Gender: Matter 9780028663203

Table of contents :
Contents
Series Preface
Introduction
Part I. Embodied Humans
1 Archaeology • Rosemary A. Joyce
2 Darwinian Feminisms • S. Pearl Brilmyer
3 Medieval Genders • Jacqueline A. Fay
4 Material Bodies • Monika Rogowska Stangret
5 Transgender Matters • Toby Beauchamp
6 Neuroscience Matters • Deboleena Roy
Part II. More-Than-Human Worlds
7 Indigenous Matters • Dian Million (Athabascan)
8 Physics • A. R. Bennett
9 Geology • Mary Thomas, Kathryn Yusoff
10 Biology • Christy Tidwell
11 Botany • Natania Meeker, Antónia Szabari
12 Water • Astrida Neimanis
13 Environment • Rebecca R. Scott
Part III. Circulation, Transfers, Interchanges
14 Labor • Kalindi Vora
15 Economics • Christine Bauhardt
16 Colonialism • Neel Ahuja
17 Geography • Angela Last
18 Food • Aya H. Kimura
19 Breast Cancer • Nadine Ehlers
20 Endomaterialities • Celia Roberts
21 Reproductive Technology • Carla Lam
22 Sexecologies • Louis van den Hengel
Part IV. Future Matters
23 Genetics and Epigenetics • Kelly E. Happe
24 Science Fiction • Sherryl Vint
25 Digital Materialities • Radhika Gajjala, Dinah Tetteh, Anca Birzescu
26 Bodily Technologies • Alison Kafer
27 Posthumanism • Jeffrey Marchand, Connor Stratman
Glossary
Index

Citation preview

Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks

Gender rene´e c. hoogland EDITOR IN CHIEF Nicole R. Fleetwood and Iris van der Tuin ASSOCIATE EDITORS Judith Laka¨mper ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR IN CHIEF

Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies rene´e c. hoogland, editor

Gender: Animals Juno Parren˜as, editor

Gender: God Sıˆan Hawthorne, editor

Gender: Laughter Bettina Papenburg, editor

Gender: Love Jennifer C. Nash, editor

Gender: Matter Stacy Alaimo, editor

Gender: Nature Iris van der Tuin, editor

Gender: Space Aimee Meredith Cox, editor

Gender: Time Karin Sellberg, editor

Gender: War Andrea Pet} o, editor

Other Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series:

Philosophy Donald M. Borchert EDITOR IN CHIEF James Petrik and Arthur Zucker ASSOCIATE

EDITORS

Religion Jeffrey J. Kripal EDITOR IN CHIEF April D. DeConick and Anthony B. Pinn

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Gender: Matter

ª 2017 Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning

Stacy Alaimo, Editor

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Project Editor: Alja Kooistra Product Design: Kristine Julien Associate Publisher, Macmillan Reference USA: He´le`ne Potter

For product information and technology assistance, contact us at Gale Customer Support, 1 800 877 4253. For permission to use material from this text or product, submit all requests online at www.cengage.com/permissions. Further permissions questions can be emailed to [email protected]. Cover photograph reproduced by permission of RyersonClark / Getty Images. While every effort has been made to ensure the reliability of the information presented in this publication, Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, does not guarantee the accuracy of the data contained herein. Gale accepts no payment for listing, and inclusion in the publication of any organization, agency, institution, publication, service, or individual does not imply endorsement of the editors or publisher. Errors brought to the attention of the publisher and verified to the satisfaction of the publisher will be corrected in future editions. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2016047457

Gale, a part of Cengage Learning 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331 3535 ISBN 978 0 02 866320 3 (this volume) ISBN 978 0 02 866315 9 (Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender set) This title is also available as an e book. ISBN: 978 0 02 866328 9 Contact your Gale sales representative for ordering information.

Printed in Mexico 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 21 20 19 18 17

Editorial Board

EDITOR IN CHIEF

rene´ e c. hoogland Professor of English, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI Author of A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics after Representation (2014); Lesbian Configurations (1997); and Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing (1994) ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Nicole R. Fleetwood Associate Professor, Department of American Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ Author of On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011)

Iris van der Tuin Associate Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Author of Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach (2015) and co author with Rick Dolphijn of New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (2012) ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR IN CHIEF

Judith Laka¨ mper PhD Candidate, Department of English, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI

Contents

Series Preface

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Introduction

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PART I. EMBODIED HUMANS

Chapter 1: Archaeology ........................................................................................................... 3 Rosemary A. Joyce Professor, Department of Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Chapter 2: Darwinian Feminisms ........................................................................................ 19 S. Pearl Brilmyer Assistant Professor, Department of English University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Chapter 3: Medieval Genders ............................................................................................... 35 Jacqueline A. Fay Associate Professor, Department of English University of Texas at Arlington Chapter 4: Material Bodies ................................................................................................... 49 Monika Rogowska Stangret PhD University of Warsaw, Poland Chapter 5: Transgender Matters .......................................................................................... 65 Toby Beauchamp Assistant Professor, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign Chapter 6: Neuroscience Matters ......................................................................................... 79 Deboleena Roy Associate Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology Emory University, Atlanta, GA

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CONTENTS

PART II. MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLDS

Chapter 7: Indigenous Matters ...............................................................................................95 Dian Million (Athabascan) Associate Professor, Department of American Indian Studies University of Washington, Seattle Chapter 8: Physics .................................................................................................................111 A. R. Bennett Assistant Professor, Department of English University of Nevada, Reno Chapter 9: Geology ................................................................................................................123 Mary Thomas Associate Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Ohio State University, Columbus Kathryn Yusoff Reader in Human Geography, School of Geography Queen Mary University of London Chapter 10: Biology ..............................................................................................................139 Christy Tidwell Assistant Professor, Department of English and Humanities South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City Chapter 11: Botany ...............................................................................................................153 Natania Meeker Associate Professor, Department of French and Comparative Literature University of Southern California, Los Angeles Anto´nia Szabari Associate Professor, Department of French and Comparative Literature University of Southern California, Los Angeles Chapter 12: Water .................................................................................................................171 Astrida Neimanis Lecturer, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies University of Sydney, Australia Chapter 13: Environment .....................................................................................................187 Rebecca R. Scott Associate Professor, Department of Sociology University of Missouri, Columbia

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CONTENTS

PART III. CIRCULATION, TRANSFERS, INTERCHANGES

Chapter 14: Labor ............................................................................................................... 205 Kalindi Vora Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies University of California, San Diego Chapter 15: Economics ....................................................................................................... 223 Christine Bauhardt Professor, Department of Gender and Globalization, Faculty of Life Sciences Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin, Germany Chapter 16: Colonialism ..................................................................................................... 237 Neel Ahuja Associate Professor, Department of Feminist Studies University of California at Santa Cruz Chapter 17: Geography ....................................................................................................... 253 Angela Last Research Associate, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences University of Glasgow, Scotland Chapter 18: Food ................................................................................................................. 267 Aya H. Kimura Associate Professor, Department of Women’s Studies University of Hawai’i Manoa, Honolulu Chapter 19: Breast Cancer .................................................................................................. 281 Nadine Ehlers Department of Sociology and Social Policy University of Sydney, Australia Chapter 20: Endomaterialities ............................................................................................ 297 Celia Roberts Professor of Gender and Science Studies, Department of Sociology Lancaster University, United Kingdom Chapter 21: Reproductive Technology .............................................................................. 313 Carla Lam Department of Politics University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand Chapter 22: Sexecologies ..................................................................................................... 329 Louis van den Hengel Assistant Professor, Centre for Gender and Diversity Maastricht University, The Netherlands GENDER: MATTER

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PART IV. FUTURE MATTERS

Chapter 23: Genetics and Epigenetics .................................................................................347 Kelly E. Happe Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies and Institute for Women’s Studies University of Georgia, Athens Chapter 24: Science Fiction ..................................................................................................361 Sherryl Vint Professor, Department of English University of California, Riverside Chapter 25: Digital Materialities .........................................................................................375 Radhika Gajjala Professor, School of Media and Communication Bowling Green State University, OH Dinah Tetteh Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Arkansas State University, Jonesboro Anca Birzescu Independent Researcher Bowling Green State University, OH Chapter 26: Bodily Technologies .........................................................................................387 Alison Kafer Professor of Feminist Studies Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX Chapter 27: Posthumanism ..................................................................................................401 Jeffrey Marchand Enhanced Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of English University of Texas at Arlington Connor Stratman Enhanced Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of English University of Texas at Arlington

Glossary .......................................................................................................................... 415 Index .............................................................................................................................. 427

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Series Preface

The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender studies is an extraordinary project. A handbook traditionally is a treatise on a special subject, often a concise reference book that comprehensively covers a particular subject. Small enough to be held in the hand, intended to be carried around at all times, a handbook can be referred to as a vade mecum, the Latin phrase for ‘‘go with me.’’ This project exceeds the traditional definitions of the handbook in practically all respects. Most obviously and immediately, a series of ten full-length book volumes on gender studies is not likely to be traveling with any one human being at all times, not even on a small handheld device in the form of e-books. Secondly, and more significantly, this series of handbooks does not aim at an all-embracing treatment of its central subject, gender. Thirdly, and relatedly, the series refutes the idea that gender is something that can be conceptualized, analyzed, or experienced fully, outside of and thus in distinction from the multiple intertwining frameworks (social, political, critical, theoretical, historical, philosophical, hermeneutical, and economic) in which it functions, socio-historically and culturally as a concrete, material, dynamic force, and as a signifying framework in and of itself. Although breadth and depth are critical aspects of this series of handbooks, comprehensiveness is not, nor can it be. Indeed, rather than adopting an approach to gender questions from within a variety of distinct disciplinary frames, or thinking gender in relation to demarcated modes of sociocultural expression, praxis, and signification (e.g., gender and religion, gender and science, gender and health), each volume seeks to shake up such (undoubtedly valuable) perspectives on gender by taking on the challenge of ostensibly universal themes. Cutting through and across the specific and shifting contexts and configurations in which they operate, both historically and in the present moment, such all-embracing themes not only organize and naturalize gender in its interrelations and intersections with other forms of differentiation, such as sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, age, and able-bodiedness. Any form of universal conceptualization is also inevitably and fundamentally informed by (questions of) gender, which to some extent explains and effectively sustains the universalizing power of, for instance, notions of Time, Space, God, Nature, and the grand narratives subtending them. While offering an extraordinary range of topics, perspectives, critical approaches, and theoretical models central to the mature field of gender studies in the twenty-first century, at the same time and as a result of its overall structure and organization, the series critically interrogates and challenges such power so that questions of gender can be asked otherwise. The entire set of handbooks includes an introductory volume, which orients readers to a broad range of gender theories and practices in and across a variety of (inter)disciplinary fields. The subsequent nine volumes are dedicated to the following themes: Time, Space,

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Laughter, War, Animals, Love, Matter, God, and Nature. The titles of the volumes are defined in such broad conceptual terms not only to open up their universalizing power to gendered critique but also to allow for the incorporation of the variety of critical, theoretical, and disciplinary perspectives on the themes, individually and collectively, that characterizes the field of gender studies. The series simultaneously offers an appealingly wide-ranging and inspiring palette of perspectives to the users of each individual handbook, whether students or instructors. Two features make this series of gender handbooks innovative. First, most (if not all) other handbooks on gender are organized from within or around a particular disciplinary field for example, gender in/and media, feminist science studies, and queer literary criticism or, alternatively, appear in the form of readers with abbreviated versions of previously published work and/or classics. This series chooses a conceptual approach that encourages a thoroughly cross-, trans-, and interdisciplinary exploration of purportedly universal themes that raise the seminal questions feminist scholars and scientists typically address, as they are problematized and interrogated from a range of gender and sexually sensitive critical perspectives. Second, all the chapters making up the individual volumes have been newly commissioned and thus are based on fresh, topical research and address debates from a variety of fields philosophy, anthropology, literature, art, social sciences, media (old and new), history, law, management, economics, digital humanities, rhetoric, politics, science, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, religion, and so on. The target audience for the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender studies consists of undergraduate college students who have had little or no exposure to gender and sexuality studies. The handbooks provide an introduction to the overall theme and varied explorations of that theme from a gendered/sexual perspective. In addition, each volume contains a glossary, bibliographies with suggestions for further reading, annotated filmographies, and an index all to encourage students to explore both the theme and the critical approaches further. In other words, each handbook combines some features of an introductory textbook with some features of a reference resource. Collectively, the volume chapters familiarize readers with the moments, movements, theories, and problems prominent within feminist and queer thinking on the volume’s theme. Authors employ an interdisciplinary lens that exhibits the potential of gender and sexuality studies to contribute to the values and concerns that animate everyday human life. The interdisciplinary lens comprises all the various areas listed above and serves to frame the topic of a chapter in a way that makes it accessible and engaging to novices in gender and sexuality studies. The eminent scholars who have authored the chapters in the series have strived to make their discussions comprehensible to undergraduates and at the same time respectable in the eyes of gender and sexuality studies majors and scholars. As editors of the series, we believe that the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender studies provides an exceptional opportunity for many people, especially undergraduate students, to become more familiar with the usefulness and joy of ‘‘doing gender and sexuality studies.’’ rene´e c. hoogland Editor in Chief

Nicole R. Fleetwood and Iris van der Tuin Associate Editors

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Matter may appear to be a strange topic for a volume within a series of handbooks on gender. The scientific definition of matter something with mass and volume that occupies space would suggest that matter is a category for physics, not for gender and sexuality studies. Even our everyday sense of matter and materiality as pertaining to objects and substances the physical world, rather than the linguistic, cultural, social, ideological, or political landscape would appear to place matter far from gender and sexuality studies. Matter may seem removed from or too mundane for social theory. It may also seem like a rather apolitical topic for scholarship committed to social justice. And yet matter and materiality have recently received a great deal of attention in gender theory. As gender studies scholar Victoria PittsTaylor puts it, ‘‘Attention to matter, and mattering matter’s ongoing processes of selfgeneration is transforming feminist thought’’ (2016, 1). According to The Oxford English Dictionary, which provides a record of how a word has been used throughout its history in the English language, some of the meanings of matter include that of being a topic of concern, contention, even quarrels. We might then ask, What is the matter with matter? One response would focus on how academic divisions place matter firmly in the domain of the natural sciences far from the humanities and social sciences and yet social, economic, political, and biopolitical systems operate through various forms of materiality, affecting human lives. Another response would focus on how matter and materiality have been conceived within pervasive Western dualisms, which imagine them to be passive or inert to be used or controlled, as in the phrase ‘‘mind over matter.’’ From a gender studies perspective, matter undergirds fundamental modes of modern Western categorization, as bodies, emotions, and nature have long been associated with the feminine, whereas the mind, rationality, and culture have been associated with the masculine. These gendered dualisms have also been overlaid on dualisms of race and colonization, with racially marked, indigenous peoples and peoples labeled as ‘‘primitive’’ being designated as not properly human. Another response would question how matter and materiality have been engaged within feminist thought. What role does matter play in feminist, queer, and other social and political theories? Furthermore, if the still-pervasive and potent dualisms in Western culture have long associated certain groups of people with materiality, by imagining them as closer to ‘‘nature,’’ how have people in those groups inhabited, contested, and recast those associations (Alaimo 2000)? Finally, the concept of the Anthropocene, the proposed geologic epoch that stresses the enormity of human impact on the planet, makes it impossible to assume that ‘‘matter’’ is not a concern for cultural theory, because we can no longer imagine any sort of materiality as outside the domain of human culture when mass extinction, climate change, nuclear technology, industrial agriculture, urban and suburban sprawl, biotechnology, and the production of xenobiotic chemicals have profoundly altered the biophysical world. For example, to consider what sex and gender may mean in the twenty-

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first century would include taking account of hormones or, as Celia Roberts’s chapter in this volume terms them, endomaterialities, because humans have altered the production and dissemination of hormones through human and animal bodies, agricultural systems, and environments. A recognition of how (post)humans are, on multiple scales, embedded within the material world, enables new forms of activism, such as that of writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado, who, in Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) documents the consumption of testosterone as a mode of corporeal activism on the molecular scale, performed with a sense of the body ‘‘not as passive living matter but as a techno-organic interface’’ (114). As Preciado’s sense of corporeality suggests, reckoning with matter is essential at this time not only because of the staggering transformations of the planet but also because humans themselves are enmeshed within networks and flows of technologies and substances. This human, the posthuman, may be thought of in terms of feminist philosopher of science Donna J. Haraway’s theory of the cyborg (1991), my conception of the trans-corporeal subject (Alaimo 2010), or the concept of ‘‘somatechnics’’ (Sullivan and Murray 2009). Although Pitts-Taylor’s assertion that ‘‘attention to matter’’ is ‘‘transforming feminist thought’’ is accurate, it is also true that, because sex, gender, race, class, ability, and other social categories involve human bodies, materiality has long been at the heart of feminist thought and practice. Preciado’s activism may be seen as part of a long history of feminist political struggles enacted over and through materiality, from the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s monumental guide to women’s health, Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), which reclaimed the medicalized female body from the experts, to the classic works of Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldu´a. Lorde, a black lesbian feminist theorist, poet, and nonfiction writer, addresses sexism, racism, and homophobia in The Cancer Journals (1980), decrying the carcinogens in food and the environment and refusing to wear the prosthetic puff of lambswool that would disguise her mastectomy. She asks, ‘‘What would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended upon Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic, fat-stored hormones in beef feed be outlawed?’’ (16). In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Chicana cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldu´a casts geography as profoundly personal and corporeal, describing the borderlands between Mexico and the United States as an ‘‘open wound running down the length of my body / staking fence rods in my flesh’’ (24). Anzaldu´a’s work stresses the materiality of body and place, making embodiment a complicated matter involving ancestry, culture, race, gender, sexuality, and geopolitical forces (Bost 2010; Keating 2012). Although Anzaldu´a’s term mestiza consciousness indicates a way of thinking, it also suggests a material mode of political being: ‘‘In our very flesh (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures’’ (103). Explicitly or implicitly, matter and materiality have long been at the heart of many social justice concerns regarding sexuality, reproduction, health, dis/ability, environmentalism and environmental justice, labor, economics, and colonialism. Different conceptions of matter and materiality have also been important for a range of classic theories and defining debates in gender theory, including Marxist, materialist, anticapitalist feminisms (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997; Ebert 2009); postmodern and poststructuralist feminisms; theories of gender performativity and the materialization of bodies (Butler 1993) and debates about essentialism and social construction. The sex/gender distinction, which has been invaluable for feminist theory, implies or explicitly invokes particular understandings of the materiality of human bodies. Analyses of embodiment are central to the work of key feminist theorists,

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such as Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, Ann Fausto-Sterling, Nancy Tuana, Hortense Spillers, and Sylvia Wynters. Rosi Braidotti, drawing on a long philosophical tradition of ‘‘monism’’ which does not divide matter from spirit or mind has been at the forefront of a new vitalist tradition. Feminist science and technology studies, including most notably the work of Donna J. Haraway, Katherine Hayles, and Karen Barad, have put forth potent theoretical transformations of the concept of materiality. Many environmental feminists and posthumanist feminists have also stressed the importance of reconceptualizing the materiality of ‘‘nature.’’ Many of these theorists would be considered part of a burgeoning group of material feminists, or ‘‘feminist new materialists,’’ who emphasize the significance, agency, interactions, intra-actions, and entanglements of materiality (Alaimo and Hekman 2008). It may be helpful to pause here to clarify terms that are often confused: materialist feminism, which grew from Marxist and socialist feminism, is different from material feminism, which is also called feminist new materialism. Philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels stress that ideas, concepts, and consciousness are ‘‘directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life’’ (2011, 15). Materialist feminism, which has debated the relations between capitalism and patriarchy, focuses on economics, class, labor, reproductive labor, and other human activities. Material feminisms, which may or may not draw upon Marxist theory and materialist feminism, is part of, or even central to, what is called new materialist or neomaterialist theory. The collection Material Feminisms (2008) grapples with such topics as gender, sexuality, class, race, disability, toxins, and illness with the stated purpose to ‘‘bring the material, specifically the materiality of the human body and the natural world, into the forefront of feminist theory and practice’’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 1). What distinguishes material feminisms and other new materialist theories is that they engage with the significance and agency of matter as well as with the interactions or even intra-actions between materiality and the social and discursive (Alaimo 2016). New materialists emphasize how bodies, substances, technologies, and environments not only are acted upon but also act. Matter is not inert but instead is active, lively, and sometimes surprising. It may be useful to point out that many material feminists have been immersed in poststructuralist feminist theory and find social construction models to be extremely valuable but also think it is important to consider material agencies, co-constructions, and entanglements. Because new materialisms, especially material feminisms, critique the way in which Western Man has been vaunted as a transcendent, immaterial rationality, it is not surprising that material feminisms would overlap with posthumanism (A¨sberg, Koobak, and Johnson 2011; Alaimo 2016). There is certainly not enough space in this brief introduction to sort out the long history of feminist engagements with matter and materiality or even to gloss the current debates. Fortunately, several of the chapters included in the volume introduce, analyze, and extend many of these theories and arguments. The purpose of this volume is not, however, to directly intervene in debates surrounding materialist (Marxist) feminisms, material feminisms, posthumanism, and the nonhuman turn in cultural theory. Instead, the volume aims to bring together many different perspectives, disciplines, methods, and topics, all of which grapple with matter and materiality in substantial ways. The divergent essays in this volume cover topics ranging from archaeology to science fiction, from indigenous studies to digital materialities, from medieval genders to posthumanism. GENDER: MATTER

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This volume on matter is organized in a somewhat chronological fashion and is divided into four sections. The first section, ‘‘Embodied Humans,’’ ranges from prehistory to the present, introducing pivotal questions about how to understand gender, sexuality, and race. This section includes chapters on topics that have been central to gender and sexuality studies, such as ‘‘Material Bodies’’ and ‘‘Transgender Matters,’’ but also includes chapters that may surprise, such as ‘‘Archaeology,’’ ‘‘Darwinian Feminisms,’’ ‘‘Medieval Genders,’’ and ‘‘Neuroscience Matters.’’ The second section, ‘‘More-Than-Human Worlds,’’ includes chapters titled ‘‘Physics,’’ ‘‘Geology,’’ ‘‘Biology,’’ ‘‘Botany,’’ ‘‘Water,’’ and ‘‘Environment.’’ The focus of the volume, matter, propels gender studies into areas that have often been the purview of the natural sciences, which means that many of the chapters in this volume draw upon and contribute to the field of feminist science and technology studies. Despite the fact that the titles may sound like straight science, they shuttle between science and culture, locating gender and sexuality in unlikely places. Even physics, for example, becomes a rather queer matter. Although much of this section pertains to Western sciences and their histories, it is crucial that it begins with ‘‘Indigenous Matters,’’ by Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan), which explains how matter, as it is understood in Western culture, does not make sense within various traditions of indigenous thought. Whereas the first and second sections of the volume are distinguished, to some extent, by traditional divides between humanity and nature, the third section ‘‘Circulation, Transfers, Interchanges’’ focuses on the movements across those realms. The theoretical frame for this section is my concept of ‘‘trans-corporeality,’’ or the material interchanges across human and nonhuman bodies, substances, objects, and places, the recognition of which reconfigures subjectivity, politics, and ethics (Alaimo 2010). In the chapters ‘‘Breast Cancer,’’ ‘‘Endomaterialities,’’ ‘‘Food,’’ ‘‘Geography,’’ and ‘‘Sexecologies,’’ the materialities involved are seldom inert they move, do unexpected and often unwanted things, catalyze desires, and cross traditional scholarly territories. Some chapters in this section, such as ‘‘Labor,’’ ‘‘Economics,’’ and ‘‘Colonialism,’’ stress Marxist models of materialism, explaining how Marxist feminists, queer Marxists, and postcolonial feminists have understood the relations between matter, capitalism, and colonialism. In ‘‘Colonialism,’’ for example, Neel Ahuja argues that ‘‘colonialism and the capitalist organizations of matter it has generated over the past five centuries constitute the single most important force shaping human societies and the planetary ecologies in which they are embedded.’’ The chapters in this section, quite notably, address vastly different scales from the planetary to the molecular. Even within a single chapter, such as Angela Last’s ‘‘Geography,’’ the scale-shifting can be dramatic, which is often the case when tracing the travels, intra-actions, effects, meanings, politics, and ethics of matter and materiality. The final section, ‘‘Future Matters,’’ includes the chapters ‘‘Genetics and Epigenetics,’’ ‘‘Science Fiction,’’ ‘‘Digital Materialities,’’ ‘‘Bodily Technologies,’’ and ‘‘Posthumanism.’’ These chapters reveal how in the futuristic present and in imaginable futures social justice involves attention to the material imbrication of human bodies with technologies, substances, and forces. Alison Kafer’s ‘‘Bodily Technologies,’’ for example, introduces ‘‘trans, queer, crip, Afrofuturist, somatechnic, and cyborg’’ theories, arguing that it in a ‘‘networked world, it is simply impossible to reject bodily technologies, but we can become more critically engaged in our interactions with and expectations of them.’’ For many theorists, a serious engagement with materiality entails an ethical and political orientation toward the nonhuman world of animals, plants, and environments. It is fitting, then, that Jeffrey Marchand’s and Connor Stratman’s ‘‘Posthumanism’’ concludes the volume. They state that ‘‘animal studies, plant studies, science studies, new materialisms, gender hacking, and critical race theory seek to extend the parameters of ethical consideration to the multiplicity of partners that co-constitute the material becoming of the human and the more-than-human world. This widening of the

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ethical field is continuous with the feminist and queer projects of liberation, and the future holds exciting possibilities for these partnerships.’’ Gender: Matter is part of the ten-volume Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbook series on gender studies, edited by rene´e c. hoogland, with associate editors Iris van der Tuin and Nicole R. Fleetwood. The many innovative and compelling chapters within this volume will be of great interest to advanced scholars in gender and sexuality studies. The handbook format also enables the volume to be a rich, engaging, and accessible resource for students and others who are new to gender studies. Each chapter includes an introduction of the topic, clearly focused sections, definitions of key concepts, historical/cultural/geographical contexts, palpable examples, summaries, and bibliographies of cited and recommended sources. Many chapters also suggest related films and websites and feature illustrations. The volume concludes with a glossary of terms and a comprehensive index. I would like to thank the authors of the chapters in this volume for taking on the difficult task of presenting emerging and sometimes thorny subjects in such a way as to render these complex matters lucid and engaging. This was no simple feat, to be sure. I would also like to thank Alja Kooistra, senior developmental editor at Macmillan Reference USA, for her smart and savvy work and the series editor and associate editor for inviting me to design a volume devoted to a topic I believe is crucial for current and future scholarship in gender, race, and sexuality studies. It would not be possible, within this short introduction, to adequately present each of the twenty-seven chapters in this volume. They are too widely ranging, capacious, and detailed to even attempt to outline the content of each piece. They must stand on their own and they do. The fascinating chapters that follow, rich with knowledge, insight, striking examples, and theoretical acumen, deserve a wide audience who will, I hope, marvel at the turns that matter takes as it travels across time and space with its surprising meanings, its unruly actions, and its boundless significance for human and nonhuman lives. Stacy Alaimo Professor of English University of Texas at Arlington

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Alaimo, Stacy. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan J. Hekman, Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Anzaldu´a, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Asberg, Cecilia, Redi Koobak, and Ericka Johnson. ‘‘Post humanities Is a Feminist Issue.’’ NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 19, no. 4 (2011): 213 216. Bost, Suzanne. Encarnacio´n: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Boston Women’s Health Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex.’’ New York: Routledge, 1993. Ebert, Teresa. The Task of Cultural Critique. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009. GENDER: MATTER

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Haraway, Donna J. ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.’’ In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hennessy, Rosemary, and Chrys Ingraham. Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives. New York: Routledge, 1997. Keating, AnaLouise. ‘‘Speculative Realism, Visionary Pragmatism, and Poet Shamanic Aesthetics in Gloria Anzaldu´a and Beyond.’’ Women Studies Quarterly 40, nos. 3 4 (2009): 51 69. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2011. First published 1939. Pitts Taylor, Victoria. ‘‘Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Corporeal Politics.’’ In Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Preciado, Beatriz [Paul B.]. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: Feminist Press, 2013. Sullivan, Nikki, and Samantha Murray, eds. Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009.

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Part I. Embodied Humans

CHAPTER 1

Archaeology Rosemary A. Joyce Professor, Department of Anthropology University of California, Berkeley

Archaeology is an interdisciplinary way to understand human history, society, and culture by studying things that began their lives at a past time and survived to the present day. Many people think of archaeology as a discipline that seeks and recovers objects made by people as tools or ornaments, as a quest to find complete objects of great intrinsic or historical value. In fact, archaeologists normally develop understanding by studying large numbers of fragments of tools of everyday life used, broken, and discarded in the past. The things a particular archaeologist studies may have been excavated by that archaeologist or by someone else and stored in a museum or research center. If the society being studied produced written documents, an archaeologist will use them, but documents are never given privileged status to guide analysis or to decide between alternative understandings of the past. Instead, documents are studied in parallel with or in comparison to other kinds of things. Archaeology relies heavily on information from chemical analysis of the soil in work spaces and living sites, which can identify microscopic evidence of the actions of people in the past. Techniques from chemistry and physics are applied to extract similar traces from portable objects, allowing archaeologists to understand what was contained in pots, cut with knives, or processed on grinding stones. Even the bones of people buried in archaeological sites can be analyzed using such chemical techniques, telling archaeologists whether people got their protein from meat, fish, or plants and what kinds of plant foods made up the bulk of the diet. For most of its history, archaeology treated its subject of study as human groups cultures or societies in which individual people were treated like interchangeable parts. Gender was treated as a simple dichotomy of men and women. Experiences of men and women were presented in stereotyped ways. Self-conscious examination of gender became a focus for some archaeologists in the 1980s, at first equated with a search for women in the past. Recognition that masculinity was as much a topic for examination as women’s lives, as were concerns about sexuality, entered archaeology in the 1990s. At the same time, some archaeologists began to draw inspiration from queer theory and questioned the two-gender/ two-sex model that was part of standard archaeology. Archaeologists are able to show that people in the past experienced lives in which gender and sexuality were complex, multiple, and sometimes fluid. This has made archaeology popular as a resource for imagining futures, with some theorists contending that the past offers more than an argument and actual evidence that heteronormativity is inevitable or natural. Instead, archaeologists have demonstrated that many past societies do not seem to

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have used a binary distinction between sexes to separate the kind of work, status, or identities that people had. Perhaps the greatest contribution archaeology makes to material feminism comes from its demonstrations of how materiality relations between things, humans, and nonhuman animals provides the stuff out of which gender and sexuality emerge over time, are stabilized temporarily, and may be transformed over generations.

DOING GENDER IN ARCHAEOLOGY Histories of the archaeology of gender generally cite articles in the early 1980s as having opened the door to talking explicitly about men’s and women’s roles in the past. This is not to say that prior to the 1980s men’s and women’s actions went unmentioned, but what men did and what women did was assumed, not investigated. Stone tools were routinely described as products of men’s craft working, used by men to hunt animals. Women were thought to have gathered plants, processed them, and prepared food for men and children. One innovation of archaeologists writing about gender in the 1980s was the recognition that these were stereotypes. Archaeologists of gender tried to develop ways to objectively establish what people of different genders were actually doing in the past without making stereotypical assumptions. The initial exploration of gender in archaeology developed incredibly quickly, fueled by a generation of graduate students who decided to focus on the archaeology of women. Larger numbers of women were joining academic archaeology programs at the time. While being female was not a requirement to do archaeology attentive to gender identity, it did make many students in universities more likely to notice silences about women’s experiences in the past, the assumed passivity of women when they did appear in archaeological accounts, and the way that a single female experience was generalized and naturalized. Where men could be rulers, warriors, farmers, crafters, artists, and more, women were mothers and cooks. Changing that story line inspired a massive outpouring of conference papers starting in the 1980s. A conference directed at asking how women contributed to social and economic life in the past resulted in a volume edited by Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey (1991) that is widely recognized as one of the first expressions of this activity. Yet it was not alone. In 1990 an annual student-organized conference at Calgary University took as its theme the archaeology of gender, and the resulting published volume, edited by Dale Walde and Noreen D. Willows (1991), contained over 500 pages documenting papers presented. By 1997 the organizer of a series of conferences on gender and archaeology that started in 1991, Cheryl Claassen (1992), could point to over 450 conference papers written by more than 300 researchers (Joyce and Claassen 1997). Most of these researchers were firmly rooted in the model of scientific archaeology that dominated the field, and they took as their main goal finding women in the past. A minority explicitly employed feminist approaches. Ultimately, some pushed for more critical approaches, leading to the development of queer theory in archaeology. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS: POSITIVISM

Feminist philosopher Alison Wylie (1997) argues that archaeological interest in women did not initially involve any new theoretical perspectives. General archaeology in the 1970s and into the early 1980s was evolutionist, understanding human lifeways as constrained by a struggle for survival, leading to the development of hierarchies of power and economic inequality. Leading archaeologists developed an explicit framework of hypothesis testing and falsification derived from positivist philosophy of science. In this positivist approach, knowledge needed to be objective, free from bias, and based on the collection of evidence through scientific methods.

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To establish something as an archaeological fact under this framework required constructing an experimental design in which different causes would produce different patterns in materials left behind what could be called archaeological ‘‘signatures.’’ If such patterns could not be identified for a topic, then that topic could not be examined through scientific archaeology. In North America, where archaeology developed within the discipline of anthropology, archaeologists studying past societies drew on the work of ethnographers who observed living people, providing models for how past social life might have been. Aspects of human experience for which archaeological signatures to be tested could not be defined could be included in models as assumptions based on demonstrated regularities in a specific practice across living cultures described by ethnographers. For example, if in most agricultural societies the products of women’s labor were controlled by men, archaeologists could assume this likely had been true in farming groups in the past, even though there was no way to identify the gender of the people who made specific things. This theoretical framework in which the archaeology of gender developed was deeply materialist. For one thing, the objective evidence archaeologists used was all physical things that could be measured by multiple researchers who would always find the same values. Archaeology was also materialist in its emphasis on the primary role of adaptation to the material conditions of specific environments through the development of technologies in shaping social life. Archaeologists asking questions about gender did not change how archaeology was done within this framework; instead, they showed that assumptions used in models were flawed or that different assumptions could be based on alternative historical and ethnographic examples. These archaeologists sought objective results. They assumed objective results could be obtained because they accepted the idea that there were universal regularities in human behavior, including some that were supposed to be required by human biology. These early archaeologists of gender returned to ethnographies and historical accounts to show that actually the past was full of more variable experiences of gender than previously assumed. Ultimately, this led to the recognition that there is very little that can be assumed to be universal about human beings. One universal assumption grounded much early archaeology of gender: that every society has a division of labor in which people of different ages and sexes take on roles that are critical to economic subsistence. Given an assumed universal existence of divisions of labor by gender, archaeologists Conkey and Janet D. Spector (1984) proposed that ‘‘task differentiation’’ between men and women could be modeled and tested, allowing gender the social interpretation of the roles of people with different reproductive biology to be an explicit part of models (see also Spector 1983). Archaeologists could explore the labor that men and women might have carried out by identifying the tools used as well as the products of specific tasks in a rigorous model defined in advance. This approach provided an opening to begin to propose differences between people within past societies based on gender, which led directly to archaeologists asking questions about women’s agency or the ability to make decisions and to control their own lives and the products of their work. Were the things women did under their control? To their credit? Or coopted by others? In her distinguished lecture for the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association in 1991, archaeologist Elizabeth M. Brumfiel (1992) included gender as one of three new perspectives, that is, gender, class, and ‘‘faction’’ (by which she meant membership in any other identity group), that archaeologists could use to treat people as actively in control of their lives. As an empiricist undertaking, asking questions about agency fueled attempts to find ways that archaeologists could ‘‘see’’ these different options in materials that survived to the present. Archaeologists interested in gender did not create new methods. Instead, GENDER: MATTER

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they worked to improve the realism of explanations, insisting that people in the past were not interchangeable units but actors with different motivations and abilities, some of them rooted in gender. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS: FROM POSITIVISM TO QUEER THEORY

The positivist archaeology of gender, based on the collection through scientific methods of material evidence to test hypotheses, was enormously productive. Yet it rapidly faced challenges to the initial assumption it employed that gender was always a fundamental part of a division of labor. This critique proceeded in two different but not opposite directions. Perhaps a division of labor based on gender might not always exist; perhaps other kinds of social difference were sometimes important. Following through on this question, archaeologists explored how age, social class, and racialized or ethnic identity crosscut gender, Classic Maya figurine of woman weaving, c. 600 900 CE. arriving at the understanding that gender always was Weaving, a task done by Classic Maya women, produced cloth intersected by other aspects of being. Gendered expethat was economically important, including as a required riences could differ between people with similar biolpayment of tribute to rulers. WERNER FORMAN / GETTY ogies in the same society when they occupied different IMAGES racialized, status-based, or class-based positions. Feminist archaeological research on the specificities of African American and indigenous experiences were notable products of the attention to such intersectionality. A more radical question was raised by some archaeologists: How could archaeologists assume that sex differences mapped onto two (and only two) genders? Pursuing this question, archaeologists arrived at understandings of gender as multiple, as a continuum, as fluid and shifting. Some archaeologists expanded investigations beyond women or femininity to explore how masculinity worked in past societies. For these archaeologists, gender and sex could not be separated the way that archaeologists had been doing, with sex treated as a purely biological layer on top of which culture imposed gender identities. Queer theory provided resources for archaeologists to rethink these issues. Archaeologists, who examine human social life through material things, such as clothing, jewelry, tools, furnishings, and architectural spaces, connected theories such as Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993) concept of gender as something one does repeatedly to the repeated use of things in particular ways. They saw sex/gender as a culturally understood way of being, produced through repeated actions that employed things such as those they excavated. Archaeologists using queer theory were able to examine a wider range of materials as potential evidence of the formation and experience of gender/sex than those who had employed the task differentiation model. Feminist and queer theory also brought challenges to archaeology that are still being worked through. Archaeologists argue about how they can make sense from partial, transformed traces of past actions informed by viewing gender and sexuality as material experiences of embodiment. Seeking women’s roles in the past continues as a strong focus in archaeology, although it may now be questioned from the perspectives of intersectionality or through a

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Rock carvings in Tanum or Tanumshede, Sweden. Archaeologists using queer theory study images such as these rock carvings to examine multiple forms of masculinity in Bronze Age (1700 500 BCE) Sweden. DEA / G. DAG LI ORTI / GETTY IMAGES

queering of categories, which Chelsea Blackmore (2011) and Mary Weismantel (2013) argue should extend far beyond the examination of sex and gender. The use of feminist and queer theory results in the recognition that a simple correspondence of two ‘‘natural’’ sexes to two genders, or to four sexual orientations, is heteronormative. Heteronormativity is recognized as blinding archaeologists to other ways that people might have thought of themselves in the past as well as to variability within what previously were seen as the unified categories of men and women. At the same time, there has been some reaction against feminist and queer archaeologies from archaeologists insisting that all societies are organized along lines of reproduction based in biology. This involves making two assumptions that do not actually correspond to observed evidence. The first assumption is that the life of a person in the past was determined based on some kind of biological sex. The second assumption is that there really are only two sexes. Pamela L. Geller, an archaeologist specializing in the biology of past populations, criticizes both assumptions. Geller (2008) discusses a telling example of research on the ancient South American Chinchorro culture. Researchers examined male and female mummies to detect external auditory exostosis, a type of bone growth in the ear canal that results from exposure to cold water. This would indicate which Chinchorro people were involved in diving in the cold water off Chile to obtain marine resources. GENDER: MATTER

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The researchers discovered that both Chinchorro men and women had this condition. Because more males had this abnormal bone growth, they characterized diving as men’s work. Geller notes that because women also were affected by this condition, the research actually challenges the assumption that males and females had clear and distinct roles in this society. Not all females automatically shared a destiny. Indeed, Geller (2008, 2009) notes that depending on how one identifies the sex of past skeletons, it may not always be possible to distinguish males from females using some methods, while the use of other methods requires the researcher to acknowledge that there are more than two biological sexes. In the former case, differences in the pelvis taken by many as absolutely distinguishing males and females are unidentifiable in children and diminish or disappear as women age. In the latter case, using DNA to identify the sex of past skeletons would require using more than two categories of sex, because around 2 percent of people have sex chromosomes different from XX female and XY male. Studies by bioarchaeologists thus constitute critical contributions to the archaeology of sex and gender, as they demonstrate that in each past society the degree to which aspects of experience, such as diet, health, and labor, are linked to biological sex is variable.

MATERIALIZING GENDER AND SEXUALITY: ARCHAEOLOGICAL CASE STUDIES Archaeology involves creating techniques to connect present-day researchers to past situations by dissecting long-enduring materials and proposing what social and natural activities could have created them. Archaeological practice is in one sense apparently simple. Archaeologists find a place where the soil has been altered by human action. They systematically map the distribution of materials in those places, including building remains, broken pieces of things used and discarded, and microscopic chemical traces, and then analyze samples collected to better understand the ways sites were shaped their ‘‘formation processes’’ including what may be missing and how things were altered. Archaeologists draw on sciences from biology to chemistry to physics, with their uniformities of material behavior, to confirm or revise their models. When needed, they conduct modern experiments to replicate the things they have recovered and understand what their creation and use would have required of people in the past. They draw on histories recorded for the same place or places with similar environments and on anthropologists’ accounts of living people who might be descendants of past residents, people who live in similar environments, or people who carry out their lives with similar technologies. This process of description and analysis of material traces of past action always takes place within a framework of assumptions. The hardest part about archaeology is making those assumptions explicit enough to recognize when an explanation is distorting the description of the material traces. The four examples of archaeological research from different times and places that follow show how archaeologists exploring gender and sexuality negotiate this challenge. WERE ICE AGE ARTISTS HETERONORMATIVE?

The image of the Venus of Willendorf is well known: a naked standing body with large breasts, belly, and thighs. At the top of the body there are no discernable facial features, just a globe covered with impressed geometric designs. Named for the site in Europe where it was found, the Willendorf object is a figurine a sculpture small enough to be held in the palm of a

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hand showing a human body in three dimensions. The people of Paleolithic Europe, the period from around 32,000 to 12,000 years ago, when ancestral humans painted the interiors of caves in glaciated landscapes, created these small, portable statues from stone and clay. Why? What did they mean? The earliest and enduring explanation is signaled by the first part of the name given this famous example: Venus. The use of the term Venus implies that these are images of a goddess, one celebrated for her body, because it appears to be entirely unclothed. The figurine has thus been seen as a piece of art, subject to the gaze of a viewer who is presumed to be male, perhaps even a form of Paleolithic erotica. These interpretations rely on projecting certain modern attitudes onto people living tens of thousands of years in the past. Such interpretations assume that the people of Paleolithic Europe were divided into two genders engaged in exclusively heteronormative sexual relations. The material traces available from sites of this period are extremely limited, making it difficult to rethink gender and sexuality within Paleolithic archaeology. This would seem to make Paleolithic Europe an unlikely site for breakthroughs in the archaeology of gender and sexuality. Nonetheless, this unpromising time and place is where two different challenges to the naturalization of gender relations started. One led to the proposition that before humans adopted agriculture, the species was naturally matrifocal, united by goddess worship and led by matriarchs (Gimbutas 1991). The other approach questioned both normative interpretations and the goddess narrative, beginning a process that might be characterized as queering the Ice Age (Dobres 1992; Schmidt 2002).

The Venus of Willendorf, made of limestone, c. 28,000 25,000 BCE. Also known as the Woman of Willendorf, this Palaeolithic figurine combines a female body and head covered with textile cap. DEA / E. LESSING / GETTY IMAGES

Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas was a central figure in the development of the goddess narrative. She treated the representation of female bodies in Paleolithic and later Neolithic societies as a sign of prosperity, the image of a ‘‘mother goddess’’ who would ensure fertility, including in the difficult environments of Ice Age Europe. Gimbutas (1991) and those who followed her lead were combating the androcentrism of existing models of Paleolithic life that elevated the role of the hunter (presumed to be male) and presented authority of men over women as natural because of women’s presumed dependency on men for survival. Instead, the goddess approach offered a picture of women in control of the mystical power of reproduction, ensuring group survival and, through their fertility, offering supernatural access to the reproduction of game animals as well. From a modern archaeological point of view, as discussed by such authors as Cynthia Eller (2000) and Conkey and Ruth E. Tringham (1995), this narrative is not well supported. GENDER: MATTER

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The goddess model accepted that there was a natural dichotomy between males and females and assumed that any human group would assign one sex authority over the other however benign the matriarchs might have been. It conformed to the theoretical approach of the time in its universalizing of human sexual relations and in its biological reductionism: biology was destiny it was just a slightly different kind of destiny. An alternative approach to an archaeology of gender in Paleolithic Europe developed during the period when a positivist mode of archaeological analysis was dominant through the work of Conkey (1991, 1997). Conkey approached Paleolithic figurines as part of assemblages of portable objects from sites of different kinds. A large number of portable tools in Paleolithic sites also include imagery. Conkey wanted to account for this imagery and its variability as well as the use of tools. She related the kind and diversity of portable objects found to the kind and size of living sites where things were discarded and later recovered by archaeologists. Some of the objects were from small sites where small bands composed of groups of biologically related people likely camped. Larger sites had more diverse assemblages of things, some made from material from distant sources. The larger sites, Conkey (1991) argued, were places where small bands of mobile gathering and hunting people came together at specific moments in their annual movement across the landscape. At these gathering places, different bands intersected, exchanging members as spouses and exchanging things each band had made from material with distinct origins. Conkey did not presume that males as a group or females as a group were automatically in power in bands or at larger gathering places. Avoiding biological reductionism, Conkey used the empirical record of human diversity to amend universalist assumptions. She emphasized that archaeologists should not assume a gender for the participants in social life in Paleolithic society or in other societies. When Conkey and archaeologist Olga Soffer (1997) mapped known Paleolithic figurines across the European landscape, it became clear that no one explanation could account for the regional variation among them (see also Conkey 1997). This supported the rejection of universal arguments explaining figurines as goddess images. Debates about Paleolithic figurines moved on from the positivism of the 1970s to interpretive approaches that considered the agency of the people making and using these things. Some analysts proposed that the fleshy bodies and schematic limbs and heads on the figurines reflected women’s own views of their bodies during pregnancy, suggesting that women were the artists making these things. Soffer pursued a line of inquiry about Paleolithic figurines that was radically different, connecting the figurines to other materials now missing from these sites because of their fragility: textiles. She and her colleagues recorded evidence of impressions of textiles on bits of clay (Soffer, Adovasio, and Hyland 2000). They argued that the geometric patterns on different parts of figurine bodies were meant to suggest pieces of textiles. The figurines at times recorded more detail of textiles than of the human body: the lack of facial features on the Willendorf figure shows the replacement of facial features by geometric marks interpretable as a textile cap. Applying a generalization rooted in ethnographic observations, Soffer argued that the makers of these textiles were likely female, suggesting that these women gained status within Paleolithic society through their actions rather than their fertility or connection to a goddess. The line of feminist archaeologists who departed from the goddess narrative thus arrived at the conclusion that women were important actors in Paleolithic society. Drawing on ethnographies of hunter-gatherers, scholars could expect that there was significant differentiation by

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age among Paleolithic people. Skill would have been another basis for differentiation skill in stonework, in carving bone into useful and ornamented things, in making modeled figurines, in painting the walls of caves, in hunting, and in making textiles (Joyce 2008). Each of these aspects of personal difference crosscuts sex, an example of the importance of intersectionality. Paleolithic Europe provided archaeologists with a challenge: while figurines placed physical sexual characteristics on display and thus made sex a necessary topic of discussion, the explanations for the representation of bodies in particular ways had to reach outside the archaeological assemblage to make a case. The use of ethnographic analogy was a staple of these works, and depending on how uncritically one read ethnographies, there was a danger of reproducing the implicit biases of the ethnographers. Contributions to the archaeology of gender and sexuality made by researchers exploring times and places that are closer to the present, however, show that having more forms of evidence, including written documents, does not necessarily make things easier. CLASSIC MAYA DEBATES: FROM QUEENS TO HOMOSOCIALITY IN THREE DIFFICULT STEPS

Classic Maya archaeology is an example illustrating how the archaeology of gender and sexuality uses materials that include documents written at the same time that sites were occupied. Early studies of the Classic Maya, who built cities across an area stretching from Mexico to Honduras between 250 and 1000 CE, led to the identification of portrayals of women on stone monuments. Accompanying texts showed that these were the mothers and wives of rulers or, in a few cases, women who ruled their cities as regents for sons who were not yet adults. Yet despite the existence of this evidence of important women in the ruling group, the archaeology of Classic Maya gender initially grew out of research aimed at understanding everyday life in residential settings. In this approach, called household archaeology, households were sites in which the work of production necessary for the survival of the social group took place and where offspring from heterosexual unions were raised. Feminist archaeologists saw these as places where women had critical roles to play. Images painted on pottery or made in the form of figurines helped archaeologists identify some daily tasks as typically carried out by women: food processing, spinning, and weaving. Each of these enterprises required specific tools: grinding stones, pots, spindle whorls, and weaving picks, among others. The distribution of these things, especially concentrations of them, could point to where women went about their work. At a site in Honduras known as Copa´n, archaeologist Julia A. Hendon (1999) mapped the distribution of weaving tools around the houses of nobles, showing that they were common in these highranking households. Based on this, she argued that noblewomen would have had significant social power. At the rural village site Joya del Cere´n in El Salvador, Tracy L. Sweely (1998) showed how the placement of grinding stones allowed women to work together in groups while also orienting them so that they were in sight of other groups of women. Women became visible through these explorations of the placement of the tools of their typical labor. Men remained a category of people whose activities were assumed rather than explored. Queer theory helped overcome some of the limitations of the positivist feminist frameworks that were initially productive in making women visible in Classic Maya society. Studies rooted in queer theory relied heavily on the work of Butler (1990, 1993), which views performance as central in producing a person’s sense of self. Butler famously suggested that gender was something a person did, a repeated performance, rather than something innate, a biological essence. Butler’s ideas were employed to understand the repeated performance of certain tasks as a way GENDER: MATTER

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that forms of femininity were reproduced over generations in Classic Maya households. Spinning and weaving were not just necessary work; they were performances of feminine being. The same theoretical perspective could illuminate performances of masculinity. In households of ruling groups, food was served in pottery vessels painted with multicolor scenes, including images of dances, ball games, and feasts. In these images, males were shown socializing together in intimate company. Similar homosocial groups were described in European texts written about descendants of the Classic Maya in the sixteenth century. At that time, women spun and wove in groups. Youths moved out of the houses in which they spent their earliest years to live together in ‘‘young men’s houses,’’ playing ball games, dancing, and learning the craft of war. Archaeological analysis of texts and images from before the European invasion demonstrated that, at least for young males, sexualized homosociality (the association of a group of people of the same sex or gender) was represented positively, not shown as sanctioned. The assumptions that helped household archaeologists define signatures of women’s work and see women’s spaces were drawn in part from much later texts written by European observers in the sixteenth century about the descendants of Classic Maya people and their neighbors. Sometimes these European colonial sources reinforced the naturalization of heteronormative models. European observers argued that the Maya were sexually conservative and intolerant of same-sex desires and practices. This reinforced a tendency by archaeologists to assume a heteronormative social order based on a universal practice of marriage between males and females leading to biological reproduction. Queer and feminist theory destabilized such assumptions of universal heteronormative sexual relations. In response, some archaeologists sought to base absolute sexual dichotomies in biological research. However, the bioarchaeology of the Classic Maya actually

Decoration on Maya cup, c. 550 900 CE. The cup depicts a palace scene in which a ruler and his men are drinking together. Honey is fermenting in the narrow necked ollas. ª JUSTIN KERR

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demonstrates more mixed patterns than can be explained by any simple dichotomy between two sexes. Christine D. White (2005), in a study of dietary privilege among the Classic Maya registered in human skeletal remains, found only mixed evidence of differentiation of diet along lines of sex. Access to certain foods was more strongly related to group status, whether someone belonged to the ruling group or not. White’s work is an example of bioarchaeology: the study of human biology in the past through the application of scientific techniques to human skeletal remains recovered by archaeological excavation. Modern bioarchaeological analysis involves recognizing that there are more than two biological statuses created by variable experiences of development. Many scholars in this field draw on the concept of developmental systems discussed by Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000), in which biological development unfolds throughout the formation of the body, starting before birth and continuing throughout life. While genes are part of the story, exercise, diet, and environmental factors all contribute to the way each body develops. Bioarchaeologists working with this contemporary understanding do not expect ancient DNA to account for all the variability they see in human sexual biology. They expect to see skeletal anatomy changing over the course of a person’s life. For bioarchaeologists, there are no accepted ways to identify sex from children’s skeletons, and sexual differences may become less clear or disappear in old age. Bioarchaeologists are aware that in living populations, one or two out of every hundred people are born with sexual biology that cannot be assigned to one of two fixed categories. Informed by such research, bioarchaeologist Rebecca Storey (2005) has suggested that she identified a possible intersexed individual in a burial of the ruling group at Copa´n. Early twenty-first-century bioarchaeologists even question the centrality of the sex/gender distinction that once seemed to offer sex as a natural ground beneath the more variable and culturally elaborated concept of gender. FROM COUNTRYSIDE TO CITY: RETHINKING BIOLOGICAL LIFE EXPERIENCES

Cemeteries from medieval and early modern Britain have yielded hundreds of bodies of the dead, allowing bioarchaeologists to assess health in life, the reproductive histories of adult women, and the effects of disease and development over the course of life. Bioarchaeology, using samples from such cemeteries, has shown that living conditions alter what are often taken as universal biological experiences. Bioarchaeologist Sabrina C. Agarwal (2012) showed that in the medieval village of Wharram Percy, occupied from the tenth to the sixteenth century, members of farming households, men and women, worked together to produce enough to survive through each winter. At the same time, city dwellers in London took on work that was not as physically challenging and more apt to be divided along lines of sex. For women in industrialized societies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, osteoporosis (bone loss and fragility) was often seen as an inevitable natural experience in aging. Yet in Wharram Percy, where men and women all engaged in physical labor, Agarwal found that work helped keep women’s bones strong even as they grew older. Men were more apt to lose bone in old age. This unexpected pattern might have been the result of a positive effect of women’s bodies experiencing a loss of bone mass during pregnancies and recovering from those temporary episodes, a cycle not experienced by males. The experience of rural people contrasted with that of their counterparts in the city. When comparing the remains of women and men in cemeteries from early modern London, Agarwal found that they did exhibit the pattern typical of the twentieth century, in which women suffered more from bone loss as they aged. She argues that the lower levels of physical GENDER: MATTER

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activity that accompanied urban life along with the separation of work lives along lines of sex gave women less chance to develop more enduring bone mass. Agarwal’s project is especially noteworthy because it demonstrated that a conventional step employed in bioarchaeological studies could obscure crosscutting forms of difference and artificially produce apparent regularities based on sex. The conventional approach begins by separating human remains under study into two sex categories. From the perspective of queer theory, this can be seen as an imposition of a heteronormative matrix, imposing two sexes on the remains, assuming there will be two groups whose experiences vary by sex. When Agarwal instead started by graphing results together for the entire group of human remains from a single cemetery she discovered they fell into groups in which intersecting variables (such as age, labor, and reproductive experience) were more relevant than sex in predicting similar outcomes. Some skeletons identified as male and others identified as female had similar patterns of bone loss. Differentiation between the sexes was more evident in London cemeteries than at Wharram Percy. No single universal pattern was evident or should be expected in other cases. Such bioarchaeological studies show that while human bodies differ depending on sexually specific aspects of their biology, biological potentials are always developed during life in interaction with specific experiences that differentiate between people whose biologies may otherwise be similar. Not all women’s lives are the same; not all men’s lives are the same. Men and women may have experiences more similar to each other or have very different life histories, depending on the organization of the society. Bioarchaeological studies that do not assume that a dichotomy of sex determined most life experiences explore intersectionality. They illustrate how crosscutting dimensions of social experience affected people in different times and places. This same approach, rooted in insights from queer theory and employing a concept of intersectionality, has been critical for the development of the archaeology of racialized experiences of sex and gender. THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MASCULINITY AND FEMININITY IN THE RACIALIZED UNITED STATES

Archaeologists have begun to explore how processes that marginalized racialized groups in the United States in the nineteenth century intersected with sexuality, including promoting interpretations of masculinity and femininity to justify unequal treatment. This research is important for the discipline of archaeology, not just for a broader understanding of nineteenthcentury history, because the continued influence of such nineteenth-century ideologies are at the root of the assumption of heteronormativity that was generally held by archaeologists in the late twentieth century. Archaeologist Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood (1999) shows that the view that normal families were composed of male-female couples in which a woman acted as mother of the children of her partner, dependent on him for political and economic capital, was an ideology of nineteenth-century upper-class society in the United States. Other nineteenth-century ideologies, such as the ‘‘cult of true womanhood,’’ justified women in other classes working outside the home by extending the caretaking roles of women to broader communities and gave greater value to women as moral forces than to men. Spencer-Wood shows that archaeological excavations of household trash, when used along with documents written to promote gender ideologies, can transform one’s understandings of things such as flowerpots and china with floral designs, which might otherwise simply be seen as everyday kitchen and home features, into evidence of domestic reform movements, such as the ‘‘cult of home religion.’’

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Far from having a uniform gender ideology of male domination of subordinate women, the United States had contesting and constantly changing gender ideologies in the nineteenth century. All these nineteenth-century gender ideologies relied on naturalizing a dichotomy between women and men. Consequently, archaeological studies of the nineteenth-century United States have great potential to also contribute to the archaeology of masculinity. Through archaeological research combining documents, photographs, oral histories, and the analysis of recovered trash, archaeologist Laurie A. Wilkie (2010) has shown how dominant ideologies of masculinity were reproduced among young men as university students associating in fraternities who later went on to be political and business leaders in California. She shows that the masculinity crafted by living in a homosocial ranked society depended in part on feminizing servants. Given roles that in upper-class homes were appropriate to women, men of specific racial and ethnic groups were associated with femininity and excluded from the dominant form of masculinity. Such racialized ideologies of gender could be contested. Archaeologist Bryn Williams (2008) explored how porcelain cups recovered in excavations of San Jose’s former Chinatown could have simultaneously been understood by non-Chinese viewers as feminizing and by Chinese men as masculine. Chinese-style porcelain was seen by dominant white groups as associated with a feminine sphere. Chinese men using these objects to drink alcohol, however, drew on a Chinese ideology of masculinity emphasizing strength and power. The ability of subordinated groups to evade dominant gender ideologies was not unlimited. Archaeologists studying nineteenth-century African American experience have shown how within the African American community influential leaders encouraged acting ‘‘respectably’’ by avoiding practices that would feed negative stereotypes, including those around sexuality. Dominant white gender ideologies that defined femininity in terms of motherhood and domesticity encouraged an emphasis on mothering by the African American community, a development Wilkie (2003) shows was exemplified by an African American midwife who practiced in a home furnished with objects that reinforced such values.

