I have had Modest_Witness for years now and never cracked it open once. The title is so off-putting.
In general, I think Haraway's earlier work is more interesting and somewhat better-written, although she is never a great stylist. Her very earliest feminist critical work on primatology and the gendered ways in which scientists and science popularizers select the species they consider "representative" of human behaviors, regardless of genetic relationship to humanity, is written with much more clarity and pointedness, probably because she started out as a primatologist and not only knows what she's talking about, but *knows* that she knows what she's talking about.
I'm sort of fond of "A Cyborg Manifesto," but that's because I know the SF novels she's talking about, can make that section of the essay make sense, and can use that as a key to decipher the rest of the essay.
I like her mostly because she thinks like a science fiction writer: she thinks of society, human behaviors, constructions of science as being limited or enabled by current knowledge, as being subject to change, is open to changes in things most people take as givens, and is open to seeing monolithic givens as actually made up of complicated connections between various behaviors, power structures, and fields of knowledge. This is something I expected to find a lot of in feminist theory when I first started studying it, but which I didn't find much of at all.
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Donna Haraway
Date: 2003-07-12 09:12 am (UTC)In general, I think Haraway's earlier work is more interesting and somewhat better-written, although she is never a great stylist. Her very earliest feminist critical work on primatology and the gendered ways in which scientists and science popularizers select the species they consider "representative" of human behaviors, regardless of genetic relationship to humanity, is written with much more clarity and pointedness, probably because she started out as a primatologist and not only knows what she's talking about, but *knows* that she knows what she's talking about.
I'm sort of fond of "A Cyborg Manifesto," but that's because I know the SF novels she's talking about, can make that section of the essay make sense, and can use that as a key to decipher the rest of the essay.
I like her mostly because she thinks like a science fiction writer: she thinks of society, human behaviors, constructions of science as being limited or enabled by current knowledge, as being subject to change, is open to changes in things most people take as givens, and is open to seeing monolithic givens as actually made up of complicated connections between various behaviors, power structures, and fields of knowledge. This is something I expected to find a lot of in feminist theory when I first started studying it, but which I didn't find much of at all.