In her essay “A Game of Cat’s Cradle,” Haraway claims that “queering what counts as nature is my categorical imperative” (1994:60). In this chapter we take Haraway at her word and read queering nature as the central impulse (and sometimes consequence) of all Haraway’s troping, figurations, and stories. We sketch one possible genealogy of Haraway’s engagements with what has come to count as nature and the ways in which her endeavours encounter, transmute, and overturn the myriad intellectual trajectories and disciplines she traverses. This will not have been the only such genealogy, and certainly not a definitive or conclusive one, since, as Haraway herself has often noted, her work is an ongoing investigation of “the invention and reinvention of nature—perhaps the most central arena of hope, oppression, and contestation for inhabitants of the planet earth in our times” (Haraway 1991c:1). But this beginning is not arbitrary. It is motivated by our belief that nature is not merely one problem among others for feminism to tackle.
In our earliest conversations around Haraway, we discovered a series of shared frustrations around the ways in which her work figured (or didn’t) in feminist theory. Not only was her precyborg work rarely referred to in feminist theory outside feminist science studies, it continued to present challenges for feminist encounters with the material despite being written more than three decades ago. Much of this disconnect appears to result from the continuing schism between feminist cultural theory and feminist science studies. In response, we here read four decades worth of Haraway’s naturalcultural work against some key moments and texts in feminist theory in order to explore the ways Haraway’s commitments continue to disturb mainstream feminist approaches to materialism. Her resistance to the construct/reality binary helps us conceive of possibilities for new characterizations of feminist engagement with what might be called the material/figural. The diffractive work implied by naturecultures has implications for a whole series of similarly divided and productive dualisms in Western thought: sex/gender, human/nonhuman, self/other, and material/semiotic. Thus this chapter foregrounds feminist science studies as core to feminist intellectual and political work based both on Haraway’s commitment to her practice of “science studies as cultural studies” and our readings in science fiction and theory.
Haraway’s commitment to “queering what counts as nature” signals a number of key problematics for both feminist and science studies projects (Haraway 1994:60). First, the relation between scientific constructions/understandings of nature and those of science studies, the social sciences, and philosophical theories more generally. Second, the commensurability of conceptions of the organic, the material, and bodies within the framework of scientific knowledges and more oppositional understandings of naturecultures. Third, how we write and theorize the type and kind of relations between the various actors and actants called upon in producing and talking of Nature. Last, the importance of denaturalizing animality for contemporary political projects or a reconceiving of political ontology in general. Obviously, answers to these questions have implications for all kinds of epistemology and ontology beyond the feminist project. At stake for us—philosophers, feminists, science fiction writers alike—is the possibility of “inhabitable narratives about science and nature” (Haraway 2004:134).
Feminism Revisits Materialism
Haraway’s insistence on unpacking nature, attending to biology, and thinking through the material-figural has, in retrospect, often not sat well with the privileged white middle-class center of academic anglo-U.S. feminism. Her refusal to credit either Nature or Woman as a source for political identity, her insistence that despite their patriarchal, colonialist histories the discourses and matters of the life sciences must be attended to, and her uneasiness about the sex/gender divide as tool for feminist critique have been, to put it mildly, unsettling for numerous feminist approaches. In the midst of feminist battles over the construction of a female subject—and a politics and theory based on such a subject—a refusal to rest either on essentialism or an antibiologist antiessentialism could well have seemed an impossible position in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Haraway first articulated these critiques. Yet in our readings it seemed as if it was precisely this refusal and her attempts to simultaneously occupy contradictory positions that has yielded a critical materialism allowing for the complicated string of modifiers Haraway has often attached to the word feminism—antiracist, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, antimilitarist, queer, and multispecies—to do its work. It is precisely the problematic of nature and its effects on the production of power-knowledge, to borrow from Foucault, that shows these modifiers to be irreducibly active in any critique of patriarchal social organization. At the base of all Haraway’s work is how to have, make, and talk about ethical relations with other beings—organic, inorganic, human, nonhuman, from mitochondria to other people, animals, and machines. Such a desire is, we argue, central to a feminism whose history has been marked by the impossibility of adequately framing such relations due to racism, heterosexism, capitalism, and colonialism.
The project of creating such a critical, ethical feminism has also taken on a rather fraught sense of urgency and legitimacy more recently, as we have seen in recent years the rise of a so-called new materialism. Claims that a refocusing on the material is the vanguard of feminism, inferring a triumphal resolution of an earlier feminism’s inadequacies are problematic. Not just because such claims or representations rest on a reductivist and loaded teleology of feminist theory but also because they signal a worrying continuation of schisms or communication blocks between humanities-based feminisms and feminist science studies.
A sign of how much matter “has come to matter” (in Karen Barad’s words, Barad 2003) within feminist theory is the proclamation of a (re)turn to a new materialism: that is, a postconstructivist focus on the material, such as matter, the biological body, and sex. The 2008 collection edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman, Material Feminisms, presents well-rehearsed claims about the need for feminists to (re)engage the material, given a damaging postmodern-inflected focus on social constructivism, representation, and discourse. As noted, Haraway has consistently exhorted feminism to attend to the sciences and the material. There is, however, something unsettling in the way that Material Feminisms insists on postulating this turn as something new, progressive, and triumphal. A back cover blurb proclaims it to be “an entirely new way for philosophers to conceive of the question of materiality” (2008). Kaye Mitchell notes that the collection is offered as a solution to a “crisis” and “impasse” in feminist theory—“a postmodern, material-world-denying, ‘playful’ dilettante who, it seems … is largely hypothetical” (Mitchell 2008:55). Mitchell’s review suggests that the editors “seem unwilling to acknowledge the extent to which they are following, rather than inaugurating, a trend.” This is a bewildering oversight, given that the contributors represent much of the leading feminist work on the relation between the material and discursive over the last couple of decades: Haraway herself, Elizabeth Wilson, Vicki Kirby, Karen Barad, Elizabeth Grosz, and Susan Bordo. The fact that Haraway’s contribution to this “new” endeavour is represented here by a reprint of her 1992 piece, “Otherworldly Conversations” is a nice bit of irony.
