Donna Haraway's Analysis

This semester, the readings were a bit challenging, but overall I enjoyed the readings. It has always been very difficult for me to understand Donna Haraway, but by discussing her in class and giving examples, I was able to have a better understanding of her topics. Throughout her work Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, Haraway explains that cyborgs are constructed as the postmodern icon in today’s society, because of science. Haraway explains that, “Biology was interesting not because it transcended historical practice in some positivist epistemological liftoff from Earth but because natural science was part of the lively action on the ground” (Haraway 1997, 104). Biology not only determines
Therefore, even in a world without human bodies, “technological things will be gendered and there will still be a patriarchal hierarchy” (Springer 1999, 48). As a result, medical discourse, in particular, has constructed negative notions of the female body and sexuality. For example, in the article The Aggressive Egg, the author describes the studies of a researcher by the name of Emily Martin, who has spent the past seven years examining the metaphors used to describe fertilization. Martin’s studies revealed the traditional ideas of fertilization, which portrays a “sperm as an intrepid warrior battling their way to an aging, passive egg that can do little but await the sturdy victor’s final” (Freedman 1992, 2), instead the process turned out to be quite the opposite. “In fact, biologists could have figured out a hundred years ago that sperms are weak forward-propulsion units, but it’s hard for men to accept the idea that sperm are best at escaping” (Freedman 1992,