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Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as creatures which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called outstanding, original, and brilliant, by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.)
312 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 1990
About the author
Donna J. Haraway
52 books994 followersDonna J. Haraway is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. She is a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies, described in the early 1990s as a "feminist, rather loosely a postmodernist". Haraway is the author of numerous foundational books and essays that bring together questions of science and feminism, such as "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985) and "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective". Additionally, for her contributions to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, Haraway is widely cited in works related to Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Her Situated Knowledges and Cyborg Manifesto publications in particular, have sparked discussion within the HCI community regarding framing the positionality from which research and systems are designed. She is also a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism, associated with post-humanism and new materialism movements. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.
Haraway has taught Women's Studies and the History of Science at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University. Haraway's works have contributed to the study of both human-machine and human-animal relations. Her works have sparked debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway participated in a collaborative exchange with the feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990 to 1996. Their engagement with specific ideas relating to feminism, technoscience, political consciousness, and other social issues, formed the images and narrative of Haraway's book Modest_Witness for which she received the Society for Social Studies of Science's (4S) Ludwik Fleck Prize in 1999. In 2000, Haraway was awarded the Society for Social Studies of Science's John Desmond Bernal Prize for her distinguished contributions to the field of science and technology studies. Haraway serves on the advisory board for numerous academic journals, including differences, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Contemporary Women's Writing, and Environmental Humanities.
Haraway has taught Women's Studies and the History of Science at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University. Haraway's works have contributed to the study of both human-machine and human-animal relations. Her works have sparked debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway participated in a collaborative exchange with the feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990 to 1996. Their engagement with specific ideas relating to feminism, technoscience, political consciousness, and other social issues, formed the images and narrative of Haraway's book Modest_Witness for which she received the Society for Social Studies of Science's (4S) Ludwik Fleck Prize in 1999. In 2000, Haraway was awarded the Society for Social Studies of Science's John Desmond Bernal Prize for her distinguished contributions to the field of science and technology studies. Haraway serves on the advisory board for numerous academic journals, including differences, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Contemporary Women's Writing, and Environmental Humanities.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
April 4, 2015
This is one of the only academic, theoretical texts I have read cover to cover in a while (fellow academics, you know we peruse for what is relevant for our research rather than read everything thoroughly).
Haraway does a great job of showing the biases in science which seek to reinforce and naturalize patriarchal and racial domination, the impact of capitalist thinking and mentality on the theories and production of science, and that science is mostly visionary, even if it is not necessarily liberatory (to paraphrase her). She asserts that all knowledge must be reexamined and examined in the future from an explicitly feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonialist epistemology.
But in her most successful chapters, she explores the foolishness of dichotomous, binary thinking when it comes to gender and sex, human and machine, and objectivity and subjectivity. "Cyborg Manifesto" fascinatingly employs the metaphor of the cyborg to discuss how we should embrace the contradictions, confusions, and dichotomies in our identities and life to end binary thinking, thinking which denies us complexity. She also argues that the age of technology has fundamentally changed the fate and nature of humanity, especially for the subjugated. And in the next chapter, "Situated Knowledges," she shows that objectivity as we know and revere it does not exist, but true subjectivity comes from appreciating and elevating partiality, subjectivity, the voices and critical inquiry of the subjugated, and contextualized knowledges—there is not such thing as universality.
Haraway does a great job of showing the biases in science which seek to reinforce and naturalize patriarchal and racial domination, the impact of capitalist thinking and mentality on the theories and production of science, and that science is mostly visionary, even if it is not necessarily liberatory (to paraphrase her). She asserts that all knowledge must be reexamined and examined in the future from an explicitly feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonialist epistemology.
But in her most successful chapters, she explores the foolishness of dichotomous, binary thinking when it comes to gender and sex, human and machine, and objectivity and subjectivity. "Cyborg Manifesto" fascinatingly employs the metaphor of the cyborg to discuss how we should embrace the contradictions, confusions, and dichotomies in our identities and life to end binary thinking, thinking which denies us complexity. She also argues that the age of technology has fundamentally changed the fate and nature of humanity, especially for the subjugated. And in the next chapter, "Situated Knowledges," she shows that objectivity as we know and revere it does not exist, but true subjectivity comes from appreciating and elevating partiality, subjectivity, the voices and critical inquiry of the subjugated, and contextualized knowledges—there is not such thing as universality.
September 5, 2015
All of Haraway's books are brilliant and definitely worth reading. Probably the single most inspiring and powerful white feminist theorists of our time. This book is best known for its classic essay playing with the notion of the cyborg as a feminist, revolutionary figure. Now the essay feels a bit dated, and doesn't compare to her later Modest Witness.
What makes Simians really interesting, though, is how it's a full arch of a brilliant philosophy in her growth, and transformation across highly volatile times for feminist theory. While many white (socialist and otherwise) feminists of the 1970s, faced with the crises of postmodernism and anti-racist critique from women of color, retreated farther into right-wing scary politics. Haraway, in the 70s, was a brilliant Marxist writing on biology on primatology. Simians includes some of these early essays. Then the 80s hit, and more essays offer her thoughtful, self-critical reflection on the neocolonial and racist currents of academic feminism, and a profound transformation in the face of postmodernism and post-structuralism. The end result is radiant, magnificent brilliance.
Simians follows this full arch, offering a powerful testimony to what real growth among academics could look like.
What makes Simians really interesting, though, is how it's a full arch of a brilliant philosophy in her growth, and transformation across highly volatile times for feminist theory. While many white (socialist and otherwise) feminists of the 1970s, faced with the crises of postmodernism and anti-racist critique from women of color, retreated farther into right-wing scary politics. Haraway, in the 70s, was a brilliant Marxist writing on biology on primatology. Simians includes some of these early essays. Then the 80s hit, and more essays offer her thoughtful, self-critical reflection on the neocolonial and racist currents of academic feminism, and a profound transformation in the face of postmodernism and post-structuralism. The end result is radiant, magnificent brilliance.
Simians follows this full arch, offering a powerful testimony to what real growth among academics could look like.
April 23, 2016
A collection of papers from 1978-89 and as such dated, since many of the debates contained in here have moved further along - debates about gender having moved well over in to the mainstream today.
The earlier papers about the history of primatology are the most interesting, charting the shifting imperatives (diagnosed as ideological) behind the varying emphases given by different theorists who are clearly looking for lessons about the human world in their carefully constructed model of the animal world. What does come across is that feminists had no difficulty getting in to the field and promoting alternative interpretations - this is not an isolated citadel, requiring the battalions of Critical Theory to draw up their war-engines and break the walls to free the prisoners. Debate and revision and even debunking seem to have been quite possible, even if it didn't proceed in the caricature of methodology favoured by lay "rationalists" (dubbed "positivism" by its enemies). In fact the only new observation Haraway has on the story is that the feminists could go further in challenging the notion of "nature", presumed as a counterpoint to "culture" - but she doesn't tell us how that line would work out, and she doesn't seem to really know herself either. She does explicitly reject, at several points, any naive constructionist view that denies any role for material facts. Of course one lesson we could draw from this tale is a Feynmanian moral that the "life sciences" are just a cargo cult and should be repudiated in favour of a rigorous physicalist eliminativism, a conclusion which Haraway does briefly allude to on pg.77.
Things sag a little after that. There is a discussion of the novels of Buchi Emecheta, which is simply a meditation on the agonies of being a reflective white western feminist in crit. theory who doesn't know who she is presuming to speak for or what to say about them. From the mid 80s onward the book starts to get haunted by a concern about "postmodernism", which just seems to be the dominating influence of that tedious gasbag Frederic Jameson. "The Cyborg Manifesto" is a lousy farrago of currently-fashionable talking points, the sole interest is that quite a few are still current in 2016. Things pick up again with the discussion of "Situated knowledges" and Haraway reiterates the need for a conception of a material base for any criticism of dominating discourses, which she hasn't lost sight of despite absorbing lots of inane pomo chatter over the years. What she wants is a version of contextualist epistemology and a formulation of objectivity that doesn't rest on transcendental vacuities - these were and are major topics in Anglophone philosophy for the last few decades, and there is plenty of work anyone wanting to escape pomo can make use of.
Reading this book does convey a sense of the terrible anxiety afflicting any intelligent thinker working in Critical Theory (the idiot majority are presumably content). It must be hard to stand in front of classes of 20 year olds and talk about radical perspectives, when most of your listeners are barely conscious of the traditional ones, and nearly all of them are going to fall into utterly conventional bourgeois lives within a few years anyway. There should be a special confidential counselling service for these academics.
The earlier papers about the history of primatology are the most interesting, charting the shifting imperatives (diagnosed as ideological) behind the varying emphases given by different theorists who are clearly looking for lessons about the human world in their carefully constructed model of the animal world. What does come across is that feminists had no difficulty getting in to the field and promoting alternative interpretations - this is not an isolated citadel, requiring the battalions of Critical Theory to draw up their war-engines and break the walls to free the prisoners. Debate and revision and even debunking seem to have been quite possible, even if it didn't proceed in the caricature of methodology favoured by lay "rationalists" (dubbed "positivism" by its enemies). In fact the only new observation Haraway has on the story is that the feminists could go further in challenging the notion of "nature", presumed as a counterpoint to "culture" - but she doesn't tell us how that line would work out, and she doesn't seem to really know herself either. She does explicitly reject, at several points, any naive constructionist view that denies any role for material facts. Of course one lesson we could draw from this tale is a Feynmanian moral that the "life sciences" are just a cargo cult and should be repudiated in favour of a rigorous physicalist eliminativism, a conclusion which Haraway does briefly allude to on pg.77.