Others have expressed their discomfort with the call to a new materialism. In an admittedly “frustrated” position paper, Sara Ahmed worries about the “routinization of the gesture towards feminist anti-biologism or constructionism” (Ahmed 2008:25). As Ahmed notes, critics such as Wilson, Kirby, and Hird have routinely identified an avoidance or distaste for the biological and/or material in feminist theory. Ahmed acknowledges that she admires and is indebted to the work of such theorists, but is concerned that the “gesturing towards feminism’s antibiologism has become a background, something taken for granted” (25). The rather defensive responses to Ahmed that followed suggest a pressing need for a more nuanced examination of exactly what feminisms and biologies we are talking about here—a tracing of feminism’s “biological” travels à la Katie King seems in order.1 In the meantime, we can observe a lack of clarity over the use and abuse of terms such as biology, antibiologism and the critiques of biological discourse at the heart of this unease. In too many formulations of the appropriate way to figure bodies, biologies, or matter into feminist theorizing, the manufactured separation between science and culture, nature and the social is maintained, with the only arguments being a matter of to what degree one is privileged over the other. As Ahmed comments, in contrast to Haraway’s material-semiotic, certain formulations of the new materialism “seem[s] to return to old binaries—between nature/materiality/biology and culture in the very argument that ‘matter’ is what is missing from feminist work” (34).2
What is at stake here is a “forgetting” of the history of feminist engagements with biology and biological discourses—in particular the long history of feminist science studies. As Haraway has also pointed out, this particular history traverses texts such as the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973) as well as others that Ahmed suggest constitute a shared genealogy for feminist science and cultural studies: the Brighton Women and Science Group’s Alice Through the Microscope (1980), Emily Martin’s The Woman in the Body (1987), and the collection edited by Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey, Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies (1991). These are, of course, all familiar names in Haraway’s lineage of feminist science studies. Ultimately, Ahmed suggests that these new materialist gestures construct a particular feminist theory which is “constituted as anti-biological by removing from the category of ‘theory’ work that engages with the biological, including work within science and technology studies, which has a long genealogy, especially within feminism” (26, see also 37n2).
Ahmed’s argument here is itself the latest in a long history of concerned observations of the schism between feminist work in the sciences and humanities. Back in 1992, Wilson commented that feminist theories of science and technology were an “exotic” area in comparison with other areas of feminist criticism (Wilson 1992:86). As recently as 2004, editors of a special issue on feminism and science could claim that feminist theory had “betrayed a certain chilliness to feminist science studies” (Squier and Littlefield 2004:123). Whether perceived or real, this disjuncture colors the claims to feminist antibiologism that Ahmed finds worrying: “it remains inadequate (both theoretically and politically) for feminism simply to reject the biological” (Roberts 2000:1; see also Severin and Wyer 2000; Wilson 1999; Kirby 2008). And yet, just as Ahmed identifies, numerous feminist critics and activitists have of course explicitly engaged with the sciences. Speaking to this issue, Vicki Kirby questions what, exactly, the humanities have to offer the sciences, given what she sees as a predilection to critique the “sins of the sciences.” In an article on the “two cultures problem,” Kirby argues that “[a]s the humanities have found ways to subject scientific research to textual and cultural analysis, there has been a tendency towards diagnostic fault-finding, suspicion and accusation that militates against more generous styles of engagement” (Kirby 2008:5). But who, exactly belongs to this “humanities”? Where does Haraway fit in this schematic? Such questions suggest a falling back into the “two houses” mentality critiqued by Latour (2004) and the realist-relativist trap in a formulation that doesn’t get at the much more messy way in which feminist engagements with science and nature emerged on a number of fronts.
Indeed, from the very beginnings of second-wave feminist theorizing, feminists working across a range of areas were concerned with the constructions of and power over nature, mostly within the domain of what would come to be called feminist science studies. As Haraway suggests, under this umbrella can be gathered the women’s health movement, debates about race and IQ, and elements of environmentalism (Schneider 2005:125), as well as critics such as Sandra Harding and others such as Ruth Bleier, who founded the October 28th group. Groups like the Boston Women’s Health Collective were well aware of the interimplications of our fleshy lived reality with the biomedical body object disciplined by the life sciences and related institutions. Feminist cultural work on science and technology has repeatedly called for the pressing need to integrate nature “including bodily matter, into the extended framework of feminist cultural analysis” (Lykke and Braidotti 1996:243). As Lykke and Braidotti argued, such a realization proceeds almost inevitably from doing feminist technoscience studies: “‘nature’ and ‘matter’ are much more difficult to avoid when you move into the monstrous area of feminist studies of the natural, technical and biomedical sciences” (243). Within the “more unambiguously” human realm of the humanities, they argue, such a realization was slower to emerge (243).
Nevertheless, even in the cyborg-inflected mode of feminist cyber-cultural studies, consideration of the body and material has been central, primarily as a way of resisting the notion of the “disappearing body” that haunts cyberpunk fictions, panic postmodernism, and information theory. N. Katherine Hayles, for example, is concerned to confront the “dematerialization of embodiment” in both postmodern literary studies and technoscientific narratives so as to understand “connections between the immateriality of information and the material conditions of its production” (Hayles 1992:148, 1999:192–93). Others, like Anne Balsamo, come close to Haraway in pointing out the limiting dualistic logic surrounding discussion and construction of the body when reduced to the either/or of a “flesh and blood entity” versus a “symbolic construct” (Balsamo 1996:23). The dualist nature of such arguments, Balsamo reminds us, arose from the historical circumstances of feminist challenges to biologically determinist accounts. For Balsamo, the best way to circumvent “the effectivity of essentialist versus anti-essentialist perspectives” was to focus “attention on the ways in which nature and culture are mutually determining systems of understanding” (Balsamo 1996: 23). Like Hayles, Balsamo links concern about the body directly with developments in postmodern thought, and asks: “Is it ironic that the body disappears in postmodern theory just as women and feminists have emerged as an intellectual force within the human disciplines?” (31).3 Balsamo draws on Haraway to argue that “the cyborg rebukes the disappearance of the body within postmodernism.... Ultimately, the cyborg challenges feminism to search for ways to study the body as it is at once both a cultural construction and a material fact of human life” (33).
