New Reproductive Technologies and Disembodiment by Lam Carla;

Author:Lam, Carla;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2015-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

PART III

Material Resolutions

Introduction to Part III

So far I have explored why the body matters regarding NRTs, arguing that women’s bodies are a source of their power (albeit a paradoxical one) in patriarchal cultures, and that NRTs disembody women conceptually and physically. By disembodying female reproductive processes, NRTs (and their supporting ideologies), tend to erode women’s unique subjectivity (which challenges androcentric hegemony concealed in Western culture), hence their embodied power. I argued that ‘the body’, in modernity, is linked to subjectivity, agency, and citizenship; and that in the history of Western political thought, authority has been linked to male bodies. The history of the Western world is androcentric, yet based on men’s ideological and material appropriation of women’s reproductive capacities. The disembodiment wrought by NRTs, when seen as part of a history of birth appropriation in Western thought, reveals the imperative to bring the materiality of bodies, especially reproductive process, back into feminist analysis.

Part III explores ‘Material Resolutions’ to the bio/social dialectic examined throughout the book. In Chapter 4, I return to Mary O’Brien’s complex conception of biosocial reproduction as a mediation of the patriarchal nature/culture dualism, linking her insights to feminist standpoint theory and the new material feminisms as constituting a post-constructionist ‘thinking technology’1 to highlight what the latter enable in feminist thought as a trans-dualist analytic framework. I draw on recent literature which examines the new material feminisms (variously referred to) as part of an emerging multidisciplinary field of scholarship in which feminist theory is prominent, and which begins from a critique of the limits of social constructionism (but also of biological determinism) in favour of a more complex material analysis.

In Chapter 3, I discussed materialism as a way to get at the methodological and worldview aspects of historical materialism and specifically as situated in its socialist feminist appropriation in second wave Anglo-feminism. More specifically I was concerned with materialism as a Marxist methodology of historical materialism adapted within feminism, especially as standpoint epistemology – a concern with social relations as constitutive of subjectivity. In Chapter 4, I will go into the biosocial negotiation associated with O’Brien (1981) and the feminist standpoint epistemology which Nancy Hartsock (1983) developed as the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism which is implicit in O’Brien’s biosocial theory of reproductive consciousness. I am particularly interested in how O’Brien’s materialist theory as a feminist standpoint epistemology, maps on to feminist essentialism and anti-essentialism debates, and what role consciousness plays in feminist standpoint and O’Brien’s theory.

There are at least three overlapping key dimensions of the biosocial: methodological (for example, cartography associated with the trans-disciplinarity of new material feminisms as opposed to linear, more two-dimensional classification); temporal in the sense of chronological and teleological relationships, for example modernity as a more or less stable and internally (ideologically) coherent temporal node that precedes postmodernity; and conceptual, as in the relationship of ideas over time, and at a time, in complex interrelation for example, what is ‘new’ about the world in this perspective? But as Nina Lykke and Iris van der Tuin reveal, these are complicated dimensions that can’t easily be separated out.

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