Summary Archaeology is a materialist discipline. When archaeology’s materialism has been rooted in biological reductionism or in universalized nature, it has been guilty of simply presenting gender relations as timeless. When archaeology has instead investigated what the material traces of gendered lives would be, it has not only illuminated the histories of human experiences of sex and gender but has also offered ways to rethink experience in the present. Changing ideas about what archaeological materialism allows have resulted in obstacles to developing approaches to gender and sexuality and extraordinarily productive avenues for exploring sex and gender; such productive avenues can lead to open-ended understandings and fluid scenarios about the past. To escape the constraints of determinism, archaeologists interested in understanding sex and gender work through the implications of concepts such as performance at the scale of a social network and the temporality of generations. Archaeologists pay attention to the things through which people experienced and extended their senses of self, showing how gender and sexuality might be connected to objects that at first glance have no obvious links to these aspects of experience. Bioarchaeologists grapple with the GENDER: MATTER

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challenge of understanding biological experiences as developmental, opening fluid possibilities of experience of sex and addressing one of the most restrictive determinisms that limited early feminist archaeology. Feminist archaeology has become thoroughly infused with concerns about the intersectionality of race, class, and ethnicity, which rests on the understanding that there is no single material experience of being female or male. Despite these achievements, archaeology is always on the edge of slipping back into an easy reliance on categorical approaches to human existence while constantly toying with simplification. Often the means of simplification is sought in biology, the latest being the hope that ancient DNA will provide an easy route to identifying past gender identities, a line of inquiry Geller (2009) critically examined. Archaeologists sometimes look suspiciously at analyses concerned with personal experience, because they are leery of masking dimensions of social hierarchy, such as class, that might seem to be obscured by gender, sexuality, and other aspects of identity. All archaeologists, if they are honest, worry that the materials that survive as remainders of past social relations may simply be too weak to bear the weight they want to put on them. Hence, archaeologists working on sexuality and gender offer partial stories. They systematically explore intersections, attend to political economy, and resist the pull to identify with actors in the past and simply project modern images that obscure past lives. The resulting stories may not always be offered as authoritative. They are open to revision. Taken together, the partial and contingent histories that archaeologists construct from things expand the spectrum of past experiences of sex and gender that can be understood as within the scope of real human life.

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Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, edited by Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, 57 92. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991.

Blackmore, Chelsea. ‘‘How to Queer the Past without Sex: Queer Theory, Feminisms, and the Archaeology of Iden tity.’’ Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 7, no. 1 (2011): 75 96.

Conkey, Margaret W. ‘‘Mobilizing Ideologies: Paleolithic ‘Art,’ Gender Trouble, and Thinking about Alternatives.’’ In Women in Human Evolution, edited by Lori D. Hager, 172 207. London: Routledge, 1997.

Brumfiel, Elizabeth M. ‘‘Breaking and Entering the Ecosystem: Gender, Class, and Faction Steal the Show.’’ American Anthropologist 94, no. 3 (1992): 551 567.

Conkey, Margaret W., and Janet D. Spector. ‘‘Archaeology and the Study of Gender.’’ Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 7 (1984): 1 38.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex.’’ New York: Routledge, 1993.

Conkey, Margaret W., and Ruth E. Tringham. ‘‘Archaeology and the Goddess: Exploring the Contours of Feminist Archaeology.’’ In Feminisms in the Academy, edited by Domna C. Stanton and Abigail J. Stewart, 199 247. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Claassen, Cheryl, ed. Exploring Gender through Archaeology: Selected Papers from the 1991 Boone Conference. Madi son, WI: Prehistory Press, 1992. Conkey, Margaret W. ‘‘Contexts of Action, Contexts for Power: Material Culture and Gender in the Magdalenian.’’ In

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Dobres, Marcia Anne. ‘‘Re considering Venus Figurines: A Feminist Inspired Re Analysis.’’ In Ancient Images, Ancient Thought: The Archaeology of Ideology; Proceed ings of the Twenty Third Annual Conference of the Archaeological Association of the University of Calgary,

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edited by A. Sean Goldsmith, Sandra Garvie, David Selin, and Jeannette Smith, 245 262. Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Archaeological Association, 1992. Eller, Cynthia. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future. Boston: Bea con Press, 2000. Fausto Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Franklin, Maria. ‘‘A Black Feminist Inspired Archaeology?’’ Journal of Social Archaeology 1, no. 1 (2001): 108 125. Geller, Pamela L. ‘‘Conceiving Sex: Fomenting a Feminist Bioarchaeology.’’ Journal of Social Archaeology 8, no. 1 (2008): 113 138. Geller, Pamela L. ‘‘Identity and Difference: Complicating Gen der in Archaeology.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 38, no. 1 (2009): 65 81. Gero, Joan M., and Margaret W. Conkey, eds. Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991. Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess. Edited by Joan Marler. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Hendon, Julia A. ‘‘Multiple Sources of Prestige and the Social Evaluation of Women in Prehispanic Mesoamerica.’’ In Material Symbols: Culture and Economy in Prehistory, edited by John E. Robb, 257 276. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University, 1999. Joyce, Rosemary A. Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gen der, and Archaeology. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008. Joyce, Rosemary A. ‘‘A Precolumbian Gaze: Male Sexuality among the Ancient Maya.’’ In Archaeologies of Sexual ity, edited by Robert A. Schmidt and Barbara L. Voss, 263 283. London: Routledge, 2000. Joyce, Rosemary A. ‘‘Women’s Work: Images of Production and Reproduction in Pre Hispanic Southern Central Amer ica.’’ Current Anthropology 34, no. 3 (1993): 255 274. Joyce, Rosemary A., and Cheryl Claassen. ‘‘Women in the Ancient Americas: Archaeologists, Gender, and the Mak ing of Prehistory.’’ In Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica, edited by Cheryl Claassen and Rose mary A. Joyce, 1 14. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl vania Press, 1997. McCoid, Catherine Hodge, and LeRoy D. McDermott. ‘‘Toward Decolonizing Gender: Female Vision in the Upper Paleolithic.’’ American Anthropologist 98, no. 2 (1996): 319 326.

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Meskell, Lynn. Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class, et cetera in Ancient Egypt. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1999. Perry, Elizabeth M., and Rosemary A. Joyce. ‘‘Providing a Past for Bodies That Matter: Judith Butler’s Impact on the Archaeology of Gender.’’ International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 6, nos. 1 2 (2001): 63 76. Pyburn, K. Anne. ‘‘Ungendering the Maya.’’ In Ungendering Civilization, edited by K. Anne Pyburn, 216 233. New York: Routledge, 2004. Schmidt, Robert A. ‘‘The Iceman Cometh: Queering the Archaeological Past.’’ In Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology, edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap, 155 185. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Soffer, Olga, J. M. Adovasio, and D. C. Hyland. ‘‘The ‘Venus’ Figurines: Textiles, Basketry, Gender, and Status in the Upper Paleolithic.’’ Current Anthropology 41, no. 4 (2000): 511 537. Soffer, Olga, and Margaret W. Conkey. ‘‘Studying Ancient Visual Culture.’’ In Beyond Art: Pleistocene Image and Symbol, edited by Margaret W. Conkey, Olga Soffer, Deborah Stratmann, and Nina G. Jablonski, 1 16. San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1997. Spector, Janet D. ‘‘Male/Female Task Differentiation among the Hidatsa: Toward the Development of an Archaeolog ical Approach to the Study of Gender.’’ In The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women, edited by Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine, 77 99. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983. Spencer Wood, Suzanne M. ‘‘The World Their Household: Changing Meanings of the Domestic Sphere in the Nine teenth Century.’’ In The Archaeology of Household Activ ities, edited by Penelope M. Allison, 162 189. London: Routledge, 1999. Storey, Rebecca. ‘‘Health and Lifestyle (before and after Death) among the Copa´n Elite.’’ In Copa´n: The History of an Ancient Maya Kingdom, edited by E. Wyllys Andrews and William L. Fash, 315 343. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2005. Sweely, Tracy L. ‘‘Personal Interactions: The Implications of Spatial Arrangements for Power Relations at Cere´n, El Sal vador.’’ World Archaeology 29, no. 3 (1998): 393 406. Voss, Barbara L. ‘‘Sexuality Studies in Archaeology.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 37, no. 1 (2008): 317 336. Walde, Dale, and Noreen D. Willows, eds. The Archaeology of Gender: Proceedings of the Twenty Second Annual

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Conference of the Archaeological Association of the Uni versity of Calgary. Calgary, Canada: University of Cal gary Archaeological Association, 1991. Weismantel, Mary. ‘‘Towards a Transgender Archaeology: A Queer Rampage through Prehistory.’’ In The Trans gender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 319 334. New York: Routledge, 2013. White, Christine D. ‘‘Gendered Food Behaviour among the Maya: Time, Place, Status, and Ritual.’’ Journal of Social Archaeology 5, no. 3 (2005): 356 382.

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Wilkie, Laurie A. An Archaeology of Mothering: An African American Midwife’s Tale. New York: Routledge, 2003. Wilkie, Laurie A. The Lost Boys of Zeta Psi: A Historical Archaeology of Masculinity in a University Fraternity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Williams, Bryn. ‘‘Chinese Masculinities and Material Cul ture.’’ Historical Archaeology 42, no. 3 (2008): 53 67. Wylie, Alison. ‘‘The Engendering of Archaeology: Refiguring Feminist Science Studies.’’ Osiris 12, no. 1 (1997): 80 99.

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CHAPTER 2

Darwinian Feminisms S. Pearl Brilmyer Assistant Professor, Department of English University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

At first glance, the terms Darwinism and feminism may seem to have little in common. What could the scientific theory of the origin of species as formulated by British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809 1882) have to offer the political movement for sexual equality? Indeed, given the centrality of competition to Darwin’s theory of evolution and the importance of community and coalition building to feminist politics, it may be easier to imagine Darwinism and feminism as adversaries rather than allies. And yet, since the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, feminist theorists and activists have found in Darwin an ally in the battle against biological essentialism that is, the assumption that human behavior can be explained by a series of unchanging, biologically determined facts. Invoking his theory of evolution in order to critique biological essentialism, along with the gendered norms and hierarchies that tend to accompany it, feminist theorists have used Darwin’s work as a platform for social and political transformation. If, as Darwin claimed, ‘‘human nature’’ itself is not a fixed constant but something constantly changing, then, some of Darwin’s readers argued, there can be nothing natural or permanent about the subordinate status of women in society. Thus, although Darwin’s major insights may appear to be contained to the natural sciences, his ideas have served as an important touchstone for feminist activism and theory from the nineteenth century until today. That Darwinism has provided a useful set of tools for feminism, however, does not mean that Darwin himself expressed particularly progressive views on women. A product of his time, Darwin often relied on stereotypes of male and female behavior consistent with the dominant assumptions of his contemporaries in Victorian England. In his account of the process of sexual selection, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), for example, Darwin proposes that a set of fundamental differences characterizes the two sexes, arguing that whereas woman has ‘‘greater tenderness and less selfishness,’’ man ‘‘delights in competition’’ ([1871] 2004, 629). Like many nineteenth-century scientists, Darwin believed that women were inherently weaker, more childlike, and less capable of rational thought than men. Even the title of Darwin’s The Descent of Man in which the word man is used generically to refer to all of humankind points to the fact that, throughout much of Darwin’s work, the male sex stands as the unquestioned ideal, standard, and norm against which all other sexes (e.g., female and hermaphroditic) are measured. Although Darwin’s vocabulary and assumptions about gender were conditioned by his historical and social context, Darwinian science has something to offer thinkers interested in challenging gendered stereotypes and hierarchies. Indeed, although many

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(including Darwin himself) used evolutionary biology to justify their belief in two distinct sexes with fixed characteristics, various of Darwin’s readers contested this sexually determinist interpretation of the theory of evolution, arguing instead that Darwin’s approach to matter in particular actually undermined the suggestion that sexual inequality and even sexual difference is natural and inevitable. Rife with implications for gender and sexuality theory, Darwin’s understanding of matter as a fundamentally indeterminate and temporally conditioned phenomenon has been invoked by feminists to call into question biologically essentialist theories of sex and race, opening the door for the emergence of new, anti-essentialist accounts of the role of matter and the body in the human social world.

THE WOMAN QUESTION: EARLY FEMINISM AND THE PROMISE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY Almost as soon as On the Origin of Species appeared in print, women writers, scientists, and activists began to engage the theory of evolution. Darwin’s early female interlocutors were some of the first to critically assess the role of matter in conditioning human social behavior. The various women who responded to Darwin’s work across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did more than defend themselves from the biological essentialism that plagued early applications of evolutionary theory to human society, however. Indeed, they actively intervened in the debates surrounding evolutionary science, inspiring and producing new research into the extent to which human sexuality and gender are materially determined. Beginning with the example of American scientist and cleric Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825 1921) and touching on the work of various other turn-of-the-twentieth-century women, this section traces the origins of ‘‘Darwinian feminism’’ back to the nineteenth century, when early readers of Darwin’s work began to question the ideologies of gender that informed scientific practice. Darwin himself often affirmed stereotypes about women’s nature, but his theory of evolution emphasized the transformable quality of all matter and, with it, all secondary sex characteristics. He even went so far as to suggest that the two sexes had emerged over time in response to environmental shifts. In so doing, he provided fuel for women’s rights advocates to claim that if men and women were at present unequal in either intellectual or physical capacity, such seemingly natural hierarchies could be transformed if women were given access to different material resources. BLACKWELL’S THE SEXES THROUGHOUT NATURE AND THE ORIGINS OF DARWINIAN FEMINISM

In November 1869 Blackwell wrote a letter to Darwin, sending him a copy of her recently published Studies in General Science (1869). Responding with enthusiasm about the work, Darwin replied to Blackwell (on November 8, 1869) that he very much appreciated the citation of various ‘‘statements made by me & very little known to public’’ (Darwin [1869] 2016). From the nature of Darwin’s response, however, it is clear that the scientist was entirely unaware that the author of Studies in General Science A. B. Blackwell was a woman: ‘‘Dear Sir,’’ his response to Blackwell begins, ‘‘I am much obliged to you for your kindness in sending me your ‘Studies in General Science,’ over which, as I observe in the Preface, you have spent so much time’’ (Darwin [1869] 2016). Darwin’s

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assumption that the author of Studies in General Science was a man speaks to the fact that few women in the nineteenth century had access to the institutional resources that would allow them to produce such a scientific study. Women like Blackwell were denied educational opportunities and refused entry to formal societies and groups and thus struggled to find their voice in the male-dominated discourse of nineteenth-century science. The challenges that nineteenth-century women faced in intervening in scientific discourse were more than institutional, however. The theory of evolution itself seemed set against them. At the heart of many early applications of evolution to human life was the suggestion that men were more highly developed and ‘‘evolved’’ than women. In The Descent of Man, Darwin maintained that sexual selection had rendered man ‘‘superior to woman’’ both physically and intellectually ([1871] 2004, 631). ‘‘The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is shown by man’s attaining higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than women can attain whether requiring deep thought, reason or imagination, or merely the use of the sense and hands’’ (629). Like the peacock, which, as a result of sexual selection, had become increasingly more beautiful than the peahen, Darwin proposed, man had over time become more powerful and intelligent than woman. Thus woman is often represented in The Descent of Man as a less-developed man, her anatomy more childlike or ‘‘primitive,’’ her mental qualities (such as intuition and imitation) harkening back, as Darwin phrased it, to ‘‘a past and lower state of civilisation’’ (629). Early feminists such as Blackwell were dissatisfied with this account of the female sex as unevolved, however, believing it to be not only politically problematic but scientifically flawed. In her groundbreaking study The Sexes throughout Nature (1875), Blackwell took issue with the presentation of the male sex in evolutionary theory as an unquestioned ideal against which all other sexes (e.g., female and hermaphroditic) were measured. ‘‘Current physiology,’’ she complained, ‘‘seems to be grounded on the assumption that woman is undersized man, with modified organs and special but temporary functions, which like other more or less abnormal activities are a direct deduction from the normal human energy’’ (1875, 233). Critiquing not only Darwin but also other evolutionary theorists, such as Englishmen Herbert Spencer (1820 1903) and Thomas Huxley (1825 1895), for basing their research on ‘‘the time-honored assumption that the male is the normal type of his species’’ (122), she contended that for all their ‘‘modern scientific reasoning’’ these so-called ‘‘eminent thinkers’’ had merely grounded themselves ‘‘anew upon the moss-grown foundations of ancient dogma’’ (231). Blackwell herself did not use the word feminist to describe her intervention into Darwinian science (though the word was slowly coming into parlance at the time). Her study of sex in nature, however, can broadly be understood to develop a feminist approach to science in its commitment to showing how assumptions about what scholars today call ‘‘gender’’ influence how experiments are conducted, which data is analyzed, and thus what conclusions are drawn and advocating for the development of a more egalitarian science. The Sexes throughout Nature did more than serve to correct the male bias of nineteenthcentury science; it also opened the door for future women and feminist scientists to conduct research into the role of sex and gender in the natural world. That women often lacked the formal training to contribute to scientific debates, Blackwell argued, should not prevent them from drawing from their experience to contribute to scientific knowledge production. ‘‘There are none but beginners among us in this class of investigations,’’ Blackwell admitted. GENDER: MATTER

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‘‘However great the disadvantages under which we are placed,’’ she continued, ‘‘these will never be lessened by waiting’’ (1875, 22). Calling upon women to make use of the resources they had, rather than wait for society to change in their favor, Blackwell encouraged women to bring their own knowledge to the study of biology. ‘‘Woman herself must speak hereafter, or forever hold . . . her peace,’’ she wrote. ‘‘She must consent to put in evidence the results of her own experience, and to develop the scientific basis of her differing conclusions’’ (234 235). TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE

What did Darwin himself think of the efforts of women scientists to improve evolutionary science by advocating for more attention to the female experience? In the online documentary Darwin’s Women (2013), produced as part of the Darwin Correspondence Project at the University of Cambridge, historian of science Philippa Hardman proposes that Darwin’s personal letters reveal a more complex picture of his relationship to women than that found in his published works. Consider the case of the British Victorian suffragette and biologist Lydia Becker (1827 1890), a prominent activist in the women’s movement with whom Darwin corresponded in the 1860s. Darwin could not have been unaware of Becker’s feminist reputation when she wrote him to inquire whether she might distribute one of his publications to her organization, the Manchester Ladies’ Literary Society. Despite having published critical views on ‘‘the woman question,’’ Darwin responded to Becker positively, supplying her, as Hardman observes in her blog post ‘‘Darwin, Becker & Sexual Equality’’ (2011), with ‘‘not one but three papers to be read at the ladies’ inaugural meeting.’’ Such instances of Darwin’s support of women in science suggest that, although Darwin publically critiqued the women’s movement, his published writings should not be interpreted as the untainted expression of his personal views. Whether Darwin felt pressure to conform to Victorian presumptions about women’s role in society or genuinely believed that women were less evolved than men, we cannot know. What we do know, however, is that Darwin’s female contemporaries from fellow scientists to political activists and novelists often turned to his work as a resource for contesting the subordinate role of women in Victorian society. As feminist historians and science studies scholars such as Gillian Beer ([1983] 2009), Stacy Alaimo (2000), Kimberly Hamlin (2014), and Abigail Mann (2011) have demonstrated, turn-of-the-twentiethcentury feminist novelists, activists, and intellectuals sometimes looked to Darwin in order to demonstrate woman’s intellectual equality with or even sometimes their superiority to man’s. Consider, as an additional example, American women’s rights activist Eliza Burt Gamble (1841 1920), who went so far as to claim that woman is actually more highly evolved than man. Developing her own interpretation of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, in The Evolution of Woman: An Inquiry into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man (1893), Gamble claimed that Darwin’s observations of animals showed that males were driven in their decision-making by sexual desire. Females, on the other hand, were more intellectually motivated and thus capable of greater thought and restraint. Whereas Gamble insisted on the superiority of women to men, others looked to Darwin to make the case that men and women were different but equal. Drawing on the work of biologists whom she had studied in her degree course at Columbia University, American intellectual and activist Helen Hamilton Gardener (born

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Alice Chenoweth, 1823 1925) set out to challenge the assumption widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that women’s brains are physically smaller and thus inherently inferior to those of men. In an article published in Popular Science Monthly, Gardener contested the erroneous claims of American neurologist William A. Hammond (1828 1900), an influential voice in the turn-of-the-century debates about brain size. Gardener disputed Hammond’s claim that, as he had put it in ‘‘Woman in Politics’’ (1883), ‘‘grave anatomical and physiological reasons demand . . . that the progress of [the women’s rights movement] be arrested’’ (138), arguing that if there was a difference between the male and female brain, it was less the result of ‘‘natural and necessary sex differences’’ than ‘‘difference of opportunity and environment’’ (1895, 107). Gardener’s ultimate testament to gender equality, however, lay in her posthumous donation of her own brain to the Burt Wilder Brain Collection at Cornell University an act Hamlin has described as ‘‘the most dramatic example of women using their bodies and their physical experiences to create a more accurate and inclusive biology of sex difference’’ (2014, 60). Gardener hoped that the comparison of her brain with those of men would prove once and for all that there existed no essential biological difference between men’s and women’s brains. She was by and large successful: an article published in the New York Times two years after her death with the headline ‘‘Woman’s Brain Not Inferior to Men’s’’ declared that Gardener’s brain donation had ‘‘posthumously substantiated her life-long contention that, given the same environment, women’s brains are equal of man’s’’ (1927, 1). Why did women’s rights activists like Gardener and Gamble follow in Blackwell’s footsteps in trusting in science as an ally when it was so often used against them? Blackwell expressed great faith in science to reveal the truth of equality when she wrote in The Sexes throughout Nature that ‘‘it is to the most rigid scientific methods of investigation that we must undoubtedly look for a final and authoritative decision as to women’s legitimate nature and functions’’ (1875, 231). Encouraging scientists to study ‘‘the feminine constitution’’ more carefully and in more detail, she maintained that further research into female physiology would reveal that feminine traits were not inferior to those of man but simply different in nature (231). In her book Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (1991), American historian Cynthia Eagle Russett (1937 2013) proposed that nineteenth-century feminists felt compelled to take up scientific discourse given the ‘‘enormous prestige of science and the universal acceptance of its authoritative status in matters of sex difference’’ (13). Where Russett characterized nineteenth-century women’s use of scientific discourse as a power play, that is, invoked solely for the authority it held in Victorian society, others have made the case that so many women have looked to Darwin to advocate for equality because of the potential of his theory of evolution for rethinking sexual difference. As Alaimo has argued in Undomesticated Ground (2000), ‘‘although Darwin and many of his followers . . . used evolution to assert the natural origin of what we call gender, his story of human descent nonetheless [has allowed] feminists to diminish the significance of sexual difference in the distant past and in the perhaps not-so-distant future’’ (41). Indeed, as is demonstrated in the following section, Darwin’s insistence in The Descent of Man that secondary sex characteristics were historically and environmentally determined called into question the commonplace understanding of sex as a fixed and unchanging dichotomy, paving the way for biologists to advocate for an understanding of sex as a biological process rather than a biological essence. GENDER: MATTER

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UNDOING SEXUAL DIFFERENCE: FEMINISM AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND TODAY With the introduction of the concept of gender in the late twentieth century, feminist theory distanced itself from the biologically grounded theories of sex that had dominated the nineteenth century. Extending the famous claim made in The Second Sex (1949) by French social theorist and feminist Simone de Beauvoir (1908 1986) that ‘‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,’’ feminists of the 1960s to 1990s contested the understanding of sex as a rigid and stable biological phenomenon, emphasizing instead the socially constructed nature of sexual subjectivity. One of the most impactful arguments for the fluid nature of gender emerges in American philosopher Judith Butler’s (1956 ) famous study Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), in which she reasons that what appears to be a biologically given binary is actually a dynamic set of social behaviors that, taken together, produce the appearance of a rigid or stable sex. ‘‘Gender,’’ she writes there, ‘‘is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, a natural sort of being’’ (2006, 33). According to Butler and her followers, although sex appears as a material and biological fact, its very appearance as such is an effect of power produced through the everyday performance of gender. Profound as these critiques of the biological nature of sex have been, it is important not to impose a contemporary understanding of the sex/gender distinction onto earlier feminisms. Simply because nineteenth-century feminists used the word sex and understood the phenomenon to be fundamentally biological does not mean that they perceived sex as a fixed or unchanging category. On the contrary, engaged with Darwin’s evolutionary framework, many came to understand sex as both material and plastic that is, transformable or open to change. At the heart of Darwinian feminist critiques of sexual binarism was the notion that sex, while it is material, is a historically contingent and environmentally determined phenomenon. The temporal and environmentally responsive framework Darwin cultivated for understanding sex has been mobilized by feminists from the nineteenth until the twenty-first century to demonstrate that the seemingly fundamental biological difference between ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ is not as rigid as presumed and thus to critique the notion of sexual binarism from the perspective of evolutionary theory. The following sections address the extent to which biologists have looked to Darwin in order to argue for an understanding of sex as historically contingent and environmentally determined. THE DESCENT OF MAN AND THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF SEX

In 1871 Darwin shocked readers by proposing that all life had evolved from a common ancestor, a single-celled hermaphroditic organism that was the ‘‘progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom’’ ([1871] 2004, 189). While in On the Origin of Species he had speculated that ‘‘probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed’’ ([1859] 1999, 472), in The Descent of Man Darwin further developed this thesis by proposing that this primordial form must have been hermaphroditic and single-celled. Over time, he contended, the two sexes had emerged to multiply the possible variations that offspring could inherit a development that had allowed for the evolution of higher animals. The theory that sexual dimorphism itself had a limited history opened up the notion of sexual binarism to radical critique. ‘‘Darwin’s suggestion that all organic life had descended from a single-celled hermaphroditic

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organism,’’ Hamlin explains, ‘‘troubled some men and women raised on the doctrine of separate spheres and the related idea that, physiologically, women were entirely distinct from men. To others, however, the possibility of a hermaphroditic past sounded exciting and opened up a new world of gendered possibilities’’ (2014, 33). The theory that the two sexes had evolved over time allowed early evolutionary biologists to imagine a future in which not only social and behavioral but also physical differences between the sexes might transform or even disappear entirely. The very materiality of sex, some reasoned, was not fixed and stable but rather contingent upon historical and environmental factors. In his study of biological sexual difference, Differences in the Nervous Organization of Man and Woman (1891), the British physician Harry Campbell, to give one example, used Darwin’s theory of sexual selection to argue that what appeared to be a rigid distinction between male and female was actually ‘‘highly variable’’ (47). Woman, Campbell wrote, is ‘‘not what she is, and man not what he is, simply because the one has ovaries and a uterus, and the other testicles’’ (46 47). Thus it was entirely possible, as he put it, that ‘‘all the secondary sexual characters in man and woman might be transposed that strength, courage, and fire of the man might be transferred to the woman; the weakness and timidity of the woman, to the man’’ (47). In The Descent of Man Darwin himself stressed the contingent nature of all secondary sex characteristics. While man was at present smarter and stronger than woman, he suggested, this may not always have been the case: ‘‘The greater intellectual vigour and power of invention in man,’’ Darwin wrote, ‘‘is probably due to natural selection combined with the inherited effects of habit’’ ([1871] 2004, 674). Readers like Campbell interpreted such remarks to suggest that the two sexes could eventually evolve to exhibit entirely different traits men might become more feminine and women more masculine. While Campbell himself was far from a feminist, his interest in Darwin’s theory of sexual selection led him to affirm the inherent contingency of biological sex. If the qualities that have come to characterize men and women were ‘‘not absolutely and inevitably necessary,’’ he reasoned, then ‘‘matters might have been otherwise’’ (1891, 46). The thesis that secondary sexual characteristics were contingent upon environmental factors, however, would take on an explicitly feminist tenor in the work of Havelock Ellis (1859 1939), an English physician and sexologist who was ‘‘one of the most authoritative spokesmen in the feminist cause’’ (Alaya 1977, 272). Like Blackwell before him, Ellis contested the theory, prevalent in nineteenth-century scientific circles, that women were less developed than men. ‘‘To assume, as Herbert Spencer and many others have assumed,’’ Ellis stated in his study of sexual difference, Man and Woman: A Study of Secondary Sexual Characters (1894), that ‘‘woman is ‘undeveloped man,’ is to state the matter in an altogether misleading manner. . . . [Such a theory] is only true in the same sense as it is to state that man is undeveloped woman; in each sex there are undeveloped organs and functions which in the other sex are developed’’ (445). Man and Woman sold out of its first edition in 1894. Highly influential for turn-of-the-century discussions of sex, the book set out to investigate ‘‘how far sexual differences are artificial, the result of tradition and environment, and how far they are really rooted in the actual constitution of the male and female organisms’’ (vii viii). If there was an essential difference between male and female, Ellis proposed, then it was impossible to discern. He concluded his study with the suggestion that there exist no ‘‘radical and essential characters of men and women uninfluenced by external modifying conditions’’ (440). By this, Ellis meant that the seemingly stable phenomenon of sex could not be considered separately from the dynamic material forces that produce it over time. GENDER: MATTER

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Man and Woman proposed that sex roles were influenced by a host of external factors, such as cultural practices, beauty ideals, and climate. In so doing, the book lent credence to the view, increasingly prevalent in turn-of-the-twentieth-century feminist circles, that sex is environmentally determined. ‘‘Interest in the environmental determination of sexuality,’’ the historian of science Ornella Moscucci explains, ‘‘represents a prominent theme in the nineteenth-century debate on sex differences. Throughout the century it was widely assumed that sex characteristics like many other physiological property [sic] of individuals, constantly interacted with a number of different external factors, such as geographical conditions, custom, and mode of government’’ (1991, 184). ‘‘Although in The Descent of Man Darwin appeared to sanction the separation of men and women into distinct spheres of aptitude and ability,’’ Moscucci continues, ‘‘his insistence that sex differences were due to the action of the environment rather than of the reproductive organs had radical implications for theories of sexual division’’ (184). One of the most significant implications of Darwin’s understanding of biological sex was that, while sex was no doubt material, as one’s environment changed, the very matter of the body could change. It was thus no great leap for turn-of-the-century feminists to argue that what was perceived to be ‘‘women’s nature’’ might transform entirely if women were provided with different resources. That sex is highly dependent on environmental factors, turn-of-thecentury scientists from Campbell to Ellis claimed, rendered it difficult to speak with certainty about the inherent ‘‘nature’’ of femininity or masculinity. Inspired by Darwin, they identified a structural indeterminacy at the heart of sex, paving the way for more recent work in biology and ecology on the environmental determination of sexual difference. PLASTICITY THEORY AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CONTINGENCY OF SEX

The suggestion that sex is environmentally determined has gained traction in recent years among evolutionary biologists working to challenge the gene-centric view of sex in favor of a view of sex as phenotypically plastic. In the biological sciences, the term plasticity has been taken up to describe the openness of bodies to change in response to environmental shifts (see, for example, Pigliucci, Murren, and Schlichting 2006; Schlichting and Pigliucci 1998). Likewise, the word phenotype is used to distinguish between the observable characteristics and behaviors of an organism and those that are inherited genetically (its genotype). To understand sex as plastic means to acknowledge that while sex is no doubt genetically mediated, the phenotypic expression of sex transforms in response to environmental factors. While Darwin did not invoke the term plasticity himself, he can be understood to have advocated for a conception of sex as plastic by emphasizing the responsiveness of sex, among other characteristics, to outside stimuli. Such a view has been further developed by contemporary feminist evolutionary biologists who draw on Darwin’s work in order to understand the role of the environment in the production of sex (see, in addition to those discussed, Wood and Eagly 2012). One prominent example can be found in the work of feminist biologist Malin Ah-King. In her collaborations with the zoologist So¨ren Nylin and the trans theorist Eva Hayward, Ah-King has advocated for an understanding of sex as what in genetics and ecology is known as a ‘‘reaction norm,’’ that is, as a genetically mediated response to environmental change. In their coauthored article ‘‘Sex in an Evolutionary Perspective: Just Another Reaction Norm’’ (2010), Ah-King and Nylin define a reaction norm as ‘‘the range of phenotypic expressions that one genotype can give rise to, in response to different environmental conditions’’ (237). As they point out, although sex is encoded in the genotype, the range

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of expressions of each genotype is dependent on a host of nongenetic factors, such as the developmental process of the organism and environmental input. Building on Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and the work of American feminist evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden (1946 ) in Evolution’s Rainbow (2005), as well as other theorists, the authors ‘‘argue against the norm of dichotomous sexes,’’ proposing that ‘‘there is not only flexibility in the proximate causation of sexes but also in ultimate causation of sexes, as selection pressures change over evolutionary time’’ (2010, 235). Within an evolutionary framework, they maintain that ‘‘sex, just like any other character, can evolve and be selected upon’’ (236). In her article ‘‘Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption’’ (2014), coauthored with Eva Hayward, Ah-King further develops this argument through the case of endocrine pollution, or the introduction of artificially produced hormones into bodies of water. Various species, the authors begin by noticing, ‘‘have environmental sex determination, in which temperature, pH, or social environment (dominance hierarchies, sex ratio of group, sex of potential partner) influence an individual’s sex’’ (6). In the case of endocrine pollution, hormones are often seen to affect the sexual morphologic characteristics and reproduction of aquatic organisms. While endocrine disruption is frequently cited in articles intending to demonstrate the negative effects of pollution, Ah-King and Hayward cite these studies toward a different end, showing how the case of endocrine disruption as it operates across both nonhuman and human worlds signals the fundamental plasticity of sex. ‘‘Instead of thinking of sex as a nature-given dichotomy, or essentially discrete characteristic,’’ they propose, ‘‘sex is better understood as a responsive potential, changing over an individual’s lifetime, in interaction with environmental factors, as well as over evolutionary time’’ (2014, 6). The work of Ah-King and her collaborators builds on the important work of earlier generations of feminist evolutionary biologists who fought to challenge the gene-centric view of sex from a Darwinian perspective. The next section looks at how feminists of the 1980s and 1990s challenged the genetic determinism of traditional evolutionary biology, developing more culturally attuned accounts of human sexual expression.

BETWEEN NATURE AND CULTURE: DARWINIAN SCIENCE AND TURN-OF-THE-TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY FEMINISMS To what extent do the principles of natural and sexual selection limit or inform human behavior, traditions, and norms? Are Darwin’s theories at all relevant to the study of gender or only its biological counterpart, sex? Do nature and culture operate on two separate planes, or are they intertwined? Late twentieth-century feminist scientists and cultural critics rigorously debated these controversial questions, reassessing the potential applicability of Darwinism for feminism and feminism for Darwinism. At the heart of these turn-of-the-twenty-first-century scientific and political debates is the controversial argument, put forth by American biologist Edward O. Wilson (1929 ) in his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis ([1976] 2000), that all animal behavior, including that of humans, could be explained with reference to evolutionary laws. Wilson’s sociobiological thesis that gender roles are the result of genetically programmed, survival-driven functions lent credence to the already pervasive assumption that gender is not a cultural construct but a biologically and materially determined phenomenon. Feminist theorists working in fields as various as biology, history, and cultural theory banded together in GENDER: MATTER

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order to undercut the biological essentialism of sociobiology and its contemporary heir, evolutionary psychology. Their strategies for doing so were diverse, and their approaches varied greatly. While some dismissed evolutionary theory, and the sciences more broadly, as essentialist and sexist (see, for example, Hubbard 1979), others took to the lab or the field to develop better and more culturally attuned scientific research practices. FEMINIST EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY AND THE CHALLENGE TO GENETIC DETERMINISM

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1990s feminist evolutionary biologists such as Americans Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (1946 ), Patricia Adair Gowaty, Linda Fedigan (1949 ), and Barbara Smuts set out to address what they felt to be the androcentric bias of the field. Contesting dominant assumptions about the role of women and female organisms in nature, these primatologists, anthropologists, and sociobiologists worked to open up evolutionary biology to less binary and essentialist understandings of sex by showing how interactions between genes and environments affect the expression of an organism’s phenotype. The aims of these scientists were diverse and their achievements widespread. In arguing for a more environmentally attuned biology, however, they sought to undermine genetically determinist approaches to sex that fueled assumptions about women’s natural inferiority. In her introduction to Feminism and Evolutionary Biology: Boundaries, Intersections, and Frontiers (1997), which grew out of the controversial symposium ‘‘Evolutionary Biology and Feminism’’ at the University of Georgia’s Institute of Ecology, Gowaty proposes that, while their approaches may differ, ‘‘Darwinian Feminists’’ are unified in their contestation of the traditional view of natural selection as functioning only through the inheritance of genes. While ‘‘most modern readers assume this mechanism [of heredity] is genetic,’’ Gowaty explains, Darwinian feminists have demonstrated that ‘‘phenotypic expression is determined not by genes alone but by the interactions of genes with their environments’’ (11). In her important study Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (1999), for example, Hrdy shows how mothers in the natural world ensure the survival of their offspring not only through behaviors traditionally conceived of as maternal, such as devotion or selflessness, but also through the more seemingly masculine qualities of ambition and entrepreneurialism. Building on the work of American theoretical biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard (1941 ), who showed that phenotypical changes throughout the course of an organism’s development play an important role in evolution, Hrdy argues that ‘‘gender is merely a potential’’ that depends on the kind of care an organism receives (1999, 59). In highlighting the difficulty of determining the nature of masculine and feminine behavior beyond environmental influence, Hrdy and others thus undermine what the editors of Evolution’s Empress: Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women (2013) describe as ‘‘Man the Hunter’’ of traditional evolutionary biology, a theory that considers men active and aggressive and women passive and nurturing (Fisher, Garcia, and Chang 2013b, 4). Feminist evolutionary biologists at the turn of the century thus aimed to dispel the myth of women’s natural inferiority by seeking both to minimize gender biases and to develop research practices more carefully attuned to female behavior strategies that led American feminist science studies scholar Anne Fausto-Sterling (1944 ) to describe this group of Darwinian feminists as ‘‘Blackwell’s modern heirs’’ (1997, 50). Not all Darwinian feminists of this generation agreed that the best way to intervene in scientific practice was to stage experiments and conduct empirical studies. While some paved the way for the development of more objective and less androcentric research practices, for others the aim was less to

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improve science than to critically examine its practices, aspirations, and assumptions. Working beyond the natural and physical sciences in the realms of philosophy, history, and cultural studies, the feminist scholars examined in the next section sought to develop a more humanistic framework for grasping the insights and limits of scientific knowledge production. FEMINIST SCIENCE STUDIES AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE

Around the same time that scientists like Hrdy, Gowaty, Fedigan, and Smuts were developing an evolutionary biology more attuned to feminist concerns, philosophers and historians of science such as Americans Evelyn Fox Keller (1936 ), Sandra Harding (1935 ), Anne Fausto-Sterling, Donna Haraway (1944 ), and Austrian-born Ruth Hubbard (1924 2016) were launching a feminist critique of evolutionary biology grounded in linguistic and cultural analysis. In conversation with the work of their more empirically minded contemporaries, the latter group of feminist critics aspired to show how scientific practice, in its aspiration to objectivity, obscured the gendered power relations at work in the very production of knowledge. One should not overstate the differences between these contemporaneous movements to rethink evolutionary discourse from a feminist perspective; many of these critics were not only in conversation but directly collaborated with one another. However, for the purposes of this chapter, it is useful to highlight their differences in methodology and approach: where the Darwinian feminists discussed in the previous section can be understood broadly to desire the improvement of evolutionary science by identifying and correcting its gendered assumptions, the thinkers highlighted in this section channeled their energy instead into developing more conceptual and theoretical frameworks for understanding how subjectivity, life, and knowledge are produced through entanglements of biology and history. In response to the claims of sociobiologists that evolutionary theory can explain the distinctions between male and female behavior, Fausto-Sterling, along with other feminist critics of her generation, reasoned that scientific practice is bound up with power relations that render it impossible to reveal any form of objective truth. In one of her most well-known articles, ‘‘The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough’’ (1993), Fausto-Sterling proposes that, in its usage of the biological designations ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female,’’ scientific discourse has relied on an outmoded understanding of sex as a nature-given binary. Revealing the long history of intersexuality and showing how cases of nonbinary sex despite their pervasiveness are treated as exceptions or oddities, she shows how cultural assumptions about the two sexes have obfuscated the true variety of human sexual expression. ‘‘Biologically speaking,’’ she contends, highlighting the difficulty of knowing the true and untainted nature of sex, ‘‘there are many gradations running from female to male; depending on how one calls the shots, one can argue that along that spectrum lie at least five sexes and perhaps even more’’ (1993, 21). Fausto-Sterling’s work responds to that of historians of evolutionary science such as Evelyn Fox Keller, who demonstrated how ideology shapes scientific practice through linguistic and cultural conventions. In her essay ‘‘Language and Ideology in Evolutionary Theory’’ (1991), Keller shows how the ideology of competitive individualism informs the discourse of population genetics and mathematical ecology, two subfields of evolutionary biology. The emphasis on individualism in these fields, Keller maintains, has led evolutionary biologists to overlook the extent to which organisms cooperate. In accounts of GENDER: MATTER

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reproduction, to give one example, the importance of sexual difference and collaboration is downplayed as scientists reference reproduction as if it were something that just happened or is undertaken individually. ‘‘The linguistic conventions of individual reproduction,’’ Keller proposes, ‘‘ conventions embodying an ideological commitment to the a priori autonomy of the individual both perpetuate that belief and promote its incorporation into the theory of evolutionary dynamics’’ (1991, 99). While the empirical scientists discussed in the previous section remained hopeful that increased attention to female perspectives and behavior could correct biases long central to evolutionary science, the cultural theorists and historians discussed in this section thus held, quite differently, that evolutionary discourse was so imbedded in social and cultural norms about progress, individualism, and masculine forms of knowledge that ‘‘objectivity,’’ as it has previously been conceived, was impossible. In highlighting the epistemological limits of any attempt to know the world, however, critics like Fausto-Sterling and Keller did not mean to suggest that scientific inquiry was futile. Far from it they hoped their work would inspire a more self-reflexive science, a science aware of its implication in networks of belief, value, and norms. ELIZABETH GROSZ AND THE ONTOLOGICAL INDETERMINACY OF LIFE

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1952 ) has shifted the conversation in feminist theory from its longtime emphasis on questions of epistemology (the study of how we know reality) toward questions of ontology (the study of the nature of reality). Where many of the Darwinian feminists analyzed so far have focused on the representation or analysis of gender in evolutionary biology, thus concerning themselves with the epistemological, Grosz instead uses Darwin to develop a theory of being an ontology compatible with the aims of feminism. One could thus summarize Grosz’s approach with the mantra ‘‘ask not what feminism can do for Darwinism but what Darwinism can do for feminism.’’ Throughout her work, which spans the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and science studies, Grosz approaches Darwin not only as a scientist whose findings apply to the study of biology but also as a thinker whose work can inform social and cultural phenomena such as gender, art, and politics. In Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (2011), Grosz proposes that ‘‘some of the most serious problems facing feminist thought . . . may be more directly addressed if we take seriously Darwin’s writings, writings that are not adequately understood without philosophical as well as biological concepts’’ (116). Darwinian feminists up to this point, Grosz claims, have operated on the false assumption that the political and the biological inhabit separate realms. To reduce Darwinism to a description of the world as it is and feminism to a theory of what should be done, Grosz proposes, is to underestimate the potential of both projects. In her essay ‘‘Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance’’ ([1999] 2008), Grosz criticizes Gowaty (discussed in the section ‘‘Feminist Evolutionary Biology and the Challenge to Genetic Determinism’’) for presenting Darwinism as a biological science concerned merely with describing the causal operations of the natural world and feminism, by contrast, as the political attempt to establish equality between the sexes. ‘‘In attributing to [Darwinism] a neutral, noninfecting position vis-a`-vis political, psychological, and cultural theory,’’ Grosz writes, Gowaty ‘‘has effectively secured Darwinism against its own most radical insights (a fundamental indetermination seems one of the most exciting elements of Darwin’s contributions to both science and politics), and has insulated feminism against any theoretical impact on, and protects feminism from being transformed by, Darwinism’’ (2008, 32). The

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concept of ‘‘indetermination’’ is central to Grosz’s philosophical project, which extracts from Darwin’s theory of evolution a feminist-materialist theory of life. According to Darwin’s theory of evolution, life is not governed by a fixed or predetermined set of causal laws but is instead shaped by two open-ended materialist principles those of natural selection and of sexual selection. Through the interaction of these two principles, differences are introduced into species over time, ensuring that life remains in a constant state of transformation. In her companion books on the philosophy of time, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (2004) and Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (2005), Grosz shows how Darwin’s insistence on the temporal quality of nature (that nature never is but always becomes) forecloses the possibility of an appeal to ‘‘nature’’ as a fixed essence an appeal that drives many biologically essentialist approaches to identity. For Darwin, Grosz points out, time is relentlessly forward moving and yet nonteleological; species emerge from other species, but the exact form that each new species will take cannot be known in advance. Against progressivist or goal-driven theories of evolution, such as those forwarded by many contemporaries of Darwin (among them, Herbert Spencer), Darwin insists that all life, human and nonhuman, is fundamentally indeterminate; that is, one cannot speak of a creature’s essential being until it comes into being; even then, being is always open to change. As discussed above, various feminist thinkers have turned to Darwin (and, in particular, to his theory that sexual difference is historically and environmentally contingent) in order to argue that the categories of ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ are neither natural nor inevitable. Grosz, quite differently, stresses instead the significance of sexual dimorphism to Darwin’s system. The motor of variation and diversity, sexual difference, Grosz points out, is the condition for the possibility of all other differences, as reproduction between sexually differentiated organisms allows for the introduction of new genetic material, while asexual reproduction does not. Scholars working in queer and trans studies, however, have pointed to the limitations of Grosz’s focus on the duality of sex, highlighting the plurality of sexual differences that make up human and nonhuman life. In her article ‘‘Spider City Sex’’ (2010), for example, Hayward critiques Grosz and augments Grosz’s account of the materiality of sex by proposing that the experience of transitioning sex (for example, from male to female) demonstrates that sex is always a temporally and environmentally conditioned process. ‘‘Though differently refracted through speciated milieus,’’ Hayward writes, ‘‘sex changing can be accounted for by the organism’s reading of changes in the environment’’ (2010, 235). In her recent work, however, Grosz has developed a more nuanced account of sexual difference and differentiation. In Becoming Undone (2011), for example, she remarks that, for Darwin, sex consists in far more than the binary distinction between male and female: ‘‘Darwin spends literally hundreds of pages addressing the very different forms of sexual difference observable in animal and plant species: they cannot be adequately addressed in terms of only two’’ (122). In her discussions of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, moreover, she highlights the important role that excessive and nonreproductive traits play in the evolution of species. Against the dominant trend in evolutionary biology, in which fitness and survival are positioned as the only goal of evolution, Grosz suggests that, for Darwin, sexual selection introduces a component of aesthetic inutility that works to complicate (and sometimes even works against) the force of natural selection by producing variations that do not at least not always result in the production of offspring better fit to survive. Think here of the bright blue feathers of the peacock, which do nothing to enable the survival of the species but are repeatedly selected by the female peahen. The principle of sexual selection thus, Grosz reasons, is ‘‘the condition for the production of biological and cultural GENDER: MATTER

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extravagance, the uncontainable production of intensification, not for the sake of skills of survival but simply because of its force of bodily intensification, its capacity to arouse pleasure or ‘desire’, in the capacity to generate sensation’’ (2011, 118). Darwin, Grosz contends, can help feminists understand the central role that emotion, art, and desire play in nature. Her work has been widely influential for materialist feminists seeking to explain the important role that matter and the body play in the production of cultural, social, and sexual difference.

Summary In approaching human beings as a part of nature, Darwin brought human traditions and norms under the critical gaze of natural science. While in On the Origin of Species Darwin merely alluded to the question of human evolution, claiming that ‘‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’’ ([1859] 1999, 477), in The Descent of Man he made good on this promise, proposing that human life, too, was subject to evolutionary laws. In demonstrating that the human was a material being like any other, Darwin opened the door to speculation about the biological limits and potential of the human compared with other nonhuman species. To what extent human social phenomena such as gender or sexuality are determined by natural-scientific principles, however, has long been and continues to be a subject of much debate. While some of Darwin’s early readers (e.g., Blackwell, Gardener, and Ellis) invoked the theory of evolution to contest claims about women’s proper role in society, gendered biases in scientific research, and the nature of sex itself, various feminist scholars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (e.g., Hubbard, Fausto-Sterling, and Gowaty) have highlighted the risks and challenges of applying evolutionary theory, and science more broadly, to the study of culture. Still other feminist theorists and scientists (e.g., Grosz, Ah-King, and Hayward), however, have shown how Darwin’s understanding of matter as a fundamentally indeterminate phenomenon points to the difficulty of ascribing a fixed essence or meaning to sex, gender, or sexuality. Darwin has no doubt provided feminists with a dynamic and nonteleological framework for understanding the material world. From Blackwell to Grosz, however, feminists have also significantly contributed to the transformation of Darwin’s system, providing new insights, evidence, and interpretative rubrics for understanding the relationship between matter and mind, nature and culture, history and biology.

Bibliography Ah King, Malin, and Eva Hayward. ‘‘Toxic Sexes: Pervert ing Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption.’’ O Zone: A Journal of Object Oriented Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 1 12. Ah King, Malin, and Soren Nylin. ‘‘Sex in an Evolutionary Perspective: Just Another Reaction Norm.’’ Evolutionary Biology 37, no. 4 (2010): 234 246. doi:10.1007/s11692 010 9101 8.

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Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Dar win, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction, 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. First published 1983.

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Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subver sion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. First pub lished 1990. Campbell, Harry. Differences in the Nervous Organisation of Man and Woman: Physiological and Pathological. London: H. K. Lewis, 1891. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man. Edited by James Moore and Adrian Desmond. New York: Penguin, 2004. First published 1871. Darwin, Charles. Letter to Antoinette Louisa Brown Black well. 8 November [1869]. Darwin Correspondence Proj ect. 2016. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId =letters/DCP LETT 6976.xml;query=blackwell;brand= default. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. New York: Bantam, 1999. First published 1859. Ellis, Havelock. Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secon dary Sexual Characters. London: Walter Scott Publishing, 1893. Fausto Sterling, Anne. ‘‘Feminism and Behavioral Evolution: A Taxonomy.’’ In Feminism and Evolutionary Biology: Boundaries, Intersections, and Frontiers, edited by Patricia Adair Gowaty, 42 60. New York: Chapman & Hall, 1997. Fausto Sterling, Anne. ‘‘The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough.’’ Sciences (March/April 1993): 20 25. Fisher, Maryanne L., Justin R. Garcia, and Rosemarie Sokol Chang, eds. Evolution’s Empress: Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013a. Fisher, Maryanne L., Rosemarie Sokol Chang, and Justin R. Garcia. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Evolution’s Empress: Darwin ian Perspectives on the Nature of Women, edited by Maryanne Fisher, Justin R. Garcia, and Rosemarie Sokol Chang, 1 16. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gamble, Eliza Burt. The Evolution of Woman: An Inquiry into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893. Gardener, Helen Hamilton. ‘‘Sex in Brain.’’ In Facts and Fictions of Life. Chicago: Charles H. Carr, 1893.

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Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘‘Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Inves tigations for a Possible Alliance.’’ In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo, Susan Hekman, and Elizabeth Grosz, 23 51. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. First published 1999. Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Hamlin, Kimberly A. From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Hammond, William A. ‘‘Woman in Politics.’’ North Ameri can Review 137, no. 321 (August 1883): 137 147. Hardman, Philippa. ‘‘Darwin, Becker & Sexual Equality.’’ Darwin and Gender: The Blog. July 8, 2011. https:// darwinandgender.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/darwin becker sexual equality/. Hayward, Eva. ‘‘Spider City Sex.’’ Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20, no. 3 (2010): 225 251. Hayward, Eva. ‘‘Transxenoestrogenesis.’’ TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1 2 (2014): 255 258. Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species. New York: Ballan tine, 1999. Hubbard, Ruth. ‘‘Have Only Men Evolved?’’ In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphy sics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, edited by Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, 45 69. Dor drecht: Springer Netherlands, 1979. Keller, Evelyn Fox. ‘‘Language and Ideology in Evolutionary Theory: Reading Cultural Norms into Natural Law.’’ In The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines,

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edited by James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna, 85 102. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Mann, Abigail Elizabeth. ‘‘Darwin’s Sisters: Darwinian Cat alysts in Late Nineteenth Century Feminism.’’ PhD diss. Indiana University, Bloomington, 2011. Moscucci, Ornella. ‘‘Hermaphroditism and Sex Difference: The Construction of Gender in Victorian England.’’ In Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry, 1780 1945, edited by Marina Benjamin, 174 199. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991. Pigliucci, Massimo, Courtney J. Murren, and Carl D. Schlichting. ‘‘Phenotypic Plasticity and Evolution by Genetic Assimilation.’’ Journal of Experimental Biology 209, no. 12 (2006): 2362 2367. Roughgarden, Joan. Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gen der, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Berkeley: Uni versity of California Press, 2005. Russett, Cynthia Eagle. Sexual Science: The Victorian Con struction of Womanhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni versity Press, 1991. Schlichting, Carl D., and Massimo Pigliucci. Phenotypic Evolution: A Reaction Norm Perspective. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1998.

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Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. 25th anniversary edition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. First published 1976. ‘‘Woman’s Brain Not Inferior to Men’s.’’ New York Times, September 29, 1927. Wood, Wendy, and Alice H. Eagly. ‘‘Biosocial Construction of Sex Differences and Similarities in Behavior.’’ In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 46, edited by James M. Olson and Mark P. Zanna, 55 123. Oxford, UK: Elsevier, 2012. FI L M Darwin’s Women. Darwin Correspondence Project, Cam bridge University. 2013. This short film, produced by historians at Cambridge University, explores Darwin’s relationship to women writers, activists, and scientists of the nineteenth century. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=9qZxa3WjZQg. WEBSITES Darwin and Gender: The Blog. https://darwinandgender .wordpress.com. Darwin Correspondence Project. http://darwin production .lib.cam.ac.uk/.

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CHAPTER 3

Medieval Genders Jacqueline A. Fay Associate Professor, Department of English University of Texas at Arlington

Although the terms gender and matter were not yet part of her version of English, the body of an early medieval woman, squatting by the hearth in seventh- or eighth-century England to make food or grind grain, nevertheless manifested the materiality of gender. Because so many femaledesignated activities required assuming this position close to the ground, women’s ankles developed ‘‘squatting facets,’’ or smooth contact surfaces on the bones of the ankle that makes squatting more comfortable for the practitioner (Fleming 2009, 610 611; Boulle 2001). Analogous to Morton’s neuroma, metatarsalgia, and Haglund’s deformity, foot disorders that may be caused today by wearing high heels, the squatting facets of seventh- and eighthcentury women are a good example of the entanglements of material practices and social norms in the production of gendered individuals. In other words, attributing certain activities and the objects required to perform them to the feminine domain not only is a social and ideological concern but also results in material change in the bodies of the women using them, manifested in the squatting facets. For the individual woman working by the fire, in a culture without radiography or anatomical practices, such as dissection, such thoughts likely did not occur; instead, the small bone modification probably just reinforced her sense that it was ‘‘natural,’’ because it was more comfortable, for her to complete the tasks before her rather than those assigned to the men in her family or, vice versa, to have menfolk prepare food for her. This chapter examines a range of examples drawn from early medieval culture in which gender emerges in just this way as a product of interactions between ideas, texts, tools, movements, and bodies, what new materialist scholars call a material-discursive network (Barad 2007). The chapter concentrates on the Anglo-Saxon period in England, spanning roughly the mid-fifth to eleventh centuries, partly for the practical reason of limiting what would otherwise be an unwieldy time span and geographical range but also because this period is often left out of those scholarly examinations aiming to treat ‘‘medieval,’’ or ‘‘preEnlightenment’’ phenomena. Anglo-Saxon England, although it frequently seems not to ‘‘fit’’ conventional histories of gender, the body, or matter, repays analysis precisely because the period is less well known by general readers and can therefore pose surprising challenges to the assumptions of the contemporary reader and the medievalist alike. The chapter begins with the historical and religious background to the period, followed by a brief overview of what some previous scholars have written about gender and matter in Anglo-Saxon England and a discussion of what the Anglo-Saxons themselves might have predominantly understood by matter. It concludes with a set of examples drawn from Anglo-Saxon medical texts in order to demonstrate the entanglement of gender, matter, and sexual continence.

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READING GENDER IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND Much excellent scholarship has been dedicated to the topic of gender in Anglo-Saxon England, mostly concentrating on how male writers employ female bodies in their works to advance ideas about virginity, communal integrity, or religious identity more generally. In some ways, scholarship on gender in this field has observed the broad movements shaping feminism more generally, with what might be classified as a ‘‘first wave’’ of work in the 1980s dedicated to recovery and reexamination of female figures in literature given scant attention previously. Representative here would be Old English scholars Helen Damico’s Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (1984) and Christine Fell’s Women in Anglo-Saxon England (1987), both of which argue for women’s agency and relative equality during this period. Following this call for a reexamination of the roles of women were a number of illuminating historical and literary studies of queenship, such as medieval historian Pauline Stafford’s 1983 Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages and 1997 Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Political Power in EleventhCentury England and Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature scholar Stacy Klein’s Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature from 2006. In addition, important studies of female religious figures appeared, such as medieval and early modern European history scholar Stephanie Hollis’s Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church in 1998, along with a host of works on women saints, for example, American scholar of Anglo-Saxon studies Virginia Blanton’s 2007 Signs of Devotion: The Cult of Saint Æthelthryth in Medieval England. As British scholars of medieval literature Clare Lees and Gillian Overing explore in their groundbreaking 2001 study Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England, a particular problem of studying gender during this period is the absence of women from the written record, because almost no texts are definitively penned by women and much writing about women relies on conventional tropes. Concurrently, while a surfeit of material by men and about men exists from the period, masculinity has not always been an explicit topic of analysis, with the exception of such notable articles as, for example, British professor of medieval archaeology Dawn Hadley’s ‘‘Warriors, Heroes, and Companions: Negotiating Masculinity in Viking-Age England.’’ Hadley analyzes the construction of gender through funerary displays, or the deliberate arrangement of goods on and around a body for burial. The burgeoning field of bioarchaeology, in which bones and grave goods are studied in order to deduce information about the diet, illnesses, injuries, and practices of populations and individuals in the past, is thus an exciting avenue for the exploration of gender identities in Anglo-Saxon England. New understanding of the importance attached to materiality in Anglo-Saxon psychology also calls for a reexamination of the position and production of gender during the period. Anglo-Saxon culture is not sustained by the organizing binaries corporeal/incorporeal, mind/ body, thing/body, emotion/reason, or material/immaterial, but evinces instead a tripartite mind-body-soul complex in which both thought and emotion manifest in material terms (Lockett 2011). A number of questions in connection with matter and gender arise from this research. In the absence of such major organizing binaries as those mentioned, where is gender itself located? A layman’s understanding of gender in the medieval period might assume it to be organized by means of an opposition between masculine/feminine that maps onto these binary categories for example, gender is often understood to emerge in the persistent drawing of associations between women and the body/emotions, whereas men are linked with the brain/rational faculties. What would gender difference look/feel/be like within a system that does not devalue the body and matter in general by positioning both

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as entirely other to reason and the soul? How matter was treated that is, conceptualized, handled, consumed, or written about in Anglo-Saxon England would have had important consequences for the ways that gender was understood and lived.

