Marlene McCarty / Donna Haraway
Ahead of her talk and discussion Bend Over I'll Drive: Sex and the Stereotype (Thursday 22 August), Keep Your Timber Limber contributing artist Marlene McCarty selects a quote by scholar and feminist Donna Haraway.
'Feminism and primatology [and I invite you to look at ART through this lens*] are each science and politics, producers of fact and fiction, technical and social disciplines. They are both social practices for writing stories about who 'we' are and for policing boundaries and structuring fields for achieving that identity. My contention is that this intersection – coupled with other aspects of the 'decolonization of nature' that have restructured the discourses of biology and anthropology as well as other practices of international politics – destabilizes the narrative fields that gave rise to both primatology and feminism, thereby generating the possibility of new stories not strangled by the same logics of appropriation and domination, but also not innocent of the workings of power and desire, including new exclusions. The intervention must work from within, constrained and enabled by the fields of power that make discourse eminently material.'
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Routledge: New York and London, 1989
*brackets are Marlene McCarty's
