Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science

– Donna Haraway
1) INTRODUCTION: THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION
A history of modern sciences and popular culture emerging from accounts of the bodies and lives of
monkeys and apes. >> Monkeys and apes have a privileged relation to nature and culture for western people:
simians occupy the border zones between those potent mythic poles. >> Primate Order (narrative, politics,
myth, economics, and technical possibilities) >> A view of nature as it is constructed and reconstructed in
the bodies and lives of "third world" animals serving as surrogates for "man".
Facts and fiction: Fiction is inescapably implicated in a dialectic of the true (natural) and the counterfeit
(artifactual). >> Story of progress from description and free qualitative experience to mature science based
on quantitative methods and falsifiable hypotheses, leading to a synthetic scientific reconstruction of primate
reality. >> The facts are reality reconstructed scientifically. >> Scientific practice may be considered a kind
of story-telling practice—a rule-governed, constrained, historically changing craft of narrating the history of
nature. >> Primatology as story-telling: biology is inherently historical, and its form of discourse is
inherently narrative; primatology is about the life history of a taxonomic order that includes people, and
simultaneously about the relations of nature and culture, animal and human, body and mind, origin and
future. >> Primate Visions reads the primate text as science fiction, where possible worlds are constantly
reinvented in the contest for very real, present worlds.
Four Temptations: Analyzing a scientific discourse, primatology, as story telling within several contested
narrative fields is a way to enter current debates about the social construction of scientific knowledge
without succumbing completely to any of four very tempting positions, which are also major resources for
the approaches of this book: 1. radically reject all forms of epistemological realism and analyze scientific
practice as thoroughly social and constructionist (Latour and Woolgar); 2. Marxist/Feminist epistemology
and 'mediation'; 3. scientific realism; 4. looking through the complex histories of gender and race in the
construction of modern sciences around the globe.
Primatology is (Judeo-) Christian Science: Linneaus taxonomy: the role of the one who renamed the animals
was to ensure a true and faithful order f nature, to purify the eye and the world. >> 2 major readings iof this
book: 1. focused on symbolic meanings and primate sciences as a kind of art form making repeated use of
the narrative resources of Judeo-Christian myth systems; 2. Focused on the way primate biology is theorized
as a material system of production and reproduction.
Primatology is Simian Orientalism: The argument of this book is that primatology is about an Order, a
taxonomic and therefore political order that works by the negotiation of boundaries achieved through
ordering differences. >> major axes are defined by the dualisms of sex/gender and nature/culture. >>
Orientalism concerns the western imagination of the origin of the city; primatology displays the western
imagination of the origin of sociality itself. >>> Simian orientalism means that western primatology has
been about the construction of the self from the raw material of the other, the appropriation of nature in the
production of culture, the ripening of the human from the soil of the animal, the clarity of white from the
obscurity of color, the issue of man from the body of woman, the elaboration of gender from the resource of
sex, the emergence of mind by the activation of body. >> Neither sex nor nature is underlying gender and
culture, any more than the "East" is really the origin and distorting mirror of the 'West'. >>> Natural
sciences, like human sciences, are inextricably within the processes that give them birth. And so, like the
human sciences, the natural sciences are culturally and historically specific, modified, involved. >> The
detached eye of objective science is an ideological fiction, and a powerful one. But it is a fiction that hides—
and is designed to hide—how the powerful discourses of the natural sciences really work. Again, the limits
are productive, not reductive and invalidating. >> The difficulty of creating embedded constructions of
science stems from Aristotle and the transformative history of white capitalist patriarchy that turns
everything into a resource for appropriation (the world must be objectified as things, not agent).
 PART THREE: THE POLITICS OF BEING FEMALE: PRIMATOLOGY IS A GENRE OF
FEMINIST THEORY
11) WOMEN'S PLACE IS IN THE JUNGLE
Redrawing Sex: Ruby Tuseday Testifies on the BBC:
To be female has been to be a pretext, not an author and a subjec of history.
Lovehoy's "origin of men" (bipedalism started so males could have their hands free to carry food and protect
females / origin of monogamic pairing) is enmeshed in the narrative of active, potent, dynamic, self-
realizing manhood achieving humanity through reproductive politics: paternity is the key to humanity. And
paternity is a world historical achievement. Maternity is inherently conservative and requires husbanding to
become truly fruitful, to move from animal to human.
Standard in western masculinist accounts, disconnection from the category "nature" is essential to man's
natural place: human self realization requires it. >> Males arose to stand upright so that this better success at
provisioning would be rewarded by making them into Man, a father, desiring subject, and author.
Zihlman's responce: interview with "Ruby" - Food played a larger role than sex. - No origin of family in her
account - her stories regularly do not generate "other" as raw material for crucial transitions to higher stages.

