Bits of Life

Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology

Anneke M. Smelik, Nina Lykke, Anneke M. Smelik, Nina Lykke

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780295990330
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Since World War II, the biological and technological have been fusing and merging in new ways, resulting in the loss of a clear distinction between the two. This entanglement of biology with technology isn't new, but the pervasiveness of that integration is staggering, as is the speed at which the two have been merging in recent decades. As this process permeates more of everyday life, the urgent necessity arises to rethink both biology and technology. Indeed, the human body can no longer be regarded either as a bounded entity or as a naturally given and distinct part of an unquestioned whole. Bits of Life assumes a posthuman definition of the body. It is grounded in questions about today's biocultures, which pertain neither to humanist bodily integrity nor to the anthropological assumption that human bodies are the only ones that matter. Editors Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke aid in mapping changes and transformations and in striking a middle road between the metaphor and the material. In exploring current reconfigurations of bodies and embodied subjects, the contributors pursue a technophilic, yet critical, path while articulating new and thoroughly appraised ethical standards.

PART 1

Histories and Genealogies

1

Feminist Cultural Studies of Technoscience

Portrait of an Implosion

NINA LYKKE

This chapter gives an introductory overview of feminist cultural studies of technoscience, the hybrid and interdisciplinary field that makes up a shared frame of reference for the contributions to this book.¹ I present here some interdisciplinary key dynamics of the field, to make things easier for readers of Bits of Life who are not familiar with the ways in which feminism, cultural studies, and technoscience studies—that is, the central components of feminist cultural studies of technoscience—have clashed as well as merged in recent decades.

The productive dynamism of the field builds very much on a relentless interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary openness to inappropriate and impossible connections, and to explorations of theoretical in-between spaces where it is possible to think differently. To portray such dynamism is not an easy task. The risk is of freezing it into quasi-stable assemblages of bounded entities or building blocks, which easily may take on a tinge of “essential truth” about “fixed components.” To avoid such counterproductive freezing, and to fulfill the didactic purpose of giving an overview, I borrow two methodological devices from Donna Haraway.

First, I apply Haraway's notion of the “imploded object” (Haraway 1997: 12; see also chapter 3, this volume). I analyze feminist cultural studies of technoscience as a knot into which different strands of the interdisciplinary nodes of research interests are imploding in an open-ended process. Second, I use a Venn diagram as an analytical engine to spell out the “components” of feminist cultural studies of technoscience.² In this chapter, however, the Venn diagram is used in a playful mood, one inspired by the way in which Haraway once ironically interpellated the famous semiotic square of classic structuralism as a “clackety structuralist meaning-making machine” (Haraway 1992: 304). I let the Venn diagram act like the semiotic square in Haraway's text, where, in its noisy insistence on a machinelike, modern way of acting, it fulfilled an ironic poststructuralist demand for exposure of the technologies of research design. In an analogous vein, the Venn diagram can insist noisily on its machinic presence in my text, thus exposing the subjective and situated moment of design and construction.

FROM SCANDINAVIA WITH LOVE: A POSITIONING

Here, as a prelude to my overview of feminist cultural studies of technoscience, I will briefly contrast my Scandinavian genealogies with the Anglo-American ones that are traced in detail by Maureen McNeil in chapter 2. In so doing, I underline the complexities of the field and stress its relentless resistance to canons and master narratives.

The label “cultural studies of technoscience” was introduced into the Anglo-American context in the early 1990s. Before that time, as McNeil stresses, people were doing this kind of research, but without the joint nodal point that, for better or for worse, is engendered by a naming device. As a Scandinavian scholar of feminist cultural studies of technoscience, I recognize the genealogies outlined by McNeil as important international trends that have inspired me and my Scandinavian colleagues in the field. From a genealogical point of view, however, our story is somewhat different. The most significant difference is perhaps the fact that studies of science and technology have been explicitly performed from the perspective of the humanities at several Scandinavian universities since the early 1980s. Feminist endeavors that were defined as feminist cultural studies of science and technology were part of this trend. When I started conducting this kind of research in Denmark, in the mid-1980s, international feminist science and technology studies formed a significant platform. But Scandinavian sources of inspiration were equally important. For example, the department for interdisciplinary studies of technology and social change at Linköping University, in Sweden, has been vital. From its start, in the late 1970s, the department stressed the importance of interdisciplinary cultural studies of technology. In the early 1980s, it hosted several research projects on cultural studies of technoscience, such as one titled “The Machine and the Humanist,” and its first Ph.D. degree was earned with a dissertation on Strindberg and machines (Kylhammar 1985). A pioneering feminist research project titled “Women's Culture, Men's Culture, and the Culture of Technology: Looking for a Border-Crossing Language” was also being carried out at the department in the early 1980s. The latter project led to an important dissertation on the sewing machine (Waldén 1990).

