The Haraway Reader
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The Haraway Reader Donna Haraway ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND WNDON Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Copyright© 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Haraway, Donna Jeanne. The Haraway reader I Donna Haraway. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96688-4 (HB: alk. paper)-ISBN 0-415-96689-2 (PB.: alk. paper) I. Feminist theory. 2. Feminist criticism. 3. Technology-Social aspects. 4. Science-Social aspects. I. Title. HQ 1190 .H364 2003 305.42'01-dc21 2003005861 To all my companion species CONTENTS Introduction: A Kinship of Feminist Figurations 1 A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s 7 2 Ecce Homo, Ain't (Ar'n't) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/cl Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape 47 3 The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/cl Others 63 4 Otherworldly Conversations; Terran Topics; Local Terms 125 5 Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936 151 6 Morphing in the Order: Flexible Strategies, Feminist Science Studies, and Primate Revisions 199 7 ModesLWitness@Second_Millennium 223 8 Race: Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture. It's All in the Family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century United States 251 9 Cyborgs to Companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience 295 viii • Contents 10 Cyborgs, Coyotes, and Dogs: A Kinship of Feminist Figurations and There Are Always More Things Going on Than You Thought! Methodologies as Thinking Technologies 321 An interview with Donna Haraway Conducted in two parts by Nina Lykke, Randi Markussen, and Finn Olesen Note on Sources 343 Index 345 INTRODUCTION A KINSHIP OF FEMINIST FIGURATIONS I learned to read and write inside worlds at war. I was born near the end of World War II, grew up in the Cold War, attended graduate school during the Viet Nam War, and I am preparing this Reader for publication during my country's invasion oflraq. And that's the short list. These wars are personal. They make me who I am; they throw me into inherited obligations, whether I like it or not. These worlds at war are the belly of the monster from which I have tried to write into a more vivid reality a kin group of feminist figures. My hope is that these marked figures might guide us to a more livable place, one that in the spirit of science fiction I have called "elsewhere." Figures collect up hopes and fears and show possibilities and dangers. Both imaginary and material, figures root peoples in stories and link them to histories. Stories are always more generous, more capacious, than ideologies; in that fact is one of my strongest hopes. I want to know how to inhabit histories and stories rather than deny them. I want to know how critically to live both inherited and novel kinships, in a spirit neither of condemnation nor celebration. I want to know how to help build ongoing stories rather than histories that end. In that sense, my kinships are about keeping the lineages going, even while defamiliarizing their members and turning lines into webs, trees into esplanades, and pedigrees into affinity groups. My kinships are made up of the florid machinic, organic, and textual entities with which we share the earth and our flesh. These entities are full of bumptious }if e, and it would be a serious mistake to figure them mainly anthropomorphically or anthropocentrically. All of the agencies, all of 2 • Introduction the actors, are not human, to say the least. Indeed, if in his potent little book Bruno Latour convinced me that We Have Never Been Modern, I firmly believe that we have never been human, much less man. That's one reason I like to explore figurations that do not resolve into the lineaments of man, even when they seem born to do so. Nonetheless, in my view, people are human in at least one important sense. We are members of a biological species, Homo sapiens. That puts us solidly inside science, history, and nature, right at the heart of things. Furthermore, I am in love with biology-the discourse and the beings, the way of knowing and the wor Id known through those practices. Biol ogy is relentlessly historical, all the way down. There is no border where· evolution ends and history begins, where genes stop and environment takes up, where culture rules and nature submits, or vice versa. Instead, there are turtles upon turtles of naturecultures all the way down. Every being that matters is a congeries of its formative histories-all of them even as any genome worth the salt to precipitate it is a convention of all the infectious events cobbled together into the provisional, permanently emerging things Westerners call individuals, but Melanesians, perhaps more presciently, call dividuals. Perhaps all of this is why, before the end of this introduction, I will go to the dogs for a life sentence. Sometimes, re-reading the essays that make up this volume, I feel that I have written the same paper twenty times. All of these papers take up one or another aspect of inherited dualisms that run deep in Western cultures. All of these dualisms escape philosophical confinement or religious ritual to find themselves built into weapons, states, economies, taxonomies, national parks, museum displays, intimate bodily practices, and much else. All of my writing is committed to swerving and tripping over these bipartite, dualist traps rather than trying to reverse them or resolve them into supposedly larger wholes. These papers are full of tropes. That is surely because I have a perverse love of words, which have always seemed like tart physical beings to me. But tropes do more than please the palate of the effete of the twenty-first century, c.E. Tropes swerve; they defer the literal, forever, if we are lucky; they make plain that to make sense we must always be ready to trip. Tropes are a way of swerving around a death-defying and death-worshipping culture bent on total war, in order to re-member-in material-semiotic reality-the fragile, mortal, and juicy beings we really are. Metaplasm is my favorite trope these days. It means remolding or remodeling. I want my writing to be read as an orthopedic practice for learning how to remold kin links to help make a kinder and unfa miliar world. It was Shakespeare who taught me about the sometimes violent play between kin and kind at the dawn of "modernity." It is A Kinship of Feminist Figurations • 3 my queer family of feminists, anti-racists, scientists, scholars, genetically engineered lab rodents, cyborgs, dogs, dog people, vampires, modest wit nesses, writers, molecules, and both living and stuffed apes who teach me how to locate kin and kind now, when all of the cosmic correspondences, which Shakespeare understood not to be legible to moderns, might be traceable in non-Euclidean geometries for those who have never been either human or modern. The papers in the Reader often rage against what I also love. All of them insist that science and feminism, anti-racism and science studies, biology and cultural theory, fiction and fact closely cohabit and should do so. Rage is not relativism in the sense that either facts or fictions are matters of "personal" opinion or "multicultural" difference. Quite the opposite. The colonialist epistemological dualisms of relativism and realism require tropic swerving in a spirit of love and rage. Anarchists knew that kind of thing; and anarchists made strong knowledge claims, not vapid truces. In the face of many established disorders we need to practice saying "none of the above." There can be an elsewhere, not as a utopian fantasy or relativist escape, but an elsewhere born out of the hard (and sometimes joyful) work of getting on together in a kin group that includes cyborgs and goddesses working for earthly survival. Many of the entities that command my attention in this Reader were birthed through the reproductive apparatuses of war. Perhaps chief among them is the cyborg. The "Cyborg Manifesto" was not only the first paper I wrote on a computer; it was also a somewhat desperate ef fort in the early Reagan years to hold together impossible things that all seemed true and necessary simultaneously. Laughing at and crying over cybernetics, the "Manifesto" was an effort at a kind of systems-run-wild triage in dangerous times. Too many people, forgetting the discipline of love and rage, have read the "Manifesto" as the ramblings of a blissed out, technobunny, fem bot. For me, the "Cyborg Manifesto" was a nearly sober socialist-feminist statement written for the Socialist Review to try to think through how to do critique, remember war and its offspring, keep ecofeminism and technoscience joined in the flesh, and generally honor possibilities that escape unkind origins. Many readers have put the mutated and contradictory cyborg of the "Manifesto" to work in their own performance art, science studies, and feminist theory.