Staying with the Trouble

Donna J. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene asks what it would mean to live and die well together on a damaged earth without pretending that damage can be undone by a technological fix, a return to purity, or a declaration that it is already too late. “Chthulucene” names neither a settled geological period nor a monster’s reign: it is Haraway’s deliberately unruly figure for earthly, tentacular relations among human and nonhuman beings. Her companion term “sympoiesis,” or making-with, challenges the fantasy of the self-contained individual. Bodies, species, technologies, and worlds emerge through relations—but those relations are historically unequal, and interdependence is not the same thing as harmony.

That distinction gives the book its feminist force. Haraway’s “making kin” is not a sentimental extension of family or a claim that women are naturally closer to nature. It is a practice of building consequential ties beyond biological genealogy while asking who has power, who performs the work of care, and who is made disposable. In the short chapter “Making Kin,” she connects “Make Kin Not Babies” to feminist struggles for sexual and reproductive freedom, while explicitly refusing population control imposed through race, class, or state power. The slogan is meant to unsettle the assumption that kinship must reproduce a human family tree—not to prescribe childlessness or diminish anyone’s reproductive choice. The distinction matters: without its antiracist and anticolonial context, the phrase can be misread as a coercive demographic program, precisely the politics Haraway rejects.

The book makes its method tangible through stories that refuse to let apparently separate issues stay separate. In “Playing String Figures,” urban pigeons connect migration, domestication, surveillance, race, and the uneven value assigned to animal life. Haraway discusses PigeonBlog, an art-and-science project in which pigeons carried pollution sensors: its makers did not present it as a replacement for professional air monitoring, and the project’s tensions—animal use, data access, and surveillance technologies—remain part of the story rather than footnotes to a feel-good collaboration. Her account of a pigeon loft in Melbourne also refuses to treat humane animal management as a repair for Wurundjeri dispossession. In another chapter, the Crochet Coral Reef project brings women’s craft, mathematical pattern, ocean science, and climate concern into public view; the work can foster attention and connection, but making an artwork is not by itself ecological remedy.

Haraway’s chapters move between feminist science studies, biology, art, Indigenous and community projects, and speculative fiction. In “Awash in Urine,” her elderly dog Cayenne’s use of diethylstilbestrol (DES) leads into the drug’s entanglement with women exposed before birth, pregnant mares whose urine supplied Premarin, livestock growth promotion, pharmaceutical markets, veterinary care, and women’s health activism. The point is not that every participant is equally responsible, or that intimate care is innocent. It is that ordinary treatment choices can be materially connected to industrial and medical histories that were kept out of view. Haraway’s self-implication—asking what she benefited from and failed to know—makes response-ability a practice of tracing those connections and accepting differentiated obligations, not a demand for guilt without action. This is a historical and theoretical discussion, not medical advice.

The final “Camille Stories” turn this argument into speculative fabulation. Across five generations, Camille’s community builds relationships with monarch butterflies while trying to repair damaged migration corridors and places devastated by extraction. Haraway does not offer this future as a policy blueprint or a forecast. The story tests what kinship, reproduction, education, migration, and long-term care might look like if human flourishing were understood as bound up with other beings. Crucially, the imagined community is not a frictionless utopia: its children include symbiotic and nonsymbiotic members; conflicts, hierarchy, and caste-like formations emerge; and the narrator openly invites readers to change and criticize the story. Its most consequential turn is toward Mazahua women’s struggles over forests and water. Camille’s earlier ecological commitments prove insufficient when they remain framed by settler categories; learning to collaborate requires confronting Indigenous sovereignty and local histories, not treating Indigenous knowledge as decorative validation for a Western ecological project.

The book’s form is part of its argument. “SF” can mean science fiction, science fact, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, or string figures: stories are not escapes from material conditions but ways to rehearse attention, relation, and possible action. Haraway’s reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier-bag fiction pushes against the lone hero’s conquest narrative; Octavia Butler’s Parable novels sharpen the question of survival and change in worlds shaped by displacement and violence. This method rewards slow, associative reading, though its dense allusions and playful terminology can obscure the thread, and its speculative communities cannot substitute for a concrete account of institutions, redistribution, or movement strategy. Readers should also notice the risk Haraway herself acknowledges: cross-cultural and multispecies thinking can reproduce appropriation if it does not stay accountable to the people and places it invokes.

The book is valuable not as a universal answer to the climate crisis but as a demanding feminist method: follow the relations that make a life possible, distinguish unequal responsibilities, and resist both rescue fantasies and despair. Read alongside Indigenous land and water struggles, environmental justice organizing, reproductive-justice writing, and climate science, it helps ask a sharper question than “Are humans part of nature?”: which particular arrangements of labor, power, care, and knowledge are making some worlds unlivable, and what forms of collective response could change them?

Edition details and contents: Duke University Press.