborg
Cyborg
A cyborg is a being with both biological and artificial parts. The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline used it in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space. D. S...
is a:
- cybernetic organismOrganismIn biology, an organism is any contiguous living system . In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homoeostasis as a stable whole.An organism may either be unicellular or, as in the case of humans, comprise...
- hybrid of machineMachineA machine manages power to accomplish a task, examples include, a mechanical system, a computing system, an electronic system, and a molecular machine. In common usage, the meaning is that of a device having parts that perform or assist in performing any type of work...
and organism - Creature of both fictionFictionFiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
and lived social reality
Haraway's cyborg is an attempt to break away from Oedipal narratives and Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
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."
As a postmodern feminist
Postmodern feminism
Postmodern feminism is an approach to feminist theory that incorporates postmodern and post-structuralist theory.-Origins and theory:The largest departure from other branches of feminism is the argument that sex is itself constructed through language, a view most notably propounded in Judith...
, she argues against essentialism
Essentialism
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...
, 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
Catharine MacKinnon
Catharine Alice MacKinnon is an American feminist, scholar, lawyer, teacher and activist.- Biography :MacKinnon was born in Minnesota. Her mother is Elizabeth Valentine Davis; her father, George E. MacKinnon was a lawyer, congressman , and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit...
" (Burow-Flak, 2000), who fought to outlaw pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
as a form of hate speech
Hate speech
Hate speech is, outside the law, any communication that disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristic such as race, color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or other characteristic....
. Haraway argues that MacKinnon's legalistic version of radical feminism
Radical feminism
Radical feminism is a current theoretical perspective within feminism that focuses on the theory of patriarchy as a system of power that organizes society into a complex of relationships based on an assumption that "male supremacy" oppresses women...
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
Being
Being , is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective and objective aspects of reality, including those fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like "existence" and "living".In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it...
' 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).
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. "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
Body
With regard to living things, a body is the physical body of an individual. "Body" often is used in connection with appearance, health issues and death...
, object and subject, nature
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
and culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
, 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.
According to Marisa Olson
Marisa Olson
Marisa Olson is a new media artist, curator, critic, and media theorist. In 2004 she auditioned for popular American television show American Idol as an artistic project. In her blog, she describes her feelings and the entire process that she must go through in order to look presentable to the...
:
According to the article Cyborgs:
"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. This essay originated as a commentary on Sandra HardingSandra Harding
Sandra G. Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology and philosophy of science.She has contributed to standpoint theory and to the multicultural study of science...
'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
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
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
Rhetoric of science
Rhetoric of science is a body of scholarly literature exploring the notion that the practice of science is a rhetorical activity. It emerged from a number of disciplines during the late twentieth century, including the disciplines of sociology, history, and philosophy of science, but it is...
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.
"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 cybercultureCyberculture
Cyberculture is the culture that has emerged, or is emerging, from the use of computer networks for communication, entertainment and business. It is also the study of various social phenomena associated with the Internet and other new forms of network communication, such as online communities,...
that exists even today. Although Haraway's writing endorses technology
Technology
Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...
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).
Popular culture
Haraway was referred to indirectly in Mamoru Oshii's film, Ghost in the Shell 2: InnocenceGhost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, known simply as in japan, is a 2004 science fiction film and sequel to the anime film, Ghost in the Shell. Released in Japan on March 6, 2004, with an U.S. release on September 17, 2004, Innocence had a production budget of approximately $20 million...
, when a cyborg version of Haraway appeared as a forensic scientist in a police station. While inspecting the body of a "dead" gynoid
Gynoid
A gynoid is anything which resembles or pertains to the female human form. It is also used in American English medical terminology as a shortening of the term Gynecoid ....
, 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.
See also
- Cyborg theoryCyborg theoryCyborg theory was created by Donna Haraway in order to criticize traditional notions of feminism—particularly its strong emphasis on identity, rather than affinity. She uses the metaphor of a cyborg in order to construct a feminism that moves beyond dualisms and moves beyond the limitations of...
- Democratic transhumanismDemocratic transhumanismDemocratic transhumanism, a term coined by Dr. James Hughes in 2002, refers to the stance of transhumanists who espouse liberal, social and/or radical democratic political views....
- PostgenderismPostgenderismPostgenderism is a diverse social, political and cultural movement whose adherents affirm the voluntary elimination of gender in the human species through the application of advanced biotechnology and assistive reproductive technologies....
- PosthumanismPosthumanismPosthumanism or post-humanism is a term with five definitions:#Antihumanism: a term applied to a number of thinkers opposed to the project of philosophical anthropology....
- PostmodernismPostmodernismPostmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
- Sandy Stone
- Techno-progressivismTechno-progressivismTechno-progressivism, technoprogressivism, tech-progressivism or techprogressivism is a stance of active support for the convergence of technological change and social change...
- TechnoscienceTechnoscienceTechnoscience is a concept widely used in the interdisciplinary community of science and technology studies to designate the technological and social context of science...
- EcofeminismEcofeminismEcofeminism is a social and political movement which points to the existence of considerable common ground between environmentalism and feminism, with some currents linking deep ecology and feminism...
External links
- Donna Haraway Faculty Webpage at UC Santa Cruz, History of Consciousness Program
- Donna Haraway Faculty Website at European Graduate SchoolEuropean Graduate SchoolThe European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland is a privately funded graduate school founded by the non-profit European Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies. Its German name is Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien...
- 1997 Interview in Wired
- Full transcript of Wired interview
- 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
- 2006 Interview - Donna Haraway Reconsiders A Cyborg Manifesto