The Gendered Cyborg

A Reader

Fiona Hovenden, Linda Janes, Gill Kirkup, Kathryn Woodward, Fiona Hovenden, Linda Janes, Gill Kirkup, Kathryn Woodward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136355080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

The Gendered Cyborg explores the relationship between representation, technoscience and gender, through the metaphor of the cyborg. The contributors argue that the figure of the cyborg offers ways of thinking about the relationship between culture and technology, people and machines which disrupt the power of science to enfore the categories through which we think about being human: male and female. Taking inspiration from Donna Haraway's groundbreaking Manifesto for Cyborgs, the articles consider how the cyborg has been used in cultural representation from reproductive technology to sci-fi, and question whether the cyborg is as powerful a symbol as is often claimed. The different sections of the reader explore: * the construction of gender categories through science
* the interraction of technoscience and gender in contemporary science fiction film such as Bladerunner and the Alien series
* debates around modern reproductive technology such as ultrasound scans and IVF, assessing their benefits and constraints for women
* issues relating to artificial intelligence and the internet.

PART ONE

Representing gender in technoscience

Introduction to Part One

GENDER, ARGUES SANDRA HARDING (1996), is a property of individuals, social structures and symbolic systems. Gender relations are also power relations which lead to unequal access to material resources. This is why a study of gender is more than simply an interesting intellectual endeavour; it is also a political activity. In the 1990s that activity has focused on understanding the representation and creation of gender in symbolic systems. Science is one of the most important symbolic systems in Western culture and it has been clear to feminist critics of science, technology and, in its more radical formulation, “technoscience”, that gender is very clearly a product of this system (Bleier, 1984).

An empiricist view of Western technoscience would see its main function as producing categories and definitions with which the material world can be described and modelled, and its behaviour controlled and predicted. A poststructuralist view would challenge the importance (and even the reality, in an ontological sense) of the material world, and argue that the categories and definitions that science produces, themselves produce knowledge, and that power comes through this production. Whichever way it is seen, power over the material world through knowledge about it is what science has been about since Francis Bacon's “Knowledge is power”. Even Fox Keller, who is a key proponent of the view that there is a “residual reality” “vastly larger than any possible representation we might construct” (1992: 74), argues that language produces meaning about this reality rather than simply reflecting it. Technoscientific knowledge contributes to the production of gender through its forms of representation, while itself being a gendered practice. Like the worm Uroborus, it constantly feeds off itself.

There is agreement that gender categories are constructed. 1970/1980s feminist theory argued that gender was a social construction based on a material-biological base: sex difference. Gender was seen as a construction used to justify social inequality. The elaboration of poststructural theory and the critical investigation of the biology of sex difference raised questions about the role of biology as a discourse that created sex difference rather than simply justified it. Biology became another discourse in the construction of gender rather than the material base for it. This left feminist scholars and activists in the uncomfortable position of having apparently deconstructed the category “Woman”; the category which formed the basis of Second Wave feminism. Many, while agreeing that the characteristics of gender categories as we know them are a social construction, would not go so far as to say that “sex/gender” itself is simply a product of discourse. All would agree, however, that it is illuminating to uncover the ways in which Western gender categories have come to be. The deep construction of gender through the casting of male and female into oppositional and hierarchical categories in which the “female” is always the inferior – for example, objectivity/subjectivity, rationality/emotion, Culture/Nature – is evident in many cultures but is especially strong in technoscientific culture. Uncovering the particular way in which this construction has developed in technoscience, from the seventeenth century on, has been a major project of feminist historians of science (for example, Schiebinger, 1989; Tuana, 1993; Fox Keller, 1992). However, uncovering and deconstructing are only the tools of a more radical ambition, which is:

to undermine the dichotomies themselves – to expose to radical critique a worldview that deploys categories of gender to rend the fabric of human life and thought along a multiplicity of mutually sanctioning mutually supportive, and mutually defining oppositions.

(Fox Keller, 1992: 18)

But once these are undermined, and therefore unserviceable as intellectual tools, it is necessary to construct new conceptual tools to think differently with.

It is easy enough to say, and to show, that the language of science is riddled with patriarchal imagery, but it is far more difficult to show – or even to think about, what effect a non-patriarchal discourse would have had or would now have (supposing we could learn to ungender our discourse) . . . This . . . is the real task that faces not only feminist critiques of science, but all of history, philosophy and sociology of science.

(Fox Keller, 1986 [1992] p: 48)

It has been in aid of this task that Donna Haraway's 1985 version of the 1960s creature, the “Cyborg” (see reading 1.3), has become a key concept for 1990s thinking about gender, and about the nature of being human in what some have identified as a “posthuman” world (Gray et al., 1995). Haraway's cyborg is not a member of the liberal humanist world. It is not concerned to differentiate itself from other forms of creature, or from machines; its identity does not rest in its individuality. Haraway's cyborg (and, as is discussed later, other versions of “cyborg”, contain none of the implications of Haraway's version), like a Rosetta stone, bridges the language of material feminists working on issues of gender and technoscience, and postmodern feminists working with cultural studies and textual deconstruction. It is a theoretical creature that has more currency, and popularity, ten years after it was described by Haraway as a “manifesto” for “socialist feminists”. She intended it to be a political creature, but very few who have found it a useful metaphor would see themselves as socialist feminists. Its usefulness for cultural deconstruction of gender has become apparent, but its usefulness as a tool for material change is yet to be proved. Although Haraway famously concludes her article “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”, the question remains: Is it better to be a cyborg than a woman?

