Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial

Perspective
Author(s): Donna Haraway
Source: Feminist Studies , Autumn, 1988, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Feminist Studies

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 SITUATED KNOWLEDGES:
THE SCIENCE QUESTION IN FEMINISM
AND THE PRIVILEGE OF PARTIAL
PERSPECTIVE

DONNA HARAWAY

Academic and activist feminist inquiry has repeatedly tried t

come to terms with the question of what we might mean by t
curious and inescapable term "objectivity." We have used a lot
toxic ink and trees processed into paper decrying what they ha
meant and how it hurts us. The imagined "they" constitute a ki
of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophe
replete with grants and laboratories. The imagined "we" are t
embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body, a fin
point of view, and so an inevitably disqualifying and polluting bia
in any discussion of consequence outside our own little circle
where a "mass"-subscription journal might reach a few thousan
readers composed mostly of science haters. At least, I confess
these paranoid fantasies and academic resentments lurking und
neath some convoluted reflections in print under my name in
feminist literature in the history and philosophy of science. W
the feminists in the debates about science and technology, are
Reagan era's "special-interest groups" in the rarified realm
epistemology, where traditionally what can count as knowledge
policed by philosophers codifying cognitive canon law. Of cour
a special-interest group is, by Reaganoid definition, any collect
historical subject that dares to resist the stripped-down atomism o
Star Wars, hypermarket, postmodern, media-simulated citize
ship. Max Headroom doesn't have a body; therefore, he alone s
everything in the great communicator's empire of the Global N
work. No wonder Max gets to have a naive sense of humor and
kind of happily regressive, preoedipal sexuality, a sexuality th
Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988). ? 1988 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
575

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 576 Donna Haraway

we ambivalently -with dang

be reserved for lifelong in
and maybe also white mal
tronic confinement.
It has seemed to me that feminists have both selectively and
flexibly used and been trapped by two poles of a tempting
dichotomy on the question of objectivity. Certainly I speak for
myself here, and I offer the speculation that there is a collective
discourse on these matters. Recent social studies of science and
technology, for example, have made available a very strong social
constructionist argument for all forms of knowledge claims, most
certainly and especially scientific ones.' According to these tempt-
ing views, no insider's perspective is privileged, because all draw-
ings of inside-outside boundaries in knowledge are theorized as
power moves, not moves toward truth. So, from the strong social
constructionist perspective, why should we be cowed by scien-
tists' descriptions of their activity and accomplishments; they and
their patrons have stakes in throwing sand in our eyes. They tell
parables about objectivity and scientific method to students in the
first years of their initiation, but no practitioner of the high scien-
tific arts would be caught dead acting on the textbook versions.
Social constructionists make clear that official ideologies about ob-
jectivity and scientific method are particularly bad guides to how
scientific knowledge is actually made. Just as for the rest of us,
what scientists believe or say they do and what they really do have
a very loose fit.
The only people who end up actually believing and, goddess for-
bid, acting on the ideological doctrines of disembodied scientific
objectivity-enshrined in elementary textbooks and technoscience
booster literature-are nonscientists, including a few very trusting
philosophers. Of course, my designation of this last group is prob-
ably just a reflection of a residual disciplinary chauvinism ac-
quired from identifying with historians of science and from spend-
ing too much time with a microscope in early adulthood in a kind
of disciplinary preoedipal and modernist poetic moment when
cells seemed to be cells and organisms, organisms. Pace, Gertrude
Stein. But then came the law of the father and its resolution of the
problem of objectivity, a problem solved by always already absent
referents, deferred signifieds, split subjects, and the endless play
of signifiers. Who wouldn't grow up warped? Gender, race, the

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Donna Haraway 577

world itself-all seem

signifiers in a cosmic f
In any case, social co
ideological doctrine of
verbiage about epistem
tion from getting to k
sciences. From this poin
is rhetoric, a series of e
one's manufactured kno
objective power. Such
ture of facts and artifa
the knowledge game.
powerful art of rheto
very much on practic
agonistic power field.
knowledge joins with
deconstruction to insist
scientific truth. Histor
other; science is a conte
the form.2 Period.
So much for those of u
with more confidence
they discuss the Secon
the final destruction o
peals to real worlds ar
cynicism and an act of
much space we genero
cally specific mediatio
must know the world
radical social construc
postmodernism, couple
the human sciences, th
fields, of moves in a f
the working metaphor
ated reality for the pos
agery of high-tech mi
fields, where blips of li
phor!) each other in o
game. Technoscience a
their radiant (ir)reality

