Disappearing Genders: Genetic Technologies and Apocalyptic Feminism - Essay Example

Alice Zhang WRI 174 Disappearing Genders: Genetic Technologies and Apocalyptic Feminism It seems that throughout its whole history humanity has always been incapable of living without a constant sense of deep-felt insecurity embodied in various apocalyptic premonitions. Indeed, pervasive religious sentiments, which arose in human societies yet in their dawn, in the past formed the backbone of the temporally limited vision of the history, and continue influencing people today, have gradually been augmented by fears stemming from new circumstances. Most notably, the advances in science and technology introduced the very real dangers of large-scale military conflicts leading to mass destruction, and the less prominent but not less scary prospects of a global ecological catastrophe. Nowadays, the amount of controversial issues that have the apocalyptic overtone is perhaps larger than ever as the human society has generated a lot of developments that rise questions never before asked. One of such important controversial issues that for quite a long time has occupied a visible place in both political and social/cultural debates is the problem of the role of gender in its numerous manifestations. All of us can easily remember the amount of public discussions devoted to sexism in society, gender discrimination at work place, and the role of feminism, which during the twentieth century has grown into the influential world view in the Western world. Now, the problem of gender in its general feminist sense also has in it prominent traces of apocalyptic rhetoric that is linked with the developments in genetic engineering technology, which promises to go beyond existing limitations in the sphere of relations between sexes, and even in the sphere of human procreation. Considering that the notion of gender belongs to the list of the most fundamental conceptions on which every human society has been based, let us take a closer look at this feminist-related debate, and try to obtain a deeper understanding of its premises and consequences. To get quickly introduced to the gist of the apocalyptic side of the gender debate, we can recall a joke from a recent article on genetic engineering in the “New York Times” that says: “Lost your little boy? We’ll make another”. The message behind this ironic observation hints at the detachment of value from human life, and at the disintegration of human morality and of the very notion of humanity. These dangers are stereotypically associated with the genetic engineering debate, and are bolstered by numerous pieces of modern popular art, such as for instance the film “The Sixth Day”, which portrays a man who finds out that a clone duplicate of himself has taken over his life, as well as by already classic literary masterpieces, like for example “Brave New World“ by Aldous Huxley, in which the author imagines a government-regulated utopia where humans are mass produced. In this context, the feminist part of the genetic engineering debate centers not so much on the loss of our humanity as a whole, but rather is preoccupied with the detachment of reproductive roles from women and the consequent destabilization of conventional femininity. That such concerns are largely justified can be seen from the fact that already today genetic technology is giving women more and more control of contraception and birth, which interferes with the traditional gender roles of women as bearers of the mystery of birth, because when something is controlled it looses its miraculous quality. Moreover, some feminists have capitalized on the deconstruction of the traditional gender stereotypes via the receipt of control over their feminine functions, which was interpreted as leading to a utopian image of a world completely devoid of all the gender boundaries. However, any change or rejection of traditions can hardly be a simple process as there are a lot of hidden factors influencing our life without our realization of them. That the issue of post-gender utopia is equally contingent on a number of cultural developments is convincingly shown by Donna Haraway in her 1991 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto”. Using the metaphorical image of the cyborg, a half machine/half organic creature, the author envisions a society free from traditional dualisms, including the biological one, that characterize gender oppression in the eyes of feminists. In this insightful piece of literature she demonstrates that “the dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically” (163), and pays special attention to the ways in which genetic technology might serve as a sort of messianic solution for women striving to escape the oppressive bounds of dualistic gender division. At the same time, from Haraway’s writing we can see that the opposition to dualisms may also ironically deepen binary thinking in women by presenting them as victims, and gender dualism as their overwhelming oppressor. Here, we may use the work of Haraway to better appreciate what it means for a controversy to bear apocalyptic connotation. She says: “The self is the One who is not dominated . . . the other is the one who holds the future. . . by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous . . . but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other” (177). Thus, we can see that apocalyptic premonitions should not be perceived only as pertaining to the external realm of reality, but rather are an integral part of human psychology in which the end of tradition may be equaled to the end of the world as we know it. And in our particular case, the looming changes in the perception of the conception of