RELIGIOUS MATTERS Because the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England were Christian, with the exception of those recently arrived Scandinavians who invaded and migrated to the country on and off from the late eighth to the eleventh centuries, the importance of religious texts, ideas, and practices cannot be underestimated when considering the materiality of gender during the period. This is especially true considering that all the surviving texts were written down by monks, for whom we might expect religious motivations to be paramount. That being said, literate monks are responsible for preserving a vast amount of material of ambiguously Christian content the Old English poem Beowulf is not even close to being the most notable example of this tendency and great diversity exists even within texts and practices that are recognizably religious or present themselves as such. In other words, as centuries of polemic and wars attest, religiosity does not mean that uncomplicated structures and ideas are available to and operational across all sectors of society, as a modern secular bias sometimes leads us to assume. In order to demonstrate this point, consider for a moment the treatment of gender in the Old English poem ‘‘Maxims II,’’ a laconic collection of aphorisms about the behavior of humans, animals, objects, weather, trees, and rivers. Representative of the poem’s overall structure are the following lines: Duru sceal on healle, rum recedes muð. Rand sceal on scylde, fæst fingra gebeorh. Fugel uppe sceal lacan on lyfte. Leax sceal on wæle mid sceote scriðan. Scur sceal on heofenum, winde geblanden, in þas woruld cuman. þeof sceal gangan þystrum wederum. þyrs sceal on fenne gewunian ana innan lande. Ides sceal dyrne cræfte, fæmne hire freond gesecean, gif heo nelle on folce geþeon þæt hi man beagum gebicge. (DOBBIE 1942, 56 57, LL. 36 45)

A door shall be on the hall, a spacious mouth of the building. A boss shall be on a shield, a firm protection for fingers. A bird shall go upward, soar in the sky. A salmon shall be in the deep water, go with the current. A shower shall in the skies, blended by wind, come into the world. A thief shall move in darkness. A giant shall dwell in the fens, alone in the land. A lady shall with secret skill, a young woman, seek out her lover if she does not wish to prosper among her people so that a man shall acquire her with rings [i.e., marry her]. (Author’s translation) This poem is of interest because it combines commentary on human and nonhuman actants without clarifying the nature of the relationship between these components (other than conventionally noting that God controls all of them). In addition, it is difficult to tell, in a poem that observes, ‘‘Stream sceal on yðum / mencgan mereflode’’ (A stream shall in waves mingle with the sea-flood) and ‘‘Draca sceal on hlæwe, frod, frætwum wlanc’’ (A dragon shall GENDER: MATTER

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‘‘be’’ in a barrow, old, rejoicing in treasures) but also that ‘‘Cyning sceal rice healdan’’ (A king shall hold the kingdom), whether phenomena are simply being described or rather the audience is exhorted to an ideal of behavior. The repetitious structure of the poem (‘‘x sceal’’) implies that gendered behaviors are in some sense equivalent to the observable tendencies of nonhuman agents, such as trees, rivers, or wind. To put this more clearly, the poem does not assert the existence of a fundamental difference between behavior, such as a woman practicing secret skill in the acquisition of a lover, and what we might more comfortably classify as material environmental changes, such as falling leaves or the onset of winter cold. At the same time, the poem does not promote an essential idea of ‘‘womanhood,’’ because this statement that a woman should practice secret skill participates in a complex intertextual network that has both generic and class dimensions. The lines recall the much better-known but similarly obtuse poem ‘‘The Wife’s Lament,’’ which seems to describe a woman separated from her ‘‘freond’’ and lord, constrained physically, and at the mercy of malicious kinfolk. Despite the rather misleading title given to the poem in the nineteenth century, the speaker of ‘‘The Wife’s Lament’’ never unambiguously states that she is married but rather writes of her relationship to an unnamed man designated as ‘‘hlaford,’’ ‘‘wine,’’ and so on. Conversely, ‘‘ides’’ and ‘‘faemne,’’ the words used for a female referent in ‘‘Maxims II,’’ are used elsewhere in Old English in contexts associated with virginity. Ides, moreover, is a poetic word and implies the typically aristocratic affiliations of women in Old English poetry. In other words, this apparently mundane and generalized statement about how women are or should be, just as how trees are or rivers are or doors are, is belied by rather specific vocabulary that invokes both class and sexual status, suggesting that these lines in actuality do not apply to all women. Reading a poem like ‘‘Maxims II’’ can leave us rather confused not only about the literal content for example, whether the poem is encouraging or discouraging this behavior on the part of a woman but also about the relationship between the phenomena apparently being invoked. In particular, we are not clear as to whether gender is a human characteristic; whether it is innate and part of the material world or part of the social environment; and how, if at all, sexual status is relevant to gender or behavior or both. The religiosity of the poem the passing references to God’s omnipotence, for instance do not, it should be emphasized, obviate the questions and confusions that the poem generates. As American medieval scholar Carolyn Walker Bynum (1941 ) has discussed in reference to the Late Middle Ages (1100 1500), medieval Christianity did not provide an incontrovertible answer to the problem of matter and its relations, and theology and its popular interpretations were at the heart of this problem. It is worth quoting Walker Bynum at length here, writing on the avidity with which late medieval pilgrims pursued pilgrimages to view, touch, and even taste objects and places thought to be materially transformed by contact with the divine: It was almost impossible for church leaders and theologians to avoid the issue of holy matter. The transformed statues, chalices, wafers, cloths, relics, and even mounds of earth to which the faithful made pilgrimage . . . presented a challenge that was theoretical as well as practical for a religion that held that the entire material world was created by and could therefore manifest God. . . . Issues of how matter behaved, both ordinarily and miraculously, when in contact with an infinitely powerful and ultimately unknowable God were key to devotion and theology. The God who lay beyond the world in unimaginable and unanalyzable darkness or light was also a God to whom human beings were led back by a human Christ a Christ whose substance (in the Eucharist) and even whose particles (in blood relics) might be present on earth. (Bynum 2011, 17)

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Unsurprisingly, the theologically sanctioned capability of matter to manifest (literally to be) the divine was deeply attractive to supplicants desirous of immediate and somatic contact with the holy, and it was a feature of medieval worship ripe for popular appropriation. The existence of holy matter generated certain questions, in particular because matter is changeable and subject to decay whereas the divine is not, which became more problematic as the centuries passed. Although Walker Bynum is analyzing a phenomenon largely distinctive to late medieval worship that is, a disjunction between the church’s increasing focus on spiritual interiority and a notion of radically animate matter (bleeding cloths, living statues, and so on) her comments are instructive in application to early medieval England also, where discussions of matter similarly unfold largely in reference to the incorporeality and immutability of divinity. In contrast to the later medieval church, however, Anglo-Saxon writers espouse a vernacular theology in which matter is not opposed to an immaterial and inward spirituality, as American Old English scholar Leslie Lockett, in her 2011 study of Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and LatinTraditions, has shown. Lockett carefully demonstrates that the Platonic notion of the incorporeal and immaterial soul was accessible only to very few Anglo-Saxon authors and was unlikely to have permeated popular religion at all until the eleventh century. Instead, Anglo-Saxon texts, both prose and poetry, favored a tripartite structure of mind-body-soul in which thought and emotion are not absolutely distinguished but are both experienced as constriction or expansion accompanied by heating or cooling of the chest cavity what scholars have called a hydraulic model. While it is eternal, the soul (sawol in Old English), is nonetheless beholden to the actions of the body, which determine its longterm health. The body, conversely, is no dummy lectured to and castigated by the spiritually superior and virtuous soul. Because the mind somatically manifests in the chest, the body can make choices and is not necessarily predisposed to a life of vice and the pursuit of worldly desire; neither is the soul by definition predisposed to virtue. As Lockett carefully shows, this tripartite hydraulic model is not metaphorical in Anglo-Saxon culture as it is, for example, in contemporary expressions such as ‘‘burning love’’ or ‘‘think with your head, not your heart’’ but is a literal understanding based on experience. Unlike Cartesian and post-Cartesian models of thought, in which mind and body are strictly separated from each other in terms of active (mind) and passive (matter), Anglo-Saxon culture exhibits a psychosomatic system in which the body is valorized and endowed with agency.

OLD ENGLISH MEDICAL TEXTS Matter and the body, while they are connected in contemporary understanding, are not as intimately associated as they are in medieval thinking; the conflation between the two terms that seems to be encouraged in the discussion thus far reflects this situation. As Walker Bynum makes clear, medieval writers understood body to mean ‘‘‘changeable thing’: gem, tree, log, or cadaver, as well as living human being. . . . To explore ‘the body’ was to explore stars and statues, blood and resin, as well as pain, perception, and survival’’ (2011, 32). In Old English, the concept of matter is etymologically linked to timber: according to A Thesaurus of Old English, ontimber, ontimbernes, and timber GENDER: MATTER

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represent half of the available vocabulary words for ‘‘substance’’ or ‘‘material’’ (Roberts, Kay, and Grundy 2000, 135). The Latin equivalent, materia, also originates with the meaning ‘‘timber’’ but has an additional association with mater, or ‘‘mother,’’ which the Oxford English Dictionary suggests is a way of referring to the main trunk of a tree as the origin of a system of branches (Walker Bynum 2011; Harris 2014). This maternal connotation is interestingly not present in Old English equivalents for the Latin word; other Old English terms for ‘‘matter,’’ such as andweorc and geteoh, are instead explicitly connected to work and tools. While the nature of these terms betrays the importance of wood as a building material for the Anglo-Saxons, their extension to refer to matter in general ultimately provides a more concrete and embedded diction than is suggested by the more neutral modern English matter. The aesthetic and scientific dimensions of this system of integrated matter are evident in the diagram associated with Byrhtferth of Ramsey, a monk who at the turn of the eleventh century wrote a number of works focusing on science and the calendar. Such diagrams built upon the Galenic theory of the four bodily humors in which blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm are associated with the four seasons, elements, winds, and properties of nature by adding the four ages of man, the signs Diagram believed to be copied from an original associated with the eleventh-century monk Byrhtferth of of the zodiac, and the four evangelists. The fabric of Ramsey. This medieval diagram shows the synthetic the human body is not isolable from the other comrelationships between the four humors, the four elements, the ponents of this multilayered system but will respond four ages of man, the seasons, the two equinoxes, the twelve differently depending on the time of year, direction months, the twelve astrological signs, and the twelve winds. of the wind, or place at which it is located. The ST. JOHNS 17 F.7V COSMOLOGIC AL DIAGRAM, FROM THE Anglo-Saxons seem not to have observed Galenic BOOK OF BYRH TFERTH, C. 1090 (VELLUM), ENG LISH SCH OOL (11TH CENTURY) / ST. JOH N’S COLLEGE practice in the fullest sense of attributing disease to LIBRARY, OXFORD, UK / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES blockages or excesses of the humors very few of the remedies prescribe bloodletting, for instance (see Cameron 1993; King 2013). Rather, these early medical texts are what British medieval historian Debby Banham has described as residually humoral, in that they will occasionally refer to conditions being caused by heat or cold or dampness or dryness without any real theoretical underpinning to this assertion. Nonetheless, Anglo-Saxon medical practice clearly shares with much Graeco-Roman medicine a sense of the human body as integrated within a fabric also containing nonhuman bodies, plants, and what we would recognize as environmental factors. In other words, Anglo-Saxons understand the body to be part of an ever-changing and interconnected material system, which mandates holistic treatment options, such as remedies made from plants and animal parts, charms, and petitioning of saints.

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ANGLO-SAXON MEDICAL DISCOURSE The corpus of Anglo-Saxon medical discourse is not only diverse but remarkable for its extent and date. The volume of medical texts surviving, which Canadian biologist and Anglo-Saxon scholar M. L. Cameron numbers at over one thousand manuscript pages dating from the ninth to eleventh centuries, indicates a lively interest in practices of healing and represents the earliest northern European tradition of vernacular medical writing (Cameron 1993; Banham 2006). This body of work spans Latin texts, vernacular translations and adaptations of Latin works, and original compositions in Old English. Three important collections of medical recipes survive and are known by titles given to them by their modern editors: Bald’s Leechbook, which was probably compiled in the late ninth century; Leechbook III, which is a separate text contained in the same tenth-century manuscript; and Lacnunga, which was compiled in the late tenth or early eleventh century. In addition, an important Old English translation, made in the middle or second half of the tenth century, of the Latin Herbarius of Pseudo-Apuleius, survives in four manuscripts, three of which are pre-Conquest in date. As is the case with many areas of Anglo-Saxon learning, we do not know definitively by whom or for whom these texts were made or exactly how they were used, but the number and extent of these major compilations do indicate the presence of a lively and early interest in practices of healing during this period. For many years large portions of these texts were dismissed as improbable and primitive, and overall the corpus was seen as lacking because it was not clearly based on empirical principles of testing and control. However, more recent scholarship has questioned the idea that Anglo-Saxon medicine is superstitious by pointing out the significant and systemic differences between Anglo-Saxon and later medical writing. For example, the way in which Old English medical texts are written assumes a user with fairly wide-ranging supplementary knowledge, and, as a consequence, they can seem very unclear to readers without this extra information (Van Arsdall 2002). Also, because medical recipes typically emphasize the product above the process, they do not include details about where a particular cure came from or how it was developed. As Cameron (1993) points out, these stylistic preferences alone do not preclude the possibility that these remedies were underpinned by some kind of testing, experimentation, or observation. Certainly some of the remedies are effective, as an interdisciplinary team of scholars at Nottingham University, in the United Kingdom, recently proved of an eye salve made according to a recipe from the tenth-century medical compilation known as Bald’s Leechbook. While this is not the first group to field-test AngloSaxon medical recipes, the Nottingham University study achieved better results in demonstrating the effectiveness of the eye salve against the antibiotic-resistant MRSA bacteria than did previous laboratory tests of early medieval remedies. This variation in findings is due to the vagueness of the directions typically given in Anglo-Saxon medical texts, which seldom specify amounts for ingredients or length of time to be spent on each stage of preparation. In addition, attempts to replicate medieval remedies cannot control for chemical reactions that occur when ingredients are combined in certain ways or are placed in contact with nonstable metals that might have been present in mixing bowls or spoons. The Nottingham experiments are exciting and have received worldwide media attention from BBC News, the British Library online, CNN, and numerous scientific and medical blogs. They also have the potential, however, to constrain our approach to Anglo-Saxon medicine precisely by applying a contemporary trial method that assesses effectiveness in terms of elimination of bacteria or the production of chemical or cellular changes. This GENDER: MATTER

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approach valorizes the field of Anglo-Saxon medicine by means of a standard that is offered as a universal, even though it is explicitly modern; in fact, the exercise serves to bolster the universalized framework of the trial method itself. In addition, the testing approach reinforces a sense of the fundamental stability of matter across the centuries, upon which the remedy can be shown to work in the same way. Perhaps most important, much of medieval medical practice simply cannot be accommodated according to this model, inviting the consequence that this remainder be set aside as ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘magical’’ because it is not scientifically testable. What to do, for example, with a medical recipe that notes, ‘‘Ðeos wyrt . . . deah gehwæþer ge þæs mannes sawle ge his lichoman’’ (De Vriend 1984, 30; ‘‘this plant . . . benefits both a man’s soul and his body’’), or one that claims to prevent stormy weather while rowing or stop bees from swarming? Such remedies belie a radically different notion of the interactions between the matter of the human body and that of plants and animals. The role within remedies of gender and, perhaps more important in the economy of medieval medicine, sexual status, does not easily fit an empirical testing-based approach that assumes the coherence and stability of human matter.

ANGLO-SAXON MEDICINE AND GENDER Medical discourse, both contemporary and ancient, has been the subject of much critique for the ways that it universalizes the male body. This tacit norming of the male body is associated with neglect of conditions that predominantly affect women and a lack of recognition for women’s experiences of their own symptoms and conditions if they do not fit predominant medical theory (see King 2013 on this issue in the Hippocratic corpus). While ‘‘women’s troubles’’ have traditionally been belittled by medicine, in Anglo-Saxon England they were not simply important; they were deadly. In only nine of the forty-eight medieval cemeteries for which published statistics are available did more men die by their thirty-fifth year than women; in thirty-four cemeteries many more women died at a younger age than their male counterparts, sometimes almost twice as many (Fleming 2009). Unfortunately, though, a large chunk of the textual material dealing with women’s health is missing, owing to the loss of the entire chapter on the topic from Bald’s Leechbook. What does survive has been summarized by professor of digital humanities Marilyn Deegan in her article ‘‘Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Anglo-Saxon Medical Texts: A Preliminary Survey’’ (1987) and by M. L. Cameron in his chapter ‘‘Gynaecology and Obstetrics’’ in Anglo-Saxon Medicine (1993). The texts indicate that the prevalence of iron deficiency in early medieval England caused by malnutrition, poor diet, chronic blood loss, or infection created particular difficulties for women (Deegan 1987; Fleming 2009), and a number of remedies address problems with menstrual flow, sore breasts from breast-feeding, and problems with labor and delivery. As Deegan observes, however, the overall number of recipes that reference the gender of the recipient is relatively small in comparison with the size of the corpus overall. Remedies do occasionally specify differing dosages for men, women, and children; for example, the Old English Herbarium notes that a varying number of spoonfuls of wild teasel should be given depending, as the texts puts it, on whether the patient is a young man, a youngster, a woman, or a small child (De Vriend 1984). As is often the case in Old English remedies, however, gender is only one factor among others, including age and overall health. In other words, gender and age are here correlated to body weight, but it is assumed that the interactions that the remedy prescribes between body and plant will occur in the same basic way for all those listed and that, therefore, such bodies are not materially differentiated

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according to gender. Nonetheless, other remedies, such as that which prescribes meadow saffron to address pimples on a woman’s nose, do make this suggestion: ‘‘Gif nebcorn on wifmannes nebbe wexen genim þysse sylfan wyrte wyrtruman 7 gemengc wið ele, þwea syððan þærmid, hyt afeormað of ealle þa nebcorn’’ (De Vriend 1984, 70; If pimples grow on a woman’s nose, take the roots of the same plant and mix with oil, then wash with it. It will cleanse away all the pimples [author’s translation]). Similarly, when using navelwort for swellings, the remedy specifies that unsalted pig grease be used as a medium for the plant’s application if the patient is a woman, whereas the salted version should be used for men (De Vriend 1984). These recipes are somewhat unusual in addressing whether the sick person is a man or a woman, outside of those for conditions that affect women specifically. Classics professor Helen King, in her study of Graeco-Roman humoral theory, asks ‘‘whether women have humors in the same way that men do’’ (2013, 38); she finds that women’s bodies are understood to be full of fluid more so than organs and humors, and as such women require different treatments than do men. While the same principle is not expected to be found in Anglo-Saxon medicine, given its loose appropriation of humoral theory, Old English remedies that specify different ingredients or formulations for male and female patients do raise the question of how much women’s bodies are understood to be different in their material composition from men’s bodies. Karen Barad’s (1956 ) notion of material-discursive apparatuses, within which gender both participates and is materially manifested, provides a helpful framework for exploring this question further, although it will require a brief excursus into quantum physics. In Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), Barad describes an experiment undertaken in 1922 by German scientists Otto Stern (1888 1969) and Walther Gerlach (1889 1979) to prove space quantization, or the process by which those electrons orbiting atoms jump from one discrete orbital (or energy field) to another. The experiment used a magnetic field to separate out different streams of electrons and then register them as minute silver traces left on a glass screen. None of these traces was detectable until Stern, having been up all night smoking cheap cigars, coincidentally exhaled sulfur-laden tobacco breath over the glass, turning the silver trails of electrons into black-colored silver sulfide. As Barad notes, the participation of the cigar breath in the experiment demonstrates that apparatuses collections of texts, instruments, participants are not ‘‘static laboratory setups but a dynamic set of open-ended practices, iteratively refined and reconfigured’’ (2007, 167) and are porous to factors not within the purview of those conducting the experiment. In continuing, Barad interestingly addresses the position of gender within this apparatus. Stern’s gender made it more likely that he would have been smoking cigars at this time than would a female scientist, but this does not mean that ‘‘social factors determine the outcome of scientific investigations’’ or ‘‘that the experimenter’s intrinsic identity . . . is a determining factor in the outcome of the experiment’’ (2007, 167). Rather, the role of the cigar smoke shows us that ‘‘material practices that contributed to the production of gendered individuals also contributed to the materialization of this particular scientific result (‘gender-and-science-in-the-making’): ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ are coproduced through specific kinds of material-discursive practices. Stern’s gendered and classed performance of masculinity (e.g., through his cigar smoking) mattered’’ (2007, 167). The formulation ‘‘gender-and-science-in-the-making’’ indicates the entangled, or what Barad would call intraactive, nature of the material production of scientific knowledge and of gender, which cannot be presumed to exist in any self-evident way outside such apparatuses. If Anglo-Saxon medical remedies are understood to be apparatuses comprising interactions between numerous elements texts, plants, animals, weather, time, healers, the sick, GENDER: MATTER

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the metal of spoons or vessels we are perhaps better positioned to understand their material production of gender. Recipes such as the one involving navelwort, for example, which prescribes differing amounts of salt and pig’s grease for male and female recipients, not only rely on a preexisting set of categories (man/woman) but also manufacture this difference as a result of these distinctive combinations of ingredients. That is, a small part of the way that women and men are made in Anglo-Saxon England is as participants and consumers of recipes, or apparatuses involving flesh, plants, animal products, and the words and practices that determine their combination and application.

FROM PLANT TO PATIENT: THE ROLE OF SEXUAL STATUS IN HEALING The final example concerns a set of related recipes that mention the sexual status of the person involved in harvesting or applying the remedy. These remedies make the intermingling of plant, animal, and human particularly evident, although they also emphasize that gender is not necessarily the most important category being materially constructed by early medieval medicine. A representative example is the remedy for ‘‘waennas’’ of the heart given in the Lacnunga. Wen is a now seldom used word referring to a protuberance on the body, such as a wart or tumor, although it is also used in Old English as a general synonym for ‘‘ache’’ or ‘‘sickness.’’ Gif wænnas eglian mæn æt þære heortan: gange mæden man to wylle þe rihte east yrne 7 gehlade ane cuppan fulle forð mid ðam streame, 7 singe þæron credan 7 pater noster 7 geote þonne on oþer fæt; 7 hlade eft oþre 7 singe eft credan 7 pater noster; 7 do swa þæt þu hæbbe þreo; do swa nygon dagas; sona him bið sel. (Grattan and Singer 1952, 196) If wens afflict a person at the heart: have a virgin go to a spring that runs due east and draw a full cup with the current, and sing the Credo and Paternoster over it and pour it into another vessel; and then fill another and sing the Credo and Paternoster again; and do this until you have three (cups); do this for nine days; soon the patient will be better. (Author’s translation) Running water is regarded as having special significance in much traditional medicine, and these properties always necessitate a careful approach from the practitioner wishing to gain access to them. For example, remedy CLXXI in the Lacnunga, for a shortage of breast milk, enjoins the woman to take milk from a cow of a single color into her mouth, spit it into running water, and then swallow a mouthful of this water while speaking a charm; it specifies, however, that ‘‘þonne heo to þan broce ga, þonne ne beseo heo no, ne eft þonne heo þanan ga’’ (Grattan and Singer 1952, 190; when she to the brook goes, then she should not look around, nor again when she goes from there [author’s translation]). In the remedy for wens of the heart, the special approach to running water interestingly requires that a mæden man, a virgin, draw the water and complete the requisite preparation of that water before giving it to the healer, who will actually administer it to the patient. This remedy invokes strong cultural notions, with both popular folkloric and entirely orthodox religious roots, of the special power and nature of virginity. What such remedies suggest about what virginity is or, perhaps better, how it works is worth pursuing, especially given the lively discourse on virginity being conducted by early medieval theologians and hagiographers (those writing the lives of saints).

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Helpful in considering this question of virginity is the entry for coriander in the Old English Herbarium, which describes a birthing remedy and provides us with another example of this phenomenon: ‘‘Wið þæt wif hrædlice cennan (m)æg(e) genim þysse ylcan coliandran sæd, endlufon corn oððe þreottyne, cnyte mid anum ðræde on anum clænan linenan claþe, nime ðonne an man þe sy mægðhades man, cnapa oððe mægden, 7 healde æt þam wynstran þeo neah þam gewealde’’ (De Vriend 1984, 150; So that a woman may give birth quickly, take eleven or thirteen seeds of this same coliandra plant, bind them with a thread in a clean linen cloth, then take a person who is a virgin, a boy or girl, and let them hold it at the left thigh near the genitals [author’s translation]). A number of similar entries, which do not require the participation of a virgin, may be recipes for abortifacients, although the wording of the text never makes this clear; some are certainly intended for stillbirths (for example, Old English Herbarium 63.1 and 94.6). The remedies using coriander, however, are especially interesting for the way that the virgin, boy or girl, is inserted into the recipe at a level analogous to the plants. In the Herbarium recipe, for instance, the same Old English verb, niman, or ‘‘to take,’’ is used to describe the gathering and preparation of plants and the action of the virgin who should apply these plants: ‘‘Nime ðonne an man þe sy mægðhades man, cnapa oþþe mægden’’ (De Vriend 1984, 150; Then take someone who is a virgin, a boy or a girl). In other words, the recipe treats the virgin as an ingredient while also dispersing medical authority from the figure of the ‘‘taker’’ or healer toward whom remedies are directed, because the healer literally does not have the power to apply the poultice effectively. This type of remedy thus positions the sexually continent human body within a network of interactions that constitute the medical process without offering a hierarchical relation between the physician, the sick person, and the plant matter. Moreover, virginity is a material factor in these remedies, in that it is both manifested in and causes substantive change both in plant material and the fabric of the body of the laboring woman. These plants do not have intrinsic properties available at any time and to anybody; instead, the plant becomes a medicine capable of speeding up the rhythms of birth when it is in the hands of a virgin. While, for a modern audience, it is explicable that the chemical properties of a plant may change when it is brought into contact with the nonstable metal fabric of a bowl or spoon, it is not similarly viable that a virgin body could produce such a change on contact. In Old English medicine, however, the effects on plants of iron, to take one representative metal as an example, and human sexual continence are rendered equal: both can alter the way that plants work on the ailing human body, and therefore it is worthwhile for the medical practitioner to know how to incorporate both into his or her remedies. Because these are practical texts, they offer nothing in the way of theorizing how plants are substantively changed either by contact with metal or with a virgin’s hand, and yet it is clear that they are. To put this in Barad’s terms, in a way that the texts themselves would not, these remedies are an apparatus that materially produces both virginity and a cure, ideally, through the intra-actions of human bodies and plants and further to adapt her formulation, this is virginity-and-medicine-in-the-making. Because virginity is largely associated with youth in these remedies, gender is ultimately less important here than is sexual status, which may seem a strange place to end a discussion of matter and gender in early medieval England. However, sexual continence is not other to gender in Anglo-Saxon culture and in medieval society in general; the two are intricately and complexly entangled in the way they are explored in texts and experienced as lived practices. Whether and how to live as a virgin or a chaste or married person and what each of those categories are understood to mean are integral to what makes male or female flesh during this GENDER: MATTER

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period, in ways that this chapter can only begin to explore. What medical works offer in particular, however, is a version of virginity as a material category without directly invoking the ideological and religious issues that preoccupy the discussion elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon textual culture.

Summary This chapter takes as its focus the relationship between gender and materiality in AngloSaxon culture, the period between the fifth and eleventh centuries in England. It begins with the provocative example of a body being shaped and changed by the positions it must assume when using certain tools: because work is often socially demarcated according to gender, repetitive use of tools gradually makes gender material. In order to explore further the ways that gender emerges interactively in this case, in the interactions between human bodies, plants, animals, and mixing tools, such as bowls and spoons the chapter turns to the example of Anglo-Saxon medical texts. Instead of a bipartite system in which body is inert and inferior to mind or soul, Anglo-Saxon England manifests a tripartite structure of mind-body-soul in which mind is embodied and thought involves material change, just as does emotion. In such a system, medicine does not treat just the body while the ideological underpinnings of this body, such as gender, are forged elsewhere. Using Karen Barad’s notion of apparatuses material and discursive configurations of text, objects, human and nonhuman actants the chapter shows how particular remedies produce gender at the same time that they generate a cure. Finally, the chapter turns to the question of virginity, a related but perhaps more important organizing term than is gender in early medieval textual culture. In a close reading of several recipes involving a virgin participant, the chapter shows how sexual continence is understood to affect the material of plant ingredients to be the product and the cause, in other words, of material change in a body other than that of the virgin himself or herself.

Bibliography Amodio, Mark C. The Anglo Saxon Literature Handbook. Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. Banham, Debby. ‘‘A Millenium in Medicine? New Medical Texts and Ideas in England in the Eleventh Century.’’ In Anglo Saxons: Studies Presented to Cyril Roy Hart, edited by Simon Keynes and Alfred P. Smyth, 230 242. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Blanton, Virginia. Signs of Devotion: The Cult of Saint Æthe lthryth in Medieval England. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

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Boulle, Eve Line. ‘‘Evolution of Two Human Skeletal Markers of the Squatting Position: A Diachronic Study from Antiquity to the Modern Age.’’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology 115, no. 1 (2001): 50 56. Cameron, M. L. Anglo Saxon Medicine. Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1993. Damico, Helen. Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. De Vriend, Hubert J., ed. The ‘‘Old English Herbarium’’ and ‘‘Medicina de Quadrupedibus.’’ Early English Text Soci ety, original series, vol. 286. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

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Deegan, Marilyn. ‘‘Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Anglo Saxon Medical Texts: A Preliminary Survey.’’ In Medi cine in Early Medieval England, edited by Marilyn Dee gan and D. G. Scragg, 17 26. Manchester, UK: Centre for Anglo Saxon Studies, 1987. Dobbie, Elliott Van Kirk, ed. The Anglo Saxon Minor Poems. Anglo Saxon Poetic Records, vol. 6. New York: Colum bia University Press, 1942. Fell, Christine. Women in Anglo Saxon England. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987. Fleming, Robin. ‘‘Bones for Historians: Putting the Body Back in Biography.’’ In Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honor of Frank Barlow, edited by David Bates, Julia C. Crick, Sarah Hamilton, and Frank Barlow, 29 48. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006. Fleming, Robin. ‘‘Writing Biography at the Edge of History.’’ American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (2009): 606 614.

Roberts, Jane, Christian Kay, and Lynne Grundy. A Thesau rus of Old English in Two Volumes. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000. Stafford, Pauline. Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queen ship and Women’s Political Power in Eleventh Century England. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997. Stafford, Pauline. Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983. Van Arsdall, Anne. Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo Saxon Medicine. New York: Routledge, 2002. Walker Bynum, Carolyn. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books, 2011. W EB S I T E S A ND O NL I NE SO U RC ES

Grattan, J. H. G., and C. Singer. Anglo Saxon Magic and Medicine Illustrated Specially from the Semi Pagan Text ‘‘Lacnunga.’’ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952.

BBC News. ‘‘1,000 year old onion and garlic eye remedy kills MRSA.’’ http://www.bbc.com/news/uk england nottinghamshire 32117815.

Hadley, Dawn. ‘‘Warriors, Heroes, and Companions: Nego tiating Masculinity in Viking Age England.’’ Anglo Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 15 (2008): 270 284.

British Library. ‘‘Digitised Manuscripts.’’ http://www.bl.uk /manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Royal MS 12 D XVII. Digitized manuscript containing Anglo Saxon medical remedies and charms.

Harris, Anne F. ‘‘Hewn.’’ In Inhuman Nature, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 17 38. Washington, DC: Oli phaunt Books, 2014. Hollis, Stephanie. Anglo Saxon Women and the Church: Shar ing a Common Fate. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1998. King, Helen. ‘‘Female Fluids in the Hippocratic Corpus: How Solid Was the Humoral Body?’’ In The Body in Balance: Humoral Medicines in Practice, edited by Pere grine Horden and Elisabeth Hsu, 25 52. New York: Ber ghahn Books, 2013. Klein, Stacy. Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo Saxon Literature. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Lees, Clare, and Gillian Overing. Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo Saxon England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Lockett, Leslie. Anglo Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

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British Library. ‘‘The Middle Ages.’’ http://www.bl.uk/the middle ages. Central portal for the British Library’s col lection of digitized medieval manuscripts and for a range of resources about medieval culture. British Library Science Blog. ‘‘A Medieval Medical Marvel.’’ http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/science/2015/04/a medieval medical marvel.html. The Calendar and the Cloister: Oxford St. John’s College MS17. http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/ms 17/. Old English Translation: Old English to Modern English Translator. http://www.oldenglishtranslator.co.uk/. An online translation tool for Old English. The Orb: On line Reference Book for Medieval Studies. http://the orb.arlima.net/index.html. Online reference book for medieval studies, including a host of links to teaching resources, full editions of medieval texts, and other useful websites.

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CHAPTER 4

Material Bodies Monika Rogowska-Stangret PhD University of Warsaw, Poland

The question of material bodies has been discussed in feminist theories from diverse theoretical standpoints and produced substantial controversy. Until the second half of the twentieth century, concepts of the body and materiality were prevailingly fashioned by essentialism. Thus, the body was understood as an unchangeable bedrock that determined the way social structures, sex roles, and the natures of both women and men were conceived. Understood in essentialist terms, the body provided no possibilities for transformation of the social order. On the contrary, it justified women’s lesser position in society. Therefore, feminist philosophers were struggling to overcome obstacles posed by such a concept of the body and to find a ground for emancipation elsewhere, such as in the ability of women’s minds to overcome their bodies. This theoretical approach was organized along the lines of dualism: materiality and body were conceptualized as opposed to intelligibility, soul, or mind, nature to culture, woman to man, passivity to activity, madness to reason. Some feminist researchers, however, pointed to the fact that such oppositions are not only categories that help individuals structure their world, knowledge, and experience but they also and primarily reveal power relations (Jay 1981): a man and a woman, a human being and an animal, nature and culture not only are different but also are differently valued in society. An acknowledgment of the fact that thinking in the frames of dualism is at least partly responsible for unjust social hierarchies led American feminist philosopher Elizabeth V. Spelman to a potent proposition. In her article ‘‘Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views’’ (1982), Spelman contends that some feminist theorists, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, or Shulamith Firestone, by adopting a mind-body distinction and accepting the hierarchy that lies behind it, are simultaneously undermining their own feminist goals because of the interconnectedness of different oppositions. For example, mind is associated with man and body is linked to woman. To change the way people are hierarchized with reference to their gender and sexuality as well as one might add their race, class, ability, or species, it is essential to redefine and reevaluate the problem of the body. This chapter investigates how the material body has been rethought in the writing of Monique Wittig (1935 2003), Luce Irigaray (1930 ), Judith Butler (1956 ), and Elizabeth Grosz (1952 ).

THE BODY BEYOND SEX Monique Wittig was a French writer and feminist theorist known for her unconventional novels, such as The Opoponax (1964), Les gue´rille`res (1969), and The Lesbian Body (1973).

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Alina Szapocznikow, Bouquet II, 1966. Alina Szapocznikow plays with the feminine body ambiguously. Is it fragmented or multiple? Complete or incomplete? Dramatically torn apart or expressing the sensual bodily fullness? Her art is said to be positioned on the edge between Eros and Thanatos, love and death, plentitude and decay, one and many, revealing the complex nature of the body that unsettles oppositions. TONY CAPPUCINO / ALAMY

She also published essays, most of which are collected in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1992). She is considered an important lesbian feminist writer and theorist. According to Wittig, humans live in a world governed by the ideology of enslavement, meaning that society consists of dominating masters and individuals restricted by categories such as sex, class, or race and thus deprived of freedom. These categories are used to maintain unequal power relations. The notion of sex is nothing more than a useful tool introducing injustice to social structures: ‘‘The perenniality of the sexes and the perenniality of slaves and masters proceed from the same belief, and, as there are no slaves without masters, there are no women without men’’ (Wittig 1992, 2). What does it mean that women are, in fact, men’s slaves? Wittig explains that women are supposed to perform 75 percent of all labor in a given society, including bodily work and reproduction. Moreover, they are to be sexually available under all circumstances on the basis of the so-called heterosexual contract that defines sexual relations between a woman and a man (Wittig 1992). In fact, the contract, although never officially articulated, is negotiated between men and regulates the exchange of women (as goods). Wittig is very explicit about the nature of this availability: women should be visible so that men can immediately see the objects of their desires. One may ask how it is possible that people accept unjust social relations. Wittig explains the mechanisms that are in place that affirm the existing inequalities. She suggests that categories such as sex, race, or species are naturalized: they seem to have a natural source one would not dare to question. Here, nature is used to justify social relations: if something is

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natural, then it is self-apparent and cannot be contested. As Wittig states: ‘‘For as long as oppositions (differences) appear as given, already there, before all thought, ‘natural’ as long as there is no conflict and no struggle there is no dialectic, there is no change, no movement’’ (3). Is it at all possible to escape such power relations and live freely outside the logic of oppression? First, Wittig claims, one needs to understand that there is no such thing as natural oppression, differences, or inequality. Oppression is purely social, and it is oppression that creates sex and not the other way around. Social systems that recognize sexual difference, such as patriarchy or matriarchy, are based on domination, so one way to escape the power relations, according to Wittig, is to search for a society beyond or without sex. That is why one should avoid the concept of a woman (a synonym for sex and enslavement): ‘‘One makes a mistake in using and giving currency to this expression’’ (59). Wittig is thus trying to escape from the paradox described by Joan Wallach Scott, who pointed out that ‘‘feminism produced the ‘sexual difference’ it sought to eliminate. This paradox the need both to accept and to refuse ‘sexual difference’ was the constitutive condition of feminism as a political movement throughout its long history’’ (1996, 3 4). This dialectic entanglement of acceptance and refusal of the notion of sexual difference is invalidated in Wittig’s writing by the figure of a lesbian. The lesbian is depicted as ‘‘a notwoman, a not-man,’’ ‘‘located philosophically (politically) beyond the categories of sex’’ (Wittig 1992, 13, 47). In consequence, a lesbian is a synonym of freedom: ‘‘Lesbianism provides for the moment the only social form in which we can live freely’’ (20). All above-mentioned diagnoses influence Wittig’s concept of the material body. The body of a woman is marked by gender. It is deformed and distorted. It is used as a sexual object: shaped to be sexually arousing, visible, and available. It is formed as a reproduction machine that maintains and naturalizes the heterosexual contract. To regain the body to envision it outside power relations one needs to turn to a concept of the free, lesbian body. THE LESBIAN BODY UNSETTLES OPPOSITIONS

The material body that emerges in Wittig’s writing seems both general and specific. This is because the poetic passages are interrupted by the lists that enumerate different body parts using the article the, which points to both a specific and a general object. Wittig describes a minority subject as not self-centered, as a subject ‘‘whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’’ (62). The body, likewise, transforms the opposition between the center and peripheries: ‘‘M/y’’ body is not opposed to your body. Just one example of this tendency is the following sentence: ‘‘You mingle with m/e m/y mouth fastened on your mouth your neck squeezed by m/y arms, I feel our intestines uncoiling gliding among themselves’’ (Wittig 1975, 51 52). Our mouths, our arms, and even our intestines are intertwined to the extent that one cannot tell the difference or distinguish between what happens to you and what happens to ‘‘m/e’’: ‘‘The sand touches your cheeks, m/y mouth is filled’’ (52). This vision of bodies merging is a powerful example of how Wittig’s concept of the body unsettles the oppositions between center and peripheries but also between myself and the other. Importantly, Wittig’s attempts to destabilize the centrality and homogeneity of the ‘‘I’’ is emphasized graphically. She writes ‘‘m/e’’ instead of ‘‘me’’ and ‘‘m/y’’ instead of ‘‘my.’’ In the English translation the ‘‘I’’ is written with italics: ‘‘I ’’ for the same purpose. The English word consists of one letter only and cannot be split using a slash (in French I is je, so Wittig writes it as ‘‘j/e’’). GENDER: MATTER

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There is also no clear distinction between inside and outside. Wittig writes, ‘‘I no longer see your lungs your stomach your bones your blood-vessels’’ (63), as if lungs, stomach, bones, or blood vessels were placed on the body’s surface. In fact, it does not matter, as the very opposition is questioned here: the skin may be easily ‘‘lifted layer by layer’’ (17), uncovering inner organs. Thus, it is possible not only to see them but also to touch them, to eat them, to lick them, to spit on them, or to embed oneself in them. There are no obstacles to touch and irritate one’s throat from within, to rip out one’s stomach or intestines from within, or even to mine one’s body. The lesbian body also exceeds the passive-active dualism. On the one hand, it is subjugated by for instance water: ‘‘The water enters by m/y mouth by m/y lungs, I cannot spit it all out again, as the pressure grows m/y intestines m/y stomach are invaded, m/y parietes [meaning: a wall of a hollow organ, cavity, or cell] burst, the skin of m/y belly splits apart, the water enters and leaves m/e’’ (125). It is dominated by sadomasochist practices: ‘‘You chase m/e brutally while I fall speechless, . . . you constrain m/e to cry out, you put words in m/y mouth, you whisper them in m/y ear and I say, no mistress, . . . do not make m/y eyeballs burst’’ (27). In these sections, the body appears to be overwhelmingly passive. Yet, on the contrary, ‘‘I ’’ may also be an active tormentor: ‘‘I am the plaited whip that flagellates the skin, I am the electric current that blasts and convulses the muscles’’ (16). In juxtaposing passive and active elements, Wittig’s lesbian body transcends essentialist notions of the female body as naturally inferior and passive. Neither is the body placed clearly within the subject-object distinction. It is oftentimes objectified: the ‘‘I ’’ sees how the body is engulfed and dismembered, how it ceases to exist. And simultaneously, it is felt subjectively: it experiences tenderness, orgasm, pain. Thus, the very materiality of the lesbian body unsettles traditional gendered oppositions. THE BODY AS ABJECT

Reflecting on the subject-object distinction, one may notice that the body presented in The Lesbian Body could be seen more adequately as abject (abjection) (Kristeva 1982). The abject is opposed to the subject but not as an object one can locate vis-a`-vis oneself. The abject is what escapes the solidity of the object. It is fluid, dirty, abominable, and musty. It endangers the purity of social relations and impersonates all the horrors of waste, sticky substances, unobvious seepages, and putridity. Wittig appears to deliberately occupy this zone of abjection. Her body is fragmented and rotten by slow decay, death, and decomposition. It stinks, it is consumed by worms and spiders, it is putrescent, half-liquid, fermented, and perforated. It suffers from purulence. It is transformed into mud, it is spat out, vomited, rejected, it melts. It causes repulsion and pleasure. BODY BEYOND THE HUMAN

The material body as presented by Wittig does not limit itself to obtaining characteristics of the body of one species only. It is diverse and heterogeneous. It sometimes has paws, claws, and fur resembling the body of a she wolf. It recalls the body of an insect with several legs, eyes, antennae, a trunk, and a chitinous skeleton. It might have a beak, feathers, and gigantic wings, cilia and flagella, a ‘‘blue glossy skin’’ (Wittig 1975, 64), and a tail like a shark; it has spores like a plant or a fungus. It reminds one of assemblages made of clay, copper, leaves, or iron. It may be monstrous gigantic in size. It is impossible to grasp it or look at it face-toface. Thus, the lesbian body escapes all possible definitions and categorizations. It is multiple, fashioned in an assemblage-like manner, and inconceivable in the frames of dual distinctions.

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QUESTIONS

Why is it that only a lesbian body can escape power relations? Is it at all possible to escape them? Is it possible to think outside of power relations if the very activity of thinking is itself shaped by them? Is it true that homosexuals are freed from sexual difference and sexual oppression? Can a heterosexual human oppose power structures? And if not (as Wittig seems to claim), what would the difference be between ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality’’ and compulsory lesbianism? In what way is the body as abject emancipatory?

THE QUEST FOR SEXUAL DIFFERENCE Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born linguist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher. Her career as a feminist theorist began with the publication of Speculum of the Other Woman ([1974] 1985a). Later she published, among other things, This Sex Which Is Not One ([1977] 1985b), An Ethics of Sexual Difference ([1984] 1993), and In the Beginning, She Was (2013). Irigaray is commonly recognized as a feminist of sexual difference, and her theory is described as a feminism of difference. Irigaray argues that philosophical investigations in general tend to erase the notion of difference with the aim to create a homogenous, one, holistic vision of the world that in Irigarayan terminology is called economy of the same. Economy of the same subordinates multitude (of bodies, sexualities, subject positions, desires) to one vision (one model of the body, one way of being sexual, one concept of the subject, one way to understand desire). For Irigaray the most striking exclusion is the exclusion of sexual difference from philosophical research. She claims that philosophers aimed at creating the neutral (in terms of sex) concept of the man, ethics, science, politics but they were, in fact, erasing sexual difference and conceptually maintaining male supremacy and female subordination. She indicates this as the most blazing problem of the twentieth century: ‘‘Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age’’ (Irigaray 1993, 5). Regaining sexual difference and grasping its sense adequately would be Irigaray’s most important philosophical task. What does Irigaray mean when she argues that sexual difference is erased? Living in a human society, one does talk about men and women as distinct in terms of anatomy, physiology, genetics, psychology, and ethics. Women and men are valued differently, they are presented diversely (in advertisements or fashion), and oftentimes they have separate roles in a society. In what way, then, is the difference omitted? GENDER: MATTER

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1979. The Dinner Party is a project devoted to uncovering herstory the human history retold from the women’s perspective. At the dinner table Chicago sat remarkable women philosophers, poets, writers, scientists, painters as a tribute to women who created our past but were obliterated from the mainstream historical narrative. The Dinner Party provides a space for women encounter; what difference does it make today to shift the frames of history? STAN H ONDA / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

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Irigaray demonstrates that the notion of sexual difference commonly used in philosophy, science, social theories, and psychoanalysis is, in fact, the erasure of difference. Woman and man are recognized as oppositions, but in this dual distinction woman is perceived as complementary (to man). Thus, she is deprived of any autonomy whatsoever. For instance, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856 1939) attempted to describe females’ sexuality but could not detach himself from the sociopolitical situation at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth (Laqueur 1990). As a result, he offered a concept of woman developed in response to his elaboration on man. She was portrayed as a lack, a negativity, captivated by ‘‘penis envy,’’ and deprived of active sexuality. Woman does not know her own sex, proper name, language, or voice she lacks any positive concept of herself. Moreover, ‘‘woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies’’ (Irigaray 1985b, 25). Thus, she is an object, a tool for enhancing active male sexual pleasure. British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey (1975) has explored the object status of women in regard to the male gaze and the cinematic image. Mulvey shows how women are depicted in films and shaped by a dominant male gaze that structures the looks and behaviors of female characters. According to Mulvey’s analysis, man is the one who watches, and woman is characterized as to-be-looked-at-ness. But the specificity of cinema lies in hiding the controlling male gaze by incorporating it into the very viewpoint of the camera. Thus, it creates a world that does not explicitly address the controlling male gaze while naturalizing such a point of view. To uncover the male gaze, it is essential to challenge the structure of the film itself and to search for its premises. It is this critical aim that directs Irigaray’s philosophical inquiries. She is devoted to tracing the marks of phallogocentrism (domination and concentration on phallus a sign of men’s domination and logos culture, language, reason), which structures the human world, and to revealing how the dominating positions of the masculine and the spoken and written word shape the symbolic order, social reality, scientific practices, and political structures. Irigaray aims at enabling sexual difference to appear by uncovering the power of one dominant position. The phallogocentric order influences the concept of material bodies immensely. The body (most prominently the maternal body) is excluded, fragmented, forbidden, and replaced with fatherly language and culture. Materiality and maternity bodily encounters with the mother ‘‘remain in the shadows of our culture’’ (Irigaray 1991, 35). To regain the material body one needs to ‘‘discover a language which does not replace the bodily encounter, as paternal language attempts to do, but which can go along with it, words which do not bar the corporeal, but which speak corporeal’’ (43). Conceptualizing the body differently is an attempt both to question the power structures of phallogocentrism and to think differently about language, culture, and society. As Grosz (1989) claims, reconceiving the female body is a first step to thinking about ‘‘woman and femininity otherwise than in phallocentric terms’’ (110). CORPOREAL SPEECH BETWEEN TWO LIPS

Irigaray (1985b) uses the metaphor of two lips to reflect on the potent relationship between corporeality and language. Two lips may be associated with both the mouth (orality, language, culture) and the vulva (sexuality, body, nature). According to psychoanalysis, the openness of the vulva marked a lack waiting to be filled, striving to be consumed. Irigaray, however, directs her efforts toward reconceptualizing woman’s sexual organs in a positive way. That is why she speaks of ‘‘two lips’’ instead of a ‘‘hole.’’

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The two lips are a powerful alternative to one phallus, because they overcome oppositions that as shown in the introduction undermine the value of women. The two lips are both one and two inseparable from one another yet not distinct. They are passively being touched and actively touching. There is no hierarchy, no control between the two lips they are both irreplaceable, equally significant. ‘‘Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two but not divisible into one(s) that caress each other’’ (Irigaray 1985b, 24). This vision of a woman’s body demonstrates its richness and potential and is a potent alternative to both the psychoanalytic image of woman’s body as a lack and to ‘‘economy of the Same.’’ The two lips are contrary to the phallus in no need of mediation. The symbolic order organized around the phallus as a metaphor of power and dominance cultivates the power of the same, one and only, in need of the subordination of others. The alternative introduced by Irigaray cherishes dialogue, togetherness, and unhierarchical models of social structures. It highlights the value of collaboration and not rivalry, fluidity (movement) and not stability, multitude and not unity. DOES THE BODY HAVE AN ESSENCE?

It was oftentimes suggested that the Irigarayan account of the body presents it as biologically given, as supporting the phallogocentric order by implying innate differences between the sexes. Irigaray was challenged with essentialism (Moi 2002), which would mean that the female body is a determined, unchangeable fact and that it is governed by a biological essence that determines women’s behavior, psychology, and social roles. From the essentialist perspective, the materiality of the body is a solid substance that remains unaffected by culture, mind, or society. Matter, in this view, is not only passive, opposed to active culture, but also impermeable. There were also commentators who argued the contrary that Irigaray develops a concept of the body that is socially, linguistically, and historically constituted. As Grosz (1989) underlines, Irigaray does not conceive of the body as ‘‘pure’’ or ‘‘natural’’ (111). Instead, the body is always a ‘‘social body’’ informed by the ‘‘social and psychical meaning of the body.’’ From this viewpoint materiality stays open to heterogeneous influences; it is still passive but is flexibly engaged in psychic and social significations. Thus, the distinction between matter and meaning is blurred here, suggesting that matter is always burdened with meaning. One may argue that by advancing her concept of the body as a multitude Irigaray evades essentializing reductionism: ‘‘Not having one identity, one location, one organ or one orgasm, female sexuality has been understood as no identity or sexuality. Irigaray accepts the phallocentric image of woman as ‘not one’ but reverses its meaning: if woman is ‘not one,’ she is more than one’’ (118). Being ‘‘more than one’’ marks the female body, speech, and language. Woman is contradictory in herself, ‘‘‘she’ is indefinitely other in herself’’ (Irigaray 1985b, 28), paradoxical, and ungraspable in terms of reason. Woman’s language and sexuality is plural: ‘‘Woman has sex organs more or less everywhere’’ (28), and she experiences multiple touches all the time and as such reorganizes the ‘‘economy of the Same’’ into the economy of multitude. QUESTIONS

Is the feminine body in Irigaray a source or an effect of the reconceptualization of the ‘‘economy of the Same’’? Does her notion of sexual difference privilege heterosexual relations, or does it shape all forms of sexual encounters (Butler and Cornell 1998)? Irigaray GENDER: MATTER

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claims that sexual difference is fundamental to twentieth-century Western culture. Will that be true for the twenty-first century? How can one envision a world organized around the idea of the body as multitude? What does Irigaray exclude from her thinking (Butler 1993)? Does Irigaray’s theory allow for analyses of race, colonialism, dis/ability, and species? Or does she omit them, focusing exclusively on sexual difference?

THE MATERIALITY THAT MATTERS Judith Butler is an American philosopher and professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has been foundational for gender and queer theories. She also comments broadly on contemporary philosophy and politics. In 1990 she published the groundbreaking and thought-provoking book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. She is a prolific author whose publications include Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex’’ (1993), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Undoing Gender (2004), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), and Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013), cowritten with Athena Athanasiou. In his inaugurating lecture at the Colle`ge de France in December 1970 titled ‘‘The Discourse on Language,’’ French philosopher Michel Foucault (1972) claimed that western European culture, regardless of its attachment to language and its ‘‘apparent logophilia’’ (228) is paradoxically driven by a hidden and ‘‘profound logophobia,’’ a fear of the ‘‘disorderly buzzing of discourse’’ (229). Foucault remarks that Western civilization is a culture of barriers and taboos, with most of them serving to govern and regulate the uncontrollable proliferation of discourse. Discourse thus may remind one of an untamed animal, a naughty child, or a whimsical hysteric that one ought to rule, limit, and restrain. When compared to an unmanageable living being, discourse and language are deprived of their position as binary oppositions of matter and the body. In fact, people are afraid of the uncontrollable points of contact between bodies and discourses, which is also the main theme for Butler. How do material bodies and words/speech/language/meaning intermingle? How do material bodies come to matter (in both meanings: how they materialize and how they become meaningful)? What is a status of the material body? One possible way to elaborate on the issue of materiality-meaning entanglements is to think about the nature-culture opposition. Butler agrees here with Wittig that the concept of nature has been employed to legitimize a specific culture, circumscribe power structures, and define proper subjects and relations between them. In particular, the opposition between sex (as a domain of nature) and gender (as a cultural appendix) controls gender by providing the ‘‘natural’’ grounding for it (Butler 1990). This is evident, for instance, in the diverse ways in which people use animals and knowledge of animal behavior to justify their own choices. Animals are presented both as close to humans (e.g., when they are needed to serve as objects of medical experiments, when one wants to show that something is ‘‘natural’’ [here, a synonym to normal, typical]) and as totally distinct from humans (e.g., when one talks about rights or human superiority or wants to condemn an action using the argument that it is animallike brute or bestial). This example indicates how people construct the discourse on nature according to their aims. The idea is that nature is culturally constructed as a raw material for culture, its bedrock is dubbed social constructionism, and Butler is oftentimes associated with it.

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It is not only nature that is posited as a foundation for culture; one may say the same about the body: ‘‘The body posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signified as prior’’ (Butler 1993, 30). Thus, body is constructed as preceding sign. Language does not reflect the reality; it constitutes it. The belief that materiality is a necessary starting point for cultural distinctions is only a social construct used to justify the system of oppression. Butler’s arguments were developed further by feminist science scholars, such as Karen Barad, who states that Butler’s elaborations are not enough to understand ‘‘precisely how discursive practices produce material bodies’’ (2003, 808). Another way in which culture draws on nature to justify its core values is through the enactment of the heterosexual matrix (Butler 1990), which may be juxtaposed with the heterosexual contract as understood by Wittig. In contrast to Wittig, however, Butler does not seek to avoid power relations by posing the lesbian outside the oppressive order. Instead, Butler directs her attention to performativity. The notion of performativity implies that the materiality of the body in itself is not gender specific (or race specific); it does not provide any raw constituents of gender (or race). Instead, the material body enacts its gender (or race) it performs them rather than having them or finding them in itself. BODILY LINGUISTIC VULNERABILITY

In searching for zones of proximity between material bodies and language or in an effort to attest to their performative entanglements, Butler turns to constitutive openness of both language and the body. In her 1997 book Excitable Speech, she investigates the metaphorical relationship between physical and linguistic injuries. A living language is one that maintains a certain openness to reinterpretation, reformulation, unexpected response. However, the openness of language also involves linguistic vulnerability: ‘‘The vulnerability to being named constitutes a constant condition of the speaking subject’’ (Butler 1997, 30). Being named is usually involuntary and might be harmful, yet it also opens up the possibility of countermobilization: to respond surprisingly, to change the meaning of the word, and to modify its context (think of the word queer and how it was used to intimidate people and how the meaning of it was reversed). Butler suggests that linguistic vulnerability is accompanied by bodily vulnerability: ‘‘Language sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible’’ (5). It is thus through language that the body is recognized as proper or improper, approved or rejected. Material bodies speak words that become ‘‘bodily offerings’’ (Butler 2004, 172). And just like being named makes an individual vulnerable to others, it is through the material body that one is exposed to others. Bodies, just like languages, exceed the individual and should remain unbound. The body is ‘‘the condition of survival’’ while simultaneously imperiling ‘‘our lives and our survivability’’ (Butler 2009, 54). Material bodies are social facts their survival depends on their outside, they are open to injuries, they are interdependent, and they react in response to the social context that shapes them. This leads Butler to the urge to rethink ‘‘a new bodily ontology’’ that would reflect on ‘‘precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work and the claims of language and social belonging’’ (2). The body reveals weakness, but it is also capable of resistance, as Butler reckons: ‘‘The body is that which can occupy the norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation’’ (Butler 2004, 217). GENDER: MATTER

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Bodily linguistic vulnerability is a commonly shared vulnerability that puts living beings at the risk of aggression, death, and violence, and simultaneously it provides them with the means to counteract. This double effect of vulnerability may arise only as a result of accepting that one’s life exceeds oneself (one does not control it), which is the object of fear in logophobia. QUESTIONS

Butler’s philosophical investigations from Gender Trouble posed questions about agency: How can one act and be held accountable for one’s actions if one’s subjectivity is constructed? How can one undertake action if ‘‘there is no ‘being’ behind the deed . . . ; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought, the doing is everything’’ (Nietzsche [1887] 2007, 26)? The development of Butler’s thought (1993, 1997) led to a reformulation of notions of agency as well as of subjectivity and emancipatory politics. How might one think of agency, subjectivity, and politics in terms of performativity? Some claim that the materiality of the body is underdeveloped: does Butler answer the question ‘‘how matter comes to matter’’? Is Butler’s account of the material body as a social construct deprived of materiality?

