Donna Haraway Biblio

Donna Haraway Biblio

Who Is Donna Haraway and What Does She Have to Do With Cyberpunk?

Donna Haraway is an innovative and wide-ranging scholar-thinker whose work in the History of Science not only references contemporary sf writers such as John Varley, Octavia Butler, and Joanna Russ, but also influences science fiction writers exploring the interfaces between human/ machine/ animal/ information and interested in the politics of the Other -- whether that other be defined in terms of race, gender, species, or technology.

Because she deals explicitly with the theoretics of the cyborg -- the being who is part human and part machine -- she has been particularly influential on cyberpunk writers.

Focused on the metaphors which science uses and how those metaphors subtly determine the networks of power which control our world, her work ranges from primatology to epistemology, from cancer research to information technology.

Haraway is currently a professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

A Haraway Bibliography

  • Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields : Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology. Yale UP, 1976.

  • “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's.” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65-108. Rpt. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. -- Haraway's single most influential essay; it interrogates the interface between human and machine, recommending a revolutionary practice of non-discrimination similar to Philip K. Dick's stance in Blade Runner and celebrating the cyborg's built-in androgyny as a potential victory for feminism.

  • “Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99.

  • Primate Visions : Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, 1990. -- Ground-breaking discussion of the relations between human and animals as mediated through science by way of an account of the history of primatology. Chapter 3, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-36," is of particular interest to Tiptree fans as it dicusses Ackley's 1922 gorrilla safari in the Blegium Congo (which the 5-year old Alice was a member of) and is partially based on Alice Sheldon (Tiptree)'s mother's memoir of the journey. The concluding Chapter “Reprise: Science Fiction, Fictions of Science, and Primatology,” includes a reading of Octavia Butler’s Xexogenesis.

  • Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991. -- A collection of ten essays written mostly during the eighties. With a feminist perspective and the premise that nature is constructed, rather than discovered--and that truth is made, not found--Haraway provides an analysis of the popular and scientific struggles involved in the telling of evolutionary tales. The author is a historian of science at the U. of California, Santa Cruz.

  • “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriated/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler. New York: Routledge: 295-337.

  • “When Man (TM) Is on the Menu.” In Incorporations, ed. By J. Crary and Sanford K. Winter. New York: Zone Books, 1992: 38-43.

  • “A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies.” Configurations: A Journal of Literature and Science 1 (1994): 59-71.

  • Modest Witness@ Second Millennium : Femaleman Meets Oncomouse : Feminism and Technoscience. Lynn M. Randolph (Illustrator). Routledge, 1996. -- An exploration of wide ranging cultural associations in the information and life sciences: “A landscape of cyborgs, patented life-forms, computer-mediated representations, reproductive technologies, genetic engineering and nuclear research.” Includes illustrations.
    Parts and Chapters:
    • I -- SYNTACTICS: The Grammar of Feminism and Technoscience
    • II -- SEMANTICS : Modest_Witness@Second_Millinium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse
      • 1. Modest_Witness@Second_Millinium
      • 2. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Mice into Wormholes: Technoscience Fugue in Two Parts
      • 3. A Family Reunion
    • III -- PRAGMATICS: Technoscience in HyperText
      • 4. Gene: Maps and Portraits of Life Itself
      • 5. Fetus: The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order
      • 6. Race: Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture
      • 7. Facts, Witnesses, and Consequences

    Haraway on the Web

    Hyperlinks to Donna Haraway -- Excellent: the source of all my links below; see especially the bibliography section for more on Haraway's various books.

    Early version of "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"

    HOTWIRED Interview with Haraway

    Another class's project on Haraway and cyborgs

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    Last update: 4/5/97