Things sag a little after that. There is a discussion of the novels of Buchi Emecheta, which is simply a meditation on the agonies of being a reflective white western feminist in crit. theory who doesn't know who she is presuming to speak for or what to say about them. From the mid 80s onward the book starts to get haunted by a concern about "postmodernism", which just seems to be the dominating influence of that tedious gasbag Frederic Jameson. "The Cyborg Manifesto" is a lousy farrago of currently-fashionable talking points, the sole interest is that quite a few are still current in 2016. Things pick up again with the discussion of "Situated knowledges" and Haraway reiterates the need for a conception of a material base for any criticism of dominating discourses, which she hasn't lost sight of despite absorbing lots of inane pomo chatter over the years. What she wants is a version of contextualist epistemology and a formulation of objectivity that doesn't rest on transcendental vacuities - these were and are major topics in Anglophone philosophy for the last few decades, and there is plenty of work anyone wanting to escape pomo can make use of.
Reading this book does convey a sense of the terrible anxiety afflicting any intelligent thinker working in Critical Theory (the idiot majority are presumably content). It must be hard to stand in front of classes of 20 year olds and talk about radical perspectives, when most of your listeners are barely conscious of the traditional ones, and nearly all of them are going to fall into utterly conventional bourgeois lives within a few years anyway. There should be a special confidential counselling service for these academics.
April 17, 2012
Although difficult, this book is an important mediation between the emerging rift between traditional 'objective' knowledge and totally relativistic subjective knowledge. Harraway, a trained Zoologist is well placed to enter into the debates regarding the production of knowledge. Furthermore, contrary to many post-modern thinkers, Deleuze, Lacan, Spivak and Zizek come to mind, Harraway has a real subject which constantly grounds her ideas. She is not just writing about writing, although she does that as well.
Many people get put off by the technical-jargon and invented words in her essay Cyborg Manifesto...most of these people that I have met are guilty of reading that article first since it is usually the one most discussed. Do not go this route. One of the greatest virtues of the book is that it goes from her more focused early work in 81 to her more inventive complicated work 91. If you follow along and read some of the early, some of the mid and some of the later work (or better yet the whole thing) you might be startled to realize that something amazing has happened to your perspectives regarding debates such as Nature vs Nurture, Gene vs Organism, objective vs subjective, they will seem absurd. In what is, I think, one of the best articles of the later half of the twentieth century, Situated Knowledges, later half of the book, Harraway introduces just that situated knoweldge, the importance of understanding the location of the observer in all observation.
Just as Einstien did in his theory of Relativity she points to the utter importance of location for an accurate understanding of knoweldge. In Einstein it was location in spacetime, for harraway it is location in the social world.
Fans of Richard Lewontin may notice an uncanny transferability between her thought and his.
Many people get put off by the technical-jargon and invented words in her essay Cyborg Manifesto...most of these people that I have met are guilty of reading that article first since it is usually the one most discussed. Do not go this route. One of the greatest virtues of the book is that it goes from her more focused early work in 81 to her more inventive complicated work 91. If you follow along and read some of the early, some of the mid and some of the later work (or better yet the whole thing) you might be startled to realize that something amazing has happened to your perspectives regarding debates such as Nature vs Nurture, Gene vs Organism, objective vs subjective, they will seem absurd. In what is, I think, one of the best articles of the later half of the twentieth century, Situated Knowledges, later half of the book, Harraway introduces just that situated knoweldge, the importance of understanding the location of the observer in all observation.
Just as Einstien did in his theory of Relativity she points to the utter importance of location for an accurate understanding of knoweldge. In Einstein it was location in spacetime, for harraway it is location in the social world.
Fans of Richard Lewontin may notice an uncanny transferability between her thought and his.
February 23, 2023
Πολύ ενδιαφέρον, θα το ξαναδιάβαζα, προσέχοντας την επόμενη φορά άλλα σημεία, άλλα νοήματα. Αν και παλαιό βιβλίο, εμπεριέχει το λεγόμενο "Κυβοργικό Μανιφέστο", που κατά απροσδόκητο τρόπο, έχει αξία ακόμα και σήμερα. Άραγε προοριζόμαστε να γίνουμε όλοι κυβόργια, cyborg, το δέρμα μας να μην είναι πλέον το όριο; Μα ήδη πολλοί μετάνθρωποι, κυβοργικά όντα, υπάρχουν εκεί έξω... Δεν πρόκειται για χίμαιρες πλέον, αλλά βρισκόμαστε προ τετελεσμένων γεγονότων!
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April 22, 2022Haraway es una gran filósofa o, mejor dicho, una gran recolectora de ideas, teorías, ciencias, prácticas y posiciones políticas. Da igual que esté realizando una crítica a la sociobiología de Edward Wilson, un análisis de cómo el punto de vista sociocultural influye en la primatología, una entrada para un diccionario marxista sobre el género o un manifiesto para cíborgs, su estilo rutilante, claro y crítico abarca gran cantidad de saberes, de perspectivas emancipatorias y de no-conclusiones estimulantes, diversas y abiertas. Lo que este libro tiene de estudios culturales sobre la ciencia es un buen hallazgo. Lo que tiene de tratado feminista ayuda a despojarse de los identitarismos y univocismos de ciertos feminismos de la segunda ola (y no solo) y apostar por un tablero en el que lo que importa no es lo idéntico, sino lo afín. Lo que tiene de epistemología contribuye a una comprensión contextualizada, situada y no por ello menos ambiciosa o rigurosa de lo que deben ser la ciencia y el conocimiento. Por todo ello Haraway demuestra su carnal inteligencia y merece ser leída y releída.
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September 29, 2019skidded into a mad depression when reading the last two essays and i will say: this book is hard to parse when you're unfocused !!
that being said; had a great time; i think haraway's alignments filled in a blank for me wrt to feminism n socialism n stuff: taking on science seriously as a useful tool, a tool that SHOULD be taken up as part of the feminist-socialist project. her central premise is trying to destroy the presumption that science and culture are separate things. the interesting but less invigorating aspect of this was analyzing how scientific movements are of course, reflections of cultural movements. 'observations' of hierarchies or alpha males in primate studies clearly cropping up hand in hand with capitalism, enforcement of gender roles in humans. still, great breakdowns there. the other side of this is how to practice science, culturally, in a way that is more helpful. her essay on how objectivity can be redefined to better speak for marginalized people was incredibly cool to me! really liked the idea of 'partiality', of grounding observations and conclusions in contexts instead of this historically white and patriarchal scientific ethos of universalizing as much as possible. the nuance of setting partiality against relativism, which sort of collapses truth (nothing is real if everything is relative) was a nice touch.
other great takeaways: old-school takedown of sex/gender binary was just well-rendered; i liked how the sex-gender binary was explained as a reverberating reinforced inaccuracy for science to support culture to support science: 'the ongoing tactical usefulness of the sex/gender distinction in life and social sciences has had dire consequences for much feminist theory, tying it to a liberal and functionalist paradigm despite repeated efforts to transcend those limits'. i am obsessed with her theme of Boundaries/immunology in the back-half of this collection; it's really making me reconsider permeability and contradiction both materially (disease) and existentially (self) and socially. i think partiality is a concession of permeable boundaries; i think her staging the idea of maintaining impermeable boundaries as a late capitalist / post modernist obsession is really helpful and sick as hell.
i will say she is vague; as people have complained about; in that her essays sort of drop off at the end in a the rest of the fucking owl, 'exercise left to the reader' way, but that's ok. in effect, there's a horizon-like leap, a reach, you can't concretize what the next step is but you need to keep striving, aspect to this that i'm willing to indulge in. but also, i'm just batting way above where i should be so a lot of references and 'the obvious' are lost, so who knows.
that being said; had a great time; i think haraway's alignments filled in a blank for me wrt to feminism n socialism n stuff: taking on science seriously as a useful tool, a tool that SHOULD be taken up as part of the feminist-socialist project. her central premise is trying to destroy the presumption that science and culture are separate things. the interesting but less invigorating aspect of this was analyzing how scientific movements are of course, reflections of cultural movements. 'observations' of hierarchies or alpha males in primate studies clearly cropping up hand in hand with capitalism, enforcement of gender roles in humans. still, great breakdowns there. the other side of this is how to practice science, culturally, in a way that is more helpful. her essay on how objectivity can be redefined to better speak for marginalized people was incredibly cool to me! really liked the idea of 'partiality', of grounding observations and conclusions in contexts instead of this historically white and patriarchal scientific ethos of universalizing as much as possible. the nuance of setting partiality against relativism, which sort of collapses truth (nothing is real if everything is relative) was a nice touch.
other great takeaways: old-school takedown of sex/gender binary was just well-rendered; i liked how the sex-gender binary was explained as a reverberating reinforced inaccuracy for science to support culture to support science: 'the ongoing tactical usefulness of the sex/gender distinction in life and social sciences has had dire consequences for much feminist theory, tying it to a liberal and functionalist paradigm despite repeated efforts to transcend those limits'. i am obsessed with her theme of Boundaries/immunology in the back-half of this collection; it's really making me reconsider permeability and contradiction both materially (disease) and existentially (self) and socially. i think partiality is a concession of permeable boundaries; i think her staging the idea of maintaining impermeable boundaries as a late capitalist / post modernist obsession is really helpful and sick as hell.
i will say she is vague; as people have complained about; in that her essays sort of drop off at the end in a the rest of the fucking owl, 'exercise left to the reader' way, but that's ok. in effect, there's a horizon-like leap, a reach, you can't concretize what the next step is but you need to keep striving, aspect to this that i'm willing to indulge in. but also, i'm just batting way above where i should be so a lot of references and 'the obvious' are lost, so who knows.