gender may be as frightening as they are attractive, which, unfortunately, is in the full accordance with the controversial nature of human beings. Besides, the outlined gender utopianism may lure feminists into a false sense of security and a cycle of passivity, because genetic technology plays the role of a savior, thereby encouraging inaction. This situation may make women further entrenched into what the feminist theorist Catherine Keller calls in her book “Apocalypse Now and Then: Dis/closing the End” an “apocalypse habit” of human psychology, which can be defined as an addictive tendency to fall into a cycle of “numbed complicity” when we, as a society, “flee inside ourselves . . . [from the] apocalyptic discourse . . . [that] has been coming at us”(14). This passivity is manifested through two types of apocalyptic behavior: the first, retroapocalypse, is characterized by the conscious expectation that the future and present are both preordained by predictions from the past. The second, cryptoapocalypse, is the unconscious expectation of apocalypse leading to our subsequent treatment of it with fascination and awe, even though we may not necessarily believe in it. This, Keller believes, is the most pervasive form of apocalyptic behavior in our society, bolstered by such famous films demonstrating different forms of apocalyptic world view as the “Terminator” trilogy, “Independence Day”, and “Titanic”, all of which reinforce our subconscious inclination to apocalyptic thinking (4). The two outlined behaviors are culminated into a societal apocalypse pattern, in which we become so overwhelmed with the problems of the world that “we get uncritically hooked on apocalypse . . . we contribute to it”. And even though the apocalypse is rarely portrayed as an absolute end to things and, according to Keller, “apocalypticism has always availed itself of a kind of sliding scale of hope” (6), if we wish for messianic solutions and end up doing nothing, we get locked into a particularly apocalyptic logic — “if we cant save the world then to hell with it” (14), which can be seen as another dualism to be fought with. By the way, in attempting to convince feminists to escape such dualisms, Donna Haraway herself can be said to have fallen into this pattern of apocalyptic logic as, presenting females as marginalized victims, she imagines no escape from the hell that is our gender-oppressive society other than the elimination of traditional dualisms. In this relation, Keller ironically points out that “. . . the feminist movement, so antidualistic in its philosophical self-dispositions—has enacted its own apocalypticism. Now that the private tales of women have so massively re-narrated history…women require self-knowing alternatives to the apocalyptic binarism of much of the feminist metanarrative” (12). Before this moment we were discussing the gender divide from the point of view of its culturally constructed dualistic nature, the negative manifestations of which feminist world view would like to obliterate. Let us now turn our attention to the biological aspects of gender roles which, as one might suppose, constitute the fundamental and objective basis of the gender dualism. For gender is traditionally defined by and bound to reproductive roles, and because of the strict line that has divided the two sexes, gender seems to be dualistic by its very nature. As feminist Hilge Landweer writes in her article “Anthropological, social, and moral limitations of a multiplicity of genders”, “The concept of sex and gender is necessarily bound to generativity (to the fact that human reproduction requires two sexes) . . . [and] . . . all versions of a politics of gender performances or gender enactments . . . will inevitably encounter this limit. In other words, the duality of sex marks an objective limitation to gender performances” (30). Indeed, it often seems that during heated debates feminists tend to forget that it is after all nature that created the difference between sexes. However, the advent of reproductive and genetic technologies threatens to blur even this principal biological difference. For one, even leaving aside the already banal operations aimed at the change of a person`s sex, the connection between the gender and reproduction is undergoing the change as natural pregnancy may be replaced by test-tube babies, artificial insemination may eliminate the sexual role of males, and cloning may be the new form of birthing. The detachment of biological and social parenthood would lead to a de-sexualization, in which our formerly rigid gender system would disintegrate as people cease to be defined in terms of sex. Not surprisingly, this impending dissolution of gender boundaries has sparked gender anxiety for critics of the development of genetic technologies. Christine Stolba, in her article, “Overcoming Motherhood”, describes “Pandora’s box of dark arts [as] an apt metaphor for human reproductive technologies” and writes that “new techniques…threaten to upend our conceptions of genetic parenthood…encouraging women to take these technologies to their . . . conclusion: a consumer-driven form of eugenics” (1). She then concludes that the “The triumph of individual [female] choice as an unassailable right prevents us from engaging in important debates about the broader social implications of reproduction and the technologies that promise to change its meaning.” (2) Anxiety like that of Stolba’s seems to be rooted in the apocalyptic fear that the recent emphasis put on feminist individualism and choice will speed the changing dynamics of the family and traditional gender roles. These critics of genetic technologies use rhetoric that presents images of a morally declining society; as