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
578 Donna Haraway

theory to sense the enem

clear in her concept of a
I, and others, started out
ing the truth claims of
torical specificity, and so
of scientific and technolo
kind of epistemological
ushering us into the hig
public truths, lays us ou
personality disorder. We
in science (that proved
the good scientific sheep
seemed promising to do
tionist argument that lef
versus objectivity, use
science. We unmasked t
threatened our budding
and agency and our "embo
ed up with one more exc
physics and one more r
practices of repairing ou
let the boys have them
Some of us tried to sta
sembling times by holdin
Here, motivated by many
seductive end of the ob
was polluted at the sour
domination of nature in
closely related impotenc
women did that didn't q
promising resource as a
hygiene that sought our o
starting points offered a
point theories, insistent e
hegemony without dise
and a way to get to nuan
of psychoanalysis were
phone object relations t
socialist feminism for a t
or Engels, much less Alth

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Donna Haraway 579

ship treating the su

Another approach,
feminist uses of M
which continues to in
which remains leery
semiology and narrat
count of the world; i
tingency and modes
feminists, find ours
of many practicing
mostly believe they a
of all their construc
particularly insistent
ding calls the goal of
nists have stakes in
adequate, richer, bet
well and in critical,
practices of dominat
pression that make
categories, the issu
epistemology.
So, I think my problem, and "our" problem, is how to have simul-
taneously an account of radical historical contingency for all
knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for
recognizing our own "semiotic technologies" for making meanings,
and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a "real"
world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to
earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abun-
dance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness. Har-
ding calls this necessary multiple desire a need for a successor
science project and a postmodern insistence on irreducible dif-
ference and radical multiplicity of local knowledges. All compo-
nents of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their com-
bination is both contradictory and necessary. Feminists don't need
a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence, a story that
loses track of its mediations just where someone might be held
responsible for something, and unlimited instrumental power. We
don't want a theory of innocent powers to represent the world,
where language and bodies both fall into the bliss of organic sym-
biosis. We also don't want to theorize the world, much less act

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 580 Donna Haraway

within it, in terms of Gl

wide network of connec
translate knowledges amo
ated - communities. W
theories of how meaning
deny meanings and bodie
bodies that have a chance for life.
Natural, social, and human sciences have always been impli-
cated in hopes like these. Science has been about a search for
translation, convertibility, mobility of meanings, and universality-
which I call reductionism only when one language (guess whose?)
must be enforced as the standard for all the translations and con-
versions. What money does in the exchange orders of capitalism,
reductionism does in the powerful mental orders of global
sciences. There is, finally, only one equation. That is the deadly
fantasy that feminists and others have identified in some versions
of objectivity, those in the service of hierarchical and positivist
orderings of what can count as knowledge. That is one of the
reasons the debates about objectivity matter, metaphorically and
otherwise. Immortality and omnipotence are not our goals. But we
could use some enforceable, reliable accounts of things not reduci-
ble to power moves and agonistic, high-status games of rhetoric or
to scientistic, positivist arrogance. This point applies whether we
are talking about genes, social classes, elementary particles,
genders, races, or texts; the point applies to the exact, natural,
social, and human sciences, despite the slippery ambiguities of the
words "objectivity" and "science" as we slide around the discursive
terrain. In our efforts to climb the greased pole leading to a usable
doctrine of objectivity, I and most other feminists in the objectivity
debates have alternatively, or even simultaneously, held on to
both ends of the dichotomy, a dichotomy which Harding des-
cribes in terms of successor science projects versus postmodernist
accounts of difference and which I have sketched in this essay as
radical constructivism versus feminist critical empiricism. It is, of
course, hard to climb when you are holding on to both ends of a
pole, simultaneously or alternatively. It is, therefore, time to
switch metaphors.