CORPOREALITY Elizabeth Grosz is an Australian philosopher who has been working and teaching at North American universities since 1999. Since 2012 she has been the Jean Fox O’Barr Women’s Studies Professor in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University. She has gained international attention thanks to her interpretations of psychoanalysis and French feminism. She is well-known for her study on corporeal feminism and for her in-depth, careful, and fresh feminist interpretations of Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Fe´lix Guattari. She is the author of Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994), The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (2004), Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (2005), and Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (2011). The concept of the material body is of pivotal importance in Grosz’s thought. From her early work on, she has been struggling to reevaluate and reimagine the body so that it could be feminism’s ally and not its enemy. Her reading of philosophy led her to conclude that since ancient Greece ‘‘philosophy has established itself on the foundations of a profound somatophobia’’ (Grosz 1994, 5). (Somatophobia means hostility to the body and fear of it.) Grosz strives to reimagine the body (particularly the sexually differentiated body) to provide an alternative to somatophobic philosophy and politics. It is with this aim that she introduced her project of corporeal feminism. The basic assumptions were offered in the article ‘‘Notes towards a Corporeal Feminism’’ (1987) and advanced in the book Volatile Bodies (1994). She contends that the body as an object of study is both universal and intimate, common and specific, object and subject, natural (biological) and cultural. The material body as established along the lines of corporeality is never a precultural given determined, fixed once and for all, or unchangeable. One will never grasp the complexity of the body referring only to genetics, physiology, or anatomy. The human body is always ‘‘the result of more than biology’’ (Grosz 1987, 7) it is shaped and influenced by psychical, cultural, and social factors, and it is ‘‘always already cultural ’’ (7). In fact, a material body is a ‘‘threshold between nature and culture’’ (8), which means that humans give meaning to their biological bodies, invest emotions in them, and shape them according to cultural and social norms. Hence, the body is understood here outside the frames of essentialist reductionism.

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Pinar Yoldas’s 2014 installation Ecosystem of Excess is presented in the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, October 29, 2015. Yoldas in her installation Ecosystem of Excess imagines the ways in which evolution might unfold. Today’s lifeforms suffer from environmental pollution; today’s oceans are ‘‘soups of plastic’’ that bring death to fauna. Yoldas tries to envision how plastic might be used to reproduce life rather than death and how evolution might create bodies capable of sensing, purifying, and digesting plastic. DPA PIC TURE ALLIANCE / ALAMY

In addition, the body should not be reduced to one model. Such a take seems neutral, but as shown in feminist scholarship, it masks a particular body (male, young, able, fit, middle class, white, heterosexual, human). That is why one needs to recognize that ‘‘there are only particular kinds of bodies’’ (9) and that there exists no ‘‘representative of all bodies’’ (9). ¨ BIUS STRIP THE BODY AS A MO

Grosz (1994) uses the mathematical concept of a Mo¨bius strip to illustrate how the body may be approached from ‘‘the inside’’ as a lived, subjectively experienced body and from ‘‘the outside’’ as a surface to be inscribed by cultural norms, practices, and meanings. A model of a Mo¨bius strip demonstrates the illusion of the rigid opposition between the outside and the inside. In the first part of Volatile Bodies, Grosz investigates theoretical approaches that resist presenting the body as an isolated object of philosophical inquiry (such as psychoanalysis, neurophysiology, and phenomenology). Such philosophy is devoted to reflecting on the body as exceeding its biological meaning and as interwoven into the psychic and subjective life of an individual. One’s body is never neutral to oneself. Individuals understand themselves with reference to their bodies: one’s sex, one’s skin color, one’s species, the ability of the body, and its shape add up to the way one engages with the world. GENDER: MATTER

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At the same time, however, the body may be treated as a surface ready to be culturally inscribed, fashioned, and structured. Grosz reflects on philosophical standpoints that emphasized the power of the ‘‘outside’’ to literally form the body. The richness of this theoretical position is exemplified here through elaboration on Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Alphonso Lingis, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari (Grosz 1994). This perspective explains, for example, the reason the concept of the beautiful, healthy, or fit body changes and how it is interdependent with culture. Why was the thin, fit, and young body desired in twentiethcentury Western cultures and its contrary was not? Why is the brain sometimes understood as a key to understanding humanity, whereas intestines are at their best considered a noisome necessity? Why is it perfectly normal in some cultures (and in some spaces and times) to be naked with family and friends, whereas in other cultures (spaces and times) it is a taboo? These two perspectives provide an insightful view on how one need not reduce one perspective to another but can combine both as well as how the two distinct points of view simultaneously disjoin (for instance, they provide different concepts of the subject) and overlap (they both attest to the concept of the body as a threshold between nature and culture). At the same time, however, they ignore sexual specificity of bodies. Is sexual differentiation a given? Or is it an effect of cultural inscriptions? And how are sexually diverse bodies experienced by individuals? In her own take on sexually diversified bodies, Grosz attempts to combine the two attitudes: sexual difference is both a given and inscribed. On the one hand, ‘‘sexual difference makes and marks a difference everywhere’’ (Grosz 2005, 166). Therefore, it shapes every cell of the material body as an active axis around which the body develops. On the other hand, certain modes of behavior linked to sexuality or sex roles are culturally fashioned. DEEPER INTO CORPOREALITY

It was obvious for Grosz that the body is both pliable, open toward cultural inscriptions and biologically constrained. Humans cannot fly in the air (using only one’s body) or breathe freely under water. Thus, the body is both flexible and resistant. It is not only a cultural construct but has its autonomy as well. Yet Grosz points to a blind spot in her own writings on corporeality: ‘‘What I did not adequately realize . . . is that without some reconfigured concept of the biological body, models of subject-inscription, production, or constitution lack material force; paradoxically, they lack corporeality’’ (2004, 3 4). To this end, Grosz develops her understanding of the biology and evolution of material bodies. How can nature and the biology of material bodies be conceptualized for feminist purposes? How can biology be understood outside essentialist, determinist, and misogynist positions? How can the openness of the body toward cultural inscriptions, meanings, and interpretations be adequately explained? Those questions serve as a departure point for investigating the materiality of the body. The body is not a unit but ‘‘a system, or series of open-ended systems, functioning within other huge systems it cannot control, through which it can access and acquire its abilities and capacities’’ (3). Therefore, the aim here is not only to apprehend the form of human corporeality but also to see a bigger picture of corporeality: How does it function, around which lines does it transform itself, and which forms does it take (and why)? A key concept toward understanding corporeality from a biological viewpoint is evolution, a notion that Grosz interprets with reference to Darwin. Neither biology nor evolution is treated here as determined or essentialist. Evolution, according to Grosz, is a mechanism open for the new: ‘‘related species in the past prefigure and provide the raw material for

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present and future species but in no way contain or limit them’’ (8). Hence, evolution is a mechanism aiming at creating new bodily forms and behaviors that are unpredictable and undetermined. In fact, nature provides all possible kinds of material bodies, ways of living, and ways of engaging in the world, whereas culture opts for one certain solution and line of development. Just to exemplify this, think of how many notions of sexual differences exist in insects or fungi and potentially how it may challenge the patriarchal notion of sex difference where male is opposed to female. It is thus by drawing on the principles of evolution that one may influence the culture as given and treat it (especially the obviousness of what is allegedly given) suspiciously. Here, evolution becomes ‘‘deconstruction itself’’ (Grosz 2005, 81). Evolution through the mechanism of sexual selection is an open-ended reservoir of possibilities, unexpected alliances, bodily forms, behaviors, and queerness. Moreover, it inscribes sexual difference in material bodies themselves. Sexual difference becomes the ontological (connected to reality and being) mechanism responsible for any transformation that can occur and for the proliferation of material bodily forms. The concept of material bodies that emerges as a result of these investigations is one shaped by evolution, which includes environmental influences (such as natural selection) and the spontaneity and artistry of sexual selection. Bodies are thus open to further metamorphosis beyond what is perceived as given or possible. They are also shaped with reference to what is inhuman in a human, what links humanity to its beyond the animal: ‘‘the origin and the end of humanity’’ (Grosz 2011, 12). QUESTIONS

One may question Grosz’s primacy of sexual difference over other kinds of differences (e.g., racial or class). It is clear that she does not privilege any type of fight against oppression over another (Grosz 2011). But what consequences does the primacy of sexual difference (as the only ontological one) have for conceptualizations of racial or class differences? Oftentimes Grosz is criticized for her claims that transsexual bodies are not capable of obtaining the characteristics of the other sex because sexual difference can be reduced to neither genetics, nor anatomy, nor physiology (Grosz 1994, 2014). Would you agree? How can one adequately grasp the meaning of sexual difference in trans bodies? Brian Massumi in turn points out that, starting her analysis from sexual selection, Grosz ‘‘leaves by the wayside the majority of life-forms populating the earth. It leapfrogs over more ‘primitive,’ less ostentatiously coupling creatures, not to mention ‘lower’ animals that persist in multiplying asexually’’ (2014, 2 3). Is that so? What kind of ontological axis may incorporate all lifeforms if not sexual difference?

Summary The philosophers mentioned in this chapter resist essentialist reductionism and develop their concepts of material bodies as an attempt to overcome dualistic conceptions of body-mind by revealing potent interconnections between body, materiality, nature, psyche, and culture. They also capture power relations embedded in conceptualizations of material bodies. Both Wittig and Butler uncover conditions under which culture draws on naturalized conceptions of the material body as preceding sign to justify social relations, while Irigaray and Grosz focus on sexually differentiated bodies to regain the notion of sexual difference. All the GENDER: MATTER

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authors search for a concept of the material body that can resist patriarchy. Wittig sees the possibility of such conceptualization in a lesbian body that avoids any set categorizations, such as gender or species, and unsettles all oppositions. Butler detects matter-meaning entanglements that are responsible for recognizing a body as proper or improper. Her concepts of bodily linguistic vulnerability and performativity offer ways to oppose injurious power relations. Irigaray introduces her concept of the body as multitude and emphasizes the complexity of sexual difference. Grosz is devoted to her concept of corporeality, which grasps the ambivalence of material bodies, both malleable and unbending. All the concepts of material bodies presented in this chapter prevailingly concentrate on sex difference and sexuality. They only touch on, rather than advance, the issue of species (Wittig, Grosz), race (Butler, Grosz), or class (Wittig). The question of dis/ability is entirely left aside. The interest in material bodies expressed by all the authors discussed marks the broader tendency of turning to matter in feminist scholarship in the twenty-first century as opposed to turning to the discursive in postmodernism. Nevertheless, some of the authors mentioned here (such as Butler) may be associated with the latter because of their focus on how the material body is constructed. The turn to matter that was initiated by feminist philosophers such as those considered here opens the ground for new theoretical considerations, such as those of feminist new materialisms, where the stress is placed on matter and its agential character. Reimagining matter as active (and not only inert) stimulated research on redefining agency beyond an anthropocentric (human-centered) approach, appreciating dispersed agentic capacities and emphasizing the mutual interconnectedness of the human with the more than human (i.e., the environment, animals, plants, the organic, the inorganic, technology) and the permeability of matter.

Bibliography Barad, Karen. ‘‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801 831. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex.’’ New York: Routledge, 1993. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Perform ative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subver sion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Butler, Judith, Drucilla Cornell, Pheng Cheah, and Elizabeth Grosz. ‘‘The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell.’’ Diacritics 28, no. 1 (1998): 19 42.

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Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Con cept of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2005. First published 1966. Foucault, Michel. ‘‘The Discourse on Language.’’ In The Archeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith, 215 237. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘‘Notes towards a Corporeal Feminism.’’ Australian Feminist Studies 2, no. 5 (1987): 1 16. Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1989. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

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Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Fem inism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.

Grosz, Elizabeth, and Esther Wolfe. ‘‘Bodies of Philosophy: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz.’’ Stance 7 (2014): 115 126.

Mulvey, Laura. ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6 18.

Irigaray, Luce. ‘‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother.’’ In The Irigaray Reader, edited by Margaret Whitford and translated by David Macey, 34 46. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. First published 1984. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985a. First published 1974. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985b. First published 1977. Jay, Nancy. ‘‘Gender and Dichotomy.’’ Feminist Studies 7, no. 1 (1981): 38 56. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Massumi, Brian. What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

GENDER: MATTER

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Rev. ed. Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson. Translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. First published 1887. Scott, Joan Wallach. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Fem inists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Spelman, Elizabeth V. ‘‘Woman as Body: Ancient and Con temporary Views.’’ Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (1982): 109 131. Wittig, Monique. The Lesbian Body. Translated by David Le Vay. New York: Morrow, 1975. Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind, and Other Essays. Bos ton: Beacon Press, 1992. FI L MS The Girl. Dir. Sande Zeig. 2000. A romantic drama based on a short story by Monique Wittig, who is also a coauthor of the screenplay. Only Angels Have Wings. Dir. Howard Hawks. 1939. One of the films referred to in Laura Mulvey’s essay on male gaze. To Have and Have Not. Dir. Howard Hawks. 1944. One of the films referred to in Laura Mulvey’s essay on male gaze.

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Transgender Matters Toby Beauchamp Assistant Professor, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In her book Transgender History (2008), transgender studies scholar Susan Stryker outlines one of the political problems that transgender topics have posed for feminist movements in the United States since the 1970s: many mainstream feminists from this period have believed that when transgender-identified people alter their physical bodies through hormones, surgeries, or prostheses they confront gender oppression only on an individual or personal level. Instead, these feminists have argued, work is needed to ‘‘systematically dismantle the social structures that created gender-based oppression in the first place’’ (Stryker 2008, 2). In other words, they have favored changing the social world to value a broader range of gendered bodies and expressions, rather than changing individual bodies, and viewed medical transition as antithetical to this project. These continued debates within feminist movements indicate the centrality of bodies and matter to feminist engagements with transgender politics. But Stryker points out that these seemingly distinct approaches need not be opposed to one another: feminism can address structural gender oppression ‘‘without passing moral judgment’’ on those who wish to change their gender and gendered bodies (3). In fact, perhaps these two approaches cannot ever really be separated. After all, people routinely change their physical bodies in gendered ways from haircuts to piercings to workout regimens and these material alterations in turn affect social norms. Likewise, feminist interventions into gendered structures of power allow for and shape new ways of imagining and inhabiting physical bodies. This chapter addresses the ways that transgender identities, bodies, and politics have been conceived in relation to the material world. Although the field of transgender studies has historically been concerned largely with identity and subjectivity, these concepts are always bound up with questions of matter. In part, this is because the physical body itself plays a central role in most conceptualizations of transgender identity, and so it becomes the material through which transgender identity is typically granted social, medical, or legal recognition. For example, the presence or absence of certain genitals, reproductive organs, sex hormones, breasts, or body hair often serves as material evidence for ‘‘being’’ a particular sex or gender both socially and legally (Currah and Moore 2009). Most medical and legal institutions and many popular-culture texts, such as films and magazines, represent transgender status primarily through a person’s intentional alteration of some or all of these bodily characteristics. As this chapter will show, some scholars suggest that transgender identity could not even be possible without materials such as surgical implements, synthetic sex hormones, or

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Stryker 2008; Valentine 2007). From the time of its invention by medical researchers and physicians during the 1950s, the category transsexual relied heavily on studies of the physical body as a means both to define it and to treat it. Although many people think of transgender primarily in terms of surgeries and synthetic hormones, the development of new medical technologies does not adequately explain early understandings of what came to be known as transgender identity. As historian Joanne Meyerowitz points out, ideas about biological sex have always been subject to change, however stable and natural they may seem when viewed in the present moment. ‘‘European and American scientists once envisioned sex as a hierarchy of similar beings in which female stood as an inferior version of male,’’ she writes, explaining that only in the late eighteenth century did this biomedical research begin to clearly distinguish between two sexes now understood to be oppositional (Meyerowitz 2002, 21 22; see also Oudshoorn 1994). Thus the sex categories of ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female,’’ now widely believed to be natural, physically obvious, and clearly distinct from one another, have not always been so; rather, ‘‘like gender and sexuality, biological sex has a history’’ (Meyerowitz 2002, 21). The development and idealization of a dichotomous sex/gender system which for many people now seems so naturalized as to be common sense, even a basic fact of life was a precursor for present-day definitions of transgender as a term describing someone who moves across the boundaries between male and female, man and woman. In other words, the common understanding of transgender as something distinct from the binary categories of ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘man’’ could not emerge as such until those binary categories themselves had first taken hold. As various scholars have observed, the dichotomous sex/gender system was often forcibly imposed during the early formation of the US nation-state, a process involving policing and punishment that European colonizers and slave traders ‘‘based on actual or projected ‘deviant’ sexualities and gender expressions, as an integral part of colonization, genocide, and enslavement’’ (Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock 2011, 1). For example, literary scholar Deborah A. Miranda shows how sixteenth-century Spanish colonizers in the region now known as California attempted to systemically exterminate gender-variant Indians who did not conform to European norms of binary gender. Because the ‘‘indigenous third gender’’ was linked to important community responsibilities, Miranda argues, violently destroying this group of people became a strategy of broader cultural genocide (Miranda 2013, 358). Yet she emphasizes that these gendered frameworks were not completely eliminated, suggesting that ‘‘contemporary California Two-Spirits are the rightful descendants’’ of those targeted for death during early colonization (360). It would be a mistake, then, to assume that the binary system invented in the European world was universal. In fact, it was and is just one way of understanding sex and gender difference in relation to the physical body. MEASURING THE BODY

Meticulous study of the physical body helped support new ideas about sex and gender difference: anthropometry, or the measurement of physical characteristics in order to classify and rank groups of people, played a significant role in the production of racial categories as well as those for gender and sexuality. Tracing the late nineteenth-century development of sexology, the scientific study of human sexuality, queer studies scholar Siobhan B. Somerville illustrates how major sexologists, such as Havelock Ellis (1859 1939) and Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840 1902) drew on discourses of racial difference in their studies of gender difference and non-normative sexuality. By looking at sexologists’ detailed anatomical accounts, Somerville explains how these studies regularly focused on the genitals and/or GENDER: MATTER

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reproductive organs of black female-assigned bodies, which researchers believed to be inherently abnormal as compared to white bodies: they ‘‘constructed the site of racial difference by marking the sexual and reproductive anatomy of the African woman as ‘peculiar’; in their characterization, sexual ambiguity delineated the boundaries of race’’ (Somerville 2000, 27). These research efforts are a form of scientific racism: the use of scientific studies of the body to support racial hierarchies already in place in the social world. In their claims that black and mixed-race people’s reproductive and sexual organs showed them to be inherently inferior and sexually deviant, these sexologists helped link ideas about sexual difference and normative gender to ideologies of racial hierarchy. This history is important for understanding how the categories of ‘‘transgender’’ and ‘‘transsexual’’ emerged beginning in the mid-twentieth century, because physicians and other medical researchers did not develop their ideas about transgender identity in a vacuum. Rather, they drew on previous efforts to classify sex, race, and sexuality through careful observation and measurement of physical aspects of the body. Those efforts occurred many years before transgender was even invented as a term, but they show how sexual and gender difference has long been imagined as something grounded in the physical body in physical attributes and material bodily processes just as they are a reminder that bodily characteristics can be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on different social and historical contexts. So by the time physicians and psychologists began to take up the category that has come to be called transgender and to classify their clients as such, both medical researchers and the general public commonly believed that non-normative gender could be traced back to some aspect of the material body. Furthermore, many believed that non-normative gender could and should be treated through medical changes to the body. MEDICAL REGULATIONS

Even years before medical researchers developed clear terms for describing non-normative gender, they began making various attempts to address it by altering the physical body. In addition to occasional transplant procedures, surgical efforts in the early twentieth-century United States and Europe focused primarily on removing different sexual and reproductive organs, suggesting a general belief that individual body parts were inherently responsible for gendered feelings and behaviors. At least one person seeking such surgeries during this time, a physician himself, argued for removal of sex organs not merely to address gender difference but to effectively sterilize people with ‘‘abnormal inversion’’ (Meyerowitz 2002, 18). This argument drew on common beliefs that gender deviance was congenital and hereditary; following this line of thought, surgically removing reproductive capacity was considered a way to prevent gender-nonconforming people from passing on any abnormalities. In this way, surgical removal of body parts had a kind of dual purpose for many medical professionals: it served as a way of normalizing transgender people in the present and as a preventative measure that guarded against future cases of non-normative gender. These ideas persist well into the twenty-first century; as of 2014, several European countries including Norway, France, and Italy legally require sterilizing surgical procedures as a condition of legal name and gender changes (Pasulka 2012; Transgender Europe 2014). Likewise, any law in the United States that requires surgeries, such as hysterectomies or orchiectomies, in order to change one’s legal gender then implicitly relies on sterilization as a condition of gender change. These kinds of regulations help make clear how central particular components of the physical body are not only to understandings of who belongs in the categories of ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘woman’’ but also to general ideas about which bodies deserve the ability to reproduce.

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Medical researchers and physicians worked in various ways through the first half of the twentieth century to identify, define, and treat non-normative gender. The formal codification of transition processes in the United States is often traced back to physician Harry Benjamin, a sexologist and clinician whose 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon advocated for beneficial medical treatment for transsexual people. Shortly after the book’s publication, Johns Hopkins University developed the first ‘‘sex change’’ program in the United States (Stryker 2008, 73). By the late 1970s, standardized criteria for diagnosing transsexuality as ‘‘gender identity disorder’’ had been codified, and continually revised medical and psychological policies specified the types of medical changes to the body that might be considered appropriate treatment. Together, these developments helped solidify the categories of transgender and transsexual in Western medicine and law and in the general public. Notably, the criteria medical providers used to determine transgender status relied on particular racial, class-based, and sexual interpretations of masculinity and femininity to assess clients’ likelihood of ‘‘success’’ as a different gender (Spade 2006; Stone 1991). BEYOND MEDICALIZATION

The development of transgender and transsexual as Western medical and legal categories occurred within a dominant social framework that assumes dichotomous sex/gender as standard and foundational. Most commonly, a person who wishes to legally change his or her gender must first make certain prescribed changes to his or her body; in turn, those bodily changes often appear to reinforce the notion that there are only two gender categories, each of which maps onto one of two distinct types of sexed bodies. This way of understanding sex and gender as fundamentally and unquestionably divided into male/female, man/ woman obscures the many ways that sex and gender have been constructed in different social and historical contexts, including varied ways of distinguishing between different sexed bodies. Feminist psychology scholar Katrina Roen, for instance, asks how well a Western medicalization model works in cultural contexts that do not necessarily prioritize bodily configuration as a marker of gender role. Roen points to Maaori and Samoan cases in which sex-reassignment surgery has been increasingly imposed upon ‘‘gender liminal’’ people, and she suggests that Western medicalization might eclipse other ways of conceptualizing sex and gender (Roen 2001, 254 255). Although medicalization and a dichotomous sex/gender system have formed the foundation for much transgender studies work from North America and Europe, many scholars question the universalizing and colonizing effects that this emphasis can entail. This critical analysis can also prompt a closer look at the specific physical materials, such as sex hormones, that are regularly understood to move sexed bodies from one category to another. As the next few sections of this chapter show, these bodily materials can be conceptualized in a variety of ways and can illuminate how race, nationality, and class are central to common medical and social conceptions of normative and ‘‘trans’’ gender. HORMONES AND BODILY FLUIDITY

Sex hormones are divided into three major categories: androgens (‘‘male’’ hormones), estrogens (‘‘female’’ hormones), and progestins (hormones related to menstruation and pregnancy). In the first decades of the twentieth century, researchers studying sex hormones focused primarily on the first two categories and believed these substances to be utterly aligned with binary sex categories: androgens belonged to male bodies and estrogens to female bodies. Yet by the 1930s, new studies determined that both of these types of hormones were present in all sexed bodies in varying ratios. In light of this conclusion, ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ bodies could no longer GENDER: MATTER

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be understood as fundamentally oppositional and distinct; sex hormones suggested that sex and gender might be more fluid than had previously been assumed, and many medical researchers adopted a new framework that approached bodies in terms of ‘‘degrees of maleness and femaleness’’ (Terry 1999, 162). Although this new approach opened possibilities for more expansive views of sex and gender, it also led to new efforts to correct and cure supposedly deviant gendered behaviors and sexual desires. In the 1930s and 1940s, many researchers proposed that an imbalance in estrogens and androgens caused deviant sexuality and gender, and they developed studies to determine whether synthetic sex hormones which were first being produced during this period could successfully treat clients who exhibited non-normative gender and same-sex sexual desires. As with earlier research on reproductive organs and genitals, these endocrinology studies also drew on theories of racial hierarchy. As science and technology studies scholar David Serlin explains, many studies of sex hormones claimed that ‘‘bodies with putatively dysfunctional or ‘primitive’ reproductive glands not only defied the concept of ‘normal’ gender but also proved that the physiological and morphological features of such bodies were considered racially uncivilized compared to the rest of modern (white) society’’ (Serlin 2004, 120). These types of studies were fundamental to early twentieth-century scientific racism, but their basic logic extends at least through the 1990s with efforts to classify racial groups according to testosterone levels (Beauchamp 2013, 76 77). Purported testosterone deficiencies help construct some racialized male-assigned bodies as inferior to white masculinity, whereas purported excesses of testosterone help characterize other racial categories as inherently violent, aggressive, or hypersexual. For instance, multiple endocrinology studies, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, sought to determine whether black men have higher testosterone levels than other racial groups, a research question that can easily contribute to stereotypical characterizations of black men as innately violent or inclined to criminal behavior. GENDER AND RACIAL NORMATIVITY THROUGH HORMONES

Yet just as hormones were considered evidence of physical and social inferiority, they also held the promise of correcting those bodily flaws. For instance, Serlin traces the life of Gladys Bentley, a black entertainer who performed in Harlem nightclubs in the 1920s and 1930s. Bentley embraced a masculine aesthetic, and she had a public wedding to marry her white girlfriend in 1928. But a few decades later, Bentley began taking estrogen treatments on the advice of her physician, who claimed that Bentley’s sex organs had not fully developed and that synthetic sex hormones would both assist them in maturing and also cure her sexual and gender deviance. Synthetic estrogen, then, seemed to offer a way for those whose bodies were classified as fundamentally underdeveloped or ‘‘primitive’’ to claim proper gender as defined through white middle-class standards. Bentley’s story illustrates how synthetic sex hormones linked ‘‘medical rehabilitation of [the] body with social rehabilitation of [the] identity’’ (Serlin 2004, 18). Bentley need not be categorized as transgender for it to be clear how her narrative connects to the prescription of synthetic sex hormones as a standard treatment for transgender-identified people. Even today, many physicians, transgender people, and popular media representations frame synthetic hormones as a way to support ‘‘appropriate’’ masculine or feminine behavior and appearances. At the same time, hormone use outside of formal medical regulation as with narratives of athletes taking illicit steroids often sparks fears of excessively masculine behaviors, such as violent aggression. But Bentley’s story is a reminder that synthetic hormones do not simply produce masculinity or femininity; rather, popular and medical discourses attach masculine or feminine meanings to hormones, which are then sometimes used as material evidence of gender deviance or normativity. Synthetic sex

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hormones are, in the most basic sense, chemical substances that travel through bodies and across national borders as they are manufactured, sold, and consumed. But because these substances are so strongly associated with ideas about gender, race, and sexuality, they are often highly regulated by medicine and law. Questions about who should have access to synthetic hormones and surgical procedures as well as the political ramifications of these medical technologies have been of particular importance for many feminist scholars addressing transgender politics.

FEMINIST DEBATES Although surgical techniques and synthetic hormones are perhaps the most commonly imagined ways by which gender is ‘‘changed,’’ it is important to consider them in a broader context of bodily changes that people have long engaged in both with and without medical oversight. Seemingly quotidian strategies, such as haircuts and clothing choices, do not typically require the professional regulation and medical expertise that surgeries and hormones do and are therefore available to a wider range of gender-nonconforming people, particularly those who cannot afford surgery or are otherwise not considered good candidates for surgery or hormones. These kinds of everyday practices are reminders that all bodies participate in material gendering processes, not simply those bodies classified as transgender and not only those that have surgeries or take hormones. Additionally, these strategies demonstrate the centrality of the material world to transgender identity and politics in ways that go far beyond the common focus on genital surgery and synthetic sex hormones. Nonetheless, those two specific medical technologies have proven central to debates about transgender people and transgender politics within feminism. CRITICISMS OF TRANSGENDER PRACTICES

One of the most contentious early works to enter these debates was Janice G. Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire, in which Raymond, professor of women’s studies and medical ethics, argues that ‘‘transsexual surgery’’ is a fundamentally patriarchal endeavor. Focusing primarily on male-to-female transgender people, Raymond contends that the technologies and practices used for medical transition create falsely gendered individuals who play directly into stereotypical binary sex roles. In other words, she suggests that transsexual women (whom she calls ‘‘male-to-constructed-female’’ to emphasize her claim that they cannot truly be considered women) wield male privilege in conjunction with patriarchal medical practices to construct themselves as women who conform to both the most stereotypical images of femininity and the appropriate (nontranssexual) women’s identities, spaces, and bodies. Raymond goes so far as to liken this to an act of rape: ‘‘All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves’’ (Raymond 1979, 104). For Raymond, medical technologies are key to this appropriation: the ‘‘transsexual empire’’ that her book’s title references, she writes, ‘‘is basically the medical conglomerate that has created the treatment and technology that makes anatomical sex conversion possible’’ (xiv xv). In Changing Sex (1995), medical humanities scholar Bernice L. Hausman takes up some similar lines of argument. Hausman rejects the idea that transsexualism is ‘‘representative of a transhistorical desire of some human subjects to be the other sex,’’ instead suggesting that ‘‘developments in medical technology and practice were central to the establishment of the necessary conditions for the emergence of the demand for sex change, which was understood as GENDER: MATTER

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the most important indicator of transsexual subjectivity’’ (1995, 2 3). Many scholars in feminist, queer, and transgender studies concur that this human desire cannot be properly understood as ‘‘transhistorical,’’ not least because the very notion that there is a single ‘‘other sex’’ is not itself transhistorical, as this chapter noted earlier. But Hausman’s fundamental argument that the discourse of transsexuality is only made possible by material changes in medical technologies tethers transsexual identity to surgeries and synthetic hormones, positioning it as inherently dependent upon medical science. Thus she argues that to be transsexual entails ‘‘a compulsive relation’’ to those medical technologies associated with transsexuality (140). Although she does not follow Raymond’s argument that transsexual people are fundamentally patriarchal or misogynistic, Hausman does contend that transgender-related medical technologies support an idealized and constraining compulsory gender system and are therefore at odds with feminism. In her book’s conclusion, she questions whether ‘‘subjects who change their sex in order to make their bodies ‘match’ some kind of internal experience of the self defined as gender’’ can really ‘‘question the ‘system’ that so clearly demarcates their choices’’ (199). Hausman explains that her work is not hostile to transsexual people her concern is perhaps more about the conservative effects she perceives transsexual practices, especially medical practices, to have. Yet at its heart, her argument, like Raymond’s, turns on an inherent and inescapable dependence upon medical technologies as producing transsexual subjects, whom these two authors then position if in slightly different ways as reinforcing gender stereotypes and constricting gender roles. RESPONSES TO CRITICISM

Other scholars have countered these arguments from a variety of angles. Most explicitly, in her article ‘‘The Empire Strikes Back’’ (1991), which provided one of the earliest foundations out of which the field of transgender studies would emerge, Sandy Stone responds directly to Raymond. Stone, an artist and a cultural theorist, expresses her own suspicions about accounts from transsexuals and from medical professionals that rely wholly on stereotypical binary gender norms. She shows how these two groups mutually provoked a standardized narrative in which transsexual clients seemed to be almost instantly transformed from one dichotomized gender category to the other by way of sex-reassignment surgery: medical researchers developed a list of criteria for determining which clients were appropriate for medical transition, and the clients reproduced these same criteria in order to gain access to those medical practices. Recounting the ways that transsexual clients strategically comply with the expectation that they erase their pretransition lives and narrate a legible gender identity that lines up seamlessly with a legibly sexed body, Stone argues for ‘‘constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic ‘third gender,’ but rather as a genre a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored’’ (Stone 1991, 296). She suggests that transgender people might usefully refuse to be silent about the complexities of their gendered lives and bodies, which would assist in disrupting the ‘‘accepted discourses of gender’’ for everyone, including the notion that gendered subjects may have only one ‘‘right’’ body (295). Much work in transgender studies builds on Stone’s intervention and suggests a rethinking of the relationship between medical technologies and transgender identities and politics. Stryker, for instance, responds to Stone’s call for disruption by naming her own transsexual body as that which illuminates ‘‘the constructedness of the natural order’’ and ‘‘literalizes [the] abstract violence’’ of the gendering process for all bodies (Stryker 1994, 250). She suggests that the fundamentally constructed nature of all gender is displaced onto

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transsexual bodies: by framing these bodies as medically constructed dangers, other gendered bodies and identities can maintain the illusion of being ‘‘natural.’’ Likewise, anthropologist David Valentine contends that ‘‘non-transsexual’’ bodies are continually naturalized through this displacement, focusing his argument on debates about sex-reassignment surgery (SRS). Noting that nontranssexual people regularly question why someone would choose to surgically alter his or her genitals and what the politics of such a choice might be (that is, whether that choice works to uphold normative gender ideals), Valentine reverses the query: why do nontranssexuals choose not to have SRS? In asking this counterintuitive question after all, nontranssexual people are almost never required to answer for their desire not to change their genitals Valentine highlights the ways that nontranssexual bodies can appear naturally whole and outside of politics. He points out that nontranssexual people make a variety of choices about their own gendered bodies, including going to the gym and following certain diets as well as not having SRS, to actively maintain their status as nontranssexual men and women. Importantly, Valentine explicitly moves away from a question that is central for Raymond and Hausman: whether transgender uses of surgeries and synthetic hormones are dangerous or liberating. Instead, he acknowledges that these uses of medical technologies ‘‘can both uphold and contest binary gender,’’ and he refocuses his analysis on the point that nontranssexuality ‘‘is equally complicit in this dialectic, but that its complicity is masked by making binary gender reduced to SRS the responsibility of transexuals [sic] alone’’ (Valentine 2012, 190). RETHINKING TRANSGENDER MEDICALIZATION

Legal scholar Dean Spade similarly questions the claim that transgender people are more invested in gender stereotypes than others, noting that this claim ‘‘requires an understanding of transsexuality that both fully accepts the medical definition of transsexual and ignores the multiple non-norm-adhering narratives that trans people produce outside of medical contexts’’ (Spade 2006, 328). In other words, because medical professionals often demand a very specific narrative from transgender clients, basing an analysis only on medical reports can erase the range of ways many transgender people resist normative gender, even if they must sometimes strategically embrace it in conversations with their physicians. Whereas Hausman argues that ‘‘asking for technologically mediated sex change is in one and the same gesture to name oneself as transsexual and to request recognition as a transsexual from the medical institution’’ (Hausman 1995, 129), Spade draws on a narrative of his own relationship with medical institutions to complicate this view. He shows how his own requests for transgender-related surgery were repeatedly stymied by medical professionals, because he did not frame those requests within the normalizing gender narrative that Stone criticizes: the narrative of being ‘‘born in the wrong body’’ and of a desire for surgery that produces a legible, normatively gendered body. Because Spade does not desire the types of medical changes that his doctors expect of him and because his desired changes disrupt the illusion of natural, binary sex/gender systems, medical professionals respond to him with a kind of disciplining skepticism: ‘‘In order to be deemed real,’’ he writes, ‘‘I need to want to pass as male all the time, and not feel ambivalent about this’’ (322). In analyzing the medical response to his own narrative, Spade radically reworks Hausman’s framework by arguing that medicine invented the categories of ‘‘transgender’’ and ‘‘transsexual’’ as one way to regulate all gendered bodies and behaviors. He explains, ‘‘The medical regime permits only the production of gender-normative altered bodies, and seeks to screen out alterations that are resistant to a dichotomized, naturalized view of gender,’’ emphasizing that this practice ‘‘may lead some people who understand themselves as not-transsexual to think that their adherence to GENDER: MATTER

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gender norms is natural and healthy. Everyone is implicated in this narrative, not only trans people’’ (319, 326). Spade’s emphasis here is a reminder that debates within feminism about the relationships that transgender bodies, identities, and politics have (or should have) with medical technologies come with high stakes not only for transgender-identified people but for all of us as we are implicated in gendered structures of power. The more firmly transgender legibility is linked socially, legally, or discursively to surgical procedures, specific prosthetic materials, or synthetic sex hormones, the more difficult it becomes to see how medical technologies and techniques serve regulatory functions for all gendered subjects and to illuminate the construction of all gendered bodies. Likewise, simply defining transgender subjects through a prescribed engagement with these medical technologies effaces the many ways that transgender people practice embodiment; it prioritizes material changes to the body that typically adhere to dominant norms of race, class, sexuality, and ability. Yet because these material changes are often deeply embedded in social and legal structures (e.g., evidence of surgery or hormone use is typically required to change one’s gender marker on identification documents), feminist and queer work may seek to expand access to such medical technologies even while critically questioning their status as primary.

THE MATERIALS THEMSELVES So far, this chapter has discussed how ideas about sex and gender categories including those of transgender and transsexual develop in relation to different physical aspects of the body and how feminist scholarship has debated the relationship between medical technologies and transgender bodies and identities. Although all of these questions remain important for feminist, queer, and transgender studies work, at times they can take for granted the materials themselves. Increasingly, feminist scholars concerned with transgender politics focus on how the very objects that are commonly associated with transgender people are produced, circulated, and consumed; collectively, they seek to unravel the political and historical contexts of these materials, which can help clarify how such objects and substances shape transgender politics. CONTEXTUALIZING HORMONES AS MATERIAL SUBSTANCES

For instance, in narrating her own use of synthetic hormones, sociologist and queer activist Michelle O’Brien focuses not on what these chemical substances might do to her own body but rather on their production through the transnational pharmaceutical industry, their regulation by US health insurance structures and illicit drug markets, and their close relationship to other highly regulated consumer materials, including HIV medications, injection needles and syringes, and other drugs classified as illegal. She addresses synthetic sex hormones as commodities moving through transnational structures of power, and in doing so she complicates understandings of hormones as straightforward methods of ‘‘treatment’’ or of self-determination. Instead, by situating her own hormone consumption as part of a larger commodity chain and approaching hormones as material substances that are bought and sold, O’Brien suggests that ‘‘we are dependent on the very systems that oppress us’’ (O’Brien 2013, 63). Building on this framework, other scholars examine the circulation of synthetic sex hormones in ways that connect transgender issues to broader questions of bodies, chemicals, and power. Cultural studies scholar Toby Beauchamp examines the events leading to the current classification in the United States of synthetic testosterone as a controlled substance. This federal

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legislation does not name transgender-identified people as its target, although certainly those seeking testosterone as part of medical transition fall under its purview. Demonstrating that legislators responded to deep cultural anxieties about shifting gender and racial categories and permeable national borders (across which testosterone travels, along with many other types of drugs that are manufactured and distributed), Beauchamp argues that ‘‘synthetic testosterone comes to stand in for the gender-nonconformity that threatens to destabilize the state’s fragile grasp on identity categories’’ (Beauchamp 2013, 74). Meanwhile, interdisciplinary scholar Bailey Kier suggests that synthetic hormones illustrate the interdependence between human and nonhuman forms of life. He traces the endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) produced in part by agricultural and industrial processes. Noting that EDCs from chemical waste have been linked to the presence of ‘‘transgender’’ fish in nearby waterways and pointing out that humans also ‘‘share a habitat with plastics, pesticides, and factory farming,’’ Kier contends that these connected hormonal ecologies may mean that ‘‘everybody on the planet is now encompassed within the category of transgender’’ (Kier 2010, 315, 299). Like O’Brien, both of these authors connect transgender politics to larger questions by studying hormones as material substances that travel across borders, bodies, and marketplaces. Their focus is less on the specific interactions between transgender persons and synthetic sex hormones than on the structures of power that shape how and for what purposes these chemicals are made and that regulate how they interact with all bodies, not only those marked as transgender. BROADER MATERIAL EFFECTS

A similar approach can apply to questions of surgery, prostheses, and related materials. For example, transgender studies and queer theorist Aren Z. Aizura questions the transnational labor practices that sex-reassignment surgery often entails. Looking specifically at gender clinics in Thailand that perform sex reassignment surgeries for many non-Thai transgender people, Aizura considers the multiple forms of labor that Thai clinic staff engage in. In addition to the more obvious work of surgery itself and postoperative health care, he also addresses affective labor emotional caretaking at all stages of the surgical process. This latter form of labor is not easily recognized as work, he suggests: because it is typically performed by Thai women, affective labor is feminized and racialized in ways that naturalize it as simply an aspect of Thai femininity rather than work. In urging engagement ‘‘with the power structures that have made gender reassignment surgery into a commodity globally,’’ Aizura’s approach illustrates how medical practices and technologies shape not only those bodies that medicine most overtly works on as patients but the many bodies that perform medical labor as well (Aizura 2013, 508). Aizura’s analysis can prompt further questions about the bodies that make the very objects used to perform surgery: How are surgical implements, electrolysis machines, implants, and prostheses produced? How are they packaged, distributed, and maintained? What labor practices do these processes entail, and how do those labor conditions also shape bodies in gendered and racialized ways? Although various technologies and materials may well be tools of self-determination or help produce the usefully disruptive ‘‘monstrous’’ body that Stryker invokes, feminist theorist Mimi Thi Nguyen points out that such materials are typically made available through ‘‘the making of other kinds of cyborgs’’: laborers whose gendered and racialized bodies work with other technologies the machines of the factory to manufacture those objects that are so strongly associated with transgender identity (Nguyen 2003, 292). Attending to the specific historical and political contexts of these objects as objects allows feminist scholars both to bring a richer analysis to debates about the materiality of transgender identities, bodies, and politics and to make important connections between transgender studies and broader questions of power. GENDER: MATTER

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Summary Much discussion on transgender topics within feminism has focused on the question of whether transgender people’s use of medical technologies such as surgeries, hormones, or prostheses constitutes a stereotypical or a liberating gender practice. Yet this debate forms only one of many possible approaches to the relationship between materiality and transgender politics. Even within this conversation, many scholars have opened new questions: some suggest that narrowly focusing on the ways that transgender identities or bodies are materially constructed helps maintain the illusion that any body is simply ‘‘naturally’’ sexed or gendered. Likewise, many feminist scholars question the way that transgender is commonly defined in relation to surgical techniques, prostheses or implants, or sex hormones. They call for a more complex analysis of this relationship in light of different cultural contexts, regulatory gender norms, and shifting meanings attached to sexed bodies, and they are a reminder that other objects from the scissors that cut hair to the clothing available may be just as important as these highly medicalized materials. Historical work on the invention of bodily based sex and gender categories and on the development of materials such as synthetic hormones illuminates how thoroughly transgender politics are part of complex conversations about racialization processes, transnational capital, and normative sexuality. Rather than taking materials such as synthetic hormones, surgical implements, and prosthetic devices at face value, many scholars research these objects themselves, analyzing how their production, use, and circulation help shape a variety of gendered bodies. Taken as a whole, this body of work considers not only the relationship transgender bodies and politics have to the material world but also the importance of ‘‘transgender matters’’ to feminist endeavors.

Bibliography Aizura, Aren Z. ‘‘The Romance of the Amazing Scalpel: ‘Race,’ Labor, and Affect in Thai Gender Reassignment Clinics.’’ In The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 496 511. New York: Routledge, 2013. Beauchamp, Toby. ‘‘The Substance of Borders: Transgender Politics, Mobility, and US State Regulation of Testoster one.’’ GLQ 19, no. 1 (2013): 57 78. Benjamin, Harry. The Transsexual Phenomenon. New York: Julian Press, 1966. Chase, Cheryl. ‘‘Hermaphodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Activism.’’ GLQ 4, no. 2 (1998): 189 211. Clare, Eli. ‘‘Body Shame, Body Pride: Lessons from the Dis ability Rights Movement.’’ In The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 261 265. New York: Routledge, 2013. Currah, Paisley, and Lisa Jean Moore. ‘‘‘We Won’t Know Who You Are’: Contesting Sex Designations in New York City Birth Certificates.’’ Hypatia 24, no. 3 (2009): 113 135.

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Fausto Sterling, Anne. ‘‘Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815 1817.’’ In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, 19 48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna. ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technol ogy, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Cen tury.’’ In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149 181. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hausman, Bernice L. Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Tech nology, and the Idea of Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Kenen, Stephanie. ‘‘Who Counts When You’re Counting Homosexuals? Hormones and Homosexuality in Mid Twentieth Century America.’’ In Science and Homosex ualities, edited by Vernon A. Rosario, 197 218. New York: Routledge, 1997. Kier, Bailey. ‘‘Interdependent Ecological Transsex: Notes on Re/Production, ‘Transgender’ Fish, and the Management

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of Populations, Species, and Resources.’’ Women and Performance 20, no. 3 (2010): 299 319.

Serlin, David. Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Post war America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Trans sexuality in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Miranda, Deborah A. ‘‘Extermination of the Joyas: Gender cide in Spanish California.’’ In The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 350 363. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Spade, Dean. ‘‘Mutilating Gender.’’ In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 315 332. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Mogul, Joey L., Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2011. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. ‘‘Queer Cyborgs and New Mutants: Race, Sexuality, and Prosthetic Sociality in Digital Space.’’ In AsianAmerica.net, edited by Rachel Lee and Sau Ling Wong, 281 305. New York: Routledge, 2003. O’Brien, Michelle. ‘‘Tracing This Body: Transsexuality, Pharmaceuticals, and Capitalism.’’ In The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 56 65. New York: Routledge, 2013. Oudshoorn, Nelly. Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeol ogy of Sex Hormones. New York: Routledge, 1994. Pasulka, Nicole. ‘‘17 European Countries Force Transgender Sterilization.’’ Mother Jones, February 16, 2012. http:// www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/02/most european countries force sterilization transgender people map. Preciado, Beatriz. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: Feminist Press, 2013. Raymond, Janice G. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She Male. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Roen, Katrina. ‘‘Transgender Theory and Embodiment: The Risk of Racial Marginalization.’’ Journal of Gender Stud ies 10, no. 3 (2001): 253 263.

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Steinbock, Eliza. ‘‘Trans.’’ In Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies, edited by rene´e c. hoogland, 377 392. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2016. Stone, Sandy. ‘‘The ‘‘Empire’’ Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.’’ In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 280 304. New York: Routledge, 1991. Stryker, Susan. ‘‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.’’ GLQ 1, no. 3 (1994): 237 254. Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008. Sullivan, Nikki. ‘‘Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s).’’ In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 552 564. New York: Routledge, 2006. Terry, Jennifer. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. Chicago: Univer sity of Chicago Press, 1999. Transgender Europe. ‘‘Trans Rights Europe Map, 2014: 21 Countries Requiring Sterilisation in Gender Identity Rec ognition.’’ 2014. http://www.tgeu.org/sites/default/files /Trans Rights Map 2014.pdf. Valentine, David. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Valentine, David. ‘‘Sue E. Generous: Toward a Theory of Non Transexuality.’’ Feminist Studies 38, no. 1 (2012): 185 211.

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CHAPTER 6

Neuroscience Matters Deboleena Roy Associate Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology Emory University, Atlanta, GA

Following major feminist social and political interventions in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the implementation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which determined that no person in the United States can, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, many feminist scholars and activists turned their attention to the authority, validity, and impact of scientific claims that attempted to justify the subordinate status of women. These claims were specifically examined for their role in supporting gender-based discrimination of women within academia, the home, and the workplace. During this initial period of scholarship and activism, feminists developed highly sophisticated critiques of scientific research. Many of these modes of critique are still relevant and operational today and continue to serve as frameworks for feminist engagements with the life sciences and biosciences and particularly with the neurosciences. Some key frameworks of these critiques include (1) pointing out essentialist assumptions in scientific theories, specifically those that reinforce and promote biologically deterministic reasoning; (2) problematizing the use of binary categories in the organization of observed biological and behavioral differences; and (3) questioning linear logic and overly simplistic models that move too easily from correlation to causation, such as from the observation of anatomical structures to the delineation of complex behaviors or the extension of observations made in animal models to humans. Indeed, these strategies have all served as cornerstones in the development of the field of feminist science studies in general. Not surprisingly, then, since the early 1980s, similar critiques have been extended to the study of the brain and into the growing fields of the neurosciences. Focusing particularly on research in neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neuroendocrinology, behavioral biology, and cognitive science, feminist critiques have specifically targeted those scientific studies that examine sex differences in the brain and move all too easily from correlation to causation while attempting to describe gender differences in mathematical abilities, IQ scores, and intelligence. Indeed, with the declaration made by President George H. W. Bush (1924 ) that the 1990s would serve as the ‘‘Decade of the Brain’’ (Bush 1990) and the support for the ‘‘Brain Initiative’’ announced by President Barack Obama (1961 ) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2013 (Obama 2013), many feminist and queer studies scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences alike have felt the need to pay closer attention to developments in the neurosciences, even as they voice skepticism of the

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overemphasis that has been placed on the brain and the ‘‘neurological turn’’ occurring in both academia and popular culture (Pitts-Taylor 2012; Kraus 2015). Regardless of the motivation behind this comingling of ideas and disciplines, the breadth of engagements between the neurosciences, feminist science studies, and feminist theory have most certainly grown during the first two decades of the twenty-first century and have come together to form an exciting area of research and scholarship that has been referred to as neurofeminism (Bluhm, Jacobson, and Maibom 2012), feminist neurosciences (Schmitz and Ho¨ppner 2014a, 2014b), and queer neuroscience (Dussauge and Kaiser 2012; Kaiser and Dussauge 2015). Starting in the 1980s, several scholars who contributed to feminist critiques of the neurosciences and biological sciences, in general, were also trained as biologists (Bleier 1984, 1986; Fausto-Sterling 1992; Rogers 2001). In addition to the important work of feminist philosophers of science (Harding 1986; Tuana 1989; Longino 1990), historians of science (Gould 1981; Schiebinger 1991), and sociologists and anthropologists of science (Martin 1987; Star 1989; Rose 1994; Clarke 1998), feminist biologists in this era were well positioned to critically analyze neuroscience research, both at the level of basic laboratory bench work and at the level of behavioral studies conducted on animal and human subjects in the clinical environment. With special emphases placed on examining research that reported anatomical differences in the brain and differences in the regulation of the brain by hormones and gonadal steroids (Bleier 1984, 1986; Fausto-Sterling 1992, 2000; Rogers 2001), these scholars developed in-depth critiques by questioning the epistemological framings, methodologies, and language and metaphors commonly used in scientific research conducted on the brain. Feminists such as Ruth Bleier, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Leslie Rogers, who were trained as biologists, conducted their careful and intimate critiques of neuroscience research while also having the experience of working with animals, microorganisms, and other biological materials in the lab. Thus, although their critiques did focus mainly on issues of gender biases and the effects of social and cultural influences on scientific research, it is misguided to suggest that feminists who took the trouble to train and spend time within the biological sciences were not also deeply aware of and committed to the importance of working with bodies, biologies, and matter. It is also misguided to suggest that their critiques of biology attempted to dismiss the role and contribution of biological matter or, in the case of the neurosciences, what we might think of today as the vital contributions, agency, push and pull, or materiality of the brain. As Bleier, a neuroscientist, noted in the context of the intersection between gender and matter: It is not possible to tease apart genetic and other biological factors from environmental and learning factors in human development. This is, in fact, a meaningless way to view the problem, since from conception the relationships between the actions of genes and the environment of the fetus are inextricable. . . . No science or discipline can peel off layers of culture and learning and find an untouched core of biological nature. Rather than biology acting to constrain and limit our potentials, it is, in fact, the supreme irony that our magnificent brains, with their nearly limitless structural and functional potentiality for learning, flexibility, and choice making, have produced cultures that constrain and limit those potentialities. (Bleier 1984, 6 7) It can be argued that the informed and in-depth critiques of the neurosciences made during this early era of feminist engagements with the brain came from the willingness of these feminists to actually work with biological matter. Their analyses were produced through their insights into the specificities associated with scientific practices such as experimentation,

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statistical analysis, and publishing, and their critiques of neuroscientific research were aimed primarily at developing new disciplinary and research frameworks that were more open to thinking about gender and the brain through a ‘‘nondeterministic’’ biology. While we must acknowledge this earlier connection between bodies, biologies, brains, matter, and materiality, it is also fair to say that many of the feminist critiques of neuroscience made during this time were, in fact, geared toward the experimental designs (both epistemological and methodological approaches) of neuroscience research, as well as popularized accounts of this research in the media. These critiques were structured primarily within gender equality based feminist frameworks and resembled feminist critiques taking place in other disciplines, such as philosophy, history, literature, political science, and sociology. For example, the role of metaphors was closely analyzed in the language of science. These scholars questioned dominant gendered paradigms operating in these traditional disciplines whereby women and any characteristics or ideas associated with femininity were deemed inferior to men and masculine traits. What these studies did not explicitly do was question the role or contribution of biology itself or the nature of being (ontological status) of biological matter. Nor did they counter traditional neuroscience research by using feminist analyses to conduct new experiments or produce new data and scientific knowledge on the brain, neurons, and synaptic functions.

BRAIN GENEALOGIES, GENDER, AND THE MATTER OF DIFFERENCE Feminist and queer scholars today are well aware that questions regarding biological differences go hand in hand with scientific measures of human value. Therefore, much of the secondary literature on neuroscience that was generated during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as much of what still appears before feminist and queer scholarly audiences today, are analyses of experimental biases based on differences in sex, gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. For instance, craniometry, conducted by French anatomist Paul Broca (1824 1880), serves as a perfect example; the size and dimensions of the human skull were used as indicators of the degree of evolution, civility, and intellect (Gould 1981). Through Broca’s findings (which were later proved to be faulty), women’s brains were deemed inferior owing to their generally smaller size, even though this size was consistent with the fact that females, on average, are shorter in height and have a lower body mass compared with males. Similarly, the brains of nonwhite subjects and criminals were considered inferior to the male European brain through questionable measuring techniques. In all cases, the European male brain was deemed the norm and the standard against which all other brains were measured. Whether measuring a person’s cranial capacity through the amount of lead shot held within the inner cavity of the skull or through new neuroimaging techniques showing differences in the brain structural connectome, the division of humans by their sex, gender, race, class, and other social categories has served as a dominant framework for experimental research designs in the neurosciences. In their innovative work at the intersections of neuroscience, feminism, and queer studies, neuroscientist Anelis Kaiser and science studies scholar Isabelle Dussauge suggest that ‘‘a queer-neuroscientific approach has to reflexively address how neuroscience deals with the categories of sex/gender and sexuality’’ (Dussauge and Kaiser 2012, 121). They further state that ‘‘destabilizing the ‘biological brain’ implies destabilizing the dichotomous and heteronormative line, which runs from sexed brain to gendered behavior. This destabilization therefore echoes Judith Butler’s queer disentanglement of the triad sex, gender and GENDER: MATTER

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sexuality. Destabilizing the biological brain also demands destabilizing the equation of sex to brain, and gender to behavior’’ (Kaiser and Dussauge 2015, 6). In regard to destabilizing projects within the current neurosciences, two specific and popular operating paradigms on human differences often have been taken to task by feminist and queer scholars and, in fact, still continue to serve as key sources of debate in these fields. Similar to critiques of craniometry, which was practiced in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, and the pseudoscience of phrenology, which was very popular in the nineteenth century, the first operating paradigm that is taken to task is the classification of human brains by differences in their size and anatomical properties through the various new tools offered by the neurosciences. Feminist, queer, and sexuality studies scholars have made it their job to interrogate the design, methodologies, and interpretations of scientific reports that claim to establish the neuroanatomical bases of human behavioral differences, moving once again all too easily from correlation to causation. Feminists have also interrogated studies in humans that claim to establish binary anatomical differences between the sexes and sexual orientations, specifically in the region of the brain known as the corpus callosum (Fausto-Sterling 2000), which is a band of nerve fibers joining the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and a densely packed cluster of cells known as the third interstitial nucleus, located in the anterior hypothalamus (INAH3) (Rogers 2001; Jordan-Young 2010). For instance, in his 1991 study of postmortem brains, neuroscientist Simon LeVay claimed to find evidence that the INAH3 region in homosexual men was smaller than that in heterosexual men and more similar to that of heterosexual women. This study, and particularly LeVay’s suggestion that ‘‘sexual orientation has a biological substrate’’ (1991, 1034), has spurred a great deal of productive critique for feminist and queer studies (Fausto-Sterling 1992, 2000; Rogers 2001; Wilson 1999, 2004; Jordan-Young 2010). More recently, neuroimaging technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have been used to move from the analyses of brain structures to the delineation of behavioral functions. For instance, it is generally held by the neuroscience community that males have better motor and spatial skills and that females have better memory and social cognition skills. As such, using diffusion tensor imaging, neuroscientist Madhura Ingalhalikar and colleagues reported significant differences in hemispheric connectivity between male and female brains, suggesting that ‘‘male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes’’ (2014, 823). As a rebuttal to the idea of sexually dimorphic brains, feminist and neuroscientist Daphna Joel and her colleagues have published a major study showing extensive functional ‘‘overlap between the distributions of females and males for all gray matter, white matter, and connections assessed’’ (2015, 1). Joel and her colleagues further suggest that although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not fall strictly along a genital sex binary distinction of male/female but rather display a ‘‘mosaic’’ (2015, 1) of male and female features that fall along a continuum. The second operating paradigm that has been taken to task by feminist and queer scholars alike can be found in neuroscience research occurring specifically at the intersections of gender and matter. Many neuroscientific studies make claims of brain ‘‘hardwiring,’’ whereby neuronal growth and synaptic pathways are viewed as being stable and fixed (Fine et al. 2013; Fine 2010; Jordan-Young 2010). The concept of hardwiring remains pervasive throughout biology, particularly in genetics. In the context of the brain, however, hardwiring is most commonly brought forward as the guiding paradigm for developing experimental

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frameworks and interpreting data on sex/gender differences. This dominant paradigm is articulated through a series of connections that have been made between the fields of reproductive physiology, neuroendocrinology, and behavioral biology. The paradigm suggests that as a result of early genetic queues and subsequent hormonal exposures, mammalian males undergo permanent and irreversible anatomical and structural changes in the brain, referred to as the ‘‘masculinization’’ of the brain. It is suggested that these changes, in turn, lead to distinct functional effects, which are linked not only to sex-related physiological processes, including reproduction, but also to nonreproduction-related behavioral differences that have been observed between males and females. Take, for instance, the theory of sexual differentiation in mammalian reproductive physiology. Through the organizational/activational hypothesis, it is suggested that the sexdetermining region Y gene (SRY in humans, Sry in other placental mammals), located on the Y chromosome, codes for a protein that orchestrates the differentiation of the male phenotype from the default female sex. The SRY gene produces the testes-determining factor protein, which in turn acts as a transcription factor that regulates the expression of other genes downstream (for a review, see Einstein 2007). It is believed that one of the main functions of SRY gene expression is the initiation of male embryonic development, beginning with the differentiation from the default female gonads into the formation of testes. Once the testes form and start producing the gonadal steroids, the resultant circulating testosterone (which is ultimately aromatized into estrogen in the brain) is thought to be responsible for specific organizational influences on the male brain, including anatomical and structural effects. The theory of sexual differentiation further suggests that these organizational effects are necessary for the masculinization process (also referred to as defeminization) of the male brain and that these processes must occur at a critical period during development. It is important to note that throughout the entire process of sexual differentiation, the female has been marked as being the default sex. This has meant that the female of the species has served as the material basis from which the male fetus and masculinized mammalian brain can emerge. In addition, owing to this designated default status, the formation of the female fetus has been depicted as that which lacks genetic signals and physiological triggers that lead to the male-aligned transformation. It is only recently that reproductive physiologists have begun to delineate the genetic processes involved in female embryonic development (Tevosian 2013). This particular paradigm has served as a deeply rich site for feminist interventions in neuroendocrinology and the behavioral neurosciences. More specifically, close attention has been paid to those studies that use the organizational/activational hypothesis to locate the origins for differences in sexuality, gender identity, and aptitudes in math and spatial orientation between men and women. The obvious concern is that this line of research and experimentation on the brain could, in turn, lead to further discrimination in already unjustly stratified social relations (Jordan-Young 2010; Fine 2010). Given the prevalence of these paradigms, it is understandable that many feminist responses to neurosciences scholarship have been cautionary in their tone. It is also the case, however, that by revealing the flaws in gender-biased research in neuroscience and spending inordinate amounts of energy battling the possible discrimination that has been validated by scientific research, feminist engagements with the neurosciences and biology more generally have not devoted a sufficient amount of energy toward developing alternate explorations of the brain or new ways to think about neurons, synaptic pathways, and anatomical or functional differences that may be present in the brain (Wilson 1999; Roy 2007). In the work being conducted by the current generation of feminist neuroscientists, this is no longer the case. The challenge that is now being met in feminist and queer theory, GENDER: MATTER

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feminist science studies, and feminist neuroscience alike is figuring out how to move forward with our work by reconfiguring how we think about the relationship between culture and biology. We now know through epigenetic research, for instance, that culture and our social environment can most certainly influence our biology, not only at the level of hormones and anatomy but also at the level of genes. We must therefore also begin to explore the idea that biological matter must also contribute in some way to the emergence of differences in our bodies, behaviors, and culture. Our work must be framed along an intra-active (Barad 2007) ontological register, rather than a dichotomous nature/nurture, biology/culture, or sex/ gender divide. We must also learn to think about biology in nonessentialist terms. This ontological reorientation to questions of biology, culture, and matter requires us to create new associations with and/or within the biological sciences. The role of critique has been crucial and will continue to be necessary. However, as the black lesbian feminist theorist Audre Lorde pointed out long ago, the need to develop alternate modes of analysis and creativity is also vital. Lorde noted that the oppressed is called on to educate the oppressor. This can be seen in the work of feminist scientists who dedicated much of their time, energy, and expertise to pointing out faults in biological research on the body and the brain. Lorde also claimed that responding to this call to educate the oppressor was in many ways drawing too heavily on the creativity and energy held by the oppressed. She stated: In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes. . . . Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future. (2007, 114 115) Similarly, feminist philosophers of science, feminist science studies scholars, and feminist theorists, such as Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Karen Barad, have in their own ways called on feminist and queer scholars to turn their emphases from critique to the formation of new collaborative practices in and with the sciences. It seems clear that feminist and queer neurosciences are well poised now not only to point out and correct worn-out biologically deterministic paradigms through critiques of gendered paradigms and deterministic claims of hardwiring in the brain but also to extend energies toward creating new approaches for coming to know the brain. We are trained and ready to begin reimagining the complex interplay between sex, gender, matter, and the brain.

