|
Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology
by Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke, Editors
In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science Series
University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, 2008
240 pp., illus. 17 b/w. Paper, $30.00
ISBN: 9780295988092.
Reviewed by Maureen Nappi
Long Island University
maureen.nappi @liu.edu
The ontological metaphor of this anthology's main title Bits of Life is a playfully clever, and potentially invertible trope. Might this anthology just as easily have been called Cells of Computing, Genes of Gigabits, or Bits of Bios/BIOS to explicate the intended conjunction of biology, science and technology? The phrase is extensively applicable providing the editors with a plethora of meanings and schemata to smartly traverse. The use of the term Bits delimits the need for engaging with "life as a whole"--employing b inary dig its for ontological measure--while specifying the techno-bios foci of the text. The life of bits, inversely, prefigures the conversion of life processes into technological methods, both an ancient and modern praxis. Further attenuated by its subtitle, Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology , this lively and ambitious anthology intermixes "bits and pieces" of these overarching and overlapping fields filtered through much needed feminist scrutiny and examination.
The synecdochical looseness of "bits and pieces" of life largely suits this anthology. It only becomes tedious when "bits" suggestively infers quantitative equivalence to cells or genes, rendering their functionality dangerously binary and teleological. Although, the concept of information to biological discourse was introduced in the early 1950s, it soon became obvious that its use was quantitatively imprecise, thus, not literally applicable but rather metaphoric. The biologist Richard Dawkins offers an apt clarification:
"The genetic code is not a blueprint for assembling a body from a set of bits; it is more like a recipe for baking one from a set of ingredients. If we follow a particular recipe, word for word, in a cookery book, what finally emerges from the oven is a cake. We cannot now break the cake into its component crumbs and say: this crumb corresponds to the first word in the recipe; this crumb corresponds to the second word in the recipe, etc." [1]
The fifth publication in the In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science Series of the University of Washington Press, Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology evolved out of a series of seminars and conferences held between 1996-2005 under the auspices of the international exchange program, "Media, Cultural Studies, and Gender: Looking for the Missing Links," was funded by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research. Further support and direction was given by the Danish research project "Cyborgs and Cyberspace: Between Narration and Sociotechnical Reality" directed by one of the editors, Nina Lykke. She, along with co-editor Anneke Smelik, culled from these gatherings, a collection of 12 scholarly papers, by 14 authors. Together, they organized their selection into four, well-focused, feminist trajectories mapped onto and through the intersecting fields of Bioscience, Media and Technology as: Part 1: Histories and Genealogies ; Part 2: Reconfigured Bodies ; Part 3: Remediated Bodies ; and Part 4: Philosophies of Life.
As feminist practice emerges out of a blending of scholarly and materialist concerns, or academic activism, here is a caveat to an otherwise extremely positive review. The editors specify the temporal parameters of the anthology as contemporary--post WWII to the present--however, I found an unfortunate referential omission of the primary text on feminism and the biological, Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 tome The Second Sex . Charting biological data of the female from the simplest organism to the most complex, de Beauvoir's assertions are formidable and would have further grounded the text in feminist theory, complementing the solidity of techno-feminism on which it is already strongly based. Another feminist reference omitted is The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone. Published in 1970--shortly after the Supreme Court decision Griswald v. Connecticut declared laws banning the use of contraceptives for married women unconstitutional (1965), and before the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion (1972)-- Firestone called for a cybernetic revolution to free women from the tyranny of the reproductive role of her sex class . The inclusion of both de Beauvoir and Firestone would have added--to an already outstanding anthology--the historical urgency of the biological imperative within feminism.
Rather, the editors cite C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures (1993) as the first significant reference in their introduction. Although briefly alluding to the post WWII advancements in biology and technology in healing this divide and ushering in The Third Culture , this allusion reveals the primacy and profundity of Snow's argument, that is, the cultural bifurcation of the humanities and the sciences. However, almost by equal measure, Snow's argument reveals his concern for largely unacknowledged, yet, entrenched class divisions between what he called the rich and the poor , and in fact, he seriously pondered this as a title for his Rede Lecture. Snow asserted that no matter how compromised the lot of the poor still is, that lot, (as well as the lot of the rich), has been exponentially raised by advances in scientific methods. Can literary progress possibly boast such an achievement?
