Tandem Surfing the Third Wave: Part 3, interview with subRosa
This interview was conducted between subRosa and Ryan Griffis via email
correspondence during the first half of 2003.
subRosa is an artists collective that produces performative and new media
projects that critique the relationships between digital technologies,
biotechnologies and women’s bodies/lives/work. subRosa was initiated
in the fall of 1998 as a project at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, from
which it has evolved into its current form, a collective of five women
dispersed throughout the US. A new book, Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist
Practices, edited by Faith Wilding, Michelle Wright and Maria Fernandez,
was recently released by the group and published by Autonomedia Books.Current
members are: Steffi Domiki, Laleh Mehran, Lucia Sommer, Hyla Willis and
Faith Wilding. subRosa can be found on the Web at www.cyberfeminism.net.
RG
Could you briefly discuss cyberfeminism and how it relates to other historical
versions of feminism and critical theory?
sR
The question of how to define cyberfeminism is at the heart of the often
contradictory contemporary positions of women working with new digital
technologies and feminist politics. (1) Cyberfeminism (CF) appeared toward
the end of the 80's as a promising new wave of (post)feminist thinking
and practice that began to contest technologically complex territories.
By 2003 cyberfeminism is still a controversial and puzzling term--as was
made evident by a recent lively exchange on the Undercurrents listserve.
(Undercurrents is a list-serve discussing intersections of cyberfeminism,
postcoloniality and technology; it was initiated by Coco Fusco, Maria
Fernandez, Faith Wilding and Irina Aristarkhova in 2002). In fact, the
attempt to avoid defining cyberfeminism became a central tenet for Old
Boys Network, a cyberfeminist group that is attempting to create a CF
politics and practice of dissent [dissence] rather than adopt a univocal
political position or program. Not surprisingly though, the refusal to
define a politics grounded in specificity often ends up reinforcing existing
structured inequities such as those of race and class.
Members of subRosa differ in our politics, practices, and everyday life
conditions, but we agree that perhaps the most urgent issue for cyberfeminist
and feminist practice and theory currently is that of seeking female affiliations
that respect difference and create productive projects in solidarity with
others who are working on similar issues.
subRosa believes that cyberfeminism is theoretically and historically
grounded in feminist philosophies and embodied in political, cultural
and social practices. Crucially, CF needs to be informed by postcolonial
theories and critiques of technological culture and representational politics.
Areas of CF intervention and practice include research on the specific
impact of ICT (Information & Communications Technologies) on different
populations of women globally--including highly educated professional
women in academia, the sciences, medical, and computer industries, as
well as clerical and factory workers in the just-in-time telecommunications
and home-work industry, and rural and urban women working in electronic
parts factories and assembly sweat-shops. In order to strategize CF practices
we must examine the impact of the new technologies on women's sexuality
and subjectivities; the conditions of production and reproduction––always
already linked for women; gender roles, social relations, and public and
private space; and we need to contest the naturalized value placed on
speed and efficiency when they take no heed of the limits and needs of
the organic body. In the aftermath of colonialism, there are more migrants,
refugees and exiles than ever before and many of these migrants are women.
As women from developing countries increasingly become the home-service
and child-care labor employed by wealthier families—as well as the
world’s electronic parts manufacturers, assemblers, and data maintenance
workers--the lives of women are mutually reliant across divisions of race,
class, and nationality. Far from being subjects irrelevant to electronic
media and cyberfeminism, these migrant populations are often the result
of devastations caused by the interventions of empire. We must begin de-colonization
in our own networks and embodied relations. CF must also research, critique
and contest developments in bio-genetic technologies that will profoundly
affect environmental and human futures. Cyberfeminists could spearhead
activism and education about Advanced Reproductive Technologies (ART),
transgenic crop production, stem cell technologies and cloning, and new
eugenics practices, to expose how profoundly traditional concepts of women’s
bodies and gender roles are implicated in the deployment of these technologies.
bell hooks' definition of feminism proposed almost two decades ago remains
relevant to cyberfeminists. In her words, feminism " is not simply
a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure that women will
have equal rights with men; it is a commitment to eradicating the ideology
of domination that permeates western culture on various levels--sex, race,
and class to name a few- and a commitment to reorganizing US society so
that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism,
economic expansion, and material desires." (2)
RG
How does subRosa's theory and practice fit into this schema?
