Donna Haraway

Early Life and Education

Donna Jeanne Haraway was born on September 6, 1944, in Denver, Colorado. She studied zoology and philosophy at the Colorado College, earned a Ph.D. in biology at Yale (with a dissertation on the role of metaphor in developmental biology), and then turned to the history and philosophy of science. This combination of biological training and humanistic inquiry became the hallmark of her work.

A Cyborg Manifesto (1985)

"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985) is one of the most influential essays in feminist theory and cultural studies. Haraway proposed the figure of the cyborg — a hybrid of machine and organism — as a political myth for feminist politics in a world where the boundaries between human and animal, organism and machine, physical and nonphysical are increasingly blurred.

The cyborg rejects the nostalgia for organic wholeness and original unity (whether in the form of goddess feminism, essentialist identity politics, or Marxist totality) and instead embraces partiality, irony, and the pleasure of boundary confusion. Haraway argued that in late capitalism, all of us are already cyborgs — constituted by our relationships with technologies — and that this condition opens new possibilities for feminist politics beyond the categories of gender, race, and class as traditionally understood.

Situated Knowledges (1988)

"Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" (1988) developed a feminist epistemology that rejected both scientific objectivism (the "god trick" of claiming to see from nowhere) and thoroughgoing relativism. Haraway argued for a "feminist objectivity" based on situated, partial, locatable knowledge — knowledge produced by embodied, positioned knowers who are accountable for their perspectives. All knowledge is situated; the question is not how to achieve a view from nowhere but how to be responsible about our particular locations.

Companion Species and Staying with the Trouble

When Species Meet (2008) and The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) shifted Haraway's focus from cyborgs to companion species — the entangled lives of humans and other animals (especially dogs). She argued that human nature is fundamentally interspecies: we become who we are through relationships with other species, and ethical and political life must account for these multispecies entanglements.

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) proposed the concept of the "Chthulucene" as an alternative to the Anthropocene — an era defined not by human exceptionalism but by the multispecies tangles and tentacular connections that constitute the Earth's living systems. "Staying with the trouble" means refusing both optimistic technofixes and despairing doomism, and instead engaging with the messy, mortal, entangled present.

Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.