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August 15, 2011This collection of previously-published essays has quite a bit of repetition even though Haraway says she revised for this volume, but that can be a good thing for readers whose knowledge of modern biology and biotechnology may be limited. She apparently wrote before the Borg appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I would be interested to see how she would reconcile that negative view with her attempt to convince readers that the cyborg's fusion of organism and machine offers hope for humanity, especially for feminists. Chapter 8, her "Cyborg Manifesto," is the detailed statement of the argument and has been influential in ecocritical writing. As in much ecocriticism, the need to overcome dualisms such as human-animal and human-machine is key, and Haraway contributes to the conversation with her insistence that a feminist science is possible. She also insists repeatedly that no position is innocent, reminding readers of the need to examine all assumptions. Much to think about, often written with engaging humor.
November 24, 2007
Simply stated, Haraway rocked my worldview. The Cyborg Manifesto was the basis for my Sr. Thesis ... the concept of activism birthed in the "borderlands," the lachlein, situated knowledges.
The language felt circular at times, even redundant, but it all has purpose--it might be seen as "Irigarayan" writing the body of the cyborg, brilliant stuff in my estimation.
Read and reread Haraway, I continually discover something new when I revisit an essay.
The language felt circular at times, even redundant, but it all has purpose--it might be seen as "Irigarayan" writing the body of the cyborg, brilliant stuff in my estimation.
Read and reread Haraway, I continually discover something new when I revisit an essay.
June 13, 2019
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto proposes new ways for thinking about unity, objectivity, and marginalised personhood, in an idiom which is particularly useful for feminists. In an increasingly technology-dominated world, Haraway’s 1985 essay continues to offer a perspective, an answer to the question ‘what now?’ regarding emancipatory theory, following an occasionally violent dissolution of boundaries that French poststructuralist thought proposed.
Haraway’s theory dissolves boundaries, but it also proposes new ways of thinking as well as addresses faults in theories which search for some unifying essence which is practically, socially, and scientifically unattainable. Trained as a scientist, Haraway’s perspective on objectivity is crucial to all humanities-focused theorists, and her concern for humanity is likewise essential to scientists.
She proposes that if this unity is impossible, one can perhaps consider the opposite: a parade of chimeric monsters sporting mechanical limbs, banding together to defy the myth of universal maternal essence. These cyborgs are at the heart of Haraway’s proposal, for they offer potentiality in the rubble left behind in the violent anxiety of what was perceived as ‘postmodernity.’
Cyborgs are different from the machines of the past; one recalls with amusement Walter Benjamin’s poetic fragment regarding an automaton which appeared to be mechanically miraculous but was actually operated by an organic creature within. These are new machines,in an age wherein an organic element does not always prevail and unpredictable maneuverings of machines cannot be chalked up to the presence of some specter. There was a time where machines were not autonomous, and had always the presence of some man (or ghost) within. ‘Now we are not so sure.’ Monsters are transforming into cyborgs, as they are both beings which ‘define the limits of community in Western imaginations.’ When considering how to form political communities (particularly regarding liberation, which the feminist Haraway is committed to), one must understand what the ‘limit’ of community is. Haraway goes beyond this and suggests that we reconsider community, including the monstrous cyborgs that once signified the limit.
Cyborgs, monsters, and labour are bound up with one another - is technology, more specifically perhaps industry, one source of depictions of monsters? In visual culture, this motif reappears: we recall factory workers being likened to zombies or the horrifying Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ Time Machine who co-dwelled subterraneously with clanking, frightening machinery, in constant toil. A Marxist reimagining changes this context which has been applied to ‘monsters.’ In Haraway’s new context, ‘the machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment.’ This recontextualisation and definition of the ‘cyborg’ is so important because it is an answer to the frustratingly vague refrain of an underlying universal unity which feminists have searched in vain for. ‘A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden, it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms.’ Antagonistic dualisms - what a term for those opposing poles which emerge constantly since Hegel’s unleashing of dialectics, a veritable Pandora’s box which upon opening released monsters which theorists have yet to work through. As a scientist, Haraway proposes a feminist way of thinking about objectivity, a task which may have once seemed impossible to her audience of humanities scholars informed by post-structuralist thought. Through readings of The Cyborg Manifesto as well as Haraway’s essay on objectivity, Situated Knowledges, we come to see that there is great potential to be found in creatively re-imagining worlds, humans and boundaries.
The cyborg is the monster of the 21st century and thus is categorised as an enemy, the ‘illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism’. Yet we are reminded that illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins,’ and can imagine that the cyborg could defect from its order, helping us accomplish previously impossible boundary breakdowns, between human and animal, animal and machine, physical and nonphysical. These boundary breakdowns inform rejections which Haraway performs, primarily the rejection of the plot of ‘original unity’ which haunts and perplexes narratives of feminism. This original unity was once thought to be what could unite women under some doctrine of a unifying spiritual mother, but which women were to be united, and how could this be possible due to the varying perspectives? Although Haraway dismisses this doctrine, she graciously acknowledges why and how this idea of unity has proliferated in the critical theory of her era: ‘then came the law of the father and its resolution of the problem of objectivity, solved by always already absent referents, deferred signifieds, split subjects, and the endless play of signifiers. Who wouldn’t grow up warped? Rejecting the impossibility of a split subject forever in agony from some primordial separation, Haraway moves toward a new framework for imagining the subject without this theatrical origin story. The cyborg is ironically without origin; they ‘are not reverent’, they ‘do not remember the cosmos.’ This is ironic because the cyborg, in another idiom, is considered to be the final product of the ‘awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency.’ If this were reformulated as Haraway proposes, a feminist consciousness could latch onto the idea of a self ‘untied from dependency’ on subjugating systems of power.
In order to be rid of the plot of original unity, several dismantlings must occur. First, nature is reconsidered. Feminists could distance themselves from the idea that they are constituted, as a group, by nature. As Derrida puts it, ‘there is no nature, only the effects of nature: denaturalisation or naturalisation.’ The plot of unity is enabled by a conception of nature, and it is kept alive by theories which imply its existence, namely Marxism and psychoanalysis. These ‘depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense.’ As cyborgs, we can eschew that pesky binding oedipal law of the father, we can bypass the impossible agony of a split subject, and we need not be arbitrarily categorised by nature. Cyborgs do not need to operate under the oppressive matrix enacted following the Fall, they turn unflinchingly to the Garden and burn it down, ridding the modern feminist consciousness of the problems of innocence and the necessity of a heterosexual ‘organic’ family. This is an essential break with previous feminist theory which has ‘proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in ‘the West’ since Aristotle still ruled.’ There is thus nothing that makes women ‘essentially woman,’ a problematic statement if one continues to cling to the belief that the only way to achieve unity is through some shared essence. How, then, are we to find unity, and without a shared essence, how are we able to speak each other’s language and form connections?
We seek another meaning or practice of ‘unity.’ Coincidentally, ‘Unity’ is a computer programming language developed in 1988 known for working in a non-deterministic way, allowing for programs to run indefinitely without a teleological flow. Perhaps we can consider a feminist ‘unity’ without exclusion or hierarchy, and Haraway suggests this is possible by seeking ‘affinity’ rather than ‘unity,’ and by reconsidering the faculty of vision. The revolutions which technology has enacted make it necessary to fundamentally disassemble old theories. No unity will be possible under exclusively identity-based feminism. There are possibilities - one could potentially craft a ‘poetic or political unity’ that does not rely on a ‘logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification.’ The feminist dream of some universal tongue is fundamentally impossible.‘Am I not reaching out for you in the only language I know?’ Asks the feminist theorist Audre Lorde. ‘If I try to hear you across your differences will that mean you can hear me?’ Maybe words will not suffice, for the dream of a common language is too tempting and misleading, suggesting too strongly totality. ‘We do not need a totality to work well’ -- after all, totality tends to imply an imperialist force. Haraway suggests we could turn to vision, a fruitful suggestion for visual theorists. Vision could be considered a subjugating force, especially by feminist theorists such as Laura Mulvey, inventor of the critical ‘gaze.’ But reclaiming that force could be useful. ‘Vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions,’ and given its embodied nature, helps privilege a form of unity based not on one-ness but on affinity and appreciation for differing perspectives, literally. Vision can be a good way to think about difference. Vision, like the cyborg, is reclaimed from the territory of a danger, enemy, or weapon, and is tamed and reappropriated into the modern feminist’s arsenal.
The next tool for this arsenal, in addition to the cyborg attitude and a privileging of vision, is a new dialectical method informed by irony. When two things are true at once, we need not performing elaborate dialectical manoeuvres to quell their opposition. Irony allows us to freely sit in the discomfort of two opposing truths. ‘At the center of’ Haraway’s ‘ironic faith’ is the ‘image of the cyborg.’
Haraway then offers a crucial solution to the problem of objectivity, long pondered by feminists and humanities thinkers wary of ‘hard science’. She humorously compares attempting to find a usable doctrine of objectivity to ‘climbing a greased pole,’ but she climbs nonetheless, recognising that an outright rejection of ‘objectivity’ robs us of a useful tool for the arsenal, so to speak. After all,‘we could use some enforceable, reliable accounts of things not reducible to power moves and agonistic, high status games of rhetoric or to scientistic, positivist arrogance. Objectivity has had the misfortune of being bound to Western cultural narratives, but how can one imagine a new narrative for objectivity? Haraway offers yet another solution: situated knowledges. Feminist objectivity is about ‘limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object.’ Perhaps in contradiction to her fellow radical cultural theorists, Haraway is wary of social constructionism, which she categorises as a particular strain of postmodernism, for it runs the risk of assuming and absorbing tired cultural narratives:
We have used a lot of toxic ink and trees processed into paper decrying what they have meant and how it hurts us. The imagined ‘they’ constitute a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories, and the imagined ‘we’ are the embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body, a finite point of view, and so inevitably disqualifying and polluting bias in any discussion of consequence outside our own little circles.
