Feminism And The Technological Fix -- Stabile, Carol A -- Manchester [England], New York, New York, England, 1994 -- Manchester [England] ; New York -- 9780719042744 -- 67d295f279dad7a865b2e52b97e46610 -- Anna’s A

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Feminism and the technological fix The quantum leaps in technology in the twentieth century have provoked a profound shift in the way we think about our bodies. Genetic engineering, reproductive technology, the advent of virtual reality, all fundamentally affect basic categories of ‘self’ and ‘gender.’ The future can look bright or apocalyptic, depending on where you stand — and, crucially, who is selling that vision to you. Carol Stabile argues that the two traditional responses of technophobia or technomania are simply inadequate for the choices facing us today. She charts the development of these two responses across a wide cultural terrain: from ecofeminism’s uncritical celebration of women and nature to fetal imaging, struggles over women and the military, and the advent of cyborg politics. The future of feminism looks bleak indeed, unless we harness the potential of new technology for our own social and political agendas.

Feminism and the technological fix Carol A. Stabile Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin's Press

Copyright © Carol A. Stabile 1994 The author has made every effort to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material in this book. If any proper acknowledgement has not been made, or permission not received, we would invite any copyright holder to inform us of this oversight. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester m13 gnr, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny rooro, USA Distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, Ny roo10, USA British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stabile, Carol A. Feminism and the technological fix / Carol A. Stabile. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0—7190-4274-7 ISBN 0~7190—4275—5 (pbk) 1. Feminist theory. 2. Technology — Social aspects. I. Title. HQII90.873 1994 305.42’01—dc20 Ome4 ISBN 0 7190 4274 7 hardback © 7190 4275 5 paperback Phototypeset by Intype, London Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Limited, Guildford and King’s Lynn

Contents page Acknowledgements vi Selling futures: Feminism and technological fix I I Recycled histories 26 2 ‘A garden inclosed is my sister’: ecofeminism and eco-valences 48 3 Shooting the mother: fetal photography and the politics of disappearance 68 4 Semper fidelis: daughters in their fathers’ military 99 5 Calculating on africtionless plane 134 Introduction 161 Bibliography Index . 181

Acknowledgements Mark Twain once said that he ‘never let his schooling interfere with his education.’ In keeping with the spirit of this remark, the debts incurred during the writing of this project have been many and varied. It was both conceived (a verb I use advisedly) and composed in very different places and would have been impossible to complete were it not for the assistance and affection of many people, not all of whom would describe themselves as either feminists or intellectuals. First of all, I am grateful to my mother, Mary Stabile, for teaching me how to argue, to my sister, also Mary Stabile, for teaching me how to listen, and to my brother Ed, who tried to teach me the virtues of abstaining. Thanks also to the folks at Wild West City who made my primary and secondary education so lively, particularly Mickey Fabian who taught me the value of tattoos (among other things). I was especially fortunate to find a temporary home with the Capital Center Project Construction Management Team: the understanding and tolerance given so generously by Wendy Flanders, Katherine Meyer, Dan Donovan, Joan Paryani, and Rick Talbot were rare indeed. The foundations for this project were laid within the boundaries of a reading group at Brown University known abjectly, if contentiously, as CRAP. My perspectives were in many ways enabled by Ashley Smith, David Barry Rapkin, Steve Evans, John Marx, and Bo Ekelund. Mary Ann Doane was a supportive and encouraging mentor to a project that underwent a series of what must have looked like bizarre mutations during the two years that she supervised it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Vil The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois not only supported this project by the way of a postdoctoral fellowship, it also gave me the opportunity to work on the manuscript ina setting free of the usual disciplinary demonizations of cultural studies. Gilvis Rodman shared food, bourbon, and Abba at key moments during the writing of this manuscript. Radhika Mongia’s insights about the cyborg were invaluable, as was her shared commitment to socialist-feminism. The graduate students in my seminars and reading groups were passionate and scrupulous critics of many of the ideas that appear in this book. Julian Halliday has been the most consistent, dogged and incisive reader a person could ask for. This book benefited greatly from his skillful and elegant rhetorical suggestions. Finally, I want to thank the group of people that I have learned to call family: Dr Eric Clarke, for getting me to the lawyer on time and being my best party doll; Keya Ganguly, for sharing her keen and refined sense of the abject, as well as her substantial intellectual prowess; Anthony Arnove, for his formidable editing ability as well as his continued optimism of the intellect; Ellie Anderson, for being a patient, if carnivorous and otherwise demanding, friend; the Udri, for waiting for the mother ship with me; Katherine Dwyer, for not putting up with my shit, as well as for the leather and revolutionary humor, Elizabeth Worf Terzakis, for her appreciation of both bodies and texts, not to mention her disciplinary skills; Michael Stabile III, who will always share the past and future (and occasionally my hair color); Jessica Barry, walkie-talkie of my heart; and last but not least (or down, but not out), Mark Unger — who continues to be a source of endless generosity, love and joy. As a small marker of my appreciation, I lovingly dedicate this book to my family.

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Introduction Selling futures: feminism and the technological fix The central premise of this analysis is the enduring pervasiveness of the woman/nature, man/culture binarism in the United States and its implications for feminist approaches to technology and modernity. As struggles over definitions of femaleness intensify, impelled largely by technological advances in areas such as reproductive technologies and genetic engineering, feminists have either withdrawn into reactionary essentialist formations (what I describe as technophobia) or equally problematic political strategies framed around fragmentary and destabilized theories of identity (technomania). In each instance, however differently manifested, the absent category of analysis is that of class. The absence of class analyses within feminist theory in general, and feminist approaches to technoscience in particular, has intimate if suppressed connections with the larger political and cultural context from which that theory has emerged. The past twenty years have been characterized by an expanding conservative dominance, as well as capitalist expansion. Mike Davis described this as an ‘accelerating rightward realignment of economic and political demands’ (1986, p. vii). In the US, as elsewhere, this realignment has entailed attacks on social programs, the deepening of oppressions carried out across national boundaries, and the ecological devastation that follows in the train of deregulation. It has, moreover, resulted in the movement of high-tech industry and traditional manufacturing from the US to ‘third world’ countries, the distension of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich (1979) have called the ‘pro-

2 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX fessional managerial class,’ and the exacerbation of the international division of labor (whose presence is.also manifest in the sweatshops and labor camps, or the ‘fourth world,’ of the US). In the US, the media joyously proclaim that the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe signifies the death of Marxism, socialism, communism, or any alternative to US-style capitalism, while postmodernists lament (but not without a self- congratulatory smirk or two) the end of history. Flying in the face of such intellectual finalities, the conservative restoration has consistently appealed to a more traditional world order — a ‘new’ world order based, ironically enough, on ‘traditional’ American values. Under Presidents Reagan, Bush, and, now, Clinton, conservative ideologists have tapped. into and exploited anxieties and fears about the rapidly changing nature and role of technology in the world.’ The problems facing the world today — widespread poverty, ever-worsening unemployment, an unstable economy based on militarism and imperialism — are explained by reference to those who are oppressed, with the suggestion that they do not adjust to economic changes swiftly enough (as in the case of countries being subjected to US development policies), or that they have rejected the bounty supposedly issuing from adherence to traditional values and must therefore live with the consequences (as in women-headed households in the US, of which there were some 6 million in 1984 in the US; in Britain, go percent of the 1 million singleparent households in 1984 were women-headed). The division of wealth in the US alone was more unequal in 1988 than at any point in time since 1947: ‘the poorest 20% of families received less than 5% of the national income, while the wealthiest 20% received 44%’ (Reed and Sautter, 1990, p. 6). Disparities like these are made invisible by the dominance of hegemonic narratives about ‘democracy’ and ‘free enterprise.’ As Davis comments, ‘With the complicity of a craven media, public discourse has been commandeered by a gaggle of post-liberals, neo-conservatives and new rightists ‘pandering to grotesque

SELLING FUTURES 3 inversions of positive discrimination for the middle classes and welfare for the corporations’ (1986, p. 157). Left and Right are in agreement with the idea that the world has been changed by a succession of technological innovations that make further, perhaps even more dramatic, changes inevitable. But there is no such consensus, between or within either camp, on what these changes are and what they mean for the future. For the Right, the commitment to the unstoppable march of capital mandates that technoscience be represented as an inherently progressive enterprise, promoting free market bounty in whatever corner of the world it flows. This narrative of progress, of course, is not without its fissures and flaws. It has proved difficult to sustain for the Right, especially in light of the continued existence of the very problems for which technoscience purported to hold the answers. The central contradiction for conservatives has been the deterioration of traditional institutions and ideologies and consequent attempts to shore these up while simultaneously promoting the policies that threaten and undermine them. A case in point is the resilient rhetoric about the irreducible necessity of the nuclear family, which exists uneasily with the economic and social realities reflected in the fact that only 10 percent of US families conform to this model.’ For post-Hiroshima Marxists, technology has ceased to hold out the progressive promise it once did. Herbert Marcuse (1964), for example, saw technologically advanced society as creating an increasingly monolithic, complacent populace being led timorous to the slaughter by capitalism and its cultural producers. The Vietnam War served to heighten the sense of technological disenfranchisement and hopelessness — television coverage of the war linked technoscience with the destruction and devastation for which it was apparently made. The second wave of feminism, coming of age during the late sixties, inherited this sense of technological hopelessness, in addition to an historically loaded binarism between woman/ nature/irrationality, on one hand, and man/culture/rationality, on the other. The trope of a technoscience equated with the

4 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX war machine and a death drive also served to consolidate a feminist opposition equated with nature and life. Within this historical ‘context, it is not surprising that Shulamith Firestone was alone in the early seventies when she argued for the potentially liberatory aspects of technology, while the majority of feminists dismissed technology as inherently patriarchal and malignant. When the technological determinism of the seventies began to recede somewhat during the eighties, it gave way to postmodernist theories of fragmented, deterritorialized, or sometimes even simulated subjectivities produced by technoculture and its ‘informatics of domination’ (Haraway, 1991d, p. 151). Whether this sea change occasions celebration or despair seems beside the point; the hyperreal has arrived with a vengeance and that is all there is to it. Worse yet, if one can envision dramatic social changes, the terms of political action have been irrevocably altered and miniaturized.’ Feminists have. been among the last to jump on the technological bandwagon. For many feminists, Jean Baudrillard, JeanFranvois Lyotard, and Iain Chambers (to name but a few) seem to be guided by a technomania that often leads them to endorse transformations that re-centralize a privileged male subjectivity in which, as Alice Jardine observes, ‘Man is always the subject of any becoming, even if “he” is a woman’ (1985, p. 217). Secondly, these technomaniacs seemingly work at a frivolous remove from a world in which technology has historically operated on material human bodies, particularly those marked by gender, race and class, or combinations thereof. But the feminist alternative to the dematerialized, idealist theorizing proposed by many postmodernists has often produced its own version of dematerialized theory, in the shape of specifically feminist technophobias. In the humanities, as in popular culture, feminist approaches to technoscience have been profoundly informed by technophobia, or an anti-modern attitude that rejects the present in favor of a temporally distant (i.e. non-existent) and holistic natural world. As the essentially villainous agent of the patriarchy, technology — for feminists

SELLING FUTURES 5 ranging from Mary Daly to the ecofeminist columnists of Ms. Magazine — is the bane of human existence, or that which threatens to destroy all things natural. The technophobic approach endorsed by so many feminists thus proposes that a rejection of technology is functionally identical to a rejection of patriarchy and that this strategy represents humankind’s (or frequently only womankind’s) sole chance for survival. Attempting to bridge the gap between technophobia and technomania, feminist theorists have also produced an important body of work analyzing how technoscience has inscribed itself (both presently and historically) on the bodies of female, or feminized subjects. Evelyn Fox Keller (1985), Sandra Harding (1986, 1991), and Helen Longino (1990) attempt to avoid the dichotomy between technophobia and technomania by suggesting that feminism needs to engage more productively with technoscience, but are rightly skeptical about immediate possibilities for intervention. Given the fact that technology has more often than not been utilized to oppress those who do not possess it or cannot engage with it, these feminists have tended to be more generally critical of technoscience, while at the same time aware of its liberatory potential. Important as this work is and continues to be, as Constance Penley and Andrew Ross observe in the introduction to Technoculture, it can also spend “more time debating and lamenting the effects of Western technoculture . .. than it devotes to the conditions for creating technological countercultures in the West’ (1991, p. Xi): Donna Haraway and feminists inspired by her ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ are generally understood to represent a more radical shift in the terms of the binarism between technomania and technophobia. Yet despite her socialist-feminist avowals, Haraway is an inveterate (if slippery) proponent of the technomaniacal ejaculations of Baudrillard and his band of unabashedly boyish poststructuralist theorists. In addition, Haraway’s work depends on extremely cognizant and resistant readers — readers capable of radically decontextualizing and re-reading texts. Although Haraway works with an expanded inventory of texts, and a concomitant expansion of the category of technosci-

6 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX ence, problems ensue from her against-the-grain readings, problems made more invidious by the complicated-seductions of her textual practices. According to John Clarke, one of the strategies for analyzing the complexities of contemporary capitalism is ‘to clarify some of the central glissades — those slippages of theoretical legerdemain — performed before our very eyes by these theoretical wizards (and the occasional witch)’ (1991, p. 22). In response to a similar commitment to clarification, this book seeks a better understanding of the complex and often antagonistic relationship between feminist theory and activism and the conditions that structure the modern, technologized world. I do this not by making a direct reading of the relationship between technologies and feminisms, but by an interstitial approach to the problematic. In other words, both feminist rejections and embraces of technology operate through instantiating some other, ostensibly preferred, space in the place of the postmodern. A predominantly technophobic ecofeminism, to take one example, derives much of its affective appeal from the deployment of a natural environment that was once a source of abundance and a model for communal living — a natural world linked to a specifically female capacity for creating and nurturing life. Not only does such a formulation hinge upon the construction of boundaries and limits based on nationalisms, it further relies on the representation of women as a class or category of analysis. So constructed, the environment at hand erases questions of the race, class, and national identity of its own subject position, as well as how these are reflected (or not) in the environment subsequently produced. In my view, the goal should be not to celebrate the blurring of boundaries mandated by capitalism, but to make visible these boundaries (which also limit feminist thought and action). For reasons that this analysis will examine in more detail, neither technophobia nor technomania is capable of producing strategies for theorizing the complexities of capitalism called postmodernity. To take two of the more extreme examples, neither Mary Daly nor Donna Haraway offer feminist theory

SELLING FUTURES v or activism politically viable, or sufficiently responsible, frameworks for political struggle. As the following chapters will illustrate, both invariably reproduce the exclusion and privilege with which feminist movement over the past years has attempted to come to terms. Technophobia suggests that women possess agency and power enough to reject postmodernity (and that, moreover, they share the desire to do so), while technom- ania ignores history, as well as the privilege of its own pleasures. This project was originally conceived as a critical assessment of feminist approaches to science and technology within the US. As my thinking on this subject progressed, however, it became evident that these approaches were both structured and limited by longstanding problems and contradictions within feminist thought itself. To begin to unpack the problematic at hand necessitated careful attention to the twisted thicket of binaries that feminism has inherited and internalized from its cultural and political context. As Donna Haraway (1989, 1991c, 1991d) and Andrew Ross (t991) have pointed out, narratives about science, technology, and postmodernity are necessarily stories about the future. But, whether utopian or dystopian, they are equally stories about the past and the present. My attention to the narratives about technology and, by extension, modernity — be they of a critical or fictive nature — that feminists have produced and are producing is structured around the conditions of possibility that have engendered these stories. Feminism has struggled for some years with the problems produced by a singular attention to gender. While, for reasons that I shall elaborate in later chapters, I am not especially concerned with what Linda J. Nicholson describes as feminism’s ‘political ideals of inclusiveness’ (1990, p. 6), or a pluralist project of inclusion, I am concerned about the all-too-predictable reproduction within feminist thought of various exclusions following from its attribution of primacy to gender oppression. Since this project stands amid an ongoing dialogue among feminist theorists and activists about the meanings and bodies that we invoke, the temptations involved in this process, and

8 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX the complicated political life such meanings and bodies may lead, a word or two about the political context in which this project evolved are in order. When I first began this work, it was with a sense of the limitations of feminism as practiced within the parameters of the academy, and of the increasing distance between feminism in the US and political struggles other than abortion rights. Unlike many of my feminist professors and predecessors, I attained the age of majority within an academic setting that represented itself as — at the very least — sympathetic to feminist thought and feminism in general. I did not, for example, participate in any of the disciplinary and interdisciplinary struggles for legitimation. Nor, in the larger political sphere, do I remember a time when abortion was not legally — as opposed to economically — available to women. I have also grown up during an historical period in which feminism — like many of the new social movements — has been cut adrift from a radical political agenda, coming to signify a particular lifestyle or world view rather than an overtly politicized and critical project. To describe oneself as a feminist in the eighties was, aside from the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, never to align one’s project with a specific political critique or project.* ‘Doing’ feminism in the academy can and does signify any number of intellectual activities, from the object-relations theory of Carol Gilligan to the feministMarxist-deconstructivist approach of Gayatri Spivak. Outside the academy, feminism (if one can get past that demonized entity known as a ‘feminist’) means very little in terms of specific political positions without protracted specifications. For instance, one can be a feminist and a NOW (National Organization for Women) liberal, a feminist and a libertarian, or, more recently, a feminist and a neoconservative or even anti-abortion fundamentalist.*> This is no deconstructive bind, for feminism is not defined in relation to any binary opposite, but assumes its meaning through its connection with another word: as a feminism manquée, the word has to be filled with/in/by some other politicized term, it seems, in order for it to signify. In response to Susan Sontag’s assertion on a television pro-

SELLING FUTURES 9 gram that political categories such as left and right are obsolete in a postmodern era, Nadine Gordimer replied: “Well, Susan, I still agree with Jéan-Paul Sartre. Socialism is the horizon of the world’ (Leonard, 1993, p. 104). Like Gordimer, the futurology that I want to put forward in this project comprises an explicitly socialist narrative — one that can combine the positive aspects of a feminism based on anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic struggles with an historical-materialist analysis. In this formulation, I am defining socialism as a movement at the center of which is the concept of class struggle against capitalism. By ‘class analysis,’ I am, like Ellen Mekisins Wood, arguing for ‘a comprehensive analysis of social relations and power. . . . based on the historical/materialist principle which places the relations of production at the centre of social life and regards their exploitative character as the root of social and_ political oppression’ (1986, p. 14). Such an analysis does not entail overlooking ‘the differences which express the social formation’ (Marx, 1978, p. 247). Instead, I argue, various oppressions find their most extreme and violent expression through economic exploitation.® Many feminists have rejected Marxism because, as Joan Scott has put it, ‘the explanation for the origins of and changes in gender systems [in Marxist theory] is found outside the sexual division of labor’ (1988, p. 35). Marxist categories, claims Heidi Hartmann, ‘like capital itself are sex-blind (1981, p. 11).’ The problems identified by Hartmann and others are posed in terms of competing claims for recognition based on victim status: whose claim to oppression is primary, and/or more viscerally experienced, and ultimately, whose needs will be subsumed beneath whose.’ In keeping with this, Nicholson makes the claim that: Twentieth-century Marxism has used the generalizing categories of production and class to delegitimize demands of women, black people, gays, lesbians, and others whose oppression cannot be reduced to economics. (1990, p. II) As Hartmann points out, the issue of ‘economic reductionism’

FEMINISM Io AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX is the cornerstone of feminist debates about Marxism. But Nicholson’s argument, as well as similar arguments, simply falls apart under further scrutiny. In the first place, are we to assume that women, African-Americans, lesbians, and gay men have no class position? Haven’t many of the most powerful and important demands made by oppressed peoples been based on demands for economic access and equality (e.g. employment, housing, health care, and education)? Secondly, insofar as the ‘generalizing categories of production and class’ are concerned, one could make the claim that, rather than generalizing, an analysis of productive forces and class position actually destabilizes all too often essentializing categories of identity (which is, ironically, what Nicholson claims that ‘postmodernism’ does). Class position, for example, structures and limits the choices available to subjects. To imply that the oppression one experiences as a white, middle-class woman with a university education is equivalent to the oppression one confronts as a poor white woman is to empty the concept of liberation of any radical significance. That the accusation of economic reductionism invariably issues from more privileged class positions should give feminists cause for a bit more self-reflexivity.” Finally, to claim that Marxism has had the power to delegitimize the claims of oppressed peoples on one hand seems ludicrous, while on the other ignores the fact that capitalism delegitimizes the claims of oppressed peoples, particularly those at an economic disadvantage. While this competitive matrix is in and of itself remarkable in such a context — competition being one fundamental aspect of capitalism — feminist critiques of Marxism hold much less purchase within the context of contemporary capitalism. The ‘domestic sphere’ can no longer be seen as autonomous, or cut off from the mode of production; in fact, Joan Scott also comments upon the problems arising when families, households, and sexualities are accorded such autonomy (1988, p. 35). Rather, it seems reasonable to suggest that such formulations have depended on the mythic nuclear family (a phenomenon linked to the rise of industrial capitalism), wherein certain more econ-

SELLING FUTURES II omically privileged, if not politically empowered, women had no immediate relationship to the production of surplus value. In 1987, 45 percent of the US workforce was female; at the same time, 50 percent of workers in Britain were female. Traditionally unpaid domestic labor, child care, cooking, cleaning, etc., have entered the marketplace in obvious ways; and it is worth remarking that certain women, many of them intellectuals, have always had access to the wherewithal to pay other, less privileged woman to perform these tasks. Within this context, shifts in gender ideology desperately need to be understood in terms of their relation to the capitalist mode of production. The rejection of Marxist methodologies by feminists clearly requires further scrutiny and clear-headed analysis. Certainly, there are few socialists who would take Capital, to use one example, as Gospel. To do so would entail a radical misreading of the basic premises of historical materialism. The rejection of Marxism by feminists amounts to a type of theoretical essentialism, compounded by the schizophrenic workings of postmodernist social theories that suggest that fragmentation is the (desirable) telos of the epoch. In terms of theoretical essential- ism, I mean to flag two distinguishable, if interrelated, trajectories. The first is the misguided notion that things economic by definition exclude feminist interests (interests that are, of necess- ity, quite loosely defined). Women’s labor, accordingly, falls outside the established parameters of an economic analysis. There are two central shortcomings to this: one, that women labor only within the household (in and of itself startlingly generalizing argument); and two, that women’s relationship to the dominant mode of production is infinitely mediated, if indeed there is any connection at all. The ostensible divide between labor performed by women and the category of economics fuels the second line of theoretical essentialism. In this, the fact that Marx’s primary topic for investigation was the nature and workings of capitalism becomes proof of his lack of interest in the question of women’s liberation. To put it bluntly, unless a text authored by a man accords gender absolute primacy, it is simply not viable. When

I2 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX we contrast this with the often uncritical endorsement of feminist thinkers in the US such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Margaret Sanger — an endorsement that requires that their eugenicist, racist, and classist polemics be either suppressed or excused — the contradictory aspects of such thought become evident. The problems confronting women today require that feminists be able to analyze oppression conjuncturally — to think, in other words, not of the mythic origins of some original and primary oppression, but rather of the multiply determined forms of oppression that constitute ‘women’ (as well as ‘men’) within the context of capitalism. The belief motivating this study is that Marxism offers the most powerful and comprehensive methodology for this task. To continue to believe that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, as Audre Lorde put it, involves a form of naive instrumentalism (akin to the technophobic belief that technology is essentially masculinist), not to mention a political puritanism that feminists can ill afford at this historical moment. Again, feminism has not operated in isolation from the larger historical context and its dominant currents, which have resulted in a growing emphasis on fragmentation and singleissue politics. Many of the problems that I discuss in the following chapters are common to the strategies and philosophies of new social movements in the US. Depending upon which side of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) a theorist stands, the designation ‘new social movement’ can be either a positive or a negative one. If one views the new social movements (or ‘identity politics, as they are more commonly known) as the fragmented, yet potentially powerful hope for left politics in the nineties, then these movements (which would also include lesbian and gay rights, African-American nationalisms, environmentalism, and so forth) are a positive phenomenon, containing the potential for broader and stronger coalitions. If we accept the belief that political action occurs within a Foucaultian network of power wherein power itself can be neither named nor located and resistance can be enacted only locally, the new social move-

SELLING FUTURES 13 ments offer the only possible hope for the future for such theorists. Unfortunately, in so resolutely avoiding ‘totalizing’ — that béte noire of contemporary critical theory — this model either ignores or jettisons a structural analysis of capitalism in which the new social movements might be read as yet another example of the disillusion and dissolution that have plagued progressive political formations in the US.!° In addition, the postmodern stance assumed by theorists like Haraway (in which the cyborg 1s neither good nor bad, but simply, if confusingly, there) seems symptomatic of what Christopher Norris has described as the ‘apparent inability of much of what currently passes for critical theory to take any principled oppositional stand on issues of local or world politics’ (1992, p. 27). Take, for example, Angela McRobbie’s claim, similar to the post-Marxism of Laclau and Mouffe, that Incompleteness, fragmentation, and the pluralities of emergent identities need not mean loss of political capacity. Instead, they can point the way to new forms of struggle; they can create conditions which are ‘more difficult to manipulate and control.’ (1991, p- 723) Such a perspective is based on a fundamentally bankrupt belief that a dehistoricized ‘radical democracy’ is ‘an alternative to capital’ and that, even more ignorantly, ‘the free market offers opportunities for new emergent identities and, besides which, capital in the homogeneous absolutist way in which we on the left have tended to refer to it, is itself a more fractured and fragile entity’ (p. 724). The fact that such identities have emerged within the framework of competing claims for recognition, rather than broader, connected demands for justice, seems to mirror the competitive nature of capitalism in particularly problematic ways. Furthermore, what theoretical and political gains proceed from viewing capital as “fractured and fragile’? In the wake of the ecstasy of communication that characterized much theoretical production in the eighties, a number of theorists have begun taking on the crucial question of the

14 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX relationship between postmodernist social theory and capitalism.'’ According to John Clarke, postmodernist social theory has been characterized by the adoption, by Lyotard and Baudrillard among others, of a systemic model — the cybernetic systems theory — that ‘functions so smoothly precisely because it is a model of a unitary system from which all concepts of contradiction or antagonism have been expelled’ (1991, p. 32). Clarke argues that, taking ‘capitalism at its face value: as a system of circulation, exchange and consumption. ... they manage to reproduce the problem of commodity fetishism: the obscuring of the conditions and relations of production’ (p. 29). Not only does this entail the forgetting of, as Neil Lazarus observes, ‘those populations, both Western and non-Western, which — for diverse reasons — are not bound by the social logic of consumption’ (1991, p. 97), it involves the elision of past and present struggles against the contemporary condition (presumably made by those for whom history has not yet ended). In the face of a grim global scenario, desperate faith in resistant possibilities may be better than nothing. But today, we do not confront a radical rupture with the past, which paradoxically entails an extremely modernist presumption. This is no kinder, gentler world, but neither is it, as George Bush avowed on the eve of the Persian Gulf War, ‘a new world order.’ That war proved that the ‘new’ — however refurbished by references to ‘smart bombs’ and ‘collateral damage’ — rested on ‘old’ forms of imperialism and oppression. Nevertheless, the immense popularity of radical democracy @ Ja Laclau and Mouffe should not be too easily dismissed. The new social movements, and their appeal to a world full of despair and disempowerment, need further critical analysis, while, at the same time, an unrelenting and brutal insistence on materiality rather than a fetishized, idealist discourse. Although the debates about postmodernism may appear to reflect only rarefied academic concerns, they have great significance for contemporary feminist politics in the US. In a context where feminist authority has been located and institutionalized predominantly within the academy, media appeals to feminist

SELLING FUTURES 15 authorities invariably invoke the work of feminists whose primary affiliation is with a university, or whose primary audience is a middle-class intellectual one.’” One point of entry into the complex dynamics of technomania and technophobia lies in the academic debates about the relationship between feminism and postmodernism and the extent to which technomanic or technophobic attitudes determine whether one settles for postmodernism or sees postmodernism as unfortunately having settled over the world.” As I will argue, postmodernist social theory has proceeded by way of aesthetics to the social, or via a theory of discourse to a theory of the social. As such, it can be seen, in Raymond Williams’ words, as an example of ‘an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory: a development and elaboration of formalism which can be seen in many fields, from literary criticism and linguistics to psychology and anthropology’ (1992, pp. 120-1). In terms of its institutional development, a similar movement can be seen within feminist theory, whose first inroads in the academy were made in the area of literary criticism. In order to unpack the connections between the postmodernist debates and feminist theory, my argument proceeds by way of two dominant feminist responses to the present, technophobia and technomania. If feminist technophobia and technomania are, respectively, negative and positive responses to the concept of postmodernity, rather than being merely abstractions, the questions that feminists pose about the status of history and contemporary society in the field of literature can serve as an index to the material interests that motivate such inquiries. Since both technophobia and technomania position themselves in relation to a present characterized by the term ‘postmodern,’ one of the difficulties involved in scrutinizing the subsequent relationships stems from the fact that, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, ‘incoherence is the most distinctive among the attributes of postmodernity (arguably its defining feature)’ (1992, p. xxiv). With this in mind, it is less than surprising that few postmodernists and even fewer feminists agree on what the

16 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX defining characteristics of postmodernism are, much less whether postmodernism should be viewed as. positive, negative, or neutral from a feminist perspective. Although it is not the purpose of this section to provide a detailed analysis of the aesthetic and philosophical debates that comprise the alleged postmodern condition, there are a few characteristics that are central to the following discussion. The following rough schema is by no means exhaustive, nor does it purport to imply rigid lines of demarcation between its categories; instead it outlines some of the more consistent features of postmodernist social theory. 1. Postmodernism is often conceptualized in apocalyptic terms ‘as the site of the final catastrophe of Western civilization’ (Callinicos, 1989, p. 11).'* By canceling history (i.e. claiming that it has ceased to exist or to matter), postmodernism 2. conceives of ‘an abstract human nature which has specific psychic needs and which variable forms of technology and intercourse come to satisfy’ (Williams, 1992, p. 123). This model, as Williams prophetically observed, “can be related to history only by endless retrospect, in which by selection such a process can be generalised or demonstrated. ... in such a model, there will be no more history: a culminating age has arrived’ (p. 123). In this way, postmodernism is accepted as the ‘name for the way we live now, and it needs to be taken account of, put into practice, and even contested within feminist discourses as a way of coming to terms with our lived situations’ (Wicke and Ferguson, 1992, p. 1). The rupture associated with this sense of historical finality has been effected by dramatic changes in capitalism (largely over the past twenty years, although in some cases the rupture is dated as post-World War II). Variously described as ‘advanced,’ ‘disorganized,’ ‘global,’ ‘late,’ ‘multinational,’ or even ‘post-capitalist,’ these changes are grounded in the assumption that capitalism has shifted to a post-Fordist mode of production, thus transforming and diffusing power

SELLING 3. FUTURES 17 and power relations beyond recognition, as well as beyond the scope of a Marxist or political-economic analysis. In place of the capitalist mode of production, postmodernist production depends on decentralization and diffusion. One by-product of this rupture is the assertion that the economic base has mutated from one based on production (e.g. subjects as producers or workers) to one based on consumption (e.g. subjects as consumers, often in the form of a professional managerial class whose raison d’étre is to consume). The very novelty of this diffusive model of power renders all preceding systemic critiques obsolete. Power/knowledge, now conflated and equated negatively — and however unknowable and/or unidentifiable — are suspect in any form. Knowledge, if not synonymous with power, produces power, hence the repeated attacks on the Enlightenment project and other such ‘totalizing’ narratives. The confusion implicit in these tautologies underscores the following: If postmodernism as a term has some force or meaning within social theory, or feminist social theory in particular, perhaps it can be found in the critical exercise that seeks to show how theory, how philosophy, is always implicated in power, and perhaps that is what is symptomatically at work in the effort to domesticate and refuse a set of powerful criticisms under the rubric of postmodernism. (J. Butler, 1992, p. 6) In effect, the only resistance 4. (not to be mistaken for opposition) possible within this system is the absolute refusal of both power and knowledge: ‘Interdeterminacy becomes, in this way, our mode of resistance to those determinate selves we do not want to be’ (Stockton, 1992, p. 120).” By way ofa tortured and idealist detour through Saussurean linguistics, postmodernism is marked by the blurring of lines between the ‘real’. and the ‘imaginary,’ or fact and fiction. In a world where all words have the status of what Benveniste (1971) called ‘shifters’ (words that gain meaning only situationally or contingently, such as personal

18 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX pronouns), this tendency emphasizes the purely discursive construction of reality — what Laclau.and Mouffe call ‘the social’. For them, “The sign is the name ofa split, of an impossible suture between signified and signifier’ (1985, p. 113). Thus, ‘Synonymy, metonymy, metaphor are not forms of thought that add a second sense to a primary, constitutive literality of social relations, instead, they are part of the primary terrain itself in which the social is constituted’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 110). John Clarke calls this ‘the paradox of the materialization of the sign and the de-materialization of everything else’ (1991, p. 25). Baudrillard’s simulacrum, Lyotard’s language-games and Haraway’s cyborg are among the most obvious ambassadors of this train of thought. In place of universalizing theories of identity and subject formation, irreducible differences comprise the postmodern social order, producing a fragmented (but not necessarily negative) contemporary condition. Angela McRobbie explains this as ‘the development of a multiplicity of partial and fragmented identities, each with its own role to play in the pursuit of radical democracy’ (1991, p. 724). Representation is not only untenable, but imminently undesirable as well. Instead, we find theories in which identity acts ‘as a kind of guide to how people see themselves, not as class subjects, not as psychoanalytic subjects, not as subjects of ideology, not as textual subjects, but as active agents whose sense of self is projected onto and expressed in an expansive range of cultural practices, including texts, images, and commodities’ (McRobbie, 1991, p. 730).'° Jane Flax asserts that, “As a type of postmodern philosophy, feminist theory reveals and contributes to the growing uncertainty within Western intellectual circles about the appropriate grounding and methods for explaining and interpreting human experience’ (1990, pp. 40-1). The upshot of this reconfiguration of the radical intellectual’s role is an emphasis on individualized and stylized resistance rather than collective, organized opposition, reform rather