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Donna Haraway 581

THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION

I would like to proceed by placing metaphorical rel
much maligned sensory system in feminist discourse: v
sion can be good for avoiding binary oppositions. I wou
insist on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sen-
sory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked
body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze
that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the un-
marked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to repre-
sent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the un-
marked positions of Man and White, one of the many nasty tones
of the word "objectivity" to feminist ears in scientific and tech-
nological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant
societies, that is, here, in the belly of the monster, in the United
States in the late 1980s. I would like a doctrine of embodied ob-
jectivity that accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist
science projects: Feminist objectivity means quite simply situated
knowledges.
The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity-honed
to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capi-
talism, colonialism, and male supremacy-to distance the know-
ing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of
unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multina-
tionalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings
of disembodiment. The visualizing technologies are without ap-
parent limit. The eye of any ordinary primate like us can be end-
lessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic reasonance
imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation sys-
tems, scanning electron microscopes, computed tomography scan-
ners, color-enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance sys-
tems, home and office video display terminals, cameras for every
purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity
of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between con-
tinental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the
solar system. Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated
gluttony; all seems not just mythically about the god trick of seeing
everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary
practice. And like the god trick, this eye fucks the world to make
techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis calls this the cannibaleye of mas-
culinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
582 Donna Haraway

A tribute to this ideo

unrestricted vision, w
neously celebrated and
found in the volume c
tional Geographic Soci
magazine's quest lit
photography, with two
introduced by the e
nothing."8 This chapter
displays the color-enh
assembled from digital
let the viewer "experien
vision of the "object."9
neously as indubitable
heroic feats of techno
the twin of outer space
"The stuff of stars has c
to the realm of the inf
outside the wave length
primates, that is, th
microscopes, whose sig
color snapshots of def
But, of course, that v
trick. I would like to s
the particularity and e
cessarily organic embo
tion), and not giving in
to disembodiment and
usable, but not an in
feminist writing of th
sion again, because we
through all the visuali
and technologies that
We need to learn in ou
stereoscopic vision, ho
and political scanners i
in dimensions of ment
to name. So, not so pe
particular and specific
false vision promising

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Donna Haraway 583

ty. The moral is simp

tive vision. All Weste
allegories of the ideol
mind and body, distan
about limited location
cendence and splitt
become answerable for what we learn how to see.
These are lessons that I learned in part walking with my dogs
and wondering how the world looks without a fovea and very few
retinal cells for color vision but with a huge neural processing and
sensory area for smells. It is a lesson available from photographs of
how the world looks to the compound eyes of an insect or even
from the camera eye of a spy satellite or the digitally transmitted
signals of space probe-perceived differences "near" Jupiter that
have been transformed into coffee table color photographs. The
"eyes" made available in modern technological sciences shatter any
idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all
eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual
systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that
is, ways of life. There is no unmediated photograph or passive
camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines;
there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a
wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds. All
these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite
mobility and interchangeability but of elaborate specificity and
difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to
see faithfully from another's point of view, even when the other is
our own machine. That's not alienating distance; that's a possible
allegory for feminist versions of objectivity. Understanding how
these visual systems work, technically, socially, and psychically,
ought to be a way of embodying feminist objectivity.
Many currents in feminism attempt to theorize grounds for
trusting especially the vantage points of the subjugated; there is
good reason to believe vision is better from below the brilliant
space platforms of the powerful." Building on that suspicion, this
essay is an argument for situated and embodied knowledges and
an argument against various forms of unlocatable, and so irrespon-
sible, knowledge claims. Irresponsible means unable to be called
into account. There is a premium on establishing the capacity to
see from the peripheries and the depths. But here there also lies a

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
584 Donna Haraway

serious danger of roman

the less powerful while
from below is neither
"we" "naturally" inhab
jugated knowledges. Th
empt from critical re
interpretation; that is
modes of critical inqu
not "innocent" positio
because in principle t
critical and interpreti
edgeable of modes of
disappearing acts-way
comprehensively. The
to the god trick and a
minations. "Subjugate
seem to promise more
ing accounts of the wor
requiring at least as mu
mediations of vision,
tions.
Such preferred position
vism as to the most exp
tific authority. But the
and single vision, whi
whose power depends
The alternative to rela
edges sustaining the
solidarity in politics a
Relativism is a way of
where equally. The "eq
sibility and critical inqu
totalization in the ideol
location, embodiment,
possible to see well. R
tricks" promising vis
and fully, common my
is precisely in the polit
that the possibility of
So, with many other f