Ecofeminism is another site of “humanities” feminism that has been very much concerned with finding ways to account for a realist understanding of nature. Like feminist science studies, ecofeminist theory has a particular (and different) investment in the discursive positioning and uses of nature. Arguably sharing a genealogy stemming from Carolyn Merchant’s classic The Death of Nature (1980), they have developed along divergent discursive and political paths. Even more so than feminist science studies, ecofeminism has had a precarious relation with feminist theory, not least because many within the academy continue to view ecofeminism with some suspicion as being overly essentialist (Sandilands 1997; Soper 1995).
Although Haraway is rarely classified as an ecofeminist, at the heart of her work is the problem of how we craft more ethical, liveable lives for all human and nonhuman organisms, which requires constant critical taking to task of the devastating machines of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. She is often at pains to point to connections with and inspirations from various ecofeminists such as Val Plumwood, although her stance does not always align with some ecofeminist approaches. As Latour also notes, historically, the work of many environmental activists and theorists, particularly deep ecologists, has merely reversed the dualism of nature/culture, in the process substituting yet another form of reification (Latour 2004). But, as Haraway reminds us, there is no untouched, “wild” nature to which we can effect a return: “there is no garden and never has been” (Haraway 2004:83). Nevertheless, in their concern with nature and nonhuman “earth others,” many ecofeminists such as Plumwood or queer ecofeminists such as Catriona Sandilands share Haraway’s desire to disrupt the nature/culture dualism (Plumwood 2002; Sandilands 1997). Haraway is thus in accord with much ecofeminist theory when she argues that “we must find another relationship to nature beside reification and possession.… Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction of man” (Haraway 2004:64, 65).
This brief survey of some feminist efforts to encounter the material and nature suggests the limitations of the “new materialism” badge. Most areas of feminist inquiry collected under this label differ little from what we might just as easily call “feminist science studies.” Which begs the question, what (or whose) interests are served by such a rebadging? While it may signal a welcome trend in feminist analysis, the term also works to obscure important lineages and connections with a forty-year history of feminist work and dislocates theorists like Haraway from significant webs of conversation and hard-won alliances. In short, for Haraway, the new materialism is old news.
What Counts as Nature?
So what exactly is at stake, or under challenge, in this term “nature”? These are central questions driving Haraway’s work: “From the beginning.… My interest has been in what gets to count as nature and who gets to inhabit natural categories. And furthermore, what’s at stake in the judgment about nature and what’s at stake in maintaining the boundaries between what gets called nature and what gets called culture in our society” (Haraway and Goodeve 2000:50). Nature is a slippery figuration that is called upon to perform a multitude of differing political, activist, theoretical, philosophical, representational, and scientific work. It can function at once as supposedly transparent descriptions of the world-as-it-is (or was), serve as justification for normalized patterns of behavior, forms, and organizations and as signifier for that which is somehow outside culture. The human knower of this nature sits in a complex and contradictory relation to this series of meanings: at once both part of nature (the organic) and what is natural (god- or biology-ordained), but also apparently separate from it as the purveyor and originator of culture and discourse (the not-animal). Our definitions and codifications of nature are complexly intertwined with the ways we define human and how/why/when we separate the human from the nonhuman.
These layers of meanings lead Kate Soper to delineate three differing uses of nature: a metaphysical concept used to signify humanity’s “difference and specificity,” which can either signal human continuity with nonhuman or its irreducible difference; the realist concept of the physical structures and processes studied by the natural sciences; and finally the lay use of the word to refer to the nonurban environment or “wilderness” (Soper 1995). Nature, in Haraway’s usage, is not so easily segmented, as each of these uses colors and impacts on the rest. In her journeys through naturecultures, Haraway is trying to get at the ways in which the “reality of nature” cannot be apprehended separately from the nature that has been produced through, and by, Western scientific discourses that are themselves contextualized and bounded by histories marked by race, class, and sex. This is not to say that there is no “real” or factual element independent of the observations and writings of scientists; as she argued in “The Past Is the Contested Zone” (one of her 1978 Signs articles): “We can both know that our bodies, other animals, fossils, and what have you are proper objects for scientific investigation, and remember how historically determined is our part in the construction of the object” (Haraway 1991c:42).
From some of her earliest work, Haraway has argued the need for feminists to struggle “within the belly of the monster,” to engage and take seriously the stories of life, nature, and the material that the sciences patrol and are implicated with/in. Her impetus was clear in 1978: “we have allowed our distance from science and technology to lead us to misunderstand the status and function of natural knowledge.… We have challenged our traditional assignment to the status of natural objects by becoming anti-natural in our ideology in a way which leave the life sciences untouched by feminist needs” (1991d [1978]:8). The ways in which we think, represent, and call upon nature is inherently political, with worldly consequences for the ways we live as humans, societies, and in relation to human and nonhuman others. From Haraway’s perspective, it is vital that feminists remain in the contest for what counts as nature. As she argued in “The Biological Enterprise” (1979): “Part of remaking ourselves as socialist-feminist human beings is remaking the sciences which construct the category of ‘nature.’... In our time, natural science defines the human being’s place in nature and history and provides the instruments of domination of the body and the community.... So science is part of the struggle over the nature of our lives” (Haraway 1991c:43). Here, then, are some of the earliest calls for feminists to resist “antibiologism,” which Haraway tried to answer in her own work, insisting on attending to the sciences as a core part of feminist activity. For Haraway, feminist science studies has always been, a priori, feminist theory.