There is a danger, Haraway warns, in theorising every knowledge claim as a power move, a theory which is ‘tempting.’ Tempting as it may be, coming to any final equation is dangerous in any terms: whether this equation is decided to be a staunch social constructionism, scientistic purity, or primordial unity - it’s all a ‘deadly fantasy.’
Rather than bemoaning the frustration of dualisms and offering an unattainable or nonsensical solution, Haraway proposes a different way of thinking about things that could have practical applications - she offers reappropriations, reconstitutions, regenerations. Cyborgs have less to do with ‘birth’, as in the birth of some new mode of thought, rather they rely upon ‘regeneration.’ The cyborg is an alternative pathway out of a ‘maze of dualisms, and ‘In our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.’
In Haraway, we come across a theory which is not destructive but constructive, and privileges useful, imaginative alternatives rather than violent postmodern disillusions: As feminists and theorists, we seek an understanding of ‘how meanings and bodies are made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for the future.’
Haraway’s theory dissolves boundaries, but it also proposes new ways of thinking as well as addresses faults in theories which search for some unifying essence which is practically, socially, and scientifically unattainable. Trained as a scientist, Haraway’s perspective on objectivity is crucial to all humanities-focused theorists, and her concern for humanity is likewise essential to scientists.
She proposes that if this unity is impossible, one can perhaps consider the opposite: a parade of chimeric monsters sporting mechanical limbs, banding together to defy the myth of universal maternal essence. These cyborgs are at the heart of Haraway’s proposal, for they offer potentiality in the rubble left behind in the violent anxiety of what was perceived as ‘postmodernity.’
Cyborgs are different from the machines of the past; one recalls with amusement Walter Benjamin’s poetic fragment regarding an automaton which appeared to be mechanically miraculous but was actually operated by an organic creature within. These are new machines,in an age wherein an organic element does not always prevail and unpredictable maneuverings of machines cannot be chalked up to the presence of some specter. There was a time where machines were not autonomous, and had always the presence of some man (or ghost) within. ‘Now we are not so sure.’ Monsters are transforming into cyborgs, as they are both beings which ‘define the limits of community in Western imaginations.’ When considering how to form political communities (particularly regarding liberation, which the feminist Haraway is committed to), one must understand what the ‘limit’ of community is. Haraway goes beyond this and suggests that we reconsider community, including the monstrous cyborgs that once signified the limit.
Cyborgs, monsters, and labour are bound up with one another - is technology, more specifically perhaps industry, one source of depictions of monsters? In visual culture, this motif reappears: we recall factory workers being likened to zombies or the horrifying Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ Time Machine who co-dwelled subterraneously with clanking, frightening machinery, in constant toil. A Marxist reimagining changes this context which has been applied to ‘monsters.’ In Haraway’s new context, ‘the machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment.’ This recontextualisation and definition of the ‘cyborg’ is so important because it is an answer to the frustratingly vague refrain of an underlying universal unity which feminists have searched in vain for. ‘A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden, it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms.’ Antagonistic dualisms - what a term for those opposing poles which emerge constantly since Hegel’s unleashing of dialectics, a veritable Pandora’s box which upon opening released monsters which theorists have yet to work through. As a scientist, Haraway proposes a feminist way of thinking about objectivity, a task which may have once seemed impossible to her audience of humanities scholars informed by post-structuralist thought. Through readings of The Cyborg Manifesto as well as Haraway’s essay on objectivity, Situated Knowledges, we come to see that there is great potential to be found in creatively re-imagining worlds, humans and boundaries.
The cyborg is the monster of the 21st century and thus is categorised as an enemy, the ‘illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism’. Yet we are reminded that illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins,’ and can imagine that the cyborg could defect from its order, helping us accomplish previously impossible boundary breakdowns, between human and animal, animal and machine, physical and nonphysical. These boundary breakdowns inform rejections which Haraway performs, primarily the rejection of the plot of ‘original unity’ which haunts and perplexes narratives of feminism. This original unity was once thought to be what could unite women under some doctrine of a unifying spiritual mother, but which women were to be united, and how could this be possible due to the varying perspectives? Although Haraway dismisses this doctrine, she graciously acknowledges why and how this idea of unity has proliferated in the critical theory of her era: ‘then came the law of the father and its resolution of the problem of objectivity, solved by always already absent referents, deferred signifieds, split subjects, and the endless play of signifiers. Who wouldn’t grow up warped? Rejecting the impossibility of a split subject forever in agony from some primordial separation, Haraway moves toward a new framework for imagining the subject without this theatrical origin story. The cyborg is ironically without origin; they ‘are not reverent’, they ‘do not remember the cosmos.’ This is ironic because the cyborg, in another idiom, is considered to be the final product of the ‘awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency.’ If this were reformulated as Haraway proposes, a feminist consciousness could latch onto the idea of a self ‘untied from dependency’ on subjugating systems of power.
In order to be rid of the plot of original unity, several dismantlings must occur. First, nature is reconsidered. Feminists could distance themselves from the idea that they are constituted, as a group, by nature. As Derrida puts it, ‘there is no nature, only the effects of nature: denaturalisation or naturalisation.’ The plot of unity is enabled by a conception of nature, and it is kept alive by theories which imply its existence, namely Marxism and psychoanalysis. These ‘depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense.’ As cyborgs, we can eschew that pesky binding oedipal law of the father, we can bypass the impossible agony of a split subject, and we need not be arbitrarily categorised by nature. Cyborgs do not need to operate under the oppressive matrix enacted following the Fall, they turn unflinchingly to the Garden and burn it down, ridding the modern feminist consciousness of the problems of innocence and the necessity of a heterosexual ‘organic’ family. This is an essential break with previous feminist theory which has ‘proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in ‘the West’ since Aristotle still ruled.’ There is thus nothing that makes women ‘essentially woman,’ a problematic statement if one continues to cling to the belief that the only way to achieve unity is through some shared essence. How, then, are we to find unity, and without a shared essence, how are we able to speak each other’s language and form connections?
We seek another meaning or practice of ‘unity.’ Coincidentally, ‘Unity’ is a computer programming language developed in 1988 known for working in a non-deterministic way, allowing for programs to run indefinitely without a teleological flow. Perhaps we can consider a feminist ‘unity’ without exclusion or hierarchy, and Haraway suggests this is possible by seeking ‘affinity’ rather than ‘unity,’ and by reconsidering the faculty of vision. The revolutions which technology has enacted make it necessary to fundamentally disassemble old theories. No unity will be possible under exclusively identity-based feminism. There are possibilities - one could potentially craft a ‘poetic or political unity’ that does not rely on a ‘logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification.’ The feminist dream of some universal tongue is fundamentally impossible.‘Am I not reaching out for you in the only language I know?’ Asks the feminist theorist Audre Lorde. ‘If I try to hear you across your differences will that mean you can hear me?’ Maybe words will not suffice, for the dream of a common language is too tempting and misleading, suggesting too strongly totality. ‘We do not need a totality to work well’ -- after all, totality tends to imply an imperialist force. Haraway suggests we could turn to vision, a fruitful suggestion for visual theorists. Vision could be considered a subjugating force, especially by feminist theorists such as Laura Mulvey, inventor of the critical ‘gaze.’ But reclaiming that force could be useful. ‘Vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions,’ and given its embodied nature, helps privilege a form of unity based not on one-ness but on affinity and appreciation for differing perspectives, literally. Vision can be a good way to think about difference. Vision, like the cyborg, is reclaimed from the territory of a danger, enemy, or weapon, and is tamed and reappropriated into the modern feminist’s arsenal.
The next tool for this arsenal, in addition to the cyborg attitude and a privileging of vision, is a new dialectical method informed by irony. When two things are true at once, we need not performing elaborate dialectical manoeuvres to quell their opposition. Irony allows us to freely sit in the discomfort of two opposing truths. ‘At the center of’ Haraway’s ‘ironic faith’ is the ‘image of the cyborg.’
Haraway then offers a crucial solution to the problem of objectivity, long pondered by feminists and humanities thinkers wary of ‘hard science’. She humorously compares attempting to find a usable doctrine of objectivity to ‘climbing a greased pole,’ but she climbs nonetheless, recognising that an outright rejection of ‘objectivity’ robs us of a useful tool for the arsenal, so to speak. After all,‘we could use some enforceable, reliable accounts of things not reducible to power moves and agonistic, high status games of rhetoric or to scientistic, positivist arrogance. Objectivity has had the misfortune of being bound to Western cultural narratives, but how can one imagine a new narrative for objectivity? Haraway offers yet another solution: situated knowledges. Feminist objectivity is about ‘limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object.’ Perhaps in contradiction to her fellow radical cultural theorists, Haraway is wary of social constructionism, which she categorises as a particular strain of postmodernism, for it runs the risk of assuming and absorbing tired cultural narratives:
We have used a lot of toxic ink and trees processed into paper decrying what they have meant and how it hurts us. The imagined ‘they’ constitute a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories, and the imagined ‘we’ are the embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body, a finite point of view, and so inevitably disqualifying and polluting bias in any discussion of consequence outside our own little circles.
There is a danger, Haraway warns, in theorising every knowledge claim as a power move, a theory which is ‘tempting.’ Tempting as it may be, coming to any final equation is dangerous in any terms: whether this equation is decided to be a staunch social constructionism, scientistic purity, or primordial unity - it’s all a ‘deadly fantasy.’