The feminist technoculture studies that came out of this department at Linköping University became a crucial inspiration for me and other feminists at the University of Southern Denmark. In 1985, we started a program in gender, culture and technology studies; it still exists, and over the years it has fostered and sustained a number of bigger and smaller research projects, with an outspoken profile in feminist cultural studies of technocience (Lykke and Braidotti 1996; Bryld and Lykke 2000). The program also generated a project titled “Cyborgs and Cyberspace: Between Narration and Sociotechnical Reality” (1999–2003), which, together with the Dutch-funded “Media, Cultural Studies, and Gender: Looking for the Missing Links,” sustained part of the networking that led to the current volume. Other examples of the early institutionalization of cultural studies of technoscience in Scandinavia are programs at the Danish universities of Aarhus and Aalborg in the 1980s, which integrated a feminist approach. In 1985, for example, the Aalborg group hosted a major Nordic conference titled “Women, Natural Sciences, and Technology.”

Against the background of the early institutionalization of interdisciplinary cultural studies of technology in Scandinavia, the historical moment of introducing and establishing the label “cultural studies of technoscience” on the international scene, in the early 1990s, signified the confirmation of already labeled and explicitly promoted research programs. I will not go more deeply into these genealogical considerations and the ways in which a Scandinavian perspective, as well as broader continental European perspectives, might be able to sustain more comprehensive feminist understandings of the geopolitically varied types of knowledge production that have contributed to the transnational emergence of feminist cultural studies of technoscience. The more limited and modest aim of this chapter is, as mentioned, to give a brief, didactic overview, with a focus on interdisciplinary key dynamics.

TO MAP AN IMPLOSION

How to perform the impossible task of mapping an implosion? In physics, an implosion is defined as an explosion directed inward instead of outward. If the cathode-ray tube of your television implodes, you will see only a small white dot on the screen; the major part of the process will be invisible, displaying none of the spectacle of the explosion. Likewise where the phonetic meaning of the word “implosion” is concerned: in phonetics, the distinctive feature of an implosive consonant is that only the closing of the mouth is heard; the rest is silence charged with meaning. Thus an implosion, while invisible, silent, and unspectacular, is nevertheless a very dynamic process. I think it was precisely the double edge of dynamism and invisibility that prompted Haraway to use the imploded knot as a methodological tool. This double edge makes the imploded knot an apt tool for the metaphorical articulation of how apparently frozen objects of study and “self-evident” entities emerge from dynamic transformation processes.

Haraway opens up seemingly fixed entities, such as “the end-of-millennium seed, chip, database, bomb, fetus, race, brain, and ecosystem” (Haraway 1997: 12), precisely by considering them as implosions. She describes them as “offspring of implosions of subjects and objects and of the natural and the artificial” (ibid.). According to Haraway, such imploded objects or knots are devices that can engage the researcher or analyst in an infinite process of untangling, where new relations continue to emerge. To grasp this methodological point in another way, see the video (Paper Tiger Television 1987) in which Haraway, using a ball of yarn from which she continues to pull out new threads, visually illustrates the process of infinite methodological untangling of imploded knots, and the article (Haraway 1994) in which she uses the game of cat's cradle as a methodological device to outline the intersectional and ever-changing relationships between and among feminism, cultural studies, and science and technology studies. Feminist cultural studies of technoscience can be aptly described as an implosion—or as a ball of yarn or a game of cat's cradle—in this open-ended sense. Here, I will try to indicate the implosive dynamics by portraying these fields as a Venn diagram, to be understood in an ironic, poststructuralist mode, where, as in Haraway's semiotic square (Haraway 1992: 304), the diagram's modernist, essentializing taxonomic ambitions are exposed to ridicule through its enginelike, utterly mechanical way of creating distinctions that seem to be always already on the verge of breaking down, in kaleidoscopic fashion, and of giving way to new divisions, themselves only momentarily stable.

If the Venn diagram functions as an engine, let me now fill it with semantic fuel. Figure 1.1 consists of three intersecting circles, which visually represent feminist cultural studies of technoscience as a moment of implosion of feminist studies³ (top), cultural studies (left), and science and technology studies, or STS (right).

In keeping with the open-endedness and playful mood with which the Venn diagram is used here, the main circles—feminist studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies—should be understood not as entities but as interdisciplinary nodes of research interests that have had strong community-building potentials. Each has led to periodically recurring conferences as well as to the emergence of journals, scholarly networks, and associations. In other words, they have all acted as scientific communities, according to mainstream definitions. But they can also be viewed as fluid sites in constant intersection and interaction, and as nodes of open-ended research interests that have produced continuous tensions and synergies. To underline the open-endedness, the circles are drawn with dotted circumferences, to emphasize the external permeability and mutual internal intersectionality of the imploding areas.

In the next section of this chapter, I will spell out some of the key dynamics implied in figure 1.1. I will focus on interactions in the four fields of overlap. First, however, let me emphasize that my presentation involves certain genealogical considerations. As we know, genealogies are contested areas. Who and what is included or excluded in the constructed histories of academic areas? What kinds of narrative structures are erected in order to highlight these particular histories? What kinds of “unsettled relations” (Thornham 2000) can be detected between different narratives about the same field of study? Such questions are especially crucial as well as controversial when we consider genealogies and key dynamics of open and heterogeneous areas, such as the ones we are dealing with here. Space permits me to mark only some of the specific dynamics of each field, without doing justice to their details and the differences within them. Therefore, I will focus on two key dynamics for each overlap space in figure 1.1, thus drawing a map of feminist cultural studies of technoscience as a hybrid area, one that productively amalgamates and transforms many different research trends and interests.

