Donna Haraway
The lines between human, animal and machine are blurring, all knowledge is tied to where it comes from, and we must live with other species.
Placement
Historian of science: the cyborg – part organism, part machine – undoes the boundaries of nature and culture; all knowledge is “situated”, and we must learn to live with other species.
Key ideas
- Cyborg manifesto
- Situated knowledges
- Companion species
Influence
Influenced by 3
Karl Marx
influenced by
Haraway wrote her cyborg myth as an ironic politics ‘faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism’, recasting the analysis of labour for technoscience (‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, 1985). D. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, Socialist Review 80 (1985); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991)
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Michel Foucault
influenced by
Haraway took up Foucault’s biopolitics but called it ‘a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics’, extending the analysis to technoscience (‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, 1985). D. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, Socialist Review 80 (1985), rev. in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991); M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I (1976)
Evidence: AI draft
Michel Foucault › 1926–1984
Isabelle Stengers
influenced by
Haraway took up Stengers’s cosmopolitics and her practice of ‘thinking with’ others for her multispecies storytelling (Staying with the Trouble, 2016). D. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016); I. Stengers, Cosmopolitiques (1997)
Evidence: AI draft
Isabelle Stengers › b. 1949
Criticism
Criticizes 1
Sandra Harding
criticised
Haraway answered Harding’s framing of feminist standpoint theory and ‘successor science’ with ‘situated knowledges’, a partial and embodied objectivity (Feminist Studies, 1988). D. Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14 (1988); S. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, 1986
Evidence: AI draft
Sandra Harding › 1935–2025
Works
“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: an ironic myth for socialist feminism in the age of informatics.
Against the “god trick” of seeing from nowhere: objectivity is partial, located, embodied vision.
Position
The “Cyborg Manifesto” proposes the cyborg – a hybrid of organism and machine, with no origin myth and no innocence – as a figure for a socialist feminism that gives up the dream of a natural, unified female identity. Late-20th-century technology, Haraway argues, has already broken the boundaries between human and animal, organism and machine, and feminists should use that breakdown rather than mourn it: “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” “Situated Knowledges” argues that objectivity cannot mean the “god trick” of seeing everything from nowhere; all vision is embodied and partial, and objectivity consists in joining such partial perspectives. Later books turn to “companion species” and to living in a damaged world.
Life & context
Donna Haraway (born 1944 in Denver) studied zoology and philosophy in Colorado and Paris and took a doctorate in biology at Yale in 1972. After teaching at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins she joined the History of Consciousness programme at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1980, where she is professor emerita. Her work combines the history of biology, feminist theory and science studies.
Further main works
- Primate Visions (1989)
- The Companion Species Manifesto (2003)
- Staying with the Trouble (2016)
Appears in
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