SELLING 19 FUTURES than revolution, as well as appeals to ‘social theory’ (now bereft of a theory of the ‘social’), ‘critical theory’ (now devoid of a critique), and various theories of agency based on the subject’s status as consumer. As Callinicos puts it, ‘In a world that has taken on the properties of a Modernist artwork, the radical intellectual must abandon the tra- ditional task of theoretical enquiry, of uncovering the underlying structure responsible for the way things seem’ (1989, p. 147). In a neat condensation of many of these characteristics, Haraway declares that ‘Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication’ (19914, p. 176). z If feminists have expressed more than a little reluctance about postmodernist social theories, their hesitations have to do with postmodernist tendencies that appear to contest many of the political and epistemological tenets of feminism. Postmodernists like Lyotard and Baudrillard were proclaiming the demise of grand narratives and the death of the real at the very moment when feminists were first entering the debates in which these are at stake. Moreover, the postmodernist emphasis on discourse, and its insistence on the unknowability of the social, directly contradicts feminist epistemological grounding in experience. Yet despite the obvious dissimilarities, the creative intellectual occupies a central position within postmodernist social theory and feminist theory. Given the emphasis on discursive practices, the intellectual — rather than the working class — appears as the agent of social change. This centrality is as crucial to understanding much contemporary feminist theory as it is to understanding postmodernist social theorists. For postmodernist social theorists, ‘it is the novelist and poets who offer most help... since they, unlike the system-building theorists and philosophers, are less often tempted to raise their imaginative insights into a wholesale doctrine, a blueprint for social progress, or a form of self-exempting Ideologiekrittk’ (Norris, 1993, p- 39). What Callinicos calls the ‘erasure of the distinction between philosophy and literature’ (1989, p. 70) is expressed through Haraway’s ‘leaky distinctions’ (1g91d, p. 152), as well

20 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX as through her insistence that ‘Contests for the meanings of writing are a major form of contemporary political struggle. Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious’ (1991d, p. 175). The political project is defined in terms of an interpretive, but no less literary, literacy: ‘actively rewriting the texts of their [real-life cyborgs] bodies and societies’ (p. 175). In a world that can be apprehended only by way of contingency and discourse, the function of intellectuals is no longer, as Bauman observes, to legislate, but instead to read, interpret, and speculate. As Perry Anderson has remarked, gender oppression may historically antedate class oppression and it may very well require more explosive power to uproot it.” But, at the same time, an end to sexual domination would necessitate an end to class exploitation: The blast from the one would inevitably sweep away the other. Any movement that incarnated values capable of realizing a society without hierarchy of gender would be constitutively incapable of accepting one founded on division of class. In that sense, the rule of capital and the emancipation of women are — historically, and practically — irreconcilable. (1983, p. 91). The ability to fashion more complicated ideological analyses — analyses capable of working through the interlocking structures of oppression, as well as to form more cohesive and coherent coalitions — may be facilitated from within feminism itself, but only if feminism and feminists can provide a more thorough analysis for the interlocking oppressions that constitute ‘women.’ Feminism is a form of political analysis worth struggling over and fighting for — the task at hand lies in rearticulating feminism with a progressive politics. The structure of the successive chapters seeks to mimic the movement of postmodernist tendencies within feminism by following their translation from aesthetic theories into what are known variously as critical, cultural, and social theories. By moving from feminist theories more isolated from their immediate political context to feminist theories explicitly related

SELLING FUTURES 21 to contemporary social problems, the decontextualizing tendency that has followed feminism from the field of literary criticism to the field of cultural analysis and political struggle may be more effectively unpacked. Chapter One considers feminist attitudes toward technology and modernity as expressed in speculative fiction of both utopian and dystopian varieties, as well as related feminist literary criticism. Since technophobia is shaped around alternative readings of history, speculative genres such as science fiction offer a fertile site for investigations into its nostalgic and often conservative historical foundations. Initially, the chapter accents feminist literary critical appropriations of a utopian matriarchy through an examination of re-visions of history emanating from the publication of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland in 1979. The concluding section analyzes similar inclinations within feminist science fiction. The broader theoretical framework explains how the logic of re-vision and recuperation inhibits an analysis of the hegemonic ideologies out of which these utopian visions grew. Chapter Two traces the political consequences that result when, as Raymond Williams puts it, ‘an aesthetic theory’ becomes ‘negatively, a social theory’ (1992, p. 120). Contemporary ecofeminist theory, which calls for the rejection of technology in favor of a return to a social order based on a feminine principle or matriarchal values, provides the context for Chapter Two’s continued discussion of problems mapped out in the first chapter. In order to illustrate the effects that the logic of recuperation and its essentialist underpinnings have within the current political context, this chapter takes a critical look at ecofeminist philosophy and its reliance on, and ultimate containment within, the naturalized link between women and nature. Hegemonic uses of this link, which empty the terms ‘women’ and ‘nature’ of their historical and material specificities, bear a certain resemblance to depoliticized and ahistorical tendencies within ecofeminism itself — especially around ecofeminist representations of an environment from which class, race, and national identities have been erased.

22 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX Chapter Three negotiates a more literal maternal topology. Reading two photographic essays from Life. Magazine (1965 and 1990), it analyzes historical shifts around visual representations of women and fetuses. Since visual representations of the fetus are playing a determining role in the renewed attacks against abortion rights, this analysis considers the implications of the erasure of material mothers under the sign of the universal — but now invisible — Mother. The central task of this essay is to examine the ideological work performed by visual representations of fetal autonomy in the service of New Right politics — to analyze the conditions that have made possible the ideological transformation of the female body from a benevolent, maternal environment into an inhospitable waste land, at war with the innocent person within. For feminism in the nineties, this transformation offers a double bind, for just as the articulation of woman with nature, feminized environments, and motherhood produces reactionary and regressive configurations, so the disarticulation of woman and mother constructs an equally reactionary problematic. But such a complex set of conjunctural circumstances cannot be collapsed into the results of a single technological advance, i.e. fetal visualization and technology; rather, I analyze how visual technologies, in a culture so dependent upon images, have played a central and paradoxical role in the erasure of women’s bodies and the social relations in which those bodies exist. Struggles over the meaning of gender roles, and its relation to technology, are nowhere so evident as in the nascent discourses of women in the military, that most publicly masculinist of institutions. Chapter Four examines the position of women in the military at two levels of representation: first, the images of women enlisted in, and deployed by, hegemonic interests during the Persian Gulf War; and second, the ways in which women’s relationship to the military is rendered in feminist debates. ; . Since the trope of the cyborg has been postulated as the alternative to many of the problems examined during the preceding chapters, Chapter Five takes up the emergence of femin-

SELLING 23 FUTURES ist technomania during the eighties, with particular attention to Donna Haraway’s work. At the level of specific analysis, the conclusion confronts the problematic intersection between theories of multiple and fragmentary subjects and aspects of capitalism that utilize this very fragmentation to disperse and undermine oppositional possibilities. In the spirit of encouraging futures other than those currently being sold to us, the conclusion argues for, and with, a socialist-feminism more capable of confronting the implications of the production and reproduction of the technological fix. Notes 1 See Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity (1986) and The New Conservatism (1989) for analyses of this. 2 The fiction of the nuclear family was used by both Republicans and Democrats in the 1992 presidential campaign. President Clinton, moreover, upon whom so many left-leaning Democrats and leftists had hung their hopes, continues to rely on this ideology. For example, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which was acclaimed as a sign of Clinton’s commitment to progressive policies, provides for twelve weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave each year for family and medical reasons. Furthermore, it stipulates that employees must have worked for the company for at least one year and they must have worked at least halftime over the previous year. Of the advanced industrialized countries, the US is the only country that has no form of at least partially subsidized maternity leave. 3 Whether this alteration severely limits the potential for political intervention or infinitely expands the possibilities for what constitutes political intervention depends on quite different readings of Foucault. For an instructive analysis of this. problematic, see Norris (1993), particularly the chapter on Foucault and Kant. 4 The Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution, which stated that ‘Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex,’ was passed by both houses of Congress in March 1972. Ratification by the individual states was never completed, although the National Organization for Women continued to pursue ratification into the late seventies. The National Organization for Women, organized in 1966, was from its Wn inception a liberal group, closely affiliated with the Democratic Party, whose politics were strictly reformist. It continues to be the major focus

24 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX of mainstream feminist political activity, despite consistent critiques of the organization’s racist, homophobic, and capitalist agenda. For a thorough "analysis of NOW’s politics and history, see Sarachild (1978). ‘Feminists for Life,’ for example, is a group in the US whose ideology is based on an amalgamation of feminist concepts of empowerment, demonization of abortion clinics based on profit, and racist and homophobic religious beliefs. The argument that subjects (particularly in the US) do not think their identitites through the category of class seems to me not only defeatist, but a major concession to hegemonic forces as well. For example, it could be argued that ‘women’ did not think their identities through ‘feminism’ until the work of the women’s movement in the 1960s. Similarly, a proletariat does not emerge spontaneously from a vacuum. See Lukacs (1971) and Marx and Engels (1976). Marx, as well as many later Marxists, can hardly be claimed to have made this assertion. Indeed, there are many places in Capital (see in particular ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’) where his comments on the increased exploitation of both women and children directly reflect his concerns about those constituencies most disempowered under capitalism. It is interesting to note that, while Donna Haraway takes Marxist analyses to task for their dependence on narratives of origins, she never seems to turn a critical eye towards those narratives of origins endorsed by feminism itself. And here, historical materialism would have added benefits for feminist theory. As Perry Anderson remarks, ‘What is distinctive about the kind of criticism that historical materialism in principle represents, is that it includes, indivisibly and unremittingly, se/f-criticism. That is, Marxism is a theory of history that lays claim, at the same stroke, to provide a history of theory’ (1983, p. 11). Io II The argument I am making is specific to the context of the United States and its histories (this is especially true around repression of class struggles within US history and culture). Following Neil Lazarus (1991) and Christopher Norris (iggo, 1992), I will use the term “postmodernist social theory’ to designate those forms of critical theory that rely upon an uncritical emphasis on the discursive constitution of the ‘real,’ a positivistic approach to the notion of ‘difference,’ and a marked lack of concern about the context of capitalism and their own locations within that process of production. ’ I2 . . Catherine MacKinnon, Carol Gilligan, Camille Paglia, and Andrea Dworkin are only a few such feminist media celebrities in the US. 3) For historical and political reasons, feminists have been much less likely to view apathy as the most powerful form of resistance (as does Baudrillard). Nevertheless, the extent to which the so-called inevitability of postmod-

SELLING FUTURES 25 ernism. will result in acquiescence has yet to be seen. Judging from the direction of Haraway’s work (discussed in Chapter Five of this work), such apathy may well be the next step toward a feminist postmodernism. 14 In the wake of the end of the Cold War, this apocalyptic narrative has gradually been shifting its ground from one of nuclear apocalypse to one of a more generalized and gradual environmental suicide. 2 That intellectuals continue to teach, publish, and lecture, all of which depend on traditional and institutionalized forms of power and knowledge, therefore is particularly revealing. 16 Bauman suggests that culture has become the proper sphere for intellec- tual activity largely because postmodern culture has been ‘reduced to things of no concern to political powers’ (1992, p. 17). According to his argument, ‘As the interest of the state in culture faded (i.e. the relevance of culture to the reproduction of political power diminished), culture was coming within the orbit of another power the intellectuals could not measure up to — the market. Literature, visual arts, music — indeed, the whole sphere of humanities — was gradually freed from the burden of carrying the ideological message, and ever more solidly set inside marketled consumption as entertainment’ (p. 17). While Bauman’s argument ignores that one of the operative factors in this is control of the media, particularly in the US (witness coverage of the Persian Gulf War in 1991), his point that intellectuals’ obsession with culture verges on critical and political despair is worth further analysis. ey That the antipathy toward a Marxist theory of class struggle has issued most decisively from middle-class feminist and lesbian and gay theorists seems somewhat less than surprising and more than a little revealing. Marxist theories demand that oppression be analyzed relationally — that while the oppression of a middle-class feminist needs to be situated within the larger context of a system based on structural inequalities, it must not be conflated with the oppressions confronting working-class and poor women and men, whether in the first or third worlds. It may be that claims to ‘oppression’ have grown a bit too trivial, as in Nancy Miller’s Getting Personal (1991), where feminist concerns are reduced to anxieties about gender mistakes in French.

I Recycled histories Because of the emphasis on postmodernist speculations of both nihilistic and relativistic varieties — speculations that scrupulously avoid making pronouncements about such obsolete concepts as justice and injustice — speculative fiction occupies a privileged interpretive position within theories of the postmodern. Andrew Ross claims that ‘Science fiction writers, more than those of any other popular genre, have been passionately concerned about their social responsibility to imagine better futures’ (1991, p. 142). For Donna Haraway, science fiction writers ‘are our story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds’ (1991d, p. 197). In this capacity as interpreters of embodiment and narrators of the future, science fiction writers can explore ‘political, social, historical and philosophical framework[s] for understanding the consequences of what’s happening’ (Fox Keller, 1991, p. 115). If the slippage between discourse and reality is taken as absolute, the realism characteristic of the genre of science fiction can be seen as a form of hyperrealism: a reference to a real that does not exist but is presented as a real that may yet exist, depending on present circumstances and actions. Fredric Jameson points out that the realism characteristic of science fiction conceals ‘another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us “images” of the future ... but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present’ (1982a, p. 151). But, he continues, science fiction defamiliarizes at the expense of history: it ‘does so in the space on which a sense of the past had once been inscribed’ (p.'150). Science fiction estab-

RECYCLED HISTORIES 27 lishes the present as a historical moment viewed from an elsewhere known as the future. The present stands in for the historical past and the relationship between present and future (now rendered in linear terms as the relationship between past and present) may produce either a utopian or dystopian vision.’ The net result is that the material and ideological conditions of the present are consigned to the past. Although this distinction applies to technomaniacal feminist science fiction (as well as cyberpunk), for a technophobic femin- ism repulsed by postmodernism this sense of time is reversed insofar as the future is constructed out of remembrances of an alternative history, thereby also leaping over the present. Technologies exist in opposition to the natural and naturalized historical concerns of women. In a curious inversion of Kantian aesthetics, the antithesis between culture and nature is trans- formed into the privileging of nature and the natural over the sphere of culture. Technophobia seeks definition in some mythic matriarchy that defines (and has historically defined) itself in opposition to a patriarchal, technologized present. Unlike technomania, which seeks to efface or transcend history through the construction of new myths for the future, technophobia is built out of the assumption that ‘Those who lived in the past had a greater tolerance for the rich diversity and range of possibilities that encompass human relationships’ (Lane, 1990, p. 78). In both cases, however, the present is present only as an effect of either the past or the future. Feminist technomania’s alienation from the past and feminist technomania’s alienation from the future travel divergent routes in the construction of an imaginary present. Frances Bartkowski claims that ‘the imagined site’ of feminist utopian fiction ‘always implicates the here and now of its production whether implicitly or explicitly. These feminist utopian fictions tell us as much about what it is possible to wish as they do about what it is necessary to hope. They are tales of disabling and enabling conditions of desire’ (1989, p. 4). I now want to look at this matrix of feminist desires, the forms of disabling amnesia that they promote, and

28 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX the obfuscation of contemporary social conditions that they help to reproduce. pi) The precession of the matriarchy Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies one of the central premises of postmodernism as the belief that ‘Societies running in the fastforward mode cannot any longer be studied ... for even the evidence, the memory of change, is destroyed in the process’ (1992, p. 49). In contrast to this premise, technophobic feminists believe that the recuperation and restoration of women’s history and literature can provide paradigms for feminist futurologies. History and historical inquiries are not a problem; the problem lies in the fact that the only history on offer is that of ‘man.’ In this formulation, criticism is accorded to the constructedness of (masculinist) literary history. Thus technophobia, unlike technomania, which shares many of poststructuralism’s critiques of history, maintains the existence of an a priori historical real that has been ignored by patriarchal historians. In ‘Dancing Through the Minefield,’ Annette Kolodny defines this recuperative project as one of ‘exposing the sexual stereotyping of women in both our literature and our literary criticism and ... demonstrating the inadequacy of established critical schools and methods to deal fairly or sensitively with works written by women’ (1985a, p. 144).’ This exposé promises ‘a radical reshaping of our concepts of literary history’ (p. 145). For Sandra Gilbert, the project means that ‘although we obviously can’t “throw out a thousand years of Western culture,” we can and must redo our history of those years’ (1985, p. 32); and further that ‘we must review, reimagine, rethink, rewrite, revise and reinterpret the events and documents that constitute it’ (p. 32). In a similar vein, Adrienne Rich has observed that: A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has

RECYCLED HISTORIES 29 been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name and therefore live afresh. (in Gilbert, 1985, p. 35) Rich calls this process ‘Re-Vision.’ In each of these definitions, the emphasis falls again and again on revising, re-inventing, and recuperating texts authored by women to restore them to literary history. Generated by the belief that alongside the canon of Western culture existed a women’s literary tradition, one that had been historically erased or devalued by the favored sons of patriarchy, what was allegedly at stake in this process ‘was not so much literature or criticism as such, but the historical, social, and ethical conse- quences of women’s participation in, or exclusion from, either enterprise’ (Kolodny, 1985a, p. 145).’ Recuperation, in which criticism is accorded to masculinist intentions rather than methodologies, involves a distinctly uncritical and celebratory approach to its subject of investigation. In opposition to poststructuralist and postmodernist rejections of both authorship and authenticity, as long as the recovered texts are authored by women they are celebrated as evidence of resistance and as proof of the distinctiveness of women’s culture. Virginia Woolf’s Mary (along with the figure of the mythical Judith Shakespeare) in A Room of One’s Own becomes the quintessential signifier for the exclusion of women from literary production. Barred from the inner circles of the literary elite (although, like Woolf, privileged enough to have a room of her own), the woman writer exists outside, on the margins, and in opposition to patriarchy. The establishment of a female literary canon suggests that patriarchal culture and women’s culture have been parallel historical projects that developed and operated in relative autonomy from one another — an autonomy that prevents an analysis of women writers’ relation to and position within hegemonic formations. Questions about which women were writing at specific moments, how the texts women writers produced were informed by imperialist ideologists and were overtly racist,

30 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX sexist or homophobic, or (and this perhaps is the key to even opening up any of the previous questions) the privileging of literature and literacy that inevitably informs even a countercanonical formation, are subsequently avoided. Despite the claims of critics like Gilbert, Gubar, and Kolodny that their readings of the past maintained relevant connections with the present, this autonomy also allows feminist literary critics to ignore the political and cultural circumstances of their own textual productions. To put it more specifically, although they are themselves involved in questioning the construction of literary history, as well as its construction by literary critics, their own construction of essentialized female writing — and the contradictions this poses for feminist thought — supports a certain political and ideological isolation, not to mention a lack of critical self-reflexivity. In fact, feminist literary critics are themselves engaged in the construction of what Raymond Williams called ‘a selective tradition’ (1961, p. 50). According to Williams, “The selective tradition thus creates, at one level, a general human culture; at another level, the historical record of a particular society; at a third level, most difficult to accept and assess, a rejection of considerable areas of what was once a living culture’ (p. 51). Because the logic for recuperation is based on the concept of women as a class (which denies the special interests that form the basis for literary analysis), the selective and interpretive process involved becomes opaque, making it impossible to demonstrate ‘historical alternatives; to relate the interpretation to the particular contemporary values on which it rests; and, by exploring the real patterns of the work, confront us with the real nature of the choices we are making’ (Williams, 1961, p. 53). In opposition to the notion that ‘Sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender [but] forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis’ (Mohanty, 1991, p. 58), ‘sisterhood’ is posited as the transcendent signifier for natural and historically continuous bonds among and between women. The publication of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland in 1979 (the novel had originally been serialized in 1915 in The |

RECYCLED HISTORIES 31 Forerunner, a periodical edited by Gilman) provides an instructive guide to howaselective tradition based on the opposition between women’s writing/history and men’s writing/history operates, particularly insofar as it underlines the connections between the special interests and dispositions of feminist literary critics and subsequent analyses of the text. Gilman, as biographical figure, had special appeal for feminist literary critics. A grandniece of Katherine Beecher Stowe, she embodied the belief in a feminist continuum of women writers. She was educated, eloquent, and held what many considered to be radical views on gender relations, marriage, child raising, physical fitness, and the economic situation of women. In addition, Herland was published in the wake of an efflorescence of feminist science fiction, including Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Monique Wittig’s The Guérilléres (1973), Suzy McKee Charnas’ Motherlines (1978), and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), to name a few. The links between Herland and these contemporary novels were often stressed to justify the claims for a female utopian literary tradition.* Whether contemporary authors of feminist utopias would have had access to Gilman’s novel hardly mattered, because the stakes were not intertextual, but rather essential. Similarities, in other words, were explained by way of factors and circumstances inherent in, and reducible to, ‘woman’s experience’ and ‘women’s writing,’ generally and universally construed. Of course, Gilman’s attitudes toward technology and modernity and those held by technophobic feminists are not identical, but Gilman’s utopian matriarchy enabled technophobic feminists to locate reflections (or projections) of their own interests in such a recuperated text. For example, despite her comparative technological positivism, like many technophobic feminists Gilman believed that women possess an essential, maternal instinct that ultimately distinguishes them and their ‘natural’ work from that of patriarchy: “Woman’s natural work as a female is that of the mother’ (1909, p. 24). If this pronatalist, female principle could be instituted in place of a predatory, androcentric principle, war, poverty, pain, and inequality could

32 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX be eradicated, Gilman believed.’ The logic involved in the feminist selective tradition suggests that such maternal qualities have been celebrated by women throughout history in ideologically oppositional and consistent fashions and that, by restoring this history, the inflection of mothering and maternity and its uses in the present can change. The partiality of this form of memory is evident in Carol Pearson’s ‘Coming Home: Four Feminist Utopias and Patriarchal Experience.’ Texts, she claims, ‘were assumed to be feminist utopias if they portrayed complete equality between the sexes’ (1981, p. 70). Her central analytic focus is ‘the surprisingly numerous areas of consensus among such seemingly divergent works, agreement which can be explained by the similar conditioning and experiences women share’ (p. 63). Areas of consensus include recognizing ‘the low status and pay for “women’s work”’ (p. 63), countering sexual stereotypes by ‘emphasizing women’s strength, courage and intelligence’ (p. 64), ‘reclaiming the self’ (p. 65), using ‘persuasion, rather than force, to establish order’ (p. 67), and a maternal ‘sense of unity with all life’ (p. 70). Pearson observes that ‘turn of the century utopias sentimentalize motherhood and assert women’s moral superiority’ (p. 65), but, in a categorical rejection of historical context, she rationalizes this by asserting that ‘the authors take pains to define that mother as a fully human free person’ (p. 65). Susan Gubar’s ‘She in Herland: Feminism as Fantasy’ shares many of Pearson’s concerns. According to Gubar, “What the subtitle of this essay — “Feminism as Fantasy” — means to point toward is the realization that women’s fantasies have frequently been feminist in nature and that, concomitantly, feminism imagines an alternative reality that is truly fantastic’ (1983, p. 139). Reading Herland against H. Ryder Haggard’s She, published almost thirty years earlier in 1886, Gubar claims that, in place of the penis as signifier for power, Gilman instantiates the womb and a notion of ‘motherhood completely transformed, divorced from heterosexuality, the private family, and economic dependency. ... Motherhood therefore serves as a paradigm of

RECYCLED HISTORIES 33 service so that labor and nursing become the model for work’ (p. 143). What Gubar neglects to mention is that women in Herland are ‘divorced not from heterosexuality but from any sexual practices whatsoever since the inflated value of reproduction is achieved through a mystical version of parthenogenesis — a secularized rendition of the shaft of light. And despite her claims that motherhood has been ‘completely transformed,’ Gubar inadvertently reveals the ahistorical nature of this claim when she states that ‘by envisioning a race of woman born, Gilman valorizes the creativity of the womb which is, and always has been, after all, the tangible workplace of production’ (p. 144, emphasis added). Although Gubar does acknowledge certain ideological problems in Herland, such as ‘the draining away of the erotic’ (p. 147), she takes her praise one step further than Pearson, by celebrating Herland as an example of ‘the anti-imperialist tradition in women’s literary history’ (p. 149). Again, this assertion reveals the selective process at work in such criticism: that women’s literary history somehow avoided the imperialism of its masculine counterpart belies what Spivak describes as a ‘basically isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America’ which then actually ‘reproduces the axioms of imperialism’ (1985, p. 262). But what do feminist literary critics make of the overtly racist ideologies that are part and parcel of Gilman’s utopian vision? Gilman’s observation that ‘insanity had increased greatly among the Negroes since they were freed, probably owing to the strain of having to look out for themselves in a civilization far beyond them’ (1935, p. 245) is borne out in the ideology of Herland, where social problems explained in terms of racist and Malthusian ideologies have been bred out of its civilized milieu. The quest for an ahistorical female principle, however, requires critics to overlook such blatantly racist ideologies. Despite obvious textual evidence to the contrary, Pearson claims that ‘Economic and racial prejudice are absent from these families. In fact, respect for the individual is an integral aspect of the feminist utopian vision’ (1981, p. 67). In addition to the dubious

34 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX belief in a respectful individualism as an antidote for economic and racial prejudice, Pearson entirely passes over the fact that racial diversity is absent from the familial structures of Herland, having been systematically eliminated during the course of 2,000 years of white (female) supremacy. Ann Lane, Gilman’s biographer, observes that “Gilman’s views of immigrants, blacks, and Jews, however typical of her time and place, are sometimes unsettling and sometimes offensive, though characteristically clever’ (Lane, 1979, p. xvii). Gil- man’s eugenicist beliefs were certainly typical of her time and place: in the 1920s, the US passed immigration laws based on racial and ethnic quotas that were not to be repealed for nearly fifty years (Duster, 1990, p. 12). Frances Bartkowski describes the ‘problems’ inherent in Gilman’s text as indicative of the ‘ideological double bind’ (1989, p. 31) emblematic of her time. Assigning eugenics to ‘the patriarchal response to feminist demands for birth control and ‘contraceptive methods,’ Bartkowski avoids implicating Gilman, as well as prominent feminist advocates of birth control such as Margaret Sanger who expounded explicitly Malthusian ideologies, within this history. Instead, she claims that to criticize Gilman on such abasis is ‘to ask Gilman to deliver the impossible, given the ideological circumscriptions of the time and her own resistance to speaking about female sexuality’ (p. 41). Despite Herlana’s repeated references to ‘pure Aryan stock’ and ‘racial purity,’ eugenicist claims that would be cause for criticism and scrutiny in male writers are excused in the case of Gilman through recourse to her historical ignorance. While the dynamics of the selective process are somewhat opaque when women’s racism is relegated to the past, they become transparent when they suppress women writers’ more oppositional attitudes, particularly around issues of compulsory heterosexuality. Although autobiographical and archival documents reveal numerous references:‘to Gilman’s eroticized relationships with other women, this aspect of her biography and work has been the subject of no critical inquiry. For example, Gilman’s advice to her close friend Martha Luther

RECYCLED HISTORIES 35 upon hearing of her plans to marry, was ‘Just open your big eyes, and tell him you are spoken for by a female in Providence, and can’t marry just yet’ (Lane, 1990, p. 76). Later, Gilman wrote to her own fiancé that “Adeline Knapp [with whom Gilman lived from 1891 to 1893] has ... letters of mine most fully owning the really passionate love I had for her. I loved her, trusted her, wrote her as freely as I wrote to you. I told you I loved her that way’ (Lane, 1990, p. 166). As if this is not explicit enough, Gilman further explained: I am not sorry for nor ashamed of my life... . I see no reason looking back, to regret one step.... But you must consider the disagreeable practical possibilities like this. Fancy San Francisco papers with a Profound Sensation in Literary Articles! Revelations of a Peculiar Past! Mrs. Stetson’s Love Affair with a Woman. Is this Friendship! and so on. Dear Heart. Am I a woman you ought to marry? Are you willing to give such a mother to your son — or Daughters? Are you sure you have understood when I told you ‘all’? (Lane, pp. 166—7) While Lane admits of the possibility of an eroticized relationshp between Gilman and Knapp, her opinion was that Gilman’s references to sleeping with other women referred only to her need for ‘special comforting’ of a desexualized variety. Gilman’s jealous reaction to Luther’s wedding plans, moreover, is reduced to her ‘truly morbid state of mind’ (p. 76). In short, Lane goes to some lengths to defend Gilman’s heterosexuality. The point at stake here has little to do with asking Gilman to deliver the impossible — to have written a different, antiracist text, for example. Instead, it involves confronting a history of racism, elitism, and homophobia in which women — some of whom called themselves feminists — participated, in addition to confronting the racism, classism, and homophobia that exist in the present. By referring to history only to explain away the ideological underpinnings of texts authored by women, technophobic feminism invents a past from which differences have been magically erased under the universally nurturing and noncomplicitous sign of woman. And through this approach, femin-

36 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX ist literary critics can construct an imaginary sisterhood in the present, thereby leaving their category of analysis uncontested. Many contemporary literary renderings of technophobic feminism continue to produce variations on a theme of original female unity, despite current feminist debates about race, class, and erotic orientation. As opposed to masculinist narratives of origin, motivated, in Donna Haraway’s terms, by the desire to locate and reproduce ‘the sacred image of the same’ (199Ic, p. 299), by ‘the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate’ (1991d, p. 151), feminist originary narratives can exist only if history itself can be invented anew. Other than that, these originary narratives parallel the masculinist versions. Feminists produce mythic versions of the past, as in Herland, by instantiat- ing the Mother in the place originally reserved for the Father. While the myth of unity is represented by the phallic mother, it hinges not on separation, but on the maintenance of a conneciton with this mother similar to that proposed by Nancy Chodorow (1978). Female principles, or matriarchal values, removed from any social or historical context, replace those of the violent and aggressive patriarchy, thus reinforcing the standard dichotomy between femininity and masculinity. Suzette Hayden Elgin’s Native Tongue illustrates the durable appeal of this mythology. In the US of the novel, radical social changes have been effected not through nuclear war (as is more usually the case), but through a patriarchal backlash. In the nineties, according to Elgin’s narrative, women’s rights were entirely revoked. The twenty-fifth amendment to the Constitution specifies that: The natural limitations of women being a clear and present danger to the national welfare when not constrained by the careful and constant supervision of a responsible male citizen, all citizens of the United States of the female gender shall be deemed legally minors, regardless of their chronological age. (Elgin, 1984, p. 7) No longer able to vote, own property, or even open a bank

RECYCLED HISTORIES 37 account, women of all classes have been legally subordinated to men. The economic ‘system of Native Tongue has gone not global but intergalactic. This intergalactic economy depends almost entirely on trade with ‘alien’ species, thereby creating a new class elite: the linguists.’ In order to effect trade with the ‘aliens,’ the government must rely on the abilities of this special group, especially the women who train their children to be native speakers of new and difficult languages. The everyday lives of female linguists are scrupulously circumscribed by their official productive duties and their domestic reproductive duties (i.e. providing sexual services to men of ‘the Lines,’ as well as biologically reproducing the labor force). Those women past childbearing years, or those who cannot physically bear children, are sent to the ‘barren houses’ — separate quarters maintained for women who are infertile, elderly, or just downright intractable. Away from the panopticism of the main house, the women work on an ‘encoding’ project — the public version of which appears stereotypically frivolous and innocuous. As one of the occupants of Chornyak Barren House comments, ‘ “The only real defense we’ve ever had ... is that no one has ever taken us seriously. The men have always thought we were silly females, playing silly female games” ’ (p. 126). Under the cover of such a silly female game, the women pursue a subversive project: the construction of a ‘native tongue,’ Ldadan, based on female experiences of reality. The project is based on ‘encodings,’ explained as A word for a perception that had never had a word of its own before’ (p. 158). The women believe that, if they can alter discourse, the ‘real’ will change accordingly: ‘Suppose we begin to use it, as you say we should do. And then, as more and more little girls acquire Ldadan and begin to speak a language that expresses the perception of women rather than those of men, reality will begin to change’ (p. 250). Presumably, this language expresses a fuller, less aggressive, and more natural version of reality. From this brief summary, we can see how the novel reflects a number of contemporary feminist concerns. At the same time,

38 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX the novel reproduces an exclusive focus on gender oppression. The novel’s central conflict occurs between: the patriarchal leaders of society and an oppressed class known as women: ‘Every woman was a prisoner for life; it was not some burden that she bore uniquely’ (p. 159). While conflict is seen as a fundamental aspect of patriarchy, antagonisms between the women of the lines and women ‘outside the Lines’ (p. 296) have been artificially constructed and maintained by patriarchal forces. The real of the situation, as the novel presents it, is that women (as a category) share a commonality of experience, although it is clear that only the women of the lines have the genetic and discursive superiority to lead the opposition. Ultimately, it is this commonality of experience that will guarantee the success of the subversive “women-language’ (p. 29), that will allow women ‘to say the things that women wanted to say, and about which men always said “Why would anyone talk about that?”’ (p. 215): a language that will change the face of society. : Although the novel lacks Herland’s scientific positivism and a programmatic utopian vision (the future will presumably be better but, beyond a faith in the power of discourse, the reader is given few hints as to how this will proceed), Native Tongue’s reliance on essentialism, and an essentially grounded technophobia, produces exlusionary problems around the category of women. Thus, despite the separation from men, the occupations of Chornyak Barren House seemingly have no connection to sexuality, whether lesbian or heterosexual. Separatism, as in Herland, is not equivalent to a critique of compulsory heterosexuality, but is posed as an ad hoc solution that will be in effect only until reality has shifted, giving the patriarchy time to grow up. Race, moreover, is invisible in Native Tongue, while class, as we have seen, is reduced to patriarchal propaganda that obscures the natural bonds among women. Whether they are women of the lines or professionally trained ‘wives,’ the women of the twenty-third century are uniformly oppressed. The women of the lines are guaranteed success because their science and their world view are natural and organic — not

