Haraway, Donna J.

1944–

U.S. Academic

Donna J. Haraway is a feminist historian of science and technology, perhaps best known for her “invention” of cyborg studies in the 1990s. She is currently a professor in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Donna Haraway was born in Denver, Colorado. Her mother was a Colorado native, and her father moved there as a boy from Tennessee to be treated for childhood tuberculosis. In spite of life-long physical disabilities associated with illness, Haraway's father was an avid sports fan, working as a sports writer for the Denver Post throughout her childhood. Her mother, a devout Irish Catholic, died in 1960, when Haraway was 16. As a young girl, Haraway attended Catholic schools, and after high school she enrolled at Colorado College, a small liberal arts school where she received a full scholarship, and where she became active in the civil rights movement occurring across college campuses at the time. She graduated with a major in zoology and minors in philosophy and English literature.

In 1966, Haraway was awarded a Fulbright to study the history and philosophy of science in Paris. When she returned to the United States, she was accepted for graduate school in biology at Yale University. While at Yale, Haraway lived in an academic commune and was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Her dissertation, which concerned the use of metaphor in the history and philosophy of biology, was accepted in 1972, and later published in 1976 as the book Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields.

In 1970, Haraway married Jaye Miller, a graduate student in history at Yale, and the two moved to the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. In 1974, Haraway left Hawaii and moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Johns Hopkins University. Then in 1980, she moved again, this time to teach feminist studies and science studies in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has remained on faculty at Santa Cruz for more than 20 years, developing her long-range academic focus—the relationship between feminism, anthropology, and the history of science.

Haraway's personal politics have long fueled her writing. In 1973, she and her husband Jaye Miller separated, as Miller, openly gay since 1968, grew more involved with gay rights and activism. Still, the two remained close friends. In 1974, she met Rusten Hogness, a graduate student in the History of Science at Johns Hopkins, with whom she has lived ever since. In 1977, Haraway, Miller, and Hogness bought land together in Healdsburg, California, where they shared a house with Miller's lover Robert Filomeno until Filomeno's death from AIDS in 1986; Miller succumbed to the same disease in 1991.

As Haraway explained to interviewer Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, “From the beginning and to the present, my interest has been in what gets to count as nature and who gets to inhabit natural categories.” Primate Visions (1989), Haraway's first book after her dissertation, investigated the field of primatology, a discipline that she argued was as much about “the origin and nature of ‘man’” as it was about the world of monkeys. At the same time, Haraway was writing the essays for Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, published in 1991. In them, she coupled her discussions about the breakdowns between animals and humans (for example, baboon heart transplants in humans) with analyses regarding the raging “border wars” between humans and machines (for example, the increased use of prosthetic body parts, the labor of women in the microprocessing industries, and the rise of telecommunications networks).

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