sR
At present (2003) subRosa consists of five new genre artists who produce
our projects. For our book , Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices (available
from <www.autonomedia.org>) we collaborated with cultural theorists
and postcolonial scholars Maria Fernandez and Michelle Wright, and invited
the participation of 12 contributors from different countries and fields
of cultural and technological research and practice. We are currently
beginning a new collaborative project MatriXial Technologies with a group
of artists, scholars, and researchers in Singapore including Irina Aristarkhova,
Margaret Tan, and Adeline Kueh. The project concerns itself with mapping
global flows of human tissue and bioinformatics, and the varying meanings
and effects these have on different populations of women. sR practices
an embodied "female affiliation" of welcoming, solidarity, and
inclusion. For example, when we are invited to do a project, organize
a panel, or speak at a conference, we try to extend that invitation to
include women with different experiences and views whose voices have not
been heard, or who do not usually travel on the circuits that we travel
in. Our activist art practice is cyberfeminist because it is based on
a contestational feminist analysis and critique of the effects of digital
(cybernetic) information, communication, and biotechnologies on women’s
material lives, bodies, work, and social relations. subRosa consciously
tries to embody feminist content, practices, and agency within the electronic
technologies, virtual systems, and RL (Real Life) spaces, which we inhabit
in our work and lives. We consciously politicize and problematize how
both the content and form of our work and social relations are mediated
by digital technologies.
RG
Since subRosa has been addressing different aspects of science and technology,
which are now harder to separate than ever, what areas have become important
targets for the group to critique?
sR
One big area is always the language and practices of science and of commodified
biotech. Thus, for example, we have critiqued the appropriation of the
feminist notion of "choice" to support commodified development
of ART's (Assisted Reproductive Technologies). We also point to the ways
in which the promissory language of science and of many new medical and
genetic technologies work to naturalize the new uses of biology in genetic
and transgenic food and medical production. For example in the area of
cloning and stem cell technologies (which is what we are looking at right
now) there is an incredible hype going on that uses words such as "magic"
"immortal" and "totipotent" to describe various kinds
of stem cells. There is also the promise of "putting death to death"
of "rejuvenating" and "revivifying" organs, aging
bodies, and the like, not to mention "saving lives" and "extending
life indefinitely." Then, we are also very concerned with capitalist
science's practices of privatization of intellectual property, knowledge
production and life tissues, as well as of patenting life materials and
biological processes. We have talked with scientists and lab researchers
in both private commercial (corporate supported) and academic (usually
also corporate supported) institutions and have often heard them complain
about the constraints that privatization and patenting put on their research
and the exchange of knowledge and materials with other scientists. But
for the public (as guinea pig and eventual consumer) these are crucial
issues of concern that need to be acted on. However, most people don't
really understand what is involved and have long since given up trying
to keep up with what science is developing. This is where we can intervene
as contestational artists and activists who are willing to do the necessary
research work to be able to involve the public in a different kind of
understanding and experience of these biotechnologies than sensationalized
or overly technical scientific reporting can.
For sR a central concern is also the ways in which biotech and various
digital technologies affect the lives, livelihoods, bodies, roles, and
subjectivities of women in different ways than they may for other sectors
of the population. The bodies of women have literally become parts-supply
and production laboratories for many aspects of the reprotech, stem cell
and cloning biotech industry. For example, lab culture fluids (also known
as matrixes) are sometimes made to resemble female reproductive tract
mucus by adding cells from women’s fallopian tubes and uteri. For
ART, cloning and stem cell technologies pregnant women are now routinely
being approached and advised to have their babies’ umbilical cord
blood collected and cryogenically stored as an eventual source of stem
cells that may one day “save the whole family.” Or, as in
ART, asking women to donate super-ovulated eggs or "excess embryos"
for therapeutic stem cell research. But new biotech and genetic engineering
affect women a lot in other ways too, for example in food production and
subsistence farming, which is still done mostly by female labor in many
countries. Gena Corea, in Man-made Women, cites the example of the Green
Revolution in India, where new farming technology deprived millions of
women of a living and of their traditional agricultural work. This led
in many cases to further devaluing of women and consequently to increased
infanticide of female children, or of sex-selective abortions after amniocentesis.
