ABSTRACT
teaches in the History of Consciousness Program and in Women's Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her teaching and writing in feminist theory and science studies are addressed to the politics, histories, and cultures of modern science and technology In general, she is consumed by questions about love, knowledge, and power in what gets to count as nature for differently situated twentieth-century people. In her first book, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in 20th Century Developmental Biology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), she asked how metaphor functions to shape experimental work in developmental biology. In Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), she examines popular scientific practices, such as natural history museums and television nature specials, along with technical lab and field primatology, to explore the tangled intersections of colonialism, decolonization, unequal gender and racial arrangements, cultural resources, and national and institutional forces in generating potent narratives about the meanings and lives of monkeys and apes for contending human constituencies. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1990, and New York: Routledge, 1991) is a collection of essays that range from contentious feminist readings of Anglo-Nigerian women's fiction in a U.S. women's studies classroom to explorations of popular and official immune system discourse, arguments for situated knowledges in feminist epistemology, and the promise and threat of "cyborg" (a hybrid of "cybernetic" and "organisms") images for progressive political practices. She is currently writing on the promises of monsters, in and out of science fiction and the fictions of science, for feminist cultural studies. This interview took place in Santa Cruz on October 18, 1990.
