A history in half.

We need the legacy of women philosophers.

“The frame for my sketch is set by the extent and importance of rearrangements in
worldwide social relations tied to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of worldorder analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we arc living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system from all work to all play, a deadly game.”

Donna J. Haraway 1985, A Manifesto for Cyborgs, pp. 79-80

“Yes! We have been hailed, in an Althusserian sense, into digital realities, digital worlding. And we recognize ourselves in it, we
have no choice. It gives us our obligations and also many of our
capacities to respond, what I call response-abilities.”

Donna J. Haraway 2019, Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleMan-Meets-OncoMouse : Feminism and Technoscience, p. xxviii

Donna Jeanne Haraway is an US-american philosopher, biologist and feminist activist. She is working on theories of technology, feminist philosophy and the protection of biological organisms. In 1985 Haraway published her famous Essay A Manifesto for Cyborgs which grounded her thinking and innovative theory. Haraway concentrates in her works on the question how humans live together with machines and other species and how this togetherness reshapes our world and thinking. All these theories and thinking also lead to a rethinking of the existing boundaries formed by men. Haraway does not fear to question social forms that have been established and manifested over centuries in order to enable a more just life and an intra-acting coexistence between human, animalistic and machine species. Examples for such life forms are primates (cf. Primate Visions), the Onco-Mouse (cf. Modest-Witness@Second-Millenium) or marginalized groups of animals/humans/organisms (cf. Staying with the trouble).

Cyborgs, redefining borders, digital technologies and how women shape into this fields will also be one of our main topics at our huge, international, hybrid Conference Women and their body. In the session on Digital Technologies and Cyborgs we will hear two interesting talks about:

The Reinvention of the human body: Cyborgs, String Figures and new Boundaries by Felix Grewe (16.03.2023, 10:00)

Women’s body and digital technologies: disembodied freedom or reproduction of social hierarchies? by Annalisa Cananzi (16.03.2023, 10:30)

Furthermore in the Session Contemporary Thoughts we will hear 4 intersting talks about the recent development of female embodiment: Piergiacomo Severini, Oblique paths to truth. Myth and bodily elements in Simone Weil, Jeanne Hersch and María Zambrano (16.03.2023, 11.00); Lisa Krall, Mothers matter! Mother(hood) as material-discursive entanglement (11.45); Henning Nörenberg, “Throwing like a girl”, “spreading like a man”? Body, power, and the sense of being in the right (12.15); and Ariadni Polychroniou, The theoretical construction of female embodiment in the early feminist phenomenological framework of Iris Marion Young (14.00).

More information about the conference and the program can be found here.

If you want to register for the conference, please click on this link: https://indico.uni-paderborn.de/event/21/

Interest aroused? More information about  female philosophers and scientists can be found in our Directory. It gives an overview of women philosophers and scientists from approx. 2300 BCE to the 21st century. Currently, there are more than 280 names of women philosophers listed and the entries will be periodically updated with biographical information and sources for further research.

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