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  Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

  The idea that nature is constructed, not discovered - that truth is made, not found - is the keynote of recent scholarship in the history of science. Tracing the gendered roots of science in culture, Donna Haraway's writings about scientific research on monkeys and apes is arguably the finest scholarship in this tradition. She has carefully studied the publications, the papers, the correspondence, and the history of the expeditions and institutions of primate studies, uncovering the historical construction of the pedigrees for existing social relations - the naturalization of race, sex, and class. Throughout this book she is analysing accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs (cybernetic organisms: systems which embrace organic and technological components). She also looks critically at the immune system as an information system, and shows how deeply our cultural assumptions penetrate into allegedly value-neutral medical research. In several of these essays she explores and develops the contested terms of reference of existing feminist scholarship; and by mapping the fate of two potent and ambiguous words - 'nature' and 'experience' - she uncovers new visions and provides the possibility of a new politics of hope.

  Her recent book, Primate Visions, has been called outstanding, original, 'brilliant', 'important' by leading scholars in the field. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women contains ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. They establish her as one of the most thoughtful and challenging feminist writers today.

  Donna Haraway is a historian of science and Professor at the History of Consciousness Board, University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her doctorate in biology at Yale and is the author of Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology and Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science.

  Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

  The Reinvention of Nature

  DONNA J. HARAWAY

  Routledge / New York

  Published in 1991 by

  Routledge

  Taylor & Francis Group

  270 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  Published in Great Britain by

  Routledge

  Taylor & Francis Group

  2 Park Square

  Milton Park, Abingdon

  Oxon OX14 4RN

  © 1991 by Donna J. Haraway

  Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group

  Transferred to Digital Printing 2010

  International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-90387-4 (Softcover)

  International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-90387-5 (Softcover)

  Library of Congress Card Number 90-8762

  No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any from by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

  Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Haraway, Donna Jeanne.

  Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature / by Donna J. Haraway.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

  ISBN 0-415-90386-6. - ISBN 0-415-90387-4 (pbk).

  1. Sociobiology. 2. Feminist criticism. 3. Primates—Behavior. 4. Human behavior. I. Title.

  GN365,9H37. 1991

  304.5—dc20

  90-8762

  informa

  Taylor & Francis Group

  is the Academic Division of Informa plc.

  Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com

  and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge-ny.com

  Publisher's Note

  The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

  For my parents, Dorothy Maguire Haraway (1917-1960) and Frank O. Haraway

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Part One Nature as a System of Production and Reproduction

  Chapter One Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic: A Political Physiology of Dominance

  Chapter Two The Past Is the Contested Zone: Human Nature and Theories of Production and Reproduction in Primate Behaviour Studies

  Chapter Three The Biological Enterprise: Sex, Mind, and Profit from Human Engineering to Sociobiology

  Part Two Contested Readings: Narrative Natures

  Chapter Four In the Beginning Was the Word: The Genesis of Biological Theory

  Chapter Five The Contest for Primate Nature: Daughters of Man-the-Hunter in the Field, 1960-80

  Chapter Six Reading Buchi Emecheta: Contests for 'Women's Experience' in Women's Studies

  Part Three Differential Politics for Inappropriate/d Others

  Chapter Seven 'Gender' for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word

  Chapter Eight A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

  Chapter Nine Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

  Chapter Ten The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Many people and many publishing practices made this book possible, beginning with the anonymous referee for Signs for my first published essays in feminist theory. This generous and critical person turned out to be Rayna Rapp, who has been a personal, intellectual, and political support and inspiration for me ever since. Catherine Stimpson was the editor for those papers, and her theoretical work and editorial skill have enriched my writing and that of many other contributors to contemporary feminism. Constance Clark and Stephen Cross, then graduate students at Johns Hopkins, will see their pervasive influence. Robert Young's ground-breaking writing and committed comradeship showed me that the history of science could be both political and scholarly without compromise. I owe much to his work and that of many others, especially Karl Figlio, Ludi Jordanova, and Les Levidow, associated with Radical Science Journal, Science as Culture, and Free Association Books.

  Friendship, ongoing critical conversations, and published and unpublished intertextualities with Judith Butler, Elizabeth Fee, Sandra Harding, Susan Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Katie King, Diana Long, Aihwa Ong, Joan Scott, Marilyn Strathern, and Adrienne Zihlman everywhere inform these chapters. I also thank Frigga Haug and Nora Rathzel from the feminist collective of Das Argument and Elizabeth Weed of differences. Jeffrey Escofier was a persistent gadfly and gentle midwife for the Cyborg Manifesto (Chapter Eight). Scott Gilbert, Michael Hadfield, and G. Evelyn Hutchinson taught me about embryology, ecology, the immune system and much else in the culture of biology.

