Sarah Franklin,
"Transbiology: A Feminist Cultural Account of Being After IVF"
(page 5 of 8)
As Susan Squier notes at the outset of her erudite and still very
prescient 1994 account of 20th century visions of reproductive
technology, entitled Babies in Bottles, reproductive technology
has long been a prominent but "puzzling" theme for
feminists.[24] It is
puzzling, Squier notes, in part because of the "disjunction" or "gap"
between feminist artists and writers, who have often produced
"emancipatory interpretations" of reproductive technology, as opposed to
theorists and activists, who largely have not:
I have long been interested in the contemporary cultural
prominence of images of reproductive technology, particularly in the
works of women writers and feminist theorists. I have wondered what work
of ideological construction was being carried out through the production
and dissemination of those images. I have been fascinated by the rich
and diverse literary representations of this new medical-scientific
field, most notably in the works of Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Margaret
Atwood, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Jolley, Angela Carter and Faye Weldon.
But I also noticed the puzzling disjunction between the emancipatory
interpretations of reproductive technology in many, though not all, of
those novels and in some of the literary critical writings on them, and
the negative responses of feminist theorists and activists to the actual
implementation of these technologies in Europe and North
America.[25]
At the time she was writing, in the early 1990s, Squier was in the
midst of the remarkable outpouring of feminist work on NRT described at
the outset of this paper. Bookending this prolific period of feminist
scholarship on new reproductive technologies were two works published in
the same year, 1985, that Squier selected to represent the
"emancipatory" and "negative" conventions of feminist representation. In
The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial
Insemination to Artificial Wombs, health journalist Gena Corea
offered the first book-length feminist critique of new reproductive
technologies, arguing they exploited women and represented a male need
to control reproduction. Drawing on extensive historical and
investigative research on the history of artificial insemination, embryo
transfer, IVF, surrogacy, cloning, sex selection, and ectogenesis, and
the theoretical work of radical feminists such as Mary Daly, Andrea
Dworkin, and Mary O'Brien, Corea was unequivocal in her denunciation of
so-called 'ART' and her feminist call to arms.
Despite the unwillingness of male supremacist society to
hear us, we must speak .... It will not be easy for us to speak at first. The
issues surrounding the new reproductive technologies are confusing.
Sometimes our heads spin. The benevolent rationales for the technologies
and images of kindly, smiling pharmacrats swirl around in our brains
along with our sense that when we are called 'living incubators' and
'oöcyte donors' all is not well. We are supposed to be confused. The
confusion keeps us speechless and powerless. It is as a Native American
friend once told me: Confusion is a tool of oppression. While we are
struggling out of our confusion into speech we must stubbornly stay with
our sense of uneasiness and think it through. We can not allow ourselves
to be bullied into acquiescence with a 'tolerant' view of technologies
simply because we are not yet able to fully articulate why the
benevolent rationales for these technologies clash with our sense of our
own dignity and worth. We can stand here stubbornly and say: 'Something
is wrong here' and explain that 'something' to the best of our ability.
Each time we do it we will get better at it. When many women break the
silence, when many women finally speak their truth, and speak it again
and again and again, the world will have to
change.[26]
Such a call to arms, familiar in its appeal to the hidden and
forbidden truth of women's experience of patriarchal oppression, and to
the potential for political change through consciousness raising and
collective 'speak outs,' could hardly have been further from the vision
presented by Donna Haraway in "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science,
Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,"
published in the same year as The Mother
Machine.[27] Rejecting
the universal, transhistorical, and essentialist constitution of
'women's experience' as either singular or even 'real,' Haraway
advocated the affinity model used by women of color to ground a vision
of an ironic, unnatural politics inspired by a love of both biology and
technology. Like Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, and Ursula Leguin, whose
transgressive science fiction inspired her to imagine fruitful couplings
with animals, machines, and even plutonium, Haraway saw in
'technoscience' the possibility of ironic offspring who were neither
pure nor whole.
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