An emeritus professor at the Department of History of Consciousness and the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). She has written reference texts throughout her academic career in a range of fields as diverse as feminism, techno-science, science fiction, primatology and postcolonial studies. She has questioned the values of humanism prevailing in Western culture from all these points of view and has studied the relationships between humans and non-humans, and from cyborgs to pets. 

In 1991 she published Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, a compilation of ten essays written in the 1980s, notably A Cyborg Manifesto (1985). Her latest essay, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (DUP, 2016), proposes a reconsideration of the relationships between humans and the Earth and all the species that inhabit it.