Rather than bemoaning the frustration of dualisms and offering an unattainable or nonsensical solution, Haraway proposes a different way of thinking about things that could have practical applications - she offers reappropriations, reconstitutions, regenerations. Cyborgs have less to do with ‘birth’, as in the birth of some new mode of thought, rather they rely upon ‘regeneration.’ The cyborg is an alternative pathway out of a ‘maze of dualisms, and ‘In our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.’
In Haraway, we come across a theory which is not destructive but constructive, and privileges useful, imaginative alternatives rather than violent postmodern disillusions: As feminists and theorists, we seek an understanding of ‘how meanings and bodies are made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for the future.’
June 12, 2020
Most of this book was a slog to get through, of the type in which you’re not sure whether the author is actually saying anything of substance, and even if she is, you’re not sure you care enough to read page after page of it for a point that could have been expressed much more succinctly.
The first part especially, “Nature as a System of Production and Reproduction”, seems to me to be of little interest to a non-biologist (but then again, I wonder whether a biologist would find it interesting at all).
The second part, however, “Contested Readings: Narrative Natures”, is brilliant. Its first chapter is an uncharacteristically straightforward consideration of some of the strategies employed by female scientists in the 20th century to claim their place, after decades of women being relegated to a mere object of the study of nature. The starting point of the second chapter is the question “Should we expect a different conceptualisation of nature/science from female life scientists and primatologists?” and answers it with a pleasantly detailed historical and institutional-sociologist account of a group of female primatologists working within the same academic network. The key point of contention are the differences in their data gathering and the way they interpret the behaviour of the females in one specific primate species – and the phenomenon of infanticide in it. The chapter is an excellent argument for the influence of social movements on the interpretation of ‘nature’.
The third chapter in the second part of the book, “Reading Buchi Emecheta: Contests for ‘Women’s Experience’ in Women’s Studies”, is an exploration of how different academics from different positions in Women’s Studies departments regard colonialism and feminism in the fiction of Nigerian-born, British-based Buchi Emecheta. The most valuable feature of Haraway’s feminism for me is its insistence on the importance of contradiction and non-unification, and it’s very visible here in her respect to a reading by Ogunyemi that regards marriage-critical (or anti-marriage?) feminism as immature and colonialist.
The third part of the book, “Differential Politics for Inappropriate/d Others”, is the one that contains Haraway’s most famous essays, “A Cyborg Manifesto” and “ Situated Knowledges”, among others. Both were somehow less exciting on my second reading now. I wonder whether it’s due to their successful seeping into social-science-and-gender-studies, making the arguments themselves seem obsolete? Or if it’s because I’ve become less patient towards a type of writing I perceive as needlessly abstruse?
Finally, I find it curious that such books are famous among people like me, instead of among people trained in the disciplines being critiqued. If you do too, perhaps you’d be interested in a chucklesome review of another of Haraway’s books, Primate Visions, by Matt Cartmill at a Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy. It contains sentences like “This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred times; but that is not a criticism of it, because its author thinks contradictions are a sign o f intellectual ferment and vitality.” and “When she can reasonably construe the writings of female primatologists as being ironic and subversive, Haraway hails them as fellow architects of a new consciousness. When she can no longer evade the suspicion that some of them are trying to discover truths about the order of nature, she is forced to put them down gently as dupes who have swallowed the patriarchal assumptions imbedded in the concepts of "truth," "order," and "nature."”.
The first part especially, “Nature as a System of Production and Reproduction”, seems to me to be of little interest to a non-biologist (but then again, I wonder whether a biologist would find it interesting at all).
The second part, however, “Contested Readings: Narrative Natures”, is brilliant. Its first chapter is an uncharacteristically straightforward consideration of some of the strategies employed by female scientists in the 20th century to claim their place, after decades of women being relegated to a mere object of the study of nature. The starting point of the second chapter is the question “Should we expect a different conceptualisation of nature/science from female life scientists and primatologists?” and answers it with a pleasantly detailed historical and institutional-sociologist account of a group of female primatologists working within the same academic network. The key point of contention are the differences in their data gathering and the way they interpret the behaviour of the females in one specific primate species – and the phenomenon of infanticide in it. The chapter is an excellent argument for the influence of social movements on the interpretation of ‘nature’.
The third chapter in the second part of the book, “Reading Buchi Emecheta: Contests for ‘Women’s Experience’ in Women’s Studies”, is an exploration of how different academics from different positions in Women’s Studies departments regard colonialism and feminism in the fiction of Nigerian-born, British-based Buchi Emecheta. The most valuable feature of Haraway’s feminism for me is its insistence on the importance of contradiction and non-unification, and it’s very visible here in her respect to a reading by Ogunyemi that regards marriage-critical (or anti-marriage?) feminism as immature and colonialist.
The third part of the book, “Differential Politics for Inappropriate/d Others”, is the one that contains Haraway’s most famous essays, “A Cyborg Manifesto” and “ Situated Knowledges”, among others. Both were somehow less exciting on my second reading now. I wonder whether it’s due to their successful seeping into social-science-and-gender-studies, making the arguments themselves seem obsolete? Or if it’s because I’ve become less patient towards a type of writing I perceive as needlessly abstruse?
Finally, I find it curious that such books are famous among people like me, instead of among people trained in the disciplines being critiqued. If you do too, perhaps you’d be interested in a chucklesome review of another of Haraway’s books, Primate Visions, by Matt Cartmill at a Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy. It contains sentences like “This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred times; but that is not a criticism of it, because its author thinks contradictions are a sign o f intellectual ferment and vitality.” and “When she can reasonably construe the writings of female primatologists as being ironic and subversive, Haraway hails them as fellow architects of a new consciousness. When she can no longer evade the suspicion that some of them are trying to discover truths about the order of nature, she is forced to put them down gently as dupes who have swallowed the patriarchal assumptions imbedded in the concepts of "truth," "order," and "nature."”.
April 30, 2023
3.5 Stars
I could have definitely understood more of what was being said in this book, Haraway is no Sagan when it comes to science communication. I have liked the other stuff I have read by Haraway much better. I picked out many threads that I could see developed her more recent work "Staying with Trouble" (which I loved).
Probably wouldn't recommend this book to most people, only theory nerds.
Despite all that, there was some good theory presented in this book and I am sure even more that was lost in translation to me. Here are some of my favorite passages;
"We must however, be acutely aware of the dangers of using old rules to tell new tales... Such theories still elude us, because we are now engaged in a political-scientific struggle to formulate the rules through which we will articulate them."
"Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities."
"Perhaps the world resist being reduced to mere resource because it is-- not mother/matter/mutter -- but coyote, a figure for the always problematic, always potent tie of meanings and bodies."
I could have definitely understood more of what was being said in this book, Haraway is no Sagan when it comes to science communication. I have liked the other stuff I have read by Haraway much better. I picked out many threads that I could see developed her more recent work "Staying with Trouble" (which I loved).
Probably wouldn't recommend this book to most people, only theory nerds.
Despite all that, there was some good theory presented in this book and I am sure even more that was lost in translation to me. Here are some of my favorite passages;
"We must however, be acutely aware of the dangers of using old rules to tell new tales... Such theories still elude us, because we are now engaged in a political-scientific struggle to formulate the rules through which we will articulate them."
"Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities."
"Perhaps the world resist being reduced to mere resource because it is-- not mother/matter/mutter -- but coyote, a figure for the always problematic, always potent tie of meanings and bodies."
August 17, 2023
Given this was my first real dive into Haraway's writing aside from some required reading in college, I'm still a bit boggled by the brilliance of her writing. That being said, although the tenets of postmodernism are laid out in a very clear manner, I wonder if they are still as relevant as they were when Haraway wrote these texts given the quick pace at which technological society continues to change. I cannot help but think, "What would Haraway make of LLMs?" or "Cyborg culture breaking into the mainstream?" Alas, Haraway put forth great texts for understanding the post-WWII era, addressing the many ways in which power is created and distributed across constructed genders, roles, and histories.
April 29, 2022
Has some interesting things to talk about regarding race and gender, but references Stars Wars way too much.
Not amazing. Not terrible.
Not amazing. Not terrible.
July 23, 2020
Is it sexist (or masculinist, or phallogocentric) to seek dominance in the contested battleground of the anthropology of human nature? Or is this battleground of constructed and reconstructed human nature really open to a subtler array of strategies and maneuvers? In the pages of Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, which bears the more fitting subtitle ‘The Reinvention of Nature’, Haraway fights the good fight against scientistic rhetoric and essentialist reduction, indicating how both the rhetoric and reductio ad absurdum of deriving all human behavior from a ‘natural’ genetic selfishness plays itself out. But before monkeying around with some of the scientific community’s most trusted and hallowed categories (e.g. ‘objectivity’, ‘nature’, ‘origin’, ‘sex’, even ‘science’ itself), Haraway demonstrates her authority (I won’t say legitimacy) both as a natural scientist (she is an expert on functional adaptation among primates) and as a human scientist (dialectical critique included). The tension between these two domains of ‘science’ (Natural/eternal vs. Human/historical) gives Simians, Cyborgs, and Women its rhetorical potency and ensures its controversial legacy.