Coloring within the Lines: A Pedagogy of Primate Relationships:

In myriad mundane ways, primatology is a practice for the negotiation of the possibility of community, of a
public world, of rational action. It is the negotiation of the time of origins, the origin of the family, the
boundary between self and other, hominid and hominoid, human and animal. Primatology is about the
principle of action, mutability, change, energy, about the possibility and constraints of politics.

The United Nations Decade for Women: An International Field of Differences:

The hope is that in the de/reconstructions of woman and female going on internationally in science and
politics, there is emerging a field for envisioning fruitfully contradictory and multiple possibilities for new
links between knowledge and power, for new apparatuses of bodily production for craftily reinventing what
it means to be— always situated, always specified—human.
1. European and Euro-American feminism and primatology are both western and sexualized discourses
inheriting the structuring logics of hierarchical appropriation proper to "human" (western "man's")
selfformation;
2. feminist theory and primatology are synergistically deeply implicated in the production of biology and
anthropology, those discourses in which both female and woman have been pivotal naturaltechnical objects
of knowledge;
3. reconstructing primatology's technical and popular stories is a serious form of feminist practice, and
stories are reconstructed in the elaboration of multiple kinds of stakes and practices in social life;
4. primatology changes the possible meanings of many feminisms;

Sex and the West:

Sex and West are intersecting axes in the origin stories told by the Judeo-Christian tradition. > Facts are
always theory-laden; theories are valueladen; therefore, facts are value-laden

Gender: The Sexual Politics of a Word:

Gender is the politics of sex, the ordering of sexual difference, just as culture designates the political
realization of natural materials. >> sex/gender axes is in a discursive field, but since stories are material
practices, discourses are not only social products, they have fundamental social effects.
The organism is the historically specific form of the body as scientific object of knowledge from the late
eighteenth century until the mid-twentieth century.

Constructing Female:
Finding females means disrupting a previous whole, now called “amorphous,” rather than the achieved
potential of the species. Feminism absolutely requires breaking up some versions of a “we” and constructing
others.
Writes that advocate for a balance of biased research (male and female) dismiss the messy matter of
scientific constructions of sex and gender as objects of knowledge and as conditions of knowing.

Restructuring the field of possible stories: destabilization is a collective undertaking >> That women usually
took the lead in the reconstructions was not a natural result of their sex; it was an historical product of their
positioning in particular cognitive and political structures of science, race, and gender.