(Presumably many of these women who lost agricultural work went into high-tech
assembly plants or emigrated to other countries to become domestic workers).
In sR’s experience, attitudes and beliefs about sexual difference
are often a suppressed but important element in scientific research and
in the way various technologies and scientific processes are deployed.
We need to research this much more.
Then, finally we are also interested in questions of difference and of
the division of labor when it comes to scientific research and digital
technologies. For example, we did a project for n.paradoxa examining the
"Economies of ART" in which we looked at the integrated circuit
of workers and knowledges that go into "making a baby" with
ART.
RG
subRosa counters the often exploitive aspects of the “high tech
gift economy” with what you called “embodied ‘female
affiliation’.” Some people may find this essentialist in assigning
a gender to the practice, especially given the residual power of gender
bending cyber-theory, but Critical Art Ensemble has spoken of the need
for “tactical essentialism” in order to create resistance.
Does this become an issue for the group?
SR
It might be more accurate to say that subRosa counters the often exploitative
aspects of the digital info-, bio-, agri-, and repro-tech industries,
with a gift economy of embodied female affiliation. In other words, we
hope to challenge the axiomatic of global pancapital, in which the value
of all life--from the molecular to the macro level--is understood solely
in relation to its potential to maximize profit. It is rather the instrumental
reduction of all of life under the current order that is the true essentializing
machine. We hope to understand through our practice, in detail and with
specificity, how this is effecting and affecting every day life. An embodied
tactical practice of female affiliation opens onto fields of immanent
possibility. For example, by asking, who makes these computers (where
are the actual female bodies within the metaphorized 'matrix')? we immediately
are confronted with a whole series of important questions. By forming
resistant alliances and networks based on contingent possibility rather
than fixed ideology, and asking "what can we actually do, here, now,
together? can we work together in a way that avoids crushing difference?"
many tactical artists and activists today are making important steps in
countering the transcendent machines of alienation and exploitation.
Our use of the strategy of female affiliation derives in the first place
from the important theory and writings of Luce Irigaray who applies the
term to affective (emotional), political and even spiritual practices.
And of course it is also crucially related to Gayatri Spivak’s writings
about Subaltern Studies, in which she develops the idea of “strategic
essentialism.”(from which no doubt the term “tactical essentialism”
is derived). In her book, Essentially Speaking, Diana Fuss explains Spivak’s
terms this way: “Spivak’s simultaneous critique and endorsement
of Subaltern Studies’ essentialism suggests that humanism can be
activated in the service of the subaltern; in other words, when put into
practice by the dispossessed themselves, essentialism can be powerfully
displacing and disruptive. This, to me, signals an exciting new way to
rethink the problem of essentialism; it represents an approach which evaluates
the motivations behind the deployment of essentialism rather than prematurely
dismissing it as an unfortunate vestige of patriarchy (itself an essentialist
category).” (p. 32)
sR’s deliberate revival and re-deployment of the practice (and naming)
of female affiliation is primarily a strategy of welcoming and hospitality
(as outlined by our friend and collaborator Irina Aristarkhova), as well
as an attempt to address the ways in which we are consciously trying to
discover and live our differences and the meanings that they produce--culturally,
socially, politically. We suggest that Irigaray’s important thinking
about sexual difference was often misread in 80’s anti-essentialist
feminist theory (whose denial of essence is quite essentialist) that was
almost phobic on the subject of essentialism. With the result that complex
political, tactical, and practical ideas of feminists like Irigaray, Audrey
Lorde and others have been condemned by different groups and often misrepresented
or completely suppressed. Irigaray’s insistence on female affiliation,
of women-among-themselves, addresses the lived reality that women have
had, and still have almost everywhere in the world, very different subject
positions that men (if they had any at all, that is) and that they must
work from this difference to begin to establish a sense of what not-male
(also not-white, not-dominant, etc.) might be. What could women be if
they did not constantly think of themselves as either dependent on, or
in competition with, or in opposition to, men, but rather as different
but complete in themselves and with themselves? Irigaray eschews “equality
feminism” as a false goal, she says: “women must of course
continue to struggle for equal wages and social rights against discrimination
in employment and education, and so forth. But that is not enough: women
merely “equal” to men would be “like them,” therefore
not women.” (This Sex Which is Not One p. 165-66) The world exists
because of difference, not sameness, and only if difference is recognized
and allowed to unfold fully can we have rich, various, productive life.