RECYCLED HISTORIES 39 technology per se, but holism. Technology is equated with death and destruction and a pure and harmonious natural life holds the only hope for humanity. In Native Tongue, the possibility of utopia depends on a disengagement with technology and phallocentrism and a return to a more natural female culture. And such a disengagement depends, of course, upon the rediscovery of women’s natural ties with nature. Technophobia, in other words, is posited as the natural female response to technology — all that is required to unleash this response is a concomitant unleashing of instinct, as in Carol Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog (1990), in which women become animals and animals become women (in a form of Hegelian dialectics), and the concept of ‘becoming animal’ provides the basis for a salvation narrative. This is not a matter of false consciousness, for women have been artificially disconnected from their instinctual and natural modes of knowledge. All that is required to rediscover these natural links is the knowledge and discursive ability possessed by the educated women of the lines. Lessons your mother never taught you Technophobia’s antipathy toward the futurologies proposed by postmodernism can be summed up asa rejection of the present and the future in favor of a return to the primal origins of the woman/nature link. Donna Haraway (1989, 1991c, 1991d) has repeatedly used the fiction of African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler to challenge the dualisms implicit in such technophobic thought: “The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual entity or body’ (1991d, p. 178). Butler is particularly successful, furthermore, in exploring the interdigitations of human, machine, nonhuman animal or alien, and their mutants in relation to the intimacies of bodily exchange and mental communication. ... Her fiction, especially in Xenogenesis, is about the monstrous hope and fear that the child will not, after all, be like the parent. There is never just one parent. ... Butler’s fiction

40 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX is about resistance to the imperative to recreate the sacred image of the same. , (Haraway, 1989, p. 378) Fred Pfeil similarly states that Butler’s work depends upon ‘some new relationship of self and other, beyond the connections of blood, race, or sex, and past the nihilistic self- and other- destroying dialectics of master-slave’ (1990, p. 90). But if texts like Herland and Native Tongue offer utopian visions based on the restoration of the sacred image of the same, or in this case universal matriarchal valués, Butler’s fiction insists upon the impossibility of improved worlds. Butler’s Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Patternmaster (1976), Xenogenesis (1989c), and Clay’s Ark (1984) depict worlds in which the terms of human existence and survival have radically mutated. In the post-apocalyptic, postmodernist world of Xenogenesis (a trilogy composed of Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago), for example, racial differences among human beings are made meaningless or subsumed beneath the absolute difference of the alien imperialists, the Oankali. In “Speechsounds’ (1989b), communication itself is undermined bya virus that leaves part of the population capable solely of speech and the remainder capable only of reading and writing. Butler’s texts are neither utopian nor dystopian, because what is at stake is not a better or worse social order, but the biological imperative to survive. Like the postmodernism endorsed by Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Haraway, Butler presumes the inevitability of the postmodern condition: we can neither love it nor leave it — it is ‘where, with or without our consent, we are located’ (Haraway, 1989, p. 382). The best we can do, in short, is attempt to survive. In addition, Butler’s visions of the future posit more advanced and sophisticated forms of imperialism, in the face of which consent, and by extension agency, are only symbolic stakes. The ‘dialectics of master-slave’ that Pfeil claims that Butler subverts are actually fully operative in each of Butler’s texts, most explicitly in the importance of ‘trade.’ In this, exchange is not a benign, organic, non-threatening symbiosis, but a fundamentally

RECYCLED HISTORIES 41 disturbing, invasive, and terrifying parasitism. While humans delude themselves into believing that they can choose to consent, the situation actually consists of only two options: absolute cooperation with colonialist forces or death. As a result, agency is circumscribed and limited by conditions of impossibility. In Clay’s Ark, Xenogenesis, and “Speechsounds,’ for example, a biological determinism that sees humans as genetically disposed to hierarchy compels humanity to accept a trade that will alter this genetic disposition. In Clay’s Ark and ‘Speechsounds,’ viruses force humans to adapt to drastic changes in sexuality, reproduction, and communication. In Xenogenesis, after a nuclear war has destroyed the earth, a few humans are rescued by the Oankali, a nomadic species of genetic engineers, who require human beings for reproductive purposes. Human beings who refuse to cooperate with the Oankali are sterilized and released. Since the biological determinism of Butler’s fiction also manifests itself as the overwhelming desire of the species to reproduce, the only available choice for humans is cooperation. The Terrans of ‘Bloodchild, ‘fleeing from their homeworld, from their own kind who would have killed or enslaved them’ (1989a, p. 293), land on a planet occupied by the Tlic, a species that must lay its eggs in living mammals in order to reproduce. Like the humans of Xenogenesis, the Terrans are seemingly persuaded, rather than forced, into accepting their union with the Tlic. Their compliance also carries with it certain privileges and pleasures: they are fed, protected from ‘the hordes [of Tlic] who did not understand why there was a Preserve — why any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way made available to them’ (p. 279). They are petted and fed the eggs that not only ‘prolonged life, prolonged vigor’ (p. 278), but offered an endless source of narcotic and aphrodisiacal pleasure. In exchange for these benefits, Terran males — ‘they usually take men to leave the women free to bear their own young’ (p. 290) — serve as hosts for the Tlic larvae. The eggs are implanted in humans by means of the Tlic’s ‘ovapositor’ and, when gestation has been completed, the larvae excrete poisons that sicken and alert the human host (the N’Tlic). At this point,

42 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX the grubs must be removed by the parent Tlic, and placed in some raw meat, or else they will devour the.N’Tlic: “There is always a grace period between the time the host sickened and the time the grubs began to eat him’ (p. 287). The Tlic, like the Oankali of Xenogenesis, are sophisticated colonizers who have learned much from previous experience. As T’Gatoi tells the narrator, Gan, ‘The animals we once used began killing most of our eggs after implantation long before your ancestors arrived.’ Gan further adds, Back when the Tlic saw us as not much more than convenient big warm-blooded animals, they would pen several of us together, male and female, and feed us only eggs. That way they could be sure of getting another generation of us no matter how we tried to hold out. We were lucky that didn’t go on long. A few generations of it and we would have been little more than convenient big animals. (Butler, 1989a, p. 282) The process whereby the humans are convinced to participate in this violent and metaphoric reproduction is by no means simple or uncontradictory, for many of them understand the price paid for the trade. Gan’s mother, having refused her portion of the egg, realizes that T’Gatoi is planning to implant the eggs in Gan. She confronts T’Gatoi, saying ‘Did you think I would sell him for eggs? for long life? My son?’ (p. 280). Gan himself, after witnessing a particularly nasty ‘birth,’ holds a loaded gun to T’Gatoi’s head, and says: “ “No one ever asks us ... You never asked me”’ p. 294). Gan finally accepts the implant when T’Gatoi threatens to use his sister Hoa instead, asking asking himself: would it be easier to know that red worms were growing in her flesh instead of mine?’ (p. 294). Thus, the Tlic manage to persuade their human hosts to submit to this violent union by means of what Ranjit Guha defines as a complicated process of dominance, persuasion, and coercion (1989, p. 231). They first must forge alliances with a member or members of the dominated classes — in “Bloodchild,’ Gan; in Xenogenesis, Lilith Iyapo; in Survivor, Alanna — who in turn convert the remainder of the human: populace. But this form

RECYCLED HISTORIES 43 of persuasion barely conceals the fact that such persuasion — in the final instance — depends on the threat of violence and repression. ; In Butler’s work, the environments produced are distinct from previous historical environments insofar as humans are confronted with forms of domination that exceed their own, in terms of both technologies of coercion and persuasion. While in Xenogenesis, Clay’s Ark, ‘Speechsounds’, and “Bloodchild’ human technologies cause the global annihilation of humanity, the superior biotechnology possessed by aliens and/or viruses far surpasses any human capacity for domination. Butler has said of ‘Bloodchild’ that ‘some people assume I’m talking about slavery when what I’m really talking about is symbiosis’ (1990, p. 56). But this uneven symbiosis, inherent in the concept of the ‘trade, depends on controls exercised through the promise of novel and overwhelming forms of seduction and pleasure. Consequently, while the humans offer some resistance to the ‘unnaturalness’ of the aliens, the pleasures offered by these beings ultimately secure the trade. Butler’s work, in short, represents worlds where — as in the postmodern — critical consciousness co-exists with certain pleasures that make an otherwise unbearable world infinitely bearable. The worlds that they inhabit, in other words, are the best worlds possible, given their circumstances. Whether such survivalist narratives actually constitute new, and more desirable, relationships to nature, environments, and ultimately tech- noculture (as Haraway proposes they do) is a matter for further debate. Fredric Jameson observes of science fiction that the present — in this society, and in the physical and psychic dissociation of the human subjects who inhabit it — is inaccessible directly, is numb, habituated, empty of affect. Elaborate strategies of indirection are therefore necessary if we are somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to ‘experience’, for some first and real time, this ‘present’, which is after all all we have. (1982a, p. 151; emphases added) Just as capitalism admits — to an extent — its flaws, so at the

44 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX same time it insists that its system, given the alternatives, is the best one possible. While the present may. indeed be all we have, it seems unlikely that a vision based on capitulation and cooperation can aid feminist theory in the task of reconfiguring its relationship to technoscience. In conclusion, technophobia’s essentialism and technomania’s anti-essentialism seem to point to very distinct trajectories within feminist theories of the postmodern. In short, technophobia universalizes through the active construction of boundaries between male and female culture, thereby eliminating the variables of race, class and erotic orientation that inform and struc- ture gender oppression. And it is totalitarian insofar as it proposes that specific traits and pleasures are natural and proper for womankind: deviations from this feminine/feminist norm are criticized as manifestations of patriarchal contamination. When limited to the field of literary production, the differ- ences between the two seem absolute. Technophobia maintains a belief in revolutionary change based on women’s experience of gender oppression, while technomania claims that the contemporary condition of society is uncontestable and that only reform is possible. In constructing separate spheres, technophobia erases difference under the universal sign of women, while the pluralism inherent in technomania celebrates the dispersal and diffusion of these boundaries. Technophobia emphasizes the practical elements of women’s culture, while technomania stresses the theoretical. Nevertheless, technophobia and technomania illustrate the continuing dualism at the heart of contemporary feminist thought: an ideology based on gender difference versus an ideology based on the endless and multiple play of difference. This distinction can also be described in terms of the division between what Alice Echols calls the ‘fantasy of a morally pure sisterhood’ (1983, p. 455), or the celebration of femininity; and a celebration of difference, wherein ‘By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism’ (Haraway, 1991d, p. 150). Technophobia and technomania share the postmodern cri-

RECYCLED HISTORIES 45 tique of Enlightenment values. The essentialism that undergirds technophobic feminism views the Enlightenment project as unredeemably phallocentric. In place of an originary narrative that situates the universal (hu)man subject at the center of the universe, feminist technophobia looks backward to a matriarchy untainted by masculinist, Enlightenment values for its version of an ideal society, although it implicitly subscribes to many other Enlightenment values. Far from subscribing to postmodernist, or even modernist, conceptualizations of history, techno- phobic feminism substitutes atavism for either progress or apocalypse. It is not that the process of constructing histories 1s in itself cause for scrutiny — and subsequently historiography is an absent mode of analysis — it is simply that we accepted the wrong history. Another more true, valid, and just history lies out there, parallel to the false, masculine version. The process of recuperating this history, of completing the quest for a feminist originary narrative, will yield guidelines for women’s salvation: for revolutionary change based on awareness of irrefutable and irrevocable gender difference. Entry to this revolutionary consciousness is gained by virtue of being a woman and therefore having access to women’s special forms of knowledge. Technomania, with its postmodernist affinities, “ceases to look back’ (Callinicos, 1989, p. 17). A viewpoint for ‘our’ times, ‘new’ times, cyborg times, it claims that the present is ‘neither wholly attractive nor abhorrent in so far as the period is one of both possibilities and foreclosures’ (Nicholson, 1999, p. 11). But technomania’s reliance on the existence of a complete rupture with previous ideologies and histories makes it a more difficult position for feminists to occupy, while its eclecticism ensures that its travels will be limited to the academy. For reasons that are explored in the next chapter, technophobia is more culturally dominant. For technophobic feminists, the point is neither to interpret nor to accept reality, but simply to reject it — a position that, as we shall see, is closely linked to the class interests of its proponents. As technomanic feminists would observe, this hardly offers an approach to contemporary society. Yet in an anti-

46 FEMINISM essentialist, technomaniacal AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX world, the point isn’t to change reality either, but to provide endlessly revolving interpretations of it. Moreover, the belief that we have no choice but to accept the postmodern absolves critical intellectuals from theorizing alternatives: as Bauman observes, it only succeeds “in re-forging its discontents into the factors of its own reproduction’ (1992, p. 82). Nevertheless, both the technophobic and technomanic emphasis on imagination, on literature, on discourse seem to carry along related sets of problems. To what extent is the emphasis on imagination, creativity, and literacy a class-based claim that can only disable and disarm a politicized feminism? Bourdieu has explored the complicated notion that, “There are economic conditions for the indifference to economy which induces a pursuit of the riskiest positions in the intellectual and artistic avant-garde, and also for the capacity to remain there over a long period without any economic compensation’ (1993, p. 40). Given the fact that this anti-economism is conferred within the field of aesthetics and for reasons owing to this positionality, what relationship does a feminist theory thus situated within this field have to a wider sphere of political activity? It is to this question that the next chapter turns. Notes 1 Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale offers an excellent example of the political ambiguities produced by such histories of the present. In the novel, it is unclear whether the past (our present, or impending future) is dystopian or utopian. The narrator’s very nostalgia for commodities that many feminists currently view as oppressive (i.e. fashion magazines, make-up, clothing), as well as the trivialization of feminism therein implied, makes the text’s political critique problematic, if not in places downright reactionary. 2 In this specific essay, Kolodny’s strategy for resolving the problem of ‘exclusion’ is a ‘playful pluralism responsive to the possibilities of multiple critical schools and methods, but captive of none’ (1985a, p. 161). Although Kolodny is conscious of the problems embedded in literary critical methodologies, her recourse to pluralism is in effect no solution at all, since pluralism itself is based on a tolerance that reproduces traditional power

RECYCLED HISTORIES 47 structures (and may, as in the case of the canon, be withdrawn at any time, depending upon the whims of the ‘tolerator’), For an incisive critique of the problem of pluralism within feminist theory, see Spelman (1988). 3 Most of the essays in The New Feminist Literary Criticism (1985), edited by Elaine Showalter, adhere to this formula. See, for example, Showalter’s ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’ and the notion of a “gynocentric feminist criticism’ (p. 248). And lest this issue seem to be historically specific, see Tania Modleski’s critique of Showalter’s shift from ‘gynocritics’ to ‘inscriptions of gender and “renditions of sexual difference” ’ (1991, p. 5) in Speaking of Gender (1989, p. 5). According to Modleski, feminism, in the hands of Showalter, ‘is a conduit to the more comprehensive field of gender studies; no longer is the latter judged, as in my opinion it ought to be, according to the contributions it can make to the feminist project and the aid it can give us in illuminating the causes, effects, scope, and limits of male dominance’ (1991, p. 5). Modleski’s reference to ‘the feminist project’ is an interesting one and not without its own connections to earlier stages of feminist thought. 4 Although Joanna Russ (1981), Frances Bartkowski (1989), Sarah Lefanu (1988), and Margaret Miller (1983) gesture in the direction of history, each uses Herland to legitimate and authorize notions of a feminist utopian tradition, as well as an essentialist continuum among these. 5 While this may seem contradictory to those readers of Gilman familiar with ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, it is worth keeping in mind that the short story’s most scathing critique is reserved for the nascent profession of psychiatry and not the institution of motherhood itself. 6 Whether repealing these laws actually eliminated their use is another question: witness President Clinton’s recent immigration policies which are explicitly based on racist and elitist ideologies. 7 Elgin herself is a professor of linguistics.

yo A garden inclosed 1s my sister’: ecofeminism and eco-valences' Dead creek, for example, a creekbed that received discharges from the chemical and metal plants in previous years, is now a place where kids from East St. Louis ride their bikes. The creek, which smokes by day and glows on moonless nights, has gained some notoriety in recent years for instances of spontaneous combustion. The Illinois EPA believes that the combustion starts when children ride their bikes across the creek bed, ‘creating friction which begins the smoldering process’. (Kozol, 1991, p. 17) In 1986 a ruptured pipeline at the Purex Corporation’s bleach plant in South Gate [in Los Angeles] sent a green cloud of deadly chlorine over nearby Tweedy Elementary School. ... The next year, teachers in Bell Gardens discovered a possible ‘miscarriage cluster’ associated with toxic chromium emissions from adjacent plating plants, and eighteen months later Park Elementary in Cudahy was closed after analysis revealed that the “gook’ oozing from the playground for the previous quarter-century was highly carcinogenic residue from an old toxic landfill. (Davis, 1992, p. 68) Our cabin, which sits high on a knoll overlooking a narrow mountain valley, has a wide verandah around two sides. We often find ourselves sitting here, reflecting on our work, our lives, the state of the world. Sometimes we are simply sitting — listening to the sounds of birds, feeling the breath of warm winds, healing ourselves in the midst of the natural world. . (Plant, 1989a, p. 1) Technophobia’s elisions and resultant erasures within the field

ECOFEMINISM AND ECO-VALENCES 49 of literary production would appear to operate at a remove from other fields of production and reproduction. While few would argue thatthe increased visibility of texts authored by women is of no significance, it is difficult to sustain an argument about its political effects in other fields, especially for those populations for whom literature is, quite simply, unimportant. For instance, feminist technophobia in the field of literature deals explicitly with women writers’ representations of reality. Whether cognizant of its primarily discursive elements or not, its relationship to material manifestations of the woman/nature link is mediated and therefore functions by way of abstraction. From this more isolated perspective, there can be little in the way of understanding the explicitly political consequences of endorsing this link at a given historical moment. Although feminist technophobia as expressed in the field of literary criticism and feminist technophobia in its more popular forms follow laws and logic specific to their fields, they share an investment in a reductive theory of patriarchy that renders them incapable of identifying ‘the point from which you can see what you see’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 131). An effective analysis of the political consequences following from the myopia of technophobic thought might best be approached through the perspective of ecofeminist thought. Here, the ideological imperatives and material effects of technophobia are exposed by ecofeminism’s insistence that it is at once a theory and a practice for revolutionary social change. The opening quotations form the starting-point for an examination of the invidious partiality of technophobic feminist visions. The point that these quotations are intended to make is that technophobia’s endorsement of naturalized connections between women and nature itself emerges from a privileged environment. The view from the hill, in other words, does not face the environments of South Gate (in South Central Los Angeles) or East St. Louis (in Illinois), As a matter of fact, it does not over look the industrialized landscapes that count as environments for much of the world’s population. Perry Anderson claims that ‘What is distinctive about the

50 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX kind of criticism that historical materialism in principle represents, is that it includes, indivisibly and unremittingly, se/fcriticism’ (1983, p. 11). The necessity for se/f-criticism is urgent around environmental issues in the United States, where — despite its assertions about the interconnectedness of nature — environmentalism seems to have no connection to issues of race and class. On television, for example, environmentalists are usually portrayed engaged in clean-up efforts in parks, beaches, or other conservation areas, or in the protection of endangered species.” The 1992 US presidential campaign was littered with shots of ‘environmentalist’ Al Gore picking up trash from the country’s beaches. Environmentalists and ecofeminists in the US are only now beginning to confront the fact that their constituencies are more often than not composed of white, middle-class people and the environments with which they are concerned.’ But while it is certain that divisions among liberals and leftists on environmental issues have been nurtured by governmental policies and corporate interests, conspiracy theories offer little help in the way of generating strong political opposition or theorizing strategies for shifting the disabling terms of environmental debates. By analyzing the manner in which certain ecofeminist strategies circulate in regressive fashions, I hope to point toward the political limitations inherent in feminist technophobia’s reliance on the woman/nature connection. I wish to point toward, in effect, a feminist and socialist environmentalism that is committed to a global understanding and formulation of the concept of an ecosystem and its social relations — one that is more cognizant of, and attentive to, the complexities of that term. In the following, I focus on the possibilities for shifting the terms of debate through an examination of ecofeminist philosophy and practice; most explicitly by reference to articu- lations of ‘women’ and ‘nature,’ consumerist models of political practice, and the concomitant absence of an analysis of capitalism.

ECOFEMINISM AND ECO-VALENCES 51 Designing women In Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (1991), Janet Biehl describes how ecofeminist reliances upon the naturalized connection between ‘woman’ and ‘nature’ reify dominant ideologies of female nature — the hegemonic affects and effects of what ecofeminist Ynestra King celebrates as ‘woman’s bridge-like position between nature and culture’ (1989, p. 22).' Like feminist technophobia in general, the central tenets of ecofeminism might well be theorized within the trajectory of what Katha Pollitt describes as ‘difference feminism’ (1992, p. 801) — or a theory of ‘a world that contains two cultures — a female world of love and ritual and a male world of getting and spending and killing’ (p. 806). Despite its claims to comprise a new and radical version of feminist thought, one that specifically responds to modernity and its multifaceted problems, in keeping with many historical versions of feminism (not to mention dominant ideologies about femininity), ecofeminists ground their critiques in the belief that contemporary social problems can be reduced to gender oppression. The historical specificity of ecofeminism consists of the premise that changes brought about by technological advances, ascribed variously to patriarchy, capitalism, and even Marxism, have resulted (and can only result) in an equivalent domination of both women and nature. Once again, the quest for a feminist narrative of origins terminates in some misty feminist or matriarchal past. For founding ecofeminists like Mary Daly and Susan Griffin, the solution to contemporary social problems (for women, at least) is to reject technology and the modern world in order to realign themselves with their true and essential source of strength: a pre-patriarchal affinity with nature. Daly’s theory of ‘patriarchy’ depends upon the binarism between technology, as the monstrous, phallic present, and the environment, as matriarchal past. In the best of all possible worlds, according to this argument, women would inhabit (or should more completely inhabit) a realm distinct from the death-loving province of masculinity.’

52 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX This approach is analytically and politically suspect for reasons that have caused much debate within feminism. The invocation of women as a class or uniform category of analysis, embedded in the belief in a special connection between women and nature, feeds into deeply misogynist ideologies. It is furthermore, as feminists like Audre Lorde have noted, very much a class — and race — based claim.® By insisting that women — across race, class, and national lines, across history — have a more intimate and stable relationship with nature and the natural, ecofeminism flattens out and ultimately ignores race and class distinctions, not to mention history. According to Lorde, such a universalizing perspective ‘serves the destructive forces of racism and separation between women — the assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women’ (1981, p. 96). The universalization at the center of ecofeminism’s belief that technology has uniformly and necessarily oppressed women therefore relies on a reductive model of social relations, a model that can neither account for the contradictory aspects of this process at different historical moments nor adequately analyze intersecting yet structurally different forms of oppression. In view of the complexity and interrelatedness of the global environmental situation, and in respect of power structures that transcend, or ignore, such boundaries, the equivalence between women and nature repeats certain erasures and invisibilities. When technology stands in opposition to women (who by virtue of their anatomical configuration have special links with nature), technology functions like the term patriarchy, which,.as Michéle Barrett reminds us, is far too often used to name ‘a system of domination completely independent of the organization of capitalist relations . . . hence the analyses fall into a universalistic trans-historical mode which may shade into biologism’ (1988, p- 15). | Ecofeminists tend to dismiss or neutralize the lengthy and two-edged history of the biologism upon which these naturalized connections depend. Despite the lengthy history of the hegemonic and misogynistic uses of this connection, it is, as

ECOFEMINISM AND ECO-VALENCES 53. Katha Pollitt comments, ‘perpetually being rediscovered, dressed in fashionable clothes and presented, despite its antiquity, as a radical new idea’ (1992, p. 800).”? Such a ‘new’ version of feminist theory, to take one example, was fitted out and influentially re-presented as early as 1973 by Jane Alpert.* In ‘Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory, Alpert asked: ‘Could it not be that just at the moment that masculinity has brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction or ecological suicide, women are beginning to rise in response to the Mother’s call to save Her planet and create instead the next stage of evolution?’ (1973, p. 94). Kenneth Pitchford, husband of feminist Robin Morgan (current editor of the ‘new’ Ms. Magazine), similarly argued that, “To be shockingly blunt, it is the male principle in human beings that has brought us historically to the verge of extinction; if we are to survive it will be because the female principle, once omnipotent in pre-history, is returned to power’ (Echols, 1989, p. 253). A more recent example of this nostalgic essentialism appears in The Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence against Animals and the Earth, where Andrée Collard alleges that ‘As with women asa class, nature and animals have been kept in a state of inferiority and powerlessness in order to enable men as a class to believe and act upon their “natural” superiority/dominance’ (1989, p. 1). This uncritical essentialism also motivates Daly’s work: ‘Phallic lust is seen as a fusion of obsession and aggression. As obsession it specializes in genital fixation and fetishism, causing broken consciousness, broken heartedness, broken connections among women and the elements’ (1984, p. 1). The postmodern condition, positioned by default against an elusive, pre-patriarchal state of organicism, results from exposure to ‘a manipulative and deadening technology’ (Daly, 1984, p. 228). Daly’s strategy for opposing the ‘technological fixers’ concurs with that of Rachel Carson (1961): ‘ “discovering our deep sources, our spring.... finding our native’ resiliency, springing into life, speech, action” ’ (Daly, 1978, p. 21). Within Daly’s cosmos, only women (and by extension, a/l women) are biologically qualified to make these discoveries.’

54 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX By ignoring realities of political power and its unequal distribution across gender, race, and class lines, and positioning both women and nature outside of existing structures of power, ecofeminism re-connects the female with the primitive or the pre-modern. To put it slightly differently, both Daly and Griffin tacitly accept a very traditional rendering of femininity in the belief that what has been socially constructed can be deconstructed and thereby differently valued.'® The process of de-reconstruction, by positing an equivalence between women and nature (and/or animals), thus undermines feminist epistemological claims. Claims made by ecofeminists, based as they are on spiritual or intuitive assertions, do not challenge scientific epistemologies as much as they uphold them. By asserting that women’s natural, instinctive, and primal link with nature is superior to man’s rational, objective, and mediated relationship to nature, they remain trapped within the dualistic logic of rationality. . Ecofeminism, however, claims to challenge ‘the dualistic belief that nature and culture are separate and opposed.... [and] finds misogyny at the root of that opposition’ (King, 1989, p. 19). For philosopher Karen Warren, “An ecofeminist perspective is... structurally pluralistic, inclusivist, and contextualist, emphasizing through concrete example the crucial role context plays in understanding sexist and naturist practice’ (1988, p. 151). This perspective is effected, in Warren’s viewpoint, ‘by identifying the prototype of other forms of domination: that of man over woman.’ Attempts to avoid charges of complicity inevitably devolve around being able ‘to step outside of the dualistic, separated world into which we were all born’ (Plant, 198ga, p. 5). Structured around strategies based on essentialized gender differences, ecofeminism facilitates intersections with conserva- tive logic. The Chodorovian belief that women are intrinsically non-hierarchical, nurturing, empathetic, and consensual as opposed to men, who are competitive, emotionally aloof, selfish, and aggressive, upholds the ideological status quo by ceding power (invariably defined as negative)'to men while arrogating

ECOFEMINISM AND ECO-VALENCES 55 a natural moral superiority to women. Judith Williamson claims that ‘If ideology is to represent differences while drawing attention away from social inequality and class struggle, what better than to emphasize differences which cut across class... [such as] the “eternal” sexual difference’ (1986, p. 101). Consequently, Women who protest ‘as women’ against the bomb are either engaging in a very effective use of society’s own values against itself or accepting society’s ideological definition of themselves as inherently more caring. Whatever their uses, the values of interpersonal relations, feeling, and caring are loaded onto women in direct proportion to their offloading from the realities of social and economic activity. (Williamson, 1986, p. 110) Accordingly, protests or resistances based on the connection between women and nature are an extremely risky business these days, always running the likelihood of affirming hegemonic identifications. Whether they intend to do so or not, they more often than not fail to escape from an historical terrain more tenaciously occupied by hegemonic and anti-feminist forces and therefore reproduce stereotypes of female nature. Political strategies, in short, should not be reduced to inten- tionality or individual agency, particularly within a political climate that continues to be anti-feminist. Instead, they need to be viewed as harnessing pre-existing and historically resonant articulations that operate within rigidly particularized circumstances. As Bourdieu puts it, ‘Social agents are the product of history, of the history of the whole social field and of the accumulated experience of a path within the specific subfield’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 136). One of the gravest weaknesses of ecofeminist philosophy, as well as of technophobia in general, involves its limited ability to contextualize. Andrée Collard’s work offers a blatant example of the risks involved in this decontextualization. In 1989, she proclaimed ‘Nothing links the human animal and nature so profoundly as woman’s reproductive system which enables her to share the experience of bringing forth and nourishing life with the rest of the living world’ (1989, p. 106).'' ‘Whether or not she personally

56 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX experiences biological mothering, Collard continues, ‘it is in this [woman’s reproductive system] that woman is most truly a child of nature and in this natural integrity lies the wellspring of her strength’ (p. 106). Every woman, according to this familiar line of thought, is a potential mother. It is instructive to observe how Collard attempts to circumvent the issue of women who cannot bear children in this passage (the implication, it seems to me, is to deny the fact that women may choose not to bear children). The logic of connection herein proposed is extremely amenable to New Right political formations, particularly those anti-abortion offshoots such as ‘Feminists for Life’ and ‘Abortion Survivors’ who claim that women seeking abortions are victims of false consciousness (i.e. they don’t naturally want to kill). In addition, the notion that any woman is a potential mother has been used by conservatives to prevent women from holding jobs in certain industries.’ Finally, to reduce ‘women’ to the sum of their reproductive capacity is a concept that many women find alienating, especially given our varied and variable relationships to our reproductive systems. We must be mindful that, legitimated by a biologism such as a notion of ‘ecological memory’ (Orenstein, 1990, p. 23) specific to women, this technophobic authorization has time and time again served only the interests of conservative politics. Such authorization guarantees that, while ecofeminists may act as ventriloquists for their mute sister (i.e. nature), because of their intermediary status they will always be spoken for and through by the paternalistic voice of reason and true authority. The implication here is that women are more talented at feeling than thinking. Because of this, although ecofeminists may claim to protect nature, both ecofeminism and the environment will always occupy only the status of the protected, and perennially potential, victim. So women are permitted to participate in the management and development of their environments (in terms, of course, set and controlled by the protector), and this per- mission is celebrated on the basis of its recognition that, as in the Rio de Janeiro environmental summit’s terms, ‘Women have a vital role in environmental managément and development’

ECOFEMINISM AND ECO-VALENCES 57) (‘Draft of Environmental Rules, 1992, p. Aro). Nevertheless, this participation must always be acknowledged and controlled by those who are truly in power in order to assume even symbolic legitimacy. Constructing environments We are the rocks, we are soil, we are trees, rivers, we are wind, we carry the birds, we are cows, mules, we are horses... We are flesh, we breathe, we are her body: we speak. (Griffin, 1978, p. 46) In “The Promises of Monsters, Donna Haraway describes a ‘political semiology of representation’ in which ‘the only actor left is the spokesperson, the one who represents’ (199ICc, p. 312). The object of this representational practice is rendered ‘Permanently speechless, forever requiring the services of a ventriloquist, never forcing a recall vote, [and] in each case the object or ground of representation is the realization of the representative’s fondest dream’ (p. 311). Haraway describes the consequences of this form of representation as a decontextualization in which ‘Everything that used to surround and sustain the represented object ... simply disappears or re-enters the drama as an agonist’ (p. 312). A dimension of this argument that remains unexplored by Haraway is the ‘political semiology of representation’ undertaken by ecofeminists. Ecofeminists, in short, also engage in ‘distancing operations’ in which the ‘represented must be disengaged from surrounding and constituting discursive and nondiscursive nexuses and relocated in the authorial domain of the representative’ (Haraway, 19gIc, p. 312). When used by ecofeminists, this radical decontextualization produces similar problems: it produces (and reproduces) nature as an object isolated from its historical, cultural, and political surroundings, with drastic consequences for political analyses. The three quotations at the beginning of this chapter provide important insights into this very problematic. The natural world

