A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s

Australian Feminist Studies

Volumn 2, Issue 4, 1987, Pages 1-42

  Haraway, Donna ^a  

^a NONE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84945781956     PISSN: 08164649     EISSN: 14653303     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08164649.1987.9961538     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Useful references to left and/or feminist radical science movements and theory and to biological/biotechnological issues include: Ruth Bleier, Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Themes on Women (New York: Pergamon, 1984); Elizabeth Fee, ‘Critiques of Modern Science: The Relationship of Feminist and Other Radical Epistemologies’ and Evelyn Hammonds, ‘Women of Color, Feminism and Science’, papers for Symposium on Feminist Perspectives on Science, University of Wisconsin, 11–12 April, 1985 (proceedings to be published by Pergamon); Stephen J. Gould, Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, Barbara Fried, eds., Biological Woman, the Convenient Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1982); Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); R. C. Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Leon Kamin, Not in Our Genes (New York: Pantheon, 1984): Radical Science Journal, 26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ; Science for the People, 897 Main St., Cambridge, MA 02139.
2. Starting points for left and/or feminist approaches to technology and politics include: Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Joan Rothschild, Machina ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology (New York: Pergamon, 1983); Sharon Traweek, ‘Uptime, Downtime, Spacetime, and Power: An Ethnography of U.S. and Japanese Particle Physics’, Ph.D. thesis, UC Santa Cruz, History of Consciousness, 1982; R. M. Young and Les Levidov, eds., Science, Technology, and the Labour Process, vols. 1–3 (London: CSE Books); Jospeh Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976); Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics Out of Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1977); Langdon Winner, ‘Paths in Technopolis’, esp. ‘Mythinformation in the High Tech Era’ (in ms., forthcoming); Jan Zimmerman, ed., The Technological Woman: Interfacing with Tomorrow (New York: Praeger, 1983); Global Electronics Newsletter, 867 West Dana St., #204, Mountain View, CA 94041; Processed World, 55 Sutter St., San Francisco, CA 94104; ISIS, Women's International Information and Communication Service, P.O. Box 50 (Cornavin), 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland, and Via Santa Maria detl'Anima 30, 00186 Rome, Italy. Fundamental approaches to modern social studies of science that do not continue the liberal mystification that it all started with Thomas Kuhn, include: Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981); K. D. Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay, eds., Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1983); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979); Robert M. Young, ‘Interpreting the Production of Science’ New Scientist, vol. 29 (March 1979), pp. 1026–1028. More is claimed than is known about room for contesting productions of science in the mythic/material space of ‘the laboratory’; the 1984 Directory of the Network for the Ethnographic Study of Science, Technology, and Organizations lists a wide range of people and projects crucial to better radical analysis; available from NESSTO, P.O. Box 11442, Stanford, CA 94305.
3. Frederic Jameson, ‘Post Modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, July/August 1984, pp. 53–94. See Marjorie Perloff, ‘Dirty Language and Scramble Systems’, Sulfur II (1984), pp. 178-183; Kathleen Fraser, Something (Even Human Voices) in the Foreground, a Lake (Berkeley, Calif.: Kelsey St. Press, 1984).
4. Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among the Apes (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); Langdon Winner, ‘Do artifacts have politics?’ Daedalus, Winner 1980.
5. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. P. Foss, P. Patton, P. Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). Jameson (‘Post modernism’, p. 66) points out that Plato's definition of the simulacrum is the copy for which there is no original, i.e., the world of advanced capitalism; of pure exchange.
6. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964); Carolyn Merchant, Death of Nature (San Francisco: Harper & Rowe, 1980).
7. Zoe Sofia, ‘Exterminating Fetuses’, Diacritics, vol. 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984), pp. 47–59, and ‘Jupiter Space’ (Pomona, Calif.: American Studies Association, 1984).
