What drew me so desperately to Haraway at twenty, eager to find a way of being in the world that I could commit to, could follow towards something I wanted that I hadn’t yet (then, or maybe even now) learned to articulate, was her additive lens: her commitment to both/AND, to celebrating a purposeful, pleasurably rigorous way of being. Haraway dreamed of a world in which people might strive to be “not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” Containing multitudes is part and parcel of the human condition. Crack the lid on any Ted and with a little elbow grease you’re liable to find a love of opera, or a penchant for karaoke, or an appreciation of experimental poetry, or a truly singular porn search history. Multitudes are one thing; multitudes are universal. Maybe when I talk about people who are more than one kind of person, what I really mean is people who are made up of contradictions.
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Hardly anyone has just one identity. Nobody is just a Muslim, or just an Italian, or just a capitalist. But every now and then a fanatical creed comes along and insists that people should believe in only one story and have only one identity. In recent generations the most fanatical such creed was fascism. Fascism insisted that people should not
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