58 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX for which Plant speaks is characteristic of the natural world stereotypically considered at risk in environmental discourses. Of course, this version of an environment is not unimportant, but it is worth emphasizing that the view from her cabin does not include a vista of East St. Louis or South Central Los Angeles, which points to both its specificity, as well as its decontextualizing force. In ecofeminist thought as well as mainstream environmentalism, what counts as an environment generally does not extend to urban areas. Nor, it should be added, does it extend to the often toxic work places in which adults (and children) spend much of their lives. The general association of environmental concerns with leisure-time activities is thus legitimated through a representational framework that rigidly distinguishes between a pre-industrial, romanticized environment and industrialized non-environments inhabited on an everyday basis. The decontextualization in which nature and environments signify in class- and race-specific fashions is evident in ecofeminist appropriations of Native American mythologies. While the recuperation of spiritual beliefs and myths from Native American cultures is elevated as a paradigm for ecofeminist approaches to living, it operates at a suspicious distance from the dire environmental and economic issues besetting Native Americans in the present. For example, for Navajo teenagers reproductive cancer is seventeen times the national average. According to Elizabeth Martinez and Louis Head, ‘About half of all Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans live in communities with one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites’ (1992, p.29). The US government has long been tempting economically devastated Native American communities with the location of toxic waste sites on tribal lands. For the US government and its corporate cronies, the benefits of this arrangement are staggering: environmental regulations do not apply to tribal lands. The negative consequences for the communities, on the other hand, are equally staggering: tribes would be held completely responsible for the integrity of storage facilities, as well as health risks, for an indeterminate period of time. An appropriation of Native American cultures that ignores or

ECOFEMINISM AND ECO-VALENCES 59 does not engage with the material conditions of those communities decontextualizes at the same time that it reveals the class and race specificity of its proponents. These specificities of subjective positioning are likewise manifested in the unmediated, visceral connections posited by ecofeminist philosophies between women nd nature. Presuppositions about the nature and quality of women’s relationship to nature cannot question accessibility to such naturalized relationships. For example, for those residing in urban settings, does ‘Nature speak to us and in us’ (Griffin, 1989, p. 17) in uniform ways? The intimate experience of nature adduced by Griffin and other ecofeminists seems limited by classed and raced positions, but problems related to this are avoided by ecofeminists through the claim that women — as gatherers and farmers — have historically had closer connections to the earth. This argument may have had validity in preindustrial periods, as well as in regions where women still retain primary responsibility for subsistence farming (and are among the first to witness the effects of environmental degradation and pollution), but it hardly applies to the predicament of urbanized poor women.” Consequently, the level of what Bourdieu calls ‘ontological complicity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 128) is striking within ecofeminist theory around the taken-for-grantedness of women’s privileged and gender-segregated access to nature. Many of the most urgent environmental problems confronting poor African-American women, Latinas, Native-Americans, and poor white women — who are more or less invisible since class is not a category of analysis for most ecofeminists — involve urban environments and poverty. For these communities, the problem cannot be criticized through the concept of ‘male culture,’ since male members of impoverished communities are also affected by environmental pollution.’ Nor can these issues be framed or resolved through a romanticized reference to women and nature that does not exist in the same way (if at all) in urban settings.’®

60 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX In part, the repression of the class and race specificity of environmental demographics results from: itsacceptance of the deep ecologist critique of ‘anthropocentrism, or ‘species-ism.’ Constructing a monolithic version of humanity, in which human beings uniformly enjoy a privileged status over nature, the critique of anthropocentrism in effect ignores how certain subjects, by virtue of skin color, economic status, or gender, do not have access to such centrality within existing structures of power. Collard’s assertion that ‘Re-connecting in kinship to the non-human world around us is the first real-step toward saving the earth and all its species from destruction’ (1989, p. 28) can be made only from a position wherein access to some nonhuman nature is universally available and in which kinship relations within the human world are unproblematic. Consumerism The absence of political contexts in ecofeminist arguments and interventions is linked not only to class-specific interests and class-structured blindnesses, but also to the related privatization and consumerization of environmentalism. L. A. Kauffman explains the problem of ‘this New Left intertwining of the personal and the political’ as an end-run around real politics ... Divorced from its original collective context, the personalized politics of the 1960s has turned into an effective means for would-be radicals to hold onto the sense of being political — a commitment to principled daily life, an engagement with far-flung and disparate causes, a will to ‘think globally and act locally’ — without ever engaging in actual contests over power. (1991, p. 296) This ‘commitment to principled daily life’ is reflected in King’s statement that, Direct [ecofeminist] actions include learning holistic health and alter- native ecological technologies, living in communities that explore old and new forms of spirituality which celebrate all life as diverse expressions of nature, considering the ecological consequences of our

ECOFEMINISM AND ECO-VALENCES 61 lifestyles and personal habits, and participating in creative public forms of resistance. (1989, p. 25) The sequencing of these “direct actions’ is revealing: only the final example moves beyond the parameters of individual lifestyles. Even the reference to ‘participating in creative public forms of resistance’ seems to proceed from an emphasis on creative lifestyles rather than coalition politics. Anne Cameron takes this one step further, suggesting that: “Every decision a person makes in her life is a personal, political, and spiritual decision’ (1989, p. 58). From sucha relativizing and individualizing perspective, it becomes difficult to make crucial distinctions between levels of political action and commitment, thus reproducing the fragmentation and decontextualization of environmental problems. Another effect of a fragmentary approach to environmental problems is the belief that political action is only effective — indeed, only possible — at the level of the local and of consumption more narrowly. The power mobilized in most direct and local actions furthermore depends on one’s ability to consume, or one’s status as a consumer. This model emphasizes that political power is wielded only by consumers and only at a micropolitical level. In Ms. magazine, T. J. Ford’s ‘EarthFriendly Ecotips’ offer the following advice: Try to reduce or eliminate meat from your diet.... If you do eat meat, try to ensure that it was not raised on lands where rain forests were cleared for grazing. If possible, eat organically grown food; join your local grocery cooperative. Boycott irresponsible or unethical corporations — it really works. Good examples are the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) boycott of table grapes and the tuna boycott to protest nets that killed dolphins. (1990, p. 17) In this excerpt, the politics of the meat industry, and the capitalism that drives this industry, are effaced by a concern for the rain forests (other instances of deforestation being less critical from a first world perspective). Political action is reduced to

62 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX consumerism, with an emphasis on buying the appropriate environmentally sanctioned products. Even more troubling is the conflation of the UFW ‘boycott of table grapes and the tuna boycott to protest nets that killed dolphins.’ While Ford gives an explanation for the tuna boycott, she never describes the objective of the UFW boycott: to protect mostly migrant farm workers from oppressive and exploitative employment conditions and lethal agricultural chemicals.”” Such variants of ecofeminism, moreover, emphasize consump- tion rather than conservation, completely sidestepping one of the central causes of environmental degradation in the first world: overconsumptionism.'® Conservation being incompatible within a system driven by consumption, environmentalism has been transformed into an intrinsic part of bourgeois culture, marketed side by side with high-tech accessories.” This is ‘the personal is the political’ with a vengeance: a space where environmentalism is reduced to another form of commodity fetishism, where decisions about buying environmentally correct paper products and diapers define the limits of what counts as ‘political,’ and where saving endangered species in distant lands provides an alibi for ignoring local ecosystem destruction and human suffering. The commodification of environmentalism also erases the human and environmental consequences of development in third world countries: the World Wildlife Federation, which supports the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), markets ties emblazoned with endangered species (and donates a percentage of the proceeds to environmental groups) — products invariably manufactured in Taiwan, Singapore, or the Philippines. Multinational corporate offenders also use environmentalism to sell a more benign image. In the US, ‘nature’ programs on television are frequently sponsored by multinationals (especially oil corporations) and a recent television commercial shows frolicking dolphins and whales, while the voice-over extolls the environmental integrity of the company that also brought us Agent Orange.” As Marx once commented,

ECOFEMINISM AND ECO-VALENCES 63 [A]ll progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.... Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of wealth — the soil and the labourer. (Marx, 1984, I, pp. 474-5) It is this sense of interconnection that is rendered impossible through technophobia, be it ecofeminist or otherwise. The oppression experienced in various ways by women and the exploitation of the environment can be synonymous, moreover, only from the perspective of a particular feminist environment. Without a theory that can account for this particularity and its relation to the larger system of capitalist production, ecofeminism’s universalizing and essentializing claims consequently contribute to reinforcing the very imbalances they purport to remedy.”! The ‘feminist matristic vision’ that Orenstein defines as being ‘about politics in the feminist sense, rather than about political systems as such’ (1990, p. xvii) is a vision that exists in and for an imaginary and privileged environment, distinct from the realm of capital and natural and social environments more brutally devastated by capitalism. To conclude then, it might be most useful to view feminist technophobia as the product of a specific habitus. According to Loic J. D. Wacquant, “Habitus is a structuring mechanism that operates from within agents, though it is neither strictly individual nor in itself fully determinative of conduct’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 18). It is, in other words, ‘a system of dispositions adjusted to the game it proposes, a sense of the game and its stakes that implies at once an inclination and an ability to play the game, both of which are socially and historically constituted rather than universally given’ (p. 118). If feminist technophobia can reconstruct history (at both individual and collective levels), it is because it is in its interests to do so. If feminist technophobia can concentrate solely on romanticized and isolated pre-industrial landscapes, it is because

64 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX that is where it is at home: ‘when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a “fish in water”: it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 127). If ecofeminists can ignore the social and economic disparities that exist within capitalism, which entails jettisoning the issue not only of postmodernity, but of the present in any form, it is because they enjoy ‘a distance from economic necessity’ in the absence of which ‘agents cannot develop the temporal dispositions necessary for conceiving the possibility of a future pregnant with options’ (p. 125). But Bourdieu observed that habitus is durable but not eternal (p. 33). The trick lies in learning to see the limits of one’s own garden and what lies beyond those limits. Notes Ll The quotation in the title comes from Solomon’s Song, 4:12. This chapter was originally published in Cultural Studies 8(1), January 1994. 2 For an extensive analysis of the media’s treatment of environmental issues, see ‘After Earth Day: A Survey of Environmental Reporting,’ in Extra! (1992). 3 Both the Socialist Review’s special issue entitled “Environment as Politics: The Shifting Ground of Activism’ (1992) and Robert Bullard’s anthology Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (1993) contain important and instructive critiques of mainstream environmentalism. 4 The implications of this ‘bridge-like’ position are analyzed in This Bridge Called My Back (1981), edited by Moraga and Anzaldta. 5 Michael Taussig’s comments about his ethnographic work, might stage useful confrontations with the dangers of Daly and Griffin’s pre-capitalist nostalgia. In The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), he cautions: “Confronted with this modern mode of comprehension it is all too easy to slip into other forms of idealism, and also into an uncritical nostalgia for times past when human relations were not seen as objectrelations beholden to marketing strategies’ (1980, p. 7). His strategy for countering this would be instructive for ecofeminists: ‘we adhere to a mode of interpretation that is unremittingly aware of its procedures and categories.... this self-awareness must be acutely sensitive to the social roots and historicity of the abstractions that we employ at any stage of the process’ (p. 7). '

ECOFEMINISM AND ECO-VALENCES 65 6 Although Lorde does not contest Daly’s claims in Gyn/Ecology on the basis of essentialism, she does assert that ‘to imply, however, that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy. It is to ignore how those tools are used by women without awareness against each other’ (1981, P: 95)- In Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (1993), Rosemary Hennessy offers an excellent analysis of such reworkings of the ‘new’ in her chapter entitled ‘New Woman, New History.’ oo Alice Echols (1989) claims that this particular essay marks the beginning of a rupture between a radical feminism based on political analysis and a cultural feminism based on the celebration of women. While the centrality of Alpert’s essay may be debatable, the early seventies marked a sea change that bears further scrutiny and analysis. For a perceptive, if overly generous, discussion of Mary Daly’s work, see Meaghan Morris’ ‘A-mazing Grace’ in The Pirate’s Fiancé (1988b). Io I_ I2 The belief that the connection between women and nature is not socially constructed and that this alliance is natural and real points to another logical failure in ecofeminist arguments about social constructionism. Such arguments insist that social constructions are exclusively man-made and consequently on a par with the technologies that ecofeminists would have women reject, but they seldom consider the fact that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘nature’ are themselves socially constructed categories. Biehl (1991) has a very strong critique of the ambiguity and duplicity with which the term ‘social construction’ is used by ecofeminists. For examples of how the judicial system deploys such myths of the natural against women, see Colb (1992). I am grateful to Linda Baughman for drawing my attention to this essay. There is an interesting tension in this section of Rape of the Wild between Collard’s text and notes made by Joyce Contrucci, who edited the book after Collard’s death in 1986. Citing Katha Pollitt’s writings in The Nation on motherhood, Contrucci’s reservations about Collard’s work surface in the form of notes advising the reader to keep important distinctions between the ‘popular sense’ of terms like ‘surrogates’ and ‘surrogate’ mothers and Collard’s allegedly distinct (and distinguishable) use of these (1989, p. 107). 28) Both Susan Faludi (1991) and Carol Tavris (1992) offer analyses of how this difference argument is deployed against working-class women. Johnson Controls, for example, the largest auto battery manufacturer in the US, attempted to ban women from employment at its plants because of the danger of lead exposure (in 1991, women workers won in the Supreme Court, although they were given no compensation for the nine years of lost wages). In 1978, American Cyanamid unveiled a ‘fetal protection’

66 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX policy that barred women of childbearing age from working in particular production jobs. Women workers were given an option, however: ‘voluntary’ sterilization. The five women who underwent the procedure filed suit (and lost) against the company; they were some of the first to be laid off in the 1980s (Faludi, 1991, pp. 440-53). 14 In the US, ecofeminists repeatedly refer to the Chipko movement in India (in which women successfully prevented deforestation and the destruction of their means of subsistence by refusing to remove themselves from trees). Not only does this example lose its political and historical context when uncritically mapped onto a US context, it also contributes to the romanticism that is a fundamental aspect of US ecofeminism. 15 This is not, of course, to suggest that communities of color are not concerned about environmental degradation, but that neither the media nor mainstream environmentalists appear particularly concerned with their efforts in this area. As Martinez and Head remark, ‘communities of color have always been concerned about contaminated water, poisoned land or animals, and all manner of deadly effects on their daily lives. But they may not have called these problems “environmental” — a problem with the scope of the term as used by the media, not with the consciousness of people of color’ (1992, p. 30). 16 Anti-racist environmental groups do indeed exist within the United States. A few examples of groups engaged in this work are: Coalition for Justice in the Magiladoras in San Antonio, Texas; Environmental Health Coalition in San Diego, California; National Toxics Campaign in Boston, Massachusetts; the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center in Lake Andes, South Dakota; and Texans United Education Fund in Houston, Texas. 17 Leaving such equivalences aside, Ford does not mention the level of political organization necessary for the success of such boycotts. 18 A central multinational tactic in global environmental discussions, particu- larly around regulations to decelerate ozone depletion, has been to emphasize the imaginary excesses of consumption in the third world, while downplaying the all too real excesses of the first world. : 19 A visit to shopping malls in the United States will confirm this weird symbiosis. The past five or more years have witnessed the appearance of any number of stores devoted exclusively to selling nature. Stuffed animals representing endangered species, rain forest jigsaw puzzles, and ‘whole earth’ T-shirts are only a few of the commodities being sold by these chains. 20 To take one popular example, while “Save the Rain Forest’ may invoke important concerns about the fate of the forests, at the same time it structures an imaginary rain forest, populated only by various forms of flora and fauna, threatened from the outside by irresponsible ‘natives’

ECOFEMINISM AND ECO-VALENCES 67 and their equally irresponsible governments. In addition to ignoring the extreme poverty in which the indigenous peoples struggle to survive, the primeval forest also eclipses the role that the United States (via the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) has played in producing the crisis by irrevocably altering the economy of such countries. To ‘Save the Rain Forest’ without offering alternative economic possibilities would entail an enormous cost in human suffering and lives. Although the plight of the humans living in such areas has received more attention lately (Hecht and Cockburn, 1989; Haraway, rgg1c), it is also relevant that many of these texts focus on the seemingly spontaneous political eruption of ‘indigenous peoples’ and ‘subordinated knowledges’ to the exclusion of the Marxist labor organizers and organizations that catalyzed these struggles. 21 Daniel Faber and James O’Connor’s critique of environmentalism offers a useful reminder about the problems of single-issue approaches: Environmentalism’s single issue, legislative approach has led capital to displace costs in different forms from one site to another. The movement’s weak analysis of capitalism has helped lead to unintended, adverse effects on the well-being of people and their environments. While environmentalists respond to ecological dangers, capital responds to its own iron laws. Regional and local movements and coalitions by and large have not looked beyond their own areas to assess the effects elsewhere of their own local or regional successes. (1989, p. 28)

2 Shooting the mother fetal photography and the politics of disappearance What name shall we call our selves now our mother is gone? (Audre Lorde, 1978, p. 21) As we have seen, feminist technophobia works through the idealist belief that history can be re-invented, re-constructed, and re-presented in the interests of women. Evacuated of its symbolic and material valences, the defining characteristic of womanhood — thé maternal — offers the paradigm for visions of the future. Despite their best attempts to hedge their bets, theorists like Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, and Sara Ruddick come down squarely on the side of a gender difference that views femininity as superior to masculinity. For feminist technomania, history no longer matters. Political meanings are not necessarily attached to a given category, but are produced contingently, locally, and provisionally. For Judith Butler, “To deconstruct the concept of matter or that of bodies is not to negate or refuse either term. To deconstruct these terms means, rather, to continue to use them, to repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from the contexts in which they have been deployed as instruments of oppressive power’ (1992, p. 17). Despite the centrality of this schematization within feminist theory, the opposition between essentialism and anti-essentialism is not, to my mind, the most productive analytic with regard to feminist work. After all, feminists must appeal to some category known as ‘women’ in’ order to contest issues

SHOOTING THE MOTHER 69 of violence, discrimination, and anti-abortion legislation. This chapter is interested in essentialism merely insofar as ‘the critique of essentialism is understood not as an exposure of error, our own or others, but as an acknowledgment of the dangerousness of what one must use’ (Spivak, 1989, p. 129). If, as Spivak further proposes, “We have nothing but the practice of essences’ (p. 142; emphasis added), then the most pressing questions center upon the practices, essentialist, anti-essentialist, or some- where in between, in which feminists must engage. The distinction between feminist technophobia and feminist technomania might be summarized as a technophobic project of re-contextualization versus a technomanic de- or extra-contextualization. Neither, however, contains a methodology capable of addressing Teresa DeLauretis’ question: ‘If the deconstruction of gender inevitably effects its (re)construction, ... in which terms and in whose interest 1s the de-re-construction being effected?’ (1987, p. 24). As Stuart Hall has remarked, ‘Ideas only become effective if they do, in the end, connect with a particular constellation of social forces’ (1986b, p. 42). It is the necessity of this connection that both technophobia and technomania neglect, which is another way of saying that both trajectories neglect historical determinations. Diana Fuss claims that “The question we should be asking is not “is this text essentialist (and therefore ‘bad’)”, but rather, “if this text is essentialist, what motivates its deployment?”’ (1989, p. xi). The twinned issues of deployment and context, and not so much motivation or intentionality, form the main thrust of the following argument. To move beyond Fuss’s original question, I want to ask: If this text or strategy takes an essentialist approach, how is it, or can it be, deployed by antifeminist forces? Or, more to the point, how can re-contextualiz- ations and de-contextualizations serve the interests of conservative politics? How has the New Right, to paraphrase Butler, ‘deconstructed’ motherhood, repeated it ‘subversively’, and ‘dis- placed’ it from a context in which it continues to be deployed as an instrument of oppressive power?

70 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX Mommy dearest Visual representations of fetal autonomy in the service of New Right politics have played a pivotal role in the transformation of the female body from a benevolent, maternal environment into an inhospitable waste land, at war with the ‘innocent person’ within. This transformation offers a paradox indeed for feminism in the nineties, for just as the articulation of woman with nature, feminized environments, and motherhood produces reactionary and regressive configurations of femininity, so the disarticulation of woman and mother constructs an equally reactionary problematic.! In terms of visual and reproductive technologies, and the political interests these technologies often serve, what we are witnessing is the result of not a regression, but a progression. In short, the division between woman and fetus is historically unprecedented, and its novelty makes the resulting articulations strained and fractured. This project of disarticulation, which has been underway for at least two decades, can be alternately read as anti-essentialist (insofar as it denies the material specificity of women’s bodies) or as a process of humanizing technology, which then figures as the sign of paternalistic intervention. I do not want to reduce a complicated combination of historical and political circumstances to the results of technological advances, i.e. fetal visualization and technology, but I do want to analyze how visual technologies, in a society dependent upon images, have played an important role in erasing women’s bodies. Effects, Raymond Williams cautioned, are far too often studied to the exclusion of social contexts, with the resulting ignorance that: just these factors and norms are themselves effects; they are the established institutions, relationships and values of a given order of society. Primary causes, in the given order of society, are then ordinarily displaced by a doubtful sphere of effects taken as causes, with the study of effects then becoming, in real terms, the isolable effects of effects. (1992, p. 120) The re-contextualizations of technophobia and the de-contex-

SHOOTING THE MOTHER 71 tualizations of technomania, in short, abstract technology from the context of a given set of social relations and conflate effects with causes. The technologies analyzed in the following pages are, in fact, intentions and effects of a particular social order. It is not, as some feminists would argue, that technology alienates women from their bodies, but that technologies reflect the interests of institutions that depend upon such alienating effects. In terms of traditional maternal environments, female interests normally have been subsumed beneath the interests of the family, but this more recent and explicit erasure has little to do with martyrdom or self-sacrifice.’ Instead, ‘fetal personhood’ depends upon the invisibility of female bodies and the reduction of women to passive, reproductive machines, as in the highly publicized cases of ‘brain-dead’ or comatose women who are kept alive long enough to give birth (Hartouni, 1991, pp. 27—30). Where previous appeals to motherhood obfuscated female subjectivity and sexuality through forms of synecdoche, this recent disarticulation functions not simply through identifying a part as the whole, but through the repression of material female bodies. The maternal space has been caused to disappear. What has emerged in its place is an environment that the fetus alone occupies. In order for the embryo/fetus to emerge as autonomous — as a person, patient, or individual in its own right — all traces of a female body (as well as the embryo’s location within that body) must disappear.’ The erstwhile docile body of the mother has given way to representations of women who must fight on both domestic and economic fronts for their survival, as well as that of their children. The anxieties activated by this shift can be seen in contemporary popular culture. In the film The Seventh Sign (1986), a pregnant Demi Moore repeatedly hears a voice asking: ‘Will you die for him?’ In the conclusion, she averts Armageddon by giving birth to a savior and then expiring. The main character in Switch (1991) redeems her/his recalcitrant soul by bearing a child (conceived through date rape, no less).* The child, ‘the only woman who loves him,’ is delivered, whereupon the protagonist immediately departs, presumably to Heaven.

72 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX These popular discourses of maternal altruism, however, are only part of the larger picture. The alternative is clearly and antithetically proposed: on one hand, the traditional, passive, self-sacrificing mother; while on the other, a world in which, as Hartouni observes, ‘women have lost heart or touch with the deepest source of their identity and thus have become not only dysfunctional but potentially dangerous’ (1991, p. 43). Morality plays about the dangerous and unnatural anti-mother, such as Fatal Attraction (1988), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), and Basic Instinct (1992), vividly illustrate this dilemma. Even when a ‘mother’ is referred to, the proliferation of definitions activated by reproductive technologies (from “birth mother’ to ‘genetic mother’ to ‘surrogate mother’) fragments this once unitary entity. Where the ideology of maternal altruism and self-sacrifice once functioned, in hegemonic terms, to gain the consent of female subjects to dominant ideologies, the contradictions inherent in this particular historical conjuncture (which include limited, but symbolically weighted, gains in terms of female sexuality and reproductive rights, as well as an increasingly feminized labor force) make such traditional ideologies more difficult to sustain than in the past.’ If female bodies can no longer be entirely disciplined with subjects’ consent, they must nonetheless be disciplined. The disappearance of female bodies is most violently enacted in legal cases invoking the category of ‘fetal rights.’ Whatever rights women may have had within the legal system (and historically certain groups of women, by virtue of race and class privilege, have always enjoyed a fuller subject status vis-a-vis the law than others) are dramatically being reversed in the interests of an amorphous subject: the fetus, or, as advocates of IVF (in vitro fertilization) technologies as well as anti-abortion factions put it, ‘the early human being.’ The visual technologies used to isolate the embryo as astronaut, extraterrestrial, or aquatic entity have had enormously repressive reverberations in the legal and medical management of women’s bodies. A sampling of such legal repercussions will suffice to illustrate this point. In June 1986, Angela Carder, a twenty-eight-year-old white woman,

SHOOTING THE MOTHER 73 twenty-six weeks pregnant, who had twice before received a terminal prognosis for bone cancer, was ordered by the Washington court system to undergo a caesarean section. Against Carder’s explicit wishes, against the opinion of her attending oncologist, against the protests of her husband and parents, the doctors refused to prescribe chemotherapy because of its potential effects on the fetus. According to Susan Faludi: instead of treating her cancer, they jammed a tube down her throat and pumped her with sedatives, a strategy to delay the hour of death. Carder tried to fight this ‘treatment’, her mother says, remembering how her daughter thrashed and twisted on the bed, fending off the doctors. ‘She said, “No, no, no. Don’t do that to me.” But Carder lost the battle and was, quite literally, silenced. With the tube in place, she couldn’t speak. (1991, p- 433) The operation was performed shortly thereafter. Carder barely lived long enough to hear that the fetus extracted from her uterus had died, if indeed it could be said to have lived at all.° The postpartum version of policing has come to be known as ‘fetal neglect.’ In 1987, Pamela Rae Stewart, according to Katha Pollitt, was ‘advised by her obstetrician to stay off her feet, to eschew sex and “street drugs,” and to go to the hospital immediately if she start[ed] to bleed’ (Pollitt, 1990a, p. 409). When she gave birth to a brain-damaged child who died, she was charged ‘with failing to deliver support to a child.’ Her lover, who had apparently had sexual intercourse with Stewart, and had beaten her, was never charged. In 1990, after the Webster decision ensured that gubernatorial elections would determine the outcome of abortion rights at the state level, ABC’s Nightline broadcast a special program entitled ‘Abortion: The New Civil War’; the program was broadcast on the Thursday evening before election day.’ The designation of the abortion debates as ‘the New Civil War’ is revealing of the amputation of embryos and fetuses from female bodies. In terms of a popular American context, the term ‘Civil War’ has the added resonance of the conflict between the North

74 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX (or Union) and the South (or Confederacy) over the issue of slavery. When applied to abortion rights,.the: analogy has an added symbolic valence. As represented on Nightline, it is a conflict between ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ advocates (hereafter referred to as ‘pro-abortion’ and ‘anti-abortion’) — a conflict that, like the Civil War, can even divide the unity of families along ideological lines.’ In a racist analogy, anti-abortion factions liken the situation of ‘the fetus’ to that of African-Americans: a group in Maryland, for example, calls themselves the “National Association for the Advancement of Preborn Children’ (NAAPC). The key to this rhetoric lies in another civil war, the groundwork for which has been steadily developing over the past thirty years; a civil war occurring not within the nation-state or body politic, but within female bodies themselves. While, historically, the embryo/fetus had no autonomy of its own (indeed, the quickening that told of life in the womb was a perceptual observation determined by the woman herself), since the late seventies,a dichotomy between the pregnant woman as maternal environment and the fetus as a person in its own right has emerged in both popular culture and medical-legal discourses. This then is the ‘New Civil War, in which an erstwhile benevolent, nurturing, and ideal environment has been transformed into a hostile, infanticidal toxic waste dump, from which the autonomous (and, one might infer, autochthonous) ‘person’ must be protected by the paternalistic arm of the government. The articulation of the embryo with victims of racism and of the Holocaust thus logically — if obscenely — proceeds from this logic. The penetrating tale of the sperm’ This is the first portrait ever made of a living embryo inside its mother’s womb. It is one of an unprecedented set of color photographs — strikingly complete in their clinical detail but at the same time strangely beautiful — of human embryos in their natural state. (Life: Magazine, 30 April 1965)

SHOOTING THE MOTHER ys On these pages is our first sight of an event as common and as ancient as humankind — the way each of us came to be. (Life Magazine, August 1990) In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson had recently been inaugurated as President for his first full term, the war in Vietnam was escalat- ing, as were racial tensions within the US, and the Civil Rights Act had been passed by the US Congress before the summer recess. On 30 April, the cover of Life Magazine displayed the photograph of a ‘Living 18-Week-Old Fetus,’ under the dramatic caption ‘Unprecedented Photographic Feat in Color’ (Figure 3.1). Cut to August 1990, twenty-five years later. In response to an anticipated Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, President George Bush mobilized the largest number of armed forces since the Vietnam War to stage a military blockade in the Middle East. The Louisiana Supreme Court was debating the terms of the most restrictive abortion bill in the US, while other states were gearing up for gubernatorial elections that in a number of states hinged on the candidates’ stands on abortion rights. Many of a younger generation of US feminists could not recall a time when an abortion was legally (if not economically) denied to them, but they were gradually coming to anticipate the worst. At this particular historical moment, Life again presented “The First Pictures Ever of How Life Begins’ (Figure 3.2). Separated by a quarter of a century, these two texts provide a unique illustration of the ideological shifts around the categories of ‘woman’ and ‘embryo’/fetus’. The narrative construction of this ‘empirical’ evidence suggests that the political stakes are very differently motivated in each case — that the skirmishes over, around, and through female bodies involve varying productions of meaning. These distinctions, moreover, cannot be reduced to or explained by technological advances, since, as we shall see, many of the photographs ostensibly represent the same, if not identical, gestational sequence of events. Instead, these narratives invoke visual technologies in the interests of shifting political formations. In 1965, abortion was illegal and,

nprecedentead photographic feat amore sg DRAMA OF LIFE agua ts eis Bae aS ea Messe loa Mt: al its arnniotic sac~— placenta is seen at rig’ APRIL 30 « 1965 + 35¢

SHOOTING THE MOTHER 77 although feminists had been protesting and organizing since at least the late fifties, the second wave of feminism had yet to converge politically upon the issue. What we see in 1990, on the other hand, is the result of the conservative restoration: more than a decade of increasing attacks on abortion rights and a strongly aligned political opposition to Roe v. Wade." In 1965, technology offered readers of Life their first ‘realistic’ glimpse into the hitherto impenetrable womb (‘Drama of Life Before Birth’, 1965). Although for a time, X-rays had offered shadowy glimpses of a skeletal embryo, reports about the harmful effects of these had curtailed the use of X-rays by the late 1950s. And in 1965, the now familiar sonographic images had yet to appear on the cultural scene. The cover of the magazine informs us that the dim image encased in a bubble represents a ‘Living 18-month-old fetus shown inside its amniotic sac — placenta is seen at right.’ Concealed within the middle of the first page of text is the curious statement that “The embryos shown on the following pages had been surgically removed for a variety of reasons’ (emphasis added). Immediately following this disclaimer, the author adds, ‘But, using a specially built super wide-angle lens and a tiny flash beam at the end of a surgical scope, Nilsson was able to shoot this picture of a living 15-week-old embryo.” While the consistent use of the present tense works to sustain the illusion of ‘life,’ at one point the text accompanying one photograph admits that ‘this embryo is an imperfect one (the tissue at the right is torn and ragged).’ To confuse matters even further, although the article designates eight weeks as the point at which the ‘embryo’ becomes a ‘fetus,’ the fifteen-week-old entity, biologically a ‘fetus,’ is described as an ‘embryo.’ In attempting to construct a chronological narrative, a first, ambient portrait of life, the text foregrounds the animate status of the cover shot, thereby insinuating that all the photographs represent ‘human embryos in their natural state’ (emphasis added). A careful reading of the text, however, reveals that all the photographs within the article are of autopsied embryos (‘embryo had been removed from sacs,’ ‘the spongy placenta .. .

ea REE MCU MILES aa (Source: Life Magazine cover, 1990)

SHOOTING THE MOTHER 79 has been partially peeled back here for better visibility,’ ‘the fetus has been backlighted’). What has been patched together, consequently, to simulate life is — ironically — death. Again, if attempts to represent the contents of the uterus as autonomous or separable from the female body itself ultimately break down under scrutiny, the technological and textual confusion of 1965’s ‘Drama of Life Before Birth’ is reducible not simply to its technological backwardness, but to its different ideological purpose and historical positioning. In other words, questions about the status of the embryo/fetus are not urgent in the way they are after Roe v. Wade. ‘Life’ exists ‘before birth’: common sense guarantees the embryo/fetus’ status as living human being. While the article certainly works to buttress this common sense, defensive maneuvers around the ontological status of the embryo/fetus are not necessary because the woman, or mother, is not yet a threat. In other words, the fetus does not need to be separated from the woman’s body in order to be protected from her. So, in 1965, the mother can be shot through, but she does not need to be erased; traces of her presence remain, both discursively and through the inclusion of the placenta in the photographs. In keeping with still dominant conceptualizations of motherhood, the absent body is consistently referred to as ‘the mother.’ The photographs are ‘the first portrait ever made of a living embryo inside its mother’s womb’ and, although they irrevocably alter the concept of the family photo album, they remain firmly situated within traditional familial ideologies. Reminders that the mother is more than mere surface or screen — that, in fact, she is absolutely central to the processes being described — sprinkle the text: ‘at 34 weeks, the embryo is so tiny — about a tenth of an inch long — that the mother may not even know she is pregnant’; at eleven weeks, ‘as the fetus’ living quarters get more cramped and as it gains steadily in strength, the mother will begin to feel the’ sharp kick and thrust of foot, knee and elbow,’ while, at eighteen weeks, ‘It can make an impressively hard fist, and the punches and kicks are plainly felt by the mother.’ ‘Mother,’ in these passages,