DOES THE BRAIN THINK? BRAINSTORMING WITH NEW MATERIALISMS In his influential essay ‘‘Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity’’ (2009), historian and philosopher of science Fernando Vidal argues that over the previous two or three decades and certainly owing to the rise in neuroimaging technologies, a ‘‘neuroscientific hype’’ (6) had contributed to building a certain view of the human being, namely that of being a ‘‘cerebral subject’’ (6). For example, citing the controversial statement ‘‘you are your brain’’ made by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga (2005, 31), Vidal states: Embodied in countless statements declaring that the brain decides, learns and loves, or even that brains, rather than persons, understand each other, personification relies on an ontological reversal such that ‘‘You are your brain’’ becomes factual,

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while ‘‘You are yourself’’, figurative. According to Vilayanur Ramachandran, highprofile neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the most cited authors of the neurocultural world, ‘‘We used to say, metaphorically, that ‘I can feel another’s pain.’ But now we know that my mirror neurons can literally feel your pain.’’ (21) At issue here for Vidal is a dual problem; not only has there been a consubstantiation of the brain and the self, but the neurons and biological matter of the brain also have been bestowed with what he describes as an active personhood or perhaps what new materialists and material feminists might refer to as ‘‘agentic’’ properties. Vidal is skeptical at the thought of a brain that has been bestowed with a ‘‘voice’’ and that might be expressing and exerting itself through the forces of deciding, learning, loving, or understanding. The tension between, on the one hand, thinking about the work of cultural inscription and, on the other hand, seriously paying attention to the work or contributions of biological and physical matters of the body, or the brain in this case, is not a new problem for feminist science studies or for feminist theories of materiality. Of course, our institutions, societal structures, and cultural norms influence our bodies and behaviors, and there is no doubt that strategies that are ‘‘embedded in the social fabric’’ (Vidal 2009, 10) can become embodied in our physical and cognitive expressions. Nevertheless, we cannot deny that who and what we are as humans is not at least partly (if not, indeed, in a large part) attributed to the materiality and material relations produced and/or coordinated by the biological skills and talents of our brains. As argued elsewhere (Roy 2012), although Vidal’s call to pay close attention to the cultural figurations of the brain and to the dominant narratives of the cerebral self is well taken, our feminist analyses and engagements with the brain cannot and should not end there. It is, of course, absolutely the case that we are not only our brains. We are obviously composed of more than a three-pound organ. However, by repeatedly bringing to light the flaws in neuroscience research, can we also say with absolute certainty that our brains (along with other material forces) do not make and remake us? Can we in good conscience continue to ignore the neurons, synapses, and biological complexities of the brain and their role in generating potentials for creativity and difference? What if our neurons do love, learn, and have expressive lives? What if our neurons do think? As a feminist neuroscientist, I have had to pose these questions to myself, to many of my colleagues in women’s studies, and to feminist health and reproductive justice activists (Roy 2008, 2014). My own work within the neurosciences and with an in vitro neuronal cell line was driven by a desire to learn from the complex interactions and forces exerted by gonadal and pineal hormones, nuclear and G-protein membrane-bound hormone receptors, and hypothalamic neurons on and through our bodies at a molecular level (Roy et al. 1999). New materialists and material feminists alike have tired of those critiques of science originating from cultural theory and feminist theory that begin and end with charges of biological determinism and reductionism. For instance, building on Haraway’s formulation of the material-semiotic (1988) and her more recent articulation of naturecultures (2003), both of which attempt to challenge binary modes of thinking, many feminist and queer scholars have realized the limits of the biological/cultural divide and instead want to move forward to create alternative modes of analysis or, as Lorde would have suggested, spend our energies by ‘‘redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future’’ (Lorde 2007, 115). The question is, however, how do we develop these new approaches in feminist and queer neurosciences? While attempting to think differently about the materiality of experimental plant biology and reconfigure our GENDER: MATTER

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understandings of evolutionary biology and the use of variation in Darwinian terms, feminist biologist Banu Subramaniam, for instance, poses the crucial question ‘‘How does one study a naturecultural world?’’ (Subramaniam 2014, 2). Subramaniam suggests several strategies, such as developing an experimental practice and method that does not overdetermine or prefigure its conclusions, creating a vision of responsible and ethical living with our cohabitants, paying close attention to the circulation of knowledge, and developing the ability to consider local contexts and histories while also attempting to practice science (2014). In the project of re-queering the brain in the neurosciences, Dussauge and Kaiser (2012) have also suggested that we develop nondeterministic approaches, create new empirical work whereby gender and sexuality are treated as performative processes, and remultiply gender expressions and sexual desires. This question of how to think about matters of gender and the brain through naturecultures forces us to first consider that studies of the brain, conducted through the disciplines and experimental apparatuses of biology and the neurosciences, need not be only deterministic or essentialist in their claims. At the same time, however, we must reimagine what the neurosciences can do for us. How can we move, for instance, from thinking about the brain as the ‘‘somatic limit of the self’’ (Vidal 2009, 21) to thinking about the brain as one of multiple sources of the somatically entwined potential of the self? One place to begin may be to reconsider Vidal’s claim regarding the personification of neurons and neuronal pathways by the neurosciences through traits attributed to the brain, such as loving, thinking, and learning. Rather than framing this personification as evidence of an ‘‘ontological reversal’’ (2009, 21) whereby the brain serves as a placeholder for selfhood, recent work in new materialisms would have us reconsider qualities used to describe the functions of this organ, such as loving, thinking, and learning, as evidence of the brain’s ‘‘performative ontology’’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 87). A performative ontology may be understood here as a way to think about matters of the body as being capable of both responding to and influencing their environment through biological plasticity and the potential for change, rather than defining biology narrowly as being predetermined by its components and functions, which, in turn, are viewed as being hardwired or static. In their work on new materialism, new materialist scholars Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin describe key features of a materialist project that would emerge from Haraway’s idea of naturecultures. They argue that at the heart of new materialist thinking lies a ‘‘transversal’’ approach to materiality that ‘‘does not privilege matter over meaning or culture over nature’’ (2012, 85). They state: New materialism wants to do justice to the ‘‘material-semiotic’’ or ‘‘materialdiscursive’’ character of all events, as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad would call it. It is interested in actualizing a metaphysics that fully affirms the active role played by matter in ‘‘receiving’’ a form. Working through Cartesian or modernist dualisms, new materialism has set itself to practice the Spinozist dictum that the mind is always already an idea of the body, while the body is the object of the mind. (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 90 91) Exploring questions of materiality, Dolphijn and van der Tuin emphasize the importance of posthumanist, antirepresentationalist, deterritorializing, and nonlinear thinking to reconceptualize our treatments of matter and difference. In particular, they find philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s (1632 1677) claim, originally made in 1677, to be a pivotal contribution to this new materialist thinking. The idea that ‘‘the mind and the body are the same thing’’

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(Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 94) draws on a materialist philosophy of the body developed by Spinoza but also elaborated through the materialist/monist work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925 1995) and other materialist philosophers, including Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 1900), Henri Bergson (1855 1941), Michel Foucault (1926 1984), Luce Irigaray (1930 ), and Rosi Braidotti (1954 ). Rather than pursuing mind/matter or culture/ nature divisions, Dolphijn and van der Tuin emphasize ‘‘mattering’’ as a process that is ‘‘simultaneously material and representational’’ (2012, 96).

FEMINIST SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES, MATERIAL FEMINISMS, AND NEUROSCIENCE The idea that biologies are not fixed and, by extension, that our brains are not static but rather should be viewed as being malleable or plastic has perhaps been the most popular point of interest and source of commentary for feminist scholars engaged with the neurosciences. Although theories of brain plasticity previously existed in neuropsychology, and neuroanatomical evidence indicating the possible formation of new synaptic connections into adulthood was also prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reports that even up until fifteen to twenty years ago ‘‘scientists believed that people were born with all of the brain cells they would ever have’’ and that ‘‘unlike the intestine, skin, and liver, the brain and nerves could not regenerate to take the place of damaged cells’’ (National Institutes of Health 2012). Thus, in addition to the depiction of the brain as being static, the number of neurons found in a brain was also seen as being fixed from birth. The NIH defines brain plasticity or neuroplasticity as ‘‘the capacity for continuous alternations of the neural pathways and synapses of the living brain and nervous system in response to experience or injury’’ (National Institutes of Health 2012). In the context of feminist neuroscience, evidence of neuronal plasticity has been used as the single most effective argument against scientific and popular claims in favor of brain hardwiring. Whether to counter claims made in evolutionary psychology regarding the causes of sex or gender differences in human behavior or to offset popular and dominant depictions of men and women as inhabitants of distinct planets, many feminist neuroscience scholars now turn to the concept of plasticity for its ability to invoke new frames of analysis for the brain. Despite the historical and recent growing evidence for neuroplasticity, feminist neuroscience scholars have also pointed out that there is an apparent conceptual barrier that obstructs the extension of biological plasticity to behavioral plasticity. These feminist scholars are particularly interested in extending ideas of plasticity beyond its purely biological associations to new understandings of the relationship between sex and gender (Schmitz and Ho¨ppner 2014a). In a 2013 article on brain plasticity titled ‘‘Plasticity, Plasticity, Plasticity . . . and the Rigid Problem of Sex,’’ psychologist Cordelia Fine, sociologist Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, neuroscientist Anelis Kaiser, and neuroscientist Gina Rippon also keenly articulate the problem of the continual use of hardwiring paradigms and the lack of applied plasticity frameworks when it comes to understanding the complex interplay between sex, gender, behavior, and the brain in the cognitive sciences. In light of the recent evidence on neuroplasticity, they argue: It is now clear that the functional and even structural organization of the human nervous system is a continuous and dynamic process that persists throughout one’s life. ‘‘Experience-dependent plasticity’’ has been demonstrated time and time again in the acquisition of skills as wide ranging as musical performance, basketball, GENDER: MATTER

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dancing, taxi driving, and juggling. Behavioral neuroendocrinology has been transformed by an increasingly large body of research demonstrating the power of an individual’s behavior, the behavior of others, and aspects of the environment to influence brain and behavior through reciprocal modulation of the endocrine system. (2013, 1) These feminist neuroscience scholars are perplexed by the fact that ‘‘popular understandings of female-male difference [are] still based on rigid models of development even though contemporary developmental sciences emphasize plasticity’’ (2013, 1). Their issue is mainly with popular depictions of male/female differences that are being informed primarily by studies in neuroeconomics and evolutionary psychology, which promote ideas of sexually dimorphic behaviors that have been evolutionarily hardwired into our brains. The tendency, however, in feminist neuroscience, feminist theory, and much of the feminist literature on embodiment, biology, and the body that has drawn on the concept of experience-dependent plasticity has been to locate the sources or ‘‘causes’’ of variability once again in culture, the environment, or other nonbiological factors. These forces are thought to act on biological materials, which, although they are viewed as being capable and amenable to change, are not regarded as active sources or starting points for this pliability in and of themselves. Some feminist science and technology studies (STS) scholars working at the intersections of neuroscience and new materialisms have drawn attention to this particular interpretation and use of the concept of plasticity (Kraus 2010; Schmitz and Ho¨ppner 2014a; Roy 2016) and are interested in challenging our accounts of the agency of biological matters. In their edited volume Gendered Neurocultures (2014a), gender studies scholar Sigrid Schmitz and sociologist Grit Ho¨ppner point out two important challenges for feminist and queer scholars related to the use of the concept of plasticity in neuroscience. They state that it is apparent that plasticity has served an important role in questioning the ‘‘unilinear’’ (2014a, 16) narrative of the biological determination of behavioral traits, which has dominated much of the neurosciences. They also suggest, however, that there is a peril in simply reversing ‘‘genealogies of cause and effect’’ (2014a, 16) by arguing solely that ‘‘social experiences and power relations impact the brain’s structure and function’’ (2014a, 16), where biological matter is perceived as being the amenable recipient of cultural plasticity but not as a source of this plasticity. Is our understanding of cause and effect capable of functioning in only one direction at a time? Must feminist articulations of plasticity simply shift the origin and destination of cause and effect, turning them around to describe the movement of the variability in culture back to blank matter? Lastly, it is also important to keep in mind that while plasticity concepts in neuroscience have been useful in many ways for feminist and queer scholars for troubling long traditions of brain-based biological determinisms, others have voiced concern over their extended use in countering hardwiring claims, particularly those projects that turn to plasticity to support the idea of individualized cerebral subjects. They are wary of the use of plasticity in support of profit-driven neoliberal practices that are based on a limited understanding of informed choice and agency and are, in fact, aimed at regulating or even optimizing human behaviors and promoting individualized biomedical interventions (Pitts-Taylor 2010). Feminist scholar Cynthia Kraus has argued, for instance, that plasticity has served as a ‘‘long-lasting trope in the critical history of feminist science studies and not an unproblematic one’’ (2010, 1). Although plasticity concepts can be used ‘‘to undermine biological determinism and overcome nature-culture oppositions,’’ she suggests that they also open the door ‘‘to argue for individual idiosyncrasy in the singular ways in which one materializes [a] brain of

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one’s own according to one’s life history and experience in a given society’’ (2010, 1). With what Kraus refers to as the ‘‘hype of neuroscience,’’ she reminds us to interrogate what plasticity can inspire in broader socioeconomic contexts. Priming autonomous individuals for participation in neoliberal capitalist practices, she points out that ‘‘the discourse of brain plasticity is a regulatory matrix for subject formation, making up plastic subjects compliant to de-regulation policies, therapeutic and enhancement treatments’’ (2010, 3). Thus, although thinking with plasticity can be useful at times, it presents a difficult challenge for feminist research on sex, gender, matter, and the brain, as it may, in fact, also move us further away from developing posthumanist and ethical approaches that are imperative to new materialist and material feminist understandings of naturecultures.

Summary In part owing to the contributions of feminist philosophy of science, Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg, and the influence of actor-network theory in the sociology of science, the field of feminist STS has flourished since the early 1990s. With an emphasis on working with the sciences while also creating new interdisciplinary dialogues, feminist STS itself is a multidisciplinary field drawing from a variety of areas, including feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, and postcolonial studies (to name but a few). Work currently taking place at the intersection of feminist STS and the neurosciences is characterized by (1) an awareness of the co-construction of science and society, (2) a recognition of the role and influence that the authority of science plays in our lives, (3) a questioning of traditional definitions of scientific objectivity, and (4) a desire to connect feminist interventions in the sciences to community-based projects or social justice movements or both. In addition to critiquing essentialist assumptions, binary categories, and linear logic, many feminist STS scholars are now also being trained in the neurosciences. Their goal also is to contribute to the production of scientific knowledge on the brain and to build interdisciplinary alliances (Kaiser et al. 2007; Einstein 2012; van Anders 2013; Joel 2014; Roy 2016). Some recent discussions at the intersections of feminist STS, feminist theory, new materialisms, and material feminisms that are being advanced by the feminist neurosciences include (1) developing the idea that identities are not fixed and therefore biologies can and should also be viewed as being nonstatic, or plastic; (2) questioning feminist theory’s use of the nature/culture binary and its corollary sex/gender; and (3) rethinking the status of matter in nonessentialist terms and reevaluating the entanglements between dynamic biologies, cultures, and scientific experimentation. The main task that lies ahead for the feminist and queer neuroscience community involves thinking about the performative ontology of the brain the idea that biological matter is marked by its potential for change and is capable of both responding to and influencing our environment while also placing our new articulations of sex, gender, and matter into specific social, historical, and political contexts. New materialisms and material feminisms can help us in our studies of the brain by creating room and providing us with a vocabulary to describe the agency, vital force, or dynamical push of matter located in our sexed, gendered, raced, classed, and embodied brains but we must also simultaneously orient these new vocabularies within our feminist and queer biopolitical analyses of matter from the beginning. In addition to allowing us to engage with the biological sciences and neurosciences in new and creative ways, materialist inquiries of the brain may bring forward ‘‘new ethical and political vistas’’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 7) for feminist and queer GENDER: MATTER

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theory. As feminist theorists Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman state, ‘‘Beginning with material substances rather than already constituted social groups may, in fact, allow for the formation of unexpected political coalitions and alliances’’ (2008, 9). As a shared object of knowledge, the brain has already exerted its pull by drawing together a truly vibrant community of scholars and by giving rise to the feminist and queer NeuroGenderings Network. Unexpected alliances are some of the sweetest rewards of a life of the mind, which, according to Spinoza, is ‘‘always already an idea of the body.’’

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Bleier, Ruth. Feminist Approaches to Science. New York: Pergamon Press, 1986. Bleier, Ruth. Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women. Boston: Pergamon Press, 1984. Bluhm, Robyn, Anne Jaap Jacobson, and Heidi Lene Mai bom, eds. Neurofeminism: Issues at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Cognitive Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Bush, George. ‘‘Presidential Proclamation 6158.’’ Project on the Decade of the Brain. July 17, 1990. http://www.loc .gov/loc/brain/proclaim.html. Clarke, Adele E. Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and ‘‘the Problems of Sex.’’ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012. Dussauge, Isabelle, and Anelis Kaiser. ‘‘Re queering the Brain.’’ In Neurofeminism: Issues at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Cognitive Science, edited by Robyn Bluhm, Anne Jaap Jacobson, and Heidi Lene Maibom, 121 144. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Einstein, Gillian. Sex and the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Einstein, Gillian. ‘‘Situated Neuroscience: Exploring Biologies of Diversity.’’ In Neurofeminism: Issues at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Cognitive Science, edited by Robyn Bluhm, Anne Jaap Jacobson, and Heidi Lene Maibom, 145 174. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Fausto Sterling, Anne. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Fausto Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Fine, Cordelia. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. New York: Norton, 2010. Fine, Cordelia, Rebecca M. Jordan Young, Anelis Kaiser, and Gina Rippon. ‘‘Plasticity, Plasticity, Plasticity . . . and the Rigid Problem of Sex.’’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17, no. 11 (2013): 550 551. Gap Junction Science. http://gapjunctionscience.org/. Gazzaniga, Michael. The Ethical Brain. New York: Dana Press, 2005. Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engi neering, and Environment. https://genderedinnovations .stanford.edu/. Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Nor ton, 1981. Haraway, Donna. Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Haraway, Donna. Modest Witness@Second Millenium .FemaleManª Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Tech noscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Haraway, Donna. ‘‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Per spective.’’ Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575 599. Harding, Sandra. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Ingalhalikar, Madhura, Alex Smith, Drew Parker, et al. ‘‘Sex Differences in the Structural Connectome of the Human

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Brain.’’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Scien ces 111, no. 2 (2014): 823 828. Joel, Daphna. ‘‘Sex, Gender, and Brain: A Problem of Con ceptualization.’’ In Gendered Neurocultures: Feminist and Queer Perspectives on Current Brain Discourses, edited by Sigrid Schmitz and Grit Hoppner, 169 186. Vienna: Zaglossus, 2014. Joel, Daphna, Zohar Berman, Ido Tavor, et al. ‘‘Sex beyond the Genitalia: The Human Brain Mosaic.’’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 50 (2015): 1 6. Jordan Young, Rebecca M. Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Kaiser, Anelis, and Isabelle Dussauge. ‘‘Feminist and Queer Repoliticizations of the Brain.’’ EspacesTemps.net. 2015. http://www.espacestemps.net/en/articles/feminist and queer repoliticizations of the brain/. Kaiser, Anelis, Esther Kuenzli, Daniela Zappatore, and Cor dula Nitsch. ‘‘On Females’ Lateral and Males’ Bilateral Activation during Language Production: A fMRI Study.’’ International Journal of Psychophysiology 63, no. 2 (2007): 192 198.

Cynthia Kraus, Catherine Vidal, Rebecca M. Jordan Young, Cordelia Fine, Deboleena Roy, Gina Rippon, Emily Ngubia Nuria, Hannah Fitsch, Christel Gumy, Robyn Bluhm, Gillian Einstein, Victoria Pitts Taylor, Daphna Joel, Giordana Grossi, Sari van Anders, and Odile Fillod. https://neurogenderings.wordpress.com/. Obama, Barack. ‘‘Remarks by the President on the BRAIN Initiative and American Innovation.’’ White House Office of the Press Secretary. 2013. http://www.white house.gov/the press office/2013/04/02/remarks president brain initiative and american innovation. Pitts Taylor, Victoria. ‘‘Neurocultures Manifesto.’’ Social Text: Periscope. 2012. http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope article/neurocultures manifesto/. Pitts Taylor, Victoria. ‘‘The Plastic Brain: Neoliberalism and the Neuronal Self.’’ Health 14, no. 6 (2010): 635 652. Rogers, Leslie. Sexing the Brain. New York: Columbia Uni versity Press, 2001. Rose, Hilary. Love, Power, and Knowledge: Toward a Fem inist Transformation of the Sciences. Bloomington: Indi ana University Press, 1994.

Kraus, Cynthia. ‘‘Tensions in Discourses about Nature Culture Productions of the Self: Brain Plasticity and Other Biosocial Arguments.’’ Paper presented at the Fourth Christina Con ference in Gender Studies Gender, Nature and Culture, University of Helsinki, Finland, May 20 22, 2010.

Roy, Deboleena. ‘‘Developing a New Political Ecology: Neuroscience, Feminism, and the Case of the Estrogen Receptor.’’ In Gendered Neurocultures: Feminist and Queer Perspectives on Current Brain Discourses, edited by Sigrid Schmitz and Grit Hoppner, 203 219. Vienna: Zaglossus, 2014.

Kraus, Cynthia. ‘‘What Is the Feminist Critique of Neuro science?’’ In Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Lim its of the Neurological Turn. New York: Routledge, 2015.

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LeVay, Simon. ‘‘A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men.’’ Science 253, no. 5023 (1991): 1034 1037. Longino, Helen. Science as Social Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berke ley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007. Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. National Institutes of Health: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Develop ment. ‘‘Neuroplasticity.’’ 2012. https://www.nichd.nih .gov/about/overview/50th/discoveries/Pages/neuroplasti city.aspx. NeuroGenderings Network. Working group members include Anelis Kaiser, Isabelle Dussauge, Sigrid Schmitz,

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Roy, Deboleena. ‘‘Neuroscience and Feminist Theory: A New Directions Essay.’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Cul ture and Society 41, no. 3 (2016): 531 532. Roy, Deboleena. ‘‘Should Feminists Clone? And If So, How?’’ Australian Feminist Studies 23, no. 56 (2008): 225 247. Roy, Deboleena. ‘‘Somatic Matters: Becoming Molecular in Molecular Biology.’’ Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 14 (Summer 2007). http://www .rhizomes.net/issue14/roy/roy.html. Roy, Deboleena, Nadia L. Angelini, and Denise D. Belsham. ‘‘Estrogen Directly Represses Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone (GnRH) Gene Expression in Estrogen Recep tor a (ER a) and ERb expressing GT1 7 GnRH Neurons.’’ Endocrinology 140, no. 11 (1999): 5045 5053. Schiebinger, Londa. The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

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Schmitz, Sigrid, and Grit Hoppner. Gendered Neurocul tures: Feminist and Queer Perspectives on Current Brain Discourses. Vienna: Zaglossus, 2014a. Schmitz, Sigrid, and Grit Hoppner. ‘‘Neurofeminism and Feminist Neurosciences: A Critical Review of Contem porary Brain Research.’’ Frontiers in Human Neuro science 8, no. 546 (2014b): 1 10. Star, Susan L. Regions of the Mind: Brain Research and the Quest for Scientific Certainty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989. Subramaniam, Banu. Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity. Urbana: Uni versity of Illinois Press, 2014. Tevosian, S. G. ‘‘Genetic Control of Ovarian Development.’’ Sexual Development 7, nos. 1 3 (2013): 33 45.

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Tuana, Nancy. Feminism and Science. Bloomington: Indi ana University Press, 1989. van Anders, Sari M. ‘‘Beyond Masculinity: Testosterone, Gender/Sex, and Human Social Behavior in a Compara tive Context.’’ Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology 34, no. 3 (2013): 198 210. Vidal, Fernando. ‘‘Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity.’’ History of the Human Sciences 22, no. 1 (2009): 5 36. Wilson, Elizabeth. Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition. New York: Routledge, 1999. Wilson, Elizabeth. Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neu rological Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

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Part II. More-Than-Human Worlds

CHAPTER 7

Indigenous Matters Dian Million (Athabascan) Associate Professor, Department of American Indian Studies University of Washington, Seattle

This chapter considers matter, as it is understood in Euro-American (i.e., Western) philosophical terms, and its relation to various Indigenous thought throughout the world. It also considers the significance of gender in Indigenous thought and the tensions and outcomes of Western gendered thought on Indigenous life ways. The Western division between mind and matter or matter and spirit the so-called Cartesian duality, derived from French philosopher Rene´ Descartes (1596 1650) can be antithetical to Indigenous concepts of what matter might be. The differences between Indigenous and Western modes of thought on matter are not innocent. They can be defined both in terms of epistemology (ways of knowing) and ontology (the nature of being), and they have enduring consequences in the world. Indeed, a majority of Indigenous scholars would cite these differences as a primary factor in the colonization, degradation, and continuing destruction of Indigenous ways of life (see, e.g., Armstrong 1998; Coulthard 2010, 2014; Denetdale 2009; Million 2013; Simpson et al. 2008). American Indian, First Nations, and Indigenous scholars of several continents increasingly engage with gender and queer studies and the study of new materialisms. All of these studies are concerned with reexamining the Cartesian and Enlightenment thought that poses a divide between humans and ‘‘matter.’’ Indigenous peoples did not originally have such fixed divides between humans and matter or fixed binaries between sexes or genders. This became clearer with the first interventions of Indigenous scholars into gay studies and second-wave (1960s 1980s) feminist studies. These scholars established a specifically Indigenous critique of Western scholarship. I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (1996) by Lee Maracle (Sto´:l¯o) was instrumental in opening dialogue between Indigenous women and non-Native feminists. Similarly, an excellent example of early dialogue on gender and race is Telling It: Women and Language across Cultures (Telling It Book Collective 1990). After Will Roscoe, a San Francisco gay activist, popularized the idea of Indigenous third genders in The Zuni Man-Woman (1991), several Indigenous scholars came forward to give a more detailed account of Indigenous gender and sexuality. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (1997), edited by SueEllen Jacobs (North American), Wesley Thomas (Dine´), and Sabine Lang (German), sought to give Indigenous Two-Spirit people a place to clarify their own genders, sexualities, and experiences. In that volume, Thomas gave one of the first accounts by an Indigenous scholar of third and fourth genders in Dine´ language and epistemology. Thomas’s chapter represented an important move by Indigenous academics to work from or acknowledge their own Indigenous knowledges, knowledges built on different ways

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of knowing than in Western academia. Thus, these early exchanges about feminist and TwoSpirit experiences coincided with the rise of research models in which Indigenous and American Indian (or Native American) studies scholars carefully critiqued and countered a wide range of academic fields such as anthropology, history, and the social sciences, arguing for the integrity of Indigenous knowledge in its own context. At stake was and is Indigenous epistemology. Epistemology denotes how truth is known, how a truth is ascertained. Epistemology is closely related to ontology, a word that denotes the nature of being. In an Indigenous sense, knowledge resides with peoples and with the living, dynamic, intergenerational relationships they have with their specific places. As a first rule, then, Indigenous knowledge is not a product of academia. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngati Awa and Ngati Porou) in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999) and Shawn Wilson (Cree) in Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (2008) spell out the political nature of research and knowledge in Indigenous communities. Indigenous knowledge is politically potent because it is place-based knowledge and now deeply intertwined with the people’s experience with colonization. Indigenous knowledge, or place-thought (Watts 2013), rises from ancient knowledge that rarely agrees with Western assumptions about the world, whether about sex, gender, or what matter is. Contemporary Indigenous critiques of gender, sexuality, and queer studies are not well known to those fields. Indeed, Indigenous scholarship developed independently from them. As a result, the conversations introduced in this chapter may be new to readers. Indigenous knowledge is specific to place and to peoples in that place; it is not abstract. No one Indigenous person’s perspective constitutes the whole. The scope of Indigenous thought in various locations is related, but there is no one totalizing category of what is ‘‘Indigenous.’’ This chapter heavily reflects North American Indigenous studies, gesturing toward but not pretending to represent global Indigenous thought. The chapter begins with the questions, who is Indigenous and what is Indigenous place? This introduces readers to the issue of what Indigenous means for peoples who identify as such. The chapter then discusses conceptions of matter that resonate among Indigenous traditions. The question ‘‘What is Indigenous place?’’ leads to understanding place as sentient and affective, as well as to seeing matter as having agency that provides social relationships within which humans find their place. The differences between Indigenous and Western knowledge in how people know both what is true (epistemology) and what being is (ontology) lie at the core of what power is in the contemporary world and are discussed specifically in the section ‘‘Indigenous Nations Critique Capitalism.’’ The chapter ends with an account of early twenty-first-century convergences of Indigenous studies in the life sciences, including in posthuman and animal studies, that challenge traditional Western ontology. What problems arise when Indigenous and Western definitions of gender and sexuality meet? This chapter introduces readers to Indigenous authors who speak to anyone who would like to join in a conversation about why Indigenous matters matter.

WHO IS INDIGENOUS? Indigenous refers to a multiplicity of peoples around the world. In North America, other collective names for peoples of Indigenous nations are American Indian or Native American for the Indigenous nations that occupy what is now the United States. For instance, Alaska Native collectively refers to the different peoples who have inhabited or are descended from ancient communities in what is now the state of Alaska. In Canada, the collective terms First

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Nation or Native are preferred over the government designation aboriginal. Canada is also home, like Alaska, to Inuit and Inupiaq peoples. Indigenous peoples may have close familial ties that still exist from before contact with Westerners that cross nation-state boundaries. For example, the Mohawk nations exist on both sides of the US Canadian border. The Tohono O’odham nation is crossed by the US border with Mexico. Many tribal nations now prefer to identify themselves using some form of their people’s name in their own language. The Nez Perce of the US Pacific Northwest, for instance, may call themselves Nimi’ipuu (meaning ‘‘the Real People’’). The more local the need for knowledge, the more specific the names. Thus, the term Indigenous is an abstract identification, implying a collective of peoples, while specific names invoke the particularity of a people’s relations to place. Indigenous is itself a contested label. The term in the sense of ‘‘Native peoples’’ came into being in the twentieth century as the many peoples from lands, first economies, and governances who were subsumed by capitalist nation-states began to collectively fight for rights to their lands and cultures. In 2007, the United Nations ratified its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). The UNDRIP seeks to extend existing and particular human-rights legal protections to self-identified Indigenous peoples, who live on every continent except Antarctica. Indigenous is a negotiated collective name that represents more than 370 million people who currently reside within but were never subsumed by any state’s colonial presence. In some places, Indigenous nations are political and cultural entities with a territorial presence that precedes the foundation of nation-states (the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and myriad South American countries, for example). In other places, including Africa, Asia, India, and the Middle East, Indigenous peoples fight to be acknowledged as such. Indigenous peoples claim nationhood rather than statehood, because nationhood involves shared culture, language, kinship relations, and governance/ stewardship of places rather than state-like control over places. The UNDRIP developed during fifty years of negotiation with global Indigenous peoples, starting not long after World War II. The UNDRIP does not rigidly define who Indigenous peoples are, allowing for an Indigenous people’s own declaration. Indigenous peoples strongly base identity on kinship, but being Indigenous is not a biological determination. Membership or belonging goes beyond blood-quantum determinations or physiological or phenotypical characteristics. Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota) describes this succinctly in her chapter ‘‘Articulating Genomic Indigeneity’’ in Native Studies Keywords: ‘‘Indigenous peoples themselves also privilege biological connection to ancestors (alongside connection to land), but they have evolved a more multifaceted definition of ‘indigenous.’. . . . Indigenous peoples understand themselves to have emerged as coherent groups and cultures in intimate relationship with particular places, especially living and sacred landscapes’’ (Teves 2015, 131).

WHAT IS INDIGENOUS PLACE? This section discusses the relationships between Indigenous concepts of place, matter, materiality, and ecologies. It is widely understood in Indigenous thought that matter, materiality, and ecology are not separable from place. These words are not distinct ‘‘things’’ in an Indigenous sense but instead imply relations. The term Indigenous, in fact, implies relation to a place. According to M. Annette Jaimes (Yaqui and Juanen~o), ‘‘In a literal sense, indigenous means ‘to be born of a place,’ but it also means ‘to live in relationship with the place where one is born’ as in the sense of an ‘indigenous homeland’’’ (2003, 66). Marie GENDER: MATTER

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Battiste (Mi’kmaq) and James Sakej Youngblood Henderson (Choctaw) have written that ‘‘place’’ is an ‘‘expression of the vibrant relationships between people, their ecosystems, and other living beings and spirits that share their lands. . . . All aspects of knowledge are interrelated and cannot be separated from the traditional territories of the people concerned . . . Indigenous knowledge is the way of living within contexts of flux, paradox, and tension, respecting the pull of dualism and reconciling opposing forces’’ (2000, 20). There is no ‘‘matter,’’ or ‘‘thing,’’ that exists that is not an expression of relationships that exist in a place. Knowledge is itself not separable. As Deborah McGregor (Anishinaabe) writes, ‘‘In conventional Eurocentric definitions of Indigenous Knowledge, it is presented as a noun, a thing, knowledge; but to Indigenous people, is it is much more than knowledge. Indigenous Knowledge cannot be separated from the people who hold and practice it, nor can it be separated from the land/environment/Creation’’ (2004, 390). Indigenous place is infinitely more than geographical location. It is in every sense holistic, in which the relations of all entities are bound in relations that interactively form societies and place. Vanessa Watts (Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee) describes this in ‘‘Indigenous PlaceThought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!)’’ (2013). Drawing from Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe oral traditions, Watts poses that in place-thought, there is no separation of mind from matter, as there is in Western Cartesian dualistic thinking. Rather, everything is sentient, ‘‘alive,’’ and feeling, and humans are part of this animate being rather than an exception to it. There is no ‘‘outside’’ of this sentient matter that humans exist in. In Indigenous ontologies and the oral traditions and practices that support this knowledge, humans and their societies are not isolated at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of being but rather are always related and relating; that is, humans are in kinship with other entities within an intricate cycle. While not human, other entities also manifest agency, thought, and will. Trees, animals, insects, and rocks are societies with their own will and intent that do not necessarily coincide with human needs and well-being. And humans, for their part, negotiate a respectful place among these entities. Sensual experiences, feelings, visual observations, and relations over hundreds of generations form knowledges of interrelated experiences in a place. This constitutes place-thought, which ‘‘is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts’’ (Watts 2013, 21). In Anishinaabe creation stories, the earth is female. Watts (2013), referencing Anishinaabe scholar, mother, and artist Leanne Simpson, articulates the earth as ‘‘female’’ placethought. Watts cautions that Anishinaabe stories are not myths or metaphoric but literal, in which the living earth is female and her thoughts are carried out in the materiality and relations of places and their entities. In Anishinaabe creation accounts, Watts emphasizes, any creator or creatrix is not necessarily gendered male or female, but the earth is. The relationship with the female earth is a living one, a relationship that still informs how many Anishinaabe peoples act in the world today. Watts explains that it represents ‘‘the common intersections of the female, animals, the spirit world, and the mineral and plant world. What constitutes ‘society’ from these perspectives revolves around interactions between these worlds rather than solely interactions amongst human beings’’ (2013, 21). There is much subtlety to, many differences among, and much complexity within the epistemologies of different Indigenous nations that cannot be discussed in detail in the context of this chapter. Still, similar creation accounts can be found among Indigenous

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societies in many places. That the earth is female is widely understood, as in the Anishinaabe creation story mentioned above. Creation stories often feature male co-creators who are helpmates to the female gendered earth. Dominique Rankin (Algonquin) reflected on a man’s role as one to protect the mother as well as females, who embody creation (Anderson, Innes, and Swift 2012). The fact that ‘‘material’’ such as plants, animals, and physical geographical features are sentient, alive, and feeling is regularly expressed. In many traditions, everything is ‘‘spirit,’’ and spirit shows or manifests itself in matter. This spiritual nature makes for a permeable and flexible transition between forms. Many Indigenous stories and visual arts showcase the transformation of forms from one state to another. All matter, all ‘‘things,’’ are imbued with spirit, including human-made articles whose spirit is inherited from the tree that provided the wood, or from the earth and clay that make up a pot. This aliveness of matter means that humans must seek relations with nonhuman entities in order to exist. And these relations come with responsibilities that involve the entire community, extending well beyond any one person’s actions. In many people’s ways of knowing, a balance or harmony of relations is sought between the non-human and between human genders. In Tlingit knowledge, for instance, this interrelated and interactive environment is obvious in stories passed down through families and owned by clans. Nora Dauenhauer (Tlingit) shares a story from her own clan in the collection of oral histories Haa Shuka´, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives (1987), co-translated with her husband, Richard Dauenhauer (North American). In the chapter ‘‘Glacier Bay History’’ told by Tlingit elder Susie James, the clan speaks to the land, to their clan, and to other clans of an ancient disaster. A young woman undergoing her puberty ceremonial breaks part of her vows and speaks, taunting a far glacier. The glacier responds by moving rapidly toward the community. The human community understands the woman’s youthful disobedience, but the glacier proceeds and the villagers must flee. The young woman’s grandmother, as an elder, stays behind to accompany the spirit of her clan house as it is destroyed, taking on the obligation to both the glacier, the place, and the human community that her clan has incurred through the young woman’s actions. This narrative addresses the human frailty and error that preceded the glacier’s actions. It also illustrates the relations wherein the human community must act to restore harmony. Tlingits receive their clan through their mother’s line, thus there is a responsibility for the grandmother, as an elder whose clan is implicated, to act. In such stories, it may be difficult for Western readers to understand the interrelatedness of people and ‘‘matter’’ in an Indigenous sense. These stories center on relations among different entities and their responsibilities rather than on their identities, such as gender identities. The youth is not punished because she is a woman. It is her clan that takes responsibility because women, integral to the integrity of the Tlingit matrilineal clans, act on their responsibilities to their place. The young woman ignored these relations with the glacier, and the glacier responded. The stories are passed on as a guide to relations rather than as fixed definitions. James’s retelling of Glacier Bay’s history carries a covenant forward as an honoring of and an open-ended lesson (open to interpretation) to the entities involved: the clan, the glacier, the waters (as a larger ecological community), and Tlingit history. This is Tlingit community and place knowledge. As Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer (1987) explain, this clan story carries the complex relations between the living land, spirit, animals, and human responsibilities into a present moment for Tlingit listening, reading, or ceremonial participation. In oral traditions, humans’ covenants with their places are brought into focus through words, material (crests, songs, dances, and names), and performance. These remind the present generation of the clan’s ongoing responsibility and ‘‘the relationship between the GENDER: MATTER

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covenants established in the stories of ‘ancestors’ and correct human action in the present. The oral literature explains the ‘cosmic significance’ of activities in daily human life’’ (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1987, 378). In oral traditions, the stories often support clan and kinship relations, as well as the relations between sexes or the nonsexed, but they do not promote the idea that matter does not have options; that is, matter changes form. As such, matter does not necessarily have a fixed gender; rather, gender comes into being through relations with other entities. Many societies recognize more than two genders, with third and fourth genders seen as intermediaries that have spiritual and cultural responsibilities. Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee) and his colleagues’ Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics and Literature (2011) posits that gender in Indigenous contexts is often related to a work role or spiritual calling rather than to a biological determination based on genitalia. Will Roscoe’s The Zuni Man-Woman (1991) brought this to the attention of a then-emerging gay and lesbian studies, though the larger context of Zuni epistemology and meaning was unfortunately often lost. The Zuni ‘‘Man-Woman’’ We’wha existed and came into being in a Zuni world that respected her chosen, highly regarded role rather than interpreting her through the genitalia she was born with. After Roscoe, gay scholars would often mention We’wha as an example of non-Western sexuality and gender role without the context of her Zuni social relations (Driskill 2010; Cruikshank 1992).

INDIGENOUS RELATIONS INFORM A HOLISTIC POLITICS The hallmark of Indigenous nations is the holistic way that the earth, animals, and nonhuman entities are accounted for in the governing formations of peoples. Governance and leadership stem from egalitarian kinship organizations that foreground responsibility and from reciprocal cooperation that values both women’s and men’s physical and spiritual work. Men’s and women’s roles were different but were equally respected and considered integral to each other. While a need for harmony, balance, and respect was paramount and reciprocal, strict rules abounded toward the different roles of men and women (as illustrated in the Tlingit story translated by the Dauenhauers above) and variable peoples, such as third-genders. In fulfilling their nation’s needs, leaders are prized for maintaining balance in their relations with all entities, whether land animals, marine life, birds, water, trees, moss, and so on. As Delgam Uukw, a hereditary chief of the Gitksan, told the British Columbia Supreme Court: ‘‘For us, the ownership of territory is a marriage of the Chief and the land. Each Chief has an ancestor who encountered and acknowledged the life of the land. From such encounters come power. The land, the plants, the animals and the people all have spirit they all must be shown respect. That is the basis of our law’’ (Wa, Gisday, and Delgam Uukw 1992). The well-being of all entities that make up any ecology is expressed in story after story throughout Indigenous oral histories and narratives. The well-being of all entities relies on the interdependency and balance of relations in a place. These places correspond with large areas, bioregions, and cyclical movement rather than with imposed political boundaries, such as those of Native American reservations in the United States or First Peoples reserves in Canada. Place, then, must always recognize relations that are never static but are interactive, mobile, and enduring. In the early twentyfirst century, this is acknowledged in (re)mapping the reclaiming of Indigenous place names where colonization has attempted to erase Indigenous presence. Mishuana Goeman (Seneca) speaks of such decolonization of place in Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping

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Our Nations (2013): ‘‘(Re)mapping is not just about regaining what is lost and returning to an original and pure point in history, but instead understanding the processes that have defined our current spatialities to sustain vibrant Native futures’’ (Goeman 2013, 3).

INDIGENOUS NATIONS CRITIQUE CAPITALISM Indigenous societies have been under attack for hundreds of years. But as Leanne Simpson (Anishinaabe) makes clear in her essay ‘‘Anticolonial Strategies for the Recovery and Maintenance of Indigenous Knowledge’’ (2004), while Indigenous societies and languages remain threatened, they nevertheless continue to persevere. Many Indigenous nations have been forced to participate or sometimes have willingly participated in capitalist life to survive, but they may also maintain Indigenous value systems that are intrinsically anticapitalist in practice. For instance, in the United States many Indigenous nations have adopted capitalist casino development in order to reduce debilitating economic poverty; at the same time, they continue to manage their undeveloped and sacred places within their territories using Indigenous principles of relation and responsibility. Historically, the growth and expansion of capitalism since the 1500s has underlain colonial expansion across the globe. Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014) gives an account of Indigenous life ways under extreme duress in areas where there is heightened capitalist economic activity. While decolonization is said to have occurred after World War II, resulting in the contemporary human rights era, capitalist states reestablished coercive economic domination over formerly colonized nations. Most Indigenous peoples are ensconced in settler states (e.g., Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand). Settler states did not colonize for the sake of profit taken to a home country. Settler states sought (and seek) to replace Indigenous peoples through assimilation, absorption, or genocide. Settler states thus did not decolonize; they still dominate most Indigenous peoples and their homelands (see Wolfe 2006). During the 1970s and 1980s, Indigenous nations eked out certain rights of self-determination that are now enshrined in the UNDRIP. More recently, in the 1990s, settler states such as Canada and Australia reversed their earlier positions on Indigenous self-determination and adopted aggressive capitalist resource extraction in increasingly fragile places, such as the Yukon and Australia’s northern territories. Indigenous traditional economies continue under duress in fewer and fewer places around the world, and Indigenous peoples are responding. Belief in the sentient, affective, and sacred nature of the earth has been brought into international politics through various global Indigenous movements, such as the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Idle No More Movement that spread internationally after originating with Canadian First Nations peoples. Indigenous nations remain under attack because their land and sacred places are threatened by development practices such as mining, clear-cutting, pressure fracturing (or fracking), oil drilling, and dumping, to name only a few such activities. Any destruction of place is a destruction of Indigenous life and place. The above named economic activities have also been part of a larger pressure to change or transform Native ideas of power and governing relations. The understanding of the relations among ‘‘matter’’ among Indigenous societies is nonhierarchical. Colonial interventions in Indigenous societies, such as the Dine´, illustrate how place-thought is disrupted when Western gender hierarchies become entangled with Indigenous governance. Jennifer Nez Denetdale, a Dine´ feminist and activist, has written about her people’s arguments over gender and traditional governing principles. These principles have changed GENDER: MATTER

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with contemporary challenges and practices. Denetdale (2009) critiques her Indigenous government’s interpretations of tradition that deny marriage rights to Dine´ Two-Spirit couples and who once recognized gender variability as sacred (Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang 1997). She sees her government adopting the Western patriarchal values that are ensconced in nation-state-like patriotisms, which in turn influences contemporary gender roles and responsibilities (Denetdale 2006). Kim Anderson (Ojibwe) notes how ‘‘pre-contact gender relations were based on equity and balance, and that male dominance in the areas of governance, social relations, economics, and spiritual practices were introduced by settler society as a way of breaking down Indigenous families and communities’’ (Anderson, Innes, and Swift 2012, 267). The following section turns to a discussion of the effects of colonial gender interventions on Indigenous nonhierarchal societies.

GENDERED DEVELOPMENT AND GENDERED VIOLENCE The Western social and scientific imagination has historically positioned Indigenous societies in absolute alterity to, as other to, global progress. Capitalist nation-states have portrayed their own economic and social growth in a teleological and upward linear trajectory from the primitive to the modern. The birth of monotheistic religions as early as the fourteenth century BCE introduced a clear hierarchy, with ‘‘human’’ and ‘‘man’’ at the top, having dominion over the earth and women. Societies that had close, nonhierarchical relations with their places and differently organized social relations were seen first as nonhuman and later as primitive (Todorov 1985). European explorers in the 1400s and 1500s were particularly disturbed by the egalitarian gender and social relations they encountered in many Indigenous societies (Ballantyne and Burton 2005). These observed differences became foundational to what it meant to be ‘‘savage’’ and ‘‘primitive.’’ Primitivism is strongly linked to Western racial hierarchies that position European societies as the pinnacle of civilization (Ballantyne and Burton 2005). This tendency to link the Indigenous with primitivism and na¨ıvete´ lingers into the twenty-first century. Positioning the Indigenous as primitive and unchanging ignores that Indigenous societies are adaptive and creative cultures that live and change in the present day. The mainstream culture of Western nation-states often still positions surviving Indigenous values and practices as ‘‘primitive,’’ thus labeling the Indigenous as nonprogressive and/or childlike. This creates a dichotomy that opposes the ‘‘primitive’’ to the ‘‘modern.’’ Indigenous peoples’ efforts to continue their historical and ancestral relations with place and matter continue to mark Indigenous societies as primitive (Johnson and Murton 2004; Blaser, Feit, and McRate 2004). At the same time, the primitive/modern binary leads Western culture to see contemporary Indigenous political and social strategies as inauthentic rather than as innovations or adaptations common to any evolving culture. That Indigenous peoples are primitive has been debunked to a degree, but Western development practice continues to exhibit this view, such as in the concepts of underdevelopment and the undeveloped (e.g., the Third World as undeveloped compared to the First World of industrialized nation-states) (Ferguson 1997; Knobl 2003; Blaser, Feit, and McRate 2004). This way of thinking is also highly gendered and violent. Sarah Deer, a 2014 MacArthur Fellow and coauthor of the Amnesty International report Maze of Injustice (2007), characterizes sexual violence as an ongoing deep assault against Native women and their nations. Another text, Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (2013), by Dian Million, describes domestic violence as economic violence, as part of a larger violence

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perpetrated against the earth itself as a female being and Indigenous societies as gender egalitarian ways of being and knowing. In ‘‘Indigenous Masculinities: Carrying the Bones of the Ancestors,’’ Anderson, Robert Alexander Innes, and John Swift posit that Indigenous men were responsible for bringing in food and resources through hunting and fishing, while also protecting their families and communities from harm. Principles of noninterference and non-coercive relations meant that everyone was honoured for their responsibilities, and thus the role to ‘‘protect’’ and ‘‘provide’’ ensured a sense of purpose, belonging, and identity that did not involve having power over others human, animal, or environment. (Anderson, Innes, and Swift 2012, 271) Western colonists sought to destroy this order by coercive gender training that established Indigenous women as subordinate to men at the same time Indigenous economies that supported their egalitarian societies were destroyed. Women were left with domestic work in the new hierarchy while men’s Indigenous roles often disappeared entirely in the new economies. Queer theorists Mark Rifkin (2011) and Scott Morgensen (2012) have established the close relationship between the establishment of Western settler states and the sexual and gender colonization of Indigenous peoples. Morgensen writes, ‘‘Gender and sexuality are intrinsic to the colonization of indigenous peoples and the promulgation of European modernity by settlers. . . . Theories of settler colonization will remain incomplete if they do not investigate how this political and economic formation is constituted by gendered and sexual power’’ (2012, 2). Anderson, Innes, and Swift argue in ‘‘Indigenous Masculinities: Carrying the Bones of the Ancestors’’ (2012) that colonial order enforces its own hierarchal relations in the process. Over the past five centuries of colonization globally, Western nation-states have sought to erase Indigenous peoples through genocidal or culture-genocidal practices (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015). This destruction was undertaken purposefully to clear land and enhance settler economies. Indigenous peoples whose epistemologies and ontologies represented radically different ideas of matter and nature, gender, and sexuality were seen as primitive. Because ‘‘nature’’ was subordinate to ‘‘men’’ in Western thought, Indigenous men and women were to be subsumed in Western hierarchies without their relations or the knowledge of their roles to protect their places. The place-thought homes of Indigenous peoples were ‘‘things’’ to be bought, sold, and used. Indigenous peoples’ sense of nonhierarchal genders and sexualities was seen as an abomination to erase through violent means. The destruction of land accompanies the destruction of peoples in particular, Indigenous women as Rauna Kuokkanen (Sa´mi) illustrates in her article ‘‘Globalization as Racialized, Sexualized Violence’’ (2008). The destruction of Indigenous lands impoverishes women as well as destroys men and women’s relations and the communities that hold the peoples accountable to each other and their generations. The significant presence of Indigenous women on the front lines of early twenty-first-century resurgence and activism reflects Indigenous women’s present knowledge of themselves as protectors of water, land, and life. The Native Youth Sexual Health Network website, created by Indigenous youth for gender and sexual justice, state their understanding of the relation between violence to their lands and bodies: ‘‘Connected to Body, Connected to Land means what happens to the land and the environment(s) around us (good, bad and everything) also happens to our bodies and communities.’’ The following paragraphs detail how Indigenous epistemology and ontology motivate practice within the contemporary generation of Indigenous peoples and their nations. GENDER: MATTER

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INDIGENOUS ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES Indigenous economic principles demonstrate the core of Indigenous belief in the spiritual, sentient, and affective nature of matter. Indigenous thought denies ‘‘man’’ as a pinnacle of creation that all other life-forms are subservient to. Indigenous peoples see violence against the earth and women as intertwined and reflexive. As early as 1995, Winona LaDuke (White Earth Ojibwe), a founder of the Indigenous Women’s Network, powerfully conveyed the links between unrestrained capitalist development and heightened violence against women in her address to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, China. ‘‘The origins of this problem,’’ LaDuke noted, ‘‘lie with the predator-prey relationship industrial society has developed with the Earth, and subsequently, the people of the Earth. This same relationship exists vis a vis women’’ (1995, para. 10). LaDuke cofounded and remains highly active in several Indigenous activist networks. Two of these networks, Honor the Earth and the Indigenous Environmental Network, are premier resources for understanding Indigenous philosophy and practice in economic and environmental politics. The Honor the Earth website describes Indigenous economic principles as ‘‘intergenerational thinking and equity (thinking for the seventh generation; inter- and intra-species equity (respect); and valuing those spiritual and intangible facets of the natural world and cultural practice (not all values and things can be monetized).’’ In Canada, four women Nina Wilson (Kahkewistahaw Cree), Sheelah McLean (Canadian), Sylvia McAdam (Big River Cree), and Jessica Gordon (Saulteaux and Cree) cofounded the (now) international Idle No More Movement. As the group’s website describes, Idle No More arose out of the rage and frustration Canadian Indigenous peoples felt over the passage in late 2012 of Omnibus Bill C-45, which removed Canadian Indigenous nations from primary consultation concerning protections of their waters and lands at the same time that plans for development of these places increased. In particular, the Canadian government planned to continue its mining of tar sands in northern Alberta, in Mikisew Cree and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations traditional lands. The destruction of the Mikisew lands is so extensive it can be seen from space. Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree First Nations, in a study with University of Manitoba researchers, show increased rates of cancer from consuming high concentrations of contaminants in their foods (McLachlan 2014). A plan to build extensive pipelines to ship tar sands oil south to the United States and then to global markets resulted in the ongoing struggle in the United States and Canada against the Keystone XL Pipeline. One part of the Keystone was ultimately rejected by the Obama administration in November 2015. Phases I III of the pipeline were built. Other pipeline proposals remain on the table as of this writing in 2016 (see Honor the Earth website). Rene´e Elizabeth Mzinegiizhigo-kwe Be´dard (Anishinaabe) explains the intimate kinship that women have with water in her chapter in the edited collection Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations (Simpson et al. 2008). Be´dard writes that women are nishnaabe-kwewag, or Keepers of the Water, with a responsibility to step forward to protect the living entity of water that is virtually life itself. Beginning in the winter of 2002, a group of First Nations women and some men formed Mother Earth Water Walkers, ‘‘who are taking action to force public attention on the growing problems facing this world’s most precious resource water, the lifeblood of Mother Earth’’ (Simpson et al. 2008, 103). This group is an example of Indigenous communities that have refused government funding or corporate resources, preferring to maintain their autonomy. In 2003, supported mostly by donations from First Nations

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communities, the Water Walkers embarked on a spiritual walk around the perimeter of Lake Superior. In subsequent years, they walked around Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, and Lake Erie. The Water Walkers continue their vision, walking to bring together clans, women, and men from different nations, all in the spirit of nibi, the Anishinaabe word for ‘‘water’’ (see the Mother Earth Water Walkers website). As they continue to walk, they practice their relations and responsibility toward the entity ‘‘water’’ with reverence and respect. In addition, these women in their role as ‘‘Keepers of the Water’’ are aided in reciprocal relations by men of their clans and men and women of other nations as helpmates in their role to further and protect the life forces present. The above examples of struggle in this section illustrate an Indigenous principle where humans stand in right relations with their ‘‘places’’ without hierarchy in an Indigenous sense where all ‘‘matter.’’

