Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Paperback)

The essay "Situated Knowledges" offers the clearest construction of her argument, which is, roughly and unjustly on my part, to trouble the subject-object distinction and provide potential postions for ethical research and study.

Her brilliance makes her important but also extremely difficult. Why it was used for a sophomore level university class I'm not sure. This book promotes and profits from rereadings--and why else buy a book?

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women written by Donna J. Haraway is a compilation of ten essays from 1978 through 1989 that focus on the idea that nature is constructed, not discovered, and truth is made, not found. Donna J. Haraway is a science historian and Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She explains her ideas in this book through a strong feminist viewpoint.
Haraway divides her book into three sections, each section addressing different topics. The first section of the book discusses feminist struggles of developing knowledge and behavior in the social lives of monkeys and apes. The second part of the book discusses contests for the power to determine stories about nature and experience. The last part of the book discusses the cyborg embodiment and the fate of feminist concepts of gender, feminist ethics and even discusses the immune system as a biopolitical map of the chief system of difference in a postmodern world.
My opinions on this book are very one sided. I did not enjoy reading it at all. I thought that the book was very difficult to read. The book had a great deal of words in it that I have never seen before. I found myself constantly looking to a dictionary just so I could get the message behind what Haraway was trying to relay. One of the other reasons that the book was difficult to read was because it talked about many theories and ideas that I have never heard about before. This would have not been a big issue if the theories had explained more before they were used in proving Haraway's arguments. A direct example of this is when Haraway uses the theories that Zuckerman and Rowell have about reproduction. There was one part of the book that I thought was fairly interesting and that was Haraway's idea, that people in today's modern world are cyborgs because we incorporate so much technology into our lives. I thought that that idea was a very clever way to describe our highly technical world. I went into reading this book with an open mind and I left the book with an open mind. Even though I did not enjoy reading this book and I thought it was very boring after reading it I am now more aware about how different people think and their point of view and that is always a valuable thing to take away from an experience.