Role of the Cyborg in Rethinking Gender and The Nature of Human/Technology/Animal Intersections - Essay Example

Role of the Cyborg in rethinking gender and the nature of human/technology/animal intersections Cyborg is a cybernetic organism that plays important role in rethinking gender and the nature of human, technology and animal intersections. It is a self-regulating integration of artificial and natural systems. The technological regulation of bodies and the control of reproduction are central issues within the sociology οf the body. The existence of such technologies has changed and transformed the way we understand the physical body, and has in turn created spaces where new truths about the body have arisen. As such, the issues raised by reproductive technologies are central to any consideration of the sociology of the body. However, it is not the existence of the technologies themselves that determines their impact on people's lives, but the social and political context within which they are located and from which they derive their meaning. Instead οf viewing ARTs statically as an essential object, they need to be understood as shifting historical practices. Like all practices, disciplines and codes, have a materiality only within the context with individual and groups' uses, appropriations and contestations. Women cannot help being shaped and transformed in their participation in these technologies; and these technologies cannot but be shaped and transformed by woman's participation. Rejecting any fixed characterization of these technologies then, a more useful appraisal would focus on the historical specifity of the diversity of their uses and the shifting of the meanings they generate for and by different constituencies. (Martin 1991, 485-501) In this vein a number οf people have commented that we are now living in a "cyborg society", all of us to some degree cyborgian whether we accept the designation or not (Haraway, 1985; Gray, 1995; Balsamo, 1999). While the cyborg metaphor is invaluable in offering a new way of conceptualizing the relationship between human beings and machines that challenges the limitations of essentialism and fixity, the idea that we are all cyborgs poses some limitations οf analysis. Such a blanket conceptualization ignores the fact that there are many ways in which women can and do resist the cyborg image, and by suggesting that we are all cyborgs there is a danger of losing sight of these differences, as well as possible differences among cyborgs. The fundamental questions in analyzing a "society of cyborgs" should be: Under what cultural, economic and political conditions are cyborgs configured? For whom and in who's interests are cyborgs "liberating" or "pleasurable"? For whom and under what conditions are cyborgs "oppressive" or "dangerous"? Donna Haraway's notion of the cyborg "as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings" is useful to invoke the emancipatory potential οf scientific practices that offer only "permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints" (1991, pp150 154) Despite criticisms about its tainted genealogy, it is one of the most useful and fruitful metaphors advanced over the last decade for those who wish to displace binary representations of technology such as liberal deification and radical demonisation. (Haraway 2000, 50-57) Dion Farquhar has located an important similarity between the liberal celebration and radical condemnation of reproductive technologies in their common tendency to treat reproduction in general and maternity in particular as historically and culturally universal practices. As she writes "Both narratives assume an essential, universal connection between "nature" and reproduction. Both narratives deny the diversity, fluidity, and essential contestedness οf representations of people's reproductive and maternal experiences or, alternatively, the host if reasons for the absence or displacement of these practices in their lives" (2000, p215) The liberal model, for example, holds that ARTs are free floating entities that exist beyond the realms of discourse and power, and that the interventions of reproductive technologies simply repair or aid the natural species drive to have a child, the normalcy οf women's desire to mother etc. (Braidotti 1994) Radical feminist narratives on the other hand, while recognizing that ARTs are always inextricably intertwined with the discourses, ideologies and hegemonies of patriarchal western society, put forward an equally unhistorical and fixed conceptualization of the female body and the possibilities of these techniques. The radical feminist's version of this narrative configures the maternal body negatively, and posits female emancipation in the liberation οf reproduction from these male dominated technologies, and the restoration of a woman's natural bodily integrity. (Irigaray 2004, 202-213; Irigaray 2000, 103-111; Young 1990) A thinly veiled moral totalitarianism would outlaw ARTs and "penalize its vendors and purveyors" in order to "prevent women from being technologically ravaged." (Raymond, 1991) Michelle Stanworth has noted the feminist criticism's "tendency to echo the very totalizing views of scientific and medical practice, of woman and of motherhood, which feminists have been seeking to transform" (1987, pp14-15) It is ironic that originally, reproductive technologies were similarly designed to reproduce normative representations οf motherhood and femininity, and have since been integral in expanding the category of motherhood in historically unprecedented ways, and have radically refigured the way that bodily alterations like pregnancy can be experienced. The notion of a technical system implies control from a centre, a place of power. This pretension is belied as soon as we look at the agency of the people who actually participate in these systems. A decade ago, access to reproductive technologies was limited to married heterosexual couples with the ability to pay, an "example οf the medical profession's enforcement of social mores in the dispensing of services" (Farquhar, 2000, p211) In 1984 the British Health and Welfare's Ethics advisory board recommended restricting access to stable, heterosexual married couples, and the 1994 Ethics Report of the American Fertility society made the same normative point in its foreword that "generally speaking, a married heterosexual couple in a stable relationship provides the most appropriate environment for