GENDERED EPISTEMOLOGIES: INTERSECTIONS AND CONVERSATIONS By the early twenty-first century, Indigenous knowledge (or epistemologies) had joined a confluence of different streams of thought about colonization, nationalism, states, settler states, gender, sexuality, economic development, and ecological destruction, employing its own voices, stories, and meanings. In their quest for justice for hundreds of years of genocide, Indigenous peoples became increasingly vocal in using Indigenous frames of meaning to interpret their ways of life. Living Indigenous nations continue to struggle for their very existence. The human and nonhuman relations in Indigenous places continue to be seen by Western interests as valuable untapped resources (as in the Canadian tar sands area). In Western epistemologies, matter is predominately seen as inert, passive, or dead, as ‘‘things’’ to be used, sold, developed, and/or destroyed, which ignores the intricate relations that make human and nonhuman of the same ‘‘kind’’ and inextricably bound. Indigenous knowledge understands that there is no ‘‘development’’ that does not change these relations. Indigenous epistemologies thus pose a different and valuable way that matter might be conceived and a deeper, less toxic understanding of what ‘‘human’’ might be. As such, Indigenous peoples are often well situated to participate in efforts to improve conditions for all life in the bioregions they know and have deep love for. Indigenous peoples are on the front lines of caring about what happens to human and nonhuman communities that inhabit a rapidly changing earth.

SCIENCE AND TRADITIONAL INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE The growing exchange between Western and Indigenous epistemologies has been aided by the work of scientists and social scientists of Indigenous descent. For example, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (2000) by Gregory Cajete (Tewa) and Leroy Little Bear (Blood Tribe of the Blackfoot Confederacy), clarifies the enduring Indigenous participation and thought concerning the life sciences. Another accessible collection in this vein is Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (2008) by Melissa K. Nelson (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), which aims to teach youth the basics of Indigenous ontologies from several different traditions. Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi) writer, environmental sciences professor, and founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment in Syracuse, New York has written two popular and accessible texts on living intimately in Indigenous relation: GENDER: MATTER

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Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (2003) and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013). In Braiding Sweetgrass, she writes that ‘‘listening to wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own’’ (2013, 48). She then astutely contrasts an intimate listening for relation with an objective naming that serves another purpose: ‘‘Science can be a language of distance which reduces a being to its working parts; it is a language of objects’’ (49). Such texts are part of an emerging effort to translate between Western scientific and Indigenous epistemologies. While these are two distinct ways of knowing, they might illuminate each other’s strengths.

GENOMICS AND INTERSPECIES THINKING Life and matter have increasingly become a focus of capitalist production in the emergent fields of bioengineering and genetic research. Traditional Indigenous Knowledge (also called Traditional Ecological Knowledge, or TEK) has allure for pharmaceutical industries as researchers have become aware that Indigenous peoples know a voluminous amount about natural life in bioregions. As interest in mapping the human genome increased in the late twentieth century, so did interest in Indigenous DNA as evidence of singularity or admixture in human populations. But TEK far exceeds the stuff of pharmaceutical product development; it involves more than a colonial mapping interest in Indigenous genomic patterns. Indigenous peoples have resisted giving away knowledge of their medicines and even of their bodies (DNA), because they are wary of Western researchers’ record of abusive strategies (TallBear 2013). Such methods mimic the extractive industries of mining and oil production, treating Indigenous knowledge as a resource for the taking. Indigenous ontological worlds offer exceedingly different ways of thinking about issues and about the proper etiquette of living as a relative in larger kinship with a sentient and affective world. Kim TallBear is an Indigenous feminist scholar who exemplifies a connective, reflexive Indigenous commitment to living an Indigenous politics. Her first book, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (2013), recounted a ten-year exploration of the emphasis on DNA in the biosciences and its impact on Indigenous political sovereignty. She then turned to the implications of sexuality in power relations in colonial contexts: ‘‘Following conversations with critical animal studies and new materialisms scholarly communities, I have most recently become interested in the overlap between constructions of ‘nature’ and ‘sexuality’’’ (Kim TallBear website, ‘‘Research’’ section). TallBear is a graduate of the University of California Santa Cruz History of Consciousness Department, where she studied with feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway. Haraway’s insights into epistemology, technology, and the sciences are considered integral to the new conversation on posthumanism, a field of thought that challenges human superiority over and separation from nature (see, e.g., Haraway 2003, 2016). TallBear herself is deeply involved in feminist critical work in the sciences from her own Indigenous, and specifically Dakota, perspective. Her contribution to The Multispecies Salon (Kirksey 2014), a collection of interspecies art and essays, is an example of TallBear’s thinking. Earlier, in 2011, she organized a symposium at the University of California Berkeley titled ‘‘Why the Animal? Queer Animalities, Indigenous Naturecultures, and Critical Race Approaches to Animal Studies.’’ Her opening comments describe the interventions she hoped to make at this radical interdisciplinary meeting: ‘‘The idea . . . behind this symposium

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is to bring together scholars within animal studies who focus on queer and critical race approaches with scholars working within longer-lived strands of study, indigenous approaches to knowing ‘nonhumans’ that are focused on critiquing settler colonialism and its management of nonhuman others’’ (Kim TallBear website, ‘‘Home/Blog’’ section, May 8, 2011). TallBear exemplifies Indigenous thought at the edges of the interwoven and emergent fields that are engaging in a conversation between Indigenous and Western epistemologies about the significance of matter. Indeed, this conversation shows why Indigenous matters matter.

Summary The most important idea conveyed by this chapter is that Indigenous knowledge of matter is inextricable from people’s holistic, lived experience in specific places, in relation with both the human and nonhuman. In an Indigenous sense, matter is understood as interactive rather than static. Gender is not necessarily fixed but is often attached to roles. Every ‘‘thing’’ is alive, sentient, and affective and has will. These Indigenous thoughts on matter, materiality, and gender cannot be separated from the lived lives of all the entities involved, because they have mutually formed each other in a place. Indigenous epistemologies, or ways of knowing, are marked by a profound belief in the interrelatedness and sentient and affective quality of all matter. This knowledge forms the constellations of narratives that are the Indigenous oral traditions. This is knowledge that resists breaking what is observed into smaller and smaller unrelated parts. As important is that Indigenous peoples and their epistemologies have always been present, have intervened, and have helped make the world. Indigenous societies have been subject to domination, colonization, and genocide because, compared to the Western view, they carry a very different human account of what matter is. In Western modes of thought, it is difficult to understand the import of living in a world that is as alive and thinking as humans are. To live as a relative of all other life, with responsibilities to other life-forms and entities, is perhaps one of the most significant challenges to Western thought offered by Indigenous understandings of matter. Indigenous knowledge confronts the hierarchies that do violence to matter, including the matter that humans are. As poet, writer, and theorist Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan) writes, ‘‘It is said in Okanagan that the land constantly speaks. It is constantly communicating. Not to learn its language is to die. We survived and thrived by listening intently to its teachings to its language and then inventing human words to retell its stories to our succeeding generation’’ (1998, 176).

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Goeman, Mishuana. Mark My Words: Native Women Map ping Our Nations. First Peoples: New Directions in Indig enous Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, Species, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Jacobs, Sue Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang. Two Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Jaimes, M. Annette. ‘‘‘Patriarchal Colonialism’ and Indigen ism: Implications for Native Feminist Spirituality and Native Womanism.’’ Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 58 69. Johnson, Jay T., and Brian Murton. ‘‘Re/placing Native Sci ence: Indigenous Voices in Contemporary Constructions of Nature.’’ Geographical Research 45, no. 2 (2007): 121 129. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. New York: Milkweed, 2013. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cul tural History of Mosses. Corvallis: Oregon State Univer sity Press, 2003. Kirksey, Eben, ed. The Multispecies Salon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Knobl, Wolfgang. ‘‘Theories That Won’t Pass Away: The Never ending Story.’’ In Handbook of Historical Sociol ogy, edited by Gerard Delanty and Engin F. Isin, 96 107. London: Sage, 2003. Kuokkanen, Rauna. ‘‘Globalization as Racialized, Sexual ized Violence.’’ International Feminist Journal of Politcs 10, no. 2 (2008): 216 233. LaDuke, Winona. ‘‘The Indigenous Women’s Network: Our Future, Our Responsibility.’’ Statement presented at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, August 31, 1995. https://www.ratical.org/co globalize/WinonaLaDuke/Beijing95.html. Maracle, Lee. I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociol ogy and Feminism. Vancouver, Canada: Press Gang Pub lishers, 1996. McGregor, Deborah. ‘‘Coming Full Circle: Indigenous Knowledge, Environment, and Our Future.’’ American Indian Quarterly 28, nos. 3 4 (2004): 385 410.

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McLachlan, Ste´phane M. ‘‘‘Water Is a Living Thing’: Environ mental and Human Health Implications of the Athabasca Oil Sands for the Mikisew Cree First Nation and Atha basca Chipewyan First Nation in Northern Alberta.’’ Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba, 2014. Million, Dian. Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. ‘‘Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction.’’ Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 2 (2012): 2 22. Nelson, Melissa K. Original Instructions: Indigenous Teach ings for a Sustainable Future. Rochester, VT: Bear & Company, 2008. Rifkin, Mark. When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Roscoe, Will. The Zuni Man Woman. Albuquerque: Univer sity of New Mexico Press, 1991. Simpson, Leanne R. ‘‘Anticolonial Strategies for the Recov ery and Maintenance of Indigenous Knowledge.’’ Amer ican Indian Quarterly 28, nos. 3 4 (2004): 377 384. Simpson, Leanne R., Charlie Greg Sark, Gerald R. Alfred, et al. Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations. Winnipeg, Canada: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2008. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 1999. TallBear, Kim. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: Uni versity of Minnesota Press, 2013. Telling It Book Collective. Telling It: Women and Language across Cultures, the Transformation of a Conference. Vancouver, Canada: Press Gang Publishers, 1990. Teves, Stephanie Nohelani, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja. Native Studies Keywords. Critical Issues in Indig enous Studies. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. 1st Colophon ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. First published 1984. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peo ples (UNDRIP). Ratified Septemper 13, 2007. http://www .un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS en.pdf.

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United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. ‘‘Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Voices: Factsheet.’’ http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/5session factsheet1.pdf. Wa, Gisday, and Delgam Uukw. The Spirit in the Land: Statements of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, 1987 1990. Gabriola, Canada: Reflections, 1992. Watts, Vanessa. ‘‘Indigenous Place Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).’’ Decolo nization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 20 34. Wilson, Shawn. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Halifax, Canada: Fernwood, 2008. Wolfe, Patrick. ‘‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.’’ Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387 409. F IL M S Cree Hunters of Mistassini. Dir. Boyce Richardson and Tony Ianzelo. 1974. An archival film that gives a historical glimpse of Cree relations with their lands and the animals they hunted. Finding Dawn. Dir. Christine Welsh. 2006. Award winning Indigenous filmmaker Christine Welsh takes a devastat ing and necessary look at the issue of violence against Indigenous women in Canada. Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World. Dir. Charles Wil kinson. 2015. A vibrant community thrives and celebra tes the chiefs, farmers, scientists, and artists who work to secure a sustainable future for the Haida Gwaii archipe lago and the Haida culture. In the Light of Reverence. Dir. Christopher McLeod. 2001. A documentary about the efforts of the Hopi, the Winne mem Wintu, and the Lakota Sioux to protect their sacred sites. Mohawk Girls. Dir. Tracey Deer. 2005. A beautiful explora tion by a Mohawk filmmaker of her community’s reading of Mohawk identity, race, and gender. O NL I NE VI D EO S Dine´ Youth Walk for Existence. ‘‘Nihı´ga´a´l Bee iina’ Tsoodził to Doko’o’osliid.’’ July 23, 2015. https://youtu.be /X6ob1tRelq8. Dine´ Youth Walk for Existence. ‘‘Our Journey for Existence.’’ December 25, 2014. https://youtu.be/g0pbKAhBysw.

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CHAPTER 8

Physics A. R. Bennett Assistant Professor, Department of English University of Nevada, Reno

Physics is the branch of the natural sciences that studies matter and its motion in space and time. The study of physics, which takes its name from the Ancient Greek word phusike  ), meaning ‘‘knowledge of nature,’’ has long been synonymous with understanding (jusikh the fundamental order of the natural world and its operations. Physics as it is known today began with the work of English natural philosopher Isaac Newton (1643 1727), whose works constitute the foundation of classical physics. Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) lays out the fundamental laws of bodies, motion, and forces while simultaneously developing the basic principles of calculus to describe the laws and postulates he proposes. In the twenty-first century, physics is known as one of the hard sciences, or sciences pertaining to nature rather than humans. Indeed, on a spectrum of hard to soft, physics is often deemed the hardest of sciences because it is the least ‘‘tainted’’ by its relationship to human concerns; the soft sciences, in contrast, are the social sciences that study humanity. With descriptors such as hard and soft, it should come as no surprise that these ends of the scientific spectrum are also gendered, with softer sciences being feminized whereas harder ones are masculinized and privileged. Modern physics is defined by its departure from classical (Newtonian) physics, particularly in terms of two separate but related developments. Albert Einstein’s (1879 1955) theories of relativity (i.e., special relativity in 1905 and general relativity in 1915) redefined the nature of space and time and the basic operations of the universe at very large scales; it also highlighted that all knowledge of a system is relative only to that system. At the very small scale, the development of quantum mechanics from German physicist Max Planck’s (1858 1947) first proposal of radiation quanta in 1900 and Einstein’s proposal of photons as light quanta in 1905, through the mid-twentieth-century work of Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885 1962) and German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901 1976) and the emergence of particle physics as a specialization has undermined basic assumptions about what matter is, how it functions, and what that might mean. Both branches of modern physics require a total rejection of classical models of not just physics but even basic forms of existence questions usually left to philosophers. The entanglement of physics and philosophy brings the issue of gender and physics to the surface. Our assumptions about matter constitute the foundation on which we conceptualize the rest of the universe, including how we organize and give significance to specific organizations of matter (such as gendered bodies). Feminist and queer critiques of physics, as well as the scientific knowledge-making practices of the field, draw attention to how even the most

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basic building blocks of matter are not exempt from the biased systems of knowledge that produce them. Subatomic particles are not ‘‘neutral’’; indeed, they may not even exist in a positivist sense. Instead, they are products of the systems that produce them by studying them an argument made both by feminist studies of science and quantum physicist Bohr. In fact, modern physics and feminist science studies may well critique in analogous ways the entire Western tradition of knowledge making with regard to nature and matter. As many feminist thinkers have pointed out, nature and culture are not totally separate realms. Indeed, the nature of matter has always been used to define what is natural, normal, and therefore morally right for gender, reproduction, and sexuality. At stake in our understanding of matter, then, is also our understanding of what the universe is, how it works, and how it should work, which is an ethical and philosophical question. This chapter outlines how the issues of gender and physics intersect in the practice of physics, as well as in the meanings of gender and reproductive science that emerge from these fundamental understandings of matter. After defining the classical ontology that modern physics and feminist science studies deconstruct, the chapter highlights how they change our understanding of not just matter and gender but the whole order of the universe and humanity’s relationship to the cosmos. Finally, how a quantum epistemology changes the way we think about the materialization of gender is explored through the example of the process of producing and gendering a fetus with a piezoelectric ultrasound transducer.

WHAT DO GENDER AND PHYSICS HAVE TO DO WITH ONE ANOTHER? Because physics is assumed to be so far from the (soft) human end of the scientific spectrum, it is hard to imagine what physics and gender have to do with one another. Indeed, as physicist Amy Bug points out, at first glance the question of physics and gender might seem to boil down only to an issue of demographics. Bug states that, as of the early twenty-first century, physicists seemed to think that ‘‘feminism has done essentially nothing to transform what one might call ‘orthodox physics’’’ (2003, 881); further than that, though, is that physicists would probably not even acknowledge the possibility that feminism could transform their hard science because of its purity (i.e., distance from human concerns and influences). Instead, physicists seem to ‘‘see their own profession as the revelation and custody of ‘fundamental truth’’’ (Traweek 1988, 2). Professor of gender studies Sharon Traweek points out that the multibillion-dollar facilities that allow the study of the most fundamental branch of physics, particle accelerators, are analogous to medieval cathedrals: they are ‘‘free from the constraints of cost-benefit analysis’’ (3), because, as some would argue, they are the places where the highest ‘‘sacraments’’ are performed in order to make ‘‘sacred’’ truths available to humanity. Physicists are ‘‘convinced that the deepest truths must be static [ . . . and] independent of human frailty and hubris’’ and that ‘‘this grand structure of physical truth can be progressively uncovered, and that this is the highest and most urgent human pursuit’’ (Traweek 1988, 17). It would seem that these objectively obtained and verified fundamental truths, far removed from the subjective realms of human perception and judgment, are beyond feminist critique and can have little to do with gender. What orthodox physics has failed to acknowledge in its mainstream, defined largely by the universities and the laboratories in the United States that support physics research, is that how physics is done inherently affects how physicists are made, and thus what kinds of physics are able to be practiced or even thought. When discussing the issue of ‘‘pipeline

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leakage,’’ or the numbers of nonmale, nonwhite practitioners that leave physics at each stage, Bug (2003) points out that at each successive stage of training the cost for being different and for thinking differently than the mainstream (which in 2011 in the United States was 87.5 percent male and 75 percent white) gets higher and that, ultimately, the price of admission into the realm of professional physics might be learning to think like a white man (see also Whitten 2012). Bug argues that only a diverse group of practitioners can yield results or even choose problems to investigate that are ‘‘divested of an existing Western or androcentric bias’’ (2003, 887; see also Harding 1998). The inclusion of nonwhite, nonmale practitioners in the field opens up the opportunity not only to add underrepresented people to the field but also to make room for alternative modes of thinking within the discipline of physics. In addition to changing the field of physics through the demographics of its practitioners, feminist thought has the potential to radically transform the way that scientific knowledge is made and the process by which it is validated; it also has the power to upend the value system that hierarchizes knowledge. Barbara L. Whitten argues that a feminist reimagining of physics would replace the top-down (hierarchical) model of scientific knowledge with a ‘‘web of interconnect[ed] fields’’ that are equally valued and mutually dependent (quoted in Bug 2003, 889), as is covered in more detail below. Reorganizing knowledge in this way creates interdisciplinary projects and practices, which Sandra Harding calls ‘‘mestiza sciences,’’ after cultural and feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldu´a’s (1942 2004) description of a border identity for mestiza (mixed-race) women suspended between Native, Mexican, and Euro-American identities (Harding 1998, 87; see also Whitten 2012). Early twenty-first century work in quantum biology has likewise proven that quantum physics can be both sensible and operative in migratory birds, the transformation of tadpoles, and even the human olfactory sense (Al-Khalili and McFadden 2014). The quantum scale cannot be divorced from the biological scale nor can it be used to mechanistically calculate biological operations from the fundamental quantum operations of particles. Instead, all the discoveries in the emerging field of quantum biology have been the result of collaboration across scientific disciplines, with biologists, zoologists, and even medical doctors working in collaboration with quantum physicists to uncover the ways that these two scales of matter’s behavior affect one another in these specific instances.

CLASSICAL ONTOLOGY Since Greek antiquity, ontology the study of being has defined the basic nature of existence. Classical ontology shares six main features that persist from antiquity through the height of modernity. The first is a hand-in-hand dualism and essentialism that was perhaps first thoroughly articulated by ancient Greek philosopher Plato (428 348 or 347 BCE) in his theory of forms. Plato posits that reality actually exists in the transcendent realm of ideal forms. The material realm is something of a cheap knockoff of this true reality, which can be accessed only through abstraction and logical reasoning. Because reality exists, for Plato, in a transcendent, immaterial plane, the role of matter in all aspects of his philosophy is reduced to one of corruption and imperfection. The idea of an essential nature of anything is tied to this tradition and is still evident in arguments that assert that particular genders or gender characteristics are ‘‘natural.’’ For Plato the dualist split was between the realm of sensory experience and the transcendent realm of forms. For early modern French philosopher Rene´ Descartes (1596 1650), who is in many ways the father of the modern Western sciences, this includes an identification of being GENDER: MATTER

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(existence) with consciousness rather than with embodiment. In his famous formulation ‘‘cogito ergo sum’’ (I think, therefore I am[/exist]) Descartes is specifically arguing that he ‘‘was a substance whose whole essence or nature resides only in thinking, and which, in order to exist, has no need of place and is not dependent on any material thing’’ (2008, 29). He continues by saying that his ‘‘I’’ is equivalent to his ‘‘Soul,’’ which is ‘‘entirely distinct from the body . . . and would not stop being everything it is, even if the body were not to exist’’ (29). Descartes thoroughly influenced the development of modern science. His separation of matter from being upholds an empirical framework in which experimentation and observation of the material world can yield knowledge of an abstract truth in the form of a mathematical principle or law of nature. The second main feature of classical ontology is the assumption that matter, as part of the ‘‘dumb’’ and ‘‘inanimate’’ world, is inert. This assumption inscribes an active/passive binary on the abstract/material dichotomy in which inert or passive matter is subject to the active principle that would then animate it. In the case of human life, medieval and classical models of reproduction essentially equate masculinity and femininity with activity and passivity, respectively. Galenic medicine, developed by Galen of Pergamum (129 c. 199 CE) in the second century CE, was the foundation of medical practice in Europe from antiquity through the Middle Ages. Galen (2011) drew on humoral and elemental theory to explain the anatomical development of gender in the womb. Each of the four humors are associated with the four elements in pairs, and each pair is either active or passive. In medieval gynecology, conception takes place when the hot, active, animating principle is supplied to the cold, damp, passive matter in a woman’s womb. That is, in the medieval reproductive model, women supply the (passive) matter for the development of a fetus, while men supply the ‘‘spark’’ of life that animates the flesh (Green 2001). According to this model, active and passive elements of reproduction also influence how gender forms within the womb. Medieval models of the reproductive organs regarded the uterus and ovaries to be the same organs as the penis and testes. Their differentiation happened in the womb and again relied on the presence of enough of the hot, active principles during fetal development (Galen 2011; Green 2001). If the womb were too cold and damp, the reproductive organs would fail to develop fully and would remain on the interior of the body as an inverted and defective penis and testes. Women are therefore defective males, or ‘‘not-men.’’ Thus, female children were female specifically because of the lack of activating power in the development of their reproductive organs. The basic passivity of matter and the female body then underwrote philosophical gender distinctions and social mores for thousands of years. Women who were active, outspoken, vocal, or hot tempered were deemed ‘‘unnatural’’ because the very activity in which they were involved was deemed contradictory to their passive natures (Blamires 1992). Even before the advent of physics as a field of modern science, Western understandings of the fundamental nature of matter underpinned philosophical frameworks for the cosmos and humanity. The active/passive and male/female binaries continue to underpin the dominant Western epistemological paradigm. Feminized matter is deemed to be inert, passive, and awaiting inscription by (active, masculine) human beings. Because of its passivity, matter is deemed to have nonbeing, or a kind of nothingness (no-thing-ness) or blankness that means it can be ethically and uncritically inscribed by human powers, wills, and desires. In this paradigm, matter makes up the unproblematic ‘‘nature’’ that scientists ‘‘discover’’ and describe through observation and experimentation. It is this inscription of matter as inert that turns nonhuman plant, animal, and mineral substances into natural resources or raw materials, land into territory, and crafted objects into products for human consumption.

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The third and fourth features of classical ontology go hand in hand. First is the idea that space consists of uniform dimensions that can be usefully abstracted and mapped through the imposition of uniform subdivisions on it. Cartesian coordinate systems, the two-dimensional x-y grids that provide the graphical background on which mathematics from algebra upward operate, are the visible representation of this uniform space. Within that space, then, are set individual bodies that have definite boundaries inherent in their form and nature. The fifth feature of classical ontology is the rise of empiricism or the belief that knowledge can be gained through observation rather than abstraction (i.e., logic, philosophy, or religion). Experimentation under this rubric is therefore a means of accessing reality through measurement of the physical world. Though it takes root in antiquity and is developed largely by medieval Islamic scholars of Aristotle, empiricism becomes central to the practice of natural philosophy in the Early Modern period. Descartes asserted that ‘‘there is only one truth of any one thing,’’ and that ‘‘whoever finds it knows as much as can be known about it’’ (2008, 19). This circumscription of truth, as well as the ability to fully know the objects of investigation, is tied into the sixth and final feature of classical ontology: that everything is knowable; discovering all of it is just a matter of figuring out the right way to measure it. Together, these features create a set of assumptions about the material universe that assert that the universe exists but that abstraction is the best way to describe the truth of that universe. The privileging of abstraction over materiality underwrites an entire system of binaries that are still foundational in much of Western thought, particularly about gender and the nature of matter.

FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF THE METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE The empiricist paradigm that has dominated scientific practice since the twelfth century relies on two basic premises, both of which are features of classical ontology that ‘‘reality’’ is essentially knowable through an interrogation of materiality and that reality assumes that matter is present and can be interrogated as such. Empiricism, then, relies on a ‘‘metaphysics of presence’’ that assumes the presence of a material reality and dismisses nonpresence as nonexistence. Many binary logics are built on this logic of the physical universe: something either is or is not. Binary genders are similarly articulated within this Western metaphysics by the proposition that an individual either has a penis or does not have one (i.e., lacks one). Contemporary feminist theorists who draw on the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901 1981) point out that the gender binary is not built on the two genders each ‘‘having’’ a particular kind of reproductive organ; instead, it is based on one gender (male) having the right, desirable, or powerful organ, and the other not having it. This makes the male gender a thing designated by a thing (a one, a presence) and everything else is a no-thing, (a zero, a nonpresence). The vagina, uterus, and ovaries are not things but no-things, because they do not have the same symbolic power of the phallus. Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (1930 ), for example, calls the female gender ‘‘this sex which is not one,’’ playing on the multiple meanings of the terms one and not one (1985). Meaning making is therefore predicated on a similar, phallic, metaphysics of presence; the phallic symbolic order in which language operates, then, is prejudiced not only toward binary logics but also toward binaries that privilege the phallic or signifying half of the dichotomy. Signification is inextricable from the way that we conceptualize our physical reality. This is why the changes to our basic concept of material reality brought about by modern physics matter. They change our fundamental understanding of matter itself and thus the logic on which meaning making is built. GENDER: MATTER

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In physics, the metaphysics of presence can be seen at the fundamental level of particles, which are presumed to exist or to have inherent material realities independent of their measurement. As discussed below, this turns out not to be the case in quantum physics, a fact that particle physicists acknowledge in passing but do not account for in the conclusions they draw from their research. A particle could be considered a phallic signifier of matter. It is the most basic presence on which an entire system of signification is built.

THE QUANTUM PROBLEM: PARTICLES THAT ARE/ARE NOT PRESENT Quantum mechanics destabilizes the metaphysics of presence because particles, it turns out, are not the basic units of matter. In fact, they are not simply matter as we think of it at all. Indeed, they may not be physically present, in the classical sense, until they are observed. Instead, all matter is both particle and wave. Everything from light to compound molecules can be observed as particles discrete bodies that are unique, finite, and (in most cases) material. However, all these microscopic elements are similarly waves or mere oscillations in an undelimited and dispersed medium that carry some kind of energy as they propagate through that medium. A wave is an entity of pure form and activity, a shape that self-perpetuates and moves through a medium but is not defined or entirely confined by it. Particles, by contrast, are units of matter confined by their location in both space and time and un-acting without outside influence. The proposal that all matter is always simultaneously both is the foundational paradox of the universe. We might be accustomed to the wave-particle duality of light, because light is form of energy that we can think of in immaterial terms. It is not too difficult to also accept that light is a wave of electromagnetic radiation, because we understand light as energy. But if we accept the full import of wave-particle duality, this means that the duality and immateriality that we allow to light we must also acknowledge is true of matter as well. This means that matter is not always, inevitably present, because it is also always wave and particle at the same time. This is a counterintuitive proposition because we encounter matter as present. This, however, does not change the fact that the fundamental property of matter (as well as light) is to be both wave and particle, sometimes simultaneously. If that does not make sense, it is not supposed to. It goes against every intuitive understanding we have of the physical universe, which is why quantum formulations are so inherently queer (Barad 2012a). They destabilize foundational binaries that we have always assumed are laws of nature and force us to entertain two (or more) seemingly mutually exclusive realities as both real at the same time.

QUANTUM EPISTEMOLOGY Theoretical physicist and feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad (1956 ) argues that Niels Bohr’s ideas ‘‘not only revolutionized physics but shook the very foundation of Western epistemology’’ (2007, 97). To understand Bohr’s philosophy-physics, it is necessary to start with Werner Heisenberg’s famed uncertainty principle, introduced in 1927, in which Heisenberg postulates that an experimenter cannot know both the position and the momentum of a particle at any given time. A simple way to explain this is that one can create an experiment that will measure position, but in so doing, that setup obviates any ability to determine momentum, and vice versa. Heisenberg’s initial interpretation of this situation aligns with classical ontology: it assumes that the particle has both position and momentum at any given moment, as premeasurement values.

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Bohr, by contrast, argues that the two attributes of the particle are not uncertain but indeterminate. The distinction between these two terms is essential, because it requires a jump out of the Cartesian epistemic frame in which everything about nature exists and is knowable, even if it is not all knowable at once. It is not that a given particle has both position and momentum until one or the other is measured, but that it is the experimental setup itself which is designed to give information on only one attribute or the other that produces the attribute. Position, therefore, exists only as a concept in relation to the experiment designed to test for it. This is an extremely counterintuitive argument: Bohr means, quite literally, that the particle has no position until an experimental arrangement measures it. At this point, the word measure starts to mean something quite different (Bohr [1934] 2011; Barad 2007). As Barad elaborates, ‘‘Bohr is making a point about the nature of reality, not merely our knowledge of it. What he is doing is calling into question an entire tradition in the history of Western metaphysics: the belief that the world is populated with individual things with their own independent sets of determinate properties’’ (2007, 19). Indeed, Bohr argues, according to Barad, that there is not ‘‘an independent physical reality . . . or, for that matter, . . . an independently existing object’’ (2007, 117). The importance of this formulation is that no portion of our physical reality operates through a metaphysics of presence and the binary ‘‘truths’’ it necessitates. Instead, Barad argues, nature is fundamentally queer because it does not exist in these determinate, binary relationships underpinned by presence or nonpresence. The physical world consists not of realities with distinct properties waiting to be discovered but of indeterminate possibilities that all exist simultaneously in superposition.

IS QUANTUM PHYSICS A FEMINIST PHYSICS? The relationship between a quantum epistemology and gender is neither a clear nor a simple one. Instead, the reformulation of how we as humans understand matter and our relationship to it leads to the validation of some existing feminist claims and changes how we order our cosmos from its fundamental principles upward. This section outlines the significant ways in which the physical reality revealed by quantum principles is better accounted for through paradigms also articulated by feminist and queer thinkers than through the masculinist and phallic paradigms that have built and maintained classical ontology. The result is a kind of queer realism that is accountable to physical reality even while it defies the principles of determinacy necessary within a metaphysics of presence. First, in a traditional framework, an active, knowing subject observes a passive object and records the properties inherent to that object. Both quantum physics and feminists would insist that the subject/object distinction is neither given nor physically real (Haraway 2004; Whitten 2012). Furthermore, there are no inherent boundaries between things. Drawing on an example from American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman (1918 1988), Barad explains that ‘‘physics tells us that edges or boundaries are not determinate either ontologically or visually. When it comes to the ‘interface’ between a coffee mug and a hand, it is not that there are x number of atoms that belong to a hand and y number of atoms that belong to a coffee mug’’ (2007, 156). The implication that there are no inherent boundaries between preexisting things is not merely a metaphor; there is quite literally no way to determine that one atom belongs on one side of a divide and another atom belongs on the other side of that divide. Indeed, those atoms are probably sharing electrons all the time. Atoms seem inherently unable to keep their electrons to themselves. GENDER: MATTER

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Even atoms at the edge of a body participate in the constant molecular vibration that holds microscopic structures together. As they vibrate in their structures, these atoms are also emitting and receiving, indeed sharing, electrons. But even the electrons themselves are constantly emitting photons that can decay into quantum pairs that then recombine, annihilating one another, creating a new photon that the same electron then swallows back up (Barad 2012b). Thus, not even bodily boundaries those of our bodies or others are a given. They come into existence through the approximations and determinations we use to define our own edge in a way that is significant or useful to us. American science and technology theorist Donna Haraway (1944 ) illustrates this point: When a blind person uses a cane to ‘‘see’’ his or her environment, the cane has become a part of the person’s sensing apparatus and even a part of himself or herself (1985). When the cane is no longer a prosthesis, it ceases to be a part of the person and is then a separate thing. Haraway’s example illustrates that the boundaries we draw around bodies are conceptual; Barad’s point is that all such boundaries are conceptual because there is no such thing as a physically determined boundary. This, according to Barad, does not mean that it is impossible to take measurements or know something about an object of study. Instead, Barad follows Haraway in insisting that all knowledge, of anything, is relative to the boundaries that we draw, not an expression of an absolute truth of the physical universe. All knowledge is necessarily situated within the frameworks that make that particular knowledge possible (Haraway 2004). Furthermore, measurement itself will change the object it is trying to observe. Knowing, even by way of making observations and taking measurements, is not a neutral practice. It is not the action of an active subject noting the characteristics of a passive object. It is, instead, an interaction taking place between two material things. Barad insists, however, that we remember that because there is no boundary between these two sides of the interaction, it is not truly an interaction between two things two ontologically separate entities. It is instead an intra-action taking place between two parts of the same physical phenomenon. The whole physical encounter, between observing agency (what used to be the subject) and thing observed (what used to be the object), is part of a single phenomenon (Barad 2007). When we take a measurement we make a temporary and arbitrary distinction between one side and the other because it is meaningful to us. Mattering, for Barad, is where matter and meaning meet. There must be a material intraaction that is then parsed into legible pieces that give the ‘‘interaction’’ some meaning to an observer. Neither the meaning nor the observing need necessarily participate in human processes. Indeed, one of Barad’s main points is that the ethical ramifications of a feminist practice of science includes acknowledging that ‘‘man’’ is not necessarily ‘‘the measure of all things’’ (2007, 136). Instead, Barad positions her epistemological framework within the bounds of posthumanism, which she argues is ‘‘about taking issue with human exceptionalism while being accountable for the role we [humans] play in the differential constitution and differential positioning of the human among other creatures (both living and nonliving)’’ (136). Posthumanism does not deny that humankind makes meaning; rather, it posits that the meaning(s) that humankind makes with the material universe are not the only ways that matter can matter. In fact, Barad emphasizes that two nonhuman parts of the universe can become legible to one another and matter without the presence of a human observer. A simple example would, of course, be the way other living organisms sense, perceive, and react to one another in instinctive and biologically driven ways. More surprisingly, Barad uses the way that lightning strikes as an example of nonbiological matter making itself legible to and intra-acting with other matter. Lightning is not just electricity that flows from a

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charged cloud to the ground. Instead, both the cloud and the ground send out oppositely charged ‘‘feelers’’ that then detect each other somewhere between cloud and ground. When the charges become legible to each other, then the connection is made that allows electricity to flow from the cloud to the ground (Barad 2012a).

PRODUCING A FETUS An example of how all this works together can be found in the creation of a gendered fetal subject. A fetus is not a preexisting entity or a ‘‘self-contained, free-floating body’’ located inside a uterine environment (Barad 2007, 217) that is waiting to be revealed by a sonogram. Instead, it is an undifferentiated mass of tissue that bears quite a resemblance to the rest of the insides of the woman’s body. Indeed, it is so interconnected with the woman’s bodily systems that locating where the fetus ends and the woman begins is particularly tricky: it is connected to her circulatory system, it breaths from her, it absorbs nutrients from her, it takes shape from the hormones in her body, it swims in fluids her body has created, it is the fluids her body has created. The fetus as phenomenon includes the whole pregnant woman, her uterus, placenta, amniotic fluid, hormones, blood, nutrients, emotions, and all the additional intra-actions that keep those systems running (Barad 2007). Making a fetus, then, includes the apparatus necessary to make some kind of agential cut between woman and fetus, to separate them into two entities. This cut is usually executed with the technoscientific practice of the sonogram. The scenario is technoscientific not only because it requires a technology (the sonogram transducer) but also because the technology itself cannot produce meaningful information without an entire set of scientific practices that interpret the results. At the core of the technology to detect a fetus is the piezoelectric transducer. Piezoelectricity is created by pressure on any solid that sends an electric signal when pressurized. A piezoelectric crystal, then, can be squeezed to produce electricity, but it also works in reverse. The converse piezoelectric effect means that an electric field applied to the crystal will deform the crystal, making it bigger or smaller depending on the polarity of the electrical field. The application, then, of an oscillating electrical signal results in a vibrating crystal; these vibrations, in turn, produce ultrasonic waves. Because this process works in both directions, the same crystal can be used to send and receive signals. In the case of ultrasound transducers, this usually means that the oscillating current is applied in short bursts, allowing the transducer to send out these waves and have them bounce back off the substance with which they are interacting. When it comes back in to the momentarily static crystal, the shape and consistency of the substance it bounced off of can be read by the crystal based on the location and intensity of the waves returned on the crystal. This information then gets fed through a computer that interprets the location and intensity information and tries to construct an image of what the crystal is ‘‘seeing.’’ The technician operating the transducer, then, needs to be able to change the type, timing, intensity, and frequency of the oscillation in order to find what she is looking for. The waves have to be longer or shorter, more or less intense depending on the size, shape, consistency, and even location of the tissue the technician is trying to bring into focus. Until relatively recently, even the image (the ‘‘gram’’ produced by the ‘‘sono’’) was a mass of information that was difficult for the untrained eye to read. A two-dimensional sonogram image is, essentially, a series of patterns in black and white that represent tissues of different consistencies with GENDER: MATTER

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different visual textures. The sonographer, then, needs to be able to find exactly the twodimensional plane that is going to render legible the most information possible in an image. In the case of ‘‘producing’’ a fetus, the sonographer needs to find exactly the right angle and plane to produce a two-dimensional slice of information that looks the most like a baby. Although three-dimensional sonography was hypothesized several decades ago, it was only in the twenty-first century that higher computing power has enabled the information from multiple two-dimensional slices to be compiled into a three-dimensional image that reconstructs the surface of tissues with different consistency. Thus, even while the fetus does not yet have clear boundaries or even skin, the image can show a kind of surface of the fetus that gives the impression of it being baby shaped. The surface the sonograph creates is only conceptual, not a clear boundary between the fetus and the tissues surrounding it. The shape and surface that the information constructs can always be adjusted to look further into the tissue, say to examine the developing heart, or to zoom out from the fetal tissue to look at the womb itself. Once the fetus becomes a thing through this intra-action, however, it also gains a kind of subjectivity insofar as it is granted personhood. Indeed, before the fetus can even live on its own, it has a kind of subjectivity that Monica J. Casper argues is accomplished largely through ‘‘constructions of the fetus as a patient’’ (1994, 843). At the point that a fetus becomes a medical entity needing attention and agency, pregnant women are transformed into ‘‘technomaternal environments for fetal patients’’ (844; see also Barad 2007). That is, the woman in whom the fetus exists gets reduced from subject to simply the life-support technology that brings the fetus into being and sustains it until its potential autonomy at birth. The fetus as subject is a phenomenon that necessarily excludes the subjectivity of the pregnant woman (Barad 2007), which is evident in all the attempts to regulate the behaviors and activities of these women on behalf of the fetal subject. The technoscientific practices not only create the fetus as fetal subject, but they are also used to gender the tissue inside the woman. Once again, gendering becomes a matter of a technoscientific apparatus detecting (or not detecting) a mass of cells on the fetus that could potentially develop into a penis. It is important to remember that it is not a penis until the sonogram constructs it as such. Similarly, the sonogram cannot see a vagina, so gendering is once again a binary practice of detecting or not detecting a male sex organ. In the same way that the detection of this tissue produces the fetal subject, the girling of a fetus without a detectable potential-penis also has immediate effects. Teresa Ebert (1996) points out that girling a fetus can lead, in some countries, to attempts to abort the fetus or even to infanticide after birth (see also Barad 2007). But even in less deadly scenarios, girling a fetus leads to a whole string of cultural practices that materialize the gender of the unborn child who is birthed into an entire matrix of expectations and anticipated desires and preferences that are all expressed in color, decor, and even clothing choices that regulate the prescribed gender expression of the future child. Thus, even in the gendering of a human fetus the principles of a feminist quantum epistemology would better account for the physical realities of the matter in hand. Only in a classical framework can distinct, unproblematic boundaries be drawn between pregnant woman and fetus. Quantum practices would insist that we are not seeing a real, preexisting entity but producing one that is meaningful to us for particular reasons. A fetus is not an inherently natural entity. It is a mass of cells inside a woman’s body, and it becomes an object only when a subject tries to detect it as a fetus. The reasons for such distinctions are pragmatic, but that does not make them natural or given.

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Furthermore, only under a binarist metaphysics of presence can the gender of a produced fetus be reduced to the simple question of either having or not having a phallic signifier. The detection of such a gender is also not a natural process but a social and scientific practice that produces rather than observes the presence or nonpresence of a potential penis and equates that with a simple binary expression of gender. As long as modern physics continues to operate in its compartmentalizing mode, it continues to allow quantum physics to illogically and awkwardly operate within a classical ontology that does not reflect the reality of the nature modern physics describes. Additionally, the masculinist and territorializing knowledge-producing practices of such a physics lead to ethically questionable appropriations of matter that both feminist science and posthumanism decry. A physics that is responsive to the queerness of the nature it investigates would not only more accurately reflect the material reality it questions, but it might also lead to more ethical scientific, epistemic, and cultural practices, as feminists have long advocated.

Summary The nature of the physical world or the nature of nature underpins our understanding of what is real. Quantum mechanics rework our most fundamental sense of what reality is. When the metaphysics of presence dissolves under the strain of physical evidence, nature itself becomes, instead, fundamentally queer operating outside binaries entirely, with an infinitude of potential expressions and intra-actions. Instead of operating by a metaphysics of presence, then, it functions through a metaphysics of potentials and probabilities that are indeterminate and queer. The issue of physics and gender, then, is not merely one of demographics or even how physics alters our understanding of gender. Instead, the same metaphysics that underpins classical physics and realist scientific practices is also central to the gendered dualisms, such as subject and object, active and passive, that feminists and queer theorists have been trying to deconstruct conceptually. The intersection between gender theory and modern physics has the potential not only to overthrow the classical ontology that has dominated Western thought for most of written history but to unleash a more liberatory, posthuman, and queer sense of matter itself.

Bibliography Al Khalili, Jim, and Johnjoe McFadden. Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology. London: Bantam Press, 2014. Barad, Karen. ‘‘Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality.’’ Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (1998): 87 128.

Bettina Hauge. Special issue, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (Women, gender & research) nos. 1 2 (2012a): 25 53. Barad, Karen. ‘‘On Touching The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.’’ Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23, no. 3 (2012b): 206 223.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Barad, Karen. ‘‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801 831.

Barad, Karen. ‘‘Nature’s Queer Performativity.’’ In ‘‘Feminist Materialisms,’’ edited by Hilda Rømer Christensen and

Barad, Karen. ‘‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime

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Enfoldings, and Justice to Come.’’ In ‘‘Deconstruction and Science,’’ edited by H. Peter Steeves and Nicole Anderson. Special issue, Derrida Today 3, no. 2 (2010): 240 268.

Galen. Method of Medicine. Edited and translated by Ian Johnston and G. H. R. Horsley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Green, Monica H., ed. and trans. The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine. Philadelphia: Uni versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

Blamires, Alcuin, ed. Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

Bleier, Ruth. Introduction to Feminist Approaches to Sci ence, edited by Ruth Bleier, 1 17. New York: Pergamon Press, 1986.

Haraway, Donna. ‘‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Tech nology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.’’ Socialist Review 15, no. 2 (1985): 65 107.

Bohr, Niels. Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. First published 1934.

Haraway, Donna. ‘‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Per spective.’’ In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, edited by Sandra Harding, 81 101. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Bug, Amy. ‘‘Has Feminism Changed Physics?’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 881 899. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex.’’ New York: Routledge, 1993. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subver sion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Casper, Monica J. The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Casper, Monica J. ‘‘Reframing and Grounding Nonhuman Agency: What Makes a Fetus an Agent?’’ American Behavioral Scientist 37, no. 6 (1994): 839 856. Descartes, Rene´. A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sci ences. Translated by Ian Maclean. Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press, 2008. Ebert, Teresa. ‘‘The Matter of Materialism.’’ In The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Don ald Morton, 352 361. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 3 vols. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 1986.

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CHAPTER 9

Geology Mary Thomas Associate Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Ohio State University, Columbus Kathryn Yusoff Reader in Human Geography, School of Geography Queen Mary University of London

Ask feminist science studies scholars about how their fields of study came to be, and they are likely to tell rich stories about the gendering of scientific inquiry and method, epistemologies of the gendered body, and the biased status of sexual and racial difference in ecology, genetics, engineering, medicine, and philosophy. There may even be some anger in their voices as they tell how women have been marginalized in their attempts to forge careers in science or the damages done to women’s bodies (especially women of color) in the name of science. However, because science is not just the location of gendered oppression and exclusion, there are also narratives about how developing knowledge continues to shift feminist theory in breathtaking ways. Thus, the intellectual breadth and depth of feminist science studies also include invigorating lessons about geophysics and matter; the biosphere; animals; other nonhuman life, including plants and bacteria; the ocean’s chemistry; and even the atmosphere’s currents. The question of how matter is represented in human understanding is raised and whether the status or agency of matter beyond human experience can be theorized. But rocks? One is not likely to hear much about rocks. Perhaps this is because of an emphasis on the bios over the geos in much of feminist science studies. Bios is the Greek word for life, and geo refers to Earth. Most feminists dwell on bios, not surprisingly, given the imperative they place on disputing the binary between nature and culture, especially when contending with the gendered body. Recently, however, feminism has emphasized the geo, given the urgency of global warming and the realization that human activity has irreversibly altered the world. Geologic working groups are even considering a new epoch called the Anthropocene, which would displace the Holocene as the current geologic era. The magnitude of human interference in Earth systems such as the atmosphere and the biosphere, including the massive displacement of Earth materials through mining, hydraulic fracturing (fracking), and the like, means that the geo must become a core concern within feminist science studies and be put into conversation with bios. This chapter begins with a quick lesson on the geologic timescale, or deep time, in order to explain new theories about human-induced geologic change. It introduces feminist contributions to thinking through the simultaneously grounded and cosmic domains of the inhuman matter of geology. Feminist philosophers of matter argue that feminism must look beyond the gendered and sexed body to give an account of material processes and matter in general. This framing of geology provides a lens to reconsider the history of geology as a

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A Path to the Past.’’

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discipline and its masculinist disposition throughout the chapter’s examples, especially in a later section on mineral and carbon extraction and the wealth it generates. The predominant modes of thinking about the Earth are framed in gendered difference, and this chapter considers whether the Anthropocene is merely another way of scripting the masculine through geology, in other words, the ‘‘Geology of Mankind’’ (Crutzen 2002). The chapter also shows that women have always been at the heart of geologic and Earth sciences and provides a few considerations of the gendering of geology and of women in geology. It demonstrates that a feminist approach to the study of geology and inhuman matter provides exciting new ways of thinking about the Earth and deep time.

GENTLEMAN GEOLOGISTS The primary approach to geology has been the search for the structure of Earth an account of processes that shape geologic formations (mostly rocky ones), such as continents and strata. Some familiar geologic processes include stratification; deformation of structure through processes such as subduction, continental drift, or erosion; fossilization of dead

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matter into rock; and the temporalization of the Earth’s material history. The geologic timescale is a particular staple in the formation of geologic knowledge (especially in childhood), since it emphasizes extinction events over deep time. In the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the deep history of the Earth was of increasing interest to scientists, who in former times did not understand just how old the planet is or even its shape and place in the solar system (not to mention the universe). Of course, the coterminous era of imperialist global exploration is key to the development of geology as a scientific field, too. Mapping excursions emphasized colonial interests in exploiting natural resources and in claiming whole regions for imperial powers to control (Braun 2000). Control meant not just dispossession of land from indigenous people but also the capture of mineral wealth and the accumulation of that wealth into the imperial coffers, which increasingly fed the process of globalized capitalism (Braun 2000). As colonial explorations extended from Europe, scientists also found intriguing connections between their homelands and ‘‘new’’ places in rock formations, fauna, fossils, and the like. For example, miners from Newcastle in the United Kingdom who migrated to North America to work in the mines in Pennsylvania found ‘‘their’’ anthracite coal in the seams that traversed the Atlantic ridge. The very idea of an interconnected, planetary structure and deep time were specific to this era of exploration, colonization, cartography, and rock and fossil collection, which served in the interests of developing taxonomies of life present and past (see also Rudwick 2005). Victorian ‘‘gentleman scientists’’ viewed rock and mineral collecting as a popular pastime; they displayed, ordered, and exchanged specimens based on their aesthetic value or their classification. Collectors often specialized in certain mineral forms: ores, meteorites, minerals and gems, collections from major expeditions and colonial conquests, ‘‘pet rocks,’’ ‘‘Eoliths,’’ or ‘‘dawn stones’’ (O’Connor 2007). Geology got boosted with the growing realization that such rock collecting could form the basis of a guide to mineral extraction. The first geologic society in the world, the Geologic Society of London, was founded in 1807, and its ‘‘suspicion of theorizing’’ in contrast to empiricism deeply influenced the self-consciously new science of geology (Rudwick 1992, 19). This burgeoning new science restricted itself to a descriptive approach and ‘‘low-level interpretation of phenomena, rejecting or discouraging ambitions to create any high-level or global ‘theory of the earth’’’ (20). Yet important information about the Earth was gathered that would form the bases of theory later on. For example, the discovery of coal in Antarctica during expeditions in the early nineteenth century established the material evidence or ‘‘ground truth’’ for a theory of continental drift, only much later proposed by German polar researcher and geophysicist Alfred Lord Wegener (1880 1930) in 1912. For decades the idea was not accepted, but it was hotly debated. It was found that the same fossils and coal seams could be identified in South America, South Africa, and Australia and that these continents must at some time have been joined (in what was later called the great southern continent of Gondwanaland). It was deduced that the Antarctic must have been covered by ancient swamps 35 million to 55 million years ago, because coal forms in swamps as plants die and are buried before they can be completely decomposed. Such unexpected discoveries of ‘‘black rocks’’ (as they were called in Newcastle, where many such coals were burned to take explorers to the most remote continents) prompted geologists to imagine the idea of the Earth as a dynamic entity rather than a fixed mass. This movement of the Earth’s surface became known as tectonic plate theory (Wegener 1966). Other early ‘‘discoveries’’ in the Arctic and Antarctic were many meteorites or ‘‘sky metal,’’ as Inuit observers called it in Greenland which made geologists think about the Earth in a cosmic context rather than as an insulated terrestrial entity, cut off from the rest of GENDER: MATTER

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space. The combination of theories of a dynamic moving Earth and the location of the Earth in larger worlds of matter within the universe shifted questions of material existence into a global and cosmic sphere. The intermittent arrival of small pieces of sky metal also raised the specter of a world that might one day be subject to extraterrestrial obliteration or might have originated from such a catastrophic impact in the first instance. The understanding of ongoing changes in the evolutionary order (life punctuated by extinction events) became understood through the notion of strata and stratification as a metaphor for the organization of past species life. The discipline of geography came to be the current understanding of the continents, their divisions, and their inhabitants. Geology, in contradistinction, became a study of the past, of life made into rock and sediment, the mineral mixing with the bios to form new minerals, the movement of plates coalescing into formations and breaking apart, constant motion. Geophysics intersects both geology and geography, and historically it was Earth physics rather than the mineralogical collection of fossil curiosities that formed the initial investigations into the new genre referred to as ‘‘theories of the earth’’ (Rudwick 1992, 135). It was within this context that Charles Darwin’s (1809 1882) observations about biologic change and evolution were ground truthed in the fossil record, but his theory was about species change rather than changes of the Earth. Darwin’s first training was in the discipline of geology, yet his theoretical assertions about the transformation of worlds are located in the biologic sphere; he only indirectly made claims about the age and formation of the Earth. In an autobiographical note Darwin (1820) remembered a childhood wish: ‘‘It was soon after I began collecting stones, i.e., when 9 or 10, that I distinctly recollect the desire I had of being able to know something about every pebble in front of the hall door it was my earliest and only geological aspiration at that time.’’ That later in life Darwin chose to make a biologic argument about species evolution rather than an argument about revolutions in the Earth is telling. Human identity was bound up in the biologism of the nineteenth century rather than in the more pragmatic and speculative science of Earth, rocks, and minerals. Although fossils were crucial empirical objects that secured biologic and ideological narratives of evolution and human development, the Earth and the human were not understood as coterminous. Meanwhile, geology became of serious interest to ‘‘men of science’’ in the nineteenth century when it became clear that understanding geologic structure was profitable and the basis of the development of new industries. Locating and mining geologic materials, such as gemstones, metals, minerals, coal, and petroleum, mean big money despite the environmental and human tolls extraction practices entail. The technical development of the discipline took off in the age of capitalism. In the early twenty-first century, most professional geologists work for extraction businesses, such as mining and petroleum, as civil engineers and in government (see Bebbington and Bury 2013).

GENDERED GEOLOGY Women’s active role in the development of geologic knowledge (see Creese and Creese 1994) is often relegated to the footnotes. In one history of geology, for example, the author writes (literally in a footnote): ‘‘Since women were completely absent from the ranks of the leading savants on whom this book is focused, no apology is necessary for the consistent use of masculine pronouns, etc. Any alternatives, however politically correct, would certainly be

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historically incorrect (and clumsy)’’ (Rudwick 2005, 35n29). Feminist scholar Martina Ko¨lbl-Ebert (2001) begs to differ. She claims that women were always central to the development of geology, but a forced invisibility of their contributions resulted from the historiography of science that relies mostly on ‘‘lists of ‘famous men’’’ (182). Most people interested in the developing science of geology in the nineteenth century were enthusiasts rather than professional scientists meaning that one must have been able to enjoy a life of resources and leisure, which provided the time for study. As Ko¨lbl-Ebert writes, women at the time (in this case, in the United Kingdom) ‘‘were welcomed within the restrictions of the social order as fellow-enthusiasts. . . . Many of them formed networks of assistants, collectors, illustrators, editors, field geologists, taxonomists and travelcompanions to the leading figures in the geological sciences, thereby adding to and shaping their work’’ (186). Yet when geology became a formalized university discipline by the end of the nineteenth century, women were almost completely excluded from its professional ranks for many decades (Ko¨lbl-Ebert 2001). For instance, the brilliant work of Marie Tharp (1920 2006), an American geologist and cartographer, went unrecognized and even covered over in the interests of maintaining male dominance in the field for years. Tharp was, like many women (who were often simply referred to as ‘‘geologists’ wives’’), involved in fieldwork from an early age and had the wish to go to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, but at the time women were not admitted there. Instead, she enrolled in the petroleum geology program at Ohio University, where she graduated in 1943. After earning a master’s in geology at the University of Michigan, she graduated from the University of Tulsa in 1948 with a master’s in mathematics and found work at the Lamont Geological Laboratory of Columbia University. During the Cold War, both space and oceans became new geopolitical arenas in the global superpower race, and during the 1957 1958 International Geophysical Year, the aim was to produce a global synoptic view of the Earth through the mapping of territories. Tharp found work collaborating with geologist Bruce C. Heezen. As women were not allowed on board the research vessels collecting seismic data of the seafloor, her job was to interpret, calculate, and visualize the information that came back. Often her work was undervalued because she was a woman and because of the bureaucracy that restricted her ability to be employed and publish at the university as a tenured faculty member. For twenty years, she worked tirelessly on the still unknown topography of the oceanic basins. Her most important discovery was of the mid-ocean ridge and the mountainous topology of the ocean floor. At first, no one believed Tharp’s discovery of mid-ocean ridges. Although Tharp did not subscribe to the new theory of plate tectonics, the production of a visual depiction of the seafloor transformed the ‘‘unknown’’ of the ocean into a large-scale physiological space in which dynamic Earth activities could begin to be contemplated and evidence of continental drift was firmly established.

ROCKS FOR JOCKS? Decades after Tharp’s work, the gendering of geology continues, even in symbolic terms. There are some contemporary references to geology in gendered ways, even if not obvious. Consider, for example, the phrase ‘‘rocks for jocks.’’ Rocks for jocks is the pejorative idea that only lazy students enroll in geology, because it is presumed to be easier than chemistry, physics, or biology for fulfilling university science requirements. Jocks are typically gendered male, and ‘‘rocks for jocks’’ thus typically points to geology as a way that even dumb guys can GENDER: MATTER

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pass the science requirement. But one large study in the United States shows that women are as likely to take geology courses as men and that highly motivated students (not just lazy ones) are in the geology classroom (Gilbert et al. 2012). This study has important implications for addressing the stereotypes of geology as an easy or banal topic and how to motivate more students, especially women, to stick with rocks rather than move into other fields. Jaime Phillips and Kathryn Hausbeck (2000) show that contemporary geology textbooks reinscribe the notion that geology is for men by continuing the invisibility of women in the field. In a survey of visual representations in textbooks, they found that men were much more likely to be pictured as professionals through photos; almost two-thirds of all photos they examined depicted men. Men were also a whopping 95 percent of humans depicted in geology textbook drawings and diagrams, and 100 percent of these men were white (190, 192). Thus, not only are geologists represented as male and white, so is the human species. When photographs appeared with people of color (at a scant rate of 14.63 percent), most, according to Phillips and Hausbeck, were found in just one photo, which was used to represent scenes of overpopulation. The photo’s caption read in part, ‘‘Until the world’s growing population is brought under control, scenes like this one will become more common’’ (193). Phillips and Hausbeck rightly categorize such sentiments as racist and Eurocentric and typify geology education as ‘‘still reflecting a scientific field of inquiry and profession that is predominantly masculine [and] Caucasian’’ (2000, 198). Whether sexism, racism, and Eurocentrism are overt or unconscious biases in geology, they do have an intersectional impact in the quest for scientific knowledge and in theories of what the Earth is made of and what it will become. In the next section, a discussion of geologic matter and life shows how feminist theories force exciting new ideas about the connections between rocks and bodies and new ideas about matter in general. The remainder of the chapter also shows how the geologic timescale is framed by masculine and European priorities.