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Donna Haraway 585

practice of objectivity t
passionate constructio
formation of systems
just any partial perspec
tivisms and holisms b
"Passionate detachmen
self-critical partiality.
those points of view,
promise something qu
for constructing wor
From such a viewpoin
appear-quite a differe
act. The imaginary an
vision - hover close tog
science and for postm
ment for the idea that
mative knowledge and
critical inquiry are joi
objectivity or rationalit
repressions. It is even
revolutions in terms of
jectivity. Science has b
that is one reason "we" need it.
A commitment to mobile positioning and to passionate detach-
ment is dependent on the impossibility of entertaining innocent
"identity" politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from
the standpoints of the subjugated in order to see well. One cannot
"be" either a cell or molecule-or a woman, colonized person,
laborer, and so on-if one intends to see and see from these posi-
tions critically. "Being" is much more problematic and contingent.
Also, one cannot relocate in any possible vantage point without
being accountable for that movement. Vision is always a question
of the power to see-and perhaps of the violence implicit in our
visualizing practices. With whose blood were my eyes crafted?
These points also apply to testimony from the position of "oneself."
We are not immediately present to ourselves. Self-knowledge re-
quires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies.
Self-identity is a bad visual system. Fusion is a bad strategy of posi-
tioning. The boys in the human sciences have called this doubt
about self-presence the "death of the subject" defined as a single

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 586 Donna Haraway

ordering point of will a

bizarre to me. I prefer t
morphic subjects, agents
from the vantage point
master subject. The W
wandering eye, a traveli
been violent and insiste
self-but not always. We
learning to participate in
in earth-transforming ch
not to be done from scratch.
The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate
positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and
join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change
history.13 Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist
epistemologies of scientific knowledge. "Splitting" in this context
should be about heterogeneous multiplicities that are simulta-
neously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic
slots or cumulative lists. This geometry pertains within and among
subjects. Subjectivity is multidimensional; so, therefore, is vision.
The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole,
simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched to-
gether imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see
together without claiming to be another. Here is the promise of ob-
jectivity: a scientific knower seeks the subject position, not of
identity, but of objectivity, that is, partial connection. There is no
way to "be" simultaneously in all, or wholly in any, of the privi-
leged (i.e., subjugated) positions structured by gender, race, na-
tion, and class. And that is a short list of critical positions. The
search for such a "full" and total position is the search for the
fetishized perfect subject of oppositional history, sometimes ap-
pearing in feminist theory as the essentialized Third World
Woman.14 Subjugation is not grounds for an ontology; it might be
a visual clue. Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a
politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
there is no immediate vision from the standpoints of the sub-
jugated. Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science;
critical positioning does, that is, objectivity. Only those occupying
the positions of the dominators are self-identical, unmarked,
disembodied, unmediated, transcendent, born again. It is unfor-

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Donna Haraway 587

tunately possible for

into that subject p
Knowledge from the
tastic, distorted, and
jectivity could not po
point of the master,
appropriates, and ord
God of monotheism o
trick is self-identical,
knowledge, omniscie
Positioning is, theref
edge organized aroun
scientific and philoso
tioning implies respon
that politics and ethics
may count as rational
and ethics ground str
natural, social, and
simply impossible, an
comprehensively. His
histories of the techn
social orders, practic
practices. How to see?
What to see for? Wh
one point of view? W
interprets the visual f
to cultivate besides vi
the paradigm for ratio
ogies of vision. Sandr
ments of social revolut
in science might be r
quences of new techn
had spent more tim
revolutions have not
always been visionar
another phrase: the sci
what will count as ra
over how to see. Th
colonialism, the scien
question in feminism

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 588 Donna Haraway

The issue in political

reductionisms, or othe
be relativism-but loc
point might look like

ethnophilosophies
universal rationality
commonheteroglossia
language
new organon deconstruction
unified field theory oppositional positioning
world system local knowledges
master theory webbed accounts

