Donna Haraway

Donna J. Haraway (Denver, Colorado, September 6, 1944) is an American professor emeritus in the Department of the History of Consciousness and the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a leading academic in the field of science and technology studies, author of works such as "Cyborg Manifesto" (1985), "Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science" (1989), "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature" (1991) and "When Species Meet" (2008) She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work critiques anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of non-human processes, and explores the dissonant relationships between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking the sources of ethics.

Haraway has taught women's studies and the history of science at the University of Hawaii (1971-1974) and Johns Hopkins University (1974-1980). She began working as a professor at the University of California in 1980, where she became the first tenured professor of feminist theory in the United States. Haraway's works have contributed to the study of human-machine and human-animal relationships. Her work has generated debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway participated in a collaborative exchange with feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990 to 1996. Her engagement with specific ideas related to feminism, technoscience, political consciousness, and other social issues shaped the images and narrative of Haraway's book Modest_Witness for which he received the Ludwik Fleck Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in 1999. He also received the Robert K. Merton Award from the Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology in 1992 for his paper Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science.

Studies and professorships

Haraway graduated in Zoology and Philosophy in 1966 from Colorado College, obtaining a Boettcher Foundation Scholarship. He lived in Paris for a year studying the philosophy of evolution on a Fulbright scholarship before completing his Ph.D. from the Yale Department of Biology in 1972. He wrote his thesis on the roles of metaphor in shaping developmental biology research at the twentieth century.

Haraway has taught women's studies and "General Science" at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University. But Haraway's greatest contribution will come during her years as a graduate professor in the renowned Department of the History of Consciousness at the University of California-Santa Cruz on her staff with Hayden White, Teresa de Lauretis, Angela Davis, and James Clifford..

In September 2000, Haraway was awarded High Honors by the Society for Social Studies of Science, with the J.D. Bernal, for a lifetime of contributions in the field. Haraway is the leading thinker on the love/hate relationship between people and machines. Her ideas have sparked an explosion of debate in areas as diverse as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology (Kunzru, 1). She has currently found a prominent place in the debates surrounding the Anthropocene where she argues for a "multispecies policy".

Haraway's Books

Primate Visions

When reading Haraway's books, it becomes clear that his writings are predominantly based on his knowledge of the history of science and biology (Carubia, 4). In his book, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Haraway explains the metaphors and narratives that drive the science of primatology. He demonstrates that there is a tendency to masculinize stories about "reproductive competition and sex between aggressive males and receptive females that facilitate some and exclude other types of conclusions." (Carubia, 4). She argues that female primatologists focus on different observations that require more basic survival and communication activities, offering perspectives on the origins of nature and culture that are very different from those currently accepted. Drawing on these examples of Western narratives and ideologies of gender, race, and social class, Haraway questions the most fundamental constructions of primate-based human nature stories. In Visions of Primate, she writes:

My hope has been that the always oblique and sometimes perverse approach will facilitate revisions of fundamental and persistent Western narratives about the difference, especially the sexual and racial difference; about reproduction, especially in terms of the multiplicity of generators and calves; and about survival, especially about the survival imagined in the limiting conditions of both origins and the end of history, as it is reported in the Western traditions of the complex.

Haraway's goal is for science to "reveal the limits and impossibilities of its 'objectivity'" and that she consider some recent reviews offered by feminist primatologists” (Russon, 10). An expert in her field, Haraway proposed an alternative perspective to the accepted ideologies that continue to shape the way scientific stories about human nature are created. Most importantly, Haraway offers inventive analogies that reveal new horizons and possibilities for inquiry (Elkins).

A Cyborg Manifesto

Haraway has been described as a "feminist, more loosely a neo-Marxist and a postmodernist" (Young, 172). Playing on the words of Marx's famous Communist Manifesto, Haraway published the essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" in the Socialist Review magazine. i> in 1985. Although most of Haraway's earlier work focuses on the emphasis of the masculine bias in scientific culture, she has also contributed enormously to 20th-century feminist narratives.

Haraway draws on her scientific background and becomes the observer and witness of a trend in today's society and cannot silence what she sees. In A Cyborg Manifesto , Haraway uses the cyborg metaphor to offer a realistic political strategy for the interests of socialism and feminism, which she deems idealistic. First, she introduces and defines the cyborg in four parts. A cyborg is:

• Cybercrime
• Machine and body hybrid
• Creature of lived social reality
• Fiction creature

In this essay, Haraway also discusses a couple of forms of feminism popular during the 1980s. As a postmodern feminist, she argues against essentialism, which is "any theory that claims to identify a cause or constitution of gender identity or universal, transhistorical and necessary patriarchy» (Feminist Epistemology, 2006). Such theories, Haraway argues, exclude women who do not conform to the theory and segregate them from "real women" or represent them as inferior. Another form of feminism that Haraway disputes is "a jurisprudential model of feminism popularized by legal scholar and Marxist Catharine MacKinnon" (Burow-Flak, 2000) who fought to make pornography illegal in the 1980s, which she considered a form of hate speech. Haraway argues that MacKinnon's radical feminism assimilates all of women's experiences into a particular identity that incorporates Western ideologies that contribute to the oppression of women. She writes, "It is factually and politically inaccurate to equate all the various 'moments' or 'conversations' in recent women's politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon's version" (158).

