Then follows the 'pure, unadulterated biology' (p. 126) of parental investment theory all about inheritance.
6 Ch. 8. Barash disavows seeking moral dictation from his science but enthusiastically endorses sociobiology's medical voice - especially in assessing mental health in terms of fitness-maximization behaviour (1979, pp. 214-15). The collapsing of morality into health is an old rhetorical strategy.
7 Washburn's opposition to sociobiology is an example of his complexity and of the inadequacy of some feminist critiques of his role as the chief author of the man-the-hunter theory in the history of physical anthropology.
8 Lila Leibowitz and Ruth Bleier highlight illogical evidence and special pleading in animal model research. Freda Salzman criticizes Maccoby and Jacklin on the relation of aggression and gender. Marian Lowe and Ruth Hubbard show the deep and shoddy similarities in E.O. Wilson's sociobiology and Alice Rossi's biosociology. Susan Leigh Star explores lateralization research in neurophysiology, and Janice Raymond argues the medicalization of moral-political issues through transexual surgery. Hubbard and Lowe provide the project's summary and theoretical framing,
9 Latour and Woolgar (1979) provide a comprehensive analysis of the epistemological and material factors involved in the production of facts packaged in objects solid enough to weigh and mail to colleagues. They calculated the cost per published paper from a Nobel Prize-winning research project in a productive Salk Institute laboratory. The word is not cheap.
10 Philosopher Noretta Koertge made the same point at the 1980 National Women's Studies Association meetings when she described a memory of herself at four years old being scolded by her mother for masturbating. Her mother claimed the act was naughty and would make her nervous. Little Noretta knew that she could never win on the naughty issue but that her mother might be wrong about the nervous part. Moral science is a feminist resource; falsifiability is a feminist issue.
11 For example, Bleier, writing in Hubbard and Lowe (1979) on animal studies applied to humans, tried to have all arguments all ways as long as they come out right for feminists. Beginning with the premise that '[S]cience is a cultural institution', she still posited that 'the structure of science has its edges pure and probing into the knowable unknown'. But pollution results from the 'massive core' which perpetuates dominant social values (p. 49). Later she argues: (1) there is a real science with unclouded vision, feminist science, for example, Jane Lancaster's conclusions (p. 57) on primate behaviour are 'more rational', though why Lancaster can engage in a science of sex differences and escape male clouded vision is unexplained; (2) real science of sex differences is impossible for historical reasons; (3) such a science does exist and has yielded feminist facts and conclusions (pp. 58, 63-4); and (4) drawing on French feminist standpoints, 'All that remains to do is to write and speak ourselves into being; to construct a new language, a new scholarship, a new knowledge that is whole' (p. 66). Pure edges, massive cores, degrees of rationality, and French feminist theories that language constitutes reality imply mutually inconsistent epistemologies. They might all somehow be necessary, but the contradictions should be analysed.
12 The other essays include Barbara Fried on the language of sex and gender, Susan Leigh Star on sex differences and brain asymmetry, Datha Clapper Brack on physicians' displacing midwives, Martha Roth Walsh on women physicians, Vicki Druss and Mary Sue Henifin on anorexia, Emily Culpepper on menstrual attitudes among the ancient Hebrews and within a women's community in a possible future, Marilyn Grossman and Pauline Bart on male control of interpretations of the menopause and female reappro-priation, Naomi Weisstein on sexist barriers to womens practising science, and a useful extended bibliography provided by Henifin on women, science, and health. Various articles note that women producing current science have had the social role of subordinates in the scientific-technical work-force. We have not been so much absent in making scientific knowledge as we have been serviceable. The collaborative and collective, largely non-hierarchical, social structure supporting both Hubbard and Lowe's book and Hubbard el al.'s book contrasts sharply with the official 'debate' of the NEXA volume and with the heavy hero's burden of telling the hard truth that makes up Barash's persona. The writers in both feminist books are also explicit about their own class and race privilege and their own impediments to telling full, new stories (see, for example, Hubbard et al., 1979, p. 32).
13 This is a central feminist criticism of Foucault's work: by highlighting the ubiquitous microcirculations of domination in his masterful analysis of the capillarity of power relations - that is, the constitution of resistance by power in a never-ending dialectic, and the demonstration of the impossibility of acquiring space without reproducing the domination named - he threatens to make the grand circulations of domination invisible.
14 This position is a non-guilt-ridden way of baking, having, sharing, and eating cake; it is a welcome pleasure after slicing Barash's iced torte. This rather free reading of Harding and Hartsock is based on Harding's unpublished essay, 'Philosophy and history of science as patriarchal oral history' (University of Delaware, 1980), and on Hartsock's unpublished manuscript, 'Money, sex, and power' (Johns Hopkins University, 1980). Harding believes the humanist and scientific approaches, at least in the social sciences, have really been opposed to each other; I disagree. In Foucault's terms there is a shared epistéme.
1 Aristotle (Generatione animalium), Lloyd (1968), Bacon (1893, 1942), Linnaeus (1758 this edition added humans to the Order, Primates; 1972).
2 See, for example, Barash (1979), Wilson (1975, 1978), Fox (1967), Ardrey (1966, 1970), Dawkins (1976), Morgan (1972), Goodall (1971).
3 Kummer (1968), Altmann (1980), Altmann (1967), Hrdy (1977), Bogess (1979), Chevalier-Skolnikoff (1974), Lindberg (1967), Sugiyama (1967, pp. 221-36), Rowell (1972), Lancaster (1975). (Haraway [1989b] examines these issues more fully).
4 Langurs are highly adaptable monkeys from a group, colobines, specialized to eat mature leaves. They spend time on the ground and in trees, can be found in bisexual muiti- or single-male troops, all-male groups and groups composed of adult females, juveniles, and infants. Troop size is highly variable. Adult males weigh about 18 kg, adult females about 11 kg. Langurs occur in remote areas and in semi-urban temple settings close to people. They range from arid lowlands to mountains (Hrdy, 1977, pp. 72-6).
5 Papers important to this essay include: Washburn (195 1a, 1951b, 1978), Washburn and Avis (1958), Washburn and DeVore (1961), Washburn and Hamburg (1965), Washbum and Lancaster (1968).
6 Cravens (1978), Zacharias (1980), Haraway (1981-2, 1983), Frisch (1959).
7 Haller (1971), Hooton (1931, 1942). In correspondence in 1959, Washburn and Julian Steward agreed that use of Hooton's book for teaching was impossible because of its racism (Washburn personal papers). Washburn (1963) delivered an anti-racist presidential address to the 1962 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. See also Washburn's letters to the editor (Newsweek, 28 April 1969) in the race-IQ debate around Arthur Jensen's Harvard Educational Review paper.
8 This summary was compiled from Washburn's curriculum vitae, annual supplements to his University of California biobibliography, copies of grant proposals, and personal interviews. Professor Washburn's generous co-operation in providing these materials is greatly appreciated.
9 These rough figures were compiled from the International Primatological Society, Members' Handbook, 1977-78; the American Society of Primatologists, Directory, 1980; and the membership list in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology 51 (September 1979): 481-504. I divided professional locations into anthropology, medicine, regional primate research centre (specialty not otherwise determined), psychology (including neuropsychology), zoology, wildlife conservation, psychiatry, other. Women were identified conservatively; in case only initials were used, the person was ascribed masculine gender unless counterindicated by specific knowledge. Thanks to Rusten Hogness for help in obtaining these figures. The following is an incomplete listing of women who earned PhDs through the 1970s in the direct Washburn and Jay/Dolhinow lineage and who have been important in major debates in their areas. The students often worked with both mentors, but Dolhinow's role in producing these students from her senior faculty position at UC Berkeley should be emphasized. Students of students, except Dolhinow's at Berkeley, are not included here. A lineage does not demonstrate what kind of importance such social links might have - or not have. Virginia Avis, 1958; Phyllis Jay, 1963; Suzanne Ripley, 1965; Jane Lancaster, 1967; Adrienne Zihlman, 1967; Judith Shirek (Ellefson), 1967; Suzanne Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1971; Shirley Strum, 1976; Naomi Bishop, 1975; Elizabeth McCown, 1977; Jane Bogess, 1976; Sheila Curtain, J976; Mary Ellen Morbeck, 1972. Jay, Ripley, Biship, Bogess, and Curtain studied langurs.
