Donna J Haraway: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991–) [EN, ES]

“The idea that nature is constructed, not discovered – that truth is made, not found – is the keynote of recent scholarship in the history of science. Tracing the gendered roots of science in culture, Donna Haraway’s writings about scientific research on monkeys and apes is arguably the finest scholarship in this tradition. She has carefully studied the publications, the papers, the correspondence, and the history of the expeditions and institions of primate studies, uncovering the historical construction of the pedigrees for existing social relations – the naturalization of race, sex, and class. Throughout this book she is analysing accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs (cybernetic organisms: systems which embrace organic and technological components). She also looks critically at the immune system as an information system, and shows how deeply our cultural assumptions penetrate into allegedly value-neutral medical research. In several of these essays she explores and develops the contested terms of reference of existing feminist scholarship; and by mapping the fate of two potent and ambiguous worlds – ‘nature’ and ‘experience’ – she uncovers new visions and provides the possibility of a new politics of hope.

Her previous book, Primate Visions, has been called ‘outstanding’, ‘original’, ‘brilliant’, ‘important’ by leading scholars in the field. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women contains ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. They establish her as one of the most thoughtful and challenging feminist writers today.”

Publisher Routledge, New York, 1991
ISBN 1853431397, 9781853431395
287 pages

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Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (English, 1991, updated on 2012-7-31)
Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres. La reinvención de la naturaleza (Spanish, trans. Manuel Talens, 1995, added on 2014-3-18)

Critical Education in the New Information Age (1999)

Essays by some of the world’s leading educators provide a revolutionary portrait of new ideas and developments in education that can influence the possibility of social and political change.

The authors take into account such diverse terrain as feminism, ecology, media, and individual liberty in their pursuit of new ideas that can inform the fundamental practice of education and promote a more humane civil society. The book consolidates recent thinking just as it reflects on emerging new lines of critical theory.

Editors Manuel Castells, Ramón Flecha, Paulo Freire, Henry A. Giroux, Donaldo Macedo, and Paul Willis
Introduction by Peter McLaren
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield, 1999
ISBN 0847690105, 9780847690107
Length 176 pages

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Nicole Shukin: Animal Capital. Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009)

Illuminates the profound contingency of market life on animal figures and flesh

The juxtaposition of biopolitical critique and animal studies—two subjects seldom theorized together—signals the double-edged intervention of Animal Capital. Nicole Shukin pursues a resolutely materialist engagement with the “question of the animal,” challenging the philosophical idealism that has dogged the question by tracing how the politics of capital and of animal life impinge on one another in market cultures of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Shukin argues that an analysis of capital’s incarnations in animal figures and flesh is pivotal to extending the examination of biopower beyond its effects on humans. “Rendering” refers simultaneously to cultural technologies and economies of mimesis and to the carnal business of boiling down and recycling animal remains. Rendering’s accommodation of these discrepant logics, she contends, suggests a rubric for the critical task of tracking the biopolitical conditions and contradictions of animal capital across the spaces of culture and economy.

From the animal capital of abattoirs and automobiles, films and mobile phones, to pandemic fear of species-leaping diseases such as avian influenza and mad cow, Shukin makes startling linkages between visceral and virtual currencies in animal life, illuminating entanglements of species, race, and labor in the conditions of capitalism. In reckoning with the violent histories and intensifying contradictions of animal rendering, Animal Capital raises provocative and pressing questions about the cultural politics of nature.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN 0816653429, 9780816653423
288 pages

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