Although, no one could argue against the humanizing effects of literature, it is quite fair to say that scientific and technological progress has not had a unilateral effect over sex, race and class divisions. For example, such advances from which the average Western woman benefits in her yearly gynecological visit have largely been gained through the incalculable suffering of enslaved Black women who underwent dozens of surgeries without the aid of anesthesia, and were, in most cases, only made worse. Numerous such surgeries were performed by Dr. J. Marion Sims, inventor of the Sims Speculum and subsequently dubbed the founder of American Gynecology. [2] As evidenced, even within the gender inequity of healthcare, some medical and technological advances that have been made in women's health have been enabled by class exploitation and racial inequality. Such concerns rightfully ground our thinking in the historical and material bodies of the feminine. To this end, selected chapters will be considered more in-depth below.
Of particular interest is Part 2: Reconfigured Bodies , which contributes solidly to this ongoing effort with the inclusion of four varied and distinctive papers. The first paper, "Fluid Ecologies: Changing Hormonal Systems of Embodied Difference" is by Celia Roberts, author of Messengers of Sex: Hormones, Biomedicines and Feminism (2007). Inspired by feminist corporeal theory, Roberts recounts the historical trajectory of our understanding of hormones, as "internal secretions" in the 1850s to discretely manipulable, albeit juicy, parameters of the chosen sexed body of today. Amade M'Charek, author of The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice (2005) and filmmaker Grietje Keller's "Parenthood and Kinship in IVF for Humans and Animals: On Traveling Bits of Life in the Age of Genetics" presents fascinating and novel concerns specific to contemporary in vitro procreation practices, i.e., two mother and one father parent configurations, etc. The third paper "From Rambo Sperm to Egg Queens: Two Versions of Lennart Nilsson's Film on Human Reproduction" by Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke, reveals the variable contextual meanings in these two versions, speculating on marketing strategies, feminist influences, etc. However, what remains intact in both is the unquestioned biological imperative to procreate, as well as the positivist portrayal into the inner portal of life. The fourth and final article is "Screening the Gene: Hollywood Cinema and the Genetic Imaginary" by Jackie Stacey, author of The Cinematic Life of the Gene (forthcoming), which offers a deftly intricate reading of genetic inference and representation in two films: Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997) and Roger Donaldson Species (1995), revealing deceptive ploys, or visual-lies, of the obvious. The final paper selected here for review is from Part 3: Remediated Bodies and is "What If Frankenstein ('s Monster) Was a Girl? Reproduction and Subjectivity in the Digital Age" by Jenny Sundén, author of Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (2003). In this chapter, Sundén examines Patchwork Girl , the multi-layered hypertext fiction by the writer Shelly Jackson, which implicates the writer Mary Shelley as an active character interacting with the nominal protagonist, the Patchwork Girl and the author Shelley Jackson. Again, expertly analyzed and richly critiqued, the paper rids the topic of simplistic solutions but is rich with ambiguity and feminist scrutiny.
Such richness of inquiry is to be found in the anthology as a whole. The editors and contributors alike are to be commended for their contribution to the intersecting fields of feminism, media, bioscience and technology. Enjoy the read; there is something for everyone.
References:
[1] Richard Dawkins wrote "In Defence of Selfish Genes ," Philosophy , Vol. 56, No 218 (556-573), a response to, what he considered, a hostile review of his book The Self Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) written by Mary Midgley entitled "Gene-juggling" published in Philosophy , Volume 54 (October 1979).
[2] See Harriet A. Washington's groundbreaking work Medical Apartheid: The DarkHistory of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present . New York: Harlem Moon, 2006. |
