Donna Haraway

Philosophy

"A Cyborg Manifesto"

In 1985, Haraway published the essay "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" in Socialist Review. Although most of Haraway's earlier work was focused on emphasizing the masculine bias in scientific culture, she has also contributed greatly to the feminist narratives of the twentieth century. For Haraway, the Manifesto offered a response to the rising conservatism during the 1980s in the United States at a critical juncture at which feminists, to have any real-world significance, had to acknowledge their situatedness within what she terms the "informatics of domination." Women were no longer on the outside along a hierarchy of privileged binaries but rather deeply imbued, exploited by and complicit within networked hegemony, and had to form their politics as such.

Cyborg feminism

In her updated essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", in her book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Haraway uses the cyborg metaphor to explain how fundamental contradictions in feminist theory and identity should be conjoined, rather than resolved, similar to the fusion of machine and organism in cyborgs. The manifesto is also an important feminist critique of capitalism by revealing how men have exploited women's reproduction labor, providing a barrier for women to reach full equality in the labor market. She later discussed her thoughts on A Cyborg Manifesto, gender and 'post-gender' in 2006, critiquing distinct and imposed categories; "people are made to live several non-isomorphic categories simultaneously, all of which torque them".

Primate Visions

Haraway also writes about the history of science and biology. In Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1990), she focused on the metaphors and narratives that direct the science of primatology. She asserted that there is a tendency to masculinize the stories about "reproductive competition and sex between aggressive males and receptive females [that] facilitate some and preclude other types of conclusions". She contended that female primatologists focus on different observations that require more communication and basic survival activities, offering very different perspectives of the origins of nature and culture than the currently accepted ones. Drawing on examples of Western narratives and ideologies of gender, race and class, Haraway questioned the most fundamental constructions of scientific human nature stories based on primates. In Primate Visions, she wrote:

My hope has been that the always oblique and sometimes perverse focusing would facilitate revisions of fundamental, persistent western narratives about difference, especially racial and sexual difference; about reproduction, especially in terms of the multiplicities of generators and offspring; and about survival, especially about survival imagined in the boundary conditions of both the origins and ends of history, as told within western traditions of that complex genre.

Haraway's aim for science is "to reveal the limits and impossibility of its 'objectivity' and to consider some recent revisions offered by feminist primatologists". Haraway presents an alternative perspective to the accepted ideologies that continue to shape the way scientific human nature stories are created. Haraway urges feminists to be more involved in the world of technoscience and to be credited for that involvement. In a 1997 publication, she remarked:

I want feminists to be enrolled more tightly in the meaning-making processes of technoscientific world-building. I also want feminist—activists, cultural producers, scientists, engineers, and scholars (all overlapping categories) — to be recognized for the articulations and enrollment we have been making all along within technoscience, in spite of the ignorance of most "mainstream" scholars in their characterization (or lack of characterizations) of feminism in relation to both technoscientific practice and technoscience studies.

Make Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations

Haraway created a panel called "Make Kin not Babies" in 2015 with five other feminist thinkers. The panel's emphasis was on moving human numbers down while paying attention to factors, such as the environment, race, and class. A key phrase of Haraway's is "Making babies is different than giving babies a good childhood." She and another panelist, Adele Clarke, later published the corresponding book Making Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations.

Speculative fabulation

Speculative fabulation is a concept that is included in many of Haraway's works. It includes all of the wild facts that will not hold still, and it indicates a mode of creativity and the story of the Anthropocene. Haraway stresses how this does not mean it is not a fact. In Staying with the Trouble, she defines speculative fabulation as "a mode of attention, theory of history, and a practice of worlding," and she finds it an integral part of scholarly writing and everyday life. In Haraway's work she addresses a feminist speculative fabulation and its focusing on making kin instead of babies to ensure the good childhood of all children while controlling the population. Making Kin not Population: Reconceiving Generations highlights practices and proposals to implement this theory in society.

The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

The companion Species Manifesto is to be read as a “personal document”. This work was written to tell the story of cohabitation, coevolution and embodied cross-species sociality. Haraway argues that humans 'companion' relationship with dogs can show us the importance of recognizing differences and ‘how to engage with significant otherness'. The link between humans and animals like dogs can show people how to interact with other humans and nonhumans. Haraway believes that we should be using the term "companion species" instead of "companion animals" because of the relationships we can learn through them.

Reception

Haraway's work has been criticized for being "methodologically vague" and using noticeably opaque language that is "sometimes concealing in an apparently deliberate way". A 1991 review of Haraway's Primate Visions, published in the International Journal of Primatology, provides some of the most common criticisms of her view of science, and a 1990 review in the American Journal of Primatology offers a similarly dismissive commentary, with both reviews arguing that her understanding of the scientific method is questionable, and that her explorations of epistemology at times leave her texts virtually meaning-free.

In reviewing the book for the Journal of the History of Biology, sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, who has written extensively on the social construction of gender, sexual identity, gender identity, gender roles, and intersexuality, wrote that the book is "important," though she wished it "were easier to read."

In 2017, ArtReview named Haraway the third most influential person in the contemporary art world, stating that her work "has become part of the art world’s DNA".