The collection of extracts in part 1 provides a context for Haraway's cyborg by looking in particular at the power of science to create categories of similarity and difference through which we think about being human: male and female. Haraway's cyborg gives us another metaphor to replace “human”, but some of the extracts question whether alone it can overcome the problems of our gendered and racialized humanity.

The first extract is taken from Londa Schiebinger's book Nature's Body (1993). Schiebinger is a historian of science, and her particular period of interest is the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In her first book, The Mind Has No Sex (Schiebinger, 1989), she traced the contributions women had made to science and technology before the modern era, and the way that the developing technosciences (of natural history and anatomy in particular) can be seen to be providing a justification, and prescription, for the exclusion of women from the social and intellectual practices of Western technoscience on the grounds of “natural” gender differences. In doing this, she argued, Western technoscience was entrenching unacknowledged sexism. Foucault would argue that the discourses of biology and anatomy were producing meaning through these classification systems, and that this meaning produced power inequalities, rather than simply justified them.

In Nature's Body Schiebinger goes more deeply into an analysis of key eighteenth-century natural history taxonomies, where the foundation for our present understanding of the relationship between ourselves as human beings and other types of living thing lies. In this work she is concerned with both gender and race as conceptual creations and material inequalities. In the extract given here she demonstrates how the basic zoological taxonomy that has been in common use for two hundred years, in which human beings are classed as mammals along with other species who suckle their young (and distinguished, for example, from birds or insects), is based on a deliberate privileging of criteria that stress the close relationship between women in particular and other mammals. In constructing his classes of animals Linnaeus deliberately chose a female characteristic as the defining property of mammals. At the same time he created the term Homo sapiens (“man of wisdom”) to differentiate human beings from other primates. Since medieval times, notes Schiebinger, human beings (especially males) have been seen as distinct from other animals because of their rationality, a characteristic seen by medieval philosophers as particularly male, and lacking in women.

In his new terminology, Linnaeus therefore reasserted that it is a masculine characteristic (and a non-material one) that differentiates human beings from “beasts”, while it is a female, biological characteristic that provides commonality with them. This relationship is very important. For Descartes, animals were a kind of machine, made by God, with very small parts. Human beings were not machines/automata like animals because of the power of rational thought and consciousness. When women are put closer to animals they are also placed closer to machines. At its very core, then, the discourse of the discipline which in the twentieth century becomes biology, in its taxonomy of what it is to be human constructs gendered inequality.

Because taxonomies produce meaning it is important to locate the historical process by which they were created. Schiebinger argues that the eighteenth century in Europe was a time of social and political upheaval, when both citizenship and the nature of the family were being redefined. A concern with “natural” rights was also mirrored by a concern with “natural” differences. This new classificatory science provided an argument for the natural place of women as nurturers, both of their own children and of the State.

These biological taxonomies were concerned to sort species and gender into their rightful places. They had a medieval concern to find a “natural hierarchy” that would produce and justify power inequalities, and assert the natural superiority/right-to-rule of white, middle-class European men. So the creation of taxonomies was also focused on identifying and classifying racial difference. The disenfranchising of women by identifying them as closer to “beasts” also extended to the disenfranchising of members of other cultures (and classes of society) by an identification based on different biological indicators. Discussion of the characteristics of non-European women, for example the “Hottentot Venus”, cast these women far beyond the defining characteristics of “human”. They became seen, and treated, as “monstrous”. The “Hottentot Venus” is an example of how technoscience creates monsters from those in some way seen as “outside” the category of “human”.

The next reading is from an article by Nancy Leys Stepan on the use of metaphor in scientific theory to disguise the importation of racist and sexist values into apparently “value-free” knowledge. Stepan, a philosopher and historian of technoscience, has written extensively on the construction of the notion of “race” in scientific discourse (Stepan, 1982). She argues that there has been a particular problem with modern science. What technoscience claims for itself as a mirror of reality includes a notion that scientific language and theory is “exact”, objective, containing nothing except the unadorned factual words of the “modest witness” (Haraway, 1997). In this positivist discourse about “truth”, language is a tool which reflects material reality; theories describe the behaviour of measurable material “stuff”. However, argues Stepan, metaphor and analogy are as important in the construction of meaning in technoscience as in any other discourse; the danger is that scientists have been the last to acknowledge their use.

Stepan uses examples from nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century natural history concerning racial and sexual difference that illustrate, when they are read following Schiebinger, the cumulative nature of that particular branch of knowledge. Schiebi...