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Birth of Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway was born on September 6, 1944, in Denver, Colorado. Her father, Frank O. Haraway, was a sportswriter for The Denver Post and her mother Dorothy McGuire Haraway, who came from a heavily Irish Catholic background, died from a heart attack when Haraway was 16. Although she is no longer religious, Catholicism had a strong influence on her as she was taught by nuns in her early life. The impression of the Eucharist influenced her linkage of the figurative and the material. -
Education
Haraway majored in Zoology, with minors in philosophy and English at the Colorado College. After college, Haraway studied evolutionary philosophy and theology at the Foundation Teilhard de Chardin on a Fulbright scholarship. She got her Ph.D. in biology at Yale in 1972 writing a dissertation about the use of metaphor in shaping experiments in experimental biology published under the title Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology. -
"A Cyborg Manifesto"
For Haraway, the Manifesto offered a response to the rising conservatism during the 1980s in the United States at a critical juncture at which feminists, to have any significance, had to acknowledge their situatedness within her terms "informatics of domination." Women were no longer outside along a hierarchy of privileged binaries but rather imbued, exploited by and complicit within networked hegemony, and had to form their politics as such. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiF9SBrzWoU -
Haraway's theses
In Haraway's theses, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" (1988), she means to expose the myth of scientific objectivity. Haraway defined the term "situated knowledges" as a means of understanding that all knowledge comes from positional perspectives. -
Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science
Haraway also writes about the history of science and biology. She states there is a tendency to masculinize stories on "reproductive competition and sex between aggressive males and receptive females that facilitate some and preclude other types of conclusions". She thinks female primatologists focus on different observations that require more communication and basic survival activity, offering different perspectives of origins of nature and culture than the currently accepted ones. -
The Companion Species Manifesto
Written to tell the story of cohabitation, coevolution and embodied cross-species sociality. Haraway argues that humans ‘companion’ relationship with dogs can show the importance of recognizing differences and ‘how to engage with significant otherness'. Haraway believes using the term "companion species" instead of "companion animals" because of the relationships we can learn through them. -
Present Day
Haraway’s more recent work has turned to human-animal relations and the climate crisis. She is a thinker, the kind of leftist feminist who believes that the best thinking is done collectively. She is constantly citing other people, including graduate students, and giving credit to them