Donna Haraway

Quick Facts

• Full name: Donna Jeanne Haraway
• Born: September 6, 1944, in Denver, Colorado
• Field: feminist theory, science and technology studies, history of science, animal studies, posthuman thought
• Education: zoology at Colorado College; PhD in biology from Yale University in 1972
• Academic home: University of California, Santa Cruz, where she joined the History of Consciousness program in 1980 and later became distinguished professor emerita
• Best known for: the cyborg, situated knowledge, the "god trick," companion species, technoscience, and making kin

The Big Question

How can we take science, technology, bodies, animals, machines, and politics seriously without pretending there is one pure human viewpoint above them all?

Haraway's answer is that knowledge is always made from somewhere. A scientist, a lab animal, a microscope, a funding system, and a colonial history can all matter to what gets counted as true. Truth is not fake, but good truth needs accountability.

In One Minute

Donna Haraway is an American feminist theorist of science, technology, animals, and bodies. She became famous for "A Cyborg Manifesto," which says modern people are already hybrids of organism and machine. A person with glasses, a phone, a medical implant, and a workplace database is not simply "natural" first and technological later.

Her deeper point is about responsibility. Science builds worlds: medicines, species categories, weapons, databases, farms, and family stories. So we should ask who benefits, who is used, what gets erased, and what other ways of living become possible.

What They Taught

Haraway taught that the old split between nature and culture is too simple. We do not first live in pure nature and then add culture on top. We are born into tools, medicine, food systems, gender categories, microbes, animals, and machines.

This is why she speaks of cyborgs. A cyborg is a mix of living organism and machine. For Haraway, it names a real social condition: bodies are connected to technologies, and technologies are connected to race, gender, labor, war, medicine, and capitalism. The cyborg breaks the fantasy of clean borders between human and machine, natural and artificial, or physical and informational.

Haraway also changed feminist philosophy of science. In "Situated Knowledges," she argues against the god trick: the fantasy of seeing everything from nowhere. A map, lab report, or algorithm can look neutral, but it is made with particular instruments and assumptions. Real objectivity names its position, checks it with others, and accepts responsibility for what the knowledge does.

Her politics follows from this. She is suspicious of purity stories: pure womanhood, pure nature, pure science, pure humanity, pure revolution. Instead she argues for coalitions built by affinity, where people work together because they share a task or danger, not because they all have one fixed identity.

In her later work, Haraway turns to animals, ecological crisis, and multispecies life. Humans are not the only actors in history. Dogs, bacteria, lab mice, forests, coral, computers, and farms all help shape the world. "Staying with the trouble" means refusing both easy optimism and despair so people can repair, mourn, adapt, and make better kinship.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Cyborg: a being made of organism and machine. A worker managed by software, a patient with an insulin pump, and a person living through a phone all cross body-machine boundaries.

• Situated knowledge: knowledge made from a specific place, body, tool, and history. A primatologist watching apes, a patient describing pain, and a satellite measuring forests each see something real, but none sees everything.

• The god trick: the false claim to see from nowhere. A company might present a hiring algorithm as neutral while hiding the data, assumptions, and social biases that shaped it.

• Technoscience: science and technology working as one social system. A vaccine is biological, but it also involves labs, patents, public trust, supply chains, law, money, and politics.

• Material-semiotic: material things and meanings made together. A lab mouse is a living animal, a research tool, a legal object, a funding category, and a story about disease.

• Companion species: species that shape each other through shared life. Haraway often uses dogs as the example: training, feeding, work, and affection change both dog and human.

• Making kin: building obligations beyond the narrow human family. Humans survive through webs of dependence, so ethics has to include other species and future generations.

Major Works

• Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1976): Haraway's first book studies how metaphors shape developmental biology.

• Primate Visions (1989): A large study of primatology. Haraway argues that ape and monkey research often carries human stories about sex, race, family, colonialism, and progress.

• Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991): A major essay collection. It includes "A Cyborg Manifesto" and "Situated Knowledges," the two texts most readers start with.

• Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse (1997): A dense book on technoscience, genetics, race, colonial history, and laboratory life. The patented "OncoMouse" becomes animal, invention, property, research partner, and moral problem at once.

• The Companion Species Manifesto (2003): A short work about dogs, humans, training, love, and obligation. It challenges human exceptionalism, the idea that humans stand alone above other species.

• When Species Meet (2008): A broader version of the companion species project. It studies humans and animals in homes, labs, farms, sports, and ecosystems.

• Staying with the Trouble (2016): Haraway's later ecological book. It rejects both technological salvation fantasies and pure apocalypse. It calls for "response-ability": the ability to respond well to others in a damaged world.

Why It Matters

Haraway matters because she gives philosophy a way to talk about the world most people already live in: bodies joined to machines, science joined to politics, humans joined to animals, and knowledge joined to power.

She is useful for thinking about AI, medicine, climate change, biotechnology, surveillance, and animal life. The better questions are: Who built this? What bodies and species does it depend on? Who is responsible, and who is treated as raw material?

Her work also keeps feminist theory from becoming only a theory of language or identity. Bodies, tools, labor, race, gender, colonial history, bacteria, dogs, forests, and lab animals all matter.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Haraway's closest readers are often in Feminist Philosophy, science and technology studies, cyberfeminism, animal studies, environmental humanities, and Philosophy of Technology and AI. Rosi Braidotti develops related posthuman themes. Bruno Latour is often read beside her because both treat nonhumans as part of social and scientific worlds.

She inherits some concerns from Karl Marx, especially attention to labor, capitalism, and material production. She also works near Michel Foucault, especially the idea that knowledge and power are tangled together. Compared with Judith Butler and Gender Trouble, Haraway puts more weight on laboratories, machines, animals, and ecological relations.

Critics make several complaints. Some scientists and philosophers find her style hard to pin down. Some Marxist critics worry that cyborg language can blur labor and class power. Some ecofeminist critics think her cyborg politics can sound too friendly to technoscience. Disability, decolonial, and race theorists have asked whether the early cyborg essay does enough with disability, colonialism, and non-Western experience.

Those criticisms do not cancel her influence. They show why her work keeps being argued over. Haraway gives readers powerful figures - cyborgs, companion species, situated knowledges - and those figures are useful partly because they can be tested, revised, and pushed further.

Related Pages

• Karl Marx
• Michel Foucault
• Bruno Latour
• Rosi Braidotti
• Feminist Philosophy
• Philosophy of Technology and AI
• Judith Butler