Intensely religious as a child, Haraway attended Catholic primary and secondary schools. She considered entering a convent at the end of high school, and wanted to enroll in a Jesuit university but could not raise the money to go out of state. Even after entering college and becoming politically active, for a while Haraway considered herself a part of the Catholic left.
Much of Haraway’s work centers around issues of ethics and offers alternative subjectivities that enable a new kind of agency—“A Cyborg Manifesto” for instance, is, in part, an effort to create an approach to ethics and agency that accounts for technologies and non-human organisms. Because she positions her cyborg ethics in opposition to the Christian creation myth and Revelations, there is a surprising continuity between the mature Haraway, who seeks to create new, less patriarchal and divisive approaches to ethics and agency in postmodernity, and the devoutly Catholic adolescent reading St. Thomas Aquinas.
Haraway’s early devotion to Catholicism seems especially important when she discusses the relationship between language, culture and science. Haraway has consistently blurred the lines between biological entities and their evolving scientific/cultural representations. In the process she often cleverly conflates signifieds with cultural systems of signification and emphasizes the importance of metaphor in technoscientific discourse. At various points in the interview, Haraway connects her innovative approach to culture, metaphor and science with Catholicism. It is surprising to find that the complicated relationship Haraway identifies between cultural systems of representation and the entities they represent could have some of its philosophical roots in the very old problems of nominalism and the nature of transubstantiation.