While her later work would frame this argument rather differently, these early works are already clear about the absolute necessity to contest for nature. It is worth remembering the very different responses to socio-biology more characteristic of feminist theory at the time. When confronted with a nature that had been “theorized and developed through the construction of life science in and for capitalism and patriarchy,” a common feminist response was rejection of such reductionist biological narratives, rather than, as for Haraway, renewed reason to engage the sciences. “To the extent that these practices inform our theorizing of nature, we are still ignorant and must engage in the practice of science. It is a matter for struggle” (Haraway 1991c:68). This imperative to struggle results in Haraway’s desire to engage in productive, sometimes contestual, conversations with the kinds of stories the life sciences tell about nature and the effects of these stories on scientific practices. These encounters change our apprehension of and relation to science as much as they do nature: “If technoscience is, among other things, a practice of materializing refigurations of what counts as nature, a practice of turning tropes into worlds, then how we figure technoscience makes an immense difference” (Haraway 1994:60). In our reading, Haraway’s challenge to feminism is that we must pay attention both to how the humanities or science studies figure technoscience and also to how the sciences “do” what it is they do.
None of the Above: Exploding Dualisms
Haraway’s ongoing plea to remain attentive to the discourses and practices of science demands a rethinking and repositioning of the historically reified boundaries between disciplines and methodologies, toward a multiliterate transdisciplinarity which encourages the “traffic between nature and culture”—and thus between and across the two-culture divide of the sciences and humanities. Contextualizing and justifying this divide is the whole series of “inherited dualisms that run deep in Western cultures” (Haraway 2004:2). All these dualisms—nature/culture, human/nonhuman, natural/social, sex/gender—are, for Haraway “different faces of the same question” (Haraway and Goodeve 2000:106). From this stance emerges a number of challenges for feminist practice and politics. First, the epistemological split between science and culture, which then underwrites the positions of realism and constructivism. Second, the sex/gender split, which has facilitated so much of post-second-wave feminist cultural discourse. Finally, and what has arguably become most central to her work, the human/nonhuman binary.
The way Haraway refigures the sciences has entailed a relentless attention to the “materializing of tropes,” the language and metaphors of science, and the historically sexed, raced, and classed nature of its construction, constitution, and reproduction. However, approaching the life sciences as “a story-telling craft,” “political discourses,” or “inherently historical” narratives (Haraway 1989b:10, 4) is not to deny the material-semiotic knot that is nature. While Primate Visions’ (1989b) focus on story and narrative fields inclined some to see Haraway as a radical constructionist, she was very clear about the dangers of the sorts of social constructionist position suggested by Bruno Latour’s early work (Haraway 1989b:6). Just as Haraway does not reduce the natural sciences to “relativism,” neither does her argument “claim there is no world for which people struggle to give an account, no referent in the system of signs and productions of meanings, no progress in building better accounts within traditions of practice. That would be to reduce a complex field to one pole of precisely the dualisms under analysis” (Haraway 1989b:12). Since Laboratory Life, Latour’s position has come to be concomitant with Haraway; along with Isabelle Stengers, Latour has distanced himself from the “social constructivists” who “confuse what the world is made of with how it is made” (Ihde and Selinger 2003:26). Together, the work of Haraway and Latour demand that we take seriously “what the world is made of” (some of which is translated through/in science), while also interrogating how it is made, that is, scrutinizing how and why science comes to know what it knows.
Simply put (but complexly rendered), Haraway’s aim is “to find a concept for telling a history of science that does not itself depend on the dualism between active and passive, culture and nature, human and animal, social and natural” (Haraway 1989b:8). Despite her respect for—and indeed love of—sciences such as biology, and the meticulous care with which she teases apart and explodes such dualisms while “constantly working for ways of connecting that don’t resolve into wholes” (Schneider 2005:143), Haraway has not been immune to criticisms of relativism. Reading some of the reductionist reviews of Primate Visions or recalling the vitriol of the science wars, it is no surprise that Haraway has since insistently and repeatedly emphasized her stance on the realist/constructivist front. The science wars in particular made evident the dangers of being seen as “antinatural” (privileging the linguistic over the material) (see Ross 1996). Haraway takes the fallout of the science wars and being labeled an “antiscience person” very seriously: “I’m not going to let people forget our organic relations with the sciences again... me and my buddies, we are not going to be as vulnerable again … we became vulnerable to the cheap attacks, as if we were people denying ‘reality’ in some ways” (Schneider 2005:148).
One of the consequences for Haraway’s work has been a need to clearly state her position: “I am neither a naturalist, nor a social constructionist. Neither-nor. This is not social constructionism, and it is not technoscientific, or biological determinism. It is not nature. It is not culture. It is truly about a serious historical effort to get elsewhere” (Haraway 2004:330). Thus Haraway’s use of naturecultures to foreground the impossibility of talking or thinking nature or reality in isolation and the turn to a congeries of figures and figurations as a means to “insist on the join between materiality and semiosis” (Haraway and Goodeve 2000:86). Indeed Haraway tries out different phrases and terms, such as being worldly, precisely as “a way to sidestep the debate between realism and relativism” (Haraway and Goodeve 2000:110). These questions are pressing for Haraway because they are involved in contests for the world and how we—and others—get to live. That is, these are intensely ontological as well as epistemological concerns. As we shall explore in later chapters, this drive to get beyond and refute a realist/relativist dilemma is at the heart of Haraway’s formulations and refashionings of feminist epistemology (such as situated knowledges and the modest witness).