Robyn Alexander writes, “uses of reproductive technologies have the potential to radically disrupt conventional ideas about parenthood and family relationships. Techniques . . . pose a fundamental threat to accepted notions of what it means to be a parent, a child, or a sibling.” After all, it is hard to deny that cultural identity and social boundaries are closely intertwined concepts — notions such as the patriarchal family with the female homemaker have dominated the image of the traditional American family for decades, and the disintegration of such concepts may ultimately lead to a similar dissolution of social and personal identities. Of course, there are people who perceive the genetic technologies in their narrow and practically applicable sense as the new promise for their hope for a society free of gender constraints and oppression. In fact, genetic engineering my serve as a means not only to achieve equality of genders, but actually as a tool for a new form of gender, or post-gender for that matter, dominance, when, as feminist Rosemarie Tong writes in her book “Feminist Approaches to Bioethics: Theoretical Reflections and Practical Applications”, “ . . . women will choose the characteristics of their fetuses in ways that will break down gender inequity and the host of other human oppressions to which it is related. In choosing for their fetuses, women will be choosing for themselves.” This breakdown in gender dualism and inequality is the ultimate feminist dream; true equality, in the eyes of such feminists, can only be achieved when women cease to be defined by their reproductive roles. In fact, women will be empowered when genetic and reproductive technologies will allow them to control conception and birthing, and when the need for male participation will be is eliminated. In this situation, the newly empowered females may be viewed as exercising positive discrimination over males, who now become passive participants, or non-participants at all, of the traditionally sacred process of procreation. With all this said, we can take a fresh look at Donna Haraway`s allegory of cyborg as a symbol of a modern human being preoccupied with changing political and social boundaries and with redefining the relevance of traditional nature-culture dualisms. In essence, Haraway, for whom we all are cyborgs, on one hand confirms the ability of humans to transcend traditional dichotomies, even though by means of technology-inspired “translation of the world into a problem in coding . . . [and of] the organism . . . into problems of genetic coding and read-out” (164), and on the other hand voices her concerns over this situation, which an attentive reader can interpret as a manifestation of those apocalyptic visions that arise whenever radical changes are looming. Truly, for Haraway the cyborg world is simultaneously about “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet”, and about “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (154). In simple words, the cyborg metaphor provides an optimistic window of hope for women, expressing a utopian longing for gender equality, and may at the same time serve as the symbol of inhibition that slows down political progress towards gender equality. Finally, at this point it seems that we are back to reality as even the discussed utopian images get numerous controversial connotations when applied to the circumstances of our life. All in all, it must be acknowledged that the above-mentioned prospects of technologically driven equalization of genders cannot be seen as a sure scenario. Many of the predictions of other radical changes in human societies as the result of their exposure to transforming technologies have not fully panned out, so it may as well turn out that, as Landweer writes, “gender remains a fundamental category for which a reference to generativity must be semantically presupposed” (30), and that the elimination of the individual gender role would most likely result in a type of an unacceptable dystopia. In this case, the deconstruction of gender systems appears to be a conceptual idealization of a society that will never exist; consequently, it will only serve to further attract women into their apocalypse ideology instead of motivating them to real action. But at this point of our discussion, we may no longer aim to determine what scenario will take place – utopian or apocalyptic, because it is clear that both of them are rather poles of our current understanding of problems of gender than real clues to the actual future developments. So, it seems warranted to suppose that the achievement of complete gender desexualization is not even necessary to attain equal gender status, and that a crucial underlying problem of gender controversy is how to make women realize that if their subconscious utopian longings for a post gender reality free from biological oppression are properly interpreted, they can indeed fully utilize technological developments to their advantage and avoid disruption of the much-valued network of social tradition. Works Cited Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. Keller, Catherine. "Dis/closing The End." Introduction. Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. By Keller. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. 1-35. Landweer, Hilge. "Anthropological, social, and moral limitations of a       multiplicity of genders." Hypatia 20.2 (Spring 2005): 28-51. 3 Dec. 2006       . Stolba, Christine. "Overcoming Motherhood." Policy Review 116 (Dec.- Jan. 2003). Hoover Institution. 2 Dec. 2006 . Tong, Rosemarie. Feminist Approaches to Bioethics: Theoretical Reflections and Practical Applications. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997. Read More