'Reproducing
Technology'
Dr Robyn Ferrell
Philosophy Department
Macquarie University
Sydney NSW 2109
Australia
While some feminists are approaching the 'new
reproductive technologies' on the assumption that democratic tools can critique
them, this paper raises the concern that this approach may be unequal to the
task. An examination of the history of nineteenth and twentieth century thought
suggests that democracy and technology arise together, both indebted to a means and ends style of thought which
is characteristic of modernity. It might be expected that certain realities and
futures produced by those technologies will be invisible to its critiques.
Further,
the political demands of feminism - an end to sexual oppression - as well as
the techniques of assisted reproduction, arise in the context of a gendered
world reconfiguring itself. Kinship is re-ordered and with it, the sexual
relation. The paternal metaphor has been slowly relinquished, and hierarchy
apparently gives way to the democratic and even the 'rhizomatic'. In this
context, the 'equalizing' of the sexes is more than a political project - it
may be an historical inevitability. But this brings both the problem of sexual
difference and its impending 'solution' (i.e. its erasure) into view.
What will remain in postmodernity - a future in which
the reproductive technologies increasingly feature - of the incalculable sexual
difference of a species which until now has been 'sexually dimorphic'? And how
much - or how little - will it matter
that being human has traditionally meant belonging to a series which is
reproduced sexually?
The Modern
The consequences for the idea of the family of the
new reproductive technologies are tied to how the ability to manipulate human
reproduction might change our social world and the relation between the sexes.
In Gender and
History, Linda Nicholson argues that by the nineteenth century 'kinship
systems which at one time had been the major mechanisms for regulating food
production and distribution, sexuality, crime and punishment etc were replaced
by the twin and separate institutions of the family and state.' (1986,2) But
the recent changes in the institution of the family allow it to be seen 'as a
contingent, primarily modern, social institution, in complicated interrelation
with other modern social institutions.' (ibid, 1) And she argues that, while
feminism is itself a manifestation of changes in the relation of private and
public, it also provides us with a vantage point from which to understand these
changes.(ibid, 4)
The advent of the new reproductive technologies has
the potential to change the norms by which society reproduces itself. The
deployment of these technologies has the capacity to bring about significant
changes in our concepts of 'sexual relation'; that is, in concepts of
femininity and masculinity, of maternity, marriage and the life of the family.
But of course, societies, through structures of kinship, have always maintained
'technologies' for the reproduction of a culture. The detailed marriage rules
of even the most nomadic communities attest to the importance to a social group
of the manner through which it permits reproduction. (cf Marilyn Strathern
(1992))
To describe these traditional arrangements - from
Australian aboriginal moieties to the Married
Women's Property Act - as technologies acknowledges that technology is not
merely a name for machine-based action but any arrangement of resources that
allows for the production of a desired end. (The notion of cultural
technologies is employed in de Lauretis (1987) and Albury (1999), among
others).The patriarchal marriage, for example, has been a ubiquitous means for
preserving inheritance not only of literal wealth but of relations between
classes of men. This 'reproduction' reproduces the social structure at the same
time as it reproduces the family.
To describe reproduction as an opening for technology
is also to take up an insight of Heidegger's: that technology, before it is a
concrete event, is a 'way of thinking'. In the 'Essay Concerning Technology'
(1953), Heidegger identifies technology as first and foremost a way of thinking
that powerfully affects what it surveys, by conceiving of nature as a means to
an end, and thus as a 'standing reserve'. As Heidegger notes, the danger of
technology is that it does not discriminate among resources - that it will come
to regard even its 'thinker', i.e. the human, as itself a standing reserve.(see
Conly (1993) for recent discussions of Heidegger's views).
Contemporary feminist analyses have already
identified this reality in the implementation of IVF, for example: the woman
herself, and her motherhood becoming tools of a medical technological
development and a material acted on in the process of fertilising her. (Corea,
1995) Even those feminist theorists who are positive about the prospects for
the new reproductive technologies warn against this tendency to reduce women
and their fertility to 'mother machines'. (Hubbard, 1990).
At the
same time, feminists have looked to developments in these (and other)
technologies to free women from their traditional reproductive role, and from
the patriarchal family, so as to take up equal positions in society with men.