80 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX invokes a sentient, sympathetic, and self-sacrificing presence, and whatever violence taking place is enacted by the fetus itself. The traditional warmth and benevolence of the maternal landscape is emphasized in an essay following the 1965 montage, suggestively entitled ‘Pushed Out into a Hostile World’ (Rosenfeld, 1965). This article extols the traditional virtues of the maternal space over that of a cold, cruel world, waxing poetic about the ‘Marvels of the Placenta.’ The ‘tranquility of his mother’s womb’ and the ‘mother’s cozy 98° F’ environment are juxtaposed against ‘the hostile world, full of startlingly unfamiliar conditions.’ Against this tranquil and cozy environment, the ‘baby’ figures as a parasitic organism. “The baby,’ as the text baldly puts it, ‘is a parasite. From the day of fertilization, the embryo becomes foreign material. The woman’s body does not reject the embryo because of the mediations of the placenta. She tolerates it only because of the placenta’s unique ability to subvert her immunological defenses.’ The fact that the fetus is an organism that feeds off the mother’s body, that the symbiosis is biologically one-sided, is a concept never voiced in contemporary debates, where the woman’s body figures not as tolerant, but downright hostile and murderous.” A quarter of a century after ‘Drama of Life Before Birth,’ Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson once again penetrated the womb to allow spectators “Our first sight of an event as common and as ancient as humankind — the way each of us came to be’ (‘The First Days of Creation, r1990).’? In 1990, however, ‘He has embraced complex high-tech tools such as scanning electron microscopes . . . and tiny endoscopes that can peer inside a woman’s womb.”* The result of this technological intercourse? In contrast to the 1965 cover photograph of an eighteen-week-old fetus, the August 1990 cover presents a seven-week-old fetus. And within the pages of Life, the gestational clock has been turned back even further — from three and one-half weeks to two hours. The earlier atmosphere of liberal tolerance, moreover, has given way to a dark, amorphous background, from which all evidence of a female body, as well ‘as any connection to a

SHOOTING THE MOTHER 81 maternal environment, have disappeared. The photographs contain no traces of either the amniotic sac or placenta, while, textually, the distinction between embryo/fetus and female body is elaborately reinforced. Initially referred to as ‘the woman’ in the text, after eight days ‘she’ is transformed into the ‘mother’ (although women who have had ‘repeated miscarriages’ remain ‘some women’). In 1965, the placenta figures as the life-sustaining link between woman and embryo/fetus: “Through the placenta the vein brings in food, oxygen and various chemical substances from the mother, while the arteries take back waste material for the mother to get rid of.’ In place of this circular movement of food and waste, in 1990 “The embryo has its own blood supply separate from the mother’s, but the placenta brings the two systems next to each other.’ Instead of being a symbiotic link between woman and embryo, the placenta becomes a modem that permits communication between two distinct, and separate environments. Thus, both visually and textually, the embryo/fetus enjoys a thoroughly autonomous status. In contrast to the modest ‘drama’ staged in 1965, “The First Days of Creation’ offers a Biblical epic of alienation, peril, and conflict. Mobilizing a rhetoric of militarism, it emphasizes the perils of an infinitely inhospitable environment, where the twohour-old, Rambo-esque blastocyst must defy and overcome a hostile system: the roo or so sperm cells that survived the journey up the reproductive tract are busily stripping the nutrient cells from the ovum. Over the next several hours the sperm will begin beating their tails vigorously as they rotate like drill bits into the outer wall of the egg. The sperm cells, miniaturized members of a Special Forces team, set to their task of penetration with aggression and purpose. The woman’s contribution to fertilization is reduced to the ‘ovum’ or ‘egg.’ Reference to the word ‘vagina, which would imply the presence of a female body, is scrupulously avoided — instead, the sperm travel through the ‘reproductive tract.’ Both the 1965 and 1990 articles claim an originary, authoritat-

82 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX ive status for themselves. In 1990, in particular, the article touts itself as ‘the culmination’ of photographer Lennart Nilsson’s oeuvre, by offering its readers ‘our first sight of an event as common and as ancient as humankind.’ Yet in 1983, Nilsson produced and photographed “The Miracle of Life’ for the Public Broadcasting System’s science series Nova, a program that con- tains identical footage of the same events, as well as some that purport to occur even earlier (the viewer, for example, travels through the penis, accompanied by the athletic sperm, and then into the vagina and fallopian tubes in search of the passive ovum). The language of militarism is also evident in “The Miracle of Life.’ The sperm, the protagonists of this drama, wait patiently in ‘transport canals’ in the male body for ‘fuel’ and their call to arms. Upon arousal, they begin to move into place, only to be visually propelled by means of a ‘propulsion system’ like little cosmonauts into the battlefield: the woman’s reproductive system.” The phalanx of sperm march through the ‘dangerously inhospitable’ and ‘hostile acid environment’ of the vagina (which perceives them as ‘alien’ and ‘intruders’). At every turn, the woman’s body provides obstacles to their success: her various ‘canals’ all seem to contain “downward currents’ and twists and turns that confuse the determined soldiers. The ‘women’s own defense system attacks the sperm,’ the viewer is told. Indeed, to listen to “The Miracle of Life’ it seems a wonder that fertilization occurs at all." So why the repeated claims to originality? A motivating force behind such claims seems to be to secure authority in the debates about the ontological status of the fetus. Central to the abortion debates is the concept of ‘viability,’ or when the fetus can reasonably be expected to survive outside the uterus. Fetal viability has been rapidly shifting in response to technological advances. At the time of this writing, fetal viability is said to be possible at about twenty-six weeks.” But the representational sleights of hand in all three visual productions deconstruct the entire notion of ‘viability.’ Like the “The First Days of Creation,’ ‘The Miracle of Life’ contains significant chronological gaps in fetal development, the purpose of which is to anthropomorphize

SHOOTING THE MOTHER 83 and autonomize the embryo. The photographic lay-out in the Life of 1990, for example, contains insets with dates clearly labeled beneath them, but in each case the larger photograph is of an embryo/fetus gestationally much further advanced, with the date embedded in the small, accompanying print. In “The Miracle of Life,’ the program contains a leap from eighteen weeks to birth, obscuring essential developmental processes and hinting at an early ‘viability’ of the fetus. The purpose of this seems clear. Foregrounding the more developed organism not only erases the woman’s participation, but implies that ‘life’ occurs very early in the pregnancy. Further, it signifies that ‘viability’ itself is a shifting concept, subject to technological advances that may soon render the term itself obsolete. Today, the photographs imply, we can photograph ‘early human life,’ but tomorrow we may well be able to sustain it through technology. Clearly, these and related images have worked to impose the image of the free-floating fetus and erase the realities surrounding the pregnant bodies that produce them. In these, the connection between representational practices and political interests is clearly revealed, for the circulation of these images is not limited to coffee tables and readers. In the late summer and early autumn of 1990, anti-abortion protesters were shoving the 1990 Life Magazine in the faces of women entering abortion clinics in Cranston, Rhode Island.” Postmodern pregnancies Your August cover [of pregnant Demi Moore] has provoked an intense response in our obstetrical-gynecological practice. To me, the photograph conveyed a sense of beauty and pride and I expected an overwhelmingly positive reaction from nurses and patients and their husbands. Unexpectedly, the opinions expressed were predominantly negative. ' Pardon the thought of a dirty old lady — I’m seventy-two — but after showing Demi Moore’s huge belly, why not on your next cover have

84 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX Bruce Willis with a huge erection? After all, he made the right connection. (Letters to the Editor, Vanity Fair October 1991) The August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair, contained a photograph of an extremely pregnant Demi Moore, clad only in diamonds, with her hand covering her breast (Figure 3.3). The cover provoked the most intense controversy in Vanity Fazr’s history: ninety-five television spots, sixty-four radio shows, 1,500 newspaper articles and a dozen cartoons. Some stores and newsstands refused to carry the August issue, while others modestly concealed it in the brown wrapper evocative of porn magazines. Nevertheless, the cover displayed no more skin than magazines like Allure, Cosmopolitan, and Vogue do on a regular basis. What repelled and shocked viewers was the vast expanse of white, pregnant belly. Why, in an era of infinitely representable female nudity, did such a comparatively modest photograph elicit such a response? Traditionally, pregnant female bodies have been objects of medical scrutiny and surveillance, as well as a mystical (if unrepresentable) reverence and awe in Western culture. Pregnant bodies — even clothed — are sources of discomfort and disgust in popular culture: women are pictured as awkward, uncomfortable, and grotesquely excessive. In a culture that places such a premium on thinness, pregnant bodies are anathema. Not only are they perhaps the most visible and physical mark of sexual difference, they also signify deeply embedded fears and anxieties about femininity and the female reproductive system. With the advent of visual technologies, the contents of the uterus have become demystified and entirely representable, but pregnant bodies themselves remain concealed. It is the pregnant body’s ability to shock and horrify the spectator that is conversely both its potential and its problem — an ability that seemingly transcends political and ideological lines. For a number of important reasons, the pregnant body also remains invisible and under-theorized in feminist theory. The resistance to theorizing pregnancy, as such, can be under-

AUGUST 1991/$2.50 by Nancy Collins CEL si and David D’Arcy 3.3 (Source: Vanity Fair cover, August 1991. Photograph copyrighted 1993, Annie Leibovitz/Contact Press Images, courtesy of the artist. Permission also granted by Demi Moore/PMK Public Relations)

86 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX stood in terms of the historical trajectory of feminist activism and thought, since an overarching goal was to extricate ‘woman’ from a purely reproductive status. Pregnancy has been traditionally predicated on an essentialism that reduces women to passive vessels, the receptacles of sperm. Pregnancy, moreover, has seemed inextricably linked to biologism, to a particularized understanding of the female body as reproductive machine. In Hartoun1’s terms, it is represented as ‘a physiological function, a biologically rooted, passive... literally mindless — state of being’ (1991, p. 30). An Australian advertisement or Toyota’s new family car in Australia illustrates this point. The image contains a torso of a naked pregnant body in a pose identical to that of Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair, while the caption reads: “There’s nowhere more comfortable than inside a wide body.’” Furthermore, when conflated with mothering, pregnancy takes on the added significance of entirely defining women’s ontological state of being, their desires, their goals, even if they never plan to give birth. As Michelle Stanworth remarks: ‘motherhood means different things to different women, and to identify motherhood so exclusively with pregnancy and childbirth runs the risk of blunting the cutting edge of feminist critique’ (1990, p. 289). Mothering is thus reduced to a biological imperative rather than socially determined labor that both women and men may choose to undertake. To invoke the pregnant body during the struggles over abortion is also to invoke a culturally, historically, and epistemologically overdetermined concept of pregnancy as the ultimate biological goal and function of the female body — a Hegelian telos that dictates the proper role of the female subject.” It further constitutes an apparently incommensurable and gendered division of labor. Unlike mothering, pregnancy can be undertaken only by women. The few texts that deal, however peripherally, with pregnancy take radically divergent approaches to their subject. On one hand, there was Shulamith Firestone’s isolated claim that ‘Pregnancy is barbaric. . . . [it] is the temporary deformation of

SHOOTING THE MOTHER 87 the body of the individual for the sake of the species’ (1970, p. 226). In a diametrically opposed position, Julia Kristeva deals with her own experience of pregnancy — ‘the immeasurable, unconfinable maternal body’ — as a source of ultimately conservative power and mysticism (1986, p. 177). This polarization boils down to the opposition between a positive and a negative feminist understanding of motherhood. In the former, according to Stanworth, ‘maternal practices are increasingly acknowledged as a source of alternative values... which stand in hopeful opposition to oppressive forms of thought’; while in the latter it is suggested ‘that motherhood locks women into institutional and psychological structures of dependency and powerlessness’ (1990, pp. 296-7). Bridging these two extremes are works that purport to deal with pregnancy and reproduction in general, but focus almost exclusively on labor and childbirth. Thus, despite critiques of the product-oriented, capitalist management of labor and childbirth, critics like Emily Martin risk reproducing those aspects of capitalist thought that they seek to undo. In other words, by focusing on the climax of reproduction — that aspect of the process that literally introduces the product into the marketplace — the concept of labor exists only in relation to activity expended during childbirth and labor. Pregnancy, so framed, again remains only a passive ontological state. Feminist attempts to disarticulate ‘women’ from ‘pregnancy,’ either in the positive sense of emphasizing maternal values grounded not in biology, but in practice, or in the negative sense (pregnancy as passivity), have unfortunately participated in the larger cultural logic of removing the laborer from the site of (re)production. They have also almost entirely ceded the terrain of pregnancy to the medical profession. Pregnancy, more than either childbirth or labor, is the site for any number of mappings and various technological surveillance systems. Pregnant bodies are subjected to ultrasound to determine the gestational age of the embryo (however unreliably), amniocentesis to screen for genetic disorders like Downs Syndrome,

88 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX as well as sexual selection, and alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) tests to screen for neural system problems such as. spina bifida. In the case of unwanted pregnancies, for example, women with access to prenatal care routinely undergo ultrasounds in order to verify the gestational age of the embryo. They are cautioned about the deleterious effects of repeated abortions on their bodies in general, and their reproductive systems more specifically. Here, pregnancy is represented as the natural state of the female body; to disrupt this in any way is to risk irrevocable damage to the ‘natural’ order of things. In the case of a wanted pregnancy, women who can afford prenatal care see their physician once a month until the eighth month and with increasing frequency after that. If they are above the age of thirty-five (or, in certain areas in the US, over thirty), their conditions are even more intensely scrutinized and pathologized. In the larger cultural sphere, women are bombarded with injunctions as to what substances might potentially ‘damage’ the fetus. Aside from the labeling of cigarette packages and alcohol, they are warned about objects ranging from VDTs (Visual Display Terminals) to operating a vehicle. Paradoxically, in place of pregnancy being the natural state of the female body, it becomes a highly dangerous, pathological condition, subject to intense surveillance. In the instances of both unwanted and wanted pregnancies, in short, a moral panic has been produced around pregnant bodies, but the terms of this panic are structured by different situations. As Emily Martin and other feminists have observed, obstetrics has functioned, since it replaced midwifery in the latter half of the nineteenth century, to control pregnancy using science and technology, as well as to dismiss women’s experience and knowledge of their bodies. With the advent of reproductive technologies, however, doctors no longer have to rely on any information from the woman about her pregnancy: ‘As the “iron curtain” of the mother has been swept aside revealing the womb and its contents in their full glory, it has become no longer necessary to consult mothers about their attitudes’ (Oakley, 1986, p. 183). Thus ‘pregnant women who can pinpoint

SHOOTING THE MOTHER 89 the exact date of intercourse as the time they became pregnant are met with disbelief by medical doctors, even when pregnancy testing technology (ultrasound scanning) is giving them [the doctors] obviously incorrect information.’ (1986, p. 17). The visual and symbolic exclusion of women from reproduction seems a further extension of this logic, yet another strategy for investing power in legal, medical, and other institutional bodies, while ignoring material female bodies. Pregnant bodies remain potently and patently hierarchical systems that must be governed with an iron hand from outside, but through the mediating construct of the fetus. To take a visual example of this, in an advertisement for Volvo automobiles, an ultrasound image of an embryo takes up the larger part of the page (Figure 3.4). The photograph has calibrated lines to one side and along the top, with technical abbreviations at the top of the page. On the left side of the page, these notations refer to the sex and age of the patient, while on the right they refer to the calibration and depth of the instrument. In a wavy, conical shaft of light, the fetus floats beatifically, while the text below reads: ‘Is Something Inside Telling You to Buy a Volvo?’ The address in this advertisement is seemingly pitched to the pregnant woman, but it is structured through advice given from both internal and external hierarchies mediated through technology. The technologically generated image of the fetus ‘tells’ her to buy a Volvo, thus legitimating the safety record of the technologically advanced automobile. The disappearance of the pregnant body renders female and male contributions to reproduction equivalent. For example, ‘The Miracle of Life’ and both Life Magazine articles begin with the apocryphal meeting of the egg and the sperm — a narrative that is structured in terms of the numerous, active sperm versus the singular, ‘mysterious celestial body’ of the egg. The foregrounding of the sperm’s quantity and activity serves also to equate the contributions of female and male to the process of reproduction. Biological reproduction is reduced to the contribution of genetic material, the contribution of labor by the male is emphasized through the centrality of erection

7 i| ae Se oe [ pi ai 3.4 ie is (Source: Volvo advertisement)

SHOOTING THE MOTHER gI and ejaculation, and the female body is reduced toa single, passive ovum that waits patiently for her rendezvous. Erasing the female body; in other words, also functions to erase her contribution of nine or more months of labor to human reproduction. If reproduction is also reduced to the contribution of genetic material, further credibility is given to the ‘rights’ of men in the decision to terminate a pregnancy, which is increasingly being argued in the erosion of abortion rights at the state level. The erasure of the pregnant female body has proved a formidable weapon in the hands of the New Right. The process of naturalization, in which the fetus exists in an ideological and historical vacuum, diverts attention from material bodies, from questions about the economic situation of pregnant women and their access to basic needs like food, shelter, and health care. The embryo/fetus exists in a nowhere land: it miraculously receives shelter and food. It exists in an environment somehow immune to racism, sexism, and economic violence — an environ- ment without borders or boundaries. In protecting this “‘endangered species, the New Right can override and dismiss the material needs of the female bodies that house these cosmonauts, as well as the needs of children and their families. While the fetus needs protection (a thinly disguised alibi for controlling women), it doesn’t demand money. The protection proffered by the New Right also dovetails with representational practices and strategies that circumvent issues related to structural and systemic oppressions. In terms of pro-life platforms, reverse discrimination arguments, welfare benefits, and so forth, the displacement of responsibility for oppression onto the oppressed has been achieved through metonymic shifts in which the New Right claims to represent the truly oppressed or paradigmatic victims. Consequently, in this paternalistic maneuver, they speak for the fetus in the abortion debates, for the disenfranchised white man, for the tax- payers exploited by the alleged hordes of welfare frauds, for the citizens of Kuwait, and for those supporters of ‘traditional, democratic’ values silenced by the ‘politically correct.” This is another version of Haraway’s ‘political semiotics of

92 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX representation, in which ‘permanently speechless, forever requiring the services of a ventriloquist, never forcing a recall vote, in each case the object or ground of representation 1s the realization of the representative’s fondest dream.’ Within this ‘political semiology of representation, nature and the unborn are even better, epistemologically, than subjugated human adults,’ because they can be thoroughly disarticulated from their surroundings or environment. In such scenarios, ‘One set of entities becomes the environment, often threatening, of the represented object. The only actor left is the spokesperson, the one who represents’ (199Ic, pp. 311-12). In terms of New Right politics, what scenario could possibly be more desirable than a world in which the only actor is the father? In light of the contemporary situation, a technophobic pronatalism that consecrates maternal values cannot formulate sufficiently comprehensive or coherent analyses to counter this problematic reinscription of paternal authority. Withdrawal into an imaginary, nostalgic environment maintains ironclad connections with conservative ideologies wherein ‘the womb becomes a species of public domain, a miniature Yellowstone Park, as it were, inside every woman, who is subject to arrest by park rangers when she disobeys the regulations’ (Baker, in Lader, 1991, p. 22). This position furthermore denies the fact that ‘none of us is free in our choices until it is possible to say aloud without fear of censure, “I don’t wish to have children” ’ (Stanworth, 1990, p. 291). And, as Stanworth further advises: it is not at all clear what a ‘natural’ relationship to our fertility, our reproductive capacity, would look like — and it is even less clear that it would be desirable. The defense of motherhood that we ultimately construct will be stronger if we resist the temptation to use nature as a territory on which to stake our claims.” On the other hand, a technomanic position that advocates ‘dispensing with the body as the necessary and sufficient criterion for legal personhood’ (Poovey, 1992, p. 253) appears to participate in the larger project in which women are excluded altogether from enjoying legal rights because of the looming, newly emerg-

SHOOTING THE MOTHER 93 ent legal subject par excellence — the fetus. Poovey’s call for a non-humanist subject position, for the cyborg, seems strangely out of sync with the contemporary political situation and climate. Haraway repeatedly invokes the cyborg subject position as one in which previously patrolled and policed boundaries and borders have been broken down by the ‘inexorable’ march of science and technology. The cyborg subject position ‘results from and leads to interruption, diffraction, reinvention. It is dangerous and replete with the promises of monsters’ (Haraway, IgQIC, p. 333). here is’, further, ‘no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction’ (1gg1d, p. 181). We are already witnessing a moment in which such constructions and deconstructions of boundaries are occurring. Heterosexual sex is no longer the prerequisite for fertilization and pregnancy. Lesbians and single women who want to bear children have taken matters into their own hands, so to speak, and have been successful in fertilizing themselves without medical inter- vention. The proliferation of definitions of ‘mother’ is at once a site of intensifying oppression and of potential liberation.” On the other hand, a cyborg has arrived on the scene with a vengeance, but it is a cyborg created out of circumstances distinctly not of our choosing and a cyborg that, in what might be construed as the apex of anti-essentialist thought, threatens completely to overwhelm material female bodies. For the fetus is the all too legitimate ‘offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism’ (Haraway, 1991d, p. 151), from the military origins of the sonogram in SONAR (an acronym for ‘sound navigation and ranging’) used to detect submarines since World War I, to the militaristic exploits of the embryo/fetus. In the absence of radical social changes, it seems unlikely that these problems will shift in any substantial fashion. Conceding this central condition, however, should not entail conceding the ground of political struggle. There is a growing body of feminist literature that theorizes mothering as work women perform in ways that do not reduce this work to biologism.”* We need more cogent and empirical accounts of the ways in

94 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX which women — from different class and race backgrounds — think and live their relationship to their: varied and various reproductive lives. Instead of disavowing representation, we need to construct representations and representational practices that self-consciously avoid positing pregnancy as a condition necessarily terminating in birth (wherein the fetus must always become the child). We need to discuss pregnancy as work that women may, or may not, choose to undertake. Rendered in this way, the approach would be neither pro- nor anti-natalist, but a negotiation between the two that could utilize both the critiques and positive aspects of mothering. Although feminists must insist that pregnancy is not necessarily synonymous with mothering, they must also insist that both are ‘biosocial’ experiences — that pregnancy, like mothering, is something that occurs within a specific social, economic, cultural, and_ historical environment and that the experience of pregnancy, as such, is structured by social relations. A contextualization of pregnancy that functioned in this way would further allow feminists to argue coherently for prenatal care and day care — for support for women who ‘choose’ to mother — at the same time that they argued for abortion rights. Put bluntly, at this particular historical moment, only women can carry out the work that is pregnancy. As long as this specific laborer remains invisible, the discourse of fetal autonomy is going to be difficult to overcome. In a world where so much exploitation depends upon the erasure of the oppressed and is sustained by the illusion that the postmodern, and the borderless, realm of privilege is the real, the promises of monsters and of the cyborg should not blind us to the cyborgs being forced upon us. In place of a technophobia that ignores the ways in which technological practices such as caesareans and birth control have saved women’s lives, or a technomania that risks forgetting how these technologies have been used to control women, we need a techno-pragmatism that can expose the borders that continue to exclude, condemn, and execute. Only when these are visible, as well as the logic that promotes them,

SHOOTING THE MOTHER 95 can the contiguities and interconnections be productively and progressively orchestrated. Notes 1 Because the term ‘articulation’ has been used in cultural studies with an increasing lack of specificity, it seems necessary to provide a definition, as well as to distinguish between the political position I want to stake out and that of post-Marxists working in the tracks of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985). Stuart Hall (1986a) speaks of articulation as ‘the form of the connection that can make a unity which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made?’ Although I have found the term ‘articulation’ a useful one in analyzing how connections are formed into naturalized unities, I am also concerned about the more voluntarist applications of the term. The belief that leftists can merely wander about, articulating at will and, moreover, producing articulations that are purged of their historical resonances, seems a particularly inane and impoverished version of political opposition. 2 By ‘traditional maternal environment’, I mean ideologies of maternity and mothering. to signify ruling-class 3 Technically, the fertilized egg is defined as an ‘embryo’ until the end of the eighth week, when it becomes a ‘fetus.’ This distinction, reserved for mammals, is based on the formation of bone cells. However, in terms of both technical and popular discourses, this distinction is not, as Patricia Spallone observes, ‘and never has been, fixed. Usage varies depending on the context, individual preference, or convention’ (1986, p. 50). In most cases, the ‘embryo’ has been replaced by of ‘the fetus.’ Where there 1s some ambiguity about the chronological status of the fertilized egg, however, I use the term ‘embryo/fetus.’ 4 The film’s plot devolves around the murder of the male character: a macho, sexist man who is murdered by three ex-lovers. He is given the opportunity to return to life in order to redeem himself, but he has to locate one woman who loves him. In a rather banal complication (characteristic of Blake Edwards’ films), he returns as a woman. 5 Susan Faludi’s Backlash (1991) contains an extremely thorough and welldocumented analysis of the development and deployment of such shifts during the eighties. 6 If Carder had not been a white middle-class woman, would the case have made it to the headlines (as well as the story-line in an episode of L.A. Law)? Further research is obviously necessary around the racial and class breakdown of court-imposed caesareans and fetal neglect cases over

FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX the past decade. Because court-imposed caesareans would logically result from access to prenatal care (and the ability to pay for it), I suspect that court-imposed caesareans will involve middle-class women, while fetal neglect cases will largely be aimed at poor women, many of whom are women of color. This paradox underscores the coercive intersections of the legal and medical systems. On the one hand, pregnant middle-class women are subjected to surveillance and intervention while under medical ‘supervision, while on the other hand, poor women are punished for not having, or heeding, the advice of medical providers. The extent to which this further involves the racist premium placed on white babies should also be subjected to scrutiny. The Webster decision (1989) was a Supreme Court ruling that permitted individual states to control, limit, and in some cases prohibit, women’s access to abortion services. In effect, the Webster decision was as far as the Supreme Court could go in curtailing abortion rights without overturning Roe v. Wade’s endorsement of women’s fundamental rights. This analogy might be extended to ‘the war between the states,’ in which abortion is prohibited in one state but available in a neighboring state. The program, of course, does not support such a reading. This title derives from the Nova special, “The Miracle of Life’ (1983), which at one point describes in great detail ‘the penetrating sail of the sperm.’ Io II Roe v. Wade was the ruling that upheld women’s constitutional right to abortion, by limiting the legislature’s right to proscribe or regulate abortion. The technology used to shoot these photographs, to represent the embryo as patient, is called ‘endoscopy, or ‘intrauterine fetal visualization.’ It began to be utilized in the 1950s, according to Ann Oakley, ‘when Westin (1954) introduced into the cervical canals of pregnant women an instrument called an endoscope’ (1986, p. 171). With advances in microscope technology, ‘fetoscopy’ eventually gave way to fetal surgery in 1981. Ironically, the benign procedure represented in the Life essays is actually a highly invasive procedure involving not only an array of other technology but drugs as well: ‘Ultrasound is used to determine placental size and fetal position and lie; and, if fetal movements obstruct the view, diazepam (valium) may be used to sedate him or her. If the fetoscopist is unable to see the desired bit of the fetus, then the fetus may be “manipulated” into view’ (Oakley, p. 172). For more on this and related technologies, see Oakley’s ‘Getting to Know the Fetus’, in The Captured Womb. I2 Ultrasound rapidly became a strategy for educating women to be better mothers: ‘When a mother undergoes ultrasound scanning of the fetus, this seems a great opportunity to meet her child socially and in this way,

SHOOTING THE MOTHER one hopes, to view him 97 [sic] as a companion aboard rather than as a parasite... Doctors and technicians scanning mothers have a great opportunity to enable mothers to form an early affectionate bond to their child by demonstrating the child to the mother. This should help mothers to behave concernedly towards the fetus’ (Dewsbury, in Oakley, p. 185). *3 Virtually all of the intrauterine fetal visualizations circulating in popular culture have been produced by Lennart Nilsson, whose other texts include A Child is Born (1977) and The Body Victorious (1987). In a Life Magazine interview (August 1990) with David Van Biema, Nilsson professed amazement at the manner in which his work has been taken up in the US and its relation to the issue of abortion. When asked when life begins, Nilsson replied, ‘I cannot tell you. If I told you only ten days, or two days, or forty days, it would be wrong. It would. Look at the pictures. I am not the man who shall decide when human life started. I am a reporter. I am a photographer.’ To this disavowal, he added, “Maybe the first moment of human life, it starts with a kiss’ (Van Biema, 1999, p. 46). 14 As Hartouni notes, the personification of technology — as in endoscopes that can ‘peer’ — is characteristic of the masking of scientific interest. Endoscopes don’t peer — scientists do and they do for a particular set of ideologically charged reasons and not merely out of some disinterested notion of ‘scientific curiosity.’ 15 That arousal is framed in terms only of male pleasure is another marker of the sexist ideologies at work. The program discusses and represents the process whereby the penis becomes erect in extensive and graphic detail: not only is this turgid phenomenon witnessed from within the penis itself, but the spectator is treated to a number of exterior angles. Female sexual arousal, in contrast, is mentioned only once, in very general terms, and the extent of its visual representation (after a throwaway reference to the multiplicity of human erogenous zones) is limited to a single close-up of a heavily made-up, blinking female eye. 16 The historical resonances of representing the sperm as self-contained entity and the ovum as passive oven (from Aristotle onwards) are examined by Emily Martin (1987, 1991). 7 The term ‘fetal viability’ also bears further unpacking and feminist analysis. The term implies that suddenly, miraculously, a fetus is capable of autonomous existence, which serves to obscure the vast array of technology and medical intervention required to sustain such a fetus. Obviously, this comes at quite a cost, both financially and psychologically. 18 These points are indebted to discussions with Meredith Kolodner about the constructedness of the photographic lay-out of Life, as well as to Lisa Billowitz for sharing her experiences as an escort at the Broad Street Clinic in Cranston, Rhode Island. oy I am grateful to Jeffrey D. Smith of Contact Press Images for the

98 20 21 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX article by Caroline Milburn (1993) describing the controversy over this advertisement. Eric Clarke (1991) offers an excellent analysis ofHegel’s telos of maternity. For an incisive and provocative reading of the manner in which such a protection scenario played out in the Persian Gulf War see Susan Jeffords (1991). 22 An example of the effects of basing a defense on the ‘natural’ is the natural childbirth movement, which began in the early seventies. Its benefits resulted in an increased range of options for some women, but, as Elizabeth Terzakis aptly put it in a conversation with me, in terms of economics, availability of ‘natural’ childbirth is rather ‘like organic tomatoes: it is only spottily available and costs money.’ Moreover, many of the premises of ‘natural’ childbirth also connect to arguments about the ‘safety’ and ‘health’ of the fetus, again subsuming women’s rights beneath those of the fetus. 2 Thomas Laqueur (1990) offers a detailed reading of a number of custody cases involving the proliferation of ‘mothers.’ 24 Rosalind Petchesky (1990), Barbara Katz Rothman (1989) and Katha Pollitt (1990a, b, 1991, 1992) are some of the best examples of these types of analyses of pregnancy and mothering.

4 Semper fidelis: daughters in their fathers’ military In the late spring and early summer of 1990, as the US government entered into the series of peregrinations, double-dealings, and back door negotiations that paved the way for the Persian Gulf War, Thelma and Louise and Terminator 2 opened to huge audiences. The most controversial aspects of the films centered upon the issue of women and violence. In the fast-talking, congenial atmosphere of television talk shows, viewers were treated to a bewildering procession of so-called experts, who pontificated about the contradiction exposed through the improbable intersection of women and violence: have women really come a long way or have they simply — and finally — just become men? The media attention to these contestations over the essential meaning of femininity, as well as its proper professional and ontological affiliations, gained added momentum later that summer (Figure 4.1). By 10 September, the largest military mobilization since D-Day included 30,000 women, or 6 percent of the troops participating in Operation Desert Shield. Since implementation of the All-Volunteer Forces (AVF) in July 1973, the US military had been actively recruiting women, but Operation Desert Shield marked the first time in US history that women had served so visibly and on such a large scale. According to Newsweek, the troops stationed in Saudi Arabia nicknamed Operation Desert Shield ‘the mom’s war’ (Beck, 1990, poop! The series of crises erupting around the issue of women in the military offers a graphic illustration of the limitations of

100 eae Tht = ny =| Time Outit aus) 4-1 (Source: Newsweek cover, 10 September 1990. Copyright 1990, Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission) |

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS’ MILITARY 101 feminist technophobia and liberal, feminist technophilia (which unlike technomania does not revel in technology, but sees it as being neutral). The contradictions exposed through the crises in the military reveal as much about the ideological foundations of feminist thought as they do about the existing social order. The connections between the two therefore stand out in sharp relief. For technophobic feminists, with their investment in women’s nurturing and pacifistic nature, women’s active participation in the armed forces rocks the foundationalist belief in an essential female nature. If, in other words, women and nature have been the historical victims of a warlike patriarchy, how can technophobic feminists account for women’s participation in this very process? For technophilic feminists and their adherence to liberal reformism, the call for equal opportunity within the military negates critiques of militarism and imperialism. By focusing on the military as a democratic institution, technophilic feminists left themselves little ground from which to launch an attack on military actions. The following analysis of representations of gender, and struggles over its meaning, is framed around Stuart Hall’s notion that ‘We mainly tell stories like we’ve told them before, or we borrow from the whole inventory of telling stories, and of narratives’ (1984, p. 5). Or, as C. Wright Mills put it, people ‘live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced; and their own experience is always indirect. The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others’ (1967, p. 405). Although the analytic focus of this chapter is gender, it must be made clear from the outset that I herein consider gender in a synthetic rather than an insular sense — as a network of social relations from which sexual difference is constructed. In order to counter the reductionism ensuing from a singular emphasis on gender difference, gender will be considered from two distinct, but necessarily connected levels: (1) the crisis as constructed by the media, and (2) the crisis and solutions as identified by feminists. The overarching goal here is to analyze how the narrative and explanatory devices and

102 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX strategies used by both technophobic and technophilic feminists, by virtue of the partiality of their accounts, ignore the complicated web that forms the social totality, thus proving unable to offer a critique of US military hegemony and the imperialism, sexism, racism, and homophobia that shore it up. In short, this analysis confronts the problem of how ‘system-generated discontents. ... lead to “single-issue” campaigns that command intense commitment to the issue in focus while surrounding the narrow area of attention with a vast no-man’s land of indifference and apathy’ (Bauman, 1992, p. 182). Since the concept of crisis is central to the following argument, I should perhaps be specific about my use of the term. In contemporary theory, ‘crisis’ frequently is used to convey the emergence of ‘critical consciousness,’ as well as potential threats to hegemonic formations. Edward Said, for example, reading Lukacs, claimed that it is through a crisis that the ‘mind or “subject” has its one opportunity to escape reification: by thinking through what it is that causes reality to appear to be only a collection of objects and economic données.’ In the case of a strike, for example, the machinations of capitalism become transparent: when workers cease to produce, the exploitative nature of capitalist production can be made visible. Crises are thus ‘converted into criticism of the status quo: the [workers] are on strike for a reason, the crisis can be explained, the system does not work infallibly, the subject has just demonstrated its victory over ossified objective forms (1984, p. 232, emphases added). In this passage, Said stresses the progressive elements of crises as conjunctural occurrences in which contradictions are rendered apparent to subjects. The element of uncertainty, the notion that a crisis is only a chance to escape reification and that the odds are hegemonically stacked against this escape, is less obvious. Against a reading that would stress the contradictory aspects of crises rather than those that maintain acquiescence, I want to refer to Gramsci’s description of a crisis, as an attempt to maintain the delicate balance between threat and containment. According to Gramsci, a crisis occurs when “incurable structural

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS MILITARY 103 contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them’ (1987, p. 178). Situating agency within a terrain itself narrowed by historical and economic determinants, it is necessary to understand that more often than not, crises are explained —and eventually resolved — in terms mobilized by and supportive of the status quo, rather than in terms of the opposition’s choosing. Further, [a crisis] creates situations which are dangerous in the short run... The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 210-11, emphases added). As Marx and Engels (1971) also make clear, crises are not inherently progressive (although their escalation may be) and, without the presence of a powerful and unified political party, they more often than not serve to mask capitalism’s massive reorganizations and consolidations — to, in effect, reabsorb control. The Persian Gulf War exemplifies this notion of crisis at a number of deeply overlapping levels. First, the military itself has been in a state of economic turmoil and crisis, insofar as the end of the Cold War has thrown into question the future of the military industrial complex. According to Bauman, “The weapons industry less than anyone else can survive without an enemy; its products have no value when no one is afraid and no one wants to frighten the others’ (1992, p. 176). In addition, the decision to wage war in the Persian Gulf, some critics argued, could be related to the deepening recession in the US: Secretary of State James Baker suggested that another not unrelated ‘economic reason for the war was to counter domestic recession or at least its political consequences at home’ (in Frank, 1992, p. 5).