The long, deep habits of patriarchy have seen to it that sexism, racism,
and domination are so deeply embedded in language and culture that they
are invisible and naturalized (they’ve become guiding mythology).
If we do not insist on practicing and speaking female affiliation it will
not exist in consciousness—and thus also not in every-day life where
it can become productive. It should be noted that “affiliation”
is based on a Latin term derived from adopting a son or daughter (filius
or filia). Female affiliation in practice means recognizing, welcoming
and acknowledging women in all their differences in public speech, in
all written language, in embodied space; it is a resistant act that contests
embedded mythologies of human universalism and sameness.
A word on cyber gender-bending: This has been overcoded as liberatory
and transformational. Embodied gender-bending is usually a lot more risky
and often harshly punished. Cyber gender bending is strongly associated
with early cyberfeminism which contributed importantly to this genre and
opened up vital discourse. However, it is hard to see how much further
this can be pushed in the virtual media and meanwhile many difficult problems
of unequal access and repression in digital terrains still remain and
need to be addressed. We agree here with Anna Munster that these are issues
which feminism(s) can address.
RG
What have been the most significant sources of resistance to the group’s
contestational theory and practice? And where have allies formed in cultural,
scientific, or other sectors?
sR
We have often had criticism from women (often feminists) and couples considering
using (or already having used) processes of ART (Assisted Reproductive
Technologies) and who believe that sR as a feminist group has the responsibility
to support women’s choices whatever they may be rather than critiquing
them. To this we respond that we have never taken the position of judging
individual women or their choices. However, we certainly have critiqued
the implied (and actual) eugenicism of ART along with embedded assumptions
of universal desire for motherhood, and the utopian and promissory language
in which its (still experimental, often dangerous, very expensive, and
only marginally successful) procedures are couched. We have critiqued
the advertising and informational ploys of corporate ART that play on
women’s insecurities and desires by appropriating the feminist rhetoric
of “choice.” We have also suggested that resistance to corporate
“solutions” to infertility can take the form of adoption,
child sharing, low-tech medical and fertility treatments, a gamete commons,
and getting rid of the idea of genetic essentialism--i.e. parents desiring
only offspring with their own genes or with handpicked purchased genes.
Of course we’ve also encountered skepticism and even hostility from
doctors who see us (amateurs) undercutting their (expert) markets. One
female gynecologist told us that she thinks it dangerous for young women
to go through super-ovulation in order to donate eggs, but that the clinic
she works for is of course in dire need of such eggs and therefore actively
encourages young women to consider these procedures through advertising
that for example asks women to consider giving “the gift of life.”
We have had a lot of positive responses to our work both from different
publics—including students, academics, activists and tactical media
practitioners, feminist, and general audiences—as well as from feminist
health workers, doctors, and people from countries in which these issues
are usually not discussed so frankly, or so critically. Most of the scientists
we have talked to are intrigued and interested and we have received many
offers of help and collaboration. So far, to our knowledge, we do not
seem to have antagonized or scared the corporate sector. So we need to
work on that.