8. Powerful developments of coalition politics emerge from ‘third world’ speakers, speaking from nowhere, the displaced center of the universe, earth: ‘We live on the third planet from the sun’ — Sun Poem by Jamaican writer Edward Kamau Braithwaite, review by Nathaniel Mackey, Sulfur, II (1984), pp. 200–205. Home Girls, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983), ironically subverts naturalized identities precisely while constructing a place from which to speak called home. See esp. Bernice Reagan, ‘Coalition Politics, Turning the Century’, pp. 356–368.
9. Chela Sandoval, ‘Dis-lllusionment and the Poetry of the Future: The Making of Oppositional Consciousness’, Ph.D. qualifying essay, UCSC, 1984.
10. Bell Hooks, Ain't I a Woman?(Boston: South End Press, 1981); Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Black, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (Old Westbury, Conn.: Feminist Press, 1982). Toni Cade Bambara, in The Salt Eaters (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1981), writes an extraordinary post-modernist novel, in which the women of color theater group, The Seven Sisters, explores a form of unity. Thanks to Elliott Evans's readings of Bambara, Ph.D. qualifying essay, UCSC, 1984.
11. On orientalism in feminist works and elsewhere, see Lisa Lowe, ‘Orientation: Representations of Cultural and Sexual “Others” ’, Ph.D. thesis, UCSC; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
12. Katie King has developed a theoretically sensitive treatment of the workings of feminist taxonomies as genealogies of power in feminist ideology and polemic: ‘Prospectus’, Gender and Genre: Academic Practice and the Making of Criticism (Santa Cruz, Calif.: University of California, 1984). King examines an intelligent, problematic example of taxonomizing feminisms to make a little machine producing the desired final position: Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983). My caricature here of socialist and radical feminism is also an example.
13. The feminist standpoint argument is being developed by: Jane Flax, ‘Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconsciousness’, in Sandra Harding and Merill Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983); Sandra Harding, ‘The Contradictions and Ambivalence of a Feminist Science’, ms.; Harding and Hintikka, Discovering Reality, Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power New York: Longman, 1983) and ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism’, in Harding and Hintikka, Discovering Reality Mary O';Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); Hilary Rose, ‘Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences’, Signs, vol. 9, no. 1 (1983), pp. 73-90; Dorothy Smith, ‘Women's Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology’, Sociological Inquiry 44 (1974), and ‘A Sociology of Women’, in J. Sherman and E. T. Beck, ed., The Prism of Sex (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979).
14. Catherine MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory’, Signs, vol. 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982), pp. 515–544. A critique indebted to MacKinnon, but without the reductionism and with an elegant feminist account of Foucault's paradoxical conservatism on sexual violence (rape), is Teresa de Lauretis, The Violence of rhetoric: Considerations on representation and gender', in Semiotica, special issue on The Rhetoric of Violence', guest ed. Nancy Armstrong, vol. 54, nos 1 & 2,1985. A theoretically elegant feminist social-historical examination of family violence, that insists on women's, men's, children's complex agency without losing sight of the material structures of male domination, race, and class, is Linda Gordon, Cruelty, Love, and Dependence: Family Violence and Social Control, Boston 1880–1960, forthcoming with Pantheon.
15. My previous efforts to understand biology as a cybernetic command-control discourse and organisms as ‘natural-technical objects of knowledge’ are: ‘The High Cost of Information in Post-World War II Evolutionary Biology’, Philosophical Forum, vol. 13, nos. 2–3 (1979), pp. 206-237; ‘Signs of Dominance: From a Physiology to a Cybernetics of Primate Society’, Studies in History of Biology 6 (1983), pp. 129-219; ‘Class, Race, Sex, Scientific Objects of Knowledge: A Socialist-Feminist Perspective on the Social Construction of Productive Knowledge and Some Political Consequences’, in Violet Haas and Carolyn Perucci, eds., Women in Scientific and Engineering Professions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), pp. 212–229.
16. E. Rusten Hogness, ‘Why Stress? A Look at the Making of Stress, 1936-56’, available from the author, 4437 Mill Creek Rd., Healdsburg, CA 95448.