In her chapter called Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway scrutinizes modern (or postmodern) technology, unveiling an ideology of mastery, of Man (or is it just ‘men’?) dominating Nature (our mother?). In minimizing, maximizing, or optimizing our technology in the interests of capitalism or colonialism, control over nature (and over people) is produced and reproduced. We have no say in any of this world-changing technology apart from our role as consumers, or as scientists, if we belong to the fraternity . But while breaching the walls of the bastion of science remains a problem for many women, Haraway sees here an opportunity. To say that science has a bias, in large part because it is dominated by men and their egos, entails the conclusion that another view, another perspective, and perhaps a countervailing bias of one’s own, is both epistemologically possible, and may in fact be a necessary detour on the way to scientific truth. In other words, feminism makes good science, not phony revisionism of a science already developed. Regarding the development of scientific terminology (and especially of crucial vocabulary pegged to controversial concepts like ‘nature’ or ‘sex’), Haraway advocates “…for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for the responsibility in their constructions.” The critic of science shouldn’t just get lost in the play of signifiers; there is a lot of real work to be done.
In some ways, Haraway’s best ideas emerge from her incisive analogy between sociobiology and political economy. Sociobiology places all its emphasis on the optimization of genetic reproduction. According to sociobiologists, we organize as families because that is how we further our DNA, and we might philander to spread our genes a little further afield. The only thing that matters to the organism is that he/she/it come out ahead in the struggle for genetic dissemination. As far as sociobiology is concerned, human reproduction must show a profit. Likewise in the sphere of political economy, at least of the bourgeois variety, coming out ahead is also the name of the game, whether the players of this game are individuals, corporations, or nation-states. This largely unnoticed analogy between, on the one hand, the population in a gene pool and, on the other hand, the producers and consumers in a market economy, unfortunately has an intuitive appeal: just as a species in the context of its ecology appears to advance through cutthroat competition, so also does an agent in the context of his/her/its economic conditions advance through the same cutthroat competition, leading to a general warfare, bellum omnium contra omnes. This all too familiar ideology of social Darwinism leads not only to imperialism and racism, but also to bad science. Sociobiologists, by poaching in the anthropological woods, far from revealing a new code of truth, have returned to a pernicious Victorian world view. Haraway’s critique goes on to deconstruct the significance of sex in this political economy of gene propagation, where the dominance of men is naturalized. As she puts it, “the fundamental sexism is less in the rationalization of sex roles as genetically predisposed, than in the basic engineering logic of ‘human’ domination by ‘nature’.”
And it is not just technology that is the source of our problems. The entire pretext of Man as the deserving master of the universe goes a long way toward showing how sex and gender become subsumed in sociobiology as hard-wired proclivities. But is it not the case that what biologists and anthropologists see around them in their western bourgeois habitats is taken as natural and is projected on the findings of both primatology and paleontology? This naturalization of the actual status quo into an inevitability is what ideology is all about, after all. For this reason, Haraway subjects biology as a whole to a feminist ideological critique: “A feminist history of science...could examine that part of biological science in which our alleged evolutionary biology is traced and supposedly inevitable patterns of order based on domination are legitimated.” As an historian of science, Haraway makes the bold claim that “the open future rests on a new past,” as good a battle cry against sexist pseudo-objective science as any, especially as the ‘new past’ will help revise the narrative of human evolution and human nature. This fight for origins is also the fight over human destiny.
If you were to read only one of the papers collected in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, I suggest the one called Situated Knowledges. In it, Haraway argues for a science steeped in hermeneutics. All scientists bring with them to the research endeavor a set of assumptions and unexamined beliefs regarding the way the world ‘should’ be, or actually ‘might’ be. This speculation over possible worlds inevitably clouds or impedes the production of objective knowledge. Haraway argues for a better science, which would be reflexive in its method and pluralist in its judgments. Better science dispenses with the ‘god-tricks’ of relativism (which sees everything from nowhere) and objectivity (which sees everything from the one true perspective, also apparently from nowhere). As better science, feminist science takes a position. It calls out the lie about seeing everything from the eternal point of view, Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis. Scientists have no god’s eye view, just a partial perspective: “it is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspective that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective enquiry rests.” You can only really see clearly by seeing from somewhere in particular: “The science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality.” Women as a group occupy a minority position in science. In the name of postmodern pluralism and deconstruction, the minority’s point of view can provide a ballast to help keep our ship aright as we steer science in a more just and less ideological-hegemonic direction.
It comes as little suprise that the boys didn’t go for it, nor did very many women in science, who might not have appreciated being singled out and lumped together as women having a different way of understanding scientific fact. C’est dommage. I think Haraway scared away too many biologists (while at the same time attracting a lot of anthropologists) with all her talk about the ‘internal craft rules’ for working in natural science. She also might have frightened away the positivist crowd with her insistence that science is a ‘myth’, albeit a ‘rigorous’ one. Her status as a ‘real’ scientist perhaps slipped some more after her proclamation that we should play with our theories while being rigorous in our methodology, yet without “worshiping the fetish of scientific objectivity.” But in the last instance, science and progress are given a reprieve in this book. We cannot dispense with progressive science the way we hope to do with reactionary ideology. According to Haraway, “we cannot go back, ideologically or materially: it’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess.’”
As a hermeneutics scholar, Haraway is aware of Dilthey’s contrast between natural science, which is based on eternal principles, and human science, which is grounded in changing histories. But she intentionally violates the purity of this distinction. While sociobiologists reduce all complexity of being human to the natural (ultimately to the propagation of DNA), Haraway reduces the natural to the human (ultimately to the boundless possibilities of culture). What makes us human is that we are human in a certain way, that we are who we are because we are in some way different from other populations of humans (and from other hominids). Civilization does not grow like some kind of parasite living off our DNA. Instead, our DNA is just another factor in the dialectics of gender, sex, and yes, domination.
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women belongs, in my opinion, in the canon of feminist anthropology. Like Mead, Haraway sees gender as variously constructed and not innate. Like Ortner, Haraway carefully unravels the nuanced interrelations between nature/culture, sex/gender, and most tellingly female/male, which resists simple reduction to the other binary contrasts.
Haraway's examination of the myth and science of primates is better treated in Primate Visions, her magnum opus.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the contested zones of human nature and production/reproduction. If these contested zones comprise a battleground, then Haraway might be the Amazon warrior dominating the high ground. The book is challenging but worth the effort. As a student of the human sciences, I think it would be nice if one of ours could tell the ‘hard’ sciences what they can do with their findings. Maybe put them back where they found them. Not all scientists are cultural philistines, but enough of them are to make it difficult to dispense with the ‘god trick’ of objectivity. Of course, objectivity is a powerful god, whose tricks go back at least to Spinoza, if not Aristotle. And while I concur with Haraway that seeing is always seeing from somewhere, and that reflexivity is the only reliable way to fight bias, I fear scientists, men or women alike, will find it impossible to do away with the ultimately ideological pursuit of pure cognition independent of any human bias or influence. As i said, c'est dommage.
In her chapter called Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway scrutinizes modern (or postmodern) technology, unveiling an ideology of mastery, of Man (or is it just ‘men’?) dominating Nature (our mother?). In minimizing, maximizing, or optimizing our technology in the interests of capitalism or colonialism, control over nature (and over people) is produced and reproduced. We have no say in any of this world-changing technology apart from our role as consumers, or as scientists, if we belong to the fraternity . But while breaching the walls of the bastion of science remains a problem for many women, Haraway sees here an opportunity. To say that science has a bias, in large part because it is dominated by men and their egos, entails the conclusion that another view, another perspective, and perhaps a countervailing bias of one’s own, is both epistemologically possible, and may in fact be a necessary detour on the way to scientific truth. In other words, feminism makes good science, not phony revisionism of a science already developed. Regarding the development of scientific terminology (and especially of crucial vocabulary pegged to controversial concepts like ‘nature’ or ‘sex’), Haraway advocates “…for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for the responsibility in their constructions.” The critic of science shouldn’t just get lost in the play of signifiers; there is a lot of real work to be done.
In some ways, Haraway’s best ideas emerge from her incisive analogy between sociobiology and political economy. Sociobiology places all its emphasis on the optimization of genetic reproduction. According to sociobiologists, we organize as families because that is how we further our DNA, and we might philander to spread our genes a little further afield. The only thing that matters to the organism is that he/she/it come out ahead in the struggle for genetic dissemination. As far as sociobiology is concerned, human reproduction must show a profit. Likewise in the sphere of political economy, at least of the bourgeois variety, coming out ahead is also the name of the game, whether the players of this game are individuals, corporations, or nation-states. This largely unnoticed analogy between, on the one hand, the population in a gene pool and, on the other hand, the producers and consumers in a market economy, unfortunately has an intuitive appeal: just as a species in the context of its ecology appears to advance through cutthroat competition, so also does an agent in the context of his/her/its economic conditions advance through the same cutthroat competition, leading to a general warfare, bellum omnium contra omnes. This all too familiar ideology of social Darwinism leads not only to imperialism and racism, but also to bad science. Sociobiologists, by poaching in the anthropological woods, far from revealing a new code of truth, have returned to a pernicious Victorian world view. Haraway’s critique goes on to deconstruct the significance of sex in this political economy of gene propagation, where the dominance of men is naturalized. As she puts it, “the fundamental sexism is less in the rationalization of sex roles as genetically predisposed, than in the basic engineering logic of ‘human’ domination by ‘nature’.”
And it is not just technology that is the source of our problems. The entire pretext of Man as the deserving master of the universe goes a long way toward showing how sex and gender become subsumed in sociobiology as hard-wired proclivities. But is it not the case that what biologists and anthropologists see around them in their western bourgeois habitats is taken as natural and is projected on the findings of both primatology and paleontology? This naturalization of the actual status quo into an inevitability is what ideology is all about, after all. For this reason, Haraway subjects biology as a whole to a feminist ideological critique: “A feminist history of science...could examine that part of biological science in which our alleged evolutionary biology is traced and supposedly inevitable patterns of order based on domination are legitimated.” As an historian of science, Haraway makes the bold claim that “the open future rests on a new past,” as good a battle cry against sexist pseudo-objective science as any, especially as the ‘new past’ will help revise the narrative of human evolution and human nature. This fight for origins is also the fight over human destiny.
