Donna Haraway

SURVEILLANCE DOSSIER – DONNA HARAWAY Origin: United States, since 1985. Primary vector: A Cyborg Manifesto (1985). American biologist and feminist theorist. Her best-known essay proposes the cyborg — a hybrid of machine and organism — as a political figure capable of overcoming the traditional dichotomies (natural/artificial, human/animal, male/female) on which most of Western thought is built. Operational assessment: Haraway precedes and partly anticipates the cyberfeminist positions later developed by Sadie Plant and the CCRU, supplying the first political vocabulary for thinking the fusion of body and technology not as a threat but as a field of possibility. Her influence extends from technoscientific feminism to animal studies, up to contemporary posthuman theory. Active traces: the cyborg as a political figure continues to structure debate on artificial intelligence, embodiment and gender. Her later writings on "companion species" and the Chthulucene extend the framework toward a multispecies ecology. Contagion level: high, in constant mutation for four decades.