Reading the Media — Season 1, Episode 1: Donna Haraway Reads 'The National Geographic'
28 min • 1 season, 5 episodes
Episode synopsis
Donna Haraway— of A Cyborg Manifesto fame, and one of today’s most recognized public intellectuals—reads National Geographic in this 1987 video. Interested in the ways meaning traffics between species, or rather, how meaning is made of images of interactions between species, Harraway looks into the case of Koko the gorilla, who was taught a variation of American Sign Language by her human keepers. How does the "cultured" gorilla come to represent universal man?, Haraway asks. How do relationships between human and non-human animals reveal how we think about ourselves? About gender, race, and class? Haraway untangles the web of meanings, tracing what gets to count as nature, for whom and when in this feminist journey through the anthropological junglescape.
About Reading the Media
Founded by a collective of radical media makers in 1981, Paper Tiger Television pioneered edutainment. Broadcast on public access television, the collective took a grassroots, DIY approach to media production that showcased how television was made through television, while critiquing corporate media and attempting to build a more equitable form of moving image. As one of the founders put it: “It is one thing to critique the mass media and rail against their abuses. It is quite another to create viable alternatives.” Punk and experimental, Paper Tiger Television was such an alternative. The series, Reading the Media, featured all manner of intellectuals, artists, and activists analyzing, and satirizing newspapers, magazines, and even cigarette ads to decipher their hidden codes, messages, and ideologies.