If you were to read only one of the papers collected in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, I suggest the one called Situated Knowledges. In it, Haraway argues for a science steeped in hermeneutics. All scientists bring with them to the research endeavor a set of assumptions and unexamined beliefs regarding the way the world ‘should’ be, or actually ‘might’ be. This speculation over possible worlds inevitably clouds or impedes the production of objective knowledge. Haraway argues for a better science, which would be reflexive in its method and pluralist in its judgments. Better science dispenses with the ‘god-tricks’ of relativism (which sees everything from nowhere) and objectivity (which sees everything from the one true perspective, also apparently from nowhere). As better science, feminist science takes a position. It calls out the lie about seeing everything from the eternal point of view, Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis. Scientists have no god’s eye view, just a partial perspective: “it is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspective that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective enquiry rests.” You can only really see clearly by seeing from somewhere in particular: “The science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality.” Women as a group occupy a minority position in science. In the name of postmodern pluralism and deconstruction, the minority’s point of view can provide a ballast to help keep our ship aright as we steer science in a more just and less ideological-hegemonic direction.
It comes as little suprise that the boys didn’t go for it, nor did very many women in science, who might not have appreciated being singled out and lumped together as women having a different way of understanding scientific fact. C’est dommage. I think Haraway scared away too many biologists (while at the same time attracting a lot of anthropologists) with all her talk about the ‘internal craft rules’ for working in natural science. She also might have frightened away the positivist crowd with her insistence that science is a ‘myth’, albeit a ‘rigorous’ one. Her status as a ‘real’ scientist perhaps slipped some more after her proclamation that we should play with our theories while being rigorous in our methodology, yet without “worshiping the fetish of scientific objectivity.” But in the last instance, science and progress are given a reprieve in this book. We cannot dispense with progressive science the way we hope to do with reactionary ideology. According to Haraway, “we cannot go back, ideologically or materially: it’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess.’”
As a hermeneutics scholar, Haraway is aware of Dilthey’s contrast between natural science, which is based on eternal principles, and human science, which is grounded in changing histories. But she intentionally violates the purity of this distinction. While sociobiologists reduce all complexity of being human to the natural (ultimately to the propagation of DNA), Haraway reduces the natural to the human (ultimately to the boundless possibilities of culture). What makes us human is that we are human in a certain way, that we are who we are because we are in some way different from other populations of humans (and from other hominids). Civilization does not grow like some kind of parasite living off our DNA. Instead, our DNA is just another factor in the dialectics of gender, sex, and yes, domination.
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women belongs, in my opinion, in the canon of feminist anthropology. Like Mead, Haraway sees gender as variously constructed and not innate. Like Ortner, Haraway carefully unravels the nuanced interrelations between nature/culture, sex/gender, and most tellingly female/male, which resists simple reduction to the other binary contrasts.
Haraway's examination of the myth and science of primates is better treated in Primate Visions, her magnum opus.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the contested zones of human nature and production/reproduction. If these contested zones comprise a battleground, then Haraway might be the Amazon warrior dominating the high ground. The book is challenging but worth the effort. As a student of the human sciences, I think it would be nice if one of ours could tell the ‘hard’ sciences what they can do with their findings. Maybe put them back where they found them. Not all scientists are cultural philistines, but enough of them are to make it difficult to dispense with the ‘god trick’ of objectivity. Of course, objectivity is a powerful god, whose tricks go back at least to Spinoza, if not Aristotle. And while I concur with Haraway that seeing is always seeing from somewhere, and that reflexivity is the only reliable way to fight bias, I fear scientists, men or women alike, will find it impossible to do away with the ultimately ideological pursuit of pure cognition independent of any human bias or influence. As i said, c'est dommage.
September 10, 2007
The best damn postmodern essayist of the 80's and 90's. Everyone ends up reading the Cyborg Manifesto as an undergraduate at some point, but it's well worth a re-reading (although I am forced to admit that at more than twenty years old, it's language--but not ideas--are a bit dated). I need to remember to assign essays from this book more often. "The Past as a Contested Zone" is a brilliant critique about the way we think about human nature and a discussion of discourses among primatologists at the same time; "Situated Knowledges" is one of the most influential essays on my own thinking about epistemology, and "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies" finds surprising insight on the subject of how we think about the self through a reading of discourses about human immune systems.
October 14, 2018
A cyborg is an irony not a prophecy; it is already happening in out daily life. It is the future that we are constructing, the science is constructed not discovered, and the truth is made not found. Therefore, a cyborg feminism will be a chance to create a post-œdipal era, a world without gender. Constructing our reality by using our new myths (science is one of these myth) is a way for a new utopia, a cyborg has no genesis, we do not have to follow history in order to know its complexes. Œdipus “left“ the equation.
I will rewrite this after I finish my second read. This books if extraordinarily amazing, not only for feminists it is also helpful as a way of thinking. FIVE STARS.
I will rewrite this after I finish my second read. This books if extraordinarily amazing, not only for feminists it is also helpful as a way of thinking. FIVE STARS.
September 16, 2007
Modern feminist theorist Haraway's essays on biology and human culture that mixes traditional Marxist thought with postmodernism.
April 3, 2021
Contains several chapters that stand well on their own and ought to be read by anyone thinking seriously about science and technology.
January 9, 2008
I love this book! Her essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" is in it, which is a must-read.
March 31, 2013
Too much postmodern truth relativism.
May 11, 2020
I was in university. Did some studies in History of Science, Philosophy of Science and reading a lot of communications theorists. Many of them coming from economics or history. Somehow, this book of essays ended up crossing my path.
I was deeply disappointed in postmodernism and the weird binary that seemed to infect academy. Sure, I was undergrad but I had hoped that learning stuff would somehow at least reflect some of my daily experience. Reading Kuhn and how science is done helped a lot. Sure, there was messiness and contradictions but it seemed to hold together better than a lot of the other stuff out there.
The idea of the cyborg, even though it was partially a joke, kind of got at a way out. It was a way to construct self in a shitty system that didn't rely on having to agree to certain ideas about the current system. That was helpful but the current explanations sucked. They still do.
Cyborg theory is gaining a new life lately and it is one of two essays that seemed to still be interesting to me as a reader reading this almost 30 years later. The other was on sex/gender. The basic thrust was how to define sex/gender for a Marxist dictionary. The part that I like and keep turning over is that sex/gender is like nature/culture. In science, the nature/nurture thing is kind of dead. It doesn't mean that it isn't sometimes helpful but it isn't a good way of talking about how things are in toto.
That essay has a lot of other valid points around gender the word and the construct that at least get one thinking. This looking at binaries and saying that maybe that wasn't all there is while still using them for their ability to allow for criticism felt more real than the alternative of diving into a whole mess of other -isms.
It also gave me the push to leave academia because even with this, the Kuhn book and her other essays, in some ways showed me that the way school works would never work for me. it is a lot of politics, hierarchy, and genealogy of thought and not a lot of trying to see how that works for most people. It is a lot of middle class white folk arguing about stuff they haven't lived.
I do have a soft spot because of this. I would recommend it for folks who have a decent knowledge of the history of science. I know that it is aimed at feminists but it is from a different era now and I am not sure how much they would see themselves in it. However, for all its sloppyness and fury making goodness, I would recommend reading A Cyborg Manifesto. Don't mind the wooly thinking. It is trying to embrace that.
I was deeply disappointed in postmodernism and the weird binary that seemed to infect academy. Sure, I was undergrad but I had hoped that learning stuff would somehow at least reflect some of my daily experience. Reading Kuhn and how science is done helped a lot. Sure, there was messiness and contradictions but it seemed to hold together better than a lot of the other stuff out there.
The idea of the cyborg, even though it was partially a joke, kind of got at a way out. It was a way to construct self in a shitty system that didn't rely on having to agree to certain ideas about the current system. That was helpful but the current explanations sucked. They still do.
Cyborg theory is gaining a new life lately and it is one of two essays that seemed to still be interesting to me as a reader reading this almost 30 years later. The other was on sex/gender. The basic thrust was how to define sex/gender for a Marxist dictionary. The part that I like and keep turning over is that sex/gender is like nature/culture. In science, the nature/nurture thing is kind of dead. It doesn't mean that it isn't sometimes helpful but it isn't a good way of talking about how things are in toto.
That essay has a lot of other valid points around gender the word and the construct that at least get one thinking. This looking at binaries and saying that maybe that wasn't all there is while still using them for their ability to allow for criticism felt more real than the alternative of diving into a whole mess of other -isms.
It also gave me the push to leave academia because even with this, the Kuhn book and her other essays, in some ways showed me that the way school works would never work for me. it is a lot of politics, hierarchy, and genealogy of thought and not a lot of trying to see how that works for most people. It is a lot of middle class white folk arguing about stuff they haven't lived.
I do have a soft spot because of this. I would recommend it for folks who have a decent knowledge of the history of science. I know that it is aimed at feminists but it is from a different era now and I am not sure how much they would see themselves in it. However, for all its sloppyness and fury making goodness, I would recommend reading A Cyborg Manifesto. Don't mind the wooly thinking. It is trying to embrace that.
June 19, 2019
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women is a collection of ten essays, covering a range of topics on the intersection of science and feminism. The writing is highly associative, which is an interesting and surprisingly effective style of communication, but it also requires effort to try and see the book from Haraway's intended perspective. I tried to read the book as a work on philosophy of science.