10 Speakers, tides, and drafts were obtained from Washburn's personal files. Other speakers in 1963 were: Ralph Holloway, Theodore Grand, Richard Lee, Peter Marler, Paul Simonds, and Washburn. Other speakers in 1966 were psychiatrist David Hamburg and student Richard van Horn. For the work of women, linked to Washburn, writing on themes relevant here, see: Zihlman (1967, 1978a, 1978b, 1978c), Tanner (1981), Jay (1963a, 1963b), Chevalier-SkolnikofF (1971, 1974), Chevalier-Skolnikoff and Poirier (1977), Ripley (1965), Lancaster (1967, 1968, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1978, 1979), Lancaster and Let (1965).
11 An incomplete list of authors in the 1970s on langurs besides Dolhinow, Ripley, Bogess, and Hrdy is: Frank Poirier, Naomi Bishop, Richard Curtain, Sheila Curtain, S.M. Mohnot, R.P. Mukherjee, S.S. Saha, J.R. Oppenheimer, H. Rahaman, M.D, Parthasarathy, Y. Sugiyama, K. Yoshiba, Y. Furuya, C. Vogel, A. Hladik, and C.M. Hladik. Note the signs of primatology's collective and international structure.
12 For the famous picture of troop progression, see Hall and DeVore (1972, p. 141). A Time-Life book is the most available popular source propagating this baboon mythology (Eimerl and DeVore, 1965).
13 Principal people here are Adrienne Zihlman, Jane Lancaster, and Shirley Strum. For a popularization of what is mostly Strum's baboon narrative, see Moss (1975, pp. 193-23°). A crucial part of this later story is the emergence of the chimpanzee as the most formidable candidate for modelling hominid evolution. But, not focusing on the chimpanzee, Strum, Lancaster, and Thelma Rowell told markedly different stories about the meanings of baboons, vervets, and patas monkeys. I think they de-emphasize DeVore's baboons in part because a widespread women's movement altered what both male and female primatologists heard, saw, and believed. Jay never indicated that she thought langurs ought to be privileged models for hominid evolution. She had a different story to tell about langurs, which could not at that time command similar public interest.
That attention erupted later, for reasons at least as political as those sustaining the early baboon model.
14 Sugiyama (1967, p. 227). Caution is necessary in interpreting the language of papers translated, often badly, from Japanese.
15 Hrdy (1981) develops her arguments about the biological inheritance of human primate females in comparison with other living primate females in The Woman That Never Evoked. The females populating her book are assertive, competitive, various, independent - but not necessarily dominant. Hrdy regards human females to be in one of the worst positions vis-à-vis their male conspecifics, partly as a function of human male control of property. Harvard University Press again outdid itself in advertising strategies: in 1981 issues of the New York Review of Books, the press pictured a piece of stitchery, drawing on prominent contemporary feminist metaphors of quilting and stitchery and on both feminist and anti-feminist rhetorics for valuing women's traditional work positively. The Harvard sociobiological stitchery says, 'A woman's place is in the jungle.' Hrdy stresses that feminism and its product, human female equality, are a fragile historical-political achievement, not a biological inheritance. That the reviewer (Henry, 1982) in the influential radical feminist publication, Off Our Backs, enthusiastically endorsed The Woman That Never Evolved indicates the complexity of ideological alignments over sociobiological claims. Henry argued that 'Every aspect of [Hrdy's] book reflects a feminist perspective ... I find it amazing that she could survive Harvard to write this... If Harvard University Press gets this important book out in paperback, maybe Hrdy can reach those to whom it is dedicated: "the liberated woman who never evolved ..."' (pp. 18-19). Of course, Hrdy 'survived' Harvard with the patrilineal connection to the major male sociobiologists, who have been condemned by Off Our Bach, among other feminist publications, as the embodiment of scientific patriarchal purveyors of the biological determinism of female inferiority. Hrdy was a research associate; DeVore and Wilson were full professors. Hrdy was a mentor for Harvard physical anthropology women graduate students. Further, her explicit self-identification as a feminist was important in her view of the history of evolutionary theory (Hrdy and Williams, 1983). Obviously, the situation is more complex than 'simple' doctrinal alignments around sociobiology indicate.
16 Zuckerman (1933), Lindberg (1967), Tanner and Zihlman (1976), Zihlman (1978a, 1978b, 1978c).
17 Although Lancaster and Zihlman were not close collaborators, they shared the excitement of their new ideas and exchanged letters and manuscripts during the mid-1970s when so many women were using inherited tools to craft new stories. Lancaster to Zihlman (23 August 1976) expresses her pleasure at Zihlman's twist on the oestrus, sexual selection, and female choice tale. Thanks to Adrienne Zihlman for access to her correspondence file. Sexual reproduction and female sexuality continue to figure in opposing new hypotheses for reconstructing hominid evolution, and tales of the past continue to be pregnant with the structure of possibilities for the future. For a blatant rejuvenation of male control of female sexuality (the pair bond) as the key to most aspects of hominid life, see Lovejoy (1981). That this paper was able to be published in a major journal without citing crucial evidence and publications on its major points is itself the subject for analysis on the establishment of scientific authority. What may count as crucial evidence about human evolution? That is the heart of the contest for human nature.
1 This chapter has been revised from a talk presented as part of the conference on Feminism and the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse at UCSC in the spring of 1987. Proceedings were published in Inscriptions 3/4 (1988), the journal of the Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse. Thanks especially to the organizers of the conference (Deborah Gordon, Lisa Bloom, Vivek Dareshawar) and co-member of the panel (Teresa de Lauretis).
2 Feminist theorist, bell hooks, emphasized the difference between the noun, as in 'the women's movement', with the potential for pernicious taxonomies and vanguardism inherent in this curious substantive, contrasted to the more active verb-like form, as in 'women's movement', that resists reification and claims to special political correctness (hooks, 1981, 1984). Avoiding the pitfalls of liberal definitions emphasizing 'equality of rights', hooks argued, 'Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Its aim is not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women. It does not privilege women over men. It has the power to transform in a meaningful way all our lives' (hooks, 1984, p. 26). Feminist movement is thus directed at the 'cultural basis of group oppression ... This would mean that race and class oppression would be recognized as feminist issues with as much relevance as sexism' (p. 25). Thanks to Katie King for reminding me of hooks's usage, and also for much else in my understanding of the detailed apparatuses of production of women's culture and women's experience (King, 1986, 1988, forthcoming).
3 At the heart of US feminist theory in the 1980s has been an effort to articulate the specificity of location from which politics and knowledge must be built. The earlier formulation that 'the personal is political' intersected with and has been transformed by representations of the webs of women's local and global positionings, resulting in a major transformation of the forms and contents of feminist movement. One of the written traces is a large network of implicit intertextuality and explicit citation in feminist publishing. See, for example, Mohanty's (1988, p. 43) citation of Adrienne Rich's (1986) 'Notes toward a politics of location' and Bernice Johnson Reagon's (1983) originary 'Coalition polities'. Mohanty repeats, as I do, Rich's line from 'North American tunnel vision,' published first in 1983: 'It was not enough to say "As a woman I have no country; as a woman my country is the whole world" ... Magnificent as that vision may be, we cannot explode into breadth without a conscious grasp on the particular and concrete meaning of our location here and now, in the United States of America' (Rich, 1986, p. 162). Neither Rich, Reagon, Mohanty, nor I disavow the hope of world-wide feminist connection, which, located within the established disorder of the United States, I call the hope for an 'elsewhere' in an appropriation of SF tropes. This kind of 'elsewhere' is brought into being out of feminist movement rooted in specification and articulation, not out of common 'identities' nor assumption of the right or ability of any particular to 'represent' the general. The 'particular' in feminist movement is not about liberal individualism nor a despairing isolation of endless differences, much less about rejecting the hope for collective movement. But the means and processes of collective movement must be imagined and acted out in new geometries. That is why I find the reading and writing strategies of SF (speculative fiction, science fiction, science fantasy, speculative feminism) so useful for feminist theorizing.