These changes are in fact no longer merely theoretical: they are real for many
western women, who now work outside the home in increasing numbers as their
domestic labour is abbreviated by 'labour-saving' devices and their
reproductive labour is modified by the availability of contraception and
abortion.
What
effect will these changes have on the utility and viability of marriage, which
in reproductive terms has provided membership of a group for each child, under
the auspices of a male head and reproducing the conventional understanding of
the roles of men and women? Kelly Oliver (1997) argues that, given the present
political revival of the 'cliché of "family values", the real
breakdown of the nuclear family in our society, and the renegotiation by women
of career and family, it is time to re-examine the family and familial
relations.' (pxvii) Her discussion, informed by psychoanalytic theory, looks at
how 'the fantasy of the nuclear family is still a centerpiece of our cultural
imaginary'. (ibid).
And this
is undoubtedly a site of visible conflict in relation to the technologies at
the present time. For example, recent debate in Australia on whether
publicly-funded IVF services should be made available to single women and
lesbian couples, draws heavily on anxiety-nostalgia for a childhood under the
protection of ‘a mummy and a daddy’ – a safety that never quite was.
Discussion of the reproductive technologies in
feminist ethics is presently pursued around questions of the value of the
technology to women's aspirations. Purdy, for example, writes: 'The central
issue is whether these new techniques are moral and ought to be used' (1996,
171), and answers in the (weak) affirmative. She engages with several
anti-feminist authors, highlighting the logical flaws in the case for 'leaving
nature as God intended'.
Cornell, reflecting on the concepts of freedom and
equality in their legal and feminist senses, as they apply in the 'emotionally
fraught sphere of life we call sex.' (1995, 3), approaches the question not
through morality but through justice.
She argues for a 'feminist re-statement of why we should prioritize
justice over the good.' (27) And against the spectre of Orwell's Brave New World, Cornell nevertheless
explores the domain of the social imaginary, declaring 'Feminism is ultimately
about politically taking that chance to create new worlds.' (ibid, and cf Moira
Gatens' 1996 discussion of the social imaginary).
Ruth Hubbard's conclusion, in The Politics of Women's Biology, represents the predominant
'reasonableness' of the feminist position. 'The biology of procreation is
embedded in human relationships and cultural realities. It is not just a
question of hormones, eggs, sperm, fallopian tubes, uteri .... The ground under
procreation is shifting, and the terms are being renegotiated. Women must be
part of this process' (208) While warning against the training up of a new
breed of experts - the bio-ethicists - to form yet another barrier to women
themselves being heard on the subject of their reproductive lives, and
questioning what kind of 'choice' the new technologies open up, Hubbard comes
back to the importance of democratic safeguards in the progress of this
technology.
Her argument is not that where the science has been
abusive - as in the selective eugenics of Nazi Germany in the thirties - it is
a case of 'bad' science departing from traditional norms, but rather that
science without consciousness of its place in the political landscape is
inherently a threat to the interests of the less powerful. She writes: 'For
science and technology to be useful and responsive to people's needs,
scientists, along with everyone else, will have to recognize that science is no
more immune from ideological commitments than are other human activities and
that we therefore need better and more democratic mechanisms than we now have
to decide what science needs to be done and how best to do it.' ( 211)
This
technology may continue to be more or less successfully overseen by democratic
processes, at least as far as it is dependent on funding which comes from the
wider political scene - the research councils and private philanthropic bodies
of the democratic nation states, or by the fees paid by those desiring it.
Feminist thinkers and actors need to enfranchise themselves in this discussion,
Hubbard prescribes. Interestingly, one such route to being heard is as 'bio-ethicists'
- cf. Albury's first-hand history of feminist response to reproductive
technologies, including detail of the democracy that Hubbard calls for
(1999,18-24).
Steinberg (1997) questions the extent to which these technologies can be rewritten in feminist terms. Like Hubbard, her answer is social justice, yet she notes that the limitations on the possibility of democratisation ‘are extensive and complex', and disentangling IVF from its 'eugenic, embryo/logic and recombinant sensibilities' is problematic, since it implies divorcing this sphere of reproductive medicine from conventional discourses of family, and from the historical role of medicine as an agency of sexual and reproductive regulation and control.(194)
I would argue these limitations arise from the conceptual paradigm common to democracy and technology: they both analyse their means into units of equivalence capable of exchange. This means that reproduction is conceived of, in the market place as well as in the sexual realm, as a matter of generating more of what there is. This is a reproduction which is primarily repetition; mechanical, foreseeable and without innovation.
