“Metaphors into Hardware: Harry Harlow and the Technology of Love”

Donna HarawayStudent Edition

Prepared by:

Dr. Kay Picart

Guide Question:

According to Haraway, what stories does Harlow’s award-winning science tell us?

Discussion Questions:

Describe how Harlow’s conceptual birthing of surrogate mother constitutes a “self-birthing.”

What role did Margaret Harlow play in this parthenogenetic birth?

Key Excerpts

“His reflection was his product, the artifact that would make him immortal for the audience of his scientific peers & his public. He was fixed in and by his own gaze.” (232)

“Margaret Harlow became a midwife in the reflective birth of her husband as father to himself-as-mother, a scientific hero.” (233)

Guide Question

Haraway writes: “Reinforcing the heroic masculinist narrative of self-birthing is the forceps of sadism.” What does “sadism” mean in this context?

Discussion Question:

Using Teresa de Lauretis & Laura Mulvey, how does the politics of the gaze in the Harlow laboratory parallel the politics of the gaze of Hollywood cinema?

Guide Question:

According to Haraway, what was the deeper subtext to Harlow’s experimentation on monkeys?

Guide Question

What were Harlow’s scientific claims to fame?