4 Trinh T. Minh-ha (1986-7, pp. 3-38; 1988, pp. 71-7; 1989) discusses this ungraspable middle space and develops her theory of the 'inappropriate/d other' as a figure for postcolonial women. Theorizing this materially real space - which is also simultaneously an SF (speculative fiction) space - inhabited by inappropriate/d others intersects with the enquiry into 'home', the 'politics of location', the 'politics of experience', and 'situated knowledges' suggested by Reagon, Rich, Mohanty, myself, and others.
5 The practices of consciousness-raising literally produced women's experience as a politically potent - and potentially imperializing - feminist discursive object. Examining another practice, Mohanty (1984) pointed out how feminist publishing, for example, many of London's Zed Press books on Third World women, were part of the apparatus of production of the 'Third World Woman' as an essentialized icon of super-oppression. This woman, at the bottom of cascades of oppression, then became the privileged potentially revolutionary subject in feminist discourses on 'liberation'. Her condition represented atlegorically the state of Woman as victim coming to consciousness. See the Zed Books catalogue, Spring 1988/Sprmg 1989, for a complete list. There are many ways of reading these Zed books, many of which do not fit Mohanty's analysis. But these books collectively have been part of a feminist apparatus of production of the Third World Woman as a site of discourse for many agendas. This is one concrete example of a feminist constitution of experience as a discursive object and its appropriation in international networks. In the words of the Zed catalogue, 'For more than a decade Zed Books has been publishing outstanding writing by and about women of the Third World ... Widely read throughout the world, many are now used in educational institutions and as an essential reference in libraries.' There is nothing innocent (nor inherently evil) about such a process; the political and epistemological problems centre around accountability and the power-charged technologies of representation, including 'self'-representation. Ong (1987) describes how young Malay women factory workers are contested sites of discourse, where others struggle to set the terms for religious authority, national identity, and family honour. Corporations, state official and oppositional Islamic organizations, the national mass media, and popular street discourse all compete to represent the sexuality of the women. Ong also discursively constructs the women - in her narrative as complex historical actors affirming their humanity in multiply constrained frameworks where gender, age, region, ethnicity, nation, and class are especially salient (Haraway, 1989a). All constructions of women as sites of discourse are not equal; to point out their circuits of production and distribution is not to forbid the process, but to attempt to engage it with deliberate accountability. Both Ong and Mani (1987) are excellent examples of feminist efforts to do just that. What they never claim is that their representations - even or especially of women representing themselves - precipitate out of the solution of discourse and give the 'experience', 'voice', or 'empirical reality' of women im-mediately to the reader. This entire issue is strongly analogous to the impossibility of representations of nature precipitating out of scientific discourses to reveal 'nature herself'.
6 On Emecheta see Schipper (1985, pp. 44-6), Bruner (1983, pp. 49-50). For the changing book jacket copy see Emecheta (1972, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1982, 1983a, b, 1985). See also Brown (1981), Taiwo (1984), Davies and Graves (1986), Jameson (1986).
7 Caren Kaplan (1986-7, 1987b) movingly and incisively theorized the 'deterritorializa-tions' in feminist discourse and the importance of displacement in the fictions constructing post-colonial subjectivity. Writing of Alicia Dujovne Ortiz's novel Buenos Aires, Kaplan formulated a reading practice that might also be engaged from Emecheta's novels: 'Buenos Aires reinvents identity as a form of selfconscious cultural criticism. Displacement is a force in the modern world which can be reckoned with, not to heal splits but to explore them, to acknowledge the politics and limits of cultural processes' (Kaplan 1986-7, p. 98).
8 The Nation for 24-31 July 1989, edited and written by black women, examines 'The scapegoating of the black family'. See especially Jewell Handy Gresham, 'The politics of family in America', pp. 116-22. See also Collins (1989a, 1989b) for an analysis of the attacks on black mothers and families in the last twenty years in the US and the use of gender to demonstrate racial inferiority. Carby (1987) analyses black women's discourse on mothering and racial uplift in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in terms of a specific non-racist and non-patriarchal reconstruction of womanhood. A major intervention in feminist literary theory, Carby's book develops a 'feminist critical practice that pays particular attention to the articulation of gender, race, and class' (p. 17). She argues that 'Black feminist criticism be regarded critically as a problem, not a solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions' (p. 15). Thus, Carby is suspicious of Christian's - and, by my extension, of Ogunyemi's - historical narrative of the literary progression of black women writers and her method of constructing a maturing tradition, which Carby sees as highly problematic (p. 14). Carby disagrees with the frequent dismissal by critics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black fiction, including Christian, of the mulatta figure as an attempt to counter white audiences' negative images of black people. Carby argues that the mulatto/a as a narrative figure works as a 'vehicle for an exploration of relation between the races and, at the same time, an expression of the relationship between the races. The figure of the mulatto should be understood and analyzed as a narrative device of mediation' (p. 89). Carby also foregrounds the black as well as white readership for black writing before the last twenty years and insists that the writing by black women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represents 'an earlier and perhaps more politically resonant renaissance [than the "black women's renaissance" conditionally certified by Hollywood, academia, and big publishing houses in the 1980s] so we may rethink the cultural politics of black women' (p. 7). These debates over the narratives of black literary and political history - cast in the figures of decades, traditions, pivotal writers, and literary characterizations - are pre-eminently debates about contemporary politics. They are also methodological debates over how to do cultural studies. Carby drinks deeply from the work in England associated with Stuart Hall. The contested and heterogeneous discourse of US 'black feminist criticism' could be traced from Smith (1977).
1 The project proved so daunting that the 'supplement' split off from the translation project and is underway as a two-volume work of its own, the Marxistisches Wörterbuch, under the general editorship of Wolfgang F. Haug of the Institut fur Philosophic, Freie Universität, Berlin. There are hundreds of contributors from Germany and many other countries. Taken from a list compiled in 1985, some of the planned keywords of particular interest to feminists include: Diskurs, Dritte Welt, Familie, Feminismus, feministische Theologie, Frauen, Frauenbewegung, Geschlecht, Homosexualität, Kulturarbeit, Kybemetik, Luxemburgismus, Marxismus-Feminismus, Natur, Ökologie, Patriarchal, Post-modernismus, Rasse, Rassismus, Reprädsentation, Sex/gender system, Sexismtis, Sexpol, Sisterhood, technologische Rationalilät, weibliche Ästhetik, and aeibliche Bildurg. This was, indeed, not the daily vocabulary of Marx and Engels. But they do, emphatically, belong in a late twentieth-century Marxist dictionary.
2 A curious linguistic point shows itself here: there is no marker to distinguish (biological) race and (cultural) race, as there is for (biological) sex and (cultural) gender, even though the nature/culture and biology/society binarisms pervade Western race discourse. The linguistic situation highlights the very recent and uneven entry of gender into the political, as opposed to the grammatical, lexicon. The non-naturalness of race - it is always and totally an arbitrary, cultural construction - can be emphasized from the lack of a linguistic marker. But, as easily, the total collapse of the category of race into biologism is linguistically invited. All these matters continue to hinge on unexamined functioning of the productionist, Aristotelian logic fundamental to so much Western discourse. In this linguistic, political, and historical matrix, matter and form, act and potency, raw material and achieved product play out their escalating dramas of production and appropriation. Here is where subjects and objects get born and endlessly reincarnated.