But a dichotomous chart misrepresents in a critical way the posi-

tions of embodied objectivity that I am trying to sketch. The pri-
mary distortion is the illusion of symmetry in the chart's di-
chotomy, making any position appear, first, simply alternative
and, second, mutually exclusive. A map of tensions and reason-
ances between the fixed ends of a charged dichotomy better repre-
sents the potent politics and epistemologies of embodied, there-
fore accountable, objectivity. For example, local knowledges have
also to be in tension with the productive structurings that force
unequal translations and exchanges - material and semiotic - with-
in the webs of knowledge and power. Webs can have the property
of being systematic, even of being centrally structured global
systems with deep filaments and tenacious tendrils into time,
space, and consciousness, which are the dimensions of world
history. Feminist accountability requires a knowledge tuned to
reasonance, not to dichotomy. Gender is a field of structured and
structuring difference, in which the tones of extreme localization,
of the intimately personal and individualized body, vibrate in the
same field with global high-tension emissions. Feminist embodi-
ment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or
otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations,
and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of
meaning. Embodiment is significant prosthesis; objectivity cannot
be about fixed vision when what counts as an object is precisely
what world history turns out to be about.
How should one be positioned in order to see, in this situation of
tensions, reasonances, transformations, resistances, and com-
plicities? Here, primate vision is not immediately a very powerful
metaphor or technology for feminist political-epistemological clari-

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Donna Haraway 589

fication, because it see

cessed and objectified
tanced. But the visual
pearances, which are o
us to investigate the v
cluding the prosthetic
eyes and brains. And
for processing region
pictures of the world.
technologies in which
phors and means for
terns of objectification
for which we must b
means for appreciatin
aspect and the aspect
scientific knowledge.
I am arguing for politi
ing, and situating, whe
dition of being heard
are claims on people's li
always a complex, co
body, versus the view
city. Only the god t
deciding the science q
technology of perfec
order.
Feminism loves anoth
terpretation, translati
Feminism is about th
least) double vision. Fe
upon a critical positi
space.16 Translation i
Here is a ground fo
tivity - which is power
not even the mythic c
rectly caricatured in
knowledges -that have
inist paradigmatic mod
of the perfectly know
ized scientific producti

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 590 Donna Haraway

Wars paradigm of r
nerability; location re
row from Althusser,
the last instance." That is because feminist embodiment resists fix-
ation and is insatiably curious about the webs of differential posi-
tioning. There is no single feminist standpoint because our maps
require too many dimensions for that metaphor to ground our vi-
sions. But the feminist standpoint theorists' goal of an
epistemology and politics of engaged, accountable positioning re-
mains eminently potent. The goal is better accounts of the world,
that is, "science."
Above all, rational knowledge does not pretend to disengage-
ment: to be from everywhere and so nowhere, to be free from in-
terpretation, from being represented, to by fully self-contained or
fully formalizable. Rational knowledge is a process of ongoing cri-
tical interpretation among "fields" of interpreters and decoders. Ra-
tional knowledge is power-sensitive conversation.7 Decoding and
transcoding plus translation and criticism; all are necessary. So
science becomes the paradigmatic model, not of closure, but of
that which is contestable and contested. Science becomes the
myth, not of what escapes human agency and responsibility in a
realm above the fray, but, rather, of accountability and respon-
sibility for translations and solidarities linking the cacophonous vi-
sions and visionary voices that characterize the knowledges of the
subjugated. A splitting of senses, a confusion of voice and sight,
rather than clear and distinct ideas, becomes the metaphor for the
ground of the rational. We seek not the knowledges ruled by
phallogocentrism (nostalgia for the presence of the one true Word)
and disembodied vision. We seek those ruled by partial sight and
limited voice-not partiality for its own sake but, rather, for the
sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowl-
edges make possible. Situated knowledges are about communities,
not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision
is to be somewhere in particular. The science question in femi-
nism is about objectivity as positioned rationality. Its images are
not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view
from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into
a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of
ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradic-
tions-of views from somewhere.