FEMINIST CULTURAL STUDIES: INTERACTING KEY DYNAMICS OF FEMINIST STUDIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES

The field of feminist cultural studies has close connections with the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. One of the founding acts of cultural studies was the critique of the high-low culture divide (Storey 1993). What we understand to be culture is no longer exclusively defined by elite culture, which linked the concept of culture to a narrow canon and to essentialist ideas about relations of class, nationhood, gender, ethnicity, and cultural superiority. Instead, with Raymond Williams (1988), we now understand culture to be practices of everyday life, comprising all kinds of popular culture and media.

Feminist cultural studies cannot adequately be described as just another chapter in the overall history of cultural studies. This point has been emphasized by feminist chroniclers of the relationships between feminism and cultural studies (Franklin, Lury, and Stacey 1991; Radway 1998; Thornham 2000). There are many parallels and overlaps between feminist studies and cultural studies—for example, the political commitment to cultures and subjectivities of “inappropriate/d others” and marginalized groups (Haraway 1992; Minh-ha 1986/87). Nevertheless, tensions, “unsettled relations” (Thornham 2000), and “lack of overlap” (Franklin, Lury, and Stacey 1991) have also been part of the picture, for several reasons. First, women's perspectives were initially ignored in the field of cultural studies, which started out with a focus on workers and youth cultures, from an implicitly masculine outlook. The classic volume Women Take Issue (Women's Studies Group 1978) testifies to the struggles and theoretical rethinking that were necessary in order for feminism to be introduced into cultural studies in the 1970s. Second, a principal strand of feminist studies focused on cultural issues right from the start, independently of the emerging cultural studies community. Because the women's movement of the 1970s wanted to change the cultural relations of everyday life, a “theory of gender oppression in culture” (de Lauretis 1990: 267) had a prominent place in early feminist theories. Third, when we shift the perspective from a narrative of cultural studies to one of feminist cultural studies, a somewhat different set of themes calls attention to itself. One of these themes is the body as a controversial and important issue (Thornham 2000). And with the body, the role of science in culture is put on the agenda as well (Franklin, Lury, and Stacey 1991).

FEMINIST SCIENCE STUDIES: INTERACTING KEY DYNAMICS OF FEMINIST STUDIES AND SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES

The next overlap area in figure 1.1 is that of feminist science studies, which amalgamates feminist studies and science and technology studies. The relationship between these two is aptly characterized by the term “unsettled relations” (Thorn-ham 2000).

Donna Haraway, interviewed for this volume (see chapter 3), stresses that feminists like herself and other pioneers of feminist science studies have been “hard to digest” for mainstream chroniclers of the history of science and technology studies. The point she makes is more or less parallel to the one Thornham (2000) has made about the relationships between feminism and cultural studies. There are many overlaps and areas of common ground between feminist science studies and science and technology studies, but that does not mean that the former is just a chapter in the academic history of the latter.

Let us look first at the overlaps. Like feminist studies and cultural studies, both science and technology studies and feminist science studies can be described as having emerged from a founding act of subversion. Somewhat in parallel to the subversion of notions of elite culture, feminist science studies and science and technology studies have critically destabilized the positivist notion of science as a logically self-developing entity, one that was often translated into rational sequences of technological applications that determined the progress of societal development. This destabilization has been called a critique of technological determinism. A joint target of this critique is the natural sciences' hegemonic claim to be able to set the standards for all ways of constructing scientific explanations. Constructivist reinterpretations of technoscience were gradually developed in the wake of discussions about the intertwinement of science and society, discussions provoked by Thomas Kuhn (1962), among others. Technoscience came to be seen as one social and cultural activity among many others. Later, from a deconstructivist perspective, science came to be defined as a material-semiotic practice (Haraway 1991a, 1991b, 1997). Technoscience had to be studied as a part of sociotechnical networks or actor networks, which could be understood as “co-constructions” of human and nonhuman actors (Haraway 1992: 296).⁴

The field of feminist science studies, although it shares these frames of reference with influential trends in science and technology studies, also has its own established genealogies. As described in more detail elsewhere (Lykke and Braidotti 1996), one source of feminist science studies was the political critiques and activism of the women's movement in the 1970s, of which the famous volume Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women's Health Book Collective 1971) was an early milestone. That book gave rise to feminist self-help groups in many countries. Another important source was the critique of the ingrained phallogocentrism of the natural, biomedical, and technical sciences, a critique that feminists in those disciplines began to articulate by the late 1970s (Keller 1992), in much the same way that feminists in the humanities and the social sciences had done somewhat earlier. These critiques drew inspiration from and contributed to the development of social constructivist approaches to science. This was the main basis for the gradual intertwinement and overlap between feminist science studies and science and technology studies. A main point of difference between these two fields lies in feminism's introduction of a gender perspective into constructivist technoscience and in feminism's focus on both the embodiment and the social and cultural situatedness of the scientist (Keller 1985; Hard...