3 Although not mutually exclusive, the language of 'gender' in Euro-American feminist discourse usually is the language of 'sexed subject position' and 'sexual difference' in European writing. For British Marxist feminism on the 'sexed subject in patriarchy', see Kuhn and Wolpe (1978), Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective (1978), Brown and Adams (1979), the journal m/f; Barrett (1980). German socialist-feminist positions on sexualization have stressed the dialectic of women's self-constructing agency, already structured social determinations, and partial restructurings. This literature examines how women construct themselves into existing structures, in order to find the point where change might be possible. If women are theorized as passive victims of sex and gender as a system of domination, no theory of liberation will be possible. So social constructionism on the question of gender must not be allowed to become a theory of closed determinism (Haug, 1980, 1982; Haug el al., 1983, 1987; Mouffe, 1983). Looking for a theory of experience, of how women actively embody themselves, the women in the collective writing the Frauenformen publications insisted on a descriptive/ theoretical practice showing 'the ways we live ourselves in bodily terms' (Haug el al., 1987, p. 30). They evolved a method called 'memory work' that emphasizes collectively criticized, written narratives about 'a stranger', a past 'remembered' self, while problematizing the self-deluding assumptions of autobiography and other causal accounts. The problem is to account for the emergence of 'the sexual itself as the process that produces the insertion of women into, and their subordination within, determinate social practices' (p. 33). Ironically, self-constituted as sexualized, as woman, women cannot be accountable for themselves or society (p. 27). Like all the theories of sex, sexuality, and gender surveyed in this effort to write for a standard reference work that inevitably functions to canonize some meanings over others, the Frauenformen versions insist on gender as a gerund or a verb, rather than a finished noun, a substantive. For feminists, gender means making and unmaking 'bodies' in a contestable world; an account of gender is a theory of experience as signifying and significant embodiment.
4 Joan Scott (1988, pp. 28-50) wrote an incisive treatment of the development of gender as a theoretical category in the discipline of history. She noted the long history of play on the grammatical gender difference for making figurative allusions to sex or character (p. 28). Scott quoted as her epigram Fowler's Dictionary of Modem English Usage's insistence that to use gender to mean the male or female sex was either a mistake or a joke. The ironies in this injunction abound. One benefit of the inheritance of feminist uses of gender from grammar is that, in that domain, 'gender is understood to be a way of classifying phenomena, a socially agreed-upon system of distinctions, rather than an objective description of inherent traits' (p. 29).
5 See Coward (1983, chs 5 and 6) for a thorough discussion of the concepts of the family and the woman question in Marxist thought from 1848 to about 1930.
6 Rubin (1975), Young and Levidow (1981), Harding (1983,1986), Hartsock (1983 a, b), Hartmann (1981), O'Brien (1981), Chodorow (1978), Jaggar (1983).
7 See The Woman Question (1951); Mara and Aveling (1885—6); Kollontai (1977).
8 To sample the uses and criticisms, see Sayers (1982), Hubbard et al. (1982), Bleier (1984, 1986), Fausto-Sterling (1985), Kessler and McKenna (1978), Thone and Henley (1975), West and Zimmermann (1987), Morawski (1987), Brighton Women and Science Group (1980), Lowe and Hubbard (1983), Lewontin et al. (1984).
9 Several streams of European feminisms (some disavowing the name) were born after the events of May '68. The stream drawing from Simone de Beauvoir's formulations, especially work by Monique Wittig, Monique Plaza, Colette Guillaumin, and Christine Deiphy, published in Questions fiministes, Nouvelles questions feministes, and Feminist Issues, and the stream associated complexly with the group 'Psychanalyse et Politique' and/or with Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, and Helene Cixous have been particularly influential in international feminist development on issues of sexual difference. (For introductory summaries, see Marks and de Courtivron, 1980; Gallop, 1982; Moi, 1985; Duchen, 1986). These streams deserve large, separate treatments; but in the context of this entry two contributions to theories of 'gender' from these writers, who are deeply opposed among themselves on precisely these issues, must be signalled. First, there are Wittig's and Delphy's arguments for a materialist feminism, which insist that the issue is 'domination', not 'difference'. Second, there are Irigaray's, Kristeva's, and Cixous's various ways (intertextually positioned in relation to Derrida, Lacan and others) of insisting that the subject, which is perhaps best approached through writing and textuality, is always in process, always disrupted, that the idea of woman remains finally unclosed and multiple. Despite their important opposition between and within the francophone streams, all these theorists are possessed with flawed, contradictory, and critical projects of denaturalization of 'woman'.
10 Smith (1974), Flax (1983), O'Brien (1981), Rose, H. (1983, 1986), Harding (1983).
11 Similarly, it is an error to equate 'race' with people of colour; whiteness is a racial construction as well, invisible as such because of its (like man's) occupation of the unmarked category (Frankenberg, 1988; Carby, 1987, p. 18; Haraway, 1989b, pp. 152, 401-2).
12 See, for example, Ware (1970); Combahee River Collective (1979); Bethel and Smith (1979); Joseph and Lewis (1981); hooks (1981, 1984); Moraga and Anzaldúa (1981); Davis (1982); Hull et al. (1982); Lorde (1982, 1984); Aptheker (1982); Moraga (1983); Walker (1983); Smith (1983); Bulkin et al. (1984); Sandoval (n.d.); Christian (1985); Giddings (1985); Anzaldúa (1987); Carby (1987); Spillers (1987); Collins (1989a), 1989b); Hurtado (1989).
1 Research was funded by an Academic Senate Faculty Research Grant from the University of California, Santa Cruz. An earlier version of the paper on genetic engineering appeared as 'Lieber Kyborg als Göttin: für eine sozialistisch-feministische Unterwanderung der Gentechnologie', in Bernd-Peter Lange and Anna Marie Stuby, eds, Berlin: Argument-Sonderband 105, 1984, pp 66-84. The cyborg manifesto grew from my 'New machines, new bodies, new communities: political dilemmas of a cyborg feminist', 'The Scholar and the Feminist X: The Question of Technology', Conference, Barnard College, April 1983.
The people associated with the History of Consciousness Board of UCSC have had an enormous influence on this paper, so that it feels collectively authored more than most, although those I cite may not recognize their ideas. In particular, members of graduate and undergraduate feminist theory, science, and politics, and theory and methods courses contributed to the cyborg manifesto. Particular debts here are due Hilary Klein (1989), Paul Edwards (1985), Lisa Lowe (1986), and James Clifford (1985)-
Parts of the paper were my contribution to a collectively developed session, 'Poetic Tools and Political Bodies: Feminist Approaches to High Technology Culture', 1984 California American Studies Association, with History of Consciousness graduate students Zoe Sofoulis, 'Jupiter space'; Katie King, 'The pleasures of repetition and the limits of identification in feminist science fiction: reimaginations of the body after the cyborg'; and Chela Sandoval, 'The construction of subjectivity and oppositional consciousness in feminist film and video'. Sandoval's (n.d.) theory of oppositional consciousness was published as 'Women respond to racism: A Report on the National Women's Studies Association Conference'. For Sofoulis's semiotic-psychoanalytic readings of nuclear culture, see Sofia (1984). King's unpublished papers ('Questioning tradition: canon formation and the veiling of power'; 'Gender and genre: reading the science fiction of Joanna Russ'; 'Varley's Titan and Wizard: feminist parodies of nature, culture, and hardware') deeply informed the cyborg manifesto.
Barbara Epstein, Jeff Escoffier, Rusten Hogness, and Jaye Miler gave extensive discussion and editorial help. Members of the Silicon Valley Research Project of UCSC and participants in SVRP conferences and workshops were very important, especially Rick Gordon, Linda Kimball, Nancy Snyder, Langdon Winner, Judith Stacey, Linda Lim, Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, and Judith Gregory. Finally, I want to thank Nancy Hartsock for years of friendship and discussion on feminist theory and feminst science fiction. I also thank Elizabeth Bird for my favourite political button: 'Cyborgs for Earthly Survival'.
2 Useful references to left and/or feminist radical science movements and theory and to biological/biotechnical issues include: Bleier (1984, 1986), Harding (1986), Fausto-Sterling (1985), Gould (1981), Hubbard et al. (1982), Keller (1985), Lewontin et al. (1984), Radical Science Journal (became Science as Culture in 1987), 26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ; Science for the People, 897 Main St, Cambridge, MA 02139.