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Donna Haraway 591

OBJECTS AS ACTORS: THE APPARATUS OF BODILY

PRODUCTION

Throughout this reflection on "objectivity," I have ref

resolve the ambiguities built into referring to science with
ferentiating its extraordinary range of contexts. Through
tent ambiguity, I have foregrounded a field of commonalit
ing exact, physical, natural, social, political, biological, a
sciences; and I have tied this whole heterogeneous
academically (and industrially, e.g., in publishing, the
trade, and pharmaceuticals) institutionalized knowledg
tion to a meaning of science that insists on its pot
ideological struggles. But, partly in order to give play t
specificities and the highly permeable boundaries of m
discourse on science, I would like to suggest a resolutio
ambiguity. Throughout the field of meanings constituting
one of the commonalities concerns the status of any o
knowledge and of related claims about the faithfulness
counts to a "real world," no matter how mediated for
matter how complex and contradictory these worlds ma
inists, and others who have been most active as critics
sciences and their claims or associated ideologies, have s
from doctrines of scientific objectivity in part because of
cion that an "object" of knowledge is a passive and inert th
counts of such objects can seem to be either appropria
fixed and determined world reduced to resource for instrumen-
talist projects of destructive Western societies, or they can be seen
as masks for interests, usually dominating interests.
For example, "sex" as an object of biological knowledge appears
regularly in the guise of biological determinism, threatening the
fragile space for social constructionism and critical theory, with
their attendant possibilities for active and transformative interven-
tion, which were called into being by feminist concepts of gender
as socially, historically, and semiotically positioned difference.
And yet, to lose authoritative biological accounts of sex, which set
up productive tensions with gender, seems to be to lose too much;
it seems to be to lose not just analytic power within a particular
Western tradition but also the body itself as anything but a blank
page for social inscriptions, including those of biological discourse.
The same problem of loss attends the radical "reduction" of the ob-
jects of physics or of any other science to the ephemera of dis-

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
592 Donna Haraway

cursive production and s

But the difficulty and lo
from the analytic traditio
transformative history
we name this scandalous
source for appropriation,
ly itself only matter for
Here, the object both gu
knower, but any status
must be denied the object
tified as a thing, not as
formation of the only s
edge, the human knower.
this mode of knowing in
ond birthing of Man thr
body into resource for
raw material of culture
alted, or otherwise mad
logic of capitalist colonia
act of gender; the produ
tions of Western binary
narrative logic accounts
distinction in the recen
sourced" for its represent
has seemed all but impo
tionist logic of dominatio
and its generative lineag
It seems clear that femi
ment-that is, of a worl
quire a deceptively simp
analytical traditions, a m
short of the needed rev
the object of knowledge b
screen or a ground or a
master that closes off t
authorship of "objective"
clear in critical approa
where the agency of peo
project of producing soc
the agency of the "objec

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Donna Haraway 593

error and false knowle

same point must ap
sciences. A corollary
covertly or overtly pr
as a heterogeneous w
granting the status of
tors come in many a
world do not, then,
power-charged social
speaks itself nor dis
codes of the world are
is not raw material f
humanism, another b
have made this poin
crudely hinted at by t
the world encountere
Insofar as a scientific
sion of the world as
be imagined and can
trine of representa
anything. The appro
"realism," which has
the world's active age
My simple, perhaps
new in Western philos
in relation to the sci
question of gender
female embodiment.
tent on some version o
to be mapped and ap
culinist projects. Ac
knowledge makes r
cluding a sense of the
sense of humor is not comfortable for humanists and others com-
mitted to the world as resource. There are, however, richly
evocative figures to promote feminist visualizations of the world as
witty agent. We need not lapse into appeals to a primal mother
resisting her translation into resource. The Coyote or Trickster, as
embodied in Southwest native American accounts, suggests the si-
tuation we are in when we give up mastery but keep searching for

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
594 Donna Haraway

fidelity, knowing all th

these are useful myths
nist objectivity makes
of all knowledge prod
We just live here and
by means of our pros
technologies. No won
writing practice in re
theory as a reinvented
many heterogeneous a
Another rich feminis
decades illustrates par
viously passive categor
permanently proble
gender, without elimin
reconstructions in p
women's practice as p
behavioral ecologists)
female sex, in scient
biological discourse, b
biological determinism
"sex"' has been so thor
emerges as practically
basic has happened to
female peopling curre
no passive properties l
respect; the "body" i
theorized biologically
from gene to foraging
the biological politics
gender need to be cate
knowledge. I would lik
strategies in biology is
jects of feminist objec
tures of the biological
testation and conversa
foreground knowledge
articulation. The boun
the stakes in this alle
and organism.