Thinking in terms of naturecultures has consequences for all the other dualisms flowing from their separation—most significantly for a feminist perspective, that of sex/gender. “Nature/culture and sex/gender are no loosely related pairs of terms; their specific form of relation is hierarchical appropriation … symbolically, nature and culture, as well as sex and gender, mutually (but not equally) construct each other” (Haraway 1989b:12). Haraway has long reminded us that while a useful and perhaps necessary tool for certain kinds of second-wave feminist political and analytical work, the sex/gender divide and the theory based upon it depend upon the “terribly contaminated roots” of an Aristotelian dichotomy (Haraway 2004:329). It is too easy to commit the sin of “misplaced concreteness” and mistake the analytical work “for the thing itself,” seeing sex and gender as things, not linguistic tools (Haraway 2004:330). As she argues from Primate Visions onward, “neither sex nor nature is the truth underlying gender and culture.... Nature and sex are as crafted as their dominant ‘other’” (Haraway 1989b:12). That is, “sex” does not ground the mutable discourses of gender; both are bound in an interimplicated history of relation. Haraway is not alone in this approach; critics identifying with the new materialism as well as feminist science scholars have contested the sex/gender tool. Anne Fausto-Sterling, for one, has called for a reconsideration of “the 1970s theoretical account of sex and gender,” which “assigned biological (especially reproductive) differences to the word sex and gave to gender all other differences” (Fausto-Sterling 2005:1495, 1493).4
Myra Hird similarly is concerned to pick apart the sex/gender dichotomy and notes that this binary has in fact “undergone vigorous challenge for some years” (Hird 2004b:24). Drawing on nonlinear biology (such as Margulis and Sagan 1997) to sketch her own brand of new materialism, she looks to analyses “that confound the often taken-for-granted immutability of sex and sexual difference found in some cultural theories” (Hird 2004a:231). Like Haraway, critics such as Hird look to science to find different narratives of sex. Hird focuses on the two-sexed system based on sexual difference and a reproductive emphasis secured through heteronormativity as the key shibboleth to be dismantled at least in part by looking to the discursive shifts around sex found in non-linear biology: “‘sex’ is not dichotomous. It makes as much sense, biologically speaking, to talk about zero sexes (we are much more similar than we are different) or a thousand tiny sexes.… That culture focuses on two sexes is, biologically speaking, arbitrary” (Hird 2004b:151). Destabilizing sex-gender means also to disrupt the powerful narratives of production and reproduction that discipline nature and to remove grounds for hierarchical human relations with other natural subjects. Troubling these categories also reveals the processes by which dualisms such as sex/gender are secured through the operation of “animal sociology” or “simian orientalism” that rest on the binary human/nonhuman.
The Actors Are Not All Us
One of the most significant consequences of thinking with naturecultures rather than dualisms is that naturecultures are made and inhabited not only for, or by, humans: “The actors are not all ‘us’” (Haraway 2004:66). It is in the sense of getting away from the fixed-nature/mutable-culture dualism and the possibility of allowing for non-human agency that Haraway argues for an “artifactual” understanding of nature—one that she clearly distinguishes from the hyper-productionism which remakes the whole world into a commodity (a move which is also the target of ecofeminism and postcolonial critique). This nature is “a co-construction among humans and non-humans” (Haraway 2004:66). One of the most pressing questions, for Haraway and feminist theory, then becomes how we can think relations with a whole host of others. “How do we designate radical otherness at the heart of ethical relating? That problem is more than a human one … it is intrinsic to the story of life on earth” (Haraway 2004:143).
How, in other words, do we figure the possible conversations, relations, and co-constructions of human and earth others? Well before her Companion Species Manifesto, in “The Promises of Monsters” (Haraway 1992) Haraway was working toward ways of thinking these relations in terms of articulations rather than representational strategies, or what she terms the “political semiotics of representation.” This is a key difference in Haraway’s approach to nature and socionatural questions, which, as with some of Latour’s work, illuminates serious problems in the processes and thinking of deep ecologists and their ilk. Haraway shows that for “us” to become agents by proxy for various nonhuman actors via questions such as “who speaks for the jaguar?” actually involves acts of silencing, disempowerment, and decontextualization of the subject-object: “the effectiveness of such representation depends on distancing operations. The represented must be disengaged from surrounding and constituting discursive and non-discursive nexuses and relocated in the authorial domain of the representative,” who, of course, is always human (Haraway 2004:87).
Thus, those whom Haraway sees as kin in the dance of companion species become, in such representational accounts (whether natural-scientific or ecowarrior), merely the “recipient of action, never to be a co-actor in an articulated practice among unlike, but joined, social partners” (Haraway 2004:87). In such a move, even if the politically motivated human has the “best interests” of the forest/jungle/animal at heart, they refuse these others’ agency such that “the only actor left is the spokesperson, the one who represents” (Haraway 2004:88). Even more troublesome is that this spokesperson, this sole and singular actor, is historically likely to be a scientist who, within the “myth of modernity,” is seen as “the perfect representative of nature” (Haraway 2004:88). In order to co-construct nature, nonproductivist modes of relating between human and nonhuman that are expressed as articulations, relationality, and respect are necessary.
These commitments distinguish Haraway’s approach to animality from that of many of her contemporaries outside feminist theory, like Giorgio Agamben and Latour. Alongside them, Haraway explores “the animal” as a contingent, historical, and contested concept in dynamic and co-constitutive relation to “the human,” raising possibilities for new ontologies of animality. The uniqueness of her contribution to this movement, however, is the invitation to construct theories through which to think not just animality in general, as many contemporary theorists are doing, but animal sexualities in particular, from the vantage point of a critical rethinking of the human. This places feminist concerns and methodologies at the center of contemporary philosophies of the animal while simultaneously calling for these feminisms to interrogate their own heterohumanist presuppositions.
