Modest−Witness@Second−Millennium.FemaleMan−Meets−OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience

Front Cover
Psychology Press, 1997 - 361 pages
Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth-century technoscience.

The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse.

From inside the book

Contents

The Grammar of Feminism and Technoscience PART
14
Modest WitnessSecond_Millennium FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse
19
Modest_WitnessSecond_Millennium
23
A Technoscience Fugue in Two Parts
49
A Family Reunion
119
Technoscience in Hypertext PART THREE
123
Maps and Portraits of Life Itself
131
The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order
173
REFERENCES
278
INDEX VII
282
1
291
23
297
49
311
119
341
125
348
131
350

Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture
213
Facts Witnesses and Consequences
267
NOTES
275

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1997)

An influential historian of science and cultural studies theorist, Haraway attended Colorado College and then Yale University, where she received a Ph.D. in biology in 1972. More recently she has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Haraway draws on poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and cultural studies theory to explore the political and social dimensions of science in order to reclaim it for ends other than social control. Axiomatic for her is that nature is not discovered and then objectively observed and described, but rather that it is actively constructed by a culture so as to serve certain political ends, even if these are not consciously articulated or known. Like Michel Foucault, Haraway believes that discourses of knowledge are always also discourses of pleasure and power. Haraway's first book, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1976), is not as theoretically sophisticated as her next two books, which have had a significant impact on cultural, feminist, and postcolonial studies, and have been the subject of some controversy amongst traditionally trained scientists and historians of science. Primate Visions (1989) is an analysis of the gender and racial politics of primatology, the study of "man's closest relatives in the animal kingdom." One of Haraway's recent books, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), collects essays written between 1978 and 1989, including the important "Cyborg Manifesto," which argues for the necessity of a feminist science and technology, rather than the rejection of both fields, as advocated by many feminist utopians. Instead, Haraway calls for the further development of the "cyborg," a hybrid subject who deconstructs by combining distinct and unitary identities (human-machine, human-animal, etc.).

Bibliographic information