3 Starting points for left and/or feminist approaches to technology and politics include: Cowan (1983), Rothschild (1983), Traweek (1988), Young and Levidow (1981, 1985), Weizenbaum (1976), Winner (1977, 1986), Zimmerm n (1983), Athanasiou (1987), Cohn (1987a, 1987b), Winograd and Flores (1986), Edwards (1985). Global Electronics Newsletter, 867 West Dana St, #204, Mountain View, CA 94041; Processed World, 55 Sutter St, San Francisco, CA 94104; ISIS, Women's International Information and Communication Service, PO Box 50 (Conavin), 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland, and Via Santa Maria Dell'Anima 30, 00186 Rome, Italy. Fundamental approaches to modern social studies of science that do not continue the liberal mystification that it all started with Thomas Kuhn, include: Knorr-Cetina (1981), Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay (1983), Latour and Woolgar (1979), Young (1979). The 1984 Directory of the Network for the Ethnographic Study of Science, Technology, and Organizations lists a wide range of people and projects crucial to better radical analysis; available from NESSTO, PO Box 11442, Stanford, CA 94305.
4 A provocative, comprehensive argument about the politics and theories of'postmodern-ism' is made by Fredric Jameson (1984), who argues that postmodernism is not an option, a style among others, but a cultural dominant requiring radical reinvention of left politics from within; there is no longer any place from without that gives meaning to the comforting fiction of critical distance. Jameson also makes clear why one cannot be for or against postmodernism, an essentially moralist move. My position is that feminists (and others) need continuous cultural reinvention, postmodernist critique, and historical materialism; only a cyborg would have a chance. The old dominations of white capitalist patriarchy seem nostalgically innocent now: they normalized heterogeneity, into man and woman, white and black, for example. 'Advanced capitalism' and postmodernism release heterogeneity without a norm, and we are flattened, without subjectivity, which requires depth, even unfriendly and drowning depths. It is time to write The Death of the Clinic. The clinic's methods required bodies and works; we have texts and surfaces. Our dominations don't work by medicalization and normalization any more; they work by networking, communications redesign, stress management. Normalization gives way to automation, utter redundancy. Michel Foucault's Birth of the Clink (1963), History of Sexuality (1976), and Discipline and Punish (1975) name a form of power at its moment of implosion. The discourse of biopolitics gives way to technobabble, the language of the spliced substantive; no noun is left whole by the multinationals. These are their names, listed from one issue of Science: Tech-Knowledge, Genentech, Allergen, Hybritech, Compupro, Genen-cor, Syntex, Allelix, Agrigenetics Corp., Syntro, Codon, Repligen, MicroAngelo from Scion Corp., Percom Data, Inter Systems, Cyborg Corp., Statcom Corp., Intertec. If we are imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison-house requires language poets, a kind of cultural restriction enzyme to cut the code; cyborg heteroglossia is one form of radical cultural politics. For cyborg poetry, see Perloff (1984); Fraser (1984). For feminist modernist/postmodernist 'cyborg' writing, see HOW(ever), 871 Corbett Ave, San Francisco, CA 94131.
5 Baudrillard (1983). Jameson (1984, p. 66) points out that Plato's definition of the simulacrum is the copy for which there is no original, i.e., the world of advanced capitalism, of pure exchange. See Discourse 9 (Spring/Summer 1987) for a special issue on technology (cybernetics, ecology, and the postmodern imagination).
6 For ethnographic accounts and political evaluations, see Epstein (forthcoming), Sturgeon (1986). Without explicit irony, adopting the spaceship earth/whole earth logo of the planet photographed from space, set off by the slogan 'Love Your Mother', the May 1987 Mothers and Others Day action at the nuclear weapons testing facility in Nevada none the less took account of the tragic contradictions of views of the earth. Demonstrators applied for official permits to be on the land from officers of the Western Shoshone tribe, whose territory was invaded by the US government when it built the nuclear weapons test ground in the 1950s. Arrested for trespassing, the demonstrators argued that the police and weapons facility personnel, without authorization from the proper officials, were the trespassers. One affinity group at the women's action called themselves the Surrogate Others; and in solidarity with the creatures forced to tunnel in the same ground with the bomb, they enacted a cyborgian emergence from the constructed body of a large, non-heterosexual desert worm.
7 Powerful developments of coalition politics emerge from 'Third World' speakers, speaking from nowhere, the displaced centre of the universe, earth: 'We live on the third planet from the sun' - Sun Poem by Jamaican writer, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, review by Mackey (1984). Contributors to Smith (1983) ironically subvert naturalized identities precisely while constructing a place from which to speak called home. See especially Reagon (in Smith, 1983, pp. 356-68). Trinh T. Minh-ha (1986-87).
8 hooks (1981, 1984); Hull et al. (1982). Bambara (1981) wrote an extraordinary novel in which the women of colour theatre group, The Seven Sisters, explores a form of unity. See analysis by Butler-Evans (1987).
9 On orientalism in feminist works and elsewhere, see Lowe (1986); Said (1978); Mohanty (1984); Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives (1984).
10 Katie King (1986, 1987a) has developed a theoretically sensitive treatment of the workings of feminist taxonomies as genealogies of power in feminist ideology and polemic. King examines Jaggar's (1983) problematic example of taxonomizing feminisms to make a little machine producing the desired final position. My caricature here of socialist and radical feminism is also an example,
11 The central role of object relations versions of psychoanalysis and related strong universalizing moves in discussing reproduction, caring work, and mothering in many approaches to epistemology underline their authors' resistance to what I am calling postmodernism. For me, both the universalizing moves and these versions of psychoanalysis make analysis of 'women's place in the integrated circuit' difficult and lead to systematic difficulties in accounting for or even seeing major aspects of the construction of gender and gendered social life. The feminist standpoint argument has been developed by: Flax {1983), Harding (1986), Harding and Hintikka (1983), Hartsock (1983a, b), O'Brien (1981), Rose {1983), Smith (1974, 1979). For rethinking theories of feminist materialism and feminist standpoints in response to criticism, see Harding (1986, pp. 163-96), Hartsock (1987), and H. Rose (1986).
12 I make an argumentative category error in 'modifying' MacKinnon's positions with the qualifier 'radical', thereby generating my own reductive critique of extremely heterogeneous writing, which does explicitly use that label, by my taxonomically interested argument about writing which does not use the modifier and which brooks no limits and thereby adds to the various dreams of a common, in the sense of univocal, language for feminism. My category error was occasioned by an assignment to write from a particular taxonomic position which itself has a heterogeneous history, socialist-feminism, for Socialist Review. A critique indebted to MacKinnon, but without the reductionism and with an elegant feminist account of Foucault's paradoxical conservatism on sexual violence (rape), is de Lauretis (1985; see also 1986, pp. 1-19). A theoretically elegant feminist social-historical examination of family violence, that insists on women's, men's, and children's complex agency without losing sight of the material structures of male domination, race, and class, is Gordon (1988).
13 This chart was published in 1985. My previous efforts to understand biology as a cybernetic command-control discourse and organisms as 'natural-technical objects of knowledge' were Haraway (1979, 1983, 1984). The 1979 version of this dichotomous chart appears in this vol., ch. 3; for a 1989 version, see ch. 10. The differences indicate shifts in argument.
14 For progressive analyses and action on the biotechnology debates: GeneWatch, a Bulletin of the Committee for Responsible Genetics, 5 Doane St, 4th Floor, Boston, MA 02109; Genetic Screening Study Group (formerly the Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People), Cambridge, MA; Wright (1982, 1986); Yoxen (1983).
15 Starting references for 'women in the integrated circuit': D'Onofrio-Flores and Pfafflin (1982), Fernandez-Kelly (1983), Fuentes and Ehrenreich (1983), Grossman (1980), Nash and Fernandez-Kelly (1983), Ong (1987), Science Policy Research Unit (1982).
16 For the 'homework economy outside the home' and related arguments: Gordon (1983); Gordon and Kimball (1985); Stacey (1987); Reskin and Hartmann (1986); Women and Poverty (1984); S. Rose (1986); Collins (1982); Burr (1982); Gregory and Nussbaum (1982); Piven and Coward (1982); Microelectronics Group (1980); Stallard et al. (1983) which includes a useful organization and resource list.