Since Foucault’s explication of biopolitics, we have known that the operation of the concept of sexuality is a supple tool for the maintenance and circulation of power. Feminism has interrogated, historicized, and unhinged the connections between femininity and sexuality for political reasons, namely in an effort to denaturalize exploitative sexual practices and thus change them. We could ask, then, whether it is not the task of feminism to denaturalize animal sexualities in order to present both animality and the political in a new light. The idea of denaturalizing animal sexuality is obviously problematic, at the very least because it complicates our relationship to the discourse that offers the most detailed information about nonreproductive sex among animals, namely animal behavior studies. Feminist theory will need to do much more than cite studies by empirical scientists that describe, for instance, same-sex sexual behaviors among some primates or those famously “gay” big horn sheep that recently made the news (Cloud 2007). In Haraway’s work, queering animals means not only showing that animals sometimes have unreproductive sex. It means showing the political value of unhinging animality from its heretofore seamless relationship to the concept of a “nature” that is stable, predictable, and controllable.
Feminism has barely begun to denaturalize or queer animal sexualities. For instance, Carol Adams persuasively argues that the sexual objectification and consumption of animals and of women follow the same models (2003). She proposes that feminism approach the animalizing of women and the feminization of animals in patriarchal culture as a unique opportunity, namely the chance to study the oppression of animals as a particular symptom of androcentric social organization. However, Adams’s work on the visual culture aspect of meat consumption is devoted to exposing the logic and structure of a pattern of oppression and exploitation, a position depending on one important assumption: that humans are the only actors in this practice. The structure of her argument makes power and privilege pretty unambiguously distinguishable from subjugation. In that sense, it offers rather limited resources for a post- or neo-Foucauldian feminist analysis of power, desire, and norms, the production of truths and practices, and the complexities of self-care.5
In contrast, Haraway shows the political significance and value of conceiving animals as agents (sexual, ethical, semiotic). She reminds us of the reasons animals were actively excluded from much early feminist inquiry, in this case Marxist feminism: “[Marxist feminists] tended to be all too happy with categories of society, culture, and humanity and all too suspicious of nature, biology, and co-constitutive human relationships with other critters” (Haraway 2008:73–74). Feminism never questioned the reserving of the categories of desire and sexuality for human beings. But surely, as Adams has shown, it cannot be by accident that the comparisons between animals and women are made in pornographic contexts in particular. Neither is it accidental that animals are overtly gendered in pornography (see Grebowicz 2010). The patriarchal logic that depends on an assumption of woman’s animal nature makes this assumption specifically in the context of sexuality, insofar as we imagine that sex is where humans are at their most animal. And we do imagine this: in his controversial piece “Heavy Petting,” Peter Singer defends bestiality as a legitimate sexual practice on the grounds that “there are many ways in which we cannot help behaving just as animals do—or mammals, anyway—and sex is one of the most obvious ones. We copulate, as they do. They have penises and vaginas, as we do, and the fact that the vagina of a calf can be sexually satisfying to a man shows how similar these organs are” (Singer 2001). According to Singer’s naturalizing logic, the zoophile’s desire for the animal is always already proof of our animality. Sexual zoophilia itself becomes a symbol of the breakdown of human exceptionalism and perhaps even proof of evolutionary theory.
But, clearly, this collapsing of desire into nature is not where most feminists will wish to end up. What kind of account of agency is available in a post-Enlightenment world in which we have abandoned human exceptionalism, where we take evolutionary biology seriously but no longer conflate nature with programming? Surprisingly, it is Derrida’s work on the animal that offers a position closer to Haraway’s because both take seriously the idea of the animal as sexual agent. For Derrida, sexuality is precisely the site of the human-animal difference where both humans and animals are denaturalized. Rather than challenging the modern anthropomorphic opposition between human and animal by pointing out how very animal we are in our sexualities, as Singer does, Derrida performs a contrasting gesture. He exposes the human as a highly mediated philosophical construct by exploring the degree to which animality poses the ultimate limit to the human. The animal is “more other than any other” and is so precisely “on the threshold of sexual difference. More precisely, of sexual differences” (Derrida 2008:36). Animals thus become not just another “other” for feminism to include in its ever expanding list of oppressed identities, but quite possibly the question mark itself, the philosophical problem of sexuality par excellence. Engaging philosophically with animality means engaging with the idea of sexual differences in the plural, a bottomless heterogeneity of sexual possibilities. This undermines the modern fantasy that humans are on one side of the divide and a homogeneous group called animals is on the other. Derrida writes, “Philosophers have always judged and all philosophers have judged that limit to be single and indivisible, considering that on the one side of that limit there is an immense group, a single and fundamentally homogeneous set that one has the right... to mark as opposite, namely the set of the Animal in general.... It applies to the whole animal kingdom with the exception of the human” (Derrida 2008:40–41). Animality, understood as the site of limitless sexual differences, overturns this received order. In accord with Latour’s rejection of fantasies of a Nature from which Politics is absent, this queer animality opens onto a new relationship between nature and the political.
Haraway’s interest in locating agency in sexuality is evident in the rather racy sex scene that concludes The Companion Species Manifesto. She makes the case that dogs are not natural using the example of complex, unique sexual play between two dogs, one of which is spayed:
None of their sexual play has anything to do with remotely functioning heterosexual mating behavior—no efforts of Willem to mount, no presenting of an attractive female backside, not much genital sniffing, no whining and pacing, none of that reproductive stuff. No, here we have pure polymorphous perversity that is so dear to the hearts of all of us who came of age in the 1960s reading Norman O. Brown. The 110 pound Willem lies down with a bright look in his eye. Cayenne, weighing in at 35 pounds, looks positively crazed as she straddles her genital area on top of his head, her nose pointed towards his tail, presses down and wags her backside vigorously. I mean hard and fast. He tries for all he’s worth to get his tongue on her genitals, which inevitably dislodges her from the top of his head. It looks a bit like the rodeo, with her riding a bronco and staying on as long as possible. They have slightly different goals in this game, but both are committed to the activity. Sure looks like eros to me. Definitely not agape.