104 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX At a global level, the economic stakes for multinational corporations were reflected in the unilateral.alliance of the rich North against the South. For many, the moral alibi offered by the Bush administration — that Iraq had violated international law and that the massive build-up of troops during Operation Desert Shield was to enforce UN resolutions — simply did not hold water, either historically or in light of contemporary global events. For example, Israel’s invasion and occupation of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip violated UN Resolution 242; the invasion of Lebanon violated UN Resolution 425; the US violated international law in its invasions of Panama and Nicaragua; and the Indonesian massacre in East Timor (which has as of this writing claimed 100,000 lives) clearly violated such laws. The crises and contradictions reflected in the above, however, were managed and defused by the powerful hegemony of the US media. The media coverage of military exploits during the conservative restoration, with its intimate links to economic interests (many of the multinationals owning major networks are also key players in the arms industry), gives the lie to mythologies of a ‘free’ press. Beginning with the invasion of the Falklands in 1982, Western defense departments have refined their control and manipulation of the flow of information. Unlike Vietnam, where journalists had almost absolute freedom of movement, during the Falklands War only thirty journalists from all nations were permitted to report from the battlefield. These journalists, moreover, had to sign a contract in which they accepted full military censorship. In, a further refinement of this process, the US government later prohibited television photographers from covering the invasion of Grenada. Media coverage of the Persian Gulf War was consequently an instance of a highly particularized version of reality. Tom Engelhardt observes that, even before the war officially began, ‘At the Pentagon, much thought had already gone into matters of scheduling and closure — this, out of a post-Vietnam desire to create a Third World battlefield where maximal weaponry and minimal US casualties would guarantee public support’

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS’ MILITARY 105 (1992, p. 631). During the Persian Gulf War, there were major restrictions to which pool journalists were forced to conform. First, and most obvious, was the overt censorship of reports. Pool journalists (those who had been approved by the Pentagon) were ‘escorted’ by military censors, who read their notes and reports, and screened footage. Saudi Arabia, in cooperation with the US military, refused to grant visas to many of the world’s media, particularly those journalists from outside the alliance. Journalists who refused to conform to the rules set forth by the military were threatened with deportation and/or the loss of their credentials. As Kevin Robins and Frank Webster comment, ‘the relationship between the military and the media offers the paradigm case for understanding the role of the mass media in our society, and, particularly, the lines of power between media institutions and state apparatuses’ (1986, p. 57).° I draw attention to these restrictions because it became clear as the war progressed that the more subtle aspects of the Falklands War coverage that Stuart Hall had analyzed in 1984 simply weren’t happening during the Gulf War. First of all, an ‘opposite version of the events (which... favoured the enemy, or the other side)’ (p. 4) never actually emerged, although the alternative media hinted at another version.* And despite the repeated, explicit markers of military censorship, such as the omnipresent subtitle ‘Cleared by the US military, journalists seldom, if ever, seemed to concede that ‘the State had its own interests in the transmission of the news’ (Hall, 1984, p. 4). Instead, most US journalists engaged in jingoistic, patriotic ejaculations, conceding that military censorship was necessary for the protection of the troops and the success of Operation Desert Storm. The transparency of the censorship of information is particularly important in understanding the ideological work performed by representations of gender. The controversial issue of women in/and the military requires an understanding of its location within this context; otherwise a critique of injustices enacted and promoted by US armed forces throughout the world becomes impossible. Bourdieu has suggested that ‘Social science is always prone to receive from

106 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX the social world it studies the issues that it poses about that world’ (1993, p. 236). In other words, ‘Each. ‘society, at each moment, elaborates a body of social problems taken to be legitimate, worthy of being debated, of being made public and sometimes officialized, and, in a sense, guaranteed by the state’ (p. 236). This state guarantee — the pre-construction of the object or issue, as Marx would have it — not only presupposes the existing social order, but is in fact the product of this complicated order and its histories. As long as women were excluded from military service or consigned to administrative or medical positions removed from combat areas, their presence in the military did not constitute an issue. It is to the construction of the issue of women and the military and its state guarantee during the Persian Gulf War that I now turn. The mom’s war Historically, Western feminists, non-feminists, and anti-femin- ists alike have accepted the opposition between the institution of the military and the category of women as a natural effect of gender. During times of war, what Cynthia Enloe refers to as the ‘womenandchildren-protected-by-statesmen’ (1992, p. 96) scenario is invariably activated as part of the call to arms. Images of women being carried off by King-Kong-like invaders abound in military recruitment ads from World War II, as well as in popular culture in general. In terms of historical discourses, both women and the nation-state — as penetrable territories — have been represented as particularly vulnerable to the predatory and rapacious advances of the enemy. Susan Jeffords (1991) analyzes discussions of the Persian Gulf War in terms of a protection scenario (or what Richard Slotkin, 1973, calls a ‘captivity narrative’) — a mythology deeply embedded in US history. According to Jeffords, the protection scenario is established through three categories that stand in unstable conjunction with one another: the protected or victim (the person violated by the villain); the threat or villain (the person who attacks the victim); and the protector or hero (the person

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS’ MILITARY 107 who protects or rescues the victim or promises such aid) (p. 204). As both Jeffords and Judith Hick Stiehm (1982) argue, the traditional protection scenario depends for its full affective force on the feminization of the one who is powerless and in need of protection and the masculinization of the protector. Jeffords elaborates the deployment of the protection scenario in relation to Kuwait (a case of white men protecting good Arabs from evil Arabs), but the presence of female soldiers in the armed forces strained the conventional gendered limits of the protection scenario. According to General John Vessey, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “The greatest change that has come about in the United States forces in the time that I’ve been in the military service has been the extensive use of women. ... That’s even greater than nuclear weapons, I feel, as far as our own forces are concerned’ (Washington Post, 1984, p- 12). The gendering of the protection scenario depends upon a traditional construction of female nature. Inherently nonaggressive, life-giving, and nurturing, women — so the story goes — naturally prefer not to fight or engage in war. Of course, the single exception to this essentialist line is when women, during the temporary absence of the male protector, must protect their children, but that is also a defensive, rather than offensive, maneuver. Given a choice, in other words, women would simply choose not to fight, an appeal to essential female nature that provides justification for barring women from combat. This essentialism proceeds by a strange, if predictable, line of reasoning. On one hand, women — powerless, defenseless, and utterly vulnerable — are always already victims who require the services of the masculine protector. On the other hand, women are accorded moral superiority — they are the angels in the house, whose shining, heavenly examples serve to humanize what Camille Paglia describes as masculinity’s ‘aggressive, unstable, combustible’ characteristics (1993, p. 65). Or, as Mikhail Gorbachev put it, ‘Women prevent the threads of life from being broken. The finest minds [which presumably don’t

108 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX include women’s] have always underscored the peacemaking role of women’ (in Gioseffi, 1988). Referring to Margaret Thatcher, Jacqueline Rose has written that ‘If femininity is opposed to violence according to one stereotype — women are not violent — Thatcher presents a femininity which does not serve to neutralize violence but allows for its legitimation’ (1988, p. 15). If, in other words, this stereotype presents women as essentially non-violent and therefore more rational, it also ensures that violence undertaken by women (or in the name of women) must be rational and therefore legitimate.® The protection scenario encompasses both these moves: it at once depends upon the essentialized non-violence of female nature and then goes on to legitimize violence in the interests of potential female victims. Following from this, the moral superiority of women, evidenced by their absence from combat, functions as a distinguishing characteristic of Western civilization. Arguing against women in the military, William F. Buckley, Jr claimed “The attempt to equalize the sexes is going to be asymptotic. You think you have reached equality, but there is still a tiny difference there. That difference bespeaks an insight which is a hallmark of civilization’ (1991, p.54). Buckley’s appeals to biology lead him to conclude that the presence of women in combat can only have deleterious results for a ‘civilized’ country: ‘we need to wonder whether the machine gunner exposing his life to effect a mission isn’t dismayed at the thought of a young woman firing away at his side, causing him to wonder, wonder whether the fight he is fighting reflects a civilized order’ (p. 54). Citing the experience of the Israelis, another writer claims that Israeli women were withdrawn from combat zones for three reasons: ‘if captured they will be raped, repeatedly; many men simply fall apart when they see young women they know well being disemboweled by shell splinters; Israeli society does not want girls to be killers’ (“Women in Battle’, 1990, p. 18). A civilized society, in other words, loses its civilized status by socializing the angel in the house to be the soldier in the field. To take an example of how this works in popular culture, on Friday, 19 January 1991, the film Not Without My Daughter

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS’ MILITARY 109 (Brian Gilbert, 1991) opened in cinemas in the US. The plot of this ‘true’ melodrama involves an American woman, Betty Mahmoody, whose hitherto loving and Americanized Iranian husband wants to take his wife and young daughter to visit his family in Iran. Despite her reservations about the dangers involved in this trip, Betty (played by a wide-eyed and tearful Sally Fields) eventually consents. When her husband rediscovers Islam, in the most dogmatic and stereotypically patriarchal fashion imaginable, he insists that the family remain in Iran. Betty objects, only to discover that, under Iranian law, she has no rights to her daughter. The remainder of the film is devoted to Betty’s struggles to escape from patriarchal captivity. It is worth noting the subject matter of this film because the release of the film had been delayed for several months. Its opening during the first days of Operation Desert Storm seems less than coincidental, particularly since the anti-Arab sentiments mobilized during the past two decades do not distinguish between various nation-states and shift only along the lines of dominant economic interests. The film’s repeated references to hostages not only recall the Iran hostage situation, but through the figure of the captive white woman link it to the alleged Kuwaiti hostages that the US was rescuing. Nuha Al-Radi remarks that “The West has three images of Arabs: terrorists, oil-rich sheikhs and women covered in black from head to toe’ (1992, p. 229). Cynthia Enloe further asserts, with specific reference to the Persian Gulf War, that coverage of the crisis ‘has been framed by a contrast between the liberated American woman soldier and the veiled Arab woman’ (1992, p. 99). Indeed, Not Without My Daughter demonstrates this contrast, as well as its anti-feminist sentiments, through its central opposition between the situation of women in Iran and that of women in the US. In one of the first shots, Sally Fields sports a tag that declares ‘I am Maatob’s Mom’ — a constitutive identification uncontested throughout the film. The remainder of the film dogmatically emphasizes the contrast between nonpatriarchal US society and the repressive patriarchal regime of

110 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX Iran, particularly through the repeated non-consensual veilings of Betty Mahmoody. During the Persian Gulf War, the veilstrictly signified the barbarism essential to Iraqi society. This stereotype of Arab cultures as paradigms of repressive, patriarchal societies was somewhat feebly offset in the case of Arab allies (notably Saudi Arabia, although not the victimized and impotent Kuwait) through appeals to ‘cultural difference.’ Despite media claims about the ‘progressive’ inclinations of Saudi society, observations such as the following were equally frequent: “Two female paratroopers ... couldn’t help but stare as a Muslim woman in a black veil walked by: “Tragic,” said First Lieutenant Jennifer Ann Wood, who quoted a maxim from her West Point days: “That’s a tradition unhampered by progress”’ (Beck, 1990, p. 24). Arguments about ‘cultural difference, however, apply only to US allies who, it is presumed, have a civilized or near civilized status. Civilization by association also relates to the deployment of female troops by other countries. Much has been made by the media of the revolutionary, and conspicuously uncivilized, participation of women in revolutionary movements — when these movements are in opposition to dictatorships sponsored by the US. Thus, in Not Without My Daughter, Betty Mahmoody is forced by veiled women wielding M—16s to cover her head, which reinforces her belief that the society is ‘so primitive.’ The US media have also negatively portrayed the active presence of women in armed struggles in third world countries, particularly communist and related anti-capitalist movements in Central and South America.’ The presence of women in these struggles, it is alleged, is symptomatic of one of two things in the eyes of the West: desperation and the descent into ‘the law of the jungle’ or essentialized inhumanity. The media representations never entertain the idea that women (as well as men) may have cause to arm themselves against the state; instead, they are the unwitting dupes or victims of communist brainwashers who care little or nothing about human lives. Of course, the rhetoric

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS MILITARY III of terrorism, Annie Goldson and Chris Bratton argue, is “struc- tured to support the interests of the United States in the Third World’ (1988, p. 151) and therefore does not discriminate along the lines of gender. The two, not necessarily competing, images of Arab women, as exemplars of oppression and/or as unnatural commandoes, not only reinforced anti-Arab prejudice in the US, they also offered the mirror-images against which representations of American women had to work in order to maintain the stability of the protection scenario. The sanctioned and civilized position for women during war times is in a supportive role — unveiled, but somewhere well behind the lines, preferably stateside. The contrast between ‘civilized’ American servicewomen and ‘barbaric,’ unnatural Arab female soldiers underpins the subsequent representations: the American woman, presented as sexualized normative object, remains a woman, while the Iraqi woman 1s a paradigm of unnatural, desexualized aggression (Figures 4.2 and 4.3). During the initial days of air war in the Persian Gulf, threats to these traditional representational frameworks were deferred or ignored, largely because female pilots were barred from flying combat missions and therefore considered immune to danger. The images carried on Cable News Network (CNN), as well as the major networks, were straightforwardly traditional during these first few days. Viewers were treated to repeated shots of male pilots slapping one another’s backs and asses, commenting on their adrenaline highs, and making statements such as, ‘I’ve been a very fortunate fellow. The Lord blessed me with a good woman and made me an American fighter pilot. God bless America’ (CNN, 18 January 1991). Consequently, at the beginning of the war, representations of women are contained within the traditional parameters of the military family. CNN repeatedly aired interviews with military wives, touting them as: ‘Another part of the human story. The war in the gulf is separating thousands of families around the world. Husbands from wives, parents from children’ (19 Janu- ary 1991). Generally, these interviews focus attention on ‘family

4.2 (Source: Time, 21 January 1991, p. 43) 4-3[facing] (Source: Time, 8 October, 1990, p. 2)

113

FEMINISM 114 AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX support groups’ and the bonding together of military wives (Figure 4.4). The voices and presence of these women were consistently set against those of anti-war protesters. For example, an interviewer asked Marine wife Christi Hawthorne how she felt about the anti-war protestors: I felt very strongly about the protestors... I know that all protestors for the war aren’t flag-burners but when I do see a flag-burner and they say they’re doing it in honor or in the name of my husband that angers me very much because my husband doesn’t want those protestors protesting the war. He wants the people in America to support the war. (CNN, 22 January 1991) The traditional image of the wife/mother, thoroughly supportive of husband and country, was mobilized to discredit antiwar protesters. In this way, the angel in the house once again provides the legitimation for violence. Undoubtedly, another aspect of these obsessive representations of ‘the women left behind,’ as well as the later images of ‘the men left behind,’ is to confirm the heterosexual orien- tation of female soldiers. The aggressive woman is always already coded as lesbian, and the military, which had every reason to conceal its heinous treatment of lesbians and gay men, went to great lengths to insure that female soldiers available for interviews possessed the appropriate heterosexual credentials. The only interview of a woman in which no reference was made to her partner status was with a butch-looking woman just before the ground war began. This interview, moreover, was conducted in partial darkness while the soldier was driving a jeep. Of course, there were limits to how far the media could go in representing femininity, without, on one hand, emphasizing the vulnerability of servicewomen, or masculinizing them on the other. One of the strategies to balance this dichotomy was to humanize servicemen. Consequently, male soldiers were frequently depicted feeding babies and caring for small children (Figures 4.5 and 4.6). Nevertheless, these narrative constructions were not without

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS MILITARY rts their contradictions. During a program called ‘The Persian Gulf War: Answering Children’s Questions,’ Peter Jennings refers to the ‘million men on the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.”* The soldiers consulted as ‘experts’ during this program were US Air Force Captain Richard Patty (a white doctor), Lieutenant Colonel Caroline Rolf (a white nurse), and Air Force Master Sergeant, Al Brooks (an African-American mech- anic who ‘fixes things’). During the course of the program, Peter Jennings admitted that: ‘I’ve forgotten the name of our master sergeant.’ With slightly less embarrassment, his single question for the nurse is: “Where do you do your laundry?’ From the mobilization of Desert Shield in August 1990 through the machinations of Desert Storm, both television and print media coverage were peppered with references to domestic and stereotypical female activities in the military. These reports consistently foregrounded the fact that women were barred from combat and therefore were unlikely to be placed in harm’s way. Despite continuing assertions that women were barred from combat, and therefore were comparatively safe, the shifting boundaries of the battle zone within a high-tech war eventually undermined these claims. During the invasion of Panama in December 1989, the 988th Military Police Company, led by Captain Linda L. Bray, engaged Panamanian soldiers in a fire fight. The incident gained immediate media attention because it was the first time in American military history that a woman had officially led forces into battle. The setting for this particular battle — described alternatively as a ‘dog kennel’ and ‘an attack dog-compound’ (‘Fire When Ready, Ma’am’, 1999, p. 29) — was used to downplay the combat, although, as one caption pointed out, ‘The women carried M-—16s, not dog biscuits.’ Yet the incident pointed to the fact that distinctions between combat and non-combative positions are neither as rigid nor as predictable as the military would have civilians believe. Coverage of women in combat during the invasion of Panama, as well as the Gulf War, invoked the protection scenario insofar as military officials expressed fatherly concern about the physical well-being of female soldiers, largely by

a

117 4.4[facing] (Source: Time, 28 January 1991, p. 37) 45 (Source: Time, 3 September 1999, p. 1)

4.6 (Source: Time, 10 December 1999, p. 40)

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS MILITARY 119g focusing.on women’s alleged inability to protect themselves during combat. But in all of the reports, whether on television or in print media, concluding references point to another dynamic at work: the manufacturing of public support for the war. Despite the gestures in the direction of protecting female soldiers, concern was clearly generated around the visual impact that images of wounded or dead female soldiers would have on support for the war, or the issue of ‘public sensitivity to possible female casualties’ (‘Fire When Ready’, 1990, p. 29). Newsweek, in fact, claimed that Congress’ opposition to women in combat ‘stems from the perception that the U.S. public won’t stomach its daughters coming home in body bags’ (Beck, 1990, p. 24).” Since the greater part of the early television coverage involved high-tech, computer-generated images and the mediation offered by Patriot missiles and ‘smart bombs,’ it wasn’t until reports of US POWs began filtering through (19 January 1991) that material, embodied, US soldiers became cause for media attention. On Sunday (20 January 1991), the fourth day of the air war, CNN presented audiotapes released by the Iraqi government of interviews with POWs. When these were presented two days later with the accompanying visual footage (a delay effected by military censorship), commentators and viewers expressed outrage at the sight of beaten, helpless soldiers being exploited for propaganda purposes.” The media launched into a speculative frenzy about the origins of the soldiers’ injuries and public sentiment was further moved to the right by what was represented as indisputable evidence of torture. After the return of the POWs, it became clear that much of this expert commentary was unsubstantiated, although, once again, there was little evidence of this in the mainstream media. One POW, for instance, later admitted that not only were his facial injuries the result of ejecting from his airplane, but that he had punched himself in the face to avoid being forced to appear on Iraqi television (Kellner, 1992, p. 191). Although these first POWs were all male, CNN was prepar-

120 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX ing its audience for the possibility of female POWs. CNN aired a brief segment on POWs, which concluded with the following: The Geneva Conventions [which are daily violated by the US] call for humane treatment of POWs without regard to race, nationality, religion, political opinions or sex. For the first time in American military history on a large scale, the latter provides a frightening scenario. There are over 27,500 women serving here with the American Forces. Although by law, women are prohibited from serving in combat, many in supply and transportation posts, for instance, are deployed very near to the front line. In today’s highly mobile ground combat, they run the risk of being captured. In a region where women traditionally play a subservient role to men, their fate — in the hands of Iraqi captors — would be uncertain. It is certain however such a sight would have tremendous repercussions on public opinion. (19 January 1991) This excerpt points to the racism embedded in these references to gender. First, it is tacitly understood that Iraq will disregard the Geneva Conventions (an understanding facilitated by repeated references to human rights violations occurring apparently only in Iraq).'' Second, the fate of women POWs is complicated by what we are to understand as the ultimate patriarchal society. The media speculation became even more exaggerated when, on 31 January, Melissa Rathbun-Nealy became the first US servicewoman since World War II to be declared missing in action. When Rathbun-Nealy’s status as POW was confirmed, anxieties about women in the military erupted in full force. Senator William Cohen’s words before the US Senate’s 14 January 1991 debates about Iraqi atrocities — ‘daughters raped before their parents and executed. ... Horrors that would challenge the imagination of a Marquis de Sade’ — returned to haunt the media coverage. Having been prepared by the coverage of the ‘brutalized’ male POWs, the media produced yet another barrage of innuendo about what forms of torture RathbunNealy would be forced to endure as a woman, with rape figuring most prominently.” When rape is centralized by the US media, a certain amount

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS’ MILITARY I21' of suspicion seems in order. To put it simply, the US government has not expressed much interest in prosecuting rapists or preventing rape except in those cases where the powerful set of emotions that rape conjures (for both women and men) can be harnessed to its political and economic interests. For example, the rape of women in Bosnia and Herzegovina has attracted the attention not only of the US media, but of prominent US feminists such as Catherine MacKinnon and Gloria Steinem as well. At the UN World Conference on Human Rights in June 1993, MacKinnon claimed that the situation constituted “a violation of women’s humanity of unprecedented visibility and priority’ (in Flanders, 1993, p. 176). One problem with MacKinnon’s approach (there are many) is her unquestioning acceptance of this state-guaranteed issue — particularly when the US military is involved. And the state-guaranteed issue with which MacKinnon is still concerned has to do with proving the causal link between pornography and violence, which assumes vast opportunistic proportions in her reductive analysis of the situation in Bosnia.'* Consequently, the atrocities in Bosnia become identical to atrocities in the US: ‘Change the politics or religion, and victims of ritual torture in this country report the same staged sexual atrocities ending in sacrifice’ (1993, p. 30). During the Gulf War, and as in the CNN coda on female POWs, the central anxiety expressed through the issue of rape had less to do with the physical and mental well-being of these women and much more to do with ‘how the public will react to see[ing] women held captive — and possibly tortured — by the enemy’ (“Women in the Military: The First POW?’, 1991, p. 20), which explains why far less coverage was devoted to Rathbun-Nealy’s release 33 days later. When asked whether she had been raped or tortured ‘like so many Kuwaiti women,’ Rathbun-Nealy responded that: “They were the nicest people . .. They did all they could to make me comfortable. I’m probably the only POW who has ever gained weight’ (‘Survivor’, 1991, p. 46). ‘Some Iraqis’, she recounted, ‘told her that she was as brave as Sylvester Stallone and as beautiful as Brooke Shields’ (p. 46).

122 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIxX Rape, in short, was only an issue as long as it could be attributed to the Iraqis and used to reinforce racist stereotypes that consolidated US interests. It was only after the Persian Gulf War reached its temporary ending that this component of the protection scenario was overtly thrown into question. As Jeffords observes, in order to maintain their status, protectors must constantly be reinforcing the validity and the viability of the scenario of protection, establishing the identities of victims and villains (the second of these is more likely to change than the first), producing ‘new’ villains when previous ones have been defeated (or redefined), and, perhaps most importantly, fending off others who would compete for protector status. (1991, p. 205) That the military is more concerned with its public image than with the safety of its troops has been hinted at by the subsequent revelations about the treatment of women in the military, which have called into question its stereotypical role as ‘protector.’ For example, in the autumn of 1990, male cadets in the US Air Force Academy concealed themselves in a closet to watch another male cadet have sex with a female cadet. According to Cynthia Wright, this ‘practice . . . is apparently common enough to have acquired the name “rodeo” based on the object of the game, which is for the male cadet to remain “mounted” for as long as possible after the closet voyeurs have leapt from concealment’ (1991, p. 17). In 1991, a female midshipman at Annapolis was handcuffed to a urinal ‘while her male peers jeered and took photographs’ (p. 16). Perhaps the most thoroughly documented instances of such abusive behavior occurred during the now infamous Tailhook convention, which was held in Las Vegas in September 1991." At this symposium, over a three-day period, ninety people (eighty-three women and seven men) ‘were victims of some form of indecent assault’ (Office of the Inspector General, 1993, p. 54) — assaults that ranged from being groped, pinched, fondled, and bitten to being forced to perform fellatio on a dildo

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS’ MILITARY 123 attached to a rhino mural. Although two civilian victims immediately filed reports with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, it wasn’t until Naval Lieutenant Paula Coughlin’s frustration with military investigations led her to go public with her account in June 1992 that the Office of the Inspector General was called in to investigate. In The Tailhook Report, Coughlin (the only victim identified by name in the report) described her assault in the following terms: He was bumping me, pushing me forward down the passageway where the group on either side was pinching and then pulling at my clothing. The man then put both his hands down the front of my tanktop and inside my bra where he grabbed my breasts. I dropped to a forward crouch position and placed my hands on the wrists of my attacker in an attempt to remove his hands... I sank my teeth into the fleshy part of the man’s left forearm, biting hard. I thought I drew blood. (p. 214) While the Inspector General’s report states that “There is no excuse for the misconduct and unbecoming behavior that occurred at Tailhook ’g1’, it immediately proceeds to comment that ‘to be fair [sic] to those engaged in nonassaultive activities, such as indecent exposure and drunkenness, the reader must keep in mind that an atmosphere was permitted to develop over a period of years which encouraged officers to act in inappropriate ways’ (p. xii). The report concludes that the problem of sexist, openly misogynistic behavior resulted from ‘a serious breakdown of leadership’ (p. 95), but then refuses to offer recommendations because “We have every expectation that the Navy will address the causes and conduct that combined to produce the disgrace of Tailhook ’91’ (p. 96). Another ongoing crisis around the military that disrupts its privileged status as protector is the debate about homosexuals’ right to serve. It has been a traditional practice within the military, as within other institutions, to abuse lesbians and gay men, whether as military personnel or civilians. Its particular virulence in the military is partially attributable to the fact that

124 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX ‘attacks on men’s sexuality are an important part of the training repertoire’ (Stiehm, 1982, p. 372). Up to. this point, lesbians and gay men have faced immediate discharge if their erotic orientation became known. Although the Pentagon suspended investigatory proceedings against lesbians and gay men during Operation Desert Shield because they were needed on the front lines, some women and men were told that, if they made it home, they would face discharge proceedings once the conflict had ended (Brown and Van Voorst, 1991, p. 15). Women, moreover, are discharged for homosexuality eight times as often as men are in the Marine Corps and three times as often in other branches of the military.” From these brief examples, it appears evident that the military has no investment in protecting democracy, nor is it clear who is being protected from whom. Appeals to men’s ‘existing instinct for aggression’ (Horowitz, 1992, p. 47) or downright lies claiming that ‘far more serious sexual molestation [was] suffered by the American female POWs in the Gulf at the hands of enemy soldiers’ (“Not the Right Stuff’, 1992, p. 14) are no longer smoothly working to uphold the military’s privileged and mythic position as protector. Newsweek pointed out that the ‘fear that women shot down will be raped as POWs’ has ceased to hold water, since the greater threat is much closer to home. At least twenty-four army servicewomen reported being raped or assaulted by fellow soldiers while serving in Saudi Arabia (Waller, 1992, p. 36). In view of the silence maintained around Tailhook, it seems likely that the actual figures were higher. White women warriors Cynthia Enloe recently offered this cautionary advice: Post-war periods are dangerous times. They are times when lessons — often the wrong lessons, often lessons right for some but harmful to others — are hammered out. Post-war is a time for feminists to keep their eyes wide open, for it is now when masculinity and

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS’ MILITARY 125 femininity will be reconsidered, and perhaps reconstructed, by warmakers and war resisters alike. (1992, pp. 95-6) Up to this point, I have been using the term ‘protection scenario’ in an uncritical manner. Since the military legislates and legitimates its actions through appeals to innocent victims, the pro- tection scenario offers a useful formula for beginning to excavate the problematic at hand. Nevertheless, the universalizing aspects of this myth — its reliance on the construction of “women’ as the central category of analysis — underwrite its methodological limitations. As Judith Williamson proposes, ‘one of the most important aspects of “femininity” in mass culture is not what they reveal, but what they conceal’ (1986, p. 103). I now want to describe how two central feminist responses to the crisis generated around women and the military operate within received and limited social parameters and in so doing contribute to the ultimate containment of the crisis. First, as Susan Faludi (1991), Carol Tavris (1992), and Katha Pollitt (1992) argue, an essentialism based on women’s pacifistic, maternal nature dovetails with dominant ideologies of female moral superiority. Positing a world of ‘maternal thinking,’ as Sara Ruddick (1989) puts it, where violence and war have been replaced with female serenity and community, in the end difference feminists wind up providing arguments that do little more than reify stereotypes of female nature. In a nutshell, feminist theories based on ‘a female world of love and ritual and a male world of getting and spending and killing’ (Pollitt, 1992, p. 806) obscure the complexities of any formulation of the category of ‘women,’ reproducing a uniform category oblivious to differences manifested along the lines of race, class, and erotic orientation." In laying claim to women’s inherently peaceful and peaceloving nature, this argument does not criticize militarism or the military state, per se, but argues universally against the aggression and phallic lust attributable to masculinity. Women’s peace movements in the US have remained contained not only

126 within the master FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX narrative of the protection scenario, but also within the boundaries of what is deemed (if not sanctioned) as appropriate female behavior during times of military aggression or conflict. As Stiehm observes, speaking as women for peace generally entails the acceptance of protection. In so doing, they ‘seem too often to ignore the fact that much “successful” nonviolence is related to having (1) a potential for violence to renounce or (2) having someone else use or threaten force for one’ (1982, p. 376). It also ignores two fundamental aspects of the problem: first, that there is nothing intrinsically non-violent about women’s participation in racist, homophobic, and imperialist endeavors; and, second, the presence of women within the military. In lieu of a synthetic analysis or a structural critique, the pacifistic argument offers a relatively non-threatening and mild form of resistance. And, as we have learned over sO many years of conservative administrations, feminist arguments based on laying claim to a creeping biologism always run the risk of being turned against progressive interests.'7 According to liberals like Patricia Schroeder and liberal institutions like Ms. Magazine and the National Organization for Women (NOW), the exclusion of women from combat is anal- ogous to the exclusion of women from other powerful institutional positions and practices. Michele Beneke, liaison to the Gay and Lesbian Military Freedom Project, views it as ‘a citizenship issue. Women won’t be full citizens until they can serve in any capacity in the military’ (Fuentes, 1991, p. 518). This equal employment opportunity argument is motivated by two dubious beliefs. The first is similar to pacifistic reasoning: the problem at hand is not structural, but results from the absence of the humanizing presence of women in such institutions. The belief that the presence of women within an institution such as the military will serve to shift or change the power structures embedded in that institution belies the power of such institutions to shape individuals. Given the histories of women who have attained power through such institutional avenues, feminists should maintain a great deal of skepticism about

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS’ MILITARY 127 such possibilities. Certainly Margaret Thatcher’s gender didn’t prevent her from starting the Falklands War (and much more). This argument relies on the belief that institutions, in and of themselves, are fundamentally neutral. Thus, Linda DePauw, a historian and founder of the Minerva Center on women and the military, says that “The apparatus of the military is neutral. You can use the hierarchical organization for different things. The planet needs a lot of work. We could use armies to clean up toxic waste’ (in Fuentes, 1991, p. 518). But the military is neither neutral nor an institution like any other: it is the institution called upon by capitalism violently to repress threats to capitalist interests when ideological coercion fails. To ignore the violent and destructive history and practices of the military is to make a travesty of arguments put forth by feminists and gay rights activists. The second, equally implausible belief, is that lifting the combat ban works in the interests of all servicewomen — that rescinding the ban will vastly improve the status of all female soldiers. While female officers have recognized that their exclusion from battle blocks promotions and upward mobility, Carolyn Becraft, a former army officer, compares enlisted women to blue-collar workers in terms of their career possibilities. As Annette Fuentes surmises, the ‘fight to end combat exclusions is driven from above’ (1991, p. 518): “A person might see the movie Top Gun and want to fly like Tom Cruise. But has anyone walked out of Platoon and signed up to be a grunt?’ In effect, while lifting the ban would improve the situation of women who have chosen the military as a career, it is difficult to argue that women who have entered the military not by choice but because they desperately need a job would endorse a policy that might result in their deaths. In the media coverage surveyed for this analysis, class position was a non-existent category. Indeed, the image of the female soldier as a white, married woman, whose concern was not how to feed her children, but with whom to leave them, obscured many levels of the reality of the armed forces. The equal employment opportunity position reproduces this obscur-

128 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX antism. Women of color account for 38 percent of all women in the armed forces — 30 percent of whom are .African-American. In the army, more than half of all enlisted women are women of color (47 percent of whom are African-American). As in ‘civilian’ institutions, discrepancies between laborers and managers (or enlisted personnel and officers) are divided by race: 41 percent of enlisted women are minorities, but only 19 percent of officers are women of color. Early in the days of Operation Desert Shield, the print media briefly made note of the fact that many of the troops to be mobilized during the ground war were African-American, Latino, and Native American and that, as in Vietnam, they would be dying in disproportionate number to whites.'* The racial and class make-up of the US military, a point raised time and time again by anti-war protestors, was given scant attention by the mainstream media. When it was raised at all, it was dismissed through the logic of the ‘volunteer’ army: unlike Vietnam, these women and men had ‘freely’ chosen military service. According to Rachel Jones, the implementation of the AVF in 1973 changed the profile of soldiers only insofar as ‘The numbers of soldiers from more affluent or well-educated backgrounds dropped starkly, replaced by recruits from lower socio-economic and educational ranks’ (1992, p. 247). This disparity is reflected in the fact that only two of the 535 members of the US Congress had offspring fighting in the Persian Gulf (p. 241)” The constant presence of conservative Colin Powell seemed to imply further that people of color had some input into this conflict and that the military was, moreover, the most integrated of US institutions. Powell himself dismissed critics of the armed forces’ racial composition: “What you keep wanting me to say is that this is disproportionate or wrong. I don’t think it’s disproportionate or wrong. I think it’s a choice the American people made when they said have a volunteer army and allow those who want to serve to serve’ (in Jones, 1992, p. 238). Soldiers in the military, Powell further asserted, ‘were white and they were black and they were a family’ (Powell, 1991,

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS’ MILITARY 129 p. 17). But, as Jones points out, such observations rely on an ‘even-playing-field’ ideology that ignores the absence of economic opportunities for many people in the US — a large proportion of whom are Latino, African-American, and Native American. Given the situation of inner-cities in the US, it should hardly come as a surprise that 80 percent of all recruits from the city of Chicago in 1990 were African-American, Latino, Asian-American, and Native American (Jones, 1992, p- 239). After troops began returning to the US from Saudi Arabia in May 1991, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a correspondent for the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, interviewed three women soldiers whose stories she had been following for the previous nine months. Air Force Colonel Theresa Collier described her return in the following terms: the first [television] image that I saw after leaving Saudi Arabia was the police beating the hell out of Rodney King in LA and that really pissed me off. Excuse my French, but I couldn’t believe it. ’'m like, here I am, spend eight months over here to protect ‘my country’ but yet people are getting beat, you know, people are getting beat for no apparent reason at home.... I heard a statistic the other day that the leading cause of death for black men between 18 and 24 is murder, but yet it seems nobody seems to care. Like, okay, let them kill themselves and you know, on to the next problem, on to the next war. (MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, 1991, p. 12) The hegemonic belief that the military somehow operates at a distance from, or outside of, the structural oppressions that comprise capitalism is contested in this passage — the concept of the ‘just’ war juxtaposed with the image of a country where justice is daily violated. In conclusion, neither the pacifistic logic nor the equal employment opportunity argument addresses issues of global and local social injustices. At the level of the global, claiming that women’s pacifistic nature causes them to oppose war in principle displaces a critique of the specific historical injustices promoted through wars in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.

