When Species Meet: Feminism after Cyborgs

Conference and seminar with Donna Haraway

The 1990's saw a blooming of critical debate concerning the constructs of gender, sexuality and race. Donna Haraway, one of the most original and controversial figures in the field of cultural studies, science and technology, uses the metaphor of the cyborg (the name given by Mandred Clynes in 1960 to a lab rat in which he implanted a cybernetic control system) to indicate that our bodies and identities—gender, sexuality and race—, are products of complex bio-political technologies. As postmodern creatures, we are techno-live cultural systems. The stage of post-Fordism that Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno refer to signals the passing from an industrial, sexo-organic society to a prosthetic and polymorphous system of gender information. Haraway denominates the current situation of sexual and cultural minorities when faced with growing globalization of systems of production and reproduction of gender, sexuality and race "the computing of domination."

Haraway's extensive bibliography is based on the analysis of metaphors used in science and the way in which they subtly determine the networks of power that control the world. Her work includes subjects from Primatology (Primate Visions:Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, 1989) to Epistemology; from cancer research to computer technology. Within her body of works are Science, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, an important text in the theory of post-human being politics, the cyborg and the interaction between man and machine, and Modest Witness@Second Millenium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technosciencewhere the author contemplates technoscience as a drama between the sciences of information and life.

Donna Haraway (Denver, 1944), PhD. in Biology and Professor of Feminist Theory and Techno-science, is known for her contributions in fields as diverse as Cultural Studies, Political Theory, Primatology, Literature, and Philosophy.

This program was organized in collaboration with the department of Social Psychology (UAB), el Centre de Dona i Literatura, Cátedra UNESCO Mujeres, development and culture (UB). With the participation of the Cos i Textualitat group (UAB, UB, UDG, UM), Editorial UOC, and the Centre Francesca Bonnemaison.