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Donna Haraway 595

So I will close with a f

situated knowledges:
analysis of the produ
value, Katie King offer
debates among femin
literary production" to
tersection of art, bu
literary production is
Focusing on the poten
plies her analytic fram
technologies.21 I woul
the generation-the
bodies and other objec
At first glance, there i
in the "facticity" of bio
discourse and its know
duced" or "generated" i
early stirrings of Rom
many poets and biol
ganisms are siblings. F
this proposition. I con
but in a postmodern a
late the ideological dim
cumbersome entity c
wieldy term is intend
active, meaning-generat
without ever implying
what is the same thing
can count as objective
ture. Like "poems," w
language too is an act
bodies as objects of k
nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boun-
daries are drawn by mapping practices; "objects" do not preexist as
such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from
within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally
contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies.
Siting (sighting) boundaries is a risky practice.
Objectivity is not about disengagement but about mutual and
usually unequal structuring, about taking risks in a world where

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 596 Donna Haraway

"we" are permanently m

have, finally, no clear a
biological bodies emerge
and writing, medical and
such as the visualization
essay. But also invited
analogue to the lively lang
duction of literary value:
of the world as witty age
ing reduced to mere res
mutter-but coyote, a fig
tent tie between meanin
nist hopes for partiality,
on conversations and code
bodies and meanings. He
science fiction converge
Perhaps our hopes for a
nism, turn on revisioning
we must learn to converse.

NOTES

This essay originated as a commentary on Sandra Harding's The Science Question

Feminism, at the Western Division meetings of the American Philosophical Associati
San Francisco, March 1987. Support during the writing of this paper was generousl
provided by the Alpha Fund of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N
Jersey. Thanks especially to Joan Scott, Judy Butler, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Dori
Kondo.

1. For example, see Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay, eds., Science Observed:
Perspectives on the Social Study of Science (London: Sage, 1983); Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas
P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987); and esp. Bruno Latour's Les microbes, guerre et paix, suivi
de irrdductions (Paris: M6tailid, 1984) and The Pastuerization of France, Followed by Ir-
reductions: A Politico-Scientific Essay (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Bor-
rowing from Michel Tournier's Vendredi (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), Les microbes (p. 171),
Latour's brilliant and maddening aphoristic polemic against all forms of reductionism,
makes the essential point for feminists: "M6fiez-vous de la puret6; c'est le vitriol de
l'ame" (Beware of purity; it is the vitriol of the soul). Latour is not otherwise a notable
feminist theorist, but he might be made into one by readings as perverse as those he
makes of the laboratory, that great machine for making significant mistakes faster than
anyone else can, and so gaining world-changing power. The laboratory for Latour is the
railroad industry of epistemology, where facts can only be made to run on the tracks
laid down from the laboratory out. Those who control the railroads control the sur-

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Donna Haraway 597

rounding territory. How cou

rupt railroads we need as th
2. For an elegant and very he
see Hayden White, The Conten
tation (Baltimore: Johns Ho
fulfilled desire can be a pow
3. In "Through the Lumen: F
University of California at S
will forgive me the metapho
sis of science fiction culture
wonderful focus on the ideo
in Western mythics of scien
Sofoulis's arguments and me
4. Nancy Hartsock, Money, S
(Boston: Northeastern Unive
5. Crucial to this discussion
(Ithaca: Cornell University P
Science (New Haven: Yale U
Standpoint: Developing the G
in Discovering Reality: Femini
of Science, eds. Sandra Hard
Reidel, 1983): 283-310; Jan
conscious," in Discovering Re
Feminist Theory," Signs 12
Grontkowski, "The Mind's E
Work, Women's Knowledge,
chell and Ann Oakley (Ne
Manifesto for Cyborgs: Sci
Socialist Review, no. 80 (Ma
"Fetal Images: The Power of
Studies 13 (Summer 1987): 2
Aspects of the debates about
of the problem of "objectivi
modernism in ethnograph
authorization or prohibition
Strathern made the crucial o
parallel to the work of art a
modernist natural-technical
tice, stand on one side of th
side, with its "anti-aesthetic
deferred "objects" of know
selves, and cultures. "Objec
problematic objects; it must
At root, objectivity is about
name things to be stable an
translates into a question of
non-innocent conversations and connections. What is at stake in the debates about
modernism and postmodernism is the pattern of relationships between and within
bodies and language. This is a crucial matter for feminists. See Marilyn Strathern, "Out
of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology," Current Anthropology 28 (June
1987): 251-81, and "Partial Connections," Munro Lecture, University of Edinburgh,
November 1987, unpublished manuscript.
6. Harding, 24-26, 161-62.