FEMINIST ARTICULATIONS OF MATTER: THE BODY Thinking about geologic materials, such as fossils, coal, oil, crystals, basalt, limestone, granite, uranium, diamonds, and rocks, might seem like the material polar opposite of the warm-blooded corporeal body and the questions of bodily difference that organize what a body becomes. When one considers these Earth materials, the tendency is instead to think of brute, inert, cold, long-dead, stony, inhuman matter. Even the term inhuman denotes deadness and the abandonment of humanity into something that is considered cataclysmic or contrary to life. Yet geologic materials, such as coal and limestone, were alive at one point. There is also a significant amount of geologic material in human bodies, including carbon (18 percent), calcium (1.5 percent), phosphorus (1 percent), potassium (0.25 percent), sulphur (0.25 percent), sodium (0.15 percent), chlorine (0.15 percent), magnesium (0.05 percent), iron (0.006 percent), zinc (0.0032 percent), lead (0.00017 percent), copper (0.0001 percent), and other rare Earth minerals. Humans literally eat fossil fuels through the consumption of food grown through the use of hydrocarbons in fertilizers and pesticides, the nitrogen-fixing (the Haber-Bosch) process, mechanization, irrigation, and in the energy of circulating and globalizing food production. Geologic materials are life shaping, not just shaped by life.

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There are also some very direct ways in which women’s bodies are affected by the burning of fossil fuels, such as birth and death rates in areas of low-intensity fossil fuel use. In the context of climate change, the fear of so-called unsustainable population growth, for example, is a question that is posed through the fear of runaway population growth in developing countries and finds its proposed solutions in the consideration of birth control in the Global South (even though this is a group of women who are the least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions [see Hartmann 2009]). Similarly, climate change impacts are highly gendered, with climate-related disasters floods, extreme weather, increased incidence of disease, drought, political instability, and growing food and water insecurity adversely affecting women because of the amplification of existing gender inequalities (women and children make up the majority of the world’s poor, and the poor are more adversely affected by climate disasters). Women also experience marginalization in political and economic decision-making processes, which can further exacerbate their vulnerability to the violent impacts of climate change.

FEMINIST AND INDIGENOUS ARTICULATIONS OF GEOLOGIC MATTER Geologists do not spend much effort on providing an account of the social or cultural agency of geologic materials in shaping social practices or how geologic materials shape bodily and social differences. Feminist scholars, however, do that work. To start, the biologic bases of life are actually subtended by geologic matter. In other words, life is shaped by geologic forces, forces that provide the context and conditions for biological life to exist. There are two distinct qualities of the inhuman that characterize the consideration of geology as a life force. First, the epochal deep time/deep history of geology is hard for most people to grasp. That is why Claire Colebrook calls epochal time ‘‘monstrously impolitic’’ (2011, 11). Elizabeth Grosz similarly describes the ‘‘cosmological imponderables’’ (2008, 23) of the inhuman. Humanoids have existed for a very short period compared to the age of the planet 7 or 6 million years compared to 4.5 billion years. Members of Homo sapiens are mere blips on the calendar of life the species has been here for only 0.004 percent of Earth’s existence. The epochal qualities of the inhuman present a challenge to thinking human time and existence within much longer timelines and within material worlds quite different from the current ones. Inhuman matter presents an alienation in terms of human scale, in time, space, and materiality. And yet inhuman matter is worn and worked through in bodies, landscapes, atmospheres, oceans, and eons. Second, geology provides the context for sustaining and differentiating the potentiality and extinguishment of life. For instance, massive volcanic eruptions continually occurred for a million years in what is now the Siberian Traps region at the end of the Permian era, about 250 million years ago. These eruptions contributed to an extinction event in which about 90 percent of all species on the planet died. It took probably 30 million years for the planet to adjust to the cataclysmic events of the eruptions, which is why Sarda Sahney and Michael J. Benton describe the end-Permian mass extinction as ‘‘the most dramatic event to impact life on Earth’’ (2008, 759) so far. Arguably, humans or any contemporary lifeform would not exist if it were not for both dramatic and incremental changes in Earth’s geology over deep time. Geologic matter and time are metabolic forces, in other words. To put it bluntly, without contingent geologic events and processes, humans never would have evolved. GENDER: MATTER

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Of course, the problem with thinking through the structure (and infrastructures) of geologic materials rather than their social effects including new planetary concepts, such as the Anthropocene is that the emphasis is on the big events to the detriment of the everyday and the bodily. Geology is all about epochal time, like ‘‘dawns’’ and ‘‘ends’’ of time, epochs, millennia, and the wholesale obliteration of biomes, species, and life-forms through extinction events like the one that marks the end of the Permian. Actually, there is a long-standing debate among stratigraphers as to whether the sedimentary records represent mainly everyday events or extraordinary events (Bjornerud 2005, 37). A reconstitution of the concept of time into deep time and life as geologic (e.g., Yusoff 2013) is precisely what is needed now. Otherwise, the ability to comprehend anthropogenic climate change and to account for humanity as a geologic force in the Anthropocene is impossible. The ‘‘nonlocal’’ events of geology that span millennia and involve thinking about life on a planetary scale are, however, connected to the local actualizations of geology in the formation of social, political, and biologic life chances and energy futures. Much discussion on the Anthropocene has concerned the before and after of human geologic time: what geologic traces humans will leave behind as a fossil legacy in the rocks (Zalasiewicz 2008) or how Homo sapiens fits into the geologic prehistory of the present. However, the political impetus of epoch change might be more usefully spent considering how the Anthropocene is materially made in the present through practices (such as mining, writing on coal-fired laptops, generating waste, cultivating carbon pleasures), so that geologic activities are considered a part of social and political relations rather than outside of them. Yet the materiality of this geologic life far exceeds the human in space and time, inasmuch as it has innumerable sites of origin and an untimely disposition that interrupts the possibility of an understanding of human life as deriving from an exclusively warm-blooded genealogy (Yusoff 2013). Although The Descent of Man (Darwin 1871) and its radical alternative that argues for the equal role of women in accounts of human evolution, The Descent of Woman (Morgan 1972), followed a biologic line of descent from apes to humans, others place equal importance on a geologic line of descent (Grosz 1999). Such an approach structures social relations and oppressive forces within geologic relations so that the material milieu of evolution can be recognized as a key factor in human or other species development. Think, for example, of the fossil fuels that structure the globalized world and enable changes through technology, medicine, nutrition, and the like, leading to evolutionary change in survival rates, human size, genetic makeup, and so on. Grosz’s work on Darwin and the possible alliances with feminist discourses and methods opens up paths of inquiry like these into the conceptualization of matter within sociopolitical worlds. For Grosz, Darwin’s theories of evolution offer a way to think about the interrelation between nature and society, biology and culture and provide a ‘‘ballast for the induction of a future different, but not detached, from the past and future’’ (1999, 41) in feminist futures. Grosz also suggests that understanding politics is predicated on forms of ‘‘geopower’’ that give rise to the very possibilities of political forms and the modes of capitalization that are called biopower (or the organization of social relations). She writes, ‘‘What we understand as the history of politics the regulations, actions and movements of individuals and collectives relative to other individuals and collectives is possible only because geopower has already elaborated an encounter between forms of life and forms of the earth’’ (2012, 975). Grosz suggests that in order for there to be relations of power, there must first be forms of geopower, which she understands as undirected forces of the universe that incite, infect, and invest bodies and collectives with material powers.

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Life emerges from and capitalizes on these forces of geopower in order to transform itself and the Earth. This interaction between life and nonliving matter creates new conditions that evolve in relation to the movement of life attempting to overcome itself (and its limitations) and the geophysical action of forces that provoke new forms of capitalization. Grosz’s explanation of geopower is not an attempt to naturalize capitalism to the Earth; rather, she insists on a serious look at the role of the cosmos (and matter) in understanding social and political arrangements. For example, the explosion of cheap oil and gas onto the US energy market inspires and transforms the national motility of US citizens (who are now driving more miles than ever) and the cultures of local sites of fracking extraction. Western knowledge practices have historically sought to separate the agencies and concepts of life and matter, and thus they make it difficult to leap across the chasm of these two different ‘‘geo-logics’’ (Frodeman 2003) of time and matter. Other ontologies, particularly those of indigenous peoples in different parts of the globe, refuse this separation; they have no such problems in thinking about geology and life-forms together. Such ontologies of rock life are evident in Australian Aboriginal concepts of ‘‘country’’ that view the land as a field of energy and power and rock art as law making integral to the ontology and epistemology of a living culture (Povinelli 1995; Yusoff 2015, 397 398). Ecuador’s 2008 constitution designates the co-legal status of humans and nature, thereby giving flora, fauna, and Earth systems the right to exist. Article 71 states: ‘‘Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.’’ Indigenous groups in Ecuador have protested against proposed mining activities as a threat to their way of life and the sacredness of their land. The Kichwa tribe from the Sarayaku region of the Amazon in Ecuador sailed down the river Seine in Paris during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP) in 2015 to fight for a ‘‘Living Forest,’’ where animals, humans, forest, and minerals live together as a continuous lifeworld. The Kichwa are fighting oil companies who want to ‘‘develop’’ the land for its oil reserves. The constitution recognizes the Kichwa claim, as it is designed to legalize respect toward all the elements that form an ecosystem, including the geologic matter that is often most under threat from mining or oil and gas extraction.

BAKKEN PETROLEUM IN NORTH DAKOTA AND THE WEALTH IN/OF GEOLOGY According to Kandi Mossett (member of the Indigenous Environmental Network representing the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, North Dakota), violence against women has increased by 168 percent since fracking technologies opened up vast oil reserves in the Bakken Formation in the 2000s (see Mossett and Goodman 2015). This violence against women is largely a result of the influx of large numbers of male workers into the area and the violent social-sexualized relations that characterize the social reproduction of labor. Indigenous communities have seen increases in missing women, sex trafficking, and rape since oil workers have begun to flood their lands seeking employment (McGill 2014). Mossett calls sites of extraction in North Dakota ‘‘sacrifice zones’’ because of the huge impact that extraction has on the social and sexual fabric of Native communities (Mossett GENDER: MATTER

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and Goodman 2015). The specificity of geologic extraction on social landscapes in which women’s bodies get entangled in particular sociosexual ways, such as rape and sexual slavery has been less attended to by academics and analysts interested in the ‘‘boom’’ narrative of oil and gas, however (New School for Public Engagement, School of Media Studies 2014). The geologic formation of the Bakken requires particular technologies of extraction with their attendant laborers. During the most active days of the oil boom in North Dakota, the rapidly growing population of the region was 80 percent male, and with requirements for extremely long workdays and physically rigorous work, fracking companies turned to young men to fill the jobs (through typically sexist assumptions about who is fit for ‘‘tough’’ outdoor labor in often harsh weather conditions). The majority of these men were white. Fracking is extremely dangerous work. North Dakota has the highest job fatality rate in the United States. In 2013 the fatality rate for workers in North Dakota was seven times that of the rest of the country (AFL-CIO 2015). Yet nationally and internationally, the price of gasoline has reached all-time lows, owing in large part to the vast quantities of oil brought to the surface through fracking in North Dakota and Texas (US Energy Information Administration 2015). Oil independence in the United States is often celebrated despite the deadly methods of extraction that ensure it. The violent modes of extraction, such as fracking, and the effective infrastructures of that extraction all contribute to the formation of new social, cultural, and economic landscapes. Residents of Williston, North Dakota, the center of fracking oil and gas infrastructures in the Bakken, began active campaigns to script new town identities around the extraction industries. Heterosexual family life sits at the core of their efforts to ‘‘settle’’ the oil industries’ roughneck laborers. The city’s economic development office, for example, has emphasized attracting retail businesses to the town so that women will move to Williston and domesticate the migrant male labor. The social, cultural, and economic formations of the Bakken, of course, can exist only with and from the geologic ones. Without the oil shale formed in the Late Devonian, no such processes would be ongoing in North Dakota now. The aggressive masculine extraction cultures of oil, gas, and mineral mining, epitomized by sexist language like the phrase ‘‘Drill, baby, drill,’’ have particular consequences for the Earth, such as the aggressive extraction of oil at any social and environmental cost. Forms of extraction matter. Fracking involves a deep vertical shaft often up to two miles down in the Bakken before a horizontal shaft is drilled up to two miles out. Then the strata is broken apart by high pressure to allow the oil to seep out of the rock and be pumped to the surface. Fracking blows up the strata in order to facilitate carbon-based dependencies on the surface, but in breaking apart strata, there are consequences for other Earth flows such as the use of huge volumes of water and its potential contamination and the unearthing of naturally occurring radioactive materials. Geologists and engineers do not really know what happens to strata that is fracked, given its depth, or what effects (in groundwater reserves, on the surface, or in the strata itself) will occur in the years to come. But the geologic effects of fracking in the region the shafts, the blown-apart strata, the reshifting ground will be evident for millions of years. Deep time imprints of humanity on the geologic record like these, of course, encompass one requirement for the designation of the Anthropocene.

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ANTHROPOS: JUST MORE ‘‘MAN’’ IN THE ANTHROPOCENE? The concept of the Anthropocene repositions the human (who is gendered male in Anthropocene scientific literatures) at the center of narratives about deep time and geologic change. The nomination of the Anthropocene as a geologic epoch identifies humans as a geomorphic force of the Earth and stratigrapher of the geologic record and a geomorphic trace in the strata to come. In the designation of the human as a geologic stratigraphic trace, a new question is posed about human history and its material and discursive capacities, which extend over deep time and the deep spaces of the Earth. The author of this new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene is Anthropos a unitary figure of ‘‘Man’’ that stands for and represents the diverse and differentiated humanity that might one day populate the strata. The imagination of this collective subjectivity, as a common image and destiny for humanity, affects understandings of who and what is involved in the Anthropocene. But if the Anthropocene is named the ‘‘Age of Man,’’ how does this shift the understanding of agency and matter? Actually, the new geologic power and genesis of the rocks are entirely dependent on the deposits of life laid down during the Devonian and Carboniferous periods. These prehistoric materials provide the material base that ‘‘allows’’ the possibility of geologic agency in the first instance, so to author the Anthropocene as attributable to the agency of ‘‘Man’’ misses the material specificity of what is at stake in the mobilization of fossil fuels. It ends up telling the same old anthropocentric stories of human dominion over matter that feminist scholars have vociferously challenged. The focus on an undifferentiated ‘‘Man’’ in the Anthropocene obscures how and where the geologic is taken up and by whom. The use of fossil fuels is configured as a cultural practice, or behavior, that is external to the biologic and its reproductive possibilities, but the reality is that geopower resides within fossil fuels and has differential impacts on social groups. The focus on human agency entirely misses yet again the entangled nature of the collaborative work that humans do with geologic materials, sometimes knowingly but often in complete ignorance of the matter that they destratify. Stephanie LeMenager (2014), for instance, discusses the lively role of bacteria in the asphalt of La Brea matrix in California amid speculative biotech development that seeks the ‘‘application’’ of these bacteria that live in the hostile and toxic environment of asphalt as future survivors of hydrocarbon contamination. Speculating on what a post-oil museum might look like, she suggests that La Brea Tar Pits in downtown Los Angeles might well have other organisms with a stake in the future: ‘‘La Brea’s living bacteria, progeny of soil microorganisms trapped in the petrol sumps tens of thousands of years ago, are prepared for a worst-case anthropogenic climate, for the end of conventional oil, even for the bomb. The conceptual ‘application’ for La Brea’s new petroleum species is, simply, the future’’ (155).

GEO/BIO FUTURES American evolutionary theorist and author Lynn Margulis (1938 2011) extended evolutionary theory back nearly 4 billion years by looking at the geologic origins of cell biology, specifically to the appearance of the eukaryotic, or nucleated, cell, the cell on which, she claimed (not without disagreement), all life is based. The crucial argument Margulis made was that the origins of life arose through symbiosis a physical living together in cell evolution, between different kinds of bacteria. This is what she called ‘‘symbiogenesis’’ the long-term symbioses that lead to new forms of life (Margulis 1999). GENDER: MATTER

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This theory of symbiosis of the planet led Margulis to propose that the Earth’s surface is alive. She supported a version of James Lovelock’s proposition of the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock and Margulis 1974), which proposes that the planet and surface sediments and the atmosphere are an interconnected self-regulating system. Although Margulis argued that the planet was an integrated ecosystem rather than self-regulating, she was quick to point out that this by no means meant that the planet was somehow a benign backdrop to life. Instead, Margulis argued that bacteria literally ruled the Earth, 4 billion years ago and now. Bacteria, she wrote, ‘‘are the source of reproduction, photosynthesis, movement indeed, all interesting features of life except perhaps speech! They’re still with us in large diversity and numbers. They still rule Earth’’ (Margulis 1995, 137). Margulis was keen to encourage thought about how the ‘‘growth, reproduction and communication of allianceforming bacteria’’ is literally in ‘‘our thought, with our happiness, our sensitivities and stimulations. . . . The implication is that we are literally inhabited by highly motile remnants of an ancient bacterial type that have become, in every sense, a part of ourselves’’ (138). Margulis argued that evolutionists, such as Darwin and his followers, reconstructed evolutionary history through fossils paleontology. Although this was a valid approach, paleontologists need to work with ‘‘modern-counterpart organisms,’’ in other words, bacteria. Margulis’s argument was that much evolutionary biology misses four out of five domains of life bacteria, protoctista, fungi, and plants and then extrapolates animal life into the entire encyclopedia of life. At any fine museum of natural history say, in New York, Cleveland, or Paris the visitor will find a hall of ancient life, a display of evolution that begins with the trilobite fossils and passes by giant nautiloids, dinosaurs, cave bears, and other extinct animals fascinating to children. Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last five hundred million years. But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly four thousand million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable. . . . All very interesting, but animals are very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution’s creativity. (130) Margulis’s version of Gaia (the concept that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to form a synergistic and complex system that maintains the conditions for life on Earth) was, as feminist science scholar Myra J. Hird (2010) argues, an ‘‘indifferent globalism’’ (see also Hird 2009, 21 57). Gaia, Hird suggests, would take care of itself, but it is likely that this amelioration of waste and pollution from human activities that is named in the Anthropocene will take place in a world devoid of people. Margulis said: ‘‘Gaia is a tough bitch a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet’s surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone’’ (1995, 140). Hird’s work on waste demonstrates quite clearly how bacteria metabolize the matter energy of geologic materials, from metallic ores to sulphates. These lithotrophs a diverse group of bacterial and archaea organisms using the inorganic substrate metabolize the Earth, including human waste deposits, while continuing all the time to form new allegiances through symbiogenesis in order to create new forms of bacterial life. These chemical conversions of geologic matter collectively generate the metabolic processes of the Earth that are called the biosphere, inventing all other forms of terrestrial life.

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Summary Geology is only beginning to capture the attention of feminist science studies scholars. There remain rich histories to tell of women’s contributions to the study of the Earth (Burek and Higgs 2007) and the universe and exciting theories to explore about the material collaborations between rocks and humans. Bringing the bios and the geos into the same conceptual plane can also help feminists confront challenges that deep time presents to expectations about planetary life and human existence. Perhaps the time has come to let go of the Anthropos, just as feminists have insisted it is time to let go of the concept of ‘‘mankind’’ as we enter an age firmly in its titled grip.

Bibliography AFL CIO. Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect. 24th ed. Washington, DC: Author, 2015.

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Barton, Cathy. ‘‘Marie Tharp, Oceanographic Cartographer, and Her Contributions to the Revolution in the Earth Sciences.’’ In The Earth Inside and Out: Some Major Contributions to Geology in the Twentieth Century, edited by David R. Oldroyd, 215 228. Geological Soci ety Special Publication 192. London: Geological Society Publishing House, 2002.

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Bebbington, Anthony, and Jeffrey Bury, eds. Subterra nean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Bjornerud, Marcia. Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Braun, Bruce. ‘‘Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentality in Late Victorian Canada.’’ Cultural Geographies 7, no. 1 (2000): 7 46. Burek, Cynthia V., and B. Higgs, eds. The Role of Women in the History of Geology. Geological Society Special Pub lication 281. London: Geological Society, 2007. Colebrook, Claire. ‘‘Matter without Bodies.’’ Derrida Today 4, no. 1 (2011): 1 20. Creese, Mary R. S., and Thomas M. Creese. ‘‘British Women Who Contributed to Research in the Geological Sciences in the Nineteenth Century.’’ British Journal for the History of Science 27, no. 1 (1994): 23 54.

Frodeman, Robert. Geo Logic: Breaking Ground between Philosophy and the Earth Sciences. Albany: State Univer sity of New York Press, 2003. Gilbert, Lisa A., Jennifer Stempien, David A. McConnell, et al. ‘‘Not Just ‘Rocks for Jocks’: Who Are Introductory Geology Students and Why Are They Here?’’ Journal of Geoscience Education 60, no. 4 (2012): 360 371. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘‘Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Inves tigations for a Possible Alliance.’’ Australian Feminist Studies 14, no. 29 (1999): 31 45. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘‘Geopower.’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30, no. 6 (2012): 973 975. Hartmann, Betsy. ‘‘10 Reasons Why Population Control Is Not the Solution to Global Warming.’’ January 8, 2009. http:// sites.hampshire.edu/popdev/10 reasons why population control is not the solution to global warming. Heezen, Bruce C., and Charles D. Hollister. The Face of the Deep. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Crutzen, Paul J. ‘‘Geology of Mankind.’’ Nature 415, no. 6867 (2002): 23.

Hird, Myra J. ‘‘Indifferent Globality.’’ Theory, Culture, and Society 27, nos. 2 3 (2010): 54 72.

Darwin, Charles. ‘‘Darwin on Childhood.’’ 1838. https:// www.darwinproject.ac.uk/people/about darwin/home and family/darwin childhood.

Hird, Myra J. The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Rudwick, Martin J. S. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Recon struction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chi cago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Kolbl Ebert, Martina. ‘‘On the Origin of Women Geologists by Means of Social Selection: German and British Com parison.’’ Episodes: Journal of International Geoscience 24, no. 3 (2001): 182 193.

Rudwick, Martin J. S. Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Lovelock, James. ‘‘Hands up for the Gaia Hypothesis.’’ Nature 344, no. 6262 (1990): 100 102. Lovelock, James, and Lynn Margulis. ‘‘Atmospheric Homeo stasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis.’’ Tellus 26, nos. 1 2 (1974): 1 10. Margulis, Lynn. ‘‘Gaia Is a Tough Bitch.’’ In The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, edited by John Brock man, 129 151. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books, 1999. McGill, Madeline. ‘‘#Frack Off: Indigenous Women Lead Effort against Fracking.’’ Cultural Survival Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2014). https://www.culturalsurvival.org/public ations/cultural survival quarterly/frack indigenous women lead effort against fracking. Morgan, Elaine. The Descent of Woman. London: Souvenir Press, 1972. Mossett, Kandi, and Amy Goodman. ‘‘We Are Sacrifice Zones: Native Leader Says Toxic North Dakota Fracking Fuels Violence against Women.’’ Democracy Now! December 11, 2015. http://www.democracynow.org /2015/12/11/we are sacrifice zones native leader. New School for Public Engagement, School of Media Studies. Climate Action Week: #Frack Off: Indigenous Women Leading Media Campaigns to Defend Our Climate. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COCeQgZ94dY& feature=youtube. O’Connor, Ralph. The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802 1856. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Phillips, Jaime, and Kathryn Hausbeck. ‘‘Just beneath the Surface: Rereading Geology, Rescripting the Knowl edge Power Nexus.’’ Women’s Studies Quarterly 28, nos. 1 2 (2000): 181 202. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. ‘‘Do Rocks Listen? The Cultural Pol itics of Apprehending Australian Aboriginal Labor.’’ American Anthropologist 97, no. 3 (1995): 505 518.

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Sahney, Sarda, and Michael J. Benton. ‘‘Recovery from the Most Profound Mass Extinction of All Time.’’ Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological 275, no. 1636 (2008): 759 765. US Energy Information Administration. ‘‘U.S. Oil and Natu ral Gas Reserves Both Increase in 2014.’’ November 30, 2015. http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id= 23932. US Geological Survey. ‘‘The Geologic Time Spiral: A Path to the Past.’’ 2008. http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/2008/58. Wegener, Alfred. The Origin of Continents and Oceans. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. Yusoff, Kathryn. ‘‘Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene.’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31, no. 5 (2013): 779 795. Yusoff, Kathryn. ‘‘Geologic Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics, and the Art of Becoming Inhu man.’’ Cultural Geographies 22, no. 3 (2015): 383 407. Zalasiewicz, Jan. The Earth after Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. F IL M S AN D TE LE V IS I O N Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Dir. Brannon Braga, Bill Pope, and Ann Druyan. Presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson. 2014. A history of Earth and its place in the uni verse in thirteen episodes. Gasland. Dir. Josh Fox. 2010. A documentary film about the perils and politics of hydraulic fracturing in the United States. Gravity. Dir. Alfonso Cuaro´n. 2013. A film about astronauts who are stranded in space trying to return to Earth. Into Eternity. Dir. Michael Madsen. 2010. A documentary film about the construction of a deep geologic nuclear waste repository in Olkiluoto, Finland. Nostalgia for the Light. Dir. Patricio Guzma´n. 2010. A docu mentary film that examines the similarities between astronomers researching humanity’s past and the struggle of many Chilean women who are searching for the rem nants of their relatives executed during the Augusto Pino chet dictatorship.

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Solaris. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. 1972. A Soviet film about a planet that can inhabit the dreams and thoughts of its inhabitants.

with ant hills prior to a uranium extraction. Aboriginal owners of the area explain that this is the place where the green ants dream.

Where the Green Ants Dream. Dir. Werner Herzog. 1984. A film about a geologist who is employed by an Australian mining company to map the subsoil of an area covered

White Earth. Dir. Christian Jensen. 2014. A short documen tary that examines the Bakken oil boom through the perspectives of three children.

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CHAPTER 10

Biology Christy Tidwell Assistant Professor, Department of English and Humanities South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City

As a discipline, biology the study of living organisms covers a great deal of ground. It includes the study of anatomy, cells, genes, reproduction, and the evolution of species. It also extends to encompass or at least touch on botany, zoology, and ecology. As British feminist science studies scholar Lynda Birke (1948 ) has written, however, it is more than a scientific discipline that studies the processes by which living organisms function and develop. It ‘‘can also be synonymous with those processes, as in ‘human biology.’ In this sense, ‘biology’ all too often invokes dualism, as it is taken to include bodily processes, and nature ‘out there’’’ (Birke 1999a, 42). As such, biology is a broadly defined scientific field and a term that carries political weight. Biology engages with our understandings of matter both scientifically and sociologically, both empirically and experientially. This complexity requires an acknowledgment that, as Australian philosopher and gender studies scholar Elizabeth Grosz (1952 ) writes, ‘‘we do not have a body the same way that we have other objects. Being a body is something that we must come to accommodate psychically, something that we must live’’ (Grosz 1994, xiii). The lived, material experience of embodiment means that any discussion of biology is necessarily more than academic. This chapter explores a few key ways of understanding the intersections of biology, matter, and gender.

THE ORIGINS OF MODERN BIOLOGY Modern biology grew out of the Enlightenment, a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European movement emphasizing reason rather than religion and tradition, and its scientific advances. The invention of the microscope made possible a greater understanding of bacteria, cells, and the internal workings of the body, and earlier ideas about human biology (e.g., the concept of humors) were displaced by this more detailed understanding. Biology as we know it is also shaped by English naturalist Charles Darwin’s (1809 1882) theory of evolution based on natural selection, which allowed biologists to see the development of and relationships between species more clearly, and by the discovery of the structure of DNA in the 1950s by American geneticist and molecular biologist James Watson (1928 ), English molecular biologist and biophysicist Francis Crick (1916 2004), and English chemist Rosalind Franklin (1920 1958). An examination of earlier European ideas regarding sex and gender within biology can provide a useful history of the discipline and its relation to matter in Western traditions. Before the Enlightenment, a one-sex model was common. In this model, male and female were not considered to be separate sexes but rather mirror images of each other that existed on

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a single spectrum. The vagina was imagined as an interior penis and the ovaries as interior testes. Because the two sexes were not absolutely divided, ‘‘femininity and masculinity were determined more by close attention to signs of movement, temperament, voice and so on which indicated on which side of the one axis of ‘sex’ any individual gravitated active/ passive, hot/cold, formed/unformed, informing/formable’’ (Hird 2004, 18). Similarly, because the sexes existed on the same spectrum, it was considered possible (and not entirely uncommon) for individuals to change sex. This one-sex model offered more freedom in some ways, but it also reflected specific cultural ideas of pre-Enlightenment Europe and a lack of understanding of basic physiology. As American historian and sexologist Thomas Laqueur (1945 ) has argued, ‘‘Anatomists might have seen bodies differently they might, for example, have regarded the vagina as other than a penis but they did not do so for essentially cultural reasons’’ (Laqueur 1990, 16). It fit their cultural conceptions of sex better to see one as the mirror image of the other, and so, despite mounting evidence, they did. During the Enlightenment, such culturally influenced interpretations continued. The developing science of anatomy allowed greater understanding of the internal workings of the body. At the same time, this anatomical approach to the body led to a search for anatomical differences between men and women, and ‘‘by the 1790s, European anatomists presented the male and female body as each having a distinct telos physical and intellectual strength for the man, motherhood for the woman’’ (Schiebinger 1989, 190 191). These gendered expectations influenced many interpretations of biological findings. Skull size was examined as a potential indicator of sex differences, for instance, but the conclusions drawn often had more to do with justifying social roles than with scientific evidence. For instance, German physician and anthropologist Samuel Thomas von So¨mmerring (1755 1830) found women’s skulls to be larger than men’s, but rather than seeing this information as a challenge to the standard view that smaller skulls equaled less capacity for rationality, he used this finding to claim that women’s larger skulls showed that they were less fully developed, closer to children than adults (Hird 2004, 35). It seems that women could not win. Smaller skulls could mean smaller brains and less intellect, but, as seen here, larger skulls could be equated with less-than-adult status. Similar comparisons between white and nonwhite skulls were used to reinforce racist categories and transform race as a social difference into a biological one. American physician and natural scientist Samuel G. Morton’s (1799 1851) 1839 research into cranial size, for instance, played a significant role in reinforcing racial hierarchies. Morton measured skulls from around the world, finding that those from ‘‘the Caucasian race’’ (Morton 1839, 5) were generally larger than those of other races, including ‘‘the Ethiopian race’’ (6). This information was widely used to illustrate white superiority and black inferiority. Morton wrote, in his categorization of the various races, that the Caucasian race ‘‘is distinguished for the facility with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments’’ (5) whereas the Ethiopian race included ‘‘the lowest grade of humanity’’ (8). This argument served to justify white Americans’ enslavement of black people. The underlying logic of this argument that there are absolute, biological differences between races has continued to reverberate throughout medical research and remains with us still. One striking example arises in American surgical pioneer James Marion Sims’s (1813 1883) experiments regarding tetany in infants. This neuromuscular disease occurred frequently among enslaved children. It ‘‘was actually the result of severe calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D deficiency caused by chronic malnutrition, but Sims was erroneously convinced that it was caused by the displacement of skull bones during birth’’ (Washington 2006, 62). His solution was to ‘‘open’’ the infant’s skull and reposition the skull bones ‘‘based upon a scientific

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myth that the bones of black infants’ skulls, unlike white infants, grew together quickly, leaving the brain no space to grow and develop’’ (63). Unsurprisingly, this method did not work, but Sims did not abandon his ideas (based on scientific racism and myth). Instead, he blamed the babies’ mothers and midwives for their deaths. Although the language has changed, contemporary medicine still clings to this idea of racial difference. American legal scholar Dorothy Roberts (1956 ) argues that contemporary medical research reinstitutes race as a biological category in its study of genetic differences supposedly determined by ‘‘genetic ancestry.’’ Even though mapping the human genome has actually revealed that there are no substantive differences between races and that humans are far more similar to each other than they are distinct, racial categories are built into genetic research models and ‘‘geographic ancestry has not replaced race it has modernized it’’ (Roberts 2011, 77). This modernized version of race obstructs our cultural ability to move away from race as a biological category, distracts scientists from studying commonalities in the human genome, and leads to medical stereotyping. The power of cultural ideals to shape biological knowledge is revealed in many other situations as well. For instance, when presenting ‘‘typical’’ male and female skeletons, anatomists emphasized gender differences by picking and choosing pieces of skeletons that fit their expectations. They created composites that ‘‘might actually be comprised of one woman’s pelvic bones that matched the cultural ideal of suitability for childbearing, added to another woman’s skull that met the cultural ideal of female irrationality, added to yet another woman’s ribs that exemplified the cultural ideal of a narrow and fragile chest’’ (Hird 2004, 35). Sex differences were clearly therefore created according to social norms rather than discovered by scientific inquiry. An early study by American psychologist and women’s studies scholar Stephanie A. Shields (1949 ) of how gender differences were theorized by psychologists and biologists from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century further supports this. Shields shows that although scientists were willing to revise their explanations based upon new evidence, this new evidence invariably led to the conclusion that women were inherently the inferior sex based upon ‘‘the assumption of an innate emotional, sexless, unimaginative female character that played the perfect foil to the Darwinian male’’ (Shields 1975, 753). One final example serves to illustrate the cultural biases present in the history of biology. American anthropologist and feminist Emily Martin (1944 ), in The Woman in the Body, analyzes changing representations of menstruation and finds that during the nineteenth century such ‘‘uniquely female’’ (Martin 1987, 34) functions were denigrated and pathologized. Englishman Walter Heape (1855 1929), antisuffragist and zoologist, described the process of menstruation violently, as ‘‘leaving behind a ragged wreck of tissue, torn glands, ruptured vessels, jagged edges of stroma, and masses of blood corpuscles, which it would seem hardly possible to heal satisfactorily without the aid of surgical treatment’’ (quoted in Martin 1987, 34). And Englishman Havelock Ellis (1859 1939), physician and social reformer, wrote of women being ‘‘‘periodically wounded’ in their most sensitive spot and ‘emphasize[d] the fact that even in the healthiest woman, a worm however harmless and unperceived, gnaws periodically at the roots of life’’’ (35). Menstruation, Martin observes, has continued to be described in overwhelmingly negative terms that focus on deprivation, constriction, and diminishment: The construction of these events in terms of a purpose that has failed is beautifully captured in a standard text for medical students . . . in which a discussion of [menstruation] ends with the statement ‘‘When fertilization fails to occur, the endometrium is shed, and a new cycle starts. This is why it used to be taught that ‘menstruation is the uterus crying for lack of a baby.’’’ (45) GENDER: MATTER

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In each of the cases cited, matter itself comes second to culture. As history of science scholar Nathan Q. Ha writes, ‘‘Such histories serve as cautionary tales against any na¨ıve reliance upon science to settle social controversies, especially when those controversies are premised upon notions of natural difference’’ (Ha 2011, 540). As these examples illustrate, within the field of biology matter has historically been dismissed and manipulated.

FEMINIST SCIENCE Given this history of biology, it is unsurprising that there have been strong feminist critiques of the discipline. Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, represents one feminist response to traditional biology. The book aimed to give women more knowledge and control over their own bodies and to empower them. This book and the movement it was a part of developed alongside second-wave feminist theory, which included more analysis of scientific methods and biological knowledge. Contemporary feminist science studies grew out of this movement. Two central questions raised by feminist science studies are: (1) How can we address gender inequities (and other inequities, such as racism and heterosexism) within scientific disciplines? (2) Is a specifically feminist science possible? There is a smaller gender gap in biology than in many other scientific disciplines (e.g., physics or computer science), but although ‘‘about half of all biology graduate students are women, and 40 percent of biology postdocs are female . . . those numbers drop dramatically among faculty members: Nationwide, only 36 percent of assistant professors and 18 percent of full professors are women’’ (Trafton 2014). This kind of inequity raises questions about the social structures within such fields, but it also relates to the possibility (or impossibility) of a feminist science. In other words, would including more women in the sciences lead to a more feminist science? Some feminists ‘‘feel that it is necessary that there be a critical mass of women practicing a science before it can become a feminist science’’ (Belcastro and Moran 2003, 27). The addition of women to the sciences certainly helps with this project in many ways, but reaching a critical mass of women does not necessarily guarantee that those women will be acting as feminists. American feminist philosopher Sandra Harding (1935 ) asks, ‘‘Can a science grounded in women’s identities as gendered be a sound grounding for a feminist science?’’ (Harding 1986, 140). The answer to this question appears to be no. ‘‘Scientific ideology is not, after all, solely determined by gender ideology’’ (Keller 1983, 144), which means that there is no inherent difference between science done by women and science done by men on the basis of the individual’s sex or gender and therefore that gender ‘‘cannot be a locus of critical agency’’ (Egeland 2004, 85). Conversely, it is possible that women will bring different, perhaps more feminist perspectives to the sciences. As feminist philosopher Catherine Hundleby maintains, there is power, which ‘‘we neglect if we haven’t developed feminist accounts,’’ simply in proposing feminist scientific theories, because ‘‘where no nonsexist theories are generated, sexist theories will survive the most rigorous available scientific assessment’’ (Hundleby 2006, 24). A third question raised by feminist science studies is even more fundamental: What counts as science? Part of the process of developing science in its current form has been a move away from amateur science, often done at home or in the community, and toward professional science, done in laboratories and university settings. This professionalization brought with it a masculinization of scientific work, because the excluded knowledge and

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practices more often were those of women, whether associated with stereotypically feminine tasks or related to the domain of the home instead of the workplace. Before this shift, however, women practiced medicine more often than men (Stanley 1983), and women’s knowledge was practical and effective. For instance, Londa Schiebinger reports: ‘‘As late as 1600, women in parts of Europe commonly had access to some 200 contraceptives and abortifacients, of both a vegetable and a mechanical nature,’’ but the decline of midwifery and the rise of professionalized and masculinized medicine meant that ‘‘European women of the nineteenth century had more children than their grandmothers did and understood less about their own bodies’’ (Schiebinger 1999, 110). The professionalization of science therefore not only excluded and disempowered women but also caused the loss of a great deal of information. Feminist science studies argues for a shift toward valuing such women’s and indigenous knowledges and recovering lost information.

CELLULAR BIOLOGY, REPRODUCTION, AND LANGUAGE Another significant issue raised by feminist science studies scholars regards the use of gendered language in the sciences. Such language plays an important role in feminist critique, because, as feminist science scholar Bonnie Spanier writes, ‘‘scientists present biology, the science of life, as impartial and objective. . . . [But] what counts as mainstream biology in this case, the biology of life at the cell and molecular levels is actually a partial vision skewed by invisible biases’’ (Spanier 1995, 3). Attempting to correct this skewed partial vision, it is hoped, can lead to a fuller understanding of biology that does not work to so easily reinforce cultural notions of gender. One example of a gendered metaphor being applied to objects or processes that are not inherently gendered is found in biologists’ discussion of ‘‘housekeeping genes’’: ‘‘This term clearly implies a routinized and less significant kind of gene, its value analogous to that of women’s wifely and motherly roles. . . . Maintenance is less important, and scientists use the gendered metaphor ‘housekeeping’ to capture that status’’ (Spanier 1995, 87 88). This metaphor is clearly biased and certainly unnecessary for understanding the scientific concept. Even worse than the simply unnecessary gendered metaphors described here, however, there are scientific metaphors that are biased, unnecessary, and also inaccurate. For instance, in human reproduction, eggs (female) are larger than sperm (male), and this size difference can be interpreted in multiple ways. Spanier notes that sociobiologists have interpreted the egg’s larger size as indicating more ‘‘parental investment’’ and therefore more maternal responsibility (despite the greater volume of sperm involved in the process). Instead of seeing larger size as representing greater value or superiority, as might have been the case if the male component were larger, the larger female egg is used to uncomplicatedly reinforce gendered ideas about parental roles (1995, 2). Martin’s analysis of the narratives told within a range of widely used medical textbooks about the process of impregnation and the relationship between egg and sperm further illustrates this point. She writes: It is remarkable how ‘‘femininely’’ the egg behaves and how ‘‘masculinely’’ the sperm. The egg is seen as large and passive. It does not move or journey, but passively ‘‘is transported,’’ ‘‘is swept,’’ or even ‘‘drifts’’ along the fallopian tube. In utter contrast, sperm are small, ‘‘streamlined,’’ and invariably active. They ‘‘deliver’’ their genes to the egg, ‘‘activate the developmental program of the egg,’’ and have a GENDER: MATTER

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‘‘velocity’’ that is often remarked upon. Their tails are ‘‘strong’’ and efficiently powered. Together with the forces of ejaculation, they can ‘‘propel the semen into the deepest recesses of the vagina.’’ For this they need ‘‘energy,’’ ‘‘fuel,’’ so that with a ‘‘whiplashlike motion and strong lurches’’ they can ‘‘burrow through the egg coat’’ and ‘‘penetrate’’ it. (Martin 1991, 489) The egg awaits ‘‘her mate’s magic kiss, which instills the spirit that brings her to life,’’ whereas sperm have a ‘‘mission,’’ a ‘‘quest,’’ and ‘‘carry out a ‘perilous journey’ into the ‘warm darkness’’’ (490). Sperm are described as assaulting the egg, which is a ‘‘prize’’ (490) to be captured and rescued. What is most striking about Martin’s research, however, is not that this narrative exists at all but that it continues to exist. Recent research has shown that this narrative is not simply misleading but wrong. The egg is far more active and the sperm far weaker than these metaphors reveal, meaning that the narratives are sexist and scientifically unsound, but they are unfortunately extremely difficult to remove. When counternarratives surface that give the egg a more active role, Martin writes, they often do so ‘‘at the cost of appearing disturbingly aggressive’’ (498), reinforcing a different set of stereotypes rather than eliminating stereotypes. This ongoing mismatch between reality and rhetoric highlights how easily we take these gendered narratives for granted, perceiving them as natural, and it is one reason we continue to take these narratives for granted and see them as natural. When the internal workings of the reproductive process are cast in such strikingly gendered terms despite evidence to the contrary, it is easy to see how this narrative both follows from and leads to the stories we tell about men and women in everyday life. It is a vicious cycle of sexist imagery that becomes more and more difficult to end as the images are repeated. Other instances of such language and imagery can be found in American cultural historian Roberta Bivins’s (1970 ) study of the unnecessary and misleading application of sex roles to E. coli bacteria and gender studies scholar Jacquelyn N. Zita’s study of the language and frameworks used to study premenstrual syndrome (PMS), in which she argues ‘‘that much of the research being done on PMS is, in fact, suspect’’ (Zita 1989, 189) because it is built upon masculinist biases in which female biological cycles are seen as deviant or diseased instead of normal or even positive. In all of these instances, ideas of culture distort and obscure the material, and bodily functions even at the bacterial and cellular level are interpreted through the lens of social norms.

BIOLOGY AS FIXED: SOCIOBIOLOGY AND NEUROSEXISM Reversing this pattern to emphasize the role of matter within biology is not always beneficial, however. Sociobiology aims to explain group social behaviors through biological and evolutionary understandings of humans and reasons that a full understanding of human behavior requires that it be placed in its evolutionary context. American entomologist and evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill (1944 ) and anthropologist Craig T. Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (2000), a study intended to reveal the evolutionary causes of rape, illustrates such analyses. Thornhill and Palmer maintain that rape is universal and draw on studies of other primates (such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans) to support their argument for rape’s evolutionary basis. They contend that rape is an adaptive mechanism used by some men to compensate for ‘‘genes that interfere with development of psycho-social skills. As a result of a mechanism that assesses the individual’s

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phenotypic condition, the offenders adopt coercive sexuality and criminal behaviors as a tactic for making the best of a bad job’’ (Thornhill and Palmer 2000, 81). Furthermore, they maintain: It is theoretically possible that female sexual resistance to rapists in some species reflects an evolved mechanism for evaluation of the rapist’s ‘‘genetic quality’’ in order to secure genes that will promote the mating success of their [the women’s] sons. Premating resistance on the part of a female may indirectly assess male heritable quality by testing the would-be rapist’s strength, endurance, and vigor. (83) Both the idea that rapists are acting specifically to compensate for other reproductive weaknesses and the idea that female resistance to rape is a test of ‘‘male heritable quality’’ rest upon some troubling and unfounded assumptions about human behavior, choice, and rape. These assumptions ignore what is known about rape that it has little to do with procreation and much to do with power and imply that there is some biological value or justification to be found in rape. This privileging of biological reproduction over cultural influences is not only misleading but also dangerous, as it risks reinforcing biological essentialism (which has historically limited women’s options) and equating cultural or societal power with physical strength. Unsurprisingly, the book met with resistance. The fundamental assumptions of the study appear to be flawed; rape is not universal and does not play the same role or occur with the same frequency across all cultures. Furthermore, research by Dutch primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal (1948 ) on bonobos and empathy as a trait shared by both humans and bonobos challenges a focus on more violent primates (e.g., chimpanzees) when examining human evolutionary history and primate behaviors. In addition, as developmental psychologist Suzanne Zeedyk points out, there are serious methodological flaws in Thornhill and Palmer’s data collection and analysis (Zeedyk 2007, 73 75). Nonetheless, this book and its argument were given a great deal of attention and represent one way in which biology can be dangerously applied to naturalize culturally influenced (and, in this case, violent) behaviors. Another example of such dangerous applications is illustrated by what Canadian-born British academic psychologist Cordelia Fine (1975 ) calls ‘‘neurosexism,’’ an approach to the human brain that ‘‘reflects and reinforces cultural beliefs about gender’’ in which ‘‘dubious ‘brain facts’ about the sexes become part of the cultural lore’’ (Fine 2010, xxviii). One example that Fine explores is a study by psychologist Jennifer Connellan, English developmental psychopathologist Simon Baron-Cohen (1958 ), and others in which they tested the responses of day-and-a-half-old newborns to either a human face or an inanimate mobile modeled on but distinct from a living human face (the mobile was matched with the human face in terms of color, size, shape, contrast, and dimensionality, so that it did not look like a face but was not dramatically different in its constituent elements) (Connellan et al. 2000, 115). This study was intended to test for a biological basis for gender differences, because presumably ‘‘any differences between the sexes seen at this tender age can’t be chalked up to socialization’’ (Fine 2010, 112). Connellan and colleagues found that ‘‘males looked longer at the mobile than did females (51 percent of looking time versus 41 percent for females) and females, as a group, looked longer at the face than the mobile (49 percent versus 41 percent of looking time)’’ (Fine 2010, 112). This study seems to indicate that gender differences are hardwired. However, as Fine points out, this study had methodological issues. Instead of presenting the two objects simultaneously, the objects GENDER: MATTER

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were presented separately, meaning that the newborns’ short attention spans may have influenced their time looking more than any actual interest. The babies were not presented with the objects at the same angle, meaning that they did not actually see the same image. Most importantly, the researchers were not prevented from knowing the sexes of the newborns they were testing, which introduces the possibility that the researchers inadvertently influenced the test. As Fine put it, ‘‘What if Connellan inadvertently moved the mobile more when she held it up for boys, or looked more directly, or with wider eyes, for the girls?’’ (15). This example is worth noting, because it illustrates the ways we may let our preconceived ideas about sex and gender influence us. It also illustrates the necessity for feminist attention to such scientific studies. As opposed to the problems within biology discussed in previous sections, sociobiology and neurosexism obscure or ignore cultural influences in favor of the material, specifically the material consequences of evolution. There is little to no room for learned behaviors or individual choice when everything boils down to adaptation for species survival (i.e., reproduction). Birke writes, ‘‘Biological bodies, within these narratives, become fixed by the parallel languages of genes (determining who we are) and homeostasis (which ensures we stay that way)’’ (Birke 1999a, 45). Similarly, American Donna J. Haraway (1944 ), scholar in the field of science and technology studies, argues that ‘‘sociobiological reasoning applied to human societies easily glides into facile naturalization of job segregation, dominance hierarchies, racial chauvinism, and the ‘necessity’ of domination in sexually based societies to control the nastier aspects of genetic competition’’ (Haraway 1991, 66 67). These dangers mean that feminists have a responsibility to engage with biology and with matter in order to find ways of acknowledging their significance without simply reinforcing the status quo or returning to biological determinism.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND TRANS-CORPOREALITY Although sociobiology is based on evolutionary theory, this does not mean that evolution has no place in feminist considerations of biology. In fact, feminist uses of Darwin and evolutionary theory point to a partial answer to another of the central questions raised by feminist science studies: How can science especially disciplines like biology take matter (and the body) seriously while avoiding the pitfalls of biological determinism? Canadian science studies and environmental studies scholar Myra J. Hird asserts that this can be done via new materialism and nonlinear biology. New materialism challenges traditional dichotomies between nature/culture, body/mind, and so on and emphasizes material interconnections between self and other as well as between human and nonhuman; nonlinear biology emphasizes complexity within biological systems rather than attempting to simplify such systems and emergence rather than causal chains. These elements do not fix biology in one static place, nor do they point to a culturally weighted interpretation of biology. Instead, they open up possibilities for biological malleability. Feminist science studies scholar Elizabeth A. Wilson also argues for the feminist value of Darwin’s ideas. She points out that ‘‘every one of Darwin’s texts attests that the stuff of evolution is radically heterogeneous; certainly it is biological, but it is also psychological, cultural, geological, oceanic, and meteorological’’ (Wilson 2004, 69). This ‘‘reciprocally configured system’’ (69) means that biology matters but that it does not matter alone. One example of this interconnectedness is the phenomenon of blushing. Although blushing seems

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like a simple and straightforward physiological action, it is not caused by a direct physical action (e.g., touch or the threat of bodily harm). Instead, it is caused by psychological action. Wilson writes: ‘‘In truth, it is not my mind that causes the capillaries of my face to be swollen with blood, it is what is in the mind of another person that has this influence. . . . Blushing is an intersubjective event’’ (75). In this case, biology and its relationship to psychology and interpersonal relations is respected, and, as Grosz writes, ‘‘Darwin provides feminist theory with a way of reconceptualizing the relations between the natural and the social, between the biological and the cultural, outside the dichotomous structure in which these terms are currently enmeshed’’ (Grosz 2008, 43). Understanding this biological occurrence (blushing) therefore highlights an important feminist concept: intersubjectivity. These uses of Darwin’s evolutionary theory can be extended to consider the relationship between human and nonhuman and to connect biology and ecology. Intersubjectivity, a shared connection between two human minds, is merely a starting point. New materialism and nonlinear biology open up possibilities of connections between bodies and between species as well. Ecocultural theorist Stacy Alaimo (1962 ) writes: ‘‘Potent ethical and political possibilities emerge from the literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature. Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’’’ (Alaimo 2010, 2). Trans-corporeality highlights the connections that are possible across such boundaries and calls into question the boundaries themselves. It ‘‘counters and critiques the obdurate, though postmodern, humanisms that seek transcendence or protection from the material world’’ (4), and it requires attention both to biology as a discipline and to biology as a way of speaking about bodies and matter.

COMPLICATING MATTERS: DISABILITY Disability is an arena in which the relationship between biology and culture is particularly complicated. On the one hand, disability is sometimes seen as purely biological or medical, an individual problem to be solved, but this view ignores the ways in which the world is built to accommodate some bodies and not others. On the other hand, the social constructionist model of disability, in which disability is defined as such primarily (or solely) because disabled bodies do not fit into social expectations, can ignore the ways in which disability is an embodied experience. American writer Nancy Mairs (1943 ) therefore ‘‘claims the appellation ‘cripple’ because it demands that others acknowledge the particularity of her body’’ (Garland-Thomson, 1997, 25). This, feminist disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1946 ) maintains, is an attempt to highlight her physical experience and her pain, to call attention to ‘‘her struggle with an environment built for other bodies’’ (25). Garland-Thomson argues for a feminist approach to disability that pays attention to both ‘‘the immutability of the flesh’’ and ‘‘the identity it supports’’ (25). Such a feminist approach would acknowledge the ways in which women and people with disabilities have disproportionately been tied to the body and identified with sickness; the widespread impact of disability, which, she reasons, will eventually affect all of us (Garland-Thomson 2010, 356); and the fact that ‘‘the disabled body is contradiction, ambiguity, and partiality incarnate’’ (371). This approach opens up promising connections with the focus on interconnectedness, malleability, and embodiment found in new materialist theory and nonlinear biology. GENDER: MATTER

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Feminist philosopher Susan Wendell, however, offers another perspective on disability and how to consider the disabled body. She contends that in all of feminist theory’s discussions of the body, ‘‘feminist writing about the body has not fully confronted experience of the negative body’’ (Wendell 1996, 166). Therefore, she presents a way of thinking about the negative body, the body that cannot be either denied or easily embraced. She writes: ‘‘When I became ill, I felt taken over and betrayed by a profound bodily vulnerability. I was forced by my body to reconceptualize my relationship to it’’ (169). This bodily vulnerability and betrayal cannot be contained by social or cultural elements, she states, and must be acknowledged as a material challenge, one that cannot be explained away or ignored. In some feminist attempts to escape biological essentialism, the idea that our lives are determined by biology, Wendell maintains, ‘‘feminist theory is in danger of idealizing ‘the body’ and erasing much of the reality of lived bodies’’ (169). Instead, she argues for transcendence. This does not require, for Wendell, denial of the body or alienation from it (both of which could have negative consequences for her lived experience of the body) but strategies that ‘‘increase the freedom of consciousness,’’ ways in which ‘‘the body itself takes us into and then beyond its sufferings and limitations’’ (1996, 78). Being able to acknowledge that ‘‘my body is painful (or nauseated, exhausted, etc.), but I’m happy,’’ she says, ‘‘asserts that the way my body feels is not the totality of my experience, that my mind and feelings can wander beyond the painful messages of my body, and that my state of mind is not completely dependent on the state of my body’’ (174). This balancing act between recognizing the body and transcending it may echo the ongoing balancing act within feminist studies and the discipline of biology between emphasizing the influences of biology and those of culture.

RECONSIDERING THE SEX/GENDER BINARY: INTERSEX AND TRANSGENDER The sex/gender binary reveals another locus of anxiety regarding embracing the body versus diminishing its impact. Feminist theory in the 1970s emphasized a distinction between sex and gender as a means of moving away from biological essentialism. However, this sex/ gender distinction, as Birke contends, has tended to focus more on gender and its social construction than on sex and biology itself. This focus contributed to a theoretical attention to the surface of the body but not its insides, wherein ‘‘the body . . . becomes a passive recipient of cultural practices, denied even the agency of experience’’ (Birke 1999b, 34). Although Australian social and feminist philosopher Moira Gatens claims that ‘‘gender is not the issue; sexual difference is’’ (Gatens 1996, 9), this division raises many questions: ‘‘Can we refer to a ‘given’ sex or a ‘given’ gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is ‘sex’ anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such ‘facts’ for us?’’ (Butler 1990, 9). As has been shown earlier, definitions such as these are often culturally influenced or determined. It is therefore important to question how both gender and sex are defined as well as how they are related to each other. Hird points to some further issues with the assumption of the centrality of sexual reproduction for defining sexual difference: Sexual reproduction is not a reliable signifier of ‘‘sex’’ or ‘‘sex differences’’ for the following reasons. First, not all women sexually reproduce: up to 30 percent of the world’s female population does not sexually reproduce. Second, reproduction does not have much to do with sex. Finally, kinship, the culturally ostensible ‘‘point’’ of

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sexual reproduction is by not [sic] means assured; as Haraway (1989) argues, sexual reproduction in fact precludes kinship. (Hird 2004, 88) The reliance on sexual reproduction may therefore misrepresent the possibilities available for sex and gender. Hird also points out the ways in which such assumptions are heterosexist and obscure homosexual behaviors. She notes that ‘‘sexual activity is assumed to be heterosexual unless absolutely proven otherwise,’’ that researchers make assumptions about the sex of the animals they are studying (and therefore mistake homosexual behavior for heterosexual behavior), and that they ‘‘commonly exclude homosexual activities from what ‘counts’ as sexual activity’’ (106). Furthermore, she points out, homosexual activities are frequently explained as something other than sexual activity or dismissed in order to normalize heterosexuality. Acknowledging homosexuality (and transspecies sexuality) in animal research, however, reveals that ‘‘the diversity of sex and sexual behavior of living organisms on this planet is far more diverse than human cultural notions typically allow. This diversity confronts cultural ideas about ‘the’ family, monogamy, fidelity, parental care, heterosexuality, and perhaps most fundamentally, sexual difference’’ (117). Furthermore, the existence of intersex individuals people who do not fall easily into one of the two options provided by the system (male or female) for a variety of reasons, including ‘‘androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), progestin induced virilization, adrenal hyperplasia, Klinefelter syndrome, and congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH)’’ (124) confounds the biological basis of the sex/gender binary. Sex, after all, is not so simple. Sex is assumed to be simple, but its complexity is revealed by the fact that ‘‘medical practitioners in Western countries actually refer to a ‘genital grid’ to determine whether a newborn’s clitoris or penis is ‘normal’’’ (125). A clitoris is considered to be acceptable at between 0.2 and 0.7 centimeters, and a penis is considered to be acceptable at between 2.5 and 4.5 centimeters. These numbers are arrived at by measuring samples of infant genitals, arriving at an average, and then declaring that average to be normal. This need to measure and determine what is normal and to surgically intervene to place intersex individuals in either the male or the female category (regardless of later physical and psychological consequences) indicates that our current definitions of sex are not ‘‘natural,’’ nor are they based in matter itself. Instead, our belief in this system is maintained by medicine despite the evidence that the system is not accurate. If there were not so many exceptions, the ‘‘genital grid’’ would not be required. Hird writes, ‘‘Clearly there is a strong paradox here between a medical protocol ostensibly based upon ‘biological facts,’ and a medical protocol that clearly acknowledges that these ‘biological facts’ consistently reveal sex diversity’’ (137). As a result, Hird states, our insistence upon sex differences is superficial and misses the point of paying attention to matter. Instead, ‘‘rather than turning away from the ‘materiality’ of the body, by looking below the surface of the body to its matter we find that intersex conditions are part of the natural ‘sex’ diversity produced in any healthy living species’’ (142). The existence of transgender individuals reveals another complication of the sex/gender binary. Whereas the experiences of intersex individuals point to the dangers of (normative) surgical modifications, transgender individuals highlight the benefits of surgical modifications. In the first instance, such surgical modifications are made in the interest of ‘‘expung[ing] the kinds of corporeal human variations that contradict the ideologies the dominant order depends upon to anchor truths it insists are unequivocally encoded in bodies’’ (GarlandThomson 2010, 361). However, in the second instance, surgical modifications are made in the interest of helping individuals gain more freedom the freedom to be one’s self or to feel one is in the right body, for instance. Birke writes, ‘‘We need to insist on thinking about the biological body as changing and changeable, as transformable’’ (Birke 1999a, 45), and this GENDER: MATTER

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sense of biology as malleable is promising for transgender people. (This is the case even though, unfortunately, Birke and other feminists have been resistant to taking transgender arguments and experiences seriously.) Biology has always been transformable, after all. It is just that sometimes we choose not to highlight those transformations. Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado (born Beatriz Preciado; 1970 ) points this out in an analysis of the birth control pill: Although the Pill was an effective form of birth control, the FDA rejected the first version invented by Pincus and Rock in 1951 and tested at Puerto Rico from 1956 on, because the agency’s scientific committee felt it threw doubt on the femininity of American women by suppressing their periods altogether. FDA standards led to Searle’s production of a second pill, commercialized in 1959, that was equally effective but could, unlike the first, technologically reproduce the rhythms of a natural menstrual cycle, inducing bleeding that created the illusion of a natural cycle’s taking place and somehow ‘‘mimicking the normal physiological cycle.’’ (Preciado 2013, 190) This mimicry calls into question the ‘‘naturalness’’ of the biological cycle and highlights the ways in which we have, for decades in this instance, not only accepted but indeed relied upon such biological transformations. All bodies not only intersex or transgender bodies are constructed and shaped by technology and culture. Therefore, ‘‘there is no empirical truth to male or female gender beyond an assemblage of normative cultural fictions’’ (263). Biology is real and material, but its reality and materiality are malleable and have always been so. The existence of intersex and transgender people and biotechnological interventions, such as the birth control pill, illustrate this malleability.