RG
Feminist voices often seem missing from technological debates, or maybe
suppressed is more accurate. Rosalyn Deutsche has pointed out the authoritarian
and masculine desires within the language of resistance itself that seeks
to suppress the gendered voice in favor of a mythical cohesive public
sphere. Have subRosa’s experiences revealed a similar tendency within
biotech resistance theory?
sR
One must ask: What is the public sphere anyway? There are so many discourses
that are repressed in it. It is not surprising that feminist and minoritarian
voices continue to be suppressed in technological and biotech debates
since these areas are so intensely male coded. However, many feminist
and minoritarian voices are critiquing new media art, information and
communication technological theory and applications, and biotech theory
and practice as well - Vandana Shiva is only one example of these. There
is a lot of resistant work—both practical and theoretical-- going
on in India and Africa for example, that contests biopiracy, biopatenting,
and the production and consumption of transgenic and genetically modified
crops and animals. Those of us living in the US and Western Europe need
to work much harder to ally ourselves with these movements and voices
because they are actually resisting much harder--and sometimes more successfully--than
we, the corporate biotech takeover of their genetic commons and agricultural
heritage. There is a strong Genetic Commons initiative coming out of Porto
Allegre’s World Social Forum and this needs our active support.
Corporate strong arming techniques being applied in various countries
in Africa and Latin America are of course related to those happening among
farmers right here in the US. US art activists and biotech tactical media
artists are generally not paying enough heed to what is going on under
our noses in regard to how farmers are being coerced by agritech conglomerates
to adopt exclusive contracts to grow patented and proprietary biotech
crops or to convert to factory farming of animals. This puts farmers in
impossible positions and is once again fundamentally changing the nature
of all agriculture and food production in the US-including organic farming.
It takes a great deal of research and perseverance to find out about many
of the initiatives and actual tactical projects of resistance that are
going on locally in different countries—they do not tend to be presented
at new media festivals in Europe or the US. Many of the people engaged
in these activities do not think of themselves as artists or even activists.
They are struggling for survival. Often they are under intense threat
from the corporate sector they are contesting, and their resistance to
adoption of biotech or high-tech products or methods may be in direct
opposition to deals their governments are trying to make in order to get
loans and technological assistance and investment in their countries.
Thus, such resisters are doubly threatened from both within and without
and their work is suppressed and silenced at every turn.. subRosa is interested
in finding out about the tactics of such resistance, supporting it, learning
from it, and engaging in it ourselves in whatever way we can through our
own projects. We’ve started a project called Refugia BAZ (Becoming
Autonomous Zones) in which we would like to feature such resistant projects
and to collaborate with people from whom we could learn, or to whom we
could be of help.
RG
Many in the “New Media” community are aware of the practice
of the Electronic Disturbance Theater and Ricardo Dominguez’s work
with the Zapatista struggle (see
discussion between Coco Fusco & Ricardo Dominguez) that desires
to expand the uses of technology to Southern struggles against pancapitalism
while also learning from them. You mentioned the “Refugia BAZ”
project, could you discuss that project and what its context is?
sR
Our Refugia BAZ (Becoming Autonomous Zones) differs in many ways from
the EDT projects you mentioned, but we don’t have room to discuss
this in detail here. sR is not so much focused on expanding uses of technology,
as we are on trying to find out what technologies people already are using,
how they are using them, and what the effects of this usage are—we
focus on a pedagogical and consciousness-raising approach. So far we have
not focused our projects on a particular activist group or political campaign,
though we are in solidarity with many such groups and would help them
in any way we could. We often use different—often fairly low-tech—digital
technologies in our projects and we are very conscious of the ways in
which different groups in different countries use a mixture of traditional
and new technologies extremely inventively to suit their purposes. This
is truly tactical media at work. For example, the way radio is used in
many Latin American countries is quite different than its use in the US.
Print media like wall posters, billboards, photo-novelas and street comix
also have a very different status still as important communication devices.
Refugia—see the BAZ manifesto on our web page >www.cyberfeminism.net<
–– is a series of modular projects that generate and explore
political, cultural, and ecological aspects of “Refuge.” Modules
can combine participatory live performances, interactive WEB works/installations,
workshops and residencies in colleges and communities, as well as radio,
video, digital, and print production. REFUGIA* is an open framework that
provides spaces to imagine and create critical models of cultural contestation
and creative intervention. It comprises a feminist BAZ 'tool-kit' [with
material and digital components] for activist projects and proposals.
