Donna Haraway, philosopher: ‘We live in a pro-natalist, anti-child world. Babies should be rare and precious’

Prepare for a journey into the outer reaches of thought: listening to Donna Haraway, 81, means venturing into unconventional territory.

Haraway is a philosopher, biologist, and feminist theorist renowned for her groundbreaking work at the crossroads of science and the humanities. She says that, in order to think, she places herself in the position of decomposing matter. Visionary and provocative, her writing has a distinctly punk edge. Drawing on science fiction and employing a deeply ironic style, Haraway weaves narratives intended to help us see the hybridization between humans, technology, and other species.

Named one of the 10 most influential thinkers in technology by the EL PAÍS supplement Ideas, she first came to prominence in 1985 with her essay A Cyborg Manifesto, in which she argued that we are integrated with and through technology. A professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she was also the tenured professor to hold the first chair in feminist theory. Her work has had a profound influence on feminist theory, queer theory, and cyberculture studies.

Haraway has supervised more than 60 doctoral dissertations across a wide range of disciplines, and her work has inspired dozens of artists. Among many distinctions, she received the American Book Award in 1992 and the Erasmus Prize in 2025, awarded by the Dutch foundation established in memory of the Rotterdam thinker Desiderius Erasmus.

Last month, Haraway took part remotely in an event hosted by La Casa Encendida in Madrid to mark the 10th anniversary of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, which argues that the world revolves around interconnected networks of life.

Haraway seems to practice what she preaches. She shares her home with three chickens, two formerly stray dogs and her partner, science communicator Rusten Hogness. Speaking by videoconference early in the morning from a corner of the house that looks comfortably chaotic — with a pair of glasses resting on a table, stacks of books, piles of clothes and an exercise bike in the background — she joins the call with a broad smile.

Question. One of the hallmarks of your work is its ability to move beyond binaries. You have described your thinking as “tentacular.” How did you begin to develop this distinctive way of thinking?

Answer. It’s a hard question, because memory is very faulty, and we reconstruct it constantly, but I can construct a story that in some sense, I was never deeply attracted to binarism. From the beginning, I grew up in a world that always seemed to be thicker and built with different kinds of figural patterns that were not broken down easily. Binaries are an essential tool in the history of chemistry, taxonomy, biology… In philosophy classes in the university, I learned the language that let me articulate how we mistake the representations for the thing itself. Reading Alfred North Whitehead and his Science and the Modern World was important. So were the American pragmatists Charles Peirce and Williams James, and later, the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. They helped me name my own intuitions.

Q. Your Cyborg Manifesto, from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, was groundbreaking. In it, you argue that humans are technology. In what sense?

A. I learned about cyborgs in the middle of the Vietnam War. The then-secretary of defense Robert McNamara installed an electronic battlefield operating out of Honolulu, and at the time I was teaching at the University of Hawaii. The military birth, if you will, of cyborgs was very present to me as an activist, as a biologist, and as an intellectual. I then learned from a graduate student of mine who had been in the army that the term “cyborg” had been coined in the space race, during the effort to put a man on the moon, and that the enhancement of human beings — usually through primates having been used as models, to implant devices to control blood sugar or neural signaling — formed part of that same technological horizon: the animal model, enhanced by technologies. For me, the cyborg was never just any kind of machine. It’s that joining of flesh and digital technology.

Q. You were never anti-technology.

A. No, never. My hand is a technology with functional uses. Technology is the organization of the world functionally. But the degree to which these kinds of technologies were enlisted in a kind of male-dominant, militarized world-building was clearly a giant problem for feminist thinking. I wanted to inhabit it, re-appropriate it, bend it, demilitarize it. From the beginning, A Cyborg Manifesto was in alliance with my eco-feminist friends, but it did not take what tended to be the anti-technology position of that period, for good reason. I wanted to argue a feminist cyborg position.

