[ExI] Fwd: [tp] H+ and Cyborg Feminism

Thu Jul 23 20:05:38 UTC 2009

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From: Hughes, James J. <jhughes at changesurfer.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 8:17 PM
Subject: [tp] H+ and Cyborg Feminism
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http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/politics/importance-being-cyborg-feminist

On the Importance of Being a Cyborg Feminist

Written By: Kyle Munkittrick

Date Published: July 21, 2009

Transhumanism's relationship with postmodern philosophy and critical theory
is a strange one. For example, Nick Bostrom's influential "A History of
Transhumanist Thought" spans centuries, covering the gamut from Utnapishtim
to the President's Council on Bioethics, but makes little mention of those
who radically challenge the core Enlightenment narrative upon which he
builds his history. Figures like Nietzsche, Marx, and Donna Haraway do all
receive a nod in Bostrom's essay, including Haraway's cyberfeminist motto,
"I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess," but their ideas go unanalyzed. Of
course, the context for these thinkers is often ignored and their works
simply mined for epigraphs and potent, argument-punctuating lines such as
Haraway's. Make no mistake: Bostrom's essay (indeed, his entire corpus of
work) is essential reading for any serious transhumanist. But there are gaps
in his history that are reflective of a larger dismissal of certain
philosophers by transhumanist intellectuals. Among those neglected, I would
list Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Bruno
Latour, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Jurgan Habermas. Clearly there is
insufficient time and space to even begin to discuss all of these figures
properly, so I would like to draw your attention to just one in particular,
Donna Haraway, and her work with cyberfeminism.

Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century" is the locus classicus of cyberfeminism.
Published as an essay in 1985 and then redrafted as a chapter in Haraway's
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature in 1991, the
manifesto has aged particularly well, remaining relevant within feminism and
cultural studies, and it is often quoted in transhumanist works. The
manifesto was written as a rebuttal of eco-feminism, a philosophy that views
technology as inherently patriarchal and advocates communism and deep
ecology as a counterpoint to what they see as the Western capitalist
patriarchy. Drawing partially upon Foucault (whom she also mocks), Haraway
argues instead that the very forms of power used by hegemonic forces can be
used for resistance and liberation.

Haraway co-opts hegemonic power through her figure of the cyborg. She begins
by defining the cyborg as a blasphemous, ironic, rebellious, and incomplete
entity that undermines the categories we so cherish in Western society:
animal-human, organic-machine, and physical-nonphysical. Though a product of
Western capitalist patriarchy, like all good science-fiction heroes the
cyborg is disloyal and insurrectionary. Thanks to its heritage, Haraway sees
the cyborg as capable of taking the West's concept of historical and
intellectual progress, the capitalist drive for communication and cooption,
and the patriarchal hierarchy and transmute all three into a postmodern
socialist-feminist counter-force. Haraway's cyborg is a rhetorical
refutation of both eco-feminism and Western capitalist patriarchy, acting as
a kind of guerilla postmodern subject, able to take the potent qualities of
its enemies and utilize them for its own purposes. In short, Donna Haraway's
cyborg is rebellion embodied in a single techno-organic subject.

Cyborg feminism - woman with face mask and goggles"A Cyborg Manifesto"
helped to found cyberfeminism and cyborgology, the latter of which was
expanded upon by Chris Hable Gray. The former, cyberfeminism, focuses on the
ways in which science and technology interact with gender roles and their
mutual constructions in society. In addition to Haraway's continuing work
with companion species, technologically mediated communities and critical
science studies, theorists like Judy Wajcman, N. Katherine Hayles, and Nina
Lykke have all contributed significantly to cyberfeminism. The corpus of
cyberfeminist literature reads like transhumanism through the looking-glass:
an odd counter-perspective that parallels, contrasts, undermines and
buttresses simultaneously. When Haraway says, "Monsters have always defined
the limits of community in Western imaginations," she captures this
counter-position perfectly. Transhumanists point to the pinnacle of what it
believes humanity could become; where it might be going, and asks, "why
not?" and "how do we get there?" Cyberfeminists (and postmodernists in
general) look at the abject, the debased, the grotesque and the marginalized
and ask "why is it so? How did this become the fringe?" Transhumanism needs
cyberfeminism because it functions to expose the way in which defining the
"human," and in turn, the "transhuman," can repress, reject, and otherize
those it claims to help.

