1st Edition

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women The Reinvention of Nature

By Donna Haraway Copyright 1991
    312 Pages
    by Routledge

    312 Pages
    by Routledge

    Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as "creatures" which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called "outstanding," "original," and "brilliant," by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.)

    I. Nature as a System of Production and Reproduction  1. Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic  2. The Past Is the Contested Zone  3. The Biological Enterprise  II. Contested Readings: Narrative Natures  4. In the Beginning Was the Word  5. The Contest for Primate Nature  6. Reading Buchi Emecheta  III. Differential Politics of Innappropriate/d Others  7. 'Gender' for a Marxist Dictionary  8. A Cyborg Manifesto  9. Situated Knowledges  10. The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies

    Biography

    Donna Haraway

    "As a whole, the book is a valuable and significant addition to the recent scholarship that argues for the sociol construction of nature. Haraway is an acknowledged authority on the history of scientific research on primates, and the book is thorough and probing in its analysis of primate studies. It is also provocative and original in its discussion of words such as "gender", "nature", and "experience." -- M.H. Chaplin Choice
    "...the book as a whole presents the relationship of the sciences to feminist theory in a thorough, even-handed manner." -- Cara E. Richards, Transylvania University Science Books and Films