Feminist Thought in Technoscientific Practice and the Diffractive Perspective of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad

Abstract

The feminist thought of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, emphasizing the materiality of knowledge, resists epistemological approaches that prioritize the social construction of discursive representations along with ethical and ontological assumptions that remain grounded in the ideals of a Western, white, anthropocentric subject envisioning the unconditional development of technoscientific innovations for the domestication of wild nature, dangerous femininity, and uncontrollable chaos. This text presents their work and contribution to a feminist technoscience that supports us to move beyond dichotomies by focusing on the diffractive perspective. This perspective, by foregrounding knowledge as a situated process of intra-action with matter and with the materiality of the elements that constitute and co-shape the technoscientific practice itself, destabilizes the epistemological dominance of an anthropocentric language that limits itself in defining, determining, and confining objects and subjects within binary identities such as male/female, nature/culture, matter/language, body/mind, human/machine.