12) JEANNE ALTMANN: TIME-ENERGY BUDGETS OF DUAL CAREER MOTHERING

Altmann destabilized a great deal of previous field research with her paper on sampling methods. >> Her
feminism was operationalized as a keen sense of critical method, with consequences for allowable narratives
about women scientists and about animals.
Possible postmodernist science: The issue is not method—technical versus interpretive, quantitative versus
qualitative, reductive versus holist, etc.—but the structure (or anti-structure) of the “object” allowed to
materialize in discourse. That is, the issue is how it is possible to imagine the world, including oneself as
observer-commentator-writer, to be articulated. >> Altmann formed herself scientifically out of a practice
that rested on modernist, coherent objects of knowledge; simultaneously, her practice of relating gender and
science turned on disrupting modernist conceptions of sex, gender, and the relation between them.
Substitutes do not destabilize; they replicate. Substitutes are tied to identifications. >> Destabilizing the
positions in a discursive field and disrupting categories for identification might be a more powerful feminist
strategy than “speaking as a woman.”
How to shift knowledge-power relations: foreground micro practice, not high drama; effect destabilization,
not substitution.
Altmann's thesis of dual career mothering: female primates' lives seem to be defined by doing several things
at once >> Altmann turned her deconstruction of identification among women and between women and
females in science, which from another point of view could be seen as a complex kind of identification, into
a way of naming the multiplicities she invoked to account for baboon mothers and so retell basic
evolutionary dramas.
Altman's text crafts a particularly tight relation between content and form, in which preferences for
multiplicity and complexity, strategic moves to foreground the previously obscure and underrated, and
substitution of compelling simplicity for high drama in the writing itself and in its message all converge to
produce a powerful effect. >> The effect allows Altmann to move across species and cultures to reconstruct
meanings of female and woman without seeming to flatten contradictions and particularity; it allows her to
foreground motherhood without remystifying it; it allows her to insist that the reader acknowledge the status
of baboons as subjects with lives of their own without surrendering objective scientific knowledge practices.
And finally, it allows her to enact her feminism as a scientist.
13) LINDA MARIE FEDIGAN: MODELS FOR INTERVENTION
Empathy is both part of a code in a narrative and a culturally specific way to construct what counts as
experience >> Fedigan insists on seeing primates as complex co-actors in the crafting of knowledge at
particular historical moments.
In Fedigan’s accounts, the drama of sexual difference is not to be found played out at the hominoid-hominid
boundary, where in other scripts the biology of heightened sexual difference becomes the originary raw
material for the linguistic and technological productions of gender, culture, and species man.
In Fedigan's deconstructionist approach male and female, masculine and feminine were presented as
mutually constituting dichotomies that obscured both the animals and the scientists’ actual practices in area
after area of investigation.
Fedigan criticizes the problems in traditional sociobiological theory: "sexism may lie not only in statements
by experts as to what ought to be, but, more importantly, in the manner in which they decide and determine
what is”
Both the view that female primates are objects, i.e., “passive resources like peanuts or water,” and the view
that the female’s best reproductive strategy is to choose male “winners” in the dominance stakes were
developed in the absence of systematic research into actual processes of female choice in primates—despite
the fact that female choice was central to Darwin’s original model.
Feminist projects in science are distinctly not feminine science. Rather, what might be problematically
named feminist science in local practices destabilizes meanings of both sex and gender and restructures the
“science/gender system” as it maps the field of meanings ordered by the axes of nature/science and
sex/gender.
Meanings of gender are produced by discourse about boundaries, transitions, and origins. Positioning within
gendered social space for historical, scientific women and men is effected by the system of scientific
production, an apparatus of bodily production, including, prominently, publishing practices. Gender is part
of the apparatus of scientific production, and in turn is replicated or destabilized through it. This is evident in
a particular local scientific practice —building models of human evolution.
How have humans been able to live with each other? The question continues to prevail over all others in a
narrative frame ordered by strategic reasoning, adaptationism, possessive individualism, and profound
antagonism at all the key moments of transition, from the development of the first gametes to the origin of
high MPI and sexual exclusivity among tool-making hominids. Here lies the scandal of difference of all
kinds, including its incarnations in differential reproductive success, in western stories of self and
community, one and other, same and different.

14) ADRIENNE ZIHLMAN: THE PALEOANTHROPOLOGY OF SEX AND GENDER

Science, Politics, and Stories:
One story is not as good as another. This book is about what enables and what constrains a particular kind of
story-telling practice—scientific narrative [...] >> Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science,
but is emphasized in order to understand a particular kind of scientific practice that remains intrinsically
story-laden—as a condition of doing good science.
Linton's criticism of "man the hunter" hypothesis.
The difficult achievement of political consciousness opened the possibility, but not inevitability or automatic
production, of a more adequate science in terms that must be negotiated by the practitioners of the craft. The
political consciousness was enabling; it could not substitute for the material, social, semiotic practice of the
science. >>> to stress a political condition of possibility is not to reduce science to another set of social
practices.
First, placing extensive hunting and a sharp sexual division of economic labor at the origin of human ways
of life far transcended the archaeological evidence for hunting tools, indeed by a few million years. But
more fundamental was the narrative logic of origins. Zihlman argued that what was new was, precisely,
extended generalist gathering by both sexes, in which the productive, exchange, and reproductive activities
of the females would dynamically propel, but not uniquely cause, a species-making transition. Extended
duration of mother-young relations, improved female sexual self-determination, greater complexity of
matrifocal groups requiring greater social skill in both cooperation and competition from both sexes, and
cultural innovations (tools, social arrangements, and other technologies) enabling these extensions were seen
as originary. Zihlman agreed that gathering was a precondition of hunting, but not as an unchanging
“matrix” for the generative principle of change. In Zihlman's story logic, both gathering and hunting
emerged as repatternings, not opposites, in changed conditions of constraint and opportunity. Narratives of
both gathering and hunting ways of life produced genders and citizens.