130 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX Women are seen as being biologically and universally opposed to a universal concept of war, which makes arguments about cultural and historical specificities, as well as economic interests, seem unnecessary. At the level of the local, pacifistic arguments can account for the presence of women in the military only through a species of false consciousness. The presence of women in the military — the idea that women might choose to participate in such an overtly aggressive bastion of masculinity — shatters the belief that women’s role in war, indeed women’s role in society at large, is dictated by their caring and nurturing essential identities. While it may be possible to explain women’s entry into the military and other anti-feminist institutions as stemming from ‘false consciousness’ — a position embodied in the work of Mary Daly (1978 and 1984) and Dorothy Dinnerstein (1976) — this offers a very partial explanation — one that is unequipped to move outside its own class position. For example, given the economic profiles and backgrounds of many women in the military, it seems altogether likely that in the absence of other options (i.e. education or employment) women would turn to military service. Annette Fuentes’ commentary offers a moving conclusion: But those whose vision of feminism extends beyond career trajectories to the search for wholeness inextricably tied to justice need to say there is another perspective on citizenship, valor and patriotism. A first-class female citizenship is founded on serving people, not destructive foreign policies. Let’s not get so tangled up in yellow ribbons that we forget the connection between the battles women wage domestically to feed themselves and their families and a ravenous military machinery that swallows nations whole. (1991, p. 519) Liberal, technophilic arguments about equal employment opportunity in the military or technophobic defenses of women’s essential natures are ill equipped to produce such a synthetic and structural vision.

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS’ MILITARY 131 Notes 1 Of course, the breakdown of occupations is predictable: 48.6% of enlisted women occupy support, administration, and medical positions, while 54.2% of women officers occupy support, administration, and medical positions (“The Total Numbers: A Strong Beachhead in the Armed Forces,’ Newsweek, 1990, p. 23). 2 For analyses of this and related issues, see Douglas Kellner (1992) and Christopher Norris (1992), and the volumes edited by Hamid Mowlana, George Gerbner, and Herbert I. Schiller (1992) and Cynthia Peters (1992). 3 It is, moreover, absolutely imperative to keep in mind that, as Noam Chomsky, put it: “The media, along with the educated classes generally, contributed mightily to driving the country toward a war that was, predictably, an utter catastrophe’ (1992, p. 61). 4 Indeed, The Nation and other plaintiffs (none of whom represented the mainstream press) went so far as to file a lawsuit against George Bush and the Department of Defense in January 1991, claiming that restrictions imposed on access to information were based not on security concerns, but on political affiliations. The media and Pentagon officials are currently trying to reach an agreement for guidelines for covering future conflicts. Newsday reporter Patrick Sloyan, however, has called the draft agreement ‘total bullshit,’ because of its vagueness and the media’s inability to force the Pentagon to abide by its own rules. For a more extensive discussion of this see, Jacqueline E. Sharkey (1992). 5 I should emphasize that my primary concern is with the representations of gender used in the media in the US and the mobilization of stereotypes peculiar to this cultural context. This is, in short, a partial analysis and does not account for the undoubtedly different images presented in other cultural contexts. 6 Of course, as Rose further notes, this rationale works only when the women involved act in the name of the law, drawing attention to the manner in which seemingly contradictory stereotypes can be assimilated to dominant ideologies. 7 Commentaries on the Maoist movement known as Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, in Peru are especially illustrative of this trend. The group is most often scathingly criticized on the basis of its successful recruitment of poor and working-class women (largely Indian women from the highlands), with the insinuation that these women are blindly led into revolutionary activity. While Shining Path might very well be subjected to criticism based on its adherence to Maoist tenets, its commitment to the issues confronting poor women hardly seems abasis for critique. 8 In retrospect, this program, as well as the US government’s concern for

132 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX the psychic well-being of children at a moment in time when US bombs were killing Iraqi children, is an especially repulsive example of governmental hypocrisy. It is difficult to forget the response to Peter Arnett’s videotaped footage of wounded and dying Iraqi children, with the voiceover provided by Bernie Shaw expressing skepticism that such wounds were incurred by US bombs. David Horowitz further claims that feminists were “advocating that women be put in combat roles because to do so would make it more difficult to commit troops to combat’ (1992, p. 47). In other words, Horowitz implies that feminists were banking on the fact that the American public would be unwilling to consent to a war in which women were placed on the front lines of battle. Actually, this:might not be a bad strategy for opposing US military interests, but it seems extremely unlikely that the economically privileged feminists mobilizing around the ban on combat have this in mind. 10 Il The display of these soldiers was a violation of the Geneva Conventions on the part of the Iraqi government insofar as the soldiers were being used for the purposes of propaganda. On the other hand, the US government permitted their release as well, thus sanctioning their use for US propaganda purposes. The mainstream media, as well as human rights groups, were noticeably silent on the even more abysmal human rights violations of the allied forces. For example, Sam Husseini claims that ‘A comparison of Amnesty’s [International] assessments of human rights abuses in various countries (1990 Annual Report) with press evaluations of those countries’ records points to a pattern: U.S. allies’ abuses are often euphemised; those of non-allies are played straight or exaggerated’ (1991, p. 20). See also Alexander Cockburn’s ‘Beat the Devil’ column in The Nation from Janu- ary 1991 through May 1gg1 for discussions of such silences. I2 Enloe’s observations about rape in war are worth noting here: ‘Rape in war is never simply random violence. It is structured by male soldiers’ notions of their masculine privilege, by the strength of the military’s lines of command and by class and ethnic inequalities among women. If you're a rich Kuwaiti woman you have less chance of being raped than if you are an Asian maid’ (1992, p. 97). ES MacKinnon’s stakes in this issue are clear in an anecdote related by Laura Flanders: when MacKinnon finished her talk at the Human Rights conference, she and her contingent of first world feminists immediately departed, leaving only a handful of people to listen to Sudanese women speaking of their experiences of war-time rape (1993, p. 176). 14 The Tailhook Association is a private organization whose membership is made up of active duty, Reserve and retired Navy and Marine Corps aviators, and defense contractors. The Tailhook Symposium is an annual

DAUGHTERS IN THEIR FATHERS MILITARY 133 reunion that includes seminars and other professional activities, although its focus is clearly social. 25 President Clinton’s backtracking around these policies is indicative of not only the power of the military, but his lack of commitment to antihomophobic struggles, as well. The ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy that the Clinton administration is currently endorsing simply supports the military status quo. 16 These methodological and political limitations are underscored in one of Tavris’ anecdotes: When the War in the Persian Gulf broke out in January 1991, a reporter from a major newspaper called me to discuss what I knew about the much-publicized ‘gender gap’ in attitudes toward war. ‘What is it about women’s nature’, he wanted to know, ‘that makes them more likely to oppose war?’ I thought about the thousands of women in the military, many of whom were, for the first time in history, in the thick of the battle; the women interviewed on television and writing to the newspapers, enthusiastically endorsing the war effort; the women who were busily draping yellow ribbons over every tree in their neighborhood; and the men and women who were organizing protests against the war. (1992, p- 57) Tavris declined the interview. y Again, Faludi, Tavris, and Pollitt offer instructive examples of how this has worked. Perhaps one of the most striking examples of this occurs in the anti-porn debates, in which Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon appealed to the Meese Commission to ‘protect’ women from the evils of pornography. For an incisive analysis of this particular example, see the first chapter of Linda Williams Hard Core (1989). 18 According to Tom Holm (1992), and based on Veteran’s Administration and census figures, the most overrepresented minority in the military is Native Americans. Compared with population numbers, their rate is three times that of any other minority group. = Rather than addressing the economic disparities so evident during the Vietnam War (i.e. the fact that college students could defer active service), the AVF merely institutionalized these inequities under the rhetoric of choice. « . ’

5 Calculating on a frictionless plane Without friction a simple linear equation expresses the amount of energy you need to accelerate a hockey puck. With friction the relationship gets complicated, because the amount of energy changes depending on how fast the puck is already moving. Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules. (Gleick, 1987, p. 24) In many ways and places, technophobia remains the dominant paradigm for feminist futurologies in Western culture. Endlessly recycled and refurbished, the connection between women and nature continues to inform and delineate the ways in which improved worlds are thought. In both popular culture and those feminist theories more accessible to non-academic feminists, technophobic feminism dictates which pleasures are proper to a feminist perspective, while dismissing those that diverge from this norm as_ technologically induced states of false consciousness.’ Taking an infinitely prescriptive approach to both pleasure and knowledge, access to the forms of feminism espoused by technophobic feminists depends on knowledge of one’s self as ‘woman’ and a celebration of the pleasures allegedly inherent in that self-awareness. As Cherrie Moraga cautions, “The mistake lies in believing in this ideal past or imagined future so thoroughly and single-mindedly that finding solutions to present-day inequities loses priority, or we attempt to create tooeasy solutions for the pain we feel today’ (1986, p. 189). As this project has illustrated, the cultural dominance of technophobic

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 135 feminism makes it a formidable trajectory indeed, one whose ideological pitfalls are expressed through the intersections of feminist technophobic theories and New Right political formations.” Feminist technomania, mainly expressed through feminist postmodernist theories, so far remains a phenomenon limited to intellectual circles.’ Presented as an alternative to the formula that celebrates women’s special connection to nature, technomania accepts the fact of postmodernity as the sine qua non of contemporary existence and claims that it is this new and novel condition that will help to dismantle the terms of the woman/ nature binarism.* Nevertheless, the questions that must be brought to bear on feminist technomania are, in the end, similar to those used to interrogate the concealed privileges and subsequent partiality of technophobic feminist visions. The final question to be addressed, involves, as Rosemary Hennessy puts it, the extent to which technomania also participates ‘in a general containment of the crisis of western subjectivities by helping to produce a subject which is “new” — that is, re-formed and updated — but nonetheless supportive of the hegemonic interests of multinational capitalism’ (1993, p. 47). In order to unpack this question, I want to turn to the work of Donna Haraway, which, as one of the most prominent attempts to reconfigure the terms of feminist approaches to nature and technoscience, occupies a position of some centrality for feminist theorizations of technology and postmodernism. Haraway’s argument ‘for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction’ (1991d, p. 150) informs and structures arguments made by feminists frustrated by the durability of the woman/nature articulation. For feminists writing about technoscience, Haraway is frequently their ‘unlikely Beatrice through the system’ (Haraway, 19gIC, p. 325; the reference is to Dante’s Beatrice, whose absence/presence guides him through hell). The cyborg has come to epitomize the postmodern traveling theorist — a theorist located nowhere, but moving toward some ‘elsewhere.”* But, as Meaghan Morris has so aptly put it, “That’s

136 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX the trouble with cultural travel and fellow-travelling, today: there’s a shuttle service in the hyperspace between the cultured halls, the college walls, the prison walls, and the tracks, and there’s a lot more baleful riff-raff on the road than there used to be’ (1988b, p. 174). While I do not want to dismiss Haraway’s work as being blithely technomanic or to categorize her as ‘baleful riff-raff, I do want to suggest that, over the past decade, Haraway’s travels, impelled by methodological erasures already implicit in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (originally published in 1985), circulate within the boundaries of a particular postmodern hyperspace. Haraway’s insistence that socialist-feminist politics for the twenty-first century must refuse ‘to give away the game’ (19914, p. 8), or to cede the terrain of technoscience, no doubt resembles my own argument, but its status as semiotic excursion troubles its claims to materialism. Its proclivity for the postmodern — what David Harvey describes as an often ‘confused jumble of concerns’ (1991, p. 76) — bears critical analysis, rather than celebration. The itinerary plotted out by the cyborg, one similar to that proposed by James Clifford (1991), occurs on a comparatively frictionless plane. To cite Jean-Francois Lyotard, one of the repressed theorists in the cyborg’s genealogy, ‘The applicable model here is that of Brownian movement, a well-known property of which is that the vector of the particle’s movement from a given point is isotropic, in other words, all possible directions are equally possible’ (1984, p. 58).° Perhaps the most effective strategy for revealing the absences in Haraway’s work is to view the sense of Brownian movement embedded in travel from the more critical perspective of ‘transportation.’ Where the word ‘travel’ suggests an active subject (one travels, but is never traveled), the term ‘transportation’ offers a much more complicated and nuanced understanding of the manner in which both objects and subjects move and are moved, particularly within capitalism. Transportation, in other words, is the’ business of transporting, be it passengers, military personnel, goods, materials, capital, or theories. A second and interrelated aspect of this perspective concerns

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 137 the state of being transported — in a rapturous or orgasmic sense. The postmodern critic is transported from the realm of the material to the realm of the discursive, from the social to the linguistic (where else could she be ‘ether’ or ‘pure quintessence’?). I don’t want to argue, as do feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, against any form of intercourse, be it material or discursive, but feminism requires more cogent understandings of how and why we are transported by postmodernism, and how our pleasurable transportations fit into a global system of transportation. Furthermore, as Bourdieu remarks of such primarily aesthetic and aestheticized pleasures, * “Empirical” interest enters into the composition of the most disinterested pleasures of pure taste, because the principle of the pleasure derived from these refined games for refined players lies, in the last analysis, in the denied experience of a social relationship of membership and exclusion’ (1984, p. 499). The denial of membership and exclusion in transportations of both varieties points to why socialist-feminism is in fact incompatible with feminist postmodernism, once more manifested in the absence of economic class as a category of analysis. In keeping with much poststructuralist theory, Haraway asserts that ‘the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now’ (1g91d, p. 181). I want to read Haraway’s work as representative of an expanding trend within feminist theory that dismisses an understanding of the complicated workings of structurally orchestrated, material oppressions in favor of endless, and endlessly revolving, metaphoric oppressions. Following Neil Lazarus, I consider this move as ‘an idealist projection, prone to the reduction of the social to the medium of language’ (1991, p. 129), in which ‘Idealism... consists in the relentless reduction of the social to discourse in that term’s conventional usage — as talk, conversation, treatise, etc. — in the dematerialisation of the social that follows necessarily from the construction of its various instances, one and all, in analogy with language’ (p. 124). In order to analyze the political implications of the dema-

138 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX terialization of social relations that Haraway’s travels produce, I will initially focus on the effects and affects issuing from methodological paradigms employed by Haraway: the practice of reading texts ‘out of context’ (1989, p. 377), the theory of articulation that derives from this practice, and its tacit endorsement of an avant-garde project characteristic of certain branches of postmodernist thought. Stop making sense Writing and reading practices form Haraway’s most consistent theoretical premise. ‘Feminist cyborg stories,’ according to Haraway, ‘have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control’ (1991d, p. 175). The tools for changing the world ‘are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities’ (991d, p. 175). Consequently, ‘If we are imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison-house requires language poets, a kind of cultural restriction enzyme to cut the code; cyborg heteroglossia is one form of radical cultural politics’ (1991d, p. 245). In order to change reality, ‘We need stories for imagining how to be responsible within and for the zones in which we find ourselves’ (1992¢, p. 42). Readings of advertisements from scientific journals are offered as examples of the alternative, and potentially emancipatory, consequences of the cyborg’s dislocating and disruptive reading practices. A MacroGene Workstation advertisement, featuring ‘the prehistoric Ichthyostega, is ‘Full of promises, breaching the first of the ever-multiplying final frontiers’ (1991, p. 301). Because ‘Ichthyostega is firmly on the margins, those potent places where theory is best cultured,’ the reader is invited ‘to join this heroic reconstructed beast with LKB, in order to trace out the transferences of competences — the metaphoricmaterial chain of substitutions — in this quite literal apparatus’ of bodily production’ (p. 303). In another advertisement, in which the image of a rabbit contemplating its computer-generated image sells Logic General

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 139 software, Haraway asserts that the rabbit might be understood as insisting that the truly rational actors will replicate themselves in a virtual world where the best players will not be Man, though he may linger like the horse-drawn carriage that gave its form to the railroad car or the typewriter that gave its illusory shape to the computer interface.... Metaphoric substitution and other circulations in the very material symbolic domain will be more likely to be effected by a competent mouse. (199IC, p. 301) Removing the rabbit from within the context of an advertisement and radically misreading the caption, ‘A Few Words About Reproduction From an Acknowledged Leader in the Field” Haraway constructs a new meaning for it: ‘Both the organic and computer rabbits of Logic General might re-enter at this point to challenge all the passive voices of productionism. The oddly duplicated bunnies might resist their logical interpellation’ (1g99ICc, p. 303). Even if the audience producing such interpretations 1s an extremely literate group of feminists, this form of decontextualization continually runs up against a number of obstacles. What, for example, does this type of decontextualization portend for longstanding problems within feminism around its very lack of context? The struggles of feminists of color and lesbian feminists within feminist theory and movement are crucially related to the problem of contextualizing the feminist movement — decontextualizing, it might be said, describes standard liberal feminist practices. Haraway’s arguments, moreover, are primarily read and appropriated by feminists in the humanities, those for whom reading science as science is often an arduous and alienating enterprise (if indeed it is undertaken at all). “With the grain’ readings, in other words, are not self-evident for this audience. Because the context productive of scientific epistemologies 1s not identical to the context that produces feminist theory, the dislocations and relocations proposed and performed by Hara-

140 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX way result in significant slippages and problematic misinterpretations. Consequently, this process of dislocation and relocation requires that texts be read not only against the grain, but outside their original fabric as well. As Meaghan Morris puts it, ‘if the notion of reading against the grain now seems tired, and indeed has come to represent some of the most vapid tendencies in criticism, it is because it can authorize a complacent sense that we know what the doxa investing a text are like, and they haven’t changed in twenty years’ (1989, p. 245). In short, the point seems to lie not in understanding the doxa investing these advertisements, but in reading them creatively. The purpose of these decontextualizations is never entirely clear, aside from showing us ‘the implosion of the technical, textual, organic, mythic, and political in the gravity wells of science in action’ (199IC, p. 300). Yet, far from being innovative, these reading practices instead appear more congruent with the hermetic approach of New Criticism — with two important divergences. First, the object of textual analysis is no longer literary (although it might be argued that the advertisement has been elevated to the status of a literary text); and second, in place of the past or present tense, the description is couched in the language of the conditional. Although ‘the collapse of the “modern” distinctions between the mythic, organic, technical, political, and textual’ (1991d, p. 301) may never have been more evident to particular readers, what remains less than evident is the political or historical point to which these collapsed distinctions lead. The point to which Haraway would like them to lead, however, is her alternative to ‘a politics of representation’ (1991C¢, Pp. 311), or ‘articulation.’ Haraway is adamant in her insistence on the ‘ultimate unrepresentability of social nature’ (p. 313). Representation, she claims, ‘depends on possession of a passive resource, namely, the silent object, the stripped actant’ (p. 31 3). Articulation, in contrast, is proposed as a synchronic practice involving provisional and contingent partnerships among ‘All the people who care,’ who ‘must articulate their position in a

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 141 field constrained by a new collective entity, made up of indigenous people and other human and unhuman actors’ (pp. 314—15). Articulation, both as partnership and as an active process of cybernetic weaving, entails the stitching together of incongruous and seemingly antagonistic elements in order to create new and different patterns. Within Haraway’s theory of articulation, objects are no longer objects, but ‘unruly partners in discursive construction, delegates who have gotten into doing things on their own, so that I don’t forget all the circuits of competences, inherited conversations, and coalitions of human and unhuman actors that go into any semiotic excursions’ (199Ic, p. 305). Although her theory bears more than a passing resemblance to the theories of discourse and articulation put forth by Laclau and Mouffe, it can be distinguished by her insistence on the ‘thing’s’ participation in its own discursive construction. The ‘new collective entity’ that results from such consensual discursive intercourse is based on the notion of nature as ‘a social partner, a social agent with a history, a conversant in a discourse where all of the actors are not “us”’ (1992b, p. 83). According to Haraway, these ‘other- worldly conversations’ need to ‘engage in forms of life with non-humans — both machines and organisms — on livelier terms than those provided by harvesting Darwinism or Marxism’ (p. 84), which presupposes that engagement with humans is already a lively enough affair. As in Laclau and Mouffe’s work, terms like ‘discourse’ and ‘articulation’ are never defined. Like the cyborg, these terms can apparently be filled at any given time with any given meaning. So, for Haraway, Discourse is only one process of articulation. An articulated world has an undecidable number of modes and sites where connections can be made. The surfaces of this kind of world are not frictionless curved planes. Unlike things can be joined — and like things can be broken apart — and vice versa.... To articulate is to signify. It is to put things together, scary things, risky things, contingent things. (1991C, p. 324)

142 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX ‘Discourse’, ‘signification,’ and ‘articulation’ blend together in an insistence on radical contingency that excludes ‘ideology.’ Indeed, as Haraway earlier remarks, “The whole point about discursive construction has been that it is not about ideology. Always radically historically specific, always lively, bodies have a different kind of specificity and effectivity; and so they invite a different kind of engagement and intervention’ (1991¢, p. 298). Haraway’s theory of articulation is a dramatic departure from Hall’s, wherein ideology occupies a position of analytic centrality: the theory of articulation asks how an ideology discovers its subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it; it enables us to think how an ideology empowers people, enabling them to begin to make some sense or intelligibility of their historical situation, without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socio-economic or class location or social position (Hall, 1986a, p. 53) Without a theory of ideology, the type of weaving proposed by Haraway can ignore that the materials employed in this process (none of which are raw) have histories independent of the moment of articulation, because articulation is assumed to exist only in the moment in which it is articulated. The focus is not on how people make sense of their historical and political location, but on how to invent new discursive constructions. Thus, material reality does not pre-exist as ever-elusive, but fully pre-packaged, referents for the names. Other actors are more like tricksters than that. Boundaries take provisional, never-finished shape in articulatory practices. The potential for the unexpected from unstripped human and unhuman actants enrolled in articulations — i.e., the potential for generation — remains both to trouble and to empower technoscience. (1991¢, p. 313) The focus on the present produces a theory of articulations that can be spoken, rather than articulations that speak through

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 143 subjects and through which subjects are spoken. This form of articulation also bypasses the critical question of what sorts of partnerships it presupposes. If we are to assume that the goal lies in ‘The potential for the unexpected from unstripped human and unhuman actants enrolled in articulations’ (1991C¢, p. 313), then we must also assume that these actants exist somewhere outside the relations of force that comprise social orders —in an elsewhere further beyond the purview of ideology. Articulation thus rendered appears as a type of spontaneism existing only in the present. As such, it ‘let[s] slip the question of the historical forces which have produced the present, and which continue to function as constraints and determinations on discursive articulations’ (Hall, 1986a, p. 58). In a move oddly similar to that made by technophobic feminists, Haraway’s theory of articulation relies on the illusion that discourse can be wrenched free of its historical resonances and, thus purged, filled with counter-hegemonic interests. Despite her observation that ‘Articulation is work, and it may fail’ (1991¢, p. 314), Haraway’s readings of political activism as a process of articulation exclude an inquiry into those articulations that either fail or secure a hegemonic balance. Although most of her examples center upon the politics of textual analyses, she refers to the ‘Mother’s and Other’s Day Action’ held at the Nevada Test Site in 1987 in protest against nuclear weapons (r99Ic, pp. 317-319; 19914, p. 245; Darnovsky, 1991) to illustrate the political potential of articulatory practices. Describing how activists printed a logo of the earth on a T-shirt, with the words ‘Love your mother’ emblazoned below, she sums up the image’s efficacy in the following terms: ‘In its worst manifestation, it’s the sort of endangered species island at Disney World, but it is beautiful. I’m moved by it; lots of people are moved by it’ (Darnovsky, 1991, p. 70). Is the presumed distinction between the emotion induced in Haraway and ‘lots of people’ and that induced in Disney Land enthusiasts a troubling one? On one hand, the globe’s affect manifests itself in ‘the sort of endangered species island at Disney World’ — which we are to assume is a strictly negative, hegemonic form of affect: if not a form of

144 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX false consciousness, certainly an inappropriate emotion. On the other hand, those ostensibly immune to, the Disney World version are also moved by it — presumably motivated by an entirely distinct and progressive form of affect. Without a theory of ideology, this distinction is impossible to comprehend, much less scrutinize. The emphasis on articulations occurring in the absence of ideological and historical constraints ultimately undermines Haraway’s concept of partnerships, as well as her claims to situated knowledges. In his interview, Andrew Ross has attempted to push Haraway on the problems attendant upon her claim that ‘we ought better to be able to see the world and its objects as agents’ (1991a, pp. 2-3), by asking her to clarify her concept of ‘the world’s independent sense of humor’ (1988, p- 593). Her response to Ross’s query illustrates the limitations of her articulatory partnerships: ‘Well, obviously, what’s going on there is some kind of play with metaphors,’ further explaining that “One has to look for a system of figures to describe an encounter in knowledge that refuses the active/passive binary which is overwhelmingly the discursive tradition that Western folks have inherited’ (19914, p. 3). But from what location does this knowledge encounter emanate and how is that site accounted for within her theoretical framework? It seems that one partner in this articulatory relationship must possess the literate and critical skills necessary to refuse such binarisms. But aren’t reading and writing skills themselves dependent on particular and unequally distributed social relations? Bourdieu has observed that ‘art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 7). Neither this predisposition nor the associated fact that social differences are not necessarily cause for celebration is ever linked to issues of class location. The ‘historically specific, conjoined discipline of love, power and knowledge’ (1992b, p. 73), in other words, is not seen as being either ideologically or economically specific. The academic setting in which this takes place seems to exist outside the purview of

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 145 ‘informatics of domination’ — an especially important oversight at a point in time when access to the forms of knowledge and cultural capital necessary to engaging in such site-specific pleasures is becoming increasingly limited.’ Despite Haraway’s insistence on the importance of seeing science as culture and studying science from a cultural studies perspective, her approach might more accurately be described as avant-gardist.® First of all, readings ‘out of context’ and articulatory practices presume that both feminism and cultural studies have moved beyond the question of how and why popular discourses become popular, a problem that has preoccupied cultural studies for close to three decades.? She consequently ignores a central argument about avant-garde practices that has emerged from within cultural studies. As Stuart Hall has noted, “The history of culture is littered with non-revolutionary “avant-gardes:” with “avant-gardes” which are revolutionary in form only; even more, with “avant-gardes” which are rapidly absorbed and incorporated into the dominant dis- course, becoming the standard orthodoxies of the next generation’ (19gob, p. 21). Lyotard, with whom Haraway shares many concerns, attempts to side-step the incorporation of the avantgarde by claiming that the ‘new’ language of the avant-garde (defined in terms of the Kantian sublime) will emerge from scientific discourses. In a similar movement, one that takes Lyotard’s ‘language-games’ a step further, Haraway looks to science fiction as the new site for avant-garde activity."° Yet despite the predictable postmodernist emphasis on the ‘novelty’ of the avant-gardism they endorse — on its absolute difference from the historical avant-garde — both Lyotard and Haraway ignore the fact that, while the avant-garde object may have shifted, the subject of this reformulated avant-garde remains consistent with her earlier incarnations. To push this a bit further, the subjects capable of occupying the cyborg position are in fact highly literate and educated subjects who can ‘transform the despised metaphors of both organic and technological vision to foreground specific positioning, multiple mediation, partial perspective, and therefore a possible allegory for antira-

146 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX cist feminist scientific and political knowledge’ (1991a, p. 21). The investment in avant-gardism precludes an.attention to class specificities; or, better yet, it reinforces class divisions in its unstated assumption that the avant-garde will take the lead in these uneasy partnerships. In direct contradiction to her criticism of vanguard parties, Haraway installs a vanguard formation composed of a feminist avant-garde which can provide ‘the roughest sketch for travel, by means of moving within and through a relentless artifactualism, which forbids any direct si(gh)tings of nature to a science fictional, speculative factual, SF place called, simply, elsewhere’ (1991¢, p. 295). This privileging of a literary avant-garde is especially revealing in the context of claims Haraway makes about the nature of postmodern society: a place where ‘the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached’ (191d, p. 151); where the ‘ “New Industrial Revolution” is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities’ (p. 166). In other words, despite the radical shifts that Haraway maps out between ‘the comfortable old hierarchical dominations’ and ‘the scary new networks .. . called the informatics of domination’ (p. 161), she appeals to traditional forms of literacy as the proper province of cyborg communications and politics. In a sense, Haraway reifies a conventional high/low binarism through her focus on limited creative and eclectic reading practices." Essentially, Haraway’s advocacy of avant-garde practices narrows and isolates political struggle to a form of discursive engagement specific to intellectuals. In this way, Haraway — like many postmodernists — avoids poststructuralist critiques of canonicity, authority, and authorship by ushering the privileged Western intellectual in through a side door: the cyborg exists simultaneously as ‘the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail’ (1991d, p. 154). While first world feminists assume the cyborg position through active, creative intellectual practices, the third world woman has cyborg status conferred on her through a (first world) reading of her body and actions.