(Haraway 2003:99)
Haraway’s political philosophy depends on the claim that humans and dogs (and many other animals) are semiotic agents in the production of naturecultures. The central role played by nonreproductive sex play is crucial to her position, which seeks to undermine the notion that animals are programmed by nature while humans are not (or that humans are animals only insofar as they are programmed by nature). She denaturalizes animal sex at the same moment that she endows the dogs with not just desire but sexual agency: “they invented this game” (Haraway 2003:100). Note the importance of the claim that this is eros and not agape, perversity and not necessity—in short, a certain sense of indeterminacy, possibility, rather than bondage to a stable and knowable script of practices and significations. Invention—in the form of nonreproductive sexual practice—appears here as an alternative to a view of nature as ordered, predictable, and thus controllable. It plays the same role in Haraway’s text as the limitless plurality of sexualities does in Derrida’s.
In the work of these theorists the animal understood as a sexual agent becomes the figure of radical possibility and openness, and it is here that talk of a multispecies body politic becomes audible. In contrast to Singer’s naturalizing move, animality explodes the universalizing category of nature as homogeneous and predictable. It is this figure of the animal with which feminist critique should engage today precisely because the new animality unmistakably announces that we don’t know what we thought we knew about any of the players in the Haraway’s equation—about sex, about women, and least of all about nature. In Judith Butler’s work this state of critical unknowing is necessary for politics. Sexuality is precisely what must remain unintelligible in order to retain its capacity to resist normativity. What would an account of animal sex that took this idea seriously look like? Butler is first of all critical of what she calls foreclosure, the tendency to decide the approach to an event prior to the event itself. In her work on the politics of gay marriage, for instance, she calls the desire for recognition and legitimation by the state “the foreclosure of the sexual field.” And sex, she writes, is precisely the thing that cannot be foreclosed, schematized a priori and thus stabilized, if it is to be the site of freedom and resistance we wish it to be in feminist and especially queer politics (Butler 2004). The political is a field of productive tension between two incommensurable ways of relating to sexuality: as intelligible, representable, and either legitimate or not, on one hand, and as unintelligible, unrepresentable, and outside the very possibility of legitimation on the other. These two poles are not in a relationship of symmetry, because the first is always privileged as recognizably political, while the second is often accused of appearing to be apolitical.
Why, under the present conditions, does the very prospect of “becoming political” depend on our ability to operate within that discursively instituted binary and not to ask, and endeavor not to know, that the sexual field is forcibly constricted through accepting those terms?... To become political, to act and speak in ways that are recognizably political, is to rely on a foreclosure of the very political field that is not subject to political scrutiny. Without the critical perspective, politics relies fundamentally on an unknowingness—and depoliticization—of the very relations of force by which its own field of operation is instituted.
(Butler 2004:107)
Foreclosure precludes the possibility of a progressive sexual movement. Accordingly, as we can see in her deliberate mystification of the sex play between Willem and Cayenne, Haraway’s demand that we consider animals as sexual agents is precisely a move away from any straightforward intelligibility of their practices. And, in keeping with Haraway’s account of posthuman hermeneutic agency, Butler describes these unintelligible places as sites from which a different kind of claim can be made. “These are not precisely places where one can choose to hang out, subject positions one might opt to occupy. These are nonplaces in which one finds oneself in spite of oneself; indeed, these are nonplaces where recognition, including self-recognition, proves precarious if not elusive, in spite of one’s best efforts to be a subject in some sense. They are not sites of enunciation, but shifts in the topography from which a questionably audible claim emerges: the claim of the not-yet-subject and the nearly recognizable” (Butler 2004:108). Borrowing this language, we could argue that in their sex play Cayenne and Willem emerge as nearly recognizable not-yet-agents. As such, they cause shifts in the political topography, the landscape in which we thought we knew what constitutes an audible claim and hermeneutic agency in general. Haraway’s concern with problems of agency intersects with Butler’s concern with unstable and unintelligible sexualities, and she follows Butler in the complexities of theorizing the effects of this intersection on ontologies of animality and in the wide-ranging effects of these ontologies on how we conceive of the political. She also follows Butler in the demand for new imaginaries and practices of kinship and in theorizing the political effects of this shift.
Queer Kin: The Two Butlers
Kinship, in Haraway’s hands, becomes a way of disrupting both natural and cultural understandings of being in the world, to what and whom we have responsibility, with whom we articulate alliances, and who or what is deserving of our respect, care, and love (Haraway 2008). In her own work on kinship Judith Butler writes, “Debates about the distinction between nature and culture, which are clearly heightened when the distinctions between animal, human, machine, hybrid, and cyborg remain unsettled, become figured at the site of kinship, for even a theory of kinship that is radically culturalist frames itself against a discredited nature’ and so remains in a constitutive and definitional relation to that which it claims to transcend” (Butler 2004:126). Queer theorists too have stakes in searching for modes of relationality not dependent on the distorted fantasy of human sexual reproduction. Butler has argued that it is politically and theoretically necessary to attend to notions of kinship as we negotiate contemporary changes in family structure away from the heterosexual norm to what she describes as “post-Oedipal kinship” (Campbell 2002:645; Butler 2004). As Butler notes, debates on gay marriage and kinship “have become sites of intense displacement for other political fears... fears that feminism... has effectively opened up kinship outside the family, opened it to strangers” (Butler 2004). Indeed, queering stands in a particular relation to the production of the human itself (just as Haraway’s queered nature does). One of the central tasks of queering projects “is to assert in clear and public terms the reality of homosexuality not as an inner truth, not as a sexual practice, but as one of the defining features of the social world in its very intelligibility.” The public assertion of homosexuality “calls into question what counts as reality and what counts as human life” (Butler 2004:29–30).
