Donna Haraway. Monkeys, Aliens, and Women: Love, Science, and Politics at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Colonial Discourse.

Donna Haraway. "Monkeys, Aliens, and Women: Love, Science, and Politics at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Colonial Discourse." in: Women's Studies International Forum Vol. 12, No. 3, 1989, pp. 295-312. (English).

Synopsis

This paper explores two U.S. white women's field studies of wild primates in Africa since 1960 and Octavia Butler's science fiction novel about an alien primatoid species enforcing a gene exchange with humanity in order to recolonize a devastated earth. Shirley Strum studied baboons in Kenya, intending to test hypotheses about male dominance that made sense in her own political and scientific cultures. In interaction with the people and land of her study site, she was forced to come to terms with different ways of seeing the animals and asking questions about their lives. Transforming her ideas of human social relationship with each other and with land and animals, Alison Jolly studied Madagascar lemurs before and after decolonization in the Malagasy Republic. Consumed with questions about human siblingship with aliens and the failure of sibling-ship within humanity, Butler uses the conventions of science fiction to fashion speculative pasts and futures for the species from the implicit perspectives of black and feminist inquiry. The three narratives are linked by the argument that race, gender, and nature are complexly renegotiated in post-colonial conditions and that new—but not innocent — forms of love and knowledge emerge. Knowing about the terrain on which love and knowledge of animal, nature, self, and other have been constructed within western culture at particular historical moments is prerequisite for remapping the possible ground for new stories. The paper emphasizes the need to see women's relations to the animals they study and love and the monsters they imagine in the intersecting contexts of science fiction, fictions of science, feminist theory, and the critique of colonial discourse.