Sarah Franklin,
"Transbiology: A Feminist Cultural Account of Being After IVF"
(page 7 of 8)
Without 'natural biology'—'itself' or otherwise—both the apparent
fixity of sexual difference, and its 'essential' connection to
reproduction, lose their foundation and their self-evidentness. Today,
post-stem cells and Dolly, this truism has become so well established in
both the life sciences and popular consciousness that it has become
unclear what the adjective 'biological,' or the expression 'biological
fact' mean anymore. Following the model of experimental embryology, in
which parts of wholes are transferred, fused, and recombined in order to
understand the basic mechanisms of development, the life sciences are
increasingly oriented toward molecular biology, synthetic biology, and
nano-biology under the sign of the new mantra of biological redesign:
in vivo, in vitro, in silico. This is
transbiology: a knowledge-production system that no longer
differentiates between life and non-life, or even organic and
non-organic, at the level of the basic component of bioengineering.
What is striking about IVF is its dual importance to this shift—in
terms of changing both the cultural logic of biological reproduction as
well as the nuts and bolts of how it is accomplished. These are what IVF
'models'—in both the literal experimental and the wider cultural
senses suggested by Strathern. As Strathern predicted, a change in how
we think about kinship inevitably affects how we think about
relationships, as well as the difference knowledge makes by making
things explicit. As Firestone might add, this process is dialectical:
with new knowledges come new relationships and with new relationships
come new knowledges. We can see this in the case of Thomas Beatie, and
from his highly publicised re-scripting of the relationship between
gender, sex and, reproduction will come others. This is how the future
does not reproduce itself exactly. It is also what we might call
transbiology in the form not only of transgender, but transpregnancy,
and transkinship (if not trans-parency).
The concept of 'trans-' was instructively hijacked by Haraway in her
effort to imagine what a feminist politics of biology might look like
shorn of loyalty to blood, lineage, families, mother nature, or purity.
She used the 'trans-' of the transgenetic and the transuranic to extend
the cyborg's mission to live perversely and blaspheme ironically. The
rogue prefix trans- does important figurative footwork for
Haraway by highlighting the shape-shifting, categorically non-compliant
events that engender unexpected alliances and break out of restrictive
norms. Indeed, for Haraway trans- is both a model and a method of
feminist biosociality.
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