(*REFUGIA is: “A center of relict forms from which a new dispersion
and speciation may take place”; a specific reserve for non-transgenic
crops within biotech agricultural fields; an asylum for political or dissenting
persons; and a critical space of autonomous social becoming and practice
for contestational action.) The project will last from approximately March
2002-December 2004. So far we have done several projects within this framework,
including the “Grade AAA Eggs” and “Biopower, Unlimited”
projects at BGSU, Ohio; MatriXial Technologies (in progress) in collaboration
with Singapore; “International Markets of Flesh” Mexico City
(July 2003); and U-Gen-A-Chix (provisional title for performance at Southwest
Missouri State University, October, 2003).
RG
i’m interested in the mode of production sR practices, moving the
group throughout the US and various other locales, like the recent collaboration
in Singapore. As someone who is always moving and making as many (if not
more) contacts through online and “away from home” situations
myself, the mobility of a lot of tactical/contestational media seems “second-nature”.
One of the long-standing dictums of contestational practice, even before
the “Battle for Seattle,” is that “resistance must be
as mobile as capital,” but this form of work usually requires substantial
capital itself. How does sR relate to this global mobility and distribution
of cultural activity?
sR
You bring up a somewhat sore point with which we wrestle daily. On the
one hand, we are committed to local, embodied work and action. On the
other hand the reality is that (as of Fall 2003) we are living in 4 different
cities and are doing our projects wherever we are invited to do them.
It is important to note that for many people—refugees, migrant workers,
historically nomadic people, for example—mobility is a necessity,
while for others (Euro and US activists, artists, academics, CEO’s,
etc.) it is a privilege: For example, not everyone can afford to fly to
Cancun or Porto Alegre to “resist.” So far our projects have
ranged from Singapore, to Europe, Mexico, and many places in the US. We
are interested in expanding our audience and also in working in non-Western
countries because we learn so much more and we are dealing with subject
matter—such as biotech, women’s health, labor issues––that
are burning issues everywhere and that connect women all over the world
in very new ways. The MatriXial Technologies project for example, is about
tracking and mapping the global flows of human tissue in the form of stem
cell lines and cloned embryos, and looking at what the implications of
these new distributed global bodies are. So we are looking at these other
forms of globally distributed bodies and body parts. In our Mexico project,
International Markets of Flesh (IMF) we are looking at the same issue
through the example of organ procurement and transplantation, and connecting
it to exchanges of laboring and reproductive bodies across borders. These
are very big and complex subjects and require a great deal of research.
MatriXial Technologies is a good example of our working process. We started
with a two-week subRosa residency in Singapore where we worked every day
with our collaborators, Irina Aristarkhova, Margaret Tan and Adeline Kueh.
We visited umbilical cord-blood banks and embryonic stem cell cloning
labs and interviewed doctors and scientists about their work. We also
visited the largest women’s hospital in Singapore, met with gynecologists
and obstetricians there, and were informed about the different ways in
which women from different ethnicities are treated when they give birth.
We also were toured around the intensely technologized environment of
the ICU for premature babies and were able to discuss the uses of these
“life-saving” technologies with nurses and interns. We conducted
workshops on “Cloning Cultures” in the art school and also
took part in a symposium on art and science at the National University
of Singapore. Subsequently, we have conducted workshops in Chicago at
Version>3 Festival and plan one in Amsterdam for the Next Five Minutes
Festival. This project is going slowly because of the necessity of collaborating
across such huge geographical divides, and because we need to take a lot
of time to work out our differences of opinion and approach to the subject
matter and to production. We are planning eventually to produce performances,
print and graphic material, videos, maps, and possibly some interactive
installation work. Fortunately, we received a grant from the Creative
Capital Foundation that has been really helpful toward funding this preliminary
work.
It is clear that sR works situationally and that this slows us down quite
a bit. It also means starting anew with each different project. But we
are beginning to pull together as quite an efficient team and are finding
that we can adapt much of what we produce in one project to other situations.
Mostly our funding comes from the places that invite us and we have luckily
had a few grants. However, we regularly contribute personal money to projects
that interest us for which there is no, or little, funding. All of us
have full-time day jobs and some of us cannot afford to take much unpenalized
time off from them for our work and for our travel to presentations. However,
as you point out, it seems to be our current condition that in order to
be active in the world it requires travel. In the scope of things we realize
that just to be able to do as much (mostly subsidized) travel as we do
is a real privilege. At the same time, the amount of money and resources
we and the art world in general use up is quite small when compared to
most research work—especially that in the sciences or marketing.
