Article
Feminist Review (1997) 55, 22–72. doi:10.1057/fr.1997.3
The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order1
Donna Haraway is a professor in the History of Consciousness Board at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she teaches feminist theory, science studies and women's studies. She is the author of Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (1976, New Haven: Yale University Press), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989, New York and London: Routledge; 1992, London: Verso), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991, London: Free Association Books; 1991, New York: Routledge), and a new book, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ (1996, New York and London: Routledge).
I would like especially to thank Adele Clarke, Valerie Hartouni, Stefan Helmreich, Lynn Randolph, and the Bay Area Technology and Culture Group for comments on 'The Virtual Speculum'.
Donna J. Haraway
1A revised version of this essay is forthcoming in Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ 1996, New York and London: Routledge).
Abstract
Beginning by reading a 1992 feminist appropriation of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam - in a cartoon in which the finger of a nude Adamic woman touches a computer keyboard, while the god-like VDT screen shows a disembodied fetus - 'Virtual Speculum' argues for a broader conception of 'new reproductive technologies' in order to foreground justice and freedom projects for differently situated women in the New World Order. Broadly conceptualized reproductive practices must be central to social theory in general, and to technoscience studies in particular. Tying together the politics of self help and women's health movements in the United States in the 1970s with positions on reproductive freedom articulated within the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the NAACP in the 1990s, the paper examines recent work in feminist science studies in several disciplinary and activist locations. Statistical analysis and ethnography emerge as critical feminist technologies for producing convincing representations of the reproduction of inequality. Untangling the semiotic and political-economic dialectics of invisibility and hypervisibility, 'Virtual Speculum' concludes by linking the well-surveyed amniotic fluid of on-screen fetuses and the off-frame diarrhea of uncounted and underfed infants in regimes of flexible accumulation and structural adjustment.
Keywords:
feminism, reproduction, freedom projects, visual culture, ethnography, science studies, reproductive technologies, United States, Brazil