17 The conjunction of the Green Revolution's social relations with biotechnologies like plant genetic engineering makes the pressures on land in the Third World increasingly intense. AID's estimates (New York Times, 14 October 1984) used at the 1984 World Food Day are that in Africa, women produce about 90 per cent of rural food supplies, about 60-80 per cent in Asia, and provide 40 per cent of agricultural labour in the Near East and Latin America. Blumberg charges that world organizations agricultural politics, as well as those of multinationals and national governments in the Third World, generally ignore fundamental issues in the sexual division of labour. The present tragedy of famine in Africa might owe as much to male supremacy as to capitalism, colonialism, and rain patterns. More accurately, capitalism and racism are usually structurally male dominant. See also Blumberg (1981); Hacker (1984); Hacker and Bovit (1981); Busch and Lacy (1983); Wilfred (1982); Sachs (1983); International Fund for Agricultural Development (1985); Bird (1984).
18 See also Enloe (1983a, b).
19 For a feminist version of this logic, see Hrdy (1981). For an analysis of scientific women's story-telling practices, especially in relation to sociobiology in evolutionary debates around child abuse and infanticide, see this vol., ch. 5.
20 For the moment of transition of hunting with guns to hunting with cameras in the construction of popular meanings of nature for an American urban immigrant public, see Haraway (1984-5, 1989b), Nash (1979), Sontag (1977), Preston (1984).
21 For guidance for thinking about the political/cultural/racial implications of the history of women doing science in the United States see: Haas and Perucci (1984); Hacker (1981); Keller (1983); National Science Foundation (1988); Rossiter (1982); Schiebinger (1987); Haraway (1989b).
22 Markoff and Siegel (1983). High Technology Professionals for Peace and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility are promising organizations.
23 King (1984). An abbreviated list of feminist science fiction underlying themes of this essay: Octavia Butler, Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Kindred, Survivor, Suzy McKee Charnas, Motherliness; Samuel R. Delany, the Neveryon series; Anne McCaffery, The Ship Who Sang, Dinosaur Planet; Vonda McIntyre, Superluminal, Dreamsnake; Joanna Russ, Adventures of Alix, The Female Man;, James Tiptree, Jr, Star Songs of an Old Primate, Up the Walk of the World-, John Varley, Titan, Wizard, Demon,
24 French feminisms contribute to cyborg heteroglossia. Burke (1981); Irigaray (1977, 1979); Marks and de Courtivron (1980); Signs (Autumn 1981); Wittig (1973); Duchen (1986). For English translation of some currents of francophone feminism see Feminist Issues: A Journal of Feminist Social and Political Theory, 1980.
25 But all these poets are very complex, not least in their treatment of themes of lying and erotic, decentred collective and personal identities. Griffin (1978), Lorde (1984), Rich (1978).
26 Derrida (1976, especially part II); Lévi-Strauss (1961, especially 'The Writing Lesson'); Gates (1985); Kahn and Neumaier (1985); Ong (1982); Kramarae and Treichler (1985)
27 The sharp relation of women of colour to writing as theme and politics can be approached through: Program for 'The Black Woman and the Diaspora: Hidden Connections and Extended Acknowledgments', An International Literary Conference, Michigan State University, October 1985; Evans (1984); Christian (1985); Carby (1987); Fisher (1980); Frontiers (1980,1983); Kingston (1977); Lerner (1973); Giddings (1985); Moraga and Anzaldúa (1981); Morgan (1984). Anglophone European and Euro-American women have also crafted special relations to their writing as a potent sign: Gilbert and Gubar (1979), Russ (1983).
28 The convention of ideologically taming militarized high technology by publicizing its applications to speech and motion problems of the disabled/differently abled takes on a special irony in monotheistic, patriarchal, and frequendy anti-semitic culture when computer-generated speech allows a boy with no voice to chant the Haftorah at his bar mitzvah. See Sussman (1986). Making the always context-relative social definitions of
'ableness particularly clear, military high-tech has a way of making human beings disabled by definition, a perverse aspect of much automated battlefield and Star Wars R&D. See Welford (1 July 1986).
29 James Clifford (1985, 1988) argues persuasively for recognition of continuous cultural reinvention, the stubborn non-disappearance of those 'marked' by Western imperializing practices,
30 DuBois (1982), Daston and Park (n.d.), Park and Daston (1981), The noun monster shares its root with the verb to demonstrate.
1 This chapter originated as a commentary on Harding (1986), at the Western Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association, San Francisco, March 1987. Support during the writing of this paper was generously provided by the Alpha Fund of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. Thanks especially to Joan Scott, Rayna Rapp, Judy Newton, Judy Butler, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Dorinne Kondo.
2 For example, see Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay (1983); Bijker et al. (1987); and especially, LLatour (1984, 1988). Borrowing from Michel Tournier's Vendredi (1967), Latour's brilliant and maddening aphoristic polemic against all forms of reductionism makes the essential point for feminists: 'Méfiez-vous de la pureté; c'est le vitriol de I'âme' (Latour, 1984, p. 171). Latour is not otherwise a notable feminist theorist, but he might be made into one by readings as perverse as those he makes of the laboratory, that great machine for making significant mistakes faster than anyone else can, and so gaining world-changing power. The laboratory for Latour is the railroad industry of epistemology, where facts can only be made to run on the tracks laid down from the laboratory out. Those who control the railroads control the surrounding territory. How could we have forgotten? But now it's not so much the bankrupt railroads we need as the satellite network. Facts run on lightbeams these days.
3 For an elegant and very helpful elucidation of a non-cartoon version of this argument, see White (1987). I still want more; and unfulfilled desire can be a powerful seed for changing the stories.
4 In her analysis exploring the fault line between modernism and postmodernism in ethnography and anthropology - in which the high stakes are the authorization or prohibition to craft comparative knowledge across 'cultures', from some epistemologically grounded vantage point either inside, outside, or in dialogical relation with any unit of analysis Marilyn Strathern (1987a) made the crucial observation that it is not the written ethnography that is parallel to the work of art as object-of-knowledge, but the culture. The Romantic and modernist natural-technical objects of knowledge, in science and in other cultural practice, stand on one side of this divide. The postmodernist formation stands on the other side, with its 'anti-aesthetic' of permanently split, problematized, always receding and deferred 'objects' of knowledge and practice, including signs, organisms, systems, selves, and cultures. 'Objectivity' in a postmodern frame cannot be about unproblematic objects; it must be about specific prosthesis and translation. Objectivity, which at root has been about crafting comparative knowledge (how to name things to be stable and to be like each other), becomes a question of the politics of redrawing of boundaries in order to have non-innocent conversations and connections. What is at stake in the debates about modernism and postmodernism is the pattern of relationships between and within bodies and language.
5 Zoe Sofoulis (1988) has produced a dazzlingly (she will forgive me the metaphor) theoretical treatment of technoscience, the psychoanalysis of science fiction culture, and the metaphorics of extra-terrestrialism, including a wonderful focus on the ideologies and philosophies of light, illumination, and discovery in Western mythics of science and technology. My essay was revised in dialogue with Sofoulis's arguments and metaphors in her PhD dissertation,
6 Crucial to this discussion are Harding (1986), Keller (1985), Hartsock (1983a, 1983b), Flax (1983,1987), Keller and Grontkowski (1983), H. Rose (1986), Haraway (1985; this vol. pp. 149-81), and Petchesky (1987).
7 John Varley's science fiction short story called 'The Persistence of Vision' is part of the inspiration for this section. In the story, Varley constructs a Utopian community designed and built by the deaf-blind. He then explores these people's technologies and other mediations of communication and their relations to sighted children and visitors (Varley, 1978). In 'Blue Champagne', Varley (1986) transmutes the theme to interrogate the politics of intimacy and technology for a paraplegic young woman whose prosthetic device, the golden gypsy, allows her full mobility. But since the infinitely costly device is owned by an intergalactic communications and entertainment empire for which she works as a media star making 'feelies', she may keep her technological, intimate, enabling, other self only in exchange for her complicity in the commodification of all experience. What are her limits to the reinvention of experience for sale? Is the personal political under the sign of simulation? One way to read Varley's repeated investigations of finally always limited embodiments, differently abled beings, prosthetic technologies, and cyborgian encounters with their finitude despite their extraordinary transcendence of 'organic' orders is to find an allegory for the personal and political in the historical mythic time of the late twentieth century, the era of techno-biopolitics. Prosthesis becomes a fundamental category for understanding our most intimate selves. Prosthesis is semiosis, the making of meanings and bodies, not for transcendence but for power-charged communication.