17. A left entry to the biotechnology debate: GeneWatch, a Bulletin of the Committee for Responsible Genetics, 5 Doane St., 4th floor, Boston, MA 02109; Susan Wright, forthcoming book and ‘Recombinant DNA: The Status of Hazards and Controls’ Environment, July/August 1982; Edward Yoxen, The Gene Business (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1983).
18. Starting references for ‘women in the integrated circuit’: Pamela D'Onofrio-Flores and Sheila M. Pfafflin eds., Scientific-Technological Change and the Role of Women in Development (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982); Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I and My People (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1983); Annette Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich, Women in the Global Factory (Boston: South End Press, 1983), with an especially useful list of resources and organizations; Rachel Grossman, ‘Women's Place in the Integrated Circuit’, Radical America, vol. 14, no. 1 (1980), pp. 29-50; June Nash and M. P. Fernandez-Kelly, eds., Women and Men and the International Division of Labor (Albany, N.Y: SUNY Press, 1983); Aiwa Ong, ‘Japanese Factories, Malay Workers: Industrialization and the Cultural Construction of Gender in West Malaysia’, in Shelley Errington and Jane Atkinson, eds., The Construction of Gender, forthcoming; Science Policy Research Unit, Microelectronics and Women's Employment in Britain (University of Sussex, 1982).
19. The best example is Bruno Latour, Les Microbes: Guerre et Paix, suivi de Irreductions (Paris: Metailie, 1984).
20. For the homework economy and some supporting arguments: Richard Gordon, ‘The Computerization of Daily Life, the Sexual Division of Labor, and the Homework Economy’, in R. Gordon, ed., Microelectronics in Transition (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1985); Patricia Hill Collins, ‘Third World Women in America’, and Sara G. Burr, ‘Women and Work’, in Barbara K. Haber, ed., The Women's Annual, 1981 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982); Judith Gregory and Karen Nussbaum, ‘Race against Time: Automation of the Office’, Office: Technology and People 1 (1982), pp. 197-236; Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, The New Class War: Reagan's Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Microelectronics Group, Microelectronics: Capitalist Technology and the Working Class (London: CSE, 1980); Karin Stallard, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Holly Sklar, Poverty in the American Dream (Boston: South End Press, 1983), including a useful organization and resource list.
21. Rae Lessor Blumberg, ‘A General Theory of Sex Stratification and Its Application to the Position of Women in Today's World Economy’, paper delivered to Sociology Board, UCSC, February 1983. Also Blumberg, Stratification: Socioeconomic and Sexual Inequality (Boston: Brown, 1981). See also Sally Hacker, ‘Doing It the Hard Way: Ethnographic Studies in the Agribusiness and Engineering Classroom’, California American Studies Association, Pomona, 1984, forthcoming in Humanity and Society, S. Hacker and Lisa Bovit, ‘Agriculture to Agribusiness: Technical Imperatives and Changing Roles’, Proceedings of the Society for the History of Technology, Milwaukee, 1981; Lawrence Busch and William Lacy, Science, Agriculture, and the Politics of Research (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983); Denis Wilfred, ‘Capital and Agriculture, a Review of Marxian Problematics’, Studies in Political Economy, no. 7 (1982), pp. 127-154; Carolyn Sachs, The Invisible Farmers: Women in Agricultural Production (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983). Thanks to Elizabeth Bird, ‘Green Revolution Imperialism’, I & II, ms. UCSC, 1984.
22. Cynthia Enloe, ‘Women Textile Workers in the Militarization of South-east Asia’, in Nash and Fernandez-Kelly, Women and Men; Rosalind Petchsky, ‘Abortion, Anti-Feminism, and the Rise of the New Right’, Feminist Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (1981).
23. For a feminist version of this logic, see Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). For an analysis of scientific women's story-telling practices, especially in relation to sociobiology, in evolutionary debates around child abuse and infanticide, see Donna Haraway, ‘The Contest for Primate Nature: Daughters of Man the Hunter in the Field, 1960-80’ in Mark Kann, ed., The Future of American Democracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), pp. 175–208.
