USA, 1944
She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. During her long academic career, she has written several books of reference in such diverse fields as feminism, technology, science fiction, primatology and postcolonial studies. From all these standpoints she has questioned the relations between humans and non-humans, from cyborgs to pets. In 1990 she published Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), a collection of ten essays written in the 1980s, notable among which is “A Cyborg Manifesto”, in which she recovered the term “cyborg” to designate a hybrid organism capable of breaking through the bounds of what is human and subverting conventional classification. Expressing her concerns about the intersections between humans and other species, her book When Species Meet (Minnesota, 2007) endorses the notion of “companion species” as opposed to “companion animals” when considering the interactions between humans and many other kinds of animals.