8 I owe my understanding of the experience of these photographs to Jim Clifford, University of California at Santa Cruz, who identified their 'land ho!' effect on the reader.
9 Joan Scott reminded me that Teresa de Lauretis (1986a, pp. 14-15) put it like this:
Differences among women may be better understood as differences within women ... But once understood in their constitutive power - once it is understood, that is, that these differences not only constitute each woman's consciousness and subjective limits but all together define the female subject of feminism in its very specificity, its inherent and at least for now irreconcilable contradiction - these differences, then, cannot be again collapsed into a fixed identity, a sameness of all women as Woman, or a representation of Feminism as a coherent and available image.
10 Harding (1986, p. 18) suggested that gender has three dimensions, each historically specific: gender symbolism, the social-sexual division of labour, and processes of constructing individual gendered identity. I would enlarge her point to note that there is no reason to expect the three dimensions to co-vary or co-determine each other, at least not direcdy. That is, extremely steep gradients between contrasting terms in gender symbolism may very well not correlate with sharp social-sexual divisions of labour or social power, but may be closely related to sharp racial stratification or something else. Similarly, the processes of gendered subject formation may not be direcdy illuminated by knowledge of the sexual division of labour or the gender symbolism in the particular historical situation under examination. On the other hand, we should expect mediated relations among the dimensions, the mediations might move through quite different social axes of organization of both symbols, practice, and identity, such as race. And vice versa. I would suggest also that science, as well as gender or race, might usefully be broken up into such a multi-part scheme of symbolism, social practice, and subject position. More than three dimensions suggest themselves when the parallels are drawn. The different dimensions of, for example, gender, race, and science might mediate relations among dimensions on a parallel chart. That is, racial divisions of labour might mediate the patterns of connection between symbolic connections and formation of individual subject positions on the science or gender chart. Or formations of gendered or racial subjectivity might mediate the relations between scientific social division of labour and scientific symbolic patterns.
The chart below begins an analysis by parallel dissections. In the chart (and in reality?), both gender and science are analytically asymmetrical; i.e., each term contains and obscures a structuring hierarchicalized binarism, sex/gender and nature/science. Each binarism orders the silent term by a logic of appropriation, as resource to product, nature to culture, potential to actual. Both poles of the binarism are constructed and structure each other dialecticaliy. Within each voiced or explicit term, further asymmetrical splittings can be excavated, as from gender, masculine to feminine, and from science, hard sciences to soft sciences. This is a point about remembering how a particular analytical tool works, willy nilly, intended or not. The chart reflects common ideological aspects of discourse on science and gender and may help as an analytical tool to crack open mystified units like Science or Woman.
| Gender | Science |
| symbolic system | symbolic system |
| social division of labour | social division oflabour |
| (by sex, by race, etc.) | (by craft, industrial, or post-industrial logics) |
| individual identity/subject position | individual identity/subject position |
| (desiring! desired; autonomous/relational) | (knowerlknown; scientist/other) |
| material culture | material culture |
| (gender paraphernalia and daily gender technologies: the narrow tracks on which sexual difference runs) | (laboratories: the narrow tracks on which facts run) |
| dialectic of construction and discovery | dialectic of construction and discovery |
11 Evelyn Keller (i 987) insists on the important possibilities opened up by the construction of the intersection of the distinction between sex and gender, on the one hand, and nature and science, on the other. She also insists on the need to hold to some non-discursive grounding in 'sex' and 'nature', perhaps what I am calling the 'body' and 'world'.
1 Special thanks to Scott Gilbert, Rusten Hogness, Jaye Miller, Rayna Rapp, and Joan Scott. Research and writing for this project were supported by the Alpha Fund and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ; Academic Senate Faculty Research Grants of the University of California Santa Cruz; and the Silicon Valley Research Project, UCSC. Crystal Gray was an excellent research assistant. Benefiting from many people's comments, this paper was first presented at the Wenner Gren Foundation's Conference on Medical Anthropology, Lisbon, Portugal, 5-13 March 1988.
2 Even without taking much account of questions of consciousness and culture, the extensive importance of immunological discourse and artefacts has many diagnostic signs: (1) The first Nobel Prize in medicine in 1901 was given for an originary development, namely, the use of diphtheria anti-toxin. With many intervening awards, the pace of Nobel awards in immunology since 1970 is stunning, covering work on the generation of antibody diversity, the histocompatibility system, monoclonal antibodies and hybridomas, the network hypothesis of immune regulation, and development of the radioimmunoassay system. (2) The products and processes of immunology enter into present and projected medical, pharmaceutical, and other industrial practices. This situation is exemplified by monoclonal antibodies, which can be used as extremely specific tools to identify, isolate, and manipulate components of production at a molecular scale and then gear up to an industrial scale with unheard-of specificity and purity, for a wide array of enterprises - from food flavouring technology, to design and manufacture of industrial chemicals, to delivery systems in chemotherapy (see figure on 'Applications of monoclonal antibodies in immunology and related disciplines', Nicholas, 1985, p. 12). The Research Briefings for 1983 for the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy and various other federal departments and agencies identified immunology, along with artificial intelligence and cognitive science, solid earth sciences, computer design and manufacture, and regions of chemistry, as research areas 'that were likely to return the highest scientific dividends as a result of incremental federal investment' (Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, 1983). The dividends in such fields are hardly expected to be simply 'scientific'. 'In these terms the major money spinner undoubtedly is hybridoma technology, and its chief product the monoclonal antibody' (Nicholas, 1985, Preface). (3) The field of immunology is itself an interational growth industry. The First International Congress of Immunology was held in 1971 in Washington, DC, attended by most of the world's leading researchers in the field, about 3500 people from 45 countries. Over 8000 people attended the Fourth Interational Congress in 1980 (Klein, 1982, p. 623). The number of journals in the field has been expanding since 1970 from around twelve to over eighty by 1984. The total of books and monographs on the subject reached well over 1000 by 1980. The industrial-university collaborations characteristic of the new biotechnology pervade research arrangements in immunology, as in molecular biology, with which it cross-reacts extensively, for example, the Basel Institute for Immunology, entirely financed by Hoffman-La Roche but featuring all the benefits of academic practice, including publishing freedoms. The International Union of Immunological Societies began in 1969 with ten national societies, increased to thirty-three by 1984 (Nicholas, 1985). Immunology will be at the heart of global biotechnological inequality and 'technology transfer' struggles. Its importance approaches that of information technologies in global science politics. (4) Ways of writing about the immune system are also ways of determining which diseases - and which interpretations of them - will prevail in courts, hospitals, international funding agencies, national policies, memories and treatment of war veterans and civilian populations, and so on. See for example the efforts of oppositional people, like labour and consumer advocates, to establish a category called 'chemical AIDS' to call attention to widespread and unnamed ('amorphous') sickness in late industrial societies putatively associated with its products and environments and to link this sickness with infectious AIDS as a political strategy (Hayes, 1987; Marshall, 1986). Discourse on infectious AIDS is part of mechanisms that determine what counts as 'the general population', such that over a million infected people in the US alone, not to mention the global dimensions of infection, can be named in terms that make them not part of the general population, with important national medical, insurance, and legal policy implications. Many leading textbooks of immunology in the United States give considerably more space to allergies or auto-immune diseases than to parasitic diseases, an allocation that might lead future Nobel Prize-winners into some areas of research rather than others and that certainly does nothing to lead undergraduates or medical students to take responsibility for the differences and inequalities of sickness globally. (Contrast Golub [1987] with Desowitz [1987] for the sensitivities of a cellular immunology researcher and a parasitologist.) Who counts as an individual is not unrelated to who counts as the general population.
