A Feminist Companion to Post‐humanities

Adopting the "companion species" approach of Haraway—a grappling with charged bits of life—the ordinary story of my own relationships with an adopted mix-breed dog, "Blackie Lawless" assists my understanding in this essay. It makes the connection clear between Haraway’s cyborg concept, a a subspecies of her new, more comprehensive kin figuration of ‘‘companion species’’. Both are figures of lively ontology and ways of knowing within dynamic emergences of their times. As developed in Haraway's book, When Species Meet, ‘‘companion species’’ anchors a form of reluctant post-humanist approach that aims, not to discard anything related to humans, but to think people (and, to practice the humanities) differently. Haraway makes an argument for interspecies survival. In the following I offer my reading of When Species Meet, my bits and bites of sensation, frustration, and curiosity within Haraway’s dog land. Moreover, I also read Haraway in the light of three decades of feminist struggles to come to terms with the body, with biology, and with more-than human existences. I believe these struggles to be crucial for the future survival and proliferation of feminist scholarship, in terms of feminist forms of post-humanities as more humane and more-than-human humanities.