Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse

Donna Haraway
University of California, Santa Cruz

ABSTRACT:

Drawing on her collaboration with the painter Lynn Randolph, Haraway's lecture will explore how the implosion of informatics and biologics in the last 40 years shapes stories, cartoons, jokes, advertizing practices, political openings, corporate strategies, interdisciplinary collaborations, and everyday laboratory work in the cultural zone called "technoscience." The premise of "Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium" is that multilayered worlds of practice and culture have been coded into a small set of potent "stem cells" in the technoscientific body. This set of condensed objects includes the chip, seed, gene, fetus, brain, bomb, race, database, and ecosystem. The FemaleMan, an odd transgenic offshoot of feminism enterprised up, and her patented breast-cancer animal-model sidekick, OncoMouse--both natural siblings marked with the signs of intellectual property--provide the point of view for the argument. Meaning-making practices of many kinds are tightly braided into productive scientific work. This thick braid of science as practical culture and cultural practice makes a mockery of the skin-head gang war between "realist" or "relativist" accounts of knowledge-making work. The major examples in the lecture will be drawn from molecular genetics, especially research on transgenics.