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 598 Donna Haraway

7. John Varley's science fiction

sistence of Vision (New York: Del
tion. In the story, Varley const
deaf-blind. He then explores th
munication and their relations
Champagne," in Blue Champagn
the theme to interrogate the po
woman whose prosthetic devi
because the infinitely costly de
entertainment empire, for whi
keep her technological, intimate,
ty in the commodification of all
perience for sale? Is the persona
Varley's repeated investigation
abled beings, prosthetic techno
despite their extraordinary tran
the personal and political in the
era of techno-biopolitics. Prosth
our most intimate selves. Prost
not for transcendence, but for
8. C.D.B Bryan, The National Ge
(New York: Harry N. Abrams,
9. I owe my understanding of t
University of California at San
reader.
10. Bryan, 454.
11. See Hartsock, "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically
Feminist Historical Materialism"; and Chela Sandoral, Yours in Struggle: Women Respond
to Racism (Oakland: Center for Third World Organizing, n.d.); Harding; and Gloria An-
zaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987).
12. Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1982), 3-18.
13. Joan Scott reminded me that Teresa de Lauretis put it like this:
Differences among women may be better understood as differences within women .... But once
understood in their constitutive power -once it is understood, that is, that these differences not only
constitute each woman's consciousness and subjective limits but all together define the female subject
of feminism in its very specificity, is inherent and at least for now irreconcilable contradiction-these
differences, then, cannot be again collapsed into a fixed identity, a sameness of all women as
Woman, or a representation of Feminism as a coherent and available image.
See Theresa de Lauretis, "Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Con-
texts," in her Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1986), 14-15.
14. Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes," Boundary 2 and 3 (1984): 333-58.
15. See Sofoulis, unpublished manuscript.
16. In The Science Question in Feminism (p. 18), Harding suggests that gender has three
dimensions, each historically specific: gender symbolism, the social-sexual division of
labor, and processes of constructing individual gendered identity. I would enlarge her
point to note that there is no reason to expect the three dimensions to covary or codeter-
mine each other, at least not directly. That is, extremely steep gradients between con-
trasting terms in gender symbolism may very well not correlate with sharp social-sexual
divisions of labor or social power, but they may be closely related to sharp racial
stratification or something else. Similarly, the processes of gendered subject formation
may not be directly illuminated by knowledge of the sexual division of labor or the

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Donna Haraway 599

gender symbolism in the part

hand, we should expect med
might move through quite di
tice, and identity, such as r
well as gender or race, might
symbolism, social practice, an
themselves when the parallel
gender, race and science migh
That is, racial divisions of labo
bolic connections and formati
chart. Or formations of gend
tween scientific social divisio
The chart below begins an
reality?), both gender and sci
tains and obscures a structu
nature/science. Each binary o
tion, as resource to product, n
position are constructed and
explicit term, further asym
masculine to feminine, and fr
about remembering how a par
The chart reflects common id
may help as an analytical too
GENDER SCIENCE
1) symbolic system symbolic system
2) social division of labor social division of labor
(by sex, by race, etc.) (e.g., by craft or industrial logics)
3) individual identity/subject position individual identity/subject position
(desiring/desired; autonomous relational) (knower/known; scientist/other)
4) material culture material culture
(e.g., gender paraphernalia and daily (e.g., laboratories, the nar
gender technologies, the narrow tracks which facts run)
on which sexual difference runs)
5) dialectic of construction and discovery dialectic of constructio
17. Katie King, "Canons without Innocence" (Ph.D. diss., Universit
Santa Cruz, 1987).
18. Evelyn Fox Keller, in "The Gender/Science System: Or, Is Sex to
Is to Science?" (Hypatia 2 [Fall 1987]: 37-49), has insisted on the imp
opened up by the construction of the intersection of the distinctio
gender, on the one hand, and nature and science, on the other. She
need to hold to some nondiscursive grounding in "sex" and "nature,"
calling the "body" and "world."
19. See Sofoulis, chap. 3.
20. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in th
Science (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul), forthcoming Spring
21. Katie King, prospectus for "The Passing Dreams of Choice ...
After: Audre Lorde and the Apparatus of Literary Production" (
Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 1987).

This content downloaded from

192.33.224.83 on Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:51:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms