Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Perspective
Author(s): Donna Haraway
Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066
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SITUATEDKNOWLEDGES:
THE SCIENCEQUESTIONIN FEMINISM
AND THE PRIVILEGEOF PARTIAL
PERSPECTIVE
DONNA HARAWAY
NOTES
roundingterritory.How could we have forgotten?But now it's not so much the bank-
rupt railroadswe need as the satellite network. Facts run on light beams these days.
2. Foran elegantand very helpfulelucidationof a noncartoonversion of this argument,
see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Represen-
tation (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). I still want more; and un-
fulfilled desire can be a powerful seed for changingthe stories.
3. In "Throughthe Lumen:Frankensteinand the Opticsof Re-Origination" (Ph.D.diss.
Universityof Californiaat SantaCruz, 1988),Zoe Sofoulishas produceda dazzling(she
will forgiveme the metaphor)theoreticaltreatmentof technoscience,the psychoanaly-
sis of science fiction culture, and the metaphoricsof extraterrestrialism,including a
wonderfulfocus on the ideologiesand philosophiesof light, illumination,and discovery
in Westernmythics of science and technology. My essay was revised in dialoguewith
Sofoulis'sargumentsand metaphorsin her dissertation.
4. Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: An Essay on Domination and Community
(Boston:NortheasternUniversity Press, 1984).
5. Crucial to this discussion are SandraHarding, The Science Questionin Feminism
(Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1987);Evelyn Fox Keller,Reflectionson Genderand
Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Nancy Hartsock, "TheFeminist
Standpoint:Developingthe Groundfor a SpecificallyFeministHistoricalMaterialism,"
in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Philosophy
of Science,eds. SandraHardingand MerrillB. Hintikka(Dordrecht,The Netherlands:
Reidel, 1983): 283-310; Jane Flax's "PoliticalPhilosophy and the PatriarchalUn-
conscious,"in DiscoveringReality,245-81;and "Postmodernismand GenderRelationsin
Feminist Theory,"Signs 12 (Summer 1987): 621-43; Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine
Grontkowski,"TheMind'sEye,"in DiscoveringReality,207-24; Hilary Rose, "Women's
Work, Women's Knowledge," in What Is Feminism? A Re-Examination, eds. Juliet Mit-
chell and Ann Oakley (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 161-83; Donna Haraway, "A
Manifesto for Cyborgs:Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,"
SocialistReview,no. 80 (March-April1985): 65-107; and RosalindPollack Petchesky,
"FetalImages:The Power of Visual Culturein the Politics of Reproduction," Feminist
Studies13 (Summer1987):263-92.
Aspects of the debatesabout modernismand postmodernismaffect feministanalyses
of the problem of "objectivity." Mappingthe fault line between modernismand post-
modernism in ethnography and anthropology-in which the high stakes are the
authorizationor prohibitionto craftcomparativeknowledge across "cultures"-Marilyn
Strathernmade the crucial observationthat it is not the written ethnographythat is
parallelto the work of art as object-of-knowledge,but the culture.The Romanticand
modernistnatural-technicalobjects of knowledge,in science and in other culturalprac-
tice, stand on one side of this divide. The postmodernistformationstands on the other
side, with its "anti-aesthetic"
of permanentlysplit, problematized,always recedingand
deferred "objects"of knowledge and practice, including signs, organisms, systems,
selves, and cultures. "Objectivity" in a postmodern framework cannot be about un-
problematicobjects;it must be about specificprosthesisand always partialtranslations.
At root, objectivityis about craftingcomparativeknowledge: How may a community
name things to be stable and to be like each other? In postmodernism,this query
translatesinto a question of the politics of redrawingof boundariesin order to have
non-innocent conversations and connections. What is at stake in the debates about
modernism and postmodernismis the pattern of relationships between and within
bodies and language.This is a crucialmatterfor feminists. See MarilynStrathern,"Out
of Context:The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology,"CurrentAnthropology28 (June
1987): 251-81, and "PartialConnections,"Munro Lecture, University of Edinburgh,
November 1987, unpublishedmanuscript.
6. Harding,24-26, 161-62.
598 Donna Haraway