Especially in the first few chapters, the book is grounded in a thorough overview of the history of evolutionary psychology and primate sociology, Haraway's original field of study. Her reading of these sciences is essentially as a tool of oppression; the category of nature is constructed by observing apes through the lens of theoretical frameworks that fit within the mindset of prestigious scientific institutes. Basically, scientists have exclusively looked at male apes as drivers of change, and have interpreted the role of female apes as passive and reproductive. Only through advancement in human society did scientists start considering other points of view.
This work culminates in the essay on Situated Knowledges, in which Haraway argues that the concept of objectivity is fundamentally inaccessible, and any pretense of it is merely a tool for the powerful to elevate their own perspective. Instead, all knowledge should be considered situated within its social context. The point is not that all theories are equally valid (indeed the standard scientific demands of rigor should apply), nor that they are primarily socially constructed as in Kuhnian philosophy of science, but that they can develop and communicate on equal footing. Science should be stronger when it can learn from multiple different perspectives rather than insisting that the interpretation of powerful men is most "objective".
In short she is taking Popper's observation that facts are theory-laden one step further to observe that "theory" includes the scientist's perspective of reality and thus social position.
Overall, the book gives a fascinating perspective on the nature of facts and science, providing much food for thought but never a truly concrete view. The most famous essay, the Cyborg Manifesto, is actually the odd one out. Unfortunately that one went over my head.
Especially in the first few chapters, the book is grounded in a thorough overview of the history of evolutionary psychology and primate sociology, Haraway's original field of study. Her reading of these sciences is essentially as a tool of oppression; the category of nature is constructed by observing apes through the lens of theoretical frameworks that fit within the mindset of prestigious scientific institutes. Basically, scientists have exclusively looked at male apes as drivers of change, and have interpreted the role of female apes as passive and reproductive. Only through advancement in human society did scientists start considering other points of view.
This work culminates in the essay on Situated Knowledges, in which Haraway argues that the concept of objectivity is fundamentally inaccessible, and any pretense of it is merely a tool for the powerful to elevate their own perspective. Instead, all knowledge should be considered situated within its social context. The point is not that all theories are equally valid (indeed the standard scientific demands of rigor should apply), nor that they are primarily socially constructed as in Kuhnian philosophy of science, but that they can develop and communicate on equal footing. Science should be stronger when it can learn from multiple different perspectives rather than insisting that the interpretation of powerful men is most "objective".
In short she is taking Popper's observation that facts are theory-laden one step further to observe that "theory" includes the scientist's perspective of reality and thus social position.
Overall, the book gives a fascinating perspective on the nature of facts and science, providing much food for thought but never a truly concrete view. The most famous essay, the Cyborg Manifesto, is actually the odd one out. Unfortunately that one went over my head.
December 1, 2018
I read The Cyborg Manifesto and found it long, convoluted, contradictory and so abstract that I questioned the practical use of it. I am really surprised and suspicious of the popularity of this book. Does it only matter to people that it's a radical polemic for liberating women, and not that it's mostly incoherent and contradictory? I am not against inspiring a revolt that is justified in the very least by benefiting those who revolt, but for me this book proposes no clear aim or result but only to disengage with society.
My understanding of the Cyborg Manifesto was:
1. Past feminist theories have been too sure of representing one woman's experience as the collective woman's experience.
2. Past feminist theories have not escaped patriarchal or other forms of societal institution oppression due to the fact that they hold beliefs to the female sex, a binary system.
3. Therefore, if women became more like the cyborg by first removing binary sex/gender distinctions from their identity and associated objects, and second by removing the belief that their individual experience correlates with their biological makeup, then this will liberate more people from societal oppression.
4. Instead cyborgs should act on affinity (as in, desire) rather than identity (as in social labels of gender/class/race).
----
The review by the The International Journal of Primatology on Haraway's Primate Visions is a better articulated version of how I feel when reading or listening to anything by Donna Haraway:
https://link.springer.com/article/10....
My understanding of the Cyborg Manifesto was:
1. Past feminist theories have been too sure of representing one woman's experience as the collective woman's experience.
2. Past feminist theories have not escaped patriarchal or other forms of societal institution oppression due to the fact that they hold beliefs to the female sex, a binary system.
3. Therefore, if women became more like the cyborg by first removing binary sex/gender distinctions from their identity and associated objects, and second by removing the belief that their individual experience correlates with their biological makeup, then this will liberate more people from societal oppression.
4. Instead cyborgs should act on affinity (as in, desire) rather than identity (as in social labels of gender/class/race).
----
The review by the The International Journal of Primatology on Haraway's Primate Visions is a better articulated version of how I feel when reading or listening to anything by Donna Haraway:
https://link.springer.com/article/10....
September 24, 2023
During the first two hundred pages, I was afraid Donna was never going to stop talking about apes. I have enjoyed the whole simian journey -Primate visions and this first piece- but I've had enough now, thanks. I've got some lessons from it, though. Anyway, after that I expected very much, but not-so-much came to me. I find it extremely difficult to take notes on her, and sometimes even following her can be simply exhausting. My body is boiling right now, having read from beginning to end the last chapter on AIDS. I found very interesting, of course, the cyborg manifesto: the problem for me is that the term just doesn't work for me, maybe I'm too much of a luddite myself, but I can't stop wishing for a future in which humans do not need technology, understood exclusively as electrical, control devices, to communicate with each other. I frankly think that technology has helped us during millennia, but for the last century it has only made things worse. It's ok, though, to be able to argue with her about this, as I'm sure there won't be much more I don't agree with. I have found extremely interesting as well her passages about feminist sci-fi, and I can't wait to begin using my own lectures as epistemological resources. Who would have thought narrative was anything but mere entertainment? Sometimes, we must admit, it is. Anyway, I'm going to keep working with Donna during the following weeks. I'm extremely excited to read her last books, Companion species and Staying with the trouble.
June 24, 2020
I feel like I had higher hopes for this book because of how much Haraway has been talked/hyped up to me by people I know. Maybe I had unrealistic hopes for it, considering that most of my struggles with "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women" came from the fact that about half of the book wasn't relevant for me based on my research interests. I dragged myself through the first three chapters on primates. The only redeeming parts were the "Cyborg Manifesto" and the last essay in the collection on the immune system as a metaphor, which reminded me of Susan Sontag's book on illness, which I have yet to read but have heard covers some very similar ground as Haraway. The writing style is dense, all over the place in terms of structure, and really dry. Maybe if I had someone reaching this to me and taking several weeks to really cover the content in depth, rather than leaving me to my own devices to try swimming my way through this sea of interlaced and often repetitive thoughts, then I would've enjoyed, or at least understood, "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women" more/better. Will file this for revisiting in the future, especially since my patience began to thing by the time I got to the two chapters I genuinely was interested in and was therefore unable to fully process what was happening.
December 5, 2017
Such a comprehensive exploration of the current position of women and feminism in all its permutations, Haraway argues that we move away from dualism, which can only compound the notion of woman as defined by what-man-is-not or by what-man-desires. Instead, she argues for liminality, for acknowledgement of the leaky boundaries in which women can establish themselves simply as. This also allows space for even more marginalised groups of women - non-white, non-English speaking, post-colonial.
In a world where technology is challenging key concepts such as labour, work and economics, Haraway argues for women to occupy the spaces hollowed out by this redefinition, to combine their multiplicities in order to exert power over new definitions and therefore over what they are, rather than what they are not.
In a world where technology is challenging key concepts such as labour, work and economics, Haraway argues for women to occupy the spaces hollowed out by this redefinition, to combine their multiplicities in order to exert power over new definitions and therefore over what they are, rather than what they are not.
August 14, 2020
Donna J. Haraway es bióloga de profesión, por esto algunos temas que trata en su libro tienen algún referente de este campo lo cual los complementa. El feminismo es un tema bastante complejo en nuestra compulsiva sociedad, mas aún cuando no se tiene conocimiento de lo profundo y fundamentado que se encuentra.
Un libro complejo, denso, pero impecablemente fundamentado. A lo largo de esta disertación encuentro algunas posturas muy interesantes con su visión del feminismo:
- Es necesario utilizar un lenguaje "peligroso/transgresor".
- Despertar de los dualismos "mente/cuerpo, animal/máquina, etc."
- Necesidad de unidad, de las personas que tratan de resistir la intensificación universal del dominio.
- Luchar por otras formas de poder y de placer en las sociedades tecnológicas.
Un libro complejo, denso, pero impecablemente fundamentado. A lo largo de esta disertación encuentro algunas posturas muy interesantes con su visión del feminismo:
- Es necesario utilizar un lenguaje "peligroso/transgresor".
- Despertar de los dualismos "mente/cuerpo, animal/máquina, etc."
- Necesidad de unidad, de las personas que tratan de resistir la intensificación universal del dominio.
- Luchar por otras formas de poder y de placer en las sociedades tecnológicas.
January 27, 2020
é possível que os diferentes gêneros (textuais) tenham seu lugar em diferentes momentos, e sem dúvida a forma da coletânea de artigos não ajuda a construir uma coerência ou um equilíbrio de abordagens - mas hoje me interessam muito mais as histórias que haraway re-conta (sobre a produção científica ou os feminismos), em sua concretude e particularidade analítica, que os vôos da teoria, com seus rasgos grandiloquentes e palavrosos. considerando a defesa do "conhecimento situado" que haraway defende (inclusive nos textos mais teóricos), acho que ela concordaria comigo.
May 6, 2021
Loved this book and its insights, reframings and unapckings. Important reframing on the subjective v objective discourse in science, or generally, and on the observer v the observed. Lots of great examples of the politics of the scientific discourse, such as the connection between primate research and essentialist arguments about men and women. Strong arguments for the importance of acknowledging situated, partial knowledge as part of a conversation with a world that may just be a trickster with a sense of humor.
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