Q. If you were to write the essay today, what would it be about?

A. [Turns to pick up a book.] Look at this painting. It’s called The Annunciation of the Second Coming; it’s by my friend Lynn Randolph. It’s clear that one of the two figures depicted is a female cyborg on a chip next to the angel Gabriel, who is announcing a pregnancy. But a pregnancy of what, exactly? I’ve named the cyborg Claudette. And I think she’s pregnant with Claude, Anthropic’s large language model. I believe that what was gestating in the belly of that cyborg are the large language models, the chatbots… those kinds of digital beings that now populate our world, which is riddled with sensors feeding veritable cascades of data into gigantic data centers. To support this enormous amount of data and energy, what kind of action needs to be taken? So that, for example, the water system doesn’t dry up and all biodiversity survives. All of this depends on the very same technologies used in the bombing of Iran by Israel and the United States, or the drones in Ukraine… I’d like to mention that I like it when technology breaks down.

Q. What do you mean?

A. These technologies, which are so valuable, break down all the time. They fail at least as much as we do. It’s important to remember that. These are moments of clarity: it’s in the conditions of breakdown that the possibility of insight arises. We don’t get new insight when things are working smoothly. We get them when things break. That’s where the possibility of change emerges. It’s just one of the reasons why I think people resist. Right now, I’m engaged with people who are trying to prevent the building of more detention centers to hold immigrants prior to deportation. In resisting these detention centers and their apparatus, we try to make them break down in a way that opens up the possibility in the world for something else to happen. We try to break down the systems of oppression so that out of the belly of the monster some new kinds of possibilities might emerge. I think the civil rights movement did that with genius.

Q. We’ll return to forms of resistance, but let me clarify something: Do you use artificial intelligence?

A. It’s impossible not to use it. Every time I log into Google, I get an AI-generated summary of what I looked up. I have no choice. Do I actively and intentionally use AI? No, I have not. I’m too lazy to learn how. I have artist friends who do very interesting things with it. At some point, I suppose I’ll learn to use it selectively. But, again, it’s not the devil: it’s a set of tools that’s the subject of hyper-investment — with large amounts of capital going into it and not for the best purposes. It’s causing enormous environmental damage. I’m more for a “slow AI” — developing it only to the extent that there are sustainable energy systems, sustainable ecological relationships, and a creative reorganization of work. I’m for slow AI integrated into the world of the kind that I want to affirm. And not the “fast AI” that we are currently being subjected to.

Q. Let’s talk about authoritarianism. Canadian political theorist Bonnie Honig suggested living our lives while ignoring Donald Trump. In Europe, it often feels as though we are following the same path you have gone down in the United States. How do we snap out of this stupor?

A. Authoritarian ethnic nationalisms are on the rise in many places — India, France, Spain, England, the United States… We’re inhabiting a widespread period of history; we’re all trying to get by and figure out what we can do. I learned from Spain’s struggle against Franco and from the fact that Spanish democracy emerged from that period, bringing positive energy to the world. At the same time, Spain is caught between neoliberalism, the contradictions of the European Union, and the need to produce unity without continuing to burden the rest of the world with the resulting immigration issues. Migrants are bearing the brunt of all these disasters. The struggle against authority involves learning to welcome the foreigner, forging bonds — creating kinship — with people who are initially strangers, and learning to rebuild far more heterogeneous societies. It’s not that immigration is new; our societies are being recomposed by climate destruction and extractive capitalism.

Q. Can you offer specific ideas on ways to resist?

A. Let’s oppose ethnic-nationalist authoritarianism with every fiber of our being. Let’s stand in solidarity with immigrants. I’m part of the network that supports them — the rapid response network. I’ve been trained as a legal observer and to take testimonies. I patrol areas where immigration enforcement agents might show up. I’m part of a group of about 2,000 people in my city — which is small, so that’s quite a lot of people. And I’ve been learning Spanish; I hope to be able to read this interview.

Q. Language itself — and also your ability to weave ideas together — plays an important role in your writing. Do you believe in the transformative potential of a story?

A. Rather than “believe,” I’d say “hope.” I hope for a commitment. We inhabit stories as organisms: nothing alive is outside the process of producing meaning over time. That’s what I call a story. I feel allied with science fiction writers, painters, and dancers. I experience their work as a way of organizing the world to make propositions. Do you want to inhabit this story? Change it? Do you want to wipe it from the face of the earth? Stories are invitations to join in the telling.