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 147 Leaky borders and disappearing boundaries Despite Haraway’s dismissal of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics as ‘a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics’ (1991d, p. 150), her ‘informatics of domination’ is centrally indebted to the belief in an epistemic rupture between modernism and postmodernism. In ‘Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies,’ for example, her binary chart ‘abstracts and dichotomizes two historical moments in the biomedical production of bodies from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s’ (1991d, p. 209). In addition to the fact that these two ‘moments’ are never identified or delineated, we are not given an understanding of the material basis of such massive shifts. Instead, what is alternatively described as late, advanced, or multinational capitalism becomes the generator of its own polymorphous existence: ‘Advanced capitalism and postmodernism release heterogeneity without norm, and we are flattened, without subjectivity, which requires depth, even unfriendly and drowning depths. It is time to write The Death of the Clinic. The clinic’s methods required bodies and works; we have texts and surfaces’ (1991d, p. 245). If Foucault’s works, as Haraway claims, ‘name a form of power at its moment of implosion,’ Haraway’s work names power at the moment of its explosion. In terms of a theorization of power, the methodological effects of both implosion and explosion are indistinguishable. Power is everywhere and nowhere; it has no matrix, but is diffuse and invisible. There is a central paradox embedded in such postmodernist social theories. On one hand, they accept the systemic nature of capitalism, as made visible in its consolidation of power and its global expansion in the eighties. Capitalism’s power as a system is therefore identified and named asatotality. On the other hand, theorists celebrate local, fragmented, or partial forms of knowledge as the only forms of knowledge available. We are thus advised to accept the effects of this unknowable totality — the processes of capital accumulation — that ‘not only thrive upon but actively produce social difference and heterogeneity’ (Harvey, 1992, p. 43) as the sole liberatory prac-

148 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX tices available.’ For instance, Haraway observes that “The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and production’ (1991d, p. 166), but at the same time she insists that we focus on ‘the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic’ (1991d, p. 170). In other words, we are encouraged to understand capitalism’s centrality through fragmented and supposedly decentralized practices." This takes on added irony when we understand that the only fact accepted as fact is postmodernity. While Haraway elsewhere wants to ‘insist on the rhetorical nature of truth, including scientific truth’ (1991d, p. 185), the condition of postmodernity is presented as a fait accompli.* Consequently, Haraway’s investment in this release of heterogeneity, her embrace of this allencompassing version of power, never questions the material circumstances surrounding its production. Instead, we are offered the now standard postmodern recital of symptoms. Modern machinery is ‘everywhere’ and ‘invisible’; ‘Miniaturisation has turned out to be about power’; and ‘Our best new machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals’ (1991d, p. 153). The evidence for such radical and universal shifts in the means and mode of production is dubious in and of itself, although it may be that capitalism has indeed become a ‘global financial system [that] is now so complicated that it surpasses most people’s understanding’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 161). However, the point is that Haraway follows Lyotard and Baudrillard in presupposing the existence of shifts rather than analyzing them.” The @ priori nature of the postmodern condition is hardly capable of asking, as does Harvey, whether ‘capitalism itself had produced the conditions for the rise of postmodern ways of thinking and operating’ (1992, p. 43). Callinicos argues that ‘social stability depends not on the subordinate classes’ belief in the legitimacy of the status quo but on a fragmentation of social consciousness which prevents them from developing a comprehensive perspective on society as a whole’ (1989, p. 116). In contrast to this, Haraway asserts

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 149 that “The permanent partiality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. We do not needa totality to work well’ (1991d, p. 173). But, as Marx and Engels observed, “The concrete concept is concrete because it is a synthesis of many definitions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects’ (1976, p. 141). Comprehending a system, in short, despite postmodern arguments to the contrary, is neither simple nor reductive. Without an understanding, or synthesis, of the relations not only among parts but between the parts and the processes of capitalism, feminists reproduce system-friendly mystifications. In short, this seems a curiously contradictory approach to either feminist theory or politics. Hall says of Foucault that he ‘saves for himself “the political” with his insistence on power, but he denies himself a politics because he has no idea of the “relations of force”’ (1986a, p. 49). The same might be said with respect to Haraway’s work, where the denial of a politics appears most vividly in the ideological underpinnings of the oppositional subject posited by Haraway and her proper sphere of activity. According to Haraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges,’ “The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history’ (in Haraway, 1gg1d, p. 193). In ‘Ecce Homo’, Haraway cites Teresa de Lauretis’ claim that: We, lesbian, mestiza, inappropriate/d other are all terms for that excessive critical position which I have attempted to tease out and rearticulate from various texts of contemporary feminism: a position attained through practices of political and personal displacement across boundaries between sociosexual identities and communities, between bodies and discourses, by what I like to call the ‘eccentric subject.’ (1992a, p. 98) Haraway claims that it is ‘these eccentric subjects [who] can call us to account for our imagined humanity, whose parts are

150 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX always articulated through translation. History can have another shape, articulated through differences that matter’ (1992a, p. 98). But who can occupy this eccentric subject position? Although Haraway claims that ‘women of color’ constitute an example of the oppositional consciousness that she endorses, a claim that Joan Scott rightly criticizes for its traces of liberal romanticism (1989, pp. 216-17), these women are privileged for their ‘superb literacy’ (1991d, p. 175). ‘Specific positioning’ for Haraway is race, erotic orientation, and gender, and not class (1991b, p. 21), which belies her earlier self-identification with socialist-feminism. While it may be one thing to forge alliances and even partnerships with individuals who share one’s class position (and Haraway’s theory of articulation ultimately depends on shared class position), it is an entirely different matter to make alliances that transcend that space. In respect to this, it is crucial to understand that the Alliance of the Peoples of the Forest in Amazonia, which Haraway cites as an instance of a non-representational, articulatory situation, was crucially enabled by the work of Marxist labor organizers. What brought the rubber tappers and those living in the forest together was a shared consciousness of their extreme economic exploitation. Furthermore, whatever authority the Alliance gained was in large part facilitated by the work of radical intellectuals and academics initially engaged in representational practices of the very kind critiqued by Haraway." So what politics does the cyborg endorse? Are these reading practices only about ‘pure pleasure, in the sense that it is irreducible to the pursuit of the profits of distinction andis felt as the simple pleasure of play, of playing the cultural game well, of playing on one’s skill at playing, of cultivating a pleasure which “cultivates” and of thus producing, like a kind of endless fire, its ever renewed sustenance of subtle illusions, deferent or irreverent references, expected or unusual associations’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 498)? Or does the cyborg actually constitute ‘an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism’ (1991d, p. 149)? These questions might best be considered in relation to the

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 151° cyborg’s own shifty (if not shiftless) nature. In 1985, the emphasis was on the production of a socialist-feminist theory, but by 1991, it has shifted: to the writing of theory, or the production of a ‘patterned vision of how to move and what to fear in the topography of an impossible but all-too-real present, in order to find an absent, but perhaps possible, other present’ (199IC, P- 295): Where, in 1988, ‘we need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life’ (1988, p. 580, emphases added), by 1991, we need this power ‘in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for the future’ (1991d, p. 187, emphases added). In effect, despite her global movements and avowed empathies, the cyborg feminist need not do anything in order to be political. Politics, so to speak, are fundamentally embedded in the cyborgian body: the fact that the cyborg signifies is enough to guarantee her politics. The shift from ‘building’ to ‘living, a crucial one for the cyborg’s trajectory during the eighties, coincides with the shift observed by Hennessy from feminist politics grounded in the question ‘what is to be done?’ to a feminist politics rooted in the more passive and individualistic ‘who am I?’ (1993, p. 136). Having transported, dislocated, and relocated the cyborg over the years, we are left with the prophetic suggestion that ‘If the cyborg has changed, so might the world’ (1991¢, p. 329). But aside from her more overt political passivity, what else has changed about the cyborg? In the end, she arrives at a form of pluralism that negates connections with either socialism or materialism. Haraway has described the central dilemma confronting feminism as one between the “dream of a common language’ or a radical heteroglossia — a formulation in which she clearly comes down on the side of the latter. Against the so-called totalizing feminist ‘dream of a common language,’ we find instead a ‘cyborg heteroglossia’ or radical cultural politics. But this investment in pluralism again overlooks the relations of force constitutive of pluralistic thought.'? Read as a manifes-

152 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX tation of feminist pluralism, the dream of a common language (and its totalitarian connotations, which have been enacted in great detail in the feminist anti-pornography debates) constitutes the material reality of pluralism, or the expression of the power structures that pluralist discourses struggle to conceal. Heteroglossia is feminist pluralism’s public face — the mythic and dematerialized belief that subjects can speak in very different languages, from entirely different social and cultural positions, yet somehow work together — in isolation from one another — toward a shared political vision. In short, neither technophobia’s “dream of a common language’ nor technomania’s heteroglossia offer the tools necessary for reshaping reality. As Hennessy further comments, the technomanic ‘celebration of difference as multiplicity within signification is suspiciously like those postmodern discourses whose promotions of heteroglossia, local strategy, play, and pleasure celebrate difference for its own sake and at the expense of unhinging it from its overdetermined structuration in systems of exclusion and exploitation’ (1993, p. 73). Furthermore, such celebrations suspiciously resemble capitalist celebrations of differences that are productive in terms of its own interests — differences visibly marked by class position. While Haraway’s theory of affinity may very well work across the lines of gender, race, and erotic orientation within an intellectual field, it seems hardly likely that affinity — ‘related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity’ (1g91d, p. 155) — will be capable of scaling the increasingly insurmountable walls that divide classes. “We're closing our borders, but opening our hearts”! The concept of closed borders and open hearts is a particularly powerful metaphor for describing the present state of feminist theory and practice, for the discursive. concerns advanced in the name of ‘women’ are increasingly being accompanied by heightened material borders between human beings. A passive theory of feminist politics and political action implicitly based

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 153, on consumerist models of choice and the celebratory consumption of difference may indicate that hearts (or wallets) have been opened here and there, but it also erases the fact that doors are being closed in other places — if indeed they ever existed. Marxist theory explicitly deals with the ever-increasing ability of capitalism to mystify its processes: capitalism is constantly refining the invisibility of the exploitation of labor, and further fragmenting and alienating labor from the products of that labor. A politics intentionally or unintentionally derived from the motif of travel, voluntaristic dislocations and relocations, and boundary confusion serves the interests of this system. Capitalism, in short, depends upon the invisibility of boundaries and hierarchies, the silencing of voices from the border wars, and the debilitating fragmentation of any opposition. As Lazarus observes, it is indeed difficult to avoid seeing the strategies of ‘postmodernist social theorists as reflecting their capitulation to the currently dominant forms of bourgeois ideology, saturated as these are with the triumphalist rhetorics of the end of history and the eternality of capitalism’ (1991, p. 128). In a social order where class position and economics, misrecognized or not, determine the manner in which gender, race, and erotic orientation are experienced (as well as the extent to which these affect choices), the reductionism attributed to Marxism by technophobic and technomanic feminists appears as a problem from the intellectual side of the border. Haraway explains her problems with Marxism as resulting from its “unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice’ (1991d, p. 159). Since no examples of these erasures are provided, perhaps we might assume that, if such erasures are ‘unintended,’ they might be attributed to certain Marxist theorists rather than to the methodologies themselves. The disavowal of representation, based on the premise of inherent colonizing tendencies within all representational practices, finally cedes one of the major contributions that critical intellectuals can make. As ‘being’ has replaced ‘doing’ and

154 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX ‘living’ has replaced ‘building,’ so a politicized sense of representation, or vertreten, has been replaced entirely with the aestheticized sense of representation, darstellen. With regard to this separation, Spivak notes that the ‘two senses of representation — within state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-predication, on the other — are related but irreducibly discontinuous’ and that, furthermore, immense problems are buried in the differences between the ‘same’ words: consciousness and conscience . . . representation and re-presentation. The critique of ideological subject-constitution within state formations and systems of political economy can now be effaced, as can the active theoretical practice of the ‘transformation of consciousness’. The banality of leftist intellectuals’ lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent. (1988a, p. 275) In a similar vein, Bourdieu remarks that ‘It is through the illusion of freedom from social determinants (an illusion which I have said a hundred times is the specific determination of intellectuals) that social determinations win the freedom to exercise their full power’ (1990, p. 15). The illusion that differences of gender, race, and erotic orien- tation can be treated independently of their expression through class position, as I have suggested throughout this work, constitutes the thread that connects feminist technophobia and technomania. According to Lukacs, “The practical danger of every such dualism shows itself in the loss of directive for action’ (1971, p. 23). In keeping with this, a seldom discussed aspect of this illusion resides in the deepening sense of social and political apathy that guides it. For technophobic feminists, capitulation underlies the retreat from reality — and the retreat from class — into a self-enclosed, isolated natural existence. For technomanic feminists, apathy is manifested in a blinkered immersion in the delights of postmodernism. As Les Levidow and Kevin Robins remark of Haraway’s cyborg, ‘By detaching the cyborg model from its present institutional context, into the realm of phantasy, her discussion can help us to analyze its manifestation in popular

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 155. culture. Yet that detachment can also lead us away from confronting the social impetus that makes the phantasy appealing’ (1989, p. 175). In a word, the technomanic, or even technophilic, cyborg does not concern herself with revolutionary social change. The confrontation, instead, involves the apocalyptic encounter between good and evil, between extinction and survival — a romanticized narrative that in no way connects to or accounts for the innumerable and banal instances of death and devastation attributable to capitalism. Survival, that is to say, means different things in different places, and extinction (be it apocryphal or mundane) may just as well be heralded by a postmodern handshake, rather than either a bang or a whimper. In the terms set up by the cyborg myth, “We have no choice but to move through a harrowed and harrowing artifactualism to elsewhere’ (Haraway, 1g991b, p. 25). Although we may have no ‘choice’ vis-a-vis the postmodern, we must be aware of unvoiced preferences and affinities. For the overwhelming preferences of cyborgs are finally for their own company, an unstated preference that results in an extremely limited concept of community. Neither shared identity nor shared affinity can provide an inclusive and democratic basis for socialist-feminism. If feminism is to have a political and politicized future, it must progress beyond either a technophobic political model based on identity or the technomanic model of affinity. And here Haraway is dead wrong: affinity is not an alternative to identity. Given the topography of contemporary US society, few middle-class women and men — and fewer still academics — have any routine contact with those outside their class position. Affinity is structured and limited by the intellectual habitus: interaction, except of the most contrived or accidental nature, is increasingly limited. ‘Difference’ — be it gendered, sexed, or raced — is consequently expressed within the parameters of a single class position and, although some intellectuals’ individual trajectories may vary along class lines, by virtue of our institutional positions we now occupy similar social spaces andclass positions. Except

156 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX in the most exceptional of cases, ‘affinity’ isSee of moving outside these boundaries. . The key, perhaps, to undoing the terms supportive of the technophobic/technomanic binarism may lie in what Bourdieu calls ‘a reasoned utopianism,’ which he defines as ‘a rational and politically conscious use of the limits of freedom afforded by a true knowledge of social laws and especially of their historical conditions of validity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 197). In order to achieve this, feminists must not only understand social laws and their histories, but forge theories and practices capable of sustaining and promoting socialist analyses. Given contemporary stereotypes of feminism (sterotypes that cannot be attributed only to a conservative backlash, but stem from problems within feminism itself), we need to formulate theories and practices based on a wider range of socialistfeminist concerns. We must put some distance between our work and the single-issue politics that have far too often been laid solely at the doorstep of feminism. Coherence is a significant part of this process. Haraway has stated that feminism loves a science other than one based on perfect communication — “The sciences and politics of interpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood. Feminism is about the sciences of the multiple subject with (at least) double vision’ (1991d, p. 195). While we may be disposed to finding these attractive, translation, stuttering, and partial understandings always run the risk not simply of incomprehensibility, but of assimilations, incorporations, and elitist notions that can only work to the detriment of socialist-feminism. Feminism needs to provide accounts of the world and possible futures that view the local and necessarily partial nature of our claims within the context of a global system of exploitation and injustice. Postmodernism seems to imply that the point is not to change reality (which, after all, offers a smorgasbord of postmodern delights for those who can afford them), but to be content to interpret it. We need to face the fact that there is little that is sexy, intellectually exciting, or conducive to postmodernist aesthetics about the gray and dull realities of

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE ES economic disadvantage. It’s obviously more charming to pursue the trope of the cyborg winging her way through the gossamer realm of the postmodern than it is to follow a ‘bag-lady practice of storytelling’ (Haraway, 1992b, p. 68), however cleverly this is packaged. We must further offer contexts that can account for, and are accountable for, our own institutional privilege. Without considering class position and its centrality for capitalism, socialist-feminism ceases to exist. Only economic analyses can force academic and similarly privileged feminists to confront the unevenness of gender oppression and undermine its methodological centrality. Only along the frictionless plane — a location where social relations and class antagonisms hold little or no critical purchase — can the category of class be so easily dismissed. As the institutionalization of feminism within an academic setting extends into the twenty-first century, we must fight against the growing depoliticization — the expanding gap between theory and practice — resulting from such institutional- ization. This might take several forms, although the two most available to feminists in the academy are critical pedagogy and a collective opposition to increasingly exclusive educational policies at all levels of US ‘public’ education. Neither of these, however, is sufficient in and of itself without the organization of a larger socialist-feminist movement — a project that cannot be considered within the purview of an individual academic project. In conclusion, I would prefer, like Haraway, ‘to facilitate revisionings of fundamental, persistent western narratives about difference, especially racial and sexual difference; about reproduction, especially in terms of the multiplicities of generators and offspring’ (1989, p. 373). But before we invent futurologies, we need to be able to tell stories about the fundamental and persistent narratives that continue to exclude, maim, and kill — stories about the segregated state of US society and education, about the dire and dehumanizing poverty in which so many inhabitants of the earth now live, about the racism, sexism, and

FEMINISM 158 AND THR TECHNOLOGICAL FIX homophobia so central to capitalism. We live in a time of broken dreams and promises — a time wary of stories about the future that have proved to be at their best illusions and at their worst lies. But socialist-feminists must also be wary of fairy tales. If we are going to forge a collective future beneficial not only to those living in our communities, but to those living outside of them, we must first recognize the futures — technophobic, technomanic, or somewhere in between — that we are selling on consignment from capitalism. Notes 1 Camille Paglia, Gloria Steinem, and Carol Gilligan are among the most popular — all of whom rely on naturalized conceptualizations of gender difference. 2 On the economic intersections, Moraga is once again instructive: Radical Feminist theorists have failed to acknowledge how their position in the dominant culture — white, middle-class, often Christian — has influenced every approach they have taken to implement feminist political change — “to give women back their bodies.” It follows then that the anti-pornography movement is the largest organized branch of Radical Feminism. For unlike battered women’s, anti-rape, and reproductive rights workers, the anti-porn “activist” never has to deal with any live woman outside of her own race and class. The tactics of the antipornography movement are largely symbolic and theoretical in nature. And, on paper, the needs of the woman of color are a lot easier to represent than in the flesh. (1986, p. 188) 3 Some varieties of liberal feminism, such as the positivism expressed through calls for the lifting of the combat ban for women, might be roughly described as technophilic, but even these are eclipsed by more technophobic narratives. 4 Stuart Hall — rightly, in my opinion — makes a claim for the cultural specificity of postmodernism: ‘I don’t think there is any such absolutely novel and unified thing as the postmodern condition. It’s another version of that historical amnesia characteristic of American culture — the tyranny of the new’ (1986a, p. 47). 5 The emphasis on the traveling theorist has unfortunately occurred to the exclusion of an analysis of the ways in which theories also travel. Edward Said (1984) offers a provocative reading of such traveling theories.

CALCULATING ON A FRICTIONLESS PLANE 159 6 Of course, it might be argued that the destination of the postmodernist theorist is much more like a mad dash toward an absolute telos: the end of history, the end of ideology, and so forth. In this case, they appear more in the guise of semiotic ambulance-chasers. For an excellent example of a ‘materialist sociology of cultural product and intellectuals’ (p. 293) that uses Bourdieu to great analytic advantage, see Anthony Arnove (1993). Haraway’s claims to be doing ‘cultural studies’ cannot be sufficiently scrutinized within this essay. However, it is worth pointing out that at no point does Haraway evidence any understanding of the tradition to which she lays claim, a point that is especially noticeable around her use of articulation. While I have no intention of speaking for any unified cultural studies perspective, I agree with Cary Nelson, that while advocates of cultural studies need not follow the British tradition of cultural studies, ‘they do have a responsibility to take a position on a tradition whose name they are borrowing’ (1991, p. 25). Within cultural studies, these debates are generally traced to Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1958), E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution(1961). Io It IZ The detour through the avant-garde to the Kantian sublime in the works of Kristeva, Foucault, Lyotard, Haraway, and others is a particularly intriguing aspect of the postmodernisms they variously espouse. In other words, the popular culture text is read using the aesthetic standards applied to analyze literary texts. Rather than analyzing the text within the context of popular culture, it is extracted from that context and elevated to the level of aesthetic text. For a thorough analysis of this, see Fredric Jameson’s conclusion in Postmodernism (1991). =5 The arguments about decentralization pursue a similarly twisted logic. If capitalism consistently works to consolidate its power (a recent example of which would be that, at this time, the top 1 percent of the US population owns more assets than the bottom go percent), then decentralization might be more accurately defined as mystification. 14 Although Haraway claims in a footnote, following Bruno Latour and Habermas, to ‘demure [sic] on the label “postmodern” because . . . within the historical domains where science has been constructed, the “modern” never existed’ (rg91Cc, p. 329), not only is her disclaimer inconsistent, but it continues to be predicated on the necessity for taking ‘a superluminal SF journey into elsewhere to find the interesting new vantage points’ (1991d, p. 330). 15 Indeed, Haraway seems content to recycle arguments about postmodernity

160 FEMINISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FIX made earlier by Baudrillard and Lyotard. Her argument about miniaturization is identical to that made by Baudrillard in Simulations (1983), while ‘ her observations about the move common to ‘communications science’ (1991d, p. 164) and the term ‘informatics’ comes directly from Lyotard (1984). The cyborg, moreover, bears more than a passing resemblance to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body without organs’ (1987), although it seems to have translated only the confusion and none of the complexity of the original argument. For compelling arguments about mapping the historical continuity of the contemporary condition rather than its singularity, see David Harvey (1989, 1991, 1992), Alex Callinicos (1989), and Philip Garrahan and Paul Stewart (1993). 16 Among these were Adrian Cowell, a British filmmaker; Mary Helena Allegretti, an anthropologist from the University of Brasilia; and Tony Gross, a British political scientist. See Andrew Revkin (1990) for a careful analysis of the Alliance. a7 Elizabeth Spelman (1988) and Nancy Fraser (1993) offer incisive examples of pluralism’s limitations for progressive social change. 18 This comment was made by US Vice-President Al Gore regarding the proposal for restricted immigration legislation (C-Span, 26 July 1993).

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Index abortion, 8, 22, 24, 56, 69, 72-5, 77, 50-1, 61, 63-4, 67, 93, 102-3, 127, 82-3, 86, 91, 94, 96-8 agency, 7, 19, 40—-I, 55, 103 All Volunteer Forces (AVF), 99 Alpert, Jane, 53, 65 129, 135-6, 147-9, 153, 155, Anderson, Perry, 20, 24, 49 articulation, 22, 70, 74, 95, 135, 138, 140-3, 150, 160 Atwood, Margaret, 46 avant-garde, 46, 138, 145-6, 160 Barrett, Michéle, 52 Bartkowski, Frances, 27, 34, 47 Basic Instinct, 72 Baudrillard, Jean, 4-5, 14, 18-19, 24, 40, 148, 161 Bauman, Zygmunt, 15, 20, 25, 46, 102-3 Benveniste, Emile, 17 Biehl, Janet, 51, 65 biologism, 52, 56, 86, 93, 126 Bosnia, 121 Bourdieu, Pierre, 46, 49, 55, 59; 63-4, 105, 137, 144, 150, 154, 156, 160 Bush, George, 2, 14, 75, 104, 131 Butler, Judith, 17, 68—9 Butler, Octavia, 39-41, 43 Cable News Network (CNN), 111, 114, 119, 120-1 Callinicos, Alex, 16, 19, 45, 148, 161 capitalism, 2-3, 6, 9-14, 16, 23-4, 43, 157-8, 160 Carder, Angela, 72-3, 95 Carson, Rachel, 53 censorship, 104-5, 119 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 28 Chambers, Iain, 4 Charnas, Suzy McKee, 31 Chipko Movement, 66 Chodorow, Nancy, 36, 68 Chomsky, Noam, 131 Clarke, Eric, 98 Clarke, John, 6, 14, 18 class, 1-2, 4, 6, 9-10, 15, 17-21, 24-5, 30, 36-8, 44-6, 50, 52-5, 58-60, 65, 72, 94-6, 103, 125, 127-8, 130-2, 137, 142, 144, 146, 150, 152-5, 157, 159-60 Clifford, James, 136 Clinton, Bill, 2, 23, 47, 133 Cockburn, Alexander, 67, 132 Collard, Andrée, 53, 55-6, 60, 65 commodity fetishism, 14, 62, 64 consumerism, 60, 62 Coughlin, Paula, 123 crisis (hegemonic), 67, 101—3, 109, 123, 125, 135 cyborg, 5, 13, 18-19, 22, 45, 93-45 135-6, 138, 141, 145-7, 150-1, 154-5, 157, 161 Daly, Mary, 5-6, 51, 53-4, 64-5, 130

182 INDEX Davis, Mike, 1-2, 48 DeLauretis, Teresa, 69 Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 130 Dworkin, Andrea, 24, 133, 137 Echols, Alice, 44, 53, 65 Ecofeminism, 6, 21, 48-9, 51-2, 54, 56, 62-3, 66 education, 10, 66, 130, 157 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 1 Habermas, Jiirgen, 160 habitus, 63-4, 155 Hall, Stuart, 69, 95, 101, 105, 142-3, 145, 149, 159 The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, 72 Haraway, Donna, 4-7, 13, 18-19, 23-6, 36, 39-40, 43, 57, 67, 91, 93, 135-57, 160 Harding, Sandra, 5 Hartmann, Heidi, 9 Elgin, Suzette Hayden, 36, 47 Hartouni, Valerie, 71-2, 86, 97 embryo, Hecht, Susannah, 67 71-2, 74-5 87-9, 91, 93, 95-6 77) 79-81, 83, Emshwiller, Carol, 39 Engels, Frederick, 24, 103, 149 Enlightenment, 17, 45 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 8, 23 essentialism, 11, 38, 44-5, 53, 65, 68-9, 86, 107, 125 eugenics, 34 Falklands War, 104-5, 127 Faludi, Susan, 65-6, 73, 95, 125, 133 family, 3, 10, 23, 32, 71, 79, 86, 109, III, 128 Fatal Attraction, 72 fetal neglect, 73, 95-6 fetus, 22, 65, 70-5, 77, 79-83, 88-9, 91, 93-8 Firestone, Shulamith, 4, 86 Foucault, Michel, 23, 147, 149, 160 Fox Keller, Evelyn, 5, 26 Fuentes, Annette, 126-7, 130 Fuss, Diana, 69 Geneva Conventions, 120, 132 Gilbert, Sandra, 28-30, 109 Gilligan, Carol, 8, 24, 68, 159 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 12, 21, 39-5» 47 Gordimer, Nadine, 9 Gramsci, Antonio, 102-3 Grenada, 104 Griffin, Susan, 51, 54, 57, 59, 64 Gubar, Susan, 30, 32-3 Hennessy, Rosemary, 65, 135, 151-2 heterosexuality, 32-5, 38 idealism, 64, 137 imperialism, 2, 14, 33, 40, 101-2 in vitro fertilization (IVF), 72 Iran, 109-10 Iraq, 104, 120 Jameson, Fredric, 26, 43, 160 Jardine, Alice, 4 Jeffords, Susan, 98, 106-7, 122 Kauffman, L.A., 60 Kellner, Douglas, 119, 131 King, Ynestra, 51, 54, 60, 106, 129 Kolodny, Annette, 28-30, 46 Kristeva, Julia, 87, 160 Kuwait, 75, 91, 107, I10, 115 Laclau, Ernesto, 12-14, 18, 95, 141 Lane, Ann, 27, 34-5 Laqueur, Thomas, 98Lazarus, Neil, 14, 24, 137, 153 Life Magazine, 22, 24, 56, 74-80, 83, 89, 96-7 literary criticism, 15, 21, 28, 47, 49 Longino, Helen, 5 Lukacs, Georg, 24, 102 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 4, 14, 18-19, 40, 136, 145, 148, 160-1 MacKinnon, Catherine, 24, 121, 132-3

183 INDEX Marcuse, Herbert, 3 Pollitt, Katha, 51, 53, 65, 73, 98, 125, Martin, Emily, 87-8, 97 Marxism, 2, 9-12, 24, 51, 141, 153 matriarchy, 21, 27-8, 31, 45 McRobbie, Angela, 13, 18 Miller, Nancy K., 25, 47 133 Poovey, Mary, 92-3 post-Marxism, 13, 95 postmodernism, 6, 10, 14-17, 23, 25, Mills, C.W., ror "The Miracle of Life", 82-3, 89, 96 modernism, 147 Modleski, Tania, 47 Mohanty, Chandra, 30 Moraga, Cherrie, 64, 134, 159 Morgan, Robin, 53 Morris, Meaghan, 65, 135, 140 Mouffe, Chantal, 12-14, 18, 95, 141 National Organization for Women (NOW), 8, 23-4, 126 New Right, 22, 56, 69-70, 91-2, 135 New Social Movements, 8, 12-14 new world order, 14, 98, 106 Nicholson, Linda, 7, 9-10, 45 Nilsson, Lennart, 77, 80, 82, 97 Norris, Christopher, 13, 19, 23-4, 131 North American Free Trade 27-8, 39-40, 95, 135, 137) 147, 154, 156, 159-60 pregnancy, 83-4, 86-9, 91, 93-4, 98 prisoner of war (POW), 119-21 protection scenario, 98, 106-8, 111, 115, 122, 125 rain forest, 66-7, 161 rape, 53, 65, 71, 98, 106, 120-2, 132, 159 reification, 102 resistance, 12, 17-18, 24, 29, 34, 40, 43, 61, 84, 126 Rich, Adrienne, 27-9, 104, 109, 132 Roe v. Wade, 77, 79, 96 Rose, Jacqueline, 108, 131 Ross, Andrew, 5, 7, 26, 144 Rothman, Barbara Katz, 98 Ruddick, Sara, 68, 125 Russ, Joanna, 31, 47 Agreement (NAFTA), 62 Not Without My Daughter, 108—10 Said, Edward, 102, 159 Sanger, Margaret, 12, 34 Sarachild, Kathie, 24 Oakley, Ann, 88, 96-7 Saudi Arabia, 99, 105, 110, 115, 124, 129 Paglia, Camille, 24, 107, 159 science fiction, 21, 26-7, 31, 39, 43, Panama, 104, 115 patriarchy, 4-5, 29, 31, 36, 38, 49, 51-2, 65, 101 Pearson, Carol, 32-4 Penley, Constance, 5 Pentagon, 104-5, 124, 131 Persian Gulf War, 14, 22, 25, 98-9, 103-6, 109—II, 115, 122, 128-9, 133 Petchesky, Rosalind, 98 Pfeil, Fred, 40 Piercy, Marge, 31 Plant, Judith, 48, 54, 58 pluralism, 44, 46-7, 151-2, 161 145 Scott, Joan, g—10, 150 separatism, 38 Showalter, Elaine, 47 socialism, 2, 9, 150-1 Sontag, Susan, 8 Spallone, Patricia, 95 Spelman, Elizabeth, 47, 161 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 8, 33, 69, 154 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 12 Stanworth, Michelle, 86—7, 92 Steinem, Gloria, 121, 159 Stiehm, Judith Hick, 107, 124-5

184 Switch, 71 INDEX Vanity Fair, 84-6 Vietnam War, 3, 75, 104, 128, 133 Tailhook Convention, 122-4, 132 Taussig, Michael, 64 Tavris, Carol, 65, 125, 133 Terminator 2, 99 Thatcher, Margaret, 108, 127 Thelma and Louise, 99 Ultrasound testing, 87-9, 96 Warren, Karen, 54 Webster decision, 73, 96 Williams, Raymond, 15-16, 21, 30, 70, 133, 160 Williamson, Judith, 55, 125 Wittig, Monique, 31 Woolf, Virginia, 29 World Wildlife Federation, 62

The quantum leaps in technology in the twentieth century have provoked a profound shift in the way we think about our bodies. Genetic engineering, reproductive technology, the advent of virtual reality all fundamentally affect basic categories of ‘self’ and ‘gender’. The future can look bright or apocalyptic, depending on where you stand — and, crucially, who is selling that vision to you. Carol A. Stabile argues that the two traditional responses of technophobia or technomania are simply inadequate for the choices facing us today. She charts the development of these two responses across a wide cultural terrain: from ecofeminism’s uncritical celebration of women and nature to foetal imaging, struggles over women and the military, and the advent of cyborg politics. ‘This is an original anc oo cultural studies can be ieee [m] courageous challenge : all sacred assumptions ol fe le of what ds ... [and] a »minant and even : | studies ... Stabile has written a kt cultural studies and fe © be on every ading list.’ ay[a] aas-sanccs rruiessur cawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill ‘[A] brave and lucid book ... Her vivid polemic against feminism reduced to a privileged avant-garde gesture is also a compelling argument for a feminism socially capable of making political sense.’ Professor Meaghan Morris, University of Technology, Sydney Carol A. Stabile is Assistant Professor in the department of communication, University of Pittsburgh. ign be Bina Front cover design by Dingus A. Hussey Manchester University Press ISBN 0-7190-4275-5 ‘| | 80719"0427 |