Cyberfeminism takes as an axiomatic principle that, though technology is
inherently neutral, the entire process of technological development, design,
and engineering is influenced by society and culture and, thus, in part by
normative forces such as patriarchy. While eco-feminists propose to fight
fire with water, countering tech with nature, cyberfeminists champion
fighting fire with fire. Feminism - and critical theory in general - provide
tools and concepts necessary for transhumanists to understand how "the
human" is socially constructed. "What makes us human" is constantly up for
debate because the meaning of "human" changes through history and from
culture to culture. The accepted or "normal" definition is the result of
sociological power structures best described by French philosopher Michel
Foucault. For example, Foucault noted in A History Of Sexuality that a
"sodomite" was one who had committed the act of sodomy, perhaps once,
perhaps on multiple occasions, while the later designation of "homosexual"
was someone with a medically or psychologically diagnosed pathology. In
short, a man having sex with a man went from a single act, a sin, to a
condition, a problematic state of being. Furthermore, it is now largely
recognized as one sexuality among a multitude. The implications for
transhumanism are clear: if Foucault's method of historical genealogy can be
used to deconstruct what is seen as "natural" sexuality, then what other
"natural" aspects of the human subject can be shown to be equally
constructed and open for change, perhaps in the form of augmentation (of
body, mind) or elimination (of suffering and death).

Defining the cyborg as a blasphemous, ironic, rebellious, and incomplete
entity that undermines the categories we so cherish in Western society

Judith Butler extrapolated Foucault's genealogy to the level of identity,
explaining that "normal" and "self" are things we perform and reiterate,
such as gender norms or patterns of speech. Interestingly, feminist scholar
Elizabeth Grosz parallel's Foucault's theories with those of Charles Darwin.
Both Darwin and Foucault expose the non-teleological progress of history
and, concomitantly, that human progress, both biologically and socially, is
determined in the retrospective. The transhumanist project, like any
technological advancement, will place new tools into the hands of
authorities to control and regulate life. Feminist and critical theorists
have done immense amounts of work exposing these systems of control and
demonstrating the methodology for changing them. The transhumanist model of
political change should, unquestionably, be built upon the cyberfeminist
model of political change.

For a specific example, we turn to reproductive technology. Be it
birth-control, STD prevention, assisted reproductive technologies, abortion
methods, ultrasounds, neo-natal care, or a myriad other technologies that
are involved in birth, the politics and ethics around these debates are
classic arenas of feminist thought and action. The main reason for this
tight coupling is that despite pregnancy's obvious impact on women, women's
voices are often silenced or manipulated in the heated political arguments.
Transhumanists are liberal/progressive almost by definition, supporting as
many options for the human body as possible, and tend to support many
feminist issues, such as abortion rights, safe-sex education, and
birth-control options. Politically, feminists and transhumanists are often
in complete agreement. Why then, you might ask, should transhumanists make a
concerted effort to embrace feminism when both philosophies seem to work
together so well as it is?

Cyborg feminism - woman with USB cord in neck ready to be plugged inThe
issue is one of the chicken-and-the-egg: does technology liberate society
from norms or does political social theory liberate technology from norms?
This question is, perhaps, the core issue of cyberfeminism. Judy Wajcman's
"In What State is the Art?" explicates the debate and concludes that while
the rise of cyberfeminism has given people the tools and understanding to
better utilize technology for feminist goals, technology currently does more
to reinforce gender roles than to undermine them. If we extend this
conclusion from just gender to all societal norms, we are confronted of a
picture in which technological advancement without accompanying social
movements becomes a source of danger and repression instead of hope and
liberation. Cyberfeminism matters for transhumanism because we cannot
overcome the limits of biology without overcoming the limits of society: the
latter will always inhibit the former, not the other way around.

Of all the examples I could present, the most forceful is that of
transgenders and intersexuals. Both communities are heavily dependant upon
and subject to the medical, technoscience, and legal institutions that form
our society in ways that uniquely highlight how interlinked transhumanism is
to cyberfeminism. For a person to change biological sex requires trained
medical professionals to both approve the procedure and to "diagnose" the
reason for it, in order to ensure it is covered by insurance. The latest
advances in technology and scientific know-how determine how "complete" the
transition can be, not to mention how quickly, safely and painlessly the
procedure is. In the legal realm, things are more complex. How does one
corroborate a male birth certificate with a female driver's license? Can
that person be drafted? Who can that person marry? For a person living
between a socially constructed binary, the law can be a Kafkaesque labyrinth
of contradictions, dead-ends and trompe l'oeil's wherein a person-in-between
ceases to be a person at all.

For transsexuals and intersexuals, transhumanism is a real, visceral,
day-to-day lived philosophy. Yet the technology, while liberating in that it
allows better transitions every year and provides better medical support for
those who have transitioned and those born in-between, has not changed the
social norms that entrap and restrict trans and intersex individuals.
Because of that failure, we need a philosophy of social change, one that is
built upon the discourse of dissolving cultural norms, of countering social
standards and undermining hegemonic power. Transhumanism can articulate the
technologies, the potential selves, the unlimited beings we can be, but it
needs cyberfeminism to prepare the way, to alter the politics and
deconstruct the norms of culture and society that would bind technoscience
to mindsets of the past. Transhumanism and cyberfeminism are complimentary
philosophies that, when united, are capable of driving the technological
development, political change, and societal progress necessary for both to
be successful.

Resources:

Nick Bostrom: "A History of Transhumanist Thought"
http://jetpress.org/volume14/bostrom.html

Donna Haraway: "A Cyborg Manifesto"
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

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