We hope that the meaning of the work we do compensates for the expenditure
in resources that it requires.
RG
Going back to what you said before about the appropriation of “choice”
by the reprotech industry, similar forms of appropriation by other biotech
industries have been criticized by environmental and agricultural activists
as “greenwashing” and “playing the hunger card.”
As Francis Lappe and others have pointed out, the promise of GMOs to feed
“the hungry” and reduce the use of chemicals are some of the
more insidious and widely used. Despite the vast collection and publishing
of data revealing that hunger results from lack of distribution, not production,
while the majority of GMO crops are designed to use more pesticide (Monsanto’s
Round-Up product-line being the most blatant), the discussion has been
following the path of the global warming debate, i.e. an ideological battle
overwhelmed by industry-led organizations creating massive PR campaigns
to misrepresent criticism. i would imagine that the discussion of reproductive
technologies becomes even more ideological, when it’s even discussed
at all, due to the history of reproductive rights struggles here. Many
of the activists i know are involved in fighting transgenic developments,
and do not often seriously consider the ramifications of genetically assisted
reproduction, or how the desire for the technology is being created. At
the same time, the issue seems off the radar for most pro-choice advocates.
Which is one reason why sR’s work is so vital, in my view. How is
the rhetoric of “choice” shaping reprotech, and how does Sr,
through projects like “Expo Emmagenics,” attempt to redirect
the debate?
sR
As you are probably aware, we wrote a long article on this subject called
“Stolen Rhetoric: The Appropriation of Choice by ART Industries.
It is included in “Domain Errors!Cyberfeminist Practices”,
a subRosa book now out from Autonomedia Books ( July 1, 2003). Here is
a taste of it from the Introduction and Conclusion:
(Introduction)“Biotech industries currently expanding globally,
but especially in the U.S., have opened new frontiers for colonizing bodies––and
commodifying and patenting life––at the molecular and genetic
level. Gamete harvesting and freezing, In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), Intra
Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI), pre-implantation embryo screening,
and genetic manipulation of embryos, are just some of the new techniques
transcending previous limits of reproductive intervention that have profound
repercussions for human genetic heritage. Under the guise of optimizing
reproduction––and “improving” human beings––ART
(Assisted Reproductive Technologies) are rapidly being naturalized in
every day life. As feminist theorists have pointed out, the new biotech
reproductive order has territorialized the female body as a pre-eminent
laboratory and tissue mine for a lucrative medical/pharmaceutical industry
(1).
The women’s liberation movement of the early ‘70s formulated
a politics of women’s autonomy and control over their sexuality
and reproduction that included the right to safe contraception and abortion.
By the late ‘80s, after almost two decades of abortion wars, the
politics of autonomy and liberation had been transformed into a rhetoric
of “choice” typified by the slogan: “A woman’s
right to choose,” which became identified with the pro-choice movement.
Since then, the rhetoric of “choice” has become firmly associated
with reproductive liberalism.
Using strategic marketing, a seductive consumer industry intent on normalizing
ART in every-day life has appropriated the rhetoric of “choice”
in order to appeal to a broad constituency of progressive consumers ready
to produce “children of choice.” Marketers of new reprogenetic
technologies (Reprotech) were quick to capture this rhetorical territory,
cashing in on the expectation that it would appeal to liberal, educated,
middle class consumers schooled by feminist activism to be proactive in
personal health care. ART industries, principally driven by profit making
motives and embodying eugenic ideologies, have recuperated the politicized
rhetoric of “choice” only by concealing a deeply embedded
conflict between the macro politics of rationalized reproduction in late
capital and a micro politics that capitalizes on individual desires.
Despite the highly invasive and risky body processes of ART, many feminists
have explicitly welcomed the development of Reprotech for its promises
of an expanded range of reproductive choices for women. Others have recognized
that Reprotech represents not only an ultimate form of body colonization,
but that its practices and ideologies reinforce patriarchal systems of
scientific and medical authority, control, and rationalization of reproduction––contradicting
feminist philosophies of women’s autonomy. …..