Mutating Universals: Mosaics of Difference:

Zihlman's particular contribution to the debates of sexual dimorphism centers around her major emphasis:
even considering “only” the flesh and bones, sexual dimorphism is not one trait; it is a mosaic of potentially
independently varying features in many parts of the body.
In dispersing single meanings and subverting stable narratives of sex, they argue for a better science at the
level of bones, genes, statistics, or foraging patterns; and simultaneously they open degrees of freedom in
their culture's constructions of gender. Again and again, they problematize what sex and sexual difference
could possibly be at the level of the potent organic stigmata which have been imagined to ground the whole
amazing ediface of sex and gender.
Without disappearing, indeed while becoming ever more deeply theorized, ever more deeply embodied,
sexual difference becomes less and less dichotomous, less and less able to police the body of nature and
appear as the ground for the elaboration of dichotomous sexual difference as gender in the space of
representation called culture. As it becomes clear that gender cannot rest on sexual difference, its
foundations in power and domination become manifest.
Zihlman's writing is a classic example of an effort to destabilize a narrative by making its easy acceptance
seem odd, irrational, or biased, rather than nearly self-evident on the Word of the Father. Settled facts
become distinctly unsettled disputes.
The gathering hypothesis was about four things: 1) female mobility; 2) social flexibility for all members of
the species; 3) the transformative power of activities of the immature members of the species and of mother-
young relationships; and 4) the deconstruction of staples in the narratives of both compulsory
heterosexuality and of the dialectic of technological determinism, masculinism, and war: e.g., male-female
sexual bonding, male-male agonism, home bases as hearths for nuclear families, and the trope of the tool-
weapon.
In a sense, science is itself a kind of gender. For the realms of both nature and culture, “science” is the key
authorizing activity, the chief sign of rationality and order. Sex is categorically opposed to order; it is what
must be ordered; woman remains the sex; woman the scientist becomes the trope figuring bias; man is
simply scientist; his gender is unmarked, unremarkable, not a problem, resting easily within the genre
(gender) of science. His gender does not seem in danger of becoming the semiotic other to science, namely,
a politics.

15) SARAH BLAFFER HRDY: INVESTMENT STRATEGIES FOR THE EVOLVING

PORTFOLIO OF PRIMATE FEMALES
Here, as in all its feminist senses, gender cannot mean simply the cultural appropriation of biological sexual
difference; indeed, sexual difference is itself the more fundamental cultural construction. And even that
sense of sexual difference is not enough for feminist theory; gender is woven of asymmetrical and multiply
arrayed difference, charged with the currents of power surging through multi-faceted dramatic narratives of
domination and struggles for its end.
In short, where there is sex, literal reproduction is a contradiction in terms. The issue from the self is always
(an)other. The scandal of sexual difference for the liberal conception of the self is at the heart of the matter.
Sexual difference founded on compulsory heterosexuality is itself the key technology for the production and
perpetuation of western Man and the assurance of this project as a fantastic lie. In the major western
narrative for generating self and other, one is always too few and two are always too many. In that awful
dialectic lies the plot of the escalation and repressive sublimation of combat as the motor of personal and
collective history.
Ontologically always potentially pregnant, women are both more limited in themselves, with a body that
betrays their individuality, and limiting to men's fantastic self-reproductive projects. To achieve themselves,
even if the achievement is a history-making fantasy, men must appropriate women. Women are the limiting
resource, but not the actors.
In postmodern, post-industrial conditions, this continuing narrative of the embattled and calculating mortal
individual takes on the added dimension of the breakdown of all coherent subjects and objects, including the
western self for both men and women. All subjects and objects seem nothing but strategic assemblages,
proximate means to some ultimate game theoretic end achieved by replicating, copying, and simulating—in
short, by the means of postmodern reproduction. No wonder cloning is the imaginary figure for the survival
of self-identity in cyborg culture.
Neo-Darwinian death of the subject: No unit, least of all the individual, sexually reproducing organism, is a
whole, classically reasonable, potentially rights-bearing subject in the realm of nature.
Univesialization of the female orgasm: such discourse harms black women > Black feminists confront a
different history, where black women's putative sexual pleasure connoted closeness to an animal world of
insatiable sensuality and black men's sexuality connoted animal aggression and the rape of white women.
>>> n the late twentieth century, anti-racist feminists cannot engage unproblematically in universalizing
discourses about sexual pleasure as a sign of female agency without reinscribing feminism within one of the
fundamental technologies for enforcing gendered racial inequality.
In a process in which Hrdy took significant part, of renegotiating the conventions that set the value of the
body for political discourse, orgasmic sexual pleasure became for (unmarked, i.e., white) women what it has
been for (unmarked) men before, the sign of the “same,” i.e., of the capacity to be (mis)represented as the
unmarked, self-identical subject—at least for a few intense seconds—in postmodern conditions.
Female orgasm came to seem non-existent or pathological only in the shift from hierarchical homology to
sexual difference in a (re)productionist frame. >> The sexes bevame "opposite" or "complementary", rather
than more or less. >> social motherhood: social argument to get voting rights.
If before the late eighteenth century, female orgasm was assumed to be necessary to conception, before the
late twentieth century, once its existence was re-admitted to polite society, its only hope for normality lay in
heterosexuality, itself one of the great constructions of the last two hundred years. In the shadow of the
normal has lurked the specter of the pathological—women's sexual pleasure for their own ends, as a sign of
their existence as ends and not as f unctions, no longer as mothers, wives, or even free lovers under the reign
of gender, i.e., male domination.
Hrdy believed keeping males uncertain about paternity was one advantage retained by females in an
evolutionary game heavily weighted toward male physical power.
Females as limiting resource (prize): The limiting resource is logically gender female; this is the “syntactic”
basis for the equation of nature and female in western-gendered narratives. >> Hrdy focused on competition
for food and female competition/cooperation in primate groups: Competition among assertive, dominance-
oriented females is an absolutely central principle of primate social life, built into their natural status as
limiting resources whose eating habits are the pivot of sexual politics.
Females remain committed to reproduction, but not within a maternalist discourse. Rather, females are
redeployed semiotically within a strategic investment discourse, where mind, sex, and economy collapse
into a single, highly problematic figure—the hyperreal unit of selection.
This narrative of female economic agency, whose foundational female spatial “deployment” and competitive
relations with each other set the constraints for shifting male “strategies,” converges with the story of female
sexual agency through such means as orgasmic sexual assertiveness and concealed ovulation to produce the
sociobiological account of females as full citizens of the evolutionary hyper-liberal state of nature.