Justice will be a leading concept in this paradigm, just because it proceeds toward adequation (equivalence) in search of a common ground from which to pronounce judgement. Feminism, as a demand for social justice, is well within this circuit of conceptual exchange. But the more it forges an alliance with justice, the less it can calculate its incalculable remainder – the difference that sexual difference makes in engendering the feminine, or indeed, any gendered ‘other’.
The Postmodern
Steinberg voices a common fear that social justice
advocacy has regarding feminism of the ‘postmodern’ variety: '[A]ll too often post-modernism involves a
discussion of difference without a discussion of power relations'.
The desire for IVF might be said to be engendered
from the power relations which manufacture knowledge i.e. the knowledge that it
is natural for women to bear children, and that medicine heals disability (i.e.
not bearing children). But feminist knowledge, too, to the extent it produces
desire for identities for women other than motherhood, is also (re)produced
through power - Steinberg asks; ' if eugenic conceptions are integral to the
technology, how can women be enabled not to want it?' (1997, 194) Ironically, m
anipulating women's desire so that we are 'enabled
not to want it' may sound at least as brave new world to some ears as the
reproductive technology it challenges. It highlights feminism as a political
reproductive technology, one for reproducing (feminist) subjects.
Certain power relations produce feminist knowledge
and may no longer be a case of 'escaping' from repressive power relations, but
rather of evaluating the chances of intensifying others. The constitution of
identities is a power issue which simple appeal to women's experience cannot
antidote, since experience itself is a product of those constituting relations.
(See my discussion in (Ferrell, 2000).) Albury (1999) represents vividly the
complexities, ambivalence and nuances in those power relations which, despite
being expressed in the plural, more often coagulate in the single noun 'power'.
As I argue above, based as it is in adequation, 'social justice' is itself part
of technological thinking. We can ask even of the politically correct
prescription: what kind of world does it reproduce?
Cultural
meanings of fertility are central in determining the social status of women in
a society, Albury argues, and suggests that formulating a feminist response
will involve 'accepting that reproductive politics will always be a process of
contest because the very definition of womanhood is at stake.' (1999, 20)
Theoretical resources, as well as empirical data, are required. Albury provides
different stories of infertility, from women reportedly relieved to have had
abortions to birth-mothers devastated by the effects of forced adoption, in
order to 'call into question the idea that an appeal to women's experience
provides sufficient evidence for political action or academic analysis.' (26)
In The Bodies
of Women as elsewhere, Diprose has shown how biomedical interventions in
human reproduction tend to highlight weaknesses in conventional ethical theory,
by their inability to take embodiment and sexual difference into account.
(1991,1994). And Fox Keller (1992) diagnoses a similar disability in the
postmodern: 'For all the divergences between advocates of the autonomy of
language and those of the autonomy of science, one cannot but be struck by
their resonances, by their convergent embrace of the very romance of
disembodiment.' (180)
Quoting Baudrillard - "From now on signs will
exchange among themselves exclusively, without interacting with the real"
- she writes, 'If such entities as subjects, motivated by desire and intention
every did exist, they clearly do no longer; the subject has been vanquished by
"the sovereign power of the object". At the other extreme of realist
scientific discourse, human subjects are equally invisible, their material,
embodied presence equally ephemeral and inconsequential... the search of
biologists for the building blocks of life leads them into the realm of pure
information... The substantive component of the gene is said to lie in its
nucleotide sequence, and that can be stored in data banks and transmitted by
electronic mail.' (179) Haraway’s
expansive study in Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium .FemaleMan_
Meets_OncoMouseTM (1997) traces an intricate web of cultural and scientific
connections through this ideological field.
But one could also ask in relation to Steinberg's
question - 'how can women be enabled not to want it?'- what is eugenics such that
women (or anyone) would want it? While its theoretical possibility appears
extreme and its historical occurrence has been deadly, nevertheless one could
argue that eugenics is the very principle of what we call reproduction - the
logical extension of technologies traditional and modern for reproducing a
social world by producing subjects in its image. As such, reproduction as
eugenic is an attempt to capture the future (as here, one which holds the hope
that 'women be enabled not to want' certain things). But one that will
necessarily fail; not because it is impossible to practice eugenics (the
technology will allow it), but because the future is by definition beyond our
reach, as that which is yet to be
determined.
