A Note by a Sportswriter's Daughter

In this personal essay, Donna Haraway talks about her relationship with her father, who was a sportswriter, and how he, along with his crutches and his wheelchairs, helped to revise her view of the “human.” Haraway’s father suffered from tuberculosis and had to use a pair of crutches for most of his adult life. When the father’s body ceased to function the family wanted at first to cremate his crutches with him, but decided to preserve them as a way of remembering him. The daughter still cannot think of him without his crutches or his chairs, beds, friends, games, balls and all the other “companion species” in his life. Haraway has more recently developed her notion of “companion species” through her participation, in close cooperation with her beloved dog Cayenne, in a competitive running game called Agility that is played by human-canine teams. Here the author notes that the term “species” is an oxymoron since it points on the one hand to the logical independence of each “species” (man, woman, dog, stick, computer chip) and on the other to the inter-relationship or symbiosis among species implied by “spectator” and “respect.” In the author’s reflections on the ontics/antics of bodies-in-making, then, the terms “regard” (not the Cultural Studies “gaze”) and “respect” play a vital role.