16) REPRISE: SCIENCE FICTION, FICTIONS OF SCIENCE, AND PRIMATOLOGY

Reading Primatology as Science Fiction: The Second Foundation and Stanford's Second Primate Project,
1983–1984
I would like to begin the conclusion to Primate Visions with a return to its recurring themes of repetition,
identity, cooperation, whole, difference, change, conflict, fragment, reproduction, sex, and mind.
Throughout Primate Visions, science fiction has provided one of the lenses for reading primatological texts.
Mixing, juxtaposing, and reversing reading conventions appropriate to each genre can yield fruitful ways of
understanding the production of origin narratives in a society that privileges science and technology in its
constructions of what may count as nature and for regulating the traffic between what it divides as nature
and culture.
I read Primate Societies as an exemplar of a widespread groping in 1980s western bio-political and other
cultural discourse for ways to narrate difference that are as deeply enmeshed in feminism, anti-colonialism,
and searches for non-antagonistic and non-organicist forms of individual and collective life, as by the hyper-
real worlds of late capitalism, neo-imperialism, and the technocratic actualization of masculinist nuclear
fantasies.
In "Primate Societies", Smuts made sex a signifier for a dynamic, context dependent array of possibilities.
>> When biology is practiced as a radically situational discourse and animals are experienced/constructed as
active, non-unitary subjects in complex relation to each other and to writers and observers, the gaps between
discourses on nature and culture seem very narrow indeed.

Reading Science Fiction as Primatology: Xenogenesis and Feminism

My hope has been that the always oblique and sometimes perverse focusing would facilitate revisionings of
fundamental, persistent western narratives about difference, especially racial and sexual difference; about
reproduction, especially in terms of the multiplicities of generators and offspring; and about survival,
especially survival imagined in the boundary conditions of both the origins and ends of history, as told
within western traditions of that complex genre.
Primate Visions does not work by prohibiting origin stories, or biological explanations of what some would
insist must be exclusively cultural matters, or any other of the enabling devices among primate discourses'
apparatuses of bodily production. I am not interested in policing the boundaries between nature and
culture—quite the opposite, I am edified by the traffic.
The argument in Primate Visions works by telling and retelling stories in the attempt to shift the webs of
intertextuality and to facilitate perhaps new possibilities for the meanings of difference, reproduction, and
survival for specifically located members of the primate order—on both sides of the bio-political and
cultural divide between human and animal.
In the narrative of Primate Visions, the terms for gestating the germ of future worlds constitute a defining
dilemma of reproductive politics. The contending shapes of sameness and difference in any possible future
are at stake in the primateorder's unfinished narrative of traffic across the specific cultural and political
boundaries that separate and link animal, human, and machine in a contemporary global world where
survival is at stake. Finally, this contested world is the primate field, where, with or without our consent, we
are located. ”She laughed bitterly. 'I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork—but how the hell do I get out
of the field?' ”