-
Birth of Donna Haraway
Born in Denver, Colorado, 1944 -
Period: to
Approximate School Years
Undergraduate: Colorado College, majored in Zoology and minored in Philosophy.
Graduate: Foundation Teilhard de Chardin, studied philosophy and theology
Graduate: Yale, Ph.D. in Biology -
"A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s"
This was Donna's most famous essay. She was attempting to establish a "ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism" (The European Graduate School). Donna dealt in key oppositions and was most famous for reinvigorating the term "cyborg". The cyborg that Donna was referring to was the hybrid of a machine and an organism. This, in itself, is a duality. This duality is the mixture of both reality and fiction...
Link text] (https://egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway) -
Contribution Continued...
...and that fiction plays a hard tole on life as we know it. Her idea of the cyborg branches out and touches many concepts; however, one key component is the idea that cyborgs are genderless and therefore a world without gender and perhaps even a world without a beginning or an end. A major factor in this essay is the idea and role of feminism in the world (still) today. The cyborg allows this disconnection to gender and...
Link text] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnY9TGbvIXA) -
Contribution Continued...
...as well as disconnection to gender roles (i.e. reproduction) and circles all the way back around to how intertwined humanity is with technology. Another way the cyborg influences us though is that Donna suggests that we are all cyborgs. She makes this point through what she considered to be the three "leaks". The first is that of the mixing of categories -- human and animal. This is aided by the concept of evolution and the reality that in evolution we derived from animals and... -
Contribution Continued...
...and remain animals today. The second "leak" is the combining of categories -- organism and machine. With this thought, Donna expresses that machines have more life than we do now-a-days. An example of this is that we remain still while our technology is what engages us and therefore "moves" more than we do. The last "leak" is the mixing of the categories -- the physical and the non-physical. In this she means that things that used to be simple materials are now created with so... -
Contribution Continued...
...so much energy that they are no longer just materials but instead literal beings that are made up of, generate, and create energy themselves. So by the time you reel in Donna's three "leaks", boundaries in multiple fields have been 'tampered with'. At the end of the day, she is a pioneer in daring thought processes and she pushes boundaries (and still pushes boundaries today). Feminism, socialism, and materialism were her first targets; however, she has expanded far beyond. -
Ludwik Fleck Prize Recipient
Donna received the Society for Social Studies of Science's, Ludwik Fleck Prize -
J.D. Bernal Award Recipient
In 2000, Donna won the Society for Social Studies of Science's highest honor, the J. D. Bernal . -
The "Now" of Donna Haraway
She is a distinguished USC Professor in the History of Consciousness Department.