Donna Jeanne Haraway was born in 1944 in Denver, Colorado. Haraway's father was a sportswriter for The Denver Post and her mother, who came from a heavily Irish Catholic background, died when Haraway was 16 years old. Haraway attended high school at St. Mary's Academy in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado. Haraway triple majored in zoology, philosophy and literature at the Colorado College.

Haraway also writes about the history of science and biology. In Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1990), she focused on the metaphors and narratives that direct the science of primatology. She asserted that there is a tendency to masculinize the stories about "reproductive competition and sex between aggressive males and receptive females [that] facilitate some and preclude other types of conclusions". She contended that female primatologists focus on different observations that require more communication and basic survival activities, offering very different perspectives of the origins of nature and culture than the currently accepted ones. Drawing on examples of Western narratives and ideologies of gender, race and class, Haraway questioned the most fundamental constructions of scientific human nature stories based on primates. In Primate Visions, she wrote:  "My hope has been that the always oblique and sometimes perverse focusing would facilitate revisionings of fundamental, persistent western narratives about difference, especially racial and sexual difference; about reproduction, especially in terms of the multiplicities of generators and offspring; and about survival, especially about survival imagined in the boundary conditions of both the origins and ends of history, as told within western traditions of that complex genre".  Haraway's aim for science is "to reveal the limits and impossibility of its 'objectivity' and to consider some recent revisions offered by feminist primatologists". Haraway presents an alternative perspective to the accepted ideologies that continue to shape the way scientific human nature stories are created. Haraway urges feminists to be more involved in the world of technoscience and to be credited for that involvement. In a 1997 publication, she remarked:  I want feminists to be enrolled more tightly in the meaning-making processes of technoscientific world-building. I also want feminist--activists, cultural producers, scientists, engineers, and scholars (all overlapping categories) -- to be recognized for the articulations and enrollment we have been making all along within technoscience, in spite of the ignorance of most "mainstream" scholars in their characterization (or lack of characterizations) of feminism in relation to both technoscientific practice and technoscience studies.

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