Q. Among other terms, you have coined “worlding” (world-building).

A. I didn’t invent it, but I certainly took it over. [Martin] Heidegger uses it, but I don’t use it the way he does; I give it the opposite meaning. His use of the term was deeply humanistic; it had to do with the idea of taking up the world and making man its center. The way I use it comes from science fiction: inhabiting the worlds that its authors propose to us. They construct solid worlds that support a story. We’re engaged in worlding for and with each other so that we can build worlds that deserve a future. And those worlds are always more than human.

Q. You don’t identify as a posthumanist; you prefer a word your partner suggested: “Compost.”

A. I get called a posthumanist all the time, but I resist that label. There are thinkers I feel close to — like the Italian philosopher Rosi Braidotti — who gladly embrace that label. I’m more in the compost, in the layers, in the material that decomposes, in the heat of the rotting compost pile; that’s where my thinking comes from.

Q. You dedicate Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene to those who create “odd kinships.” What do you mean by “odd kinships”?

A. You may have noticed that I don’t feel particularly comfortable with the heteronormative nuclear family or its genealogies. I’m interested in engaging in practices that make kin with each other. Anthropologists define kinship as a diffuse and enduring solidarity. It’s not optional; generally speaking, you don’t choose your kin. If you have a cousin, that cousin has you, whether you like the cousin or not. You can’t just turn around and stop being their relative. But we also form kinship intentionally. And I’m interested in what’s enduring — which, hopefully, spans generations — what’s diffuse—it doesn’t necessarily mean living under the same roof — and what’s supportive: being there for and with one another. I’m interested in kin-making with humans and with more-than-humans. I think I am in the same litter as cyborgs, dogs, deer, yeast, bacteria, and redwoods. We are profoundly kin to each other. My good friend [the anthropologist] Susan Harding and her adopted son, Marco, have been part of an odd kinship with Rusten and me for 30 years. We are an intentional family.

Q. But are you in favor of population control?

A. No, but I have a motto: Make kin, not babies.” Institutional population control has been imperialist and racist; I reject it outright. I talk in terms of human numbers. Today there are 8.5 billion of us — an extraordinary figure. That’s about three times as many as there were in 1944, when I was born. We’ve gone from about 2.5 billion to 8.5 billion by favoring the rich like me and exploiting the majority of the world’s population. There are more of us than necessary for the flourishing of biodiversity and humanity. I advocate forming kinships in other ways and caring for the babies who already exist. We live in a pro-natalist and anti-child world. There’s a push for a kind of mandatory pregnancy without serious care for those who have already been born — for children — and without serious concern for women and their families. I’m pro-child and non-natalist, but I’m not anti-natalist either. I believe that having babies should be a rare and precious thing. Taking care of babies is really important. They smell almost as good as puppies… though not quite [smiles].

Q. You were the first tenured professor to hold the first chair in feminist theory in the U.S. How did your feminism take shape?

A. I went to a Catholic girls’ high school run by nuns. They took their students very seriously — as basketball players, as thinkers, as people. It was a great gift in my life. In college, I had a philosophy professor who made all the difference in the world: Jane Cauvel. I spent four years laughing with and at the most illustrious philosophers alongside a classmate. Later, at Yale, I joined the Women in Cell Biology committee, which challenged the patriarchal structure in the study of biology. I became an explicit feminist in the 1960s.

Q. In Spain, the feminist movement has been divided for years. Two demonstrations passed through several cities without crossing paths: the pro-trans and anti-trans factions, to put it simply. I understand that you would be in the pro-trans group. Could you share your arguments?

A. Feminism is not a synonym for the good. Feminism has always been full of conflicts and divisions. There were plenty of feminist fascists, and there still are today. But I believe that at its root lies a love for women and girls, and an understanding of the damage done in the name of patriarchy and male superiority — including the harm that is also done to men. For me, feminism is about breaking down gender, not reinforcing it. It’s about understanding that gender categories are made — not simply invented, but constructed — and that they could be different: less violent and binary, more open and welcoming. And that gender fluidity, and a certain… let’s say, sovereignty in one’s own body — though I’m wary with that word — are important. Gender has an evolutionary history, and today that fluidity is very intense: rivers flow strongly. Feminism is part of that river. Feminists who want to damn and define gender, to know in advance what it is — only this and not that — I believe they’re making category and political mistakes, and I oppose their proposals. Even so, I continue to read them. I refuse to cancel them. I still read Harry Potter. I absolutely refuse to cancel someone I disagree with.

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