  Extraordinary people whom I first knew through the History of Consciousness Board and graduate seminars at the University of California at Santa Cruz contributed expSicidy and implicitly to this book. I am especially grateful to Gloria Anzaldua, Bettina Aptheker, Sandra Azeredo, Faith Beckett, Elizabeth Bird, Norman O. Brown, Jim Clifford, Mary Crane, Teresa de Lauretis, Paul Edwards, Ron Eglash, Barbara Epstein, Peter Euben, Ramona Fernandez, Ruth Frankenberg, Margo Franz, Thyrza Goodeve, Deborah Gordon, Chris Gray, Val Hartouni, Mary John, Caren Kaplan, Katie King, Hilary Klein, Lisa Lowe, Carole McCann,
Lata Mani, Alvina Quintana, Chela Sandoval, Zoe Sofoulis, Noel Sturgeon, Jenny Terry, Sharon Traweek, and Gloria Watkins (bell hooks).

  Financial support for writing portions of this book was provided by Academic Senate Research Grants of the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Alpha Fund of the Institute for Advanced Study.

  Others have offered support and inspiration in countless ways over many years. These essays especially show the imprint of living and working with Gail Coleman, Layla Krieger, Richard and Rosemarie Stith, Carolyn Hadfield, Robert Filomeno, Jaye Miller, and Rusten Hogness. Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents, Frank Haraway, a sports reporter who showed me that writing can be simultaneously pleasure and work, and Dorothy Maguire Haraway, who died in i960 before I could know her as an adult, but who had communicated to me the trouble and strength of belief and commitment.

  The following chapters have been revised from previously published essays, and are printed here with permission. Chapter One originally appeared under the tide 'Animal sociology and a natural economy of the body politic, part I, a political physiology of dominance', in Signs 4 (1978): 21-36. Chapter Two, under the tide 'Animal sociology and a natural economy of the body politic, part II, the past is the contested zone: human nature and theories of production and reproduction in primate behavior studies', in Signs 4 (1978): 37-60. Chapter Three, 'The biological enterprise: sex, mind, and profit from human engineering to sociobiology', in Radical History Review 20 (1979): 206-37. Chapter Four, 'In the beginning was the word: the genesis of biological theory', in Signs 6 (1981): 469-81. Chapter Five, 'The contest for primate nature: daughters of man the hunter in the field, 1960-80', in Mark Kann, ed. The Future of American Democracy: Views from the Left (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983, pp. 175-207). Chapter Six, 'Reading Buchi Emecheta: contests for 'women's experience' in women's studies', in Inscriptions 3/4 (1988): 107-24. Chapter Seven, as 'Geschlecht, Gender, Genre: Sexualpolitik eines Wortes', in Kornelia Hauser, ed. Viele Orte. Uberall? Feminismus in Bewegung, Festschrift for Frigga Haug. (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1987, pp. 22-41). Chapter Eight, as 'Manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s', Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65-108. Chapter Nine, as 'Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism as a site of discourse on the privilege of partial perspective', in Feminist Studies 14(3) (1988): 575-99. Chapter Ten, as 'The biopolitics of postmodern bodies: determinations of self in immune system discourse', in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 1(1) (1989): 3-43.

  Introduction

  This book should be read as a cautionary tale about the evolution of bodies, politics, and stories. Above all, it is a book about the invention and reinvention of nature - perhaps the most central arena of hope, oppression, and contestation for inhabitants of the planet earth in our times. Once upon a time, in the 1970s, the author was a proper, US socialist-feminist, white, female, hominid biologist, who became a historian of science to write about modern Western accounts of monkeys, apes, and women. She belonged to those odd categories, invisible to themselves, which are called 'unmarked' and which are dependent upon unequal power for their maintenance. But by the last essays,'she has turned into a multiply marked cyborg feminist, who tried to keep her politics, as well as her other critical functions, alive in the unpromising times of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The book examines the breakup of versions of Euro-American feminist humanism in their devastating assumptions of master narratives deeply indebted to racism and colonialism. Then, adopting an illegitimate and frightening sign, the book's tale turns to the possibilities of a 'cyborg' feminism that is perhaps more able to remain attuned to specific historical and political positionings and permanent partialities without abandoning the search for potent connections.

  A cyborg is a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine. But, cyborgs are compounded of special kinds of machines and special kinds of organisms appropriate to the late twentieth century. Cyborgs are post-Second World War hybrid entities made of, first, ourselves and other organic creatures in our unchosen 'high-technological' guise as information systems, texts, and ergonomically controlled labouring, desiring, and reproducing systems. The second essential ingredient in cyborgs is machines in their guise, also, as communications systems, texts, and self-acting, ergonomically designed apparatuses.