3 Like the universe inhabited by readers and writer of this essay.
4 This ontological continuity enables the discussion of the growing practical problem of 'virus' programs infecting computer software (McLellan, 1988). The infective, invading information fragments that parasitize their host code in favour of their own replication and their own program commands are more than metaphorically like biological viruses. And like the body's unwelcome invaders, the software viruses are discussed in terms of pathology as communications terrorism, requiring therapy in the form of strategic security measures. There is a kind of epidemiology of virus infections of artificial intelligence systems, and neither the large corporate or military systems nor the personal computers have good immune defences. Both are extremely vulnerable to terrorism and rapid proliferation of the foreign code that multiplies silently and subverts their normal functions. Immunity programs to kill the viruses, like Data Physician sold by Digital Dispatch, Inc., are being marketed. More than half the buyers of Data Physician in 1985 were military. Every time I start up my Macintosh, it shows the icon for its vaccine program - a hypodermic needle.
5 Thanks to Elizabeth Bird for creating a political button with this slogan, which I wore as a member of an affinity group called Surrogate Others at the Mothers and Others Day Action at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site in May 1987.
6 The relation of the immune and nervous systems conceived within contemporary neuroimmunology or psychoneuroimmunology would be the ideal place to locate a fuller argument here. With the discovery of receptors and products shared by cells of the neural, endocrine, and immune systems, positing the dispersed and networking immune system as the mediator between mind and body began to make sense to 'hard' scientists. The implications for popular and official therapeutics are legion, for example, in relation to the polysemic entity called 'stress'. See Barnes (1986, 1987); Wechsier (1987); Kanigel (1986). The biological metaphors invoked to name the immune system also facilitate or inhibit notions of the IS as a potent mediator, rather than a master control system or hyper-armed defence department. For example, developmental biologist and immunologist, Scott Gilbert, refers in his teaching to the immune system as an ecosystem and neuroimmunology researcher, Edwin Blalock, calls the immune system a sensory organ. These metaphors can be oppositional to the hyper-rationalistic AI immune body in Star Wars imagery. They can also have multiple effects in research design, as well as teaching and therapeutics.
7 When I begin to think I am paranoid for thinking anyone really dreams of transcendent disembodiment as the telos of life and mind, 1 find such things as the following quote by the computer designer W. Daniel Hiliis in the Winter 1988 issue of Daedalus on artificial intelligence:
Of course, I understand that this is just a dream, and I will admit that I am propelled more by hope than by the probability of success. But if this artificial mind can sustain itself and grow of its own accord, then for the first time human thought will live free of bones and flesh, giving this child of mind an earthly immortality denied to us. (Hiliis, 1988, p. 189)
Thanks to Evelyn Keller for pointing me to the quote. See her 'From secrets of life, secrets of death', (1990). I am indebted to Zoe Sofia (1984; Sofoulis, 1988) for analysis of the iconography and mythology of nuclear exterminism, extra-terrestrialism, and cannibalism.
8 That, of course, is why women have had so much trouble counting as individuals in modern Western discourses. Their personal, bounded individuality is compromised by their bodies' troubling talent for making other bodies, whose individuality can take precedence over their own, even while the little bodies are fully contained and invisible without major optical technologies (Petchesky, 1987). Women can, in a sense, be cut in half and retain their maternal function - witness their bodies maintained after death to sustain the life of another individual. The special ambiguity of female individuality perhaps more resistant, finally, than worms to full liberal personhood - extends into accounts of immune function during pregnancy. The old biomedical question has been, why does the mother not reject the little invader within as foreign? After all, the embryo and foetus are quite well marked as 'other' by all the ordinary immunological criteria; and there is intimate contact between foetal and maternal tissue at the site of certain cells of the placenta, called trophoblasts. Counter-intuitively, it turns out that it is women with 'underactive immune systems' who end up rejecting their foetuses immunologically by forming antibodies against their tissues. Normally, women make special antibodies that mask the tell-tale foreign signals on the foetal trophoblasts, so that the mother's immune surveillance system remains blind to the foetus's presence. By immunizing the 'rejecting' women with cells taken from their 'husbands' or other genetically unrelated donors, the women's immune systems can be induced to make blocking antibodies. It appears that most women are induced to make this sort of antibody as a result of 'immunization' from their 'husband's' sperm during intercourse. But if the 'husband' is too genetically close to the potential mother, some women won't recognize the sperm as foreign, and their immune systems won't make blocking antibodies. So the baby gets recognized as foreign. But even this hostile act doesn't make the female a good invidivual, since it resulted from her failure to respond properly to the original breach of her boundaries in intercourse (Kolata, 1988a, b). It seems pretty clear that the biopolitical discourses of individuation have their limits for feminist purposes!
9 Jerne's debt to Chomsky's structuralism is obvious, as are the difficulties that pertain to any such version of structuralist internal totality. My argument is that there is more to see here than a too rapid criticism would allow. Jerne's and Chomsky's internal image of each other does not constitute the first time theories of the living animal and of language have occupied the same epistemic terrain. See Foucault, The Order o/Thinp (1970). Remember that Foucault in Archaeology of Knowledge defined discourses as 'practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak' (Foucault, 1972, p. 49). The family relation between structuralism and rationalism is something I will avoid for now.
10 Emily Martin has begun a three-year fieldwork project on networks of immunological discourse in laboratories, the media, and among people with and without AIDS.
11 Mice and 'men' are constantly associated in immune discourse because these sibling animal bodies have been best characterized in the immunological laboratory. For example, the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), a complex of genes that encodes a critical array of surface markers involved in almost all of the key immune response recognition events, is well characterized for each species. The complex is called the H2 locus in die mouse and the HLA locus in humans. The MHC codes for what will be recognized as 'self'. The locus is critically involved in 'restriction' of specificities. Highly polygenic and polyallelic, the MHC may be the main system allowing discrimination between self and non-self. 'Non-self' must be presented to an immune system cell 'in the context of self'; that is, associated with the surface markers coded by the lyiHC. Comparative studies of the antigens of the MHC with the molecular structures of other key actors in the immune response (antibodies, T cell differentiation antigens) have led to the concept of the 'immunoglobulin superfamily', characterized by its extensive sequence homologies that suggest an evolutionary elaboration from a common genie ancestor (Golub, 1987, pp. 202-33). The conceptual and laboratory tools developed to construct knowledge of the MHC are a microcosm for understanding the apparatus of production of the bodies of the immune system. Various antigens coded by the MHC confer 'public* or 'private' specificities, terms which designate degrees of shared versus differentiating antigens against a background of close genetic similarity, but not identity. Immunology could be approached as the science constructing such language-like 'distinguishing features' of the organic communications system. Current research on 'tolerance' and the ways thymic cells (T cells) 'educate' other cells about what is and is not 'seif ! led the biologist, Scott Gilbert, to ask if that is immunology's equivalent of the injunction to know 'thy-self' (personal communication). Reading immunological language requires both extreme literal-mindedness and a taste for troping. Jennifer Terry examined AIDS as a 'trop(olog)ical pandemic' (unpublished paper, UCSC).
12 It is not just imagers of the immune system who learn from military cultures; military cultures draw symbiotically on immune system discourse, just as strategic planners draw direcdy from and contribute to video game practices and science fiction. For example, in Military Review Colonel Frederick Timmerman argued for an elite corps of special strike force soldiers in the army of the future in these terms:
The most appropriate example to describe how this system would work is the most complex biological model we know - the body's immune system. Within the body there exists a remarkably complex corps of internal bodyguards. In absolute numbers they are small - only about one percent of the body's cells. Yet they consist of reconnaissance specialists, killers, reconstitution specialists, and communicators that can seek out invaders, sound the alarm, reproduce rapidly, and swarm to the attack to repel the enemy ... In this regard, the June 1986 issue of National Geographic contains a detailed account of how the body's immune system functions. (Timmer-man, 1987, p. 52)