Donna Haraway

Donna Haraway: The Biologist Who Rewired the Humanities

In 2017 *ArtReview* named a retired professor from a hillside campus in Santa Cruz the third most influential person in the contemporary art world. She had never made a painting or curated a show. Her doctorate was in biology, from Yale, and her dissertation was about the metaphors organic biologists use when they describe embryos. Somewhere between the laboratory and the art world, Donna Haraway became one of the few living thinkers whose vocabulary — cyborg, situated knowledges, natureculture, making kin — has escaped the academy entirely.

Denver, the Eucharist, and a Sportswriter's Daughter

Haraway was born in Denver on 6 September 1944. Her father, Frank O. Haraway, wrote sports for *The Denver Post*, and she credits him with her ear for language and her conviction that storytelling is a serious activity rather than a decorative one. Her mother, Dorothy McGuire Haraway, came from an Irish Catholic family and died of a heart attack when Donna was sixteen.

The Catholicism did not survive, but its intellectual furniture did. She attended St Mary's Academy in Cherry Hills Village, and she has been explicit that the doctrine of the eucharist — the insistence that a sign and a body can be the same object, that the figural and the material are not separable — is foundational to everything she has argued since. It is an unusual admission from a theorist regularly filed under postmodernism, and it explains a lot: she has never been interested in the claim that things are "just" representations.

From Cells to Metaphors

At Colorado College, on a Boettcher Scholarship, she majored in zoology with minors in philosophy and English — a combination that in 1962 looked eccentric and now looks like a career plan. A Fulbright took her to Paris to study evolutionary philosophy and theology at the Fondation Teilhard de Chardin. She arrived at Yale in 1967 for a doctorate in cell and molecular biology, took it in 1972, and spent the same years inside the anti-war movement and the earliest wave of academic feminism.

Her thesis became *Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields* in 1976. Its argument was that developmental biology does not merely use metaphors to explain its findings to laypeople; the metaphors do load-bearing work inside the science, determining what counts as a question. She taught at the University of Hawaiʻi from 1971, then at Johns Hopkins from 1974, where she co-founded women's studies with Nancy Hartsock and helped build feminist standpoint theory. In 1980 UC Santa Cruz gave her a chair in its History of Consciousness programme, making her the first tenured professor of feminist theory in the United States.

The Manifesto

In 1985 *Socialist Review* published "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s." It was written under Reagan-era pressure and against a feminism she thought had grown attached to a pure, natural, essentially female subject. Her counter-figure was the cyborg: a hybrid of organism and machine that could not appeal to any original wholeness and therefore could not be nostalgic. The essay mapped how cybernetics and the new information economy were remaking gender and personhood while stitching together global chains of both exploitation and solidarity.

It became one of the most cited essays of the late twentieth century, and its author's relationship to it is complicated. She has said the reception sometimes makes her "want to jump into a foxhole." The cyborg, she maintains, is still a useful trickster, but the world has moved and so has she.

Situated Knowledges, and the God Trick

Her more durable contribution arrived in 1988. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" attacked what she called the god trick — the pretence of seeing everything from nowhere, the disembodied objectivity that science claims for itself. Her alternative was not relativism, which she regarded as the god trick's mirror image and equally useless. It was accountability: knowledge is always made from somewhere by someone, and admitting where you stand makes your claims more testable, not less.

The distinction was widely missed. During the 1990s Science Wars she was accused of denying that truth exists. Her flat response, decades later: "Truth is perspectival was never our position." What she practises she calls semiotic materialism — meaning-making grounded in bodies and worlds. Post-truth politics, she argues, is the abandonment of exactly the materialism her work demands.

Primates, Dogs, and the End of the Human

*Primate Visions* (1989) turned the method on primatology, showing how mid-century narratives about ape societies encoded contemporary assumptions about gender, race and heterosexuality. It won the American Sociological Association's Robert K. Merton Award in 1992 and irritated a good many primatologists. *Simians, Cyborgs and Women* followed in 1991, and *Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™* — a title designed to be unquotable — in 1997, with images by the artist Lynn Randolph; it took the Ludwik Fleck Prize in 1999.

Then she changed animals. *The Companion Species Manifesto* (2003) and *When Species Meet* turned to dogs, and to what she calls significant otherness: relationships between species that are neither fusion nor mastery. *Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene* (2016) proposed replacing the Anthropocene — a term she dislikes because it implies humans were always destined to wreck things — with a name for an era of tentacular, multispecies entanglement. Extractivism, she insists, has a specific five-hundred-year history and is therefore contingent. "The established disorder of our present era is not necessary. It exists. But it's not" inevitable.

Why Donna Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a rare structural talent: inventing figures that let other people think. Cyborg, situated knowledges, natureculture, companion species, making kin — each is a compact device that reorganises a field, and each has been taken up by researchers who never read the original essay. That is closer to what a mathematician does in coining a productive notation than to what a philosopher does in constructing an argument. It requires two literacies at once: she can read a primatology paper as a scientist and read it again as a text, and the second reading is only credible because the first is real.

The institutions have agreed, across unrelated fields. The Society for Social Studies of Science gave her the Ludwik Fleck Prize and, in 2000, the J.D. Bernal Award for lifetime contribution; Yale awarded her the Wilbur Cross Medal in 2017; the Erasmus Prize followed in 2025.

The counter-case is about the prose. Critics have called her approach methodologically vague and her language opaque in a way that looks deliberate — a charge that stings because it often comes from sympathisers. Anne Fausto-Sterling called *Primate Visions* important while wishing it were easier to read. Some primatologists questioned whether she understood their methods well enough to indict them. The real risk in her style is that a striking figure substitutes for a demonstrated claim, leaving her impossible to falsify. Her defenders answer that a thinker dismantling the fantasy of neutral language could hardly write in it. Both things can be true.

Legacy

Haraway is Professor Emerita at Santa Cruz and lives north of San Francisco with Rusten Hogness, whom she married in 1975. Her current attention is on land and water sovereignty struggles and on collaboration with Indigenous knowledge systems rather than on digital culture. Her lasting effect is a permission slip: three generations of scholars now treat the boundary between nature and culture, human and animal, organism and machine, as a thing to be examined rather than assumed. She insists on play as a political practice equal to labour, and on refusing both techno-utopian cheer and the paralysis of despair. Staying with the trouble, in her phrase, is the work.

Achievements

• John Desmond Bernal Prize — 2000
• Wilbur Cross Medal — 2017
• Ludwik Fleck Prize — 1999
• Erasmus Prize — 2025
• Notable work: When Species Meet
• Notable work: A Cyborg Manifesto
• Notable work: Staying with the Trouble
• Notable work: The Companion Species Manifesto
• Held posts at University of California, Santa Cruz, European Graduate School and Johns Hopkins University
• Fields: gender studies