According to Haraway in her Manifesto, “There is nothing about being female that naturally unites women. There is not even such a state as that of 'being' female, which is itself a highly complex category constructed in debated sexual scientific discourses and other social practices' (155). A cyborg, on the other hand, does not require a stable, essentialist identity, argues Haraway, and women should consider building coalitions based on "affinity" rather than identity. To support her argument, Haraway analyzes the phrase 'women of colour', suggesting it as a possible category of affinity politics (Senft, 2001). Using a term coined by theorist Chela Sandoval, Haraway writes that "'oppositional consciousness' is comparable to cyborg politics, since instead of identity it emphasizes how affinity results from otherness, difference, and specificity" (156)..

The idea is to change the thinking of isolated individuals to the thinking of people as vertices in a network. In this sense, a link can be developed that has nothing to do with patriarchal Western ideals. Haraway's ideal "cyborg world" consists of people living together, unafraid of their communal nexus with animals and machines. "Political struggle is seeing from both perspectives at the same time, as each reveals both dominations and unimaginable possibilities from the other point of view. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters" (155).

“I'd rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess”

The cyborg era began in the 1990s, and Haraway is a loyal contributor to today's cyberculture^{[citation needed]}. Although in her texts Haraway uses technology through the metaphor of the cyborg, she is also critical of the consequences of technology. The idea that machines can contribute to liberation is something that feminists and women should consider. Haraway writes: “Until now (once upon a time), the female impersonation seemed to be something given, organic, necessary; and the expression of the feminine seemed to mean having maternal abilities either in a strict or metaphorical sense. Only by being out of place will we achieve intense pleasure with machines, and then, with the excuse that after all it is an organic activity, we will be able to appropriate them for women(180).

The following table is taken from Apes, Cyborgs and Women and illustrates the shift we are experiencing from an organic, industrial society (left column) to a polymorphous information system (right column). right) created by science and technology policy. Haraway writes: "Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies can be expressed in the following list of transitions from comfortably old hierarchical dominations to the terrifying new networks I have called the informatics of domination." (275):

Camille's stories: the children of the compost

Camille's Stories: The Compost Children is a speculative fiction written by Haraway and contained in Staying with the Problem: Generating Kinship in the Chthulucene, published by Duke in 2016. Donna fictionalizes life in five generations of people born in compost communities. and which covers from 2025 (the moment of Camille 1's birth) to 2425 (the moment of Camille 5's death).

The composting movement that he proposes is the reaction to the Great Denial (understood as the period in which denial is extended to the human agency in the environmental crisis) and they are articulated communities to propose new relationships with other living entities, the landscape and other kinship relationships and social interaction. In them, paternity-maternity are not fixed and immovable, but the figures with this social function change throughout life. Camile (and subsequent Camilles) will be symbiotes, people with artificial genetic alterations that will allow them to generate more evident links with another species of living being. In her case, Camille is a symbiote of the monarch butterfly and this will lead to a social and affective responsibility that will lead her to intercultural and transnational dialogues to protect the butterfly (with emphasis on the Mazahua peoples in Mexico). Over the course of the five centuries of the story, the human population gradually decreases with awareness of its ecological implication and there will be massive extinctions of animal and plant species. The monarch butterfly will be one of those extinct species and in Camille 5's lifetime, it will become a palabrero de la muerte (a figure that exists to preserve memory and hope for collective action through mourning).

Fonts

• Burow-Flak, Elizabeth. "Background Information on Cyborg Manifesto." 17 September 2000.
• Carubia, Josephine M. “Haraway on the Map. ” Semiotic Review of Books. 9:1 (1998) 4-7
• Elkins, Charles. “The Uses of Science Fiction. ” Science Fiction Studies. 17:2 (1990)
• “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. ” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 30 January 2006.
• Kunzru, Hari. “You Are Cyborg”. Wired Magazine. 5:2 (1997) 1-7
• Russon, Anne. “Deconstructing Primatology?” Semiotic Review of Books. 2:2 (1991) 9-11
• Senft, Theresa M. "Reading Notes on Donna Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto.'"
• Young, Robert M. “Science, Ideology & Donna Haraway. ” Science as Culture. 15.3(1992): 165-207