the rearing οf a child" (Farquhar, 2000, p211) Against such conservatism, the inclusion of other mothers into the assisted reproductive technologies came as a result of the arduous political and representational contestations carried out by the gay liberation and women's liberation movements. In the U.S, the increase in medical reimbursement, itself a result of intense lobbying efforts by advocacy groups like Resolve, coupled with the increased militancy of groups οf other mothers to be admitted to clientele, led to more and more people who did not conform with the heterosexist standard utilizing reproductive technologies than ever before. Thus, both single heterosexual women and partnered and single lesbians with no medically defined reproductive "pathology" have increasingly been using ARTs, not only to avoid heterosexual coitus, but also because of their collaborative reproductive potential. In addition, peri-menopausal women over 40, who may be poor candidates for IVF have been utilizing a host of other technologies such as hyperovarian stimulation via pharmacological intervention and IUI, donor egg, donor embryo or traditional surrogacy. Technology providers have responded to the politicized demand for inclusion by queer populations such as single heterosexual women, lesbians, gays, and older people who's access is now largely based on ability to pay. Entirely new discourses on what constitutes pregnancy and motherhood have been created through the increasing employment of these technologies by 'other' subjectivities, and by separating reproduction into its genetic, biological and social aspects, these discourses serve to confront the former giveness of reproduction and performativly declare its unnaturalness, which is to say its social constructedness. As Farquhar writes, "By definitively separating sex from reproduction, reproductive technologies break the naturalized assumption that reproduction is heterosexual and heterosocial. By fetishizing the social criterion οf the "[heterosexual couple]," medical discourse invokes the heterosexist standard only to disrupt it by its asexual and third party donor interventions" (2000, pp217-218). It is illuminating that "natural" pregnancy as a hegemonic category was only called into existence as a political discourse with the manifestation of its binary opposite, "artificial" reproduction. Natural pregnancy is not then, some a historical woman's experience that gets fragmented and sullied by new technologies, but is rather a discursive manifestation of these new technologies concomitant to the arising 'other' forms of motherhood that it has positioned itself in binary opposition to. Rather than condemn these processes as a "system of dismembered motherhood", in which women will be "technologically ravaged", and threatens something intrinsically "natural", an alternative approach would be to celebrate the proliferation οf diversity and the subversion of binary hegemonies that such a position offers. By separating pregnancy, birth and parenting into their genetic, biological and social legal aspects, ARTs change and challenge the fetishizisation of blood-ties, the nuclear reproductive norm and their corollary sexual identities. They declare the constructedness of reproduction by posing alternative ways to conceive. Reproduction can now occur beyond the marital master bedroom, and beyond the phallocentric script οf heterosexual sex, and beyond their corollary identities, prescribed lifestyles and sexual roles. As such, while it is essential to be able to conceptualize these technologies in terms of their libratory potential, the possibilities they offer for strategic appropriation, and ways in which they can be contested and altered to allow broader economic, political and democratic access, such an appropriative movement demands that we also recognize technology's inbuilt defenses against appropriation, and the way in which these technologies seek to recuperate old patterns of domination. Following Sawicki, in interrogating ARTs we need to distinguish between a 'repressive model of power' which focuses on the way in which women are oppressed and repressed by men, and a 'disciplinary model οf power', which focuses on the struggles and resistances between men and women. As she writes, ARTs are disciplinary techniques that "represent one of a series of types of body management that have emerged over the past two decades rendering women's bodies more mobilizable in the service of changing utilities οf dominant agencies". (1991, p83) Whilst these techniques are aimed at reducing a woman's body as a political force and augmenting its capacities as an economic utility which will render them useful to the agencies that regulate, study and control them, as we have seen they are also creative. While the adoption and use of ARTs by certain groups have created new subjects - good mothers, bad mothers, infertile women, surrogate mothers etc - they have also created new sites for resistance, and possibilities for the formation of new identities. But forms of domination, if they are going to have any kind of durability such as patriarchy, are purely historical: the juridical and strategic modes οf power will shift, develop and refine themselves with the movements of history, and reorganize themselves according to the actions and resistances of the objects of discipline. Male domination is not homogenous and static, but hegemonic: it changes in response to the resistances of women. For example, in her essay on reproductive genetics Elizabeth Ettorre has shown how ART institutions have now become functional in reproducing a "genetic moral order", a dominant morality οf the body targeted at maintaining the standardization of economically useful bodies demanded by the capitalist division of labor. (2002, pp65-76) Of course, such a disciplinary matrix denies embodied agency - something that should be valued and preserved in contemporary society - both to mothers and 'potential' people, as well as reproducing disabilist social relations. But it can also be understood as a process in which the relative reproductive autonomy many women have gained through ARTs is recaptured and women's reproductive power is subjected to the reproduction of the relations οf economic production. Prenatal diagnostic data and testing provides a similar function, and profoundly affects a pregnant woman's experience of her pregnancy and her fetus. Casper (1995) has argued that amniocentesis