Donna Haraway

Biography

	Donna Haraway is a professor of feminist theory and technoscience at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where she conducts an Intensive Summer Seminar.

Donna Haraway was born in Denver in 1944 and attended Catholic schools. With the aid of a Boettcher Foundation scholarship, she majored in zoology and philosophy at The Colorado College and also fulfilled the requirements for an English major. She graduated in 1966, and studied philosophies of evolution in Paris for a year on a Fulbright scholarship. She earned a Ph.D. from the Biology Department at Yale in 1972 for an interdisciplinary dissertation on the functions of metaphor in shaping research in developmental biology in the twentieth century. After teaching in Women's Studies and General Science at the University of Hawaii, she went on to Johns Hopkins University, and is now professor and former chair of the influential History of Consciousness Program at University of California, Santa Cruz. 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.
Her seminal work, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature has become the authoritative text in the theorizing the politics of the post-human, the cyborg, the techno-mythological ideal and its promised utopia(s).

Haraway likens "cyborg" to the political identity of "women of color," which "marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship" (ibid). The "Cyborg" though, is grounded in "political-scientific" analysis. This analysis takes up most of the manifesto.

Haraway uses the metaphor of the cyborg to discuss the relationships of science, technology, and "socialist-feminism." She holds that hi-tech culture challenges and breaks down the old dualisms of Western thinking like the mind/body split, Self/Other, male/female, reality/appearance, and truth/illusion. She holds that we are no longer able to think of ourselves in these terms, or even strictly speaking, as biological entities. Instead, we have become cyborgs, mixtures of human and machine, where the biological side and the mechanical/electrical side become so inextricably entwined that they can't be split.

Focused on the metaphors which science uses and how those metaphors subtly determine the networks of power which control our world, her work ranges from primatology to epistemology, from cancer research to information technology. Haraway has identified a social and cultural movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous information system, which she has charted as a series of transformations that restructure webs of power created by the politics of science and technology. Below is an updated version of the chart, which reveals much of the discourses she engages:

Haraway's work in the History of Science not only references contemporary science fiction writers such as John Varley, Octavia Butler, and Joanna Russ, but also influences writers exploring the interfaces between human/ machine/ animal/ information. Her writings focus an interest in the politics of the Other — whether that other be defined in terms of race, gender, species, or technology. Because she deals explicitly with the theory of the cyborg — the being who is part human and part machine — she has been particularly influential on cyberpunk writers.

Haraway argues that "one important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imagination" (ibid). The relations between science and technology are "rearranging" categories of race, sex and class; Haraway insists that feminism needs to take this into account.

Donna Haraway's influence is felt widely in cultural studies, women's studies, political theory, primatology, literature, and philosophy. Haraway's prolific publications are required reading across the humanities and social sciences. In Primate Visions: Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1990) she combines literary theory, political philosophy, primatology, and American history to explore the world of primatology, which has become a largely woman-dominated field. Two other widely cited and highly influential articles include A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985) intially published in Socialist Review, and Situated Knowledge first published in Feminist Studies. These two essays revolutionized feminist theory, and set a tone of playfulness and experimentation that has become a Haraway trademark, as demonstrated in her most recent book, Modest Witness @ Second Millenium (1996). This book continues her impious metaphors for a kind of thinking that blurs borders and renders categories permeable: from cyborgs, she moves to vampires and monsters, taking each as an opportunity to put unfamiliar metaphors to productive use.