“Metaphors into Hardware: Harry Harlow and the Technology of Love” Donna Haraway Student Edition

1. “Metaphors into Hardware: Harry Harlow and the Technology of Love”Donna HarawayStudent Edition Prepared by: Dr. Kay Picart

2. Guide Question: • According to Haraway, what stories does Harlow’s award-winning science tell us?

3. 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?

4. “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) Key Excerpts

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

6. 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?

7. Guide Question: • According to Haraway, what was the deeper subtext to Harlow’s experimentation on monkeys?

8. Guide Question • What were Harlow’s scientific claims to fame?