(Conclusion) The micro and macro politics of the public discourse of ART
are unbalanced; currently the forces of market capitalism have won the
field with the consumer friendly appropriated rhetoric of “choice.”
Research in assisted Reprotech is still advancing rapidly, and increasingly
there are contestatory interests at stake. An ever-growing body of feminist
cultural theory and literature, as well as new media practices and art
works play with concepts of the cyborg body and recombinations of women
and machines. The ‘80s saw strong feminist activism, both in the
U.S. and internationally (groups such as FINNRAGE), that critiqued and
opposed new Reprotech using many classic activist feminist arguments and
tactics. But currently there is a wide gap between academic theory and
activist (radical) feminist practices in the domains of biotech and ART.
(Cyber)feminist artists working with these domains must expose the ways
in which the marketing of ART promotes the colonizing interests of late
capital, rather than the critical goal of women’s autonomy.
New developments in ART, genetics, and biotechnology, are constructing
new rhetorics and practices. This places critical artists who desire to
counter the recuperation of political and cultural rhetoric by a consumer
economy in a quandary. On the one hand they must learn enough about the
new biological science to understand its implications and risks; on the
other, they must maintain a critical stance and create a non-specialist
public discourse that debunks the capitalist propaganda of corporate biotech.
One way to do this is through cross-disciplinary collaborations of artists,
scientists, doctors, and health practitioners, in which expertise is shared
to create a participatory discourse. Rather than producing aestheticized
representations or objects celebrating biotech (as many artists are now
doing), such collaborations involve participants in a critical and pedagogical
process––an information theatre––in which they
can develop informed, critical responses based on actual learning and
experience.
The challenge for feminist activist/artists is to create strategies to
deterritorialize biotech’s control of the female body. In Women
as Wombs, Janice Raymond suggests separating science from technology in
order to create a new feminist science of reproduction that doesn’t
depend solely on risky high tech solutions (9). (This is not because of
technophobia, but because it is the money to be made off technologizing
of science that attracts the interests of capitalist entrepreneurs). Such
a science would recombine diverse sources of knowledge, and interdisciplinary
practices, to create wholly new solutions that take into account women’s
differing conditions and desires––and it would be based on
a criteria of what is good for women’s autonomy. New feminist reproductive
science would have to devise a workable distribution mechanism, perhaps
based on a combination of electronic networking and performative practices.
As in the autonomous method of menstrual extraction practiced by lay people
(and bypassing the medical authority system), new approaches to reproductive
science could enlist feminist activists as informed, non-specialist practitioners
using methods that foster principles of autonomy and embodiment.
subRosa has activated a resistant cultural practice based on the goals
discussed above. Initially, we have focused on aspects of ART that have
largely been silenced in public discourse. We hope to disrupt the current
“choice” discourse of ART; to initiate an interventionist
debate and practice among diverse non-specialist audiences; and to further
probe and expose biotechnologies’ far-reaching repercussions for
women’s health and bodily autonomy worldwide. Following is a brief
listing of subRosa projects on ART to date: 1) “Does She or Doesn’t
She”, “SmartMom”, and “Vulva De/Reconstructa”
expose gender differences in ART practices, and highlight the effects
of high tech body invasion on women’s health and bodily autonomy.
2) “Expo EmmaGenics” and “The Economies of ART”
question and challenge the ways in which market forces drive the research,
development and deployment of Reprotech’s products and ‘services’
through an analysis of the economies of ART; and 3) “Sex and Gender
Education in the Biotech Century” interrogates the intersecting
ideologies and practices that serve to normalize and naturalize ART, exposing
their historical connections to eugenics and colonial ideologies.
1) Much of this interview contains material from Maria
Fernandez and Faith Wilding, "Situating Cyberfeminism(s)," the
introduction to Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices, a subRosa project,
Autonomedia Books, 2003.
See also: "Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism," (Faith Wilding,
n.paradoxa, No. 3, London, 1999); "Notes on the Political Condition
of Cyberfeminism," (Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble, CAA
Journal, NY, Summer 1998).
2) Bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston:South
End Press, 1981), p. 194-195.
