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Thinkers

Donna Haraway

Critical Theory · North America · born 1944

American thinker who holds that the borders between human, animal and machine are blurred. She urges us to think in terms of kinship.

What it is

Donna Haraway (born 1944 in Denver, Colorado) is an American thinker whose work joins the history of science, feminist theory and the study of animals and machines. She studied zoology and philosophy at Colorado College, took a doctorate at Yale in 1972 with a dissertation on developmental biology, and has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz since 1980.

She is best known for her essay on the cyborg, first published in 1985 in the journal Socialist Review, and for later work on how people live alongside other species.

The main ideas

  • The cyborg. She used the cyborg, a creature that is part machine and part organism, as a figure for thinking past neat divisions between the natural and the made. She called her essay on it an effort to build an ironic political myth.
  • Boundary creatures. In the essays collected as Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, she treats apes, cyborgs and women as creatures that unsettle the older Western stories of evolution, technology and biology, and asks how the ideas of nature and the human body have been made and remade.
  • Science tells stories. Her book Primate Visions looks at the history of research on monkeys and apes, and at how ideas about gender, race and nature shape what is said in the name of science.
  • Kinship across species. Her later work looks at life shared with other species. Her book Staying with the Trouble carries the subtitle Making Kin in the Chthulucene.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine a person who trains a dog for a sport and finds that each of them has changed the other: the person's days, the dog's habits, both of their bodies. Haraway would see in this a small case of what she means by kinship across species, in which neither side is simply the master. This is an illustration of her line of thought, not a passage from her writing.

Books and moments

  • A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985) is her best-known essay, also known as A Cyborg Manifesto.
  • Primate Visions studies the history of research on monkeys and apes.
  • Simians, Cyborgs, and Women collects essays on gender, nature and the cyborg.
  • The Companion Species Manifesto looks at life shared with dogs.
  • Staying with the Trouble is her 2016 book, subtitled Making Kin in the Chthulucene.

Questions and criticism

  • Myth or claim? She called the cyborg essay an ironic political myth. It is fair to ask how literally its picture of people and machines should be taken.
  • Without a big theory. If no single theory covers everything, it is fair to ask what shared ground is left for argument and for politics.
  • Science and its critics. Her work crosses primatology, philosophy and biology. It is fair to ask how much of any dispute about it is about facts and how much about meaning.

Close neighbours

The page on Bruno Latour covers another thinker who studied science as something people make in practice.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Michel Foucault · She drew on Foucault's view of how power works through knowledge about bodies and life. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Critical Theory thinkers

Sources we used

  • Donna Haraway · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026
  • Haraway, Donna · American Women Writers (Encyclopedia.com), read on 29 October 2026
  • Donna Haraway · European Graduate School, read on 29 October 2026
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