transforms pregnancy into a "tentative" event, contingent on the outcome of testing. And what kind of knowledge does this prenatal diagnostic data οffer pregnant women? Most significantly it will tell them whether or not their fetuses are genetically defective or monstrous. Yet, as Casper points out, "because there are currently very few treatment options for genetic diseases, prenatal diagnosis leaves pregnant women with only two "choices": abort or carry a potentially "defective" baby to term, often with significant clinical and social ramifications" (p189). We are, after all, a culture that values "perfect", rather than "monstrous" babies. While these technologies can be viewed, and indeed are surly experienced as empowering for pregnant women which offers many social and economic benefits, Stabile has persuasively argued that paradoxically, prenatal diagnosis is able to function like this only because "the maternal space has, in effect, disappeared and what has emerged in its place is an environment that the fetus alone occupies." (1992, p180) Ultrasound images, for example, are used to detect birth defects and "see" how many fetuses are inside the womb. It does this by transforming an embodies fetal entity into a series of photographic images on film, allowing clinicians to focus on these images in forming diagnoses and eschew the more traditional forms of fetal diagnosis which involve direct contact with a woman's body. The ultrasound image does not "show" the mother, but rather symbolically and visually dissects the embodied fetus from her body, an in the domain οf medical decision making, these techno-visual representations replace the organic fetus inside their mother's bodies (Casper, 1995, p188). These foeto-centric practices that can be seen as threatening the pregnant woman's embodied agency and blurring the distinction between the physiological event of pregnancy and a woman's subjective experience of it is perhaps most strikingly represented in the practice of PMV (Post-Mortem Maternal Ventilation). In PMV brain-dead pregnant women are kept alive via intricate life-support or ventilation technologies in order to sustain the fetus until it grows to viability, at which point it is delivered. These fetuses are not transformed by any outside technology, rather it is the dead mother who is transformed into the technology that keeps the fetus alive, described by surgeons as "the best heart-lung machine available" (Casper, 1995, p196). Hartouni has argued that the discourse surrounding PMV sustains the view that motherhood is a "natural condition and a state of bodily being, rather that a deliberate social activity", in which women are reduced to "biological tissue and process" (1991, p32). In this context, PMV could be seen as simply the most vivid reflection οf the processes of recuperation also familiar to genetic reproductive technologies and prenatal diagnostics that are targeted at positioning reproduction within disciplinary structures, and are organized towards functionalizing women's reproductive power in line with the economic needs of contemporary society. Stabile has argued that "the promise of monsters and of the cyborg should not blind us to the cyborgs being forced upon us" (1992, p200) although this cautionary note needs to be taken seriously, the cyborg still has value as an analytical tool. While becoming a cyborg is not always a political act for those who participate in cyborg technologies, it is a positively political act for the sociological analyst to recognize something or someone as being a cyborg and thus put forward some possible dangers and/or liberations to be gained from engagement with these technologies. Such an approach does not involve speaking on behalf οf the interests of cyborgs, or any putative moral definition of cyborg technologies. As illustrated above, there are a range of dimensions, positions, pleasures and resistances all representing differences in the dialectical interplay between subjective agents and these technologies. As Casper has suggested, more useful way in analyzing the proliferation of cyborgs might best be conceptualized as a continuum, with "choice" at one end and "no choice" at the other. As a way οf avoiding the potential dichotomy this sets up, we need to acknowledge that most cyborgs will fall somewhere in between these two options. Analytically, our task is to place cyborgs along this continuum and attempt to resituate them within their conditions of origin. This enables us to see the actual cyborg making practices, as well as any resistances to these. Of course, reproductive genetics and prenatal diagnostics do not necessarily debase woman's agency or inherently embody some dystopian means of social control like Huxley's hatcheries (2002). These technologies must be understood within the context of their multiple uses and functions which can be at once experientially limiting and liberating, and can also be destabilizing for patriarchal reproductive hegemony at the same time that their configuration and appropriation can uncritically continue old patterns οf subjugation and male domination. Only after we have located these technologies in their multiple uses and functions can we begin to ask the important questions: Do ARTs function as a limiting or constraining factor in women's subjective experience of pregnancy? Are they functioning to empower or disempower pregnant women, and on whose terms? Do they offer choice, or take it away? Under what conditions are pregnant women able to resist these factors, and conversely, when do these factors allow women to gain pleasure and economic benefit? Works Cited Baker, Maureen. (2004) "The Elusive Pregnancy: Choice and Empowerment In Medically Assisted Conception", Woman's Health and Urban Life, III (1): 34-55 (ISSN 1499-0369) Balsamo, Anne. (2004) "Reading Cyborgs, Writing Feminism", in Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Wolmark, J. (ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp145-156. Braidotti, Rosi., (1994) “Mothers, Monsters and Machines” in Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Columbia University Press, New York, Butler, Judith. (1987) "Variations on Sex and Gender", in Benhabib, Seyla. & Cornell, Drucilla. (eds.) Feminism as Critique, Blackwell: Polity Press, pp 128-143. Casper, Monica (1995) "Fetal Cyborgs and Techomums on the Reproductive Frontier", in The Cyborg Handbook, Gray, C. (ed.) 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