Donna Haraway

Biography

Donna Jeanne Haraway was born in 1944 in Denver, Colorado. She studied philosophy and zoology at Colorado College, earned a doctorate in biology from Yale University in 1972, and then turned from the laboratory to the study of science itself. Her doctoral and postdoctoral work on the history and philosophy of biology combined a deep technical knowledge of the life sciences with the emerging tools of feminist theory, Marxism, and continental philosophy. She taught at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins before joining the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1980, where she was professor until her retirement.

Haraway became one of the most influential theorists in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and posthumanism. Her essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985) is among the most cited works in the humanities of the late twentieth century, and her later writings — on primatology, companion species, and the environmental crisis — extended her distinctive project: telling stories about science, nature, and technology that refuse both the old humanisms and the simple anti-scientific rebellions against them. She was awarded the J. D. Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science in 2000 and the Wilbur Cross Medal of Yale University in 2017.

Key Ideas

The Cyborg

Haraway's cyborg is "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction." She deploys the figure to attack three boundary breakdowns of the late twentieth century: between human and animal, between organism and machine, and between the physical and the non-physical. The cyborg, she argues, is a creature of a post-gender world: it has no origin myth, no Eden, no Oedipal drama, no innocence to lose. For feminism, this is liberating rather than threatening — it releases us from the myth of a pure, natural womanhood and from the dream of a return to a pre-technological unity. The cyborg is "oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence": a way of being political without a fixed identity.

Situated Knowledges and Partial Perspective

In "Situated Knowledges" (1988), Haraway offers her epistemology: all knowledge is situated, embodied, and partial. Against the ideal of the "god trick" — the view from nowhere that claims to see everything — she argues that objectivity is not achieved by transcending position but by acknowledging it. A "feminist objectivity" means taking responsibility for the partiality of one's perspective, building solidarity across differences, and refusing both the false universalism of science and the relativist claim that all knowledge is equally valid. Vision is always embodied, and the only honest objectivity is the one that owns its location.

Naturecultures and Companion Species

Haraway's later work replaces the opposition of nature and culture with "naturecultures": the recognition that nature is never pure, that the human is always already entangled with the non-human. In The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and When Species Meet (2008), she explores the "significant otherness" of dogs, microbes, and machines — the co-evolution, co-habitation, and co-constitution of species. The figure of the companion species generalizes the cyborg: we are all "compost" rather than "posthuman," she jokes, participants in ongoing, multispecies entanglements that demand response and responsibility rather than mastery.

Staying with the Trouble

In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Haraway confronts the climate and extinction crises of the Anthropocene. She refuses both the techno-fix of "the techno-optimists" and the despair of apocalyptic thinking, proposing instead "making kin" — building caring, non-biological kinship networks across species — as the practice that might yet compose a liveable future. The "Chthulucene" is her name for a time in which the tentacular, entangled, and vulnerable creatures of the earth — human and otherwise — must learn to live together without the promise of a saving hero.

Primate Visions and Science Studies

Before the cyborg, Haraway established herself with Primate Visions (1989), a study of how the science of primatology — the study of monkeys and apes — has been shaped by the gender, race, and colonial histories of its practitioners. The book shows that scientific stories about "nature" are always also stories about human society: the primate order that scientists described in the twentieth century was, in part, a projection of Western anxieties about sex, work, and kinship. This work made Haraway one of the founders of feminist science studies and prepared the ground for the cyborg: if the "natural" world is already a human construction, then the boundary between the natural and the technological was never the firm line it seemed, and the figure of the hybrid is not a novelty but the truth of the matter all along.

Major Works

A Cyborg Manifesto (1985; collected in Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 1991) is her foundational text. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989) deconstructed the science of primatology. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) gathered her key essays of the 1980s. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse (1997) examined biotechnology and technoscience. The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), When Species Meet (2008), and Staying with the Trouble (2016) extended her thinking on multispecies entanglement and ecological responsibility.

Legacy

Haraway transformed how we think about science, gender, and technology. Her cyborg has become the emblem of a whole style of posthumanism that refuses both technophobic luddism and technophilic futurism, and her situated knowledges remains one of the most important statements in feminist epistemology. She helped create science and technology studies as we know it, and her influence extends across feminism, queer theory, environmental humanities, media studies, and art.

Critics have sometimes found her prose deliberately opaque, and defenders of scientific realism have questioned whether her emphasis on partiality and situatedness undermines the authority of scientific knowledge. But Haraway's answers are part of her provocation: objectivity is not threatened by situatedness, it is achieved through it, and the stories we tell about nature are not optional extras but the very medium in which the future is decided. Her work remains essential for any feminist philosophy of technology and for thinking about what kinds of beings we are becoming.

Sources

• Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-599.
• Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
• University of California, Santa Cruz, Feminist Studies Department, "Donna Haraway."
• Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989.