Sarah Franklin,
"Transbiology: A Feminist Cultural Account of Being After IVF"
(page 3 of 8)
One of the biggest implications of IVF, however, is not the
biological consequences of its widespread use three generations from
now, but the cultural changes its rapid normalisation has engendered.
Marilyn Strathern was the first to begin to chart these in two 1992
publications, Reproducing the Future and After
Nature.[16]
In both books, Strathern drew on anthropological theories of kinship to
examine changes to the meaning of natural or biological facts engendered
by the advent of new reproductive technologies. She argued that NRTs
revealed the contingencies of how different domains of facts provide the
ground for others, comparing this movement to the function of analogy.
NRTs, with their new analogy of kinship as the outcome of technological
choice, made explicit the 'hybrid' logic of kinship connection—which
was not fixed by biology, one-way, or given by nature but rather
digital, plural, and merographic—i.e. always switching back and
forth. What makes a person biological is not the same as what makes
them social: what makes them kindred is not the same as what makes them
an individual, and so forth. NRTs, and the discourses surrounding them,
added into the switching back and forth of kinship analogies and new
elements of choice and technological assistance. This had a displacing
effect. In Strathern's terms, the analogies 'travelled back' to
renaturalise conception as an act of technological choice rather than
natural fact. Human reproduction was now explicitly 'after assistance,'
'after culture,' and 'after IVF.'
This displacement of the prior ground of natural biological
conception by technologically-assisted conception is evident today in
the way that pregnancies are described as being 'spontaneous' or
'unassisted' when they are not the result of NRT. Post-IVF, non-miracle
babies are no longer un-marked. We are thus 'after IVF' in another
sense—IVF has to an extent become the model for 'normal'
reproduction. IVF at once 'reproduces' conception as an in vitro
replica of 'natural, existing biology' and inaugurates a powerful new
domain of 'artificially constructed' biology that is simultaneously
understood to be 'just like' the 'real thing' and completely different
from it—being improved, redesigned, cleaner, and more manageable. IVF
is in this sense a classically hybrid technology—a technology that has
become second nature, and so normalised and naturalised it establishes a
new 'ground' against which more radical innovations, such as human
cloning for example, are compared.
One reason the history of IVF deserves to be reconsidered, I suggest,
is because it turns out that this hybridity is very characteristic of
the logic of post-genomic biology more generally today, which constantly
vacillates between naturally existing and technologically assisted
biologies. Arguably, IVF inaugurates precisely the doubled, hybrid
logic of being just like the real thing, only not—as in
genetically modified foods, artificial skin, or cloned
sheep.[17] This
is why the importance of IVF has been underestimated: the number of
people who use the procedure may be small, but the power of its
logic—and its core analogies—are vast. Both sides of the IVF analogy have
importance for feminism: the idea that new biomedical techniques or
biotechnological applications are 'just like' their 'natural biological'
counterparts—i.e. that they are 'mere' imitations—naturalises
synthetic applications such as hormone replacement therapy. Conversely,
emphasis on the 'designed' or 'engineered' character of IVF aligns it
with the many other contemporary practices that challenge a model of
biology as fixed, inevitable, or determining—including plastic
surgery, transgenesis, and the transsex movement. By this logic, IVF
brings us to another set of questions about how technology and choice
operate as denaturalising idioms not only for reproduction and kinship,
but for gender and sex?
Schematically it is often asserted that the Pill brought about a
separation of sex from reproduction. Artificial insemination and embryo
transfer enabled reproduction without sex. Both the Olympic Committee
and feminism had a hand in confirming the separation of gender from sex.
And with the publicity surrounding Oregon's Thomas Beatie, the pregnant
trans man, we can rethink Gayle Rubin's sex-gender system once again.
Recalling Rubin's definition of the sex-gender system as 'the set of
arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into
products of human activity, and in which these transformed needs are
satisfied,' we have to ask if the term 'biological sexuality' has any
meaning anymore.[18]
Or indeed 'biological' anything? We have to ask
whether the transformation of biological sexuality—or for that matter
biology full stop—into products of human activity is not a precise
description of what The Economist magazine has recently dubbed
"The Age of Biology." Arguably, it is in part the condition of being
'after IVF' that will enable the sex-gender system of what is now known
as 'big biology' to be mapped.
To think through these questions I want to delve further back into
the feminist archives, to an earlier feminist writer, Shulamith
Firestone. Firestone is of course famous, or infamous, for her advocacy
of new reproductive technologies as a means of freeing women from the
tyranny of biology by liberating them from pregnancy. For this
prediction, her 1970 publication The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for
Feminist Revolution has long drawn regret and vitriol from critics
accusing its author of all manner of folly—from technological
determinism and biological essentialism to sheer naïveté.[19]
Maria Mies characterises the dangers of the "technocratic illusion
many feminists pursue in the wake of Shulamith Firestone:"
They think the new reproductive technology and genetics
could, if they were in the control of women be used for finally
abolishing men (by cloning them off). These women not only fail to
realize that economic/political and military power is not in the hands
of Lesbians .... Ultimately, all these arguments are based on a biologistic
interpretation of a historical and social relationship. They are without
doubt going in the direction of racist and fascist
thinking.[20]
Mies is hardly unique in her accusation that Firestone and her fellow
travellers unwittingly promoted the same totalitarian reasoning they
allegedly sought to oppose by attempting to take control of human
biology, and in particular biological reproduction. To the contrary, it
could even be claimed that criticism of Firestone's famous fallacy has
become iconic of a retrospective dismissal of second-wave radical
feminism more broadly as being anti-family, anti-maternity, and even
anti-woman. The 'Miss Firestone Regrets' version of 70s feminism
includes a lengthy list of malapropisms—from over-reliance on
out-dated polarities to unforgivably bad tailoring.
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