In this light, feminism as a political technology needs to scrutinise the direction in which it fails. Sarah Franklin's analysis of IVF failure is instructive in this regard. Despite the advancement of biological science and technology, the high fail rate of IVF - only one in five women conceive using it - renders conception 'opaque', she argues. IVF failure attests to an ignorance of the facts of life, which can supply a causal explanation only post facto. (Franklin, 1997, 200) She makes the point not in order to cast doubt on the efficacy of the technology, but to draw attention to the social iconography surrounding it - the rhetoric of hope for 'miracle babies' and faith in science.
'That such religious parallels appear in the context
of evocative imagery concerning reproduction is hardly surprising given the
importance of belief about conception to cultural accounts of human origins or
genesis. As anthropologists have been quick to discover elsewhere, beliefs
about conception are inseparable from questions about what it is to be human
...' (ibid)
In pursuing this iconography, Franklin offers an
answer to the 'haunting' question with which Adele Clark's insightful study of
the emergence of reproductive science concludes: 'Why did the reproductive
sciences receive the extensive and prestigious institutional and financial
support they did when they were and remain so deeply illegitimate and
controversial?' (1998,274) Drawing on the historical importance of 'conceiving'
as 'both an epistemological and a procreative act' (199), Franklin concludes
that 'through IVF, science and nature are unified in an act of pro-creation'
which affirms the truth effects of science: the "miracle baby" and
the "desperate" infertile woman are evidence of 'not only a devotion
to the ideals of scientific and technological progress, but their capacity to be embodied'. (207) Thus, 'the biological
facts of human reproduction not only signify the 'truth' of reproduction, they signify the power of science to determine
this truth.'(208). (Cf Vasseleu (1991) for a related argument concerning
medical imaging.)
Reproductive science, Clarke argues, from birth
control to the human genome project, suffers from an ethic of modernity - the
rationalization of nature (1998, 276). Tracing the history of the discipline of
reproductive science, she (1998) notes that ' cloning and genetic manipulation
are quite likely to be the most controversial of all reproductive technologies,
exceeding in the twenty-first century the controversy surrounding birth control
and abortion in the twentieth.' (Clarke, 252) Each of the techniques of
reproductive science have been held to be illegitimate, in that they are
associated either with taboos on sexuality, perceptions of quackery and /or
engendering 'Brave New Worlds'. But the
latter is 'truly revolutionary', she suggests; 'The capacity to create "brave
new worlds" bridges modern and postmodern approaches to reproduction.'
(253)
Franklin's
view goes beyond the observation of a 'modernist project of controlling life
itself' by rationalizing and industrializing reproductive processes, to a
postmodern kinship theory, the 'study of vital signs'. And in this connection,
Judith Butler’s influential theorising the production of gender, in for
example, Bodies That Matter, also
opens onto the realm of the postmodern (cf. Butler 1990,1993).
Conclusion
What will
have had to change in a way of
thinking, to allow the reproductive
technologies to be deployed as they have already been? It is only as a
consequence of political technologies
such as 'universal suffrage' and 'sexual equality' that these changes to
reproduction can be conceived, let alone conceived of as desirable. Ironically,
it can be observed that feminism is itself the most significant of these
political technologies for intervention in the sphere of sexual relations.
Describing feminisms as technologies connects a
concept of technology to one of power, in order to comprehend 're/productive
relations'. The medical technologies of assisted reproduction and the political
technologies of feminism come to be seen as two sides of the same coin,
expressive of postmodernity and its concepts of individual and social life.
Thus, in tracing the common root of technology and
democracy in modernity, one might expect that the provision of democracy to protect both the advancement of the
technology, and the aims of the social equivalence it is premised on, is a
foregone conclusion. The spinning out of the techno-logical is the same idea as the development of the
democratic regime. It is, indeed, the enemy within that drives anxiety about
this technology, for it implements a world that is already conceived (of) in
the political imaginary.
Perhaps now the rhetoric of 'safeguards' against a
'brave new world' might be qualified by a political discourse which explores
the prospects for technologically-engendered realms, political and medical. If
technology is a way of thinking, then feminism might need to ‘think with
technology against technology’, in the interests of a reproduction which
engenders the new.
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