This book should be read as a cautionary tale about the evolution of bodies, politics, and stories. Above all, it is a book about 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. Once upon a time, in the 1970s, the author was a proper, US socialist-feminist, white, female, hominid biologist, who became a historian of science to write about modern Western accounts of monkeys, apes, and women. She belonged to those odd categories, invisible to themselves, which are called 'unmarked' and which are dependent upon unequal power for their maintenance. But by the last essays,'she has turned into a multiply marked cyborg feminist, who tried to keep her politics, as well as her other critical functions, alive in the unpromising times of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The book examines the breakup of versions of Euro-American feminist humanism in their devastating assumptions of master narratives deeply indebted to racism and colonialism. Then, adopting an illegitimate and frightening sign, the book's tale turns to the possibilities of a 'cyborg' feminism that is perhaps more able to remain attuned to specific historical and political positionings and permanent partialities without abandoning the search for potent connections.
A cyborg is a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine. But, cyborgs are compounded of special kinds of machines and special kinds of organisms appropriate to the late twentieth century. Cyborgs are post-Second World War hybrid entities made of, first, ourselves and other organic creatures in our unchosen 'high-technological' guise as information systems, texts, and ergonomically controlled labouring, desiring, and reproducing systems. The second essential ingredient in cyborgs is machines in their guise, also, as communications systems, texts, and self-acting, ergonomically designed apparatuses.
The chapters comprising Part One of this book examine feminist struggles over the modes of producing knowledge about, and the meanings of, the behaviour and the social lives of monkeys and apes. Part Two explores contests for the power to determine stories about 'nature' and 'experience' two of the most potent and ambiguous words in English. Part Three focuses on cyborg embodiment, the fate of various feminist concepts of gender, reappropriations of metaphors of vision for feminist ethical and epistemological purposes, and the immune system as a biopolitical map of the chief systems of difference in a postmodern world. Throughout these diverse contents, this book treats constructions of nature as a crucial cultural process for people who need and hope to live in a world less riddled by the dominations of race, colonialism, class, gender, and sexuality
Inhabiting these pages are odd boundary creatures - simians, cyborgs, and women - all of which have had a destabilizing place in the great Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives. These boundary creatures are, literally, monsters, a word that shares more than its root with the word, to demonstrate. Monsters signify. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women interrogates the multi-faceted biopolitical, biotechnological, and feminist theoretical stories of the situated knowledges by and about these promising and non-innocent monsters. The power-differentiated and highly contested modes of being of these monsters may be signs of possible worlds - and they are surely signs of worlds for which we are responsible.
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women collects essays written from 1978 through 1989, a period of complicated political, cultural, and epistemological foment within the many feminisms which have appeared in the last decades. Focusing on the biopolitical narratives of the sciences of monkeys and apes, the earliest essays were written from within US Eurocentric socialist-feminism. They treat the deep constitution of nature in modern biology as a system of production and reproduction, that is, as a labouring system, with all the ambiguities and dominations inherent in that metaphor. How did nature for a dominant cultural group with immense power to make its stories into reality become a system of work, ruled by the hierarchical division of labour, where the inequities of race, sex, and class could be naturalized in functioning systems of exploitation? What were the consequences for views of the lives of animals and people?
The middle set of chapters examines contests for narrative forms and strategies among feminists, as the heteroglossia and power inequities within modem feminism and among contemporary women became inescapable. The section concludes with an examination of ways of reading a modern Nigerian-British author, Buchi Emecheta, as an example of contests among differently situated African, Afro-American, and Euro-American critics over what will count as women's experience in the pedagogical context of a women's studies classroom. What kind of accountability, coalition, opposition, constituencies, and publishing practices structure particular readings of such an author on such a topic?
Part Three, 'Differential Politics for Inappropriate/d Others', contains four essays. The phrase, 'inappropriate/d others', is borrowed from the Vietnamese film-maker and feminist theorist, Trinh T. Minh-ha. She used the term to suggest the historical positioning of those who refuse to adopt the mask of either 'self' or 'other' offered by dominant narratives of identity and politics. Her metaphors suggest a geometry for considering the relations of difference other than hierarchical domination, incorporation of 'parts' into 'wholes', or antagonistic opposition. But her metaphors also suggest the hard intellectual, cultural, and political work these new geometries will require, if not from simians, at least from cyborgs and women.
The essays show the contradictory matrices of their composition. The examination of the recent history of the term sex/gender, written for a German Marxist dictionary, exemplifies the textual politics embedded in producing standard reference-work accounts of complicated struggles. The Cyborg Manifesto was written to find political direction in the 1980s in the face of the hybrids 'we' seemed to have become world-wide. The examination of the debates about 'scientific objectivity' in feminist theory argues for a transformation of the despised metaphors of organic and technological vision in order to foreground specific positioning, multiple mediation, partial perspective, and therefore a possible allegory for feminist scientific and political knowledge.
Nature emerges from this exercise as coyote. This potent trickster can show us that historically specific human relations with 'nature' must somehow - linguistically, ethically, scientifically, politically, technologically, and epistemologically - be imagined as genuinely social and actively relational; and yet the partners remain utterly inhomogeneous. 'Our' relations with 'nature' might be imagined as a social engagement with a being who is neither 'it', 'you', 'thou', 'he', 'she', nor 'they' in relation to 'us'. The pronouns embedded in sentences about contestations for what may count as nature are themselves political tools, expressing hopes, fears, and contradictory histories. Grammar is politics by other means. What narrative possibilities might lie in monstrous linguistic figures for relations with 'nature' for ecofeminist work? Curiously, as for people before us in Western discourses, efforts to come to linguistic terms with the non-representability, historical contingency, artefactuality, and yet spontaneity, necessity, fragility, and stunning profusions of 'nature' can help us refigure the kind of persons we might be. These persons can no longer be, if they ever were, master subjects, nor alienated subjects, but - just possibly - multiply heterogeneous, inhomogeneous, accountable, and connected human agents. But we must never again connect as parts to wholes, as marked beings incorporated into unmarked ones, as unitary and complementary subjects serving the one Subject of monotheism and its secular heresies. We must have agency - or agencies - without defended subjects.
Finally, the mapping of the biopolitical body considered from the perspective of contemporary immune system discourse probes again for ways to refigure multiplicities outside the geometry of part/whole constraints. How can our 'natural' bodies be reimagined - and relived - in ways that transform the relations of same and different, self and other, inner and outer, recognition and misrecognition into guiding maps for inappropriate/d others? And inescapably, these refigurings must acknowledge the permanent condition of our fragility, mortality, and finitude.
Throughout these essays, I have tried to look again at some feminist discards from the Western deck of cards, to look for the trickster figures that might turn a stacked deck into a potent set of wild cards for refiguring possible worlds. Can cyborgs, or binary oppositions, or technological vision hint at ways that the things many feminists have feared most can and must be refigured and put back to work for life and not death? Located in the belly of the monster, the 'First World' in the 1980s and after, how can we develop reading and writing practices, as well as other kinds of political work, to continue to contest for the material shapes and meaninp of nature and experience? How might an appreciation of the constructed, artefactual, historically contingent nature of simians, cyborgs, and women lead from an impossible but all too present reality to a possible but all too absent elsewhere? As monsters, can we demonstrate another order of signification? Cyborgs for earthly survival!