24. For the moment of transition of hunting with guns to hunting with cameras in the construction of popular meanings of nature for an American urban immigrant public, see Donna Haraway, ‘Teddy Bear Patriarchy’, Social Text, no. 11, Winter 1984–5, pp. 20-64; Roderick Nash, ‘The Exporting and Importing of Nature: Nature-Appreciation as a Commodity, 1850-1980’, Perspectives in American History, vol. 3 (1979), pp. 517-560; Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Dell, 1977); and Douglas Preston, ‘Shooting in Paradise’, Natural History, vol. 93, no. 12 (December 1984), pp. 14–19.
25. For crucial guidance for thinking about the political/cultural implications of the history of women doing science in the United States, see: Violet Haas and Carolyn Perucci,-eds., Women in Scientific and Engineering Professions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984); Sally Hacker, ‘The Culture of Engineering: Women, Workplace, and Machine’ Women's Studies International Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 3 (1981), pp. 341-53; Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism (San Francisco: Freeman, 1983); National Science Foundation, Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering (Washington, D.C.: NSF, 1982); Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
26. John Markoff and Lenny Siegel, ‘Military Micros’, UCSC Silicon Valley Research Project conference, 1983, forthcoming in Microelectronics and Industrial Transformation. High Technology Professionals for Peace and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility are promising organizations.
27. Katie King, ‘The Pleasure of Repetition and the Limits of Identification in Feminist Science Fiction: Reimaginations of the Body after the Cyborg’, California American Studies Association, Pomona, 1984. An abbreviated list of feminist science fiction underlying themes of this essay: Octavia Butler, Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Kindred, Survivor, Suzy McKee Charnas, Motherlines; Samuel Delany, Tales of Neveryorr, Anne McCaffrey, The Ship Who Sang, Dinosaur Planet, Vonda McIntyre, Superluminal, Dreamsnake, Joanna Russ, Adventures of Ayx, The Female Man; James Tiptree, Jr., Star Songs of an Old Primate, Up the Walls of the World, John Varley, Titan, Wizard, Demon.
28. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), Natural Symbols (London: Cresset Press, 1970).
29. French feminisms contribute to cyborg heteroglossia. Carolyn Burke, ‘Irigaray through the Looking Glass’, Feminist Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (Summer 1981), pp. 288-306; Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un(Paris: Minuit, 1977); L. Irigaray, Et I'une ne bouge pas sans I'autre (Paris: Minuit, 1979); Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, ed., New French Feminisms (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); Signs, vol. 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1981), special issue on French feminism; Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body, trans. David LeVay (New York: Avon, 1975; Le corps lesbien, 1973).
30. But all these poets are very complex, not least in treatment of themes of lying and erotic, decentered collective and personal identities. Susan Griffin, Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (New York: Crossing Press, 1984); Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language (New York: Norton, 1978).
31. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. and introd. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), esp. part II. ‘Nature, Culture, Writing’; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (New York, 1961), esp. The Writing Lesson'.
32. Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years (Boston: South End Press, 1983). The sharp relation of women of color to writing as theme and politics can be approached through: ‘The Black Woman and the Diaspora: Hidden Connections and Extended Acknowledgments’, An International Literary Conference, Michigan State University, October 1985; Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers: A Critical Evaluation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1984); Dexter Fisher, ed., The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980); several issues of Frontiers, esp. vol. 5 (1980), ‘Chicanas en el Ambiente Nacional’ and vol. 7 (1983), ‘Feminisms in the Non-Western World’; Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Knopf, 1977); Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, 1973); Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1981); Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Global (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984). The writing of white women has had similar meanings: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing (Austin: University for Texas Press, 1983).
33. James Clifford argues persuasively for recognition of continuous cultural reinvention, the stubborn non-disappearance of those ‘marked’ by Western imperializing practices; see ‘On Ethnographic Allegory: Essays’ forthcoming 1985, and ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, Representations, vol. 1, no. 2 (1983), pp. 118–146.
34. Page DuBois, Centaurs and Amazons (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, ‘Hermaphrodites in Renaissance France’, ms., n.d.; Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, ‘Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in 16th and 17th Century France and England’, Past and Present, no. 92 (August 1981), pp. 20–54.