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| - Allucquére Rosanne Stone (Sandy Stone) was born Zelig Ben-Natan in New York City. Her date of birth is uncertain but was probably in the late 1940s. She has stated that while a teen she was intensely averse to formal education, preferring to travel in the New England area auditing classes with university professors whose work she admired. Stone was flagged as an unusually gifted high school student and was offered a job at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. She did not fit comfortably into the corporate research culture, and in addition came under pressure to pursue a graduate degree in engineering, and after a few years she left the company. However, during her time at Murray Hill she met many of the pioneers in a wide variety of scientific and technological fields, which may have sparked her later interdisciplinary work. After leaving Bell Labs Stone worked odd jobs to support her own research and continued to avoid a traditional academic path. She seems to have changed her mind briefly in the early 1960s, attending St. John's College, Annapolis and receiving a B.A. in 1964. During summers she interned at Fordel Films, a New York production company, and was peripherally involved in the formation of NABET Local 10 in Manhattan. Later she worked in experimental neurology with the Eye Research Foundation in Bethesda, Maryland and a team affiliated with the National Institutes of Health. During this time she contributed to research in feline single-cell retinal color response,10 and, separately, research in the feline auditory system. As this research progressed Stone came under increasing pressure to obtain a terminal academic degree. Instead, as she had done in similar circumstances in the past, she chose to leave the field. In the late 1960s Stone moved to New York City and embarked on a career as a recording engineer. During her time on the East Coast of the United States she worked in various capacities with artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Edgar Winter, the Velvet Underground, and Todd Rundgren. After Woodstock Stone moved to the West Coast of the United States, where she worked with Jefferson Airplane, Marty Balin, The Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, Crosby & Nash, Captain Beefheart, and other individuals and groups of the period. In 1974 Stone withdrew from mainstream recording, settled in Santa Cruz, California, and undertook gender reassignment with the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program in Palo Alto. During this period she published pseudonymously in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" and "Galaxy" magazine.1 Later she became a member of the Olivia Records collective, a popular women's music label. This led to an extraordinary contretemps in lesbian feminist circles in the U.S., which has been extensively documented elsewhere² (and vide infra). In the early 1980s Stone built a small computer, taught herself programming, and became a freelance coder, writing medical software for such firms as Greenleaf Medical; and later became engineering manager for Sequential Circuits, a manufacturer of musical synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines. In 1983 Stone met Donna Haraway, an influential cultural theorist and faculty member in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Haraway was in the process of writing A Manifesto for Cyborgs, which was to become a watershed essay in cultural theory and the foundation of the academic field of cyborg studies. The meeting initiated a long-lasting friendship, punctuated by a period from 1987 to 1993 during which Stone was Haraway's student. At the time, and long afterward, she described the period as a personal watershed during which her life radically changed in direction and purpose, and that after years of denial she had finally come home to academia.9 Before Stone finished her coursework in History of Consciousness, at Haraway's suggestion she visited the University of California's San Diego campus as an exchange student in the newly-formed Science Studies program. There she was at first accepted, then cashiered and sent packing in a dispute involving conflicts between progressive and conservative faculty factions, then immediately offered a job as Instructor in the Department of Sociology. She accepted and remained in San Diego as faculty, teaching courses in sociology, anthropology, political science, English, communications, and the experimental program "The Making of the Modern World", until 1992, when she was recruited by and became an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, Austin. She finally received her doctorate in 1993. Stone's dissertation, "Presence", which Haraway supervised, was published in 1996 by MIT Press as "The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age". Stone's literary agent, Sandra Dijkstra, arranged the manuscript's sale and publication. As with Stone herself during the Olivia years,5 in some academic areas "Desire and Technology" ignited a firestorm. Its style, in which Stone carefully blended and meticulously footnoted elements of anthropology, sociology, computer science, journalism, and fiction, was anathema to many conservative scholars. Stone described the work as "creat(ing) a discourse which contains all the elements of the original discourse but which is quite different from it...remember that at heart I am a narrator, a shameless teller of stories."7 In the years following the book's publication, several major social science departments fractured into separate departments along lines that in part came to be drawn by reference to "Desire and Technology" and other, similar publications.6
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