There is, coincidentally, another Butler whose work interrogates the human and the intelligibility of the social world in its reimagining of kinship. At its close, Haraway’s early work Primate Visions draws overtly on a specific SF text by African American SF author Octavia Butler, whose work Haraway finds helpful in its refusal to admit the sanctity of origin myths and her troubled and troubling accounts of the “threateningly intimate other as self” (Haraway 1991:226). Haraway argues that Butler’s SF is about “resistance to the imperative to recreate the sacred image of the same”—particularly Xenogenesis, which offers “the monstrous fear and hope that the child will not, after all, be like the parent” (Haraway 1989b:378). Given Butler’s positioning as an African American woman in the violent postcolonial and patriarchal histories of America and SF, origin stories are more “bad joke” than “original sacred myth” (378): “Butler’s communities are assembled out of the genocides of history, not rooted in the fantasies of natural roots and recoverable origins. Hers is survival fiction” (379).6
Xenogenesis tells the story of the very costly and altered survival of the main character, black American Lilith, who along with other scattered remnants of humanity, has been rescued from a postholocaust Earth by an alien species, the Oankali. The Oankali spectacularly fulfill Haraway’s challenge to blur boundaries: “Their bodies themselves are immune and genetic technologies, driven to exchange, replication, dangerous intimacy across the boundaries of self and other, and the power of images” (Haraway 1989b:379). Haraway points to an important difference between human and Oankali technology: rather than building “non-living technologies to mediate their self-formations and reformations,” the Oankali “are complexly webbed into a universe of living machines, all of which are partners in their apparatus of bodily production, including the ship on which the action of Dawn takes place” (379). These are, however, no selfless, disinterested saviors—the Oankali’s drive to trade in genetic material means they have a particularly invested interest in ensuring the survival of humans—that of a “full trade” which requires “the intimacies of sexual mingling and embodied pregnancy in a shared colonial venture” (Haraway 1989b:380)—a nonconsenting impregnation made all the more horrific by the fact that, as Lilith despairs, the resulting children “won’t be human” (Butler 1988:263).
Whether or not Butler believes, alongside her gene-trading aliens, that humans are “fatally, but reparably, flawed by their genetic nature as simultaneously intelligent and hierarchical” (279) is really beside the point. (It is worth noting that just such a collapse of Butler into her aliens is what leads some critics to criticize Butler’s utility for a feminist alternative vision of humanity based on dreaded essentialism). This is, after all just one story about the naturalcultural formulation of humans—one that, at any rate, is rendered irrelevant as it becomes clear that the only humanity to survive will be irrevocably changed through enforced sharing and trade with the alien. The Oankali-human constructs will need new stories that cannot help but avoid the “sacred image, the sign of the same” (Haraway 1989b:380). Where others see flawed utopias, biological essentialism, or a dystopian figuring of colonialist powers,7 Haraway sees “survival stories” and hopeful kinships. Haraway is “drawn to the ‘non-originality’ of [Butler’s] characters: as diasporic people, they can’t go back to an original that never existed for them” including, importantly, an oedipal kinship system (Penley and Ross 1990:17). The value of Butler’s work lies in the way her stories, damaged heroines, and societies nevertheless accept the need to make “survivable” lives out of polluted and marked histories and bodies. The central message of Butler’s fictions is that there are different possibilities for telling noninnocent origin and kinship stories for human and other species. In this way, feminist SF illuminates Haraway’s search for stories that help queer nature and thus participate in the transdisciplinary, multiliterate conversation feminist science studies becomes in her hands.8
Of course, for Haraway and ecofeminists, queer kinship goes well beyond the human “family” to include all kinds of organisms and animals:
I want my writing to be read as an orthopedic practice for learning how to remold kin links to help make a kinder and unfamiliar world.... It is my queer family of feminists, antiracists, scientists, scholars, genetically engineered lab rodents, cyborgs, dog people, vampires, modest witnesses, writers, molecules, and both living and stuffed apes who teach me how to locate kin and kind now, when all of the cosmic correspondences … might be traceable in non-Euclidean geometries for those who have never been either human or modern.
(Haraway 2004:2–3)
Judith Butler traces the radical changes in contemporary anthropological practice and resulting theories of kinship, which have moved from the concept of a natural and reprocentric relation to the more performative notion that “kinship is itself a kind of doing,” a practice of self-conscious assemblage. This illuminates complications in the relation between nature and culture. There are obvious resonances here with Haraway’s approach to companion species: her figuration for telling a “story of co-habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross species sociality” (Haraway 2003:4). Nonreprocentric models of kinship “constitute a ‘breakdown’ of traditional kinship that not only displaces the central place of biological and sexual relations from its definition but gives sexuality a domain separate from kinship, which allows for the durable ties to be thought of outside of the conjugal frame and thus opens kinship to a set of community ties that are irreducible to family” (Butler 2004:127).
This facilitates imagining interspecies kinship because the species line no longer signifies as that which constrains biological reproduction. It loses its significance in contrast to the considerable ethical challenges involved in agential “doing.” Like the two Butlers, Haraway figures this doing as process—a “becoming with” as a way of “becoming worldly” where “the partners do not precede their relating” (Haraway 2008:3, 17). This doing, which Judith Butler describes as “a process of cultural translation, where it is not a translation between two languages that stay enclosed, distinct, unified,” but rather “the occasion for both an ethical and social transformation,” will not be warm, fuzzy, or comfortable. “It will constitute a loss, a disorientation, but one in which the human stands a chance of coming into being anew” in a relationship of ongoing conceptual and material mutual intervention with animalities (Butler 2004:38–39). This disorientation is, we argue, what feminism needs in order to meet Haraway’s challenge: that primatology as well as dog writing is feminist politics.