  The chapters comprising Part One of this book examine feminist struggles over the modes of producing knowledge about, and the meanings of, the behaviour and the social lives of monkeys and apes. Part Two explores contests for the power to determine stories about 'nature' and 'experience' two of the most potent and ambiguous words in English. Part Three focuses on cyborg embodiment, the fate of various feminist concepts of gender, reappropriations of metaphors of vision for feminist ethical and epistemological purposes, and the immune system as a biopolitical map of the chief systems of difference in a postmodern world. Throughout these diverse contents, this book treats constructions of nature as a crucial cultural process for people who need and hope to live in a world less riddled by the dominations of race, colonialism, class, gender, and sexuality

  Inhabiting these pages are odd boundary creatures - simians, cyborgs, and women - all of which have had a destabilizing place in the great Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives. These boundary creatures are, literally, monsters, a word that shares more than its root with the word, to demonstrate. Monsters signify. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women interrogates the multi-faceted biopolitical, biotechnological, and feminist theoretical stories of the situated knowledges by and about these promising and non-innocent monsters. The power-differentiated and highly contested modes of being of these monsters may be signs of possible worlds - and they are surely signs of worlds for which we are responsible.

  Simians, Cyborgs, and Women collects essays written from 1978 through 1989, a period of complicated political, cultural, and epistemological foment within the many feminisms which have appeared in the last decades. Focusing on the biopolitical narratives of the sciences of monkeys and apes, the earliest essays were written from within US Eurocentric socialist-feminism. They treat the deep constitution of nature in modern biology as a system of production and reproduction, that is, as a labouring system, with all the ambiguities and dominations inherent in that metaphor. How did nature for a dominant cultural group with immense power to make its stories into reality become a system of work, ruled by the hierarchical division of labour, where the inequities of race, sex, and class could be naturalized in functioning systems of exploitation? What were the consequences for views of the lives of animals and people?

  The middle set of chapters examines contests for narrative forms and strategies among feminists, as the heteroglossia and power inequities within modem feminism and among contemporary women became inescapable. The section concludes with an examination of ways of reading a modern Nigerian-British author, Buchi Emecheta, as an example of contests among differently situated African, Afro-American, and Euro-American critics over what will count as women's experience in the pedagogical context of a women's studies classroom. What kind of accountability, coalition, opposition, constituencies, and publishing practices structure particular readings of such an author on such a topic?

  Part Three, 'Differential Politics for Inappropriate/d Others', contains four essays. The phrase, 'inappropriate/d others', is borrowed from the Vietnamese film-maker and feminist theorist, Trinh T. Minh-ha. She used the term to suggest the historical positioning of those who refuse to adopt the mask of either 'self' or 'other' offered by dominant narratives of identity and politics. Her metaphors suggest a geometry for considering the relations of difference other than hierarchical domination, incorporation of 'parts' into 'wholes', or antagonistic opposition. But her metaphors also suggest the hard intellectual, cultural, and political work these new geometries will require, if not from simians, at least from cyborgs and women.

  The essays show the contradictory matrices of their com
position. The examination of the recent history of the term sex/gender, written for a German Marxist dictionary, exemplifies the textual politics embedded in producing standard reference-work accounts of complicated struggles. The Cyborg Manifesto was written to find political direction in the 1980s in the face of the hybrids 'we' seemed to have become world-wide. The examination of the debates about 'scientific objectivity' in feminist theory argues for a transformation of the despised metaphors of organic and technological vision in order to foreground specific positioning, multiple mediation, partial perspective, and therefore a possible allegory for feminist scientific and political knowledge.

  Nature emerges from this exercise as coyote. This potent trickster can show us that historically specific human relations with 'nature' must somehow - linguistically, ethically, scientifically, politically, technologically, and epistemologically - be imagined as genuinely social and actively relational; and yet the partners remain utterly inhomogeneous. 'Our' relations with 'nature' might be imagined as a social engagement with a being who is neither 'it', 'you', 'thou', 'he', 'she', nor 'they' in relation to 'us'. The pronouns embedded in sentences about contestations for what may count as nature are themselves political tools, expressing hopes, fears, and contradictory histories. Grammar is politics by other means. What narrative possibilities might lie in monstrous linguistic figures for relations with 'nature' for ecofeminist work? Curiously, as for people before us in Western discourses, efforts to come to linguistic terms with the non-representability, historical contingency, artefactuality, and yet spontaneity, necessity, fragility, and stunning profusions of 'nature' can help us refigure the kind of persons we might be. These persons can no longer be, if they ever were, master subjects, nor alienated subjects, but - just possibly - multiply heterogeneous, inhomogeneous, accountable, and connected human agents. But we must never again connect as parts to wholes, as marked beings incorporated into unmarked ones, as unitary and complementary subjects serving the one Subject of monotheism and its secular heresies. We must have agency - or agencies - without defended subjects.