Summary Biology has a long and troubled history with regard to gender, but it is also powerful and potentially liberatory. Haraway writes that we ‘‘must engage in the practice of science. It is a matter for struggle’’ (Haraway 1991, 68). If those who have been oppressed or ignored by biology in the past, in particular, do not engage in or with the discipline, all of us will suffer. As this chapter has shown, biology has been used many times as a tool to restrict or oppress, but it also offers opportunities for empowerment, from including more women and other minorities in the discipline of biology to understanding and subsequently controlling ways in which discourses of biology influence people’s lives to modifying one’s own body through the use of biological sciences. Despite the checkered history of the discipline and the very understandable wariness many feminists have had in being identified too closely with the body, ultimately we have more to gain than to lose by engaging with biology and with the material.

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Birke, Lynda. ‘‘Bodies and Biology.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, 42 49. New York: Routledge, 1999a. Birke, Lynda. Feminism and the Biological Body. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999b. Bivins, Roberta. ‘‘Sex Cells: Gender and the Language of Bacterial Genetics.’’ Journal of the History of Biology 33, no. 1 (2000): 113 139. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Our selves. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subver sion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Connellan, Jennifer, Simon Baron Cohen, Sally Wheel wright, et al. ‘‘Sex Differences in Human Neonatal Social Perception.’’ Infant Behavior and Development 23, no. 1 (2000): 113 118. de Waal, Frans. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. New York: River head Books, 2005. Egeland, Cathrine. ‘‘Interventions in a Cat’s Cradle.’’ Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 12, no. 2 (2004): 83 92. Fine, Cordelia. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Soci ety, and Neurosexism Create Difference. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figur ing Physical Disability in American Culture and Litera ture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. ‘‘Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.’’ In The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 353 373. New York: Routledge, 2010. Gatens, Moira. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corpo reality. London: Routledge, 1996. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘‘Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance.’’ In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hek man, 25 51. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

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CHAPTER 11

Botany Natania Meeker Associate Professor, Department of French and Comparative Literature University of Southern California, Los Angeles Anto´nia Szabari Associate Professor, Department of French and Comparative Literature University of Southern California, Los Angeles Botany, or the scientific study of plants, has changed significantly over time. Knowledge of plant life is global and present in all cultures, but the science of botany as a subdiscipline of biology is of western European origin. Although this chapter focuses primarily on botany in Western contexts, non-Western forms of botany, including Indian and Chinese systems of botanical classification, have their own rich and varied history. Moreover, it is important to note that botanical knowledge as it develops in the Western world is closely linked to the circulation, importation, and exploitation of plant (and animal) species from other cultures and places. The history of modern botany is thus tightly intertwined with the history of colonialism and imperialism as practiced in western Europe. From antiquity through the medieval period and into the Renaissance, botany often emphasized the way in which plants could be useful to humans. Western botanical knowledge was thus closely associated with the fields of medicine, agriculture, gardening, and household management. This early botany often took the form of ‘‘herbals,’’ lists and descriptions of plants for medicinal purposes, and functioned as a kind of applied medical wisdom, in which legends about plants were detailed alongside their inherent properties (or ‘‘virtues’’) and physical characteristics. The advent of modern botany is traditionally dated to the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when botanical science moved toward an emphasis on classification, physiology, and the study of the particular structures, features, and qualities distinctive to the plant kingdom. During this period, botany gradually lost its intimate connections to medicine. The plant lore of the herbals was replaced by systematic studies of plants that focused less on the uses to which plants could be put by humans and more on their relationships to and among one another; colonial voyages of exploration encouraged and facilitated the production of encyclopedic botanical taxonomies. French historian and philosopher Franc¸ois Delaporte (1941 ) argues in Nature’s Second Kingdom (1979) that the utilitarian approach to plants, so prevalent in the medieval period and the Renaissance, precluded the desire to comprehend them. The emphasis on botany as an applied form of knowledge shifted around the eighteenth century, during the era of the Enlightenment. This period stressed the importance of scientific knowledge and the use of reason to cultivate this knowledge; it is the moment when, according to Delaporte, ‘‘the recognition that plants are living things is . . . matched by an understanding that their

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structure is as complex as that of animals’’ (10 11). As the eighteenth century wore on, scientists moved from simple anatomies in which parts of the plants were observed Italian physician and biologist Marcello Malpighi (1628 1694) and English plant anatomist and physiologist Nehemiah Grew (1641 1712) practiced science in this way toward a focus on the physiology of the plant. In 1727 English clergyman and scientist Stephen Hales (1677 1761) published his research on transpiration the loss of water from the leaves of plants although the significance of this work was not clearly understood at the time. By the end of the century, English physician and natural philosopher (and grandfather of Charles Darwin) Erasmus Darwin (1731 1802) was studying what would become known as stomata, or the pores on leaves; around the same time, English theologian and chemist Joseph Priestley (1733 1804) and Dutch physiologist, biologist, and chemist Jan Ingen-Housz (1730 1799) discovered some of the elements of photosynthesis. Thus botany as it took shape in the era of Swedish naturalist and physician Carl Linnaeus (1707 1778), known as the father of modern botany, united classification and physiology; in fact, Linnaeus was the first to use the latter term in reference to plants, although he remains best known for his system for classifying them. The development of the great systems of plant classification in western Europe during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries also coincided with an increasing fascination with plant sexuality and, LINNAEUS’S SYSTEMA NATURAE (1736) / NATURAL over time, increased participation of women in botaniHISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON, UK / BRIDGEMAN IMAG ES cal pursuits. Scholars, including literary critics Samantha George, Theresa M. Kelley, and Ann B. Shteir and historian Londa L. Schiebinger, have studied how the feminization of botanical knowledge during this period a cultural association of women with botanical pursuits that persists allowed some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women botanists to find a place within the scientific discipline of botany, even as women were being shut out from public participation in scientific research and struggled to gain entrance to institutions that facilitated the creation of scientific knowledge (including universities, although some women did attend, and scientific societies and academies). The sexual system of Linnaeus. Watercolor illustration by Georg Ehret of Carl Linneaus’s sexual system for the classification of plants from Systema Naturae. CARL

With the development of the biological sciences in the nineteenth century, the botany of the classical era morphed into the field of plant biology. Nonetheless, the term botany is still used to denote the scientific study of plants. Contemporary botanists continue to explore and manipulate plants investigating their structure, genetics, chemical processes, consumption as food and fuel, interactions with one another and their environments, conservation,

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evolution, and biodiversity. Botany as it is currently practiced has generated a wide array of responses from scientists, writers, philosophers, filmmakers, and artists some of which is investigated in this chapter. Although they are not part of the strict scientific study of the plant, these responses are intimately related to the knowledge that botanical or plant science generates and to the ways in which this knowledge is used. Botany in a broad sense includes these conversations spanning disciplines and moving far beyond the confines of the university as well as the crucial questions that the study of plants raises for theories of matter, gender, sexuality, and ethics.

WOMEN AND THE PRACTICE OF BOTANY Women’s participation in botany certainly predated the culturally sanctioned engagement, in the eighteenth century, of elite women with botanical study and botanical illustration, in particular. In the medieval period, when monastic gardens were important sites for growing and studying medicinal plants, Hildegard of Bingen (1098 1179), a German abbess and renowned composer, made important contributions to herbal medicine. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sites of botanical research expanded from monasteries into the gardens of the nobility. The herbals written in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century were usually by male authors, but women circulated their knowledge of medicinal herbs in recipes and commonplace books, some of which found their way into print in the seventeenth century. In both elite and popular contexts, early modern women used herbs to induce menstruation and to procure abortions, among other medical practices. In Plants and Empire (1993), Schiebinger discusses the deployment of the peacock flower as an abortifacient by Amerindians and enslaved women in the fight against slavery and colonization (as well as the efforts to keep this particular form of botanical expertise from circulating within Europe). In these and other contexts, botanical knowledge was not just linked to but became an intimate part of a political struggle in which women and oppressed peoples played a key role. Women’s association with the botanical sciences took on new amplitude in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when ‘‘botany more than any other field of science was considered appropriate for ladies’’ (36). Women were encouraged to ‘‘herborize,’’ or collect and classify plants in their local environments, as a decorous form of scientific engagement. By the end of the eighteenth century, women were active in all areas of botany, including dissection and microscopy as well as botanical illustration, drawing, and engraving. At the end of the seventeenth century, German naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 1717) traveled with her GENDER: MATTER

Plate from Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium by Maria Sibylla Merian, Amsterdam, 1705. Merian’s observations and illustrations of the local flora and fauna in Surinam, a Dutch plantation colony in South America, helped usher in a tradition of botanical illustration by women. INTERFOTO / ALAMY

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younger daughter to Surinam, where she made observations of the local flora and fauna that transformed the fields of botany and entomology. Her stunning illustrations of plants and animals ushered in a tradition of botanical art by women, including French illustrator Madeleine Franc¸oise Basseporte (1701 1780), Scottish illustrator Elizabeth Blackwell (1707 1758), and French painter Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744 1818) work that played a crucial role in the production and dissemination of western European botanical knowledge, although it was often underrecognized (and uncredited). While botanical art was a key component of the development of botanical science, a strict division of labor was in place during the eighteenth century between the scientist (the public face of scientific discovery) and the illustrator (often anonymous), with the latter role more regularly occupied by women (Daston and Galison 2010). Throughout this period, important philosophers and naturalists participated in the effort to introduce women to the botanical sciences and affirmed the importance of a botanical education for elite girls. Notably, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 1778) addressed his Lettres ´ele´mentaires sur la botanique ([1771 1773] 1969) to Frenchwoman Madeleine-Catherine Delessert (1747 1816), an avid botanist, and developed in this work a program for her young daughter’s botanical education. At the end of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin published his two-part poem The Botanic Garden (1791), written at least in part for women, in which he argues that botanical knowledge should be available to all. (The socially progressive ideas Darwin advocated in the book ended up momentarily unleashing a conservative backlash against women botanizing.) In Darwin’s wake, English protofeminist philosopher and writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 1797), whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) argues forcefully on behalf of women’s rationality and ability to contribute to civic life, despised (and parodied) comparisons between women and beautiful flowers and advocated a more rationalist approach to women’s education, as Samantha George (2007) has shown. Beginning with the Enlightenment and continuing into the Romantic era in Europe and North America, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics and philosophers were preoccupied with the tension between women’s participation in science and the prevailing norms governing women’s comportment in their roles as wives and mothers. Did women ratify the exclusion that was imposed upon them by taking up work as illustrators and popularizers of science, or did they, in fact, assert themselves as autonomous contributors to scientific research? In Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science (1996), Ann B. Shteir confirms women’s importance to the field of botany by showing that, in the nineteenth century, women continued to engage in all areas of botanical science, including botanical pedagogy (teaching botany to children and to other women). In her 2012 book, Kelley demonstrates that some late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women botanists responded to their marginalization as scientific researchers by focusing on plants that posed particular problems for accepted systems of botanical classification and, in doing so, challenged the cultural identification of women with plants as ornamental and passive objects. English poet and essayist Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743 1825) and English writer (and wife of Joseph Priestley) Mary Priestley (1742 1796), both participants in the dissenting Warrington circle; English Quaker Priscilla Wakefield (1751 1832), philanthropist and scientific writer who was the first woman to publish a systematic account of botany; Englishwoman Maria Jackson (1755 1829), an experimental botanist and educator; English artist Mary Granville Delany (1700 1788), creator of paper cutouts of flowers; Irish artist and memoirist Frances Anne Beaufort Edgeworth (1769 1865),

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painter of watercolors; and Katherine Charteris Grey (1773 1843), who manipulated pressed flowers into shapes of animals, insects, and human beings, all worked against the grain to overturn assumptions about both femininity and plant life prevalent in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the seventeenth through the early twentieth century, botanical illustration and sometimes botanical research provided women with the opportunity to make a living, to pursue and popularize science, and even to question mainstream scientific findings, but more often than not, these ‘‘botanizing women,’’ as they were popularly known in the eighteenth century, labored in the shadows of their male colleagues. Are these women, then, best remembered in the context of the history of science? Contemporary American visual artist Emilie Clark (1969 ) has studied and, to some extent, reconstructed the work of three Victorian women scientists and illustrators Anglo-Irishwoman Mary Ward (1827 1869), American Mary Treat (1830 1923), and American Martha Maxwell (1831 1881). The work of these artist-researchers is both fascinating and elusive and, as Clark suggests, constitutes a world that, in its technical detail and obsessive focus, appears closed to the beholder in multiple ways. But Clark also implies that Ward, Treat, and Maxwell reveal something of themselves from within their studious and artful creations made of paper or canvas and preserved specimens, even as the archives of the history of science or art history largely exclude them. In engaging in this kind of world making, women botanists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries anticipated some of the concerns of contemporary ecocriticism, which studies the portrayal of the environment in diverse cultural contexts as well as those of modern forms of bioart, particularly in the latter’s investigation of the enmeshment of humans in their environment. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, women botanists and plant biologists, including Scotswoman Marie Stopes (1880 1958), a paleobotanist who founded the first birth-control clinic in Britain; Englishwoman Agnes Robertson Arber (1879 1960), the first woman botanist to be elected a Fellow to the Royal Society; Katherine Esau (1898 1997), German American plant anatomist; and American Barbara McClintock (1902 1992), maize geneticist and Nobel laureate, have been leaders in the field of plant science. Francis Halle´ (1938 ), French plant biologist and specialist of rain forest flora, anecdotally illustrates in his book In Praise of Plants (1999), the effects on botanical science of the cultural identification of plants with femininity. In a description of his colleague French botanist Benoıˆt Garrone’s (1937 ) experience with teaching botany to groups of students, Halle´ writes: ‘‘In botany courses, even in field exercises in the most rugged and wild terrain, it is women who mainly participate. The guys would say, ‘Botany, that’s for women and gays’’’ (31). This feminization (and devaluation) of botany as a scientific field is part of a cultural and intellectual context in which plants are still overlooked or diminished relative to animals, so that, as Halle´ affirms, ‘‘fundamental discoveries in plant biology are only truly accepted if they are ultimately confirmed by animal experiments’’ (30). Most recently, American geobiologist Hope Jahren’s (1969 ) popular memoir Lab Girl (2016) draws parallels between the lives of the plants she studies and the lives of women in the academy and the discriminations they face. Yet women botanists have long been particularly attentive to the liveliness, vigor, and as gender historian Carla Hustak and anthropologist Natasha Myers have put it, ‘‘practices’’ of plants (2012, 78 81). This emphasis on the plant as actively engaged with its environment calls into question philosophical and scientific models that ascribe the capacity for action (and selfmotion) primarily to humans and other animals. GENDER: MATTER

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GENDER AND PLANT SEXUALITY The introduction by the eighteenth century of sexuality into botanical classification what Schiebinger has called ‘‘the ‘sexualization’ of plants’’ (1993, 12) makes botany an important site for studying how gender norms and conventions influence the production of scientific knowledge. The sexing of plants does not require the use of human sexual metaphors; in fact, as recent critics have claimed, plants may provide an important model of a sexuality that exceeds, transgresses, or simply defies categorization in human terms. But the attempt to import normative forms of sexual difference into botany is productive in the sense that this effort highlights the ways in which plants fail to conform to conventional expectations about sexuality. From antiquity through the Renaissance in the West and in popular contexts still today, plants have been understood to be without sensation and desire (and even without needs). As Delaporte notes, ‘‘Clearly, during the Renaissance no one had any specific idea about how plants are fertilized’’ ([1979] 1982, 22). However, the ancients did have some practical knowledge of plants’ sexual reproduction notably in palm trees, which were recognized as having male and female variations. Greek natural philosopher Theophrastus (371 287 BCE) and Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder (23 79 CE) describe methods of bringing flowers from the male to the female tree and dusting pollen, without, however, grasping the full significance of pollination. These occasional observations led to fabled accounts of plants ‘‘in love’’ that were accorded more attention in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an Aristotelian paradigm, which tended to categorize plants as minimally alive and thus inferior to animals and humans, gave way to a materialism that emphasized the vitality and sensitivity of plants. However, the study of plants continued to seem more ‘‘innocent’’ than the study of animals, because plants did not involve the observer in the matters of the flesh. In the eighteenth century, European scientists became engaged in an intense debate over the existence of plant sexuality which agamists like Malpighi and French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656 1708) denied and sexualists like English botanist Richard Bradley (1688 1732), Scottish surgeon and botanist Patrick Blair (c. 1680 1728), and German physician and botanist Johann Gottlieb Gleditsch (1714 1786) affirmed the precise function of plant sex organs, and the prevalence of hermaphroditism and unisexuality in plants. Plant hermaphroditism was described as a monstrosity, but the sexual reproduction of unisexual plants remained no less enigmatic. Linnaeus, in his Systema Naturae (1735), famously developed a method of classifying plants based on the identification of the male and female parts of the flower. Linnaeus classed plants according to the number of male parts, or stamens, belonging to each and then subdivided each class into orders according to the number of female parts, or pistils. Another principle of classification was the manner in which anthers (or filaments or stamens) are united to each other or to pistils. Linnaeus’s last class, Cryptogamia (drawn from the Latin for ‘‘clandestine marriage’’), included all plants without obvious sex organs (lichens, fungi, and mosses) and, as Kelley (2012) has argued, revealed the failure of the sexual system to account for all plants. Precisely because plant classification, under Linnaeus, made use of a ‘‘two-sex’’ model derived (at least in theory) from human sexuality, botany became a source for relativizing or pushing against human notions of sexual difference. With the Linnaean sexual system, botany did not just reflect gender norms, it emerged as a site of their contestation. In describing his system, Linnaeus relied heavily on metaphorical depictions of plant ‘‘marriage’’ in an effort that ultimately showed the impossibility of forcing plants to conform to

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normative conceptions of human sexuality. This system nonetheless acquired enormous popularity, particularly in England. (In France it vied with other systems, not all of which emphasized sexual difference as their primary organizing principle, although some did.) While the knowledge that plants have sexual distinctions was not new, Linnaean botany gave preeminent importance to the process of sexual reproduction with what were sometimes considered scandalous results. Despite Linnaeus’s own commitment to a view of sexuality and female virtue that appeared conservative even for the period, the sexual system of classification could be read as inadvertently stressing the fact that the majority of plants fail to abide by human social norms. Plant ‘‘nuptials,’’ as they were poetically referred to at the time, are often polygamous or polyandrous, their bodies hermaphroditic or intersex, and their relations interspecial and nonmonogamous. The effects of this uneasy fit between vegetal sexuality and human conventions were fully visible in the reception of Erasmus Darwin’s poem The Loves of the Plants (1789), which became the second part of The Botanic Garden and was attacked as an embrace of unorthodox sexuality (and even as an endorsement of free love, practiced by Darwin himself). The conflation of vegetal and human sexuality that was given scientific currency with Linnaeus remained part of cultural production migrating into art and literature even after his system slid into disuse. Throughout the nineteenth century, literature, philosophy, and the visual arts explored the plant as an emblem of dangerous, monstrous, and transgressive sexuality (often women’s sexuality). This sense of plant life as posing a threat to the superiority of humans over other forms of life took on new vigor with the publication of Darwin’s work on plant movement and carnivorous plants (Miller 2012) but certainly predated these discoveries. American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1804 1864) story Rappaccini’s Daughter (1844) imagines a beautiful woman as a ‘‘sister’’ to the poisonous flowers cultivated in her father’s garden. In France decadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848 1907) populated his novel Against Nature (1884) with images of carnivorous plants, often emphasizing their femininity. American feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 1935), author of the classic short story ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’ (1892), also penned the littleknown tale ‘‘The Giant Wistaria’’ (1891), in which a plant strangles a woman and a child. In 1967 Belgian author Anne Richter (1939 ) published ‘‘The Sleep of Plants’’ about a young woman who becomes a potted plant in an effort to resist the impositions of a patriarchal culture. These kinds of narratives have their visual counterparts in art and cinema. In the US context, beginning in the 1940s the popular genre of the ‘‘plant horror’’ film GENDER: MATTER

Movie poster for The Gardener, 1974. In this film, alternatively called Seeds of Evil, the main character seduces (and poisons) rich women while also maintaining a highly eroticized relationship to the plants under his care. EVERETT COLLEC TION, INC. / ALAMY

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pictures plants in various guises as a menace to the human social order, most particularly including gender and, to a certain extent, racial norms. In the 1974 film The Gardener, also known as The Seeds of Evil and The Garden of Death, icon of queer desirability and Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro seduces (and poisons) rich women, all the while maintaining a highly eroticized relationship to the plants under his care. Of course, the association between plants and non-normative sexuality does not always take terrifying forms, although it often does. In the early twentieth century, French writer Marcel Proust (1871 1922) famously intertwined botanical preoccupations including knowledge of flowers with an exploration of queer desire in his novel in seven volumes, In Search of Lost Time (1913 1927). More recently, in her meditative and lyrical essay ‘‘A Field Guide to Brazen Harlotry’’ (2002) American nature writer Ellen Meloy (1946 2004) describes her entanglement in a vegetal sexuality that pulses and vibrates all around her, making the landscape through which she moves a site of erotic stimulation and connection and bringing together disparate bodies, species, and affects. Thanks to such representations, plants acquire a physicality and a form of embodiment that extends well beyond the twodimensional, transparent figures that, as French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926 1984) argues, dominated the representational regime of botany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West ([1966] 1970, 277).

WESTERN PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES TO BOTANY Plants have long provoked philosophical speculation in various guises. The plant is an object of intense questioning in classical Greek philosophy; the Aristotelian concept of the ‘‘vegetative soul,’’ picked up by and developed in the work of Christian philosophers, came to define the plant’s essence at least through the Renaissance. On the one hand, this notion guarantees that the plant is alive (the Greek psukhe, translated as ‘‘soul,’’ has a meaning close to ‘‘organism’’ or ‘‘organized living being’’); on the other hand, the plant is relegated by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 322 BCE) to a position of relative passivity, because it represents a lesser kind of life defined solely by its capacity for growth and reproduction. Philosopher Michael Marder (1980 ) has analyzed the ways in which the plant is marginalized within Western metaphysics. He discusses ‘‘privative’’ notions of plants, including the obscurity of their lives (in that their movements are often too slow for humans to perceive), their heteronomy (in that they depend on other factors, such as nutrients in the soil, for their existence), and their lack of individuation (Marder 2013, 22). These seemingly deficient qualities, Marder argues, can be recuperated for an ethical program that advocates on behalf of the weak within both metaphysics and the global capitalist economy more generally (itself in a complicit relationship with metaphysical forms of thought). ‘‘Critical plant studies’’ (coined by Marder as the title of a book series he edited at Rodopi Press) speaks for all marginalized beings as it speaks for plants, brings plants back into history, and imagines a vegetal subjectivity that is defined by passivity rather than activity, by collectivity rather than individuality. As Marder weakens and inverts metaphysical assumptions about the plant, he sometimes can appear to distill the history of Western philosophy to a single gesture of marginalizing the plant. Other critics have turned to this long tradition of philosophical inquiry into plants to unearth a more positive relationship to vegetality. For example, feminist philosopher Elaine P. Miller (1962 ) has written about the association between femininity and nature in

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German idealism and romantic philosophy. This is an association with problematic effects on women, in particular, yet according to Miller it engenders an alternate notion of subjectivity another kind of ‘‘vegetative soul’’ that can be recuperated for feminist philosophy. Both Miller and Marder discuss French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (1930 ) as an important contemporary thinker who studies the use of the plant as a figure of femininity; highlighting this intertwining of women with plants even as she destabilizes it, Irigaray puts feminist philosophy into a rich and productive relationship with plant life. Philosopher Jeffrey T. Nealon (1963 ) has examined the plant as a figure of alterity in the history of Continental philosophy, in particular, in the works of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889 1976), Foucault, Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930 2004), French psychotherapist and philosopher Fe´lix Guattari (1930 1992), and French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925 1995). In Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (2015), Nealon investigates the exclusion of vegetable life from analyses of nonhuman forms of life, including animal forms. He works to analyze and critique what he calls ‘‘the Linnaean kingdom divide that still bifurcates life (animal/vegetable)’’ (119). He shows how attention to plant-based ways of living and being can help us come to a different understanding of what life itself is and does. ‘‘Life is not housed exclusively in living animal or human beings and their potential-saturated worlds,’’ writes Nealon (100). The inclusion of vegetable life in the debates around the category of life obliges us to take our connections to (and dependence on) plants seriously. It also makes available to scholars and thinkers a more diverse, interconnected, and distributed notion of life in general a crucial move in an era of ecological crisis. Does this mean the future is vegetal?

PLANTS AND MATERIALISM While Western metaphysics may have treated plants, with their ways of being that do not fit comfortably into anthropomorphic models, with suspicion and hostility, plant life has at the same time played a crucial role in the development of materialist philosophies that seek to call into question a human-centered perception of the universe. Materialist philosophy including writings by the ‘‘new materialists’’ and a tradition of materialist thought beginning in antiquity and incorporating authors such as Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (c. 99 c. 55 BCE), Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632 1677), and Deleuze has nonetheless developed strong critiques of assertions of human superiority over other beings. In the vision of the world elaborated by Lucretius, for instance, all beings are made of the same material particles (atoms) and differ only according to the arrangement of these particles. Humans, animals, plants, minerals each body is like all others in that it comes from (and eventually returns to) the same constituent parts. Unlike the philosophies of the Greek philosophers Plato (428/427 or 424/423 348/347 BCE) and Aristotle, both of which explicitly prioritize the status of human beings vis-a`-vis other creatures, Lucretius, in his discussion of the philosophy of Epicurus (341 270 BCE), grants no such automatic privilege to the human. In the seventeenth century, botanists and philosophers in France including Guy de la Brosse (1586 1641), Franc¸ois de La Mothe le Vayer (1588 1672), and Cyrano de Bergerac (1619 1655) turned to the plant as a figure that decenters and destabilizes anthropocentric conceptions of the material world (Brancher 2015). In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, increasing interest in Epicurean philosophy (including the works of Epicurus and Lucretius) coincided with the development of modern botany, the popularization of certain GENDER: MATTER

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forms of botanical knowledge, and a preoccupation with the plant in its difference from (or resemblance to) the animal (including the human animal). The zoophyte, an animal that closely resembles a plant, troubled hierarchies that work to establish distinct differences among various modes of being (plant, animal, human). The long-standing materialist investment in theories of being that do not take human experience as a starting (or ending) point alongside encounters with non-European peoples in the context of early modern colonialism participated in an intellectual climate that fostered narratives of travel, adventure, and discovery. At the same time, this materialist philosophy was often itself invested in the modes of colonization and imperialism that enabled its critique of anthropocentric modes of knowledge. Early forms of science fiction such as Bergerac’s Voyages to the Moon and the Sun (1657), written in the 1640s and 1650s, and Dano-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg’s (1684 1754) Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground (1741) portray plants as intelligent and animated creatures capable of reason and of criticizing the practices and assumptions of the humans who encounter them. In Holberg’s utopian adventure, for instance, talking trees inhabit the land of Potu, where they have established gender equality and take a dim view of the protagonist’s attempt to introduce human forms of gender discrimination into their society. In 1748 French materialist Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709 1751), under the influence of Epicureanism (among other philosophical traditions), wrote the treatise Man a Machine and Man a Plant (1747 1748), in which he discusses the resemblance of humans and plants, particularly where sexuality and sexual organs are concerned. Indeed, this early modern tradition of interrogating the distinctions that seem to separate humans from plants often put a particular emphasis on gender and sexuality. Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, with its blend of poetry and philosophy, was inspired in part by Lucretius’s scientific epic and was, as already discussed, explicitly invested in the presentation of plant sexuality (through the personification of flowers as women and men). Materialist philosophy and the literary genres that engage with it have thus long been a site for the development of what Italian-born Deleuzian feminist Rosi Braidotti (1954 ) has called posthuman knowledge (2013). Contemporary materialist feminism, including the work of Braidotti and ecocultural theorist Stacy Alaimo (1962 ), feminist theorists Karen Barad (1956 ) and Vicki Kirby (1950 ), and environmental studies scholar Catriona MortimerSandilands, has emphasized the interconnectedness of all life-forms (and all bodies, including inanimate ones), thereby enabling a richer understanding of the enmeshment of humans with the very beings (such as plants) that other traditions see as mere passive objects. The focus on what Alaimo calls the more-than-human world represents a point of contact with another line of materialist criticism often referred to as speculative realism that seeks to extend equal consideration to all things without privileging either human perspective or human agency (so that objects may be understood as active in their own right). Both the new materialist feminism and a speculative realist approach can help with the effort to understand plants on their own terms in that both approaches successfully criticize the practice of identifying plants, animals, and indeed, specific humans with a natural world that is ‘‘out there,’’ or ‘‘for us’’ available for human manipulation and consumption (and therefore unworthy of moral consideration or dignity). Instead, critics like Alaimo, without taking up the problem of plant life specifically, encourage a focus on trans-corporeality, which values the connections among all sorts of beings and bodies and refuses the separation of ‘‘matter’’ and ‘‘mind’’ that has for so long ratified the exclusion of plants from philosophical inquiry in Western contexts.

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Contemporary philosophers and literary critics have thus taken up the comparison between human and plant that was a source of early modern philosophical speculation in order to criticize the tendency to understand human life as not just inherently superior to but separate from other life-forms (often the life-forms upon which humans are the most dependent, such as plants, for their very existence). In The Ecological Thought (2010a), philosopher and literary critic Timothy Morton (1968 ) affirms, ‘‘That’s the disturbing thing about ‘animals’ at bottom they are vegetables. (Movie monsters such as zombies tend to resemble animated plants.)’’ (68). The proximity of humans to plants can be a source of terror and anxiety, as in the horror films Morton cites, but it can also elicit wonder and desire. American political theorist Jane Bennett (1957 ) has written in The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (2001): ‘‘‘Mere’ plants, ants, and ideas turn out to have a degree of complexity and material efficacy that humans hitherto ignored or underestimated. New scientific practices and instruments render these capacities sensible to us, and we are both charmed and disturbed by them’’ (171). Attention to and respect for the distinctive capacities of the plant produce effects on the human observer that cannot always be predicted in advance and that can generate not just new kinds of scientific knowledge but new cultural and aesthetic forms. Indeed, in Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noo¨sphere (2011), literary scholar and theorist Richard M. Doyle (1963 ) has discussed how human culture generally has been produced in a coevolutionary relationship with plants. Scholars working in the humanities in the twenty-first century, particularly those influenced by developments in materialist philosophy, have increasingly drawn on plant biologists’ discoveries. In What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (2012), plant scientist Daniel Chamovitz (1963 ) reflects on the parallels between plant and human biology and the limitations of any anthropomorphic description of plant behavior. He investigates what he calls ‘‘plant awareness’’ through a comparison between the ways in which plants and people process the sensory data they receive (139). While the ability of plants to move and sense their environment has been studied at least from the nineteenth century on, other attempts to describe plants as intelligent and capable of problem solving in ways analogous to animals have been received with justified skepticism on the part of plant scientists as a whole (Pollan 2013). Nonetheless, the field of plant science has in the early twenty-first century witnessed an explosion of interest in the capacities of the plant to actively navigate its environment. In Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence (2015), plant biologist Stefano Mancuso and scientific journalist Alessandra Viola make a (controversial) claim on behalf of plants’ ability to make intelligent decisions to think, in other words. This claim is grounded in a recognition of humans’ dependence on plants and an attempt to uncouple the seemingly intuitive connection between self-motion and what may be called self-consciousness. The authors write that ‘‘the most recent studies of the plant world have demonstrated that plants are sentient (and thus are endowed with senses), that they communicate (with each other and with animals), sleep, remember, and can even manipulate other species. For all intents and purposes, they can be described as intelligent’’ (156). While their approach is polemical (and unrepresentative of plant science as a field), Mancuso and Viola’s interest in the plant as a being with a distinct (and fascinating) relationship to its environment capable of responding to stimuli and of changing over time resonates with the calls of botanists like Halle´ and philosophers like Bennett, Braidotti, and Marder to resist uncritical presumptions of human (or animal) superiority to other forms of life. GENDER: MATTER

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Should the capacities of plants be described by using words denoting faculties traditionally associated with animals, such as hearing, sight, or intelligence? These debates about plant intelligence are underpinned by the long history of comparing them to animals, a comparison that goes back in the scientific study of plants at least to the eighteenth century (Delaporte [1979] 1982). In the early modern period, comparing plants to animals helped reveal the former’s aliveness and complexity, but the comparison can also work to relegate plants to an inferior status, as Halle´ and Mancuso point out. Halle´ and Mancuso, for all their differences, both underscore instead the specificity of plants and their difference from animals, as do philosophers like Marder and Miller, as already discussed. Marder calls for an attention to the plant that necessitates a rethinking of the investment not just in anthropocentric philosophical models but also in exploitative agricultural practices and the ‘‘capitalist agro-scientific complex’’ (2013, 184). At the same time, the increasing scientific exploration of the physiology, biochemistry, and (possibly) intellectual life of the plant creates a need for an ethical and philosophical questioning of its status (and possibly rights) as a living being. Should plants be exploited now that more about their capacities is known? What kinds of biological and technological hybrids does the knowledge of plants make it possible to create? What can be learned from plants whose own forms of ‘‘knowledge’’ are being archived in seed banks? How might such archives help in coping with a changing environment that threatens the existence of plants and animals alike? Although these are not strictly ‘‘botanical’’ questions, contemporary understanding of plants demands a response to the question of ‘‘what a plant knows’’ in ways that are sensitive to the plant’s agency and specific mode of existence.

QUEER BOTANY While botany and plants, as Halle´ puts it, may be occasionally degraded as ‘‘for women and gays,’’ queer people have embraced botany and plants at different historical periods as materially engaged with the production and expression of non-normative sexualities. Morton defines queer ecology as open to polymorphous and perverse forms of belonging and desire. He writes: ‘‘Tree hugging is indeed a form of eroticism. . . . To contemplate ecology’s unfathomable intimacies is to imagine pleasures that are not hetero-normative, not genital, not geared toward ideologies about where the body stops and starts’’ (2010b, 280). In the early modern period, many authors envisioned forms of intimacy involving botanical entities, plants, and gardens, even if (and perhaps in part because) plants were considered largely nonsexual. While the seventeenth century slowly discovered vegetal sexuality, gardens and plants were often taken for sites of an unsexed yet erotic and productive libidinal economy. In his protoscience fiction Voyages to the Moon and the Sun, Bergerac describes imaginary encounters with fantastic extraterrestrial plants that elude patriarchal social norms and prove to be erotically and affectively seductive while partaking in autonomous, exuberant, and excessive forms of generation. In Britain, as literature and culture scholar Marjorie Swann has argued, the fascination with botanical sexlessness in poems by English poet and satirist Andrew Marvell (1621 1678) and treatises by English physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne (1605 1682) similarly allowed for the creation of an imaginary vegetal realm in which male subjects could find erotic satisfaction. The sexlessness of plants as a source of libidinal pleasure was not explored until the Renaissance. The Hollywood ‘‘plant horror’’ classic The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978), in both its iterations, invokes the realm of the vegetal erotic, which invades and terminates the heterosexual romance plot.

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While the Linnaean system solidly established the sexuality of plants, it also normativized it. Yet in the close relationships among plants, animals, and human beings charted by Charles Darwin, new ideas of queer belonging and desire are born. In the early twentieth century, with the advent of time-lapse photography and the visualization for both scientific and popular audiences of plant movement or tropisms, initially studied by Charles Darwin and his son Francis Darwin (1848 1925), German botanist Julius von Sachs (1832 1897), and others plants come to the forefront of aesthetic and especially cinematic discussion. Plant movement, as revealed by the eye of the camera, is taken to be not only a form of scientific evidence but also an insight into a material reality that does not conform to the established categories of human reason and experience. For French film theorists and filmmakers Jean Epstein (1897 1953) and Germaine Dulac (1882 1942), time-lapse images of plants, especially as shown in the short film La croissance des ve´ge´taux (The Growth of Plants, 1929), by French medical researcher and cinematographer Jean Comandon (1877 1970), inspire a queered perception of reality. In the later part of the twentieth century, gay people’s experiences of AIDS and vulnerability to oppression became a source of critical analysis of the human relationship to nature, including landscapes devastated by deforestation and climate change. Such ‘‘melancholic’’ relations to natural objects can make gardens and even individual plants the archives of traumatic loss. For Mortimer-Sandilands (2010), British filmmaker and author Derek Jarman’s (1942 1994) Dungeness Garden, located next to a nuclear power plant, works to ‘‘queer’’ natural spaces, attests to a libidinal freedom located in the exclusion from normative society, and embraces the wasteland. In his journal chronicles of his experiences in

Jessica Rath, Paragon, from Ripe, 2013 2014. This work was named for the first supermarket variety tomato, in the late 1800s, bred for symmetry and uniformity of color. Blossom end faces up, resembling a human orifice. Custom urethane on ceramic. ª JESSICA RATH

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Dungeness Garden, Jarman integrates historical knowledge of plants with literary quotations and accounts of gardens and gardening, including his own intimate sexual memories. This intertwining of personal sexual history with botanical discourse and history becomes the ordering principle of the garden itself. Jarman’s films, especially The Tempest (1979) and The Garden (1990), similarly weave together images of plants and gardens with botanical metaphors to create queer natural spaces. Scientific practice can also be a source of queer pleasure. Hustak and Myers analyze specific cases of scientific botanophilia, exemplified in the sometimes obsessive botanical passions of Charles Darwin, Stopes, and McClintock, as creating ‘‘affective ecologies’’ that are based on ‘‘pleasure, play, or improvisation’’ (2012, 77). For Hustak and Myers, the nonreproductive involvement of human researchers in vegetal lives generates a set of sensitive and libidinal relationships. In their work, Hustak and Myers make possible an exploration of the ‘‘queer assemblages’’ that plants are often involved in (82). In her biography of McClintock, Evelyn Fox Keller (1936 ), American biologist and feminist critic of science, underscores McClintock’s sudden experience of connection with her research subject (meiosis in fungi) as she is sitting under giant eucalyptus trees on the Stanford campus. In a series of projects, Los Angeles based American artist Jessica Rath investigates the affective, libidinal, and ludic relations among plants and insects, scientists, and consumers. Her exhibitions take me to the apple breeder (2012) and Ripe (2013 2014) explore the effects of desiring human consumers and breeding culture (of apples and tomatoes, respectively) on the evolution of fruit, while A Better Nectar (2015) involves the viewer in the libidinal economy linking bumble bees, plants, and scientists. Both Hustak and Myers’s anthropological account of scientist-observers’ passionate involvement with plants and Rath’s artistic project put into question neo-Darwinian accounts of plants as simply mechanical organisms at the same time that they open up new libidinal pathways connecting people to plants (and other organisms).

BOTANY AND ART The arts can help develop and expand an engagement with plant science that both responds to new discoveries about how plants live and function and poses new questions about the nature of plant life more generally. In 1936 the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its first exhibition devoted to flowers, Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums. While Steichen is perhaps best known as a photographer and painter, he was also a horticulturalist of note, creating delphinium breeds still in use today. His exhibition confronted the viewer with massive stalks of flowers towering over museum visitors and filling the room with a vibrant floral beauty that also struck a note of horror. American artist Heidi Norton (1977 ) has riffed on this early example of bioart (in which artists manipulate live tissues, life-forms, and life processes) in the work The Museum Archive (Dedicated to Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums, MoMA 1936) (2004), which juxtaposes live plants, images from Steichen’s exhibition, and decaying material, among other objects. In Monica Westin’s (2014) interview with Norton and Marder, Norton describes her art as reflecting on the ‘‘perceived ‘stillness’’’ of plants but also their resilience and mutability. Where Steichen stages the delphiniums as beautiful and overwhelming objects, Norton’s work calls into question the status of plant as object its manipulation in scientific, aesthetic, and cultural contexts. In a related context, Rath investigates the forms of desire and even longing that traverse the human relationship to plants. If her exhibition Ripe shows how the human creation of a beautiful but tasteless tomato represents a certain projection of human desire onto a plant

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body, so that ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘nature’’ fully converge, Rath remains attentive in her work not just to human but also to vegetal desire so that plants can be said to be manipulating humans even as humans manipulate them. Contemporary artists’ engagement with plants and plant science has taken on new vigor in the context of ever-worsening climate change. In Archiving Eden: The Vaults (2008 Present), American artist Dornith Doherty’s photographs of seeds, seed banks, and seed vaults speak to the human dependence on plants, without which humans are unable to survive. French artist Mathilde Roussel’s (1983 ) 2010 exhibition Lives of Grass intermingles vegetal and human forms to create bioart; in her work, she shows human figures falling through the air as grass grows on and through them. In her short film Planet Z (2011), Japanese artist and filmmaker Momoko Seto (1980 ) uses time-lapse techniques to make a decaying orange into a new world full of life, conflict, decay, and regeneration. In this film are echoes of early instructional science films, including work by Comandon and British naturalist and nature documentary pioneer Frank Percy Smith (1880 1945) that use time-lapse imaging techniques to reveal the incredible motility (and dramatic potential) inherent in plant life. Yet Seto’s work animates plants in a scenario that evokes the drama of an ecological crisis in which the entire planet participates. These and other artists are inspired by the presence and activity of plants in a variety of settings (including but not limited to the scientific laboratory, the museum, the garden, the supermarket, the orchard, the kitchen, and, of course, experimental and narrative film), but they bring to their work an emphasis on ways in which humans and plants respond and react to one another in a web of relationships that are not always immediately visible but are no less significant for all that. Without reifying or naturalizing the connection between femininity and plant life a cultural association that has been as damaging as it is productive it should be noted that in this context, too, women artists have taken on a particularly important role.

Summary Western botany since the late seventeenth century has analyzed plants as living beings characterized by complex structures and processes. The intensification of scientific awareness of plant life opens up a series of questions for those who approach the plant from within the study of gender and sexuality. Botany as a field reflects societal ideas about gender and sexuality, but it also allows for the development of nonhuman or ‘‘inhuman’’ perspectives on such basic categories of existence as time and space categories that deeply inform any understanding of matter. An analysis of women’s participation in botany reveals both women’s marginalization within science and their ability to respond to the specificity of plant life. The association of women with plants has thus been both deeply productive and damaging. At different historical periods, plants have represented a form of alterity that has inspired the development of queer conceptions of desire and sexuality. Critical reflections on botany in the arts, philosophy, literature, and film have interrogated the specificity of plants and their resemblance to other life-forms; in these contexts, botany participates in the debates within materialist and feminist traditions around the nature of life itself and the relationship of humans to the other creatures that populate the cosmos. Finally, plants can function as figures of resistance to social and economic structures of exploitation; they can also aid materially in developing resistant practices. In their rich variety and diversity, botanical perspectives on life show the importance of the human relationship with plants to the survival and development not just of human bodies but also of human cultures. GENDER: MATTER

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Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.

George, Samantha. Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writ ing 1760 1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. ‘‘The Giant Wistaria.’’ In The Online Archive of Nineteenth Century U.S. Women’s Writings, edited by Glynis Carr, 1998. http://www.facstaff .bucknell.edu/gcarr/19cusww/CPG/GW.html. First pub lished 1891.

Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attach ments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Halle´, Francis. In Praise of Plants. Translated by David Lee. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2002. First published 1999.

de Bergerac, Cyrano. Voyages to the Moon and the Sun. Translated by Richard Aldington. New York: Orion Press, 1962. First published 1657.

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Botanical Society of America. ‘‘What Is Botany?’’ http:// botany.org/Resources/Botany.php.

Holberg, Ludvig. The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground. Translated by James I. McNelis Jr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. First published 1741.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Brancher, Dominique. Quand l’esprit vient aux plantes: Bot anique sensible et subversion libertine (XVIe XVIIe sie`cles). Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2015. Chamovitz, Daniel. What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses. New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012. Darwin, Charles. Insectivorous Plants. London: John Murray, 1875.

Hustak, Carla, and Natasha Myers. ‘‘Involutionary Momen tum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters.’’ Differences 23, no. 5 (2012): 74 118. Huysmans, Joris Karl. Against Nature. Translated by Mar garet Mauldon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. First published 1884. Jahren, Hope. Lab Girl. New York: Knopf, 2016. Jarman, Derek. Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman. New York: Vintage, 1992.

Darwin, Charles. The Power of Movement in Plants. Lon don: John Murray, 1880.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: Freeman/Holt, 1983.

Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden. 2 vols. In The Col lected Writings of Erasmus Darwin, Vols. 1 2. Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. First published 1791.

Kelley, Theresa M. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

Daston, Lorraine J., and Peter Galison. Objectivity. Cam bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.

Kirby, Vicki. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Delaporte, Franc¸ois. Nature’s Second Kingdom: Exploration of Vegetality in the Eighteenth Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. First published 1979.

de la Mettrie, Julien Offray. Man a Machine and Man a Plant. Translated by Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994. First published 1747 1748.

Doyle, Richard M. Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2011. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1970. First published 1966.

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Marder, Michael. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Marder, Michael. Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Meloy, Ellen. ‘‘A Field Guide to Brazen Harlotry.’’ In The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit, 221 255. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.

Schiebinger, Londa L. Plants and Empire: Colonial Biopro specting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Shteir, Ann B. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 1860. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Stopes, Marie. Ancient Plants. London: Blackie and Son, 1910.

Miller, Elaine P. The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.

Swann, Marjorie. ‘‘Vegetable Love: Botany and Sexuality in Seventeenth Century England.’’ In The Indistinct Human in the Renaissance, edited by Vin Nardizzi and Jean E. Freerick, 139 159. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2012.

Miller, T. S. ‘‘Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies.’’ Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 3 (2012): 460 479.

Westin, Monica. ‘‘Heidi Norton and Michael Marder.’’ BOMB, March 24, 2014. http://bombmagazine.org /article/1000078/heidi norton and michael marder.

Mortimer Sandilands, Catriona. ‘‘Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies.’’ In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Pol itics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 331 358. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010a. Morton, Timothy. ‘‘Guest Column: Queer Ecology.’’ PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010b): 278 280. Nealon, Jeffrey T. Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pollan, Michael. ‘‘The Intelligent Plant.’’ New Yorker, December 23, 2013. Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor. Revised by D. J. Enright. 7 vols. New York: The Modern Library, 1992. First published 1913 1927. Richter, Anne. ‘‘The Sleep of Plants.’’ In Sisters of the Revo lution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, 131 136. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015. First published 1967. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Lettres sur la botanique. In Œuvres completes, vol. 4, edited by Roger de Vilmorin, 1149 1197. Paris: E´ditions Gallimard, 1969. Schiebinger, Londa L. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Science. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.

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FI L MS The Garden. Dir. Derek Jarman. 1990. Bleak and lyrical story of a gay couple filmed against the background of Jarman’s garden at Dungeness. The Gardener. Dir. James H. Kay. 1974. Plant horror film focusing on a mysterious but handsome gardener able to communicate with sinister plants. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. 1956. Classic plant horror tale of pod people who take over a small California town. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Philip Kaufman. 1978. Remake of the 1956 film set in San Francisco and incorporating reflections on urban life and late capitalist malaise. La croissance des ve´ge´taux. Dir. Jean Comandon. 1929. Early time lapse film in showing the growth of plants and flowers. Planet Z. Dir. Momoko Seto. 2011. A decaying orange is changed into a new world full of life, conflict, decay, and regeneration using time lapse techniques. The Tempest. Dir. Derek Jarman. 1979. Avant garde reinter pretation of William Shakespeare’s drama. The`mes et variations. Dir. Germaine Dulac. 1928 1929. Experimental short film in which Dulac uses images of machines, dancers, and plants to develop a new theory and representation of movement on screen.

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Water Astrida Neimanis Lecturer, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies University of Sydney, Australia

What is water? This may be an odd way to begin a discussion on water in relation to gender and sexuality studies, but it is a question that certainly matters. Water is, after all, a shapeshifter of the highest order; it is ‘‘transmutable’’ (Somerville 2013, 79) and ‘‘the most elusive and changeable of objects’’ (Strang 2006, 70). Not only is it a ‘‘thing itself’’ a lake, an ocean, a teardrop but also, like amniotic fluid or the primordial soup in which life on the earth ostensibly began, it can bathe other things into being. Alternatively, water may be understood primarily as a medium or a communicator of information like rivers that carry fish, boats, commerce, and cultures or the bodily fluids that carry viruses and bacteria. Water may even be imagined as something that does away with other ‘‘somethings’’ altogether. Water, after all, has been called a universal solvent (even if that is not exactly the case). While its capacity to erase the traces of other elements is one of its chemical properties, this characteristic just as easily applies to floods, rogue waves, and raging storms. Water is also extremely promiscuous. It saturates tissues and landscapes and invites all kinds of other materialities into its own constitution. It can be difficult to figure out where water begins and other matters end. Such observations underscore that what water is at its core is an open question. This mutability is further reinforced by the simple fact that water is defined by its very ability to change: water moves from liquid to solid to gas according to scientifically recognized phase changes. To complicate matters, what water is cannot be separated from what water does that is, how it becomes meaningful to gendered, human bodies in different modes and contexts. Does the word water stress its biochemical function as H2O, which keeps bodies hydrated and blood pumping? Does the term refer to the water that makes up the natural environment providing us with nourishment, serving as a transportation corridor, or offering us recreation? Or is water understood as a highly charged spiritual symbol, a myth bearer and storyteller of both ancient and contemporary cultures a source of life, a carrier of death, an archive of memory, a harbinger of good fortune? Perhaps water is construed as a waste receptacle a dumping ground and thus a hot spot for both environmental pollution and the environmental justice efforts that attempt to stem these flows. Clearly, if water is linked to survival, then humans survive (or not) in more ways than one. Humans need water for biological survival, but as this chapter demonstrates, water is also closely connected to cultural survival and to the ability to live and thrive as gendered beings within relations of social, economic, and symbolic power.

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Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoi, Mermaids, 1871. Mythological figures associated with water are often signs of feminine fertility and creation, but these Slavic Rusalki, like the Sirens of Greek mythology, represent danger and sexual power. HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSH IP LTD / ALAMY

In its varying contexts, water crosses and gathers various disciplines (philosophy, geography, anthropology, cultural studies, science studies, among others) while also connecting many diverse questions relevant for thinking about gender difference, sexuality, bodies, and identities. This chapter begins by examining how water is linked to feminine, masculine, and transgender identities in myths and cultural symbols. It then discusses how water and fluid bodies have informed feminist philosophies. Following this discussion, the chapter explores how water in the context of environmental justice has been taken up in ecofeminist and related approaches and how social relations to water inform gendered subjectivities more broadly. The chapter concludes with an examination of water as relevant to feminist and queer approaches to science studies and, finally, as a key element in indigenous art and activism. A common thread through all of these discussions is the inseparability of water as an idea loaded with symbolic and metaphorical meaning from water as a material entity. Both aspects of water organize human and nonhuman beings according to structures of power. While this chapter draws out some of the nuances in these debates, ultimately it demonstrates that the impossibility of partitioning discourse from matter should not be treated as a problem. Water, in fact, teaches us about the futility of full compartmentalization, that is, of keeping things (bodies, ideas, binary opposites) discretely segregated.

WATERY MYTHS OF THE FEMININE Water is a quotidian matter in daily existences, but water also flows through the heart of creation stories and other founding narratives of human cultures. In these contexts, water often has a strong relation to women and the feminine.

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For example, the image of parting waters figures within a number of creation stories from the Hindu goddess Bindumati, who divides the Ganges, to the Egyptian goddess Isis, who divides the river Phaedrus. Such narratives link water, women, and fertility more generally. Known in one of her aspects as Acuecucyoticihuati, goddess of oceans, the Aztec goddess Chalchiutlicue is associated with fertility and birth, while the Sumero-Babylonian goddess Tiamat and the Hindu goddess Kali are both connected to oceans of menstrual blood. In a Yoruban religious framework, Oshun is the orisha, or goddess, of sweet water and fertility, known to bring health and prosperity, while Yemaya is associated with saltwater and the living ocean; she is mother of all and literally ‘‘the Mother whose children are the fish’’ (West 1996, 197). As American ecofeminist Greta Gaard (1960 ) notes, such ‘‘myths associated women, water, and nature and held all three as sacred sources of creation’’ (Gaard 2001, 160). Drawing on other scholars, such as Austrian-born cultural historian and systems scientist Riane Eisler (1931 ) and American philosopher Karen Warren, Gaard argues that the transition to patriarchal, ‘‘dominator’’ cultures in the West has resulted in the reversal of former reverence for both women and water into what Gaard calls a ‘‘shared subordination’’ (160). In other myths and cosmologies, feminine waters have signaled danger, often in a sexualized form consider the beautiful yet treacherous Sirens of Greek mythology or the Slavic Rusalki, alluring shape-shifters associated with death by drowning. Water as both life giver and life taker is thus commonly associated with a feminine power a power that is arguably devalued or pathologized in contemporary industrialized societies. In gender and sexuality studies, such mythical associations of women and water have at times been the source of celebration and have fueled attempts to reclaim and revalue the power represented by these images. These myths have also, however, given rise to critiques of an essentialist association between women and nature. One could argue that these images reduce women to biological functions as reproducer and sexual object thus reinforcing binaristic understandings of women as either mother/goddess or vamp/temptress. This critique may also be linked to the ongoing association between sexy/fertile women and water in contemporary advertising. The power that a woman holds in such associations is certainly open to debate. Contemporary gender and sexuality studies have been, for the most part, critical of such essentialist gestures. To reduce a woman to her reproductive/sexual biology is problematic because of the troubling symbolic meanings passive, sacrificing, contaminating, erogenous that persistently imbue this biologically essentialist reading. Reclaiming and celebrating mythologized feminine figures and their links to water and nature would invert a binary between men/women, culture/nature, and water/land, yet it would not overturn this binary thinking more generally. The water-power nexus is not the exclusive domain of female deities; think of Poseidon, ancient Greek (male) god of the sea, or even Hapi, the Egyptian god associated with the Nile’s fertile flooding, who with his pendulous breasts and beard might be considered in the contemporary terms of intersexuality and transgender embodiment. Given these counterexamples, a reclamation of the woman-water mythical connection might serve to further entrench an essentialist ‘‘women-water’’ association that does not stand up to close scrutiny. As discussed in further detail in a later section, this critique is linked to a broader suspicion in some gender studies contexts of ecofeminism a critical school of feminist thought that connects the degradation of nature to gender oppression. Ecofeminism is sometimes seen to promote (rather than critique) the mother/woman/nature connection. Ecofeminism, GENDER: MATTER

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however, does not necessarily do this; most ecofeminisms, in fact, reject this kind of essentialism. Nonetheless, because ecofeminism examines nature and gender together with a view to recuperate the value of both, associations between femininity and the natural are hard to eliminate altogether.

WATERY EMBODIMENT IN FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY In the case of water-related deities and myths, feminist inquiry whether in a critical or a celebratory vein is interested in how these stories take up the feminine body’s connection to water. Embodiment is also a key area for concern in feminist philosophy. For the most part, feminist philosophies of embodiment challenge Hapi, the Egyptian god of the Nile. Hapi is often depicted in the Enlightenment idea of a political or ethical subject a transgender form. This is an exception to the feminine avatars of most water related deities. PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC / as an abstract entity. They instead insist that how AL AMY humans are embodied (e.g., as male, female, or trans; as sighted or visually impaired; as white or brown; as youthful or aging; and so on) is closely related to the social, political, and cultural situation and to kinds of knowledge about the world. In this context where embodiment is a crucial determinant of social life, how humans understand the nature of a body deeply influences how they conceive of political subjects and ethical actors. For some feminist philosophers, this has also meant challenging the Enlightenment vision of bodies as individual, separate, and self-sufficient. These feminist philosophers (such as Luce Irigaray and He´le`ne Cixous, discussed below, but also others like Elizabeth Grosz, Rosalind Diprose, and Margrit Shildrick) understand bodies as fundamentally connected to other bodies. Human bodies are extensions of other bodies, to which they are always indebted. This is the case in a very literal and material sense, as pregnancy and lactation clearly demonstrate. Humans are also connected by the bodily and environmental waters that pass between bodies, as is explored at the end of this section. The tradition of ´ecriture fe´minine is a school of late twentieth-century French feminist philosophy that literally means ‘‘women’s writing.’’ E´criture fe´minine sought to translate into text the material difference of the feminine body as experienced by women. In other words, these philosophers looked for a way to write philosophy differently (against the rational, linear, and dry norm of male philosophers) so that it might better correspond to the bodily experience of women. E´criture fe´minine invoked women’s bodies as specifically fluid as a means of interrupting a philosophical tradition that valorized a male (morphological, psychological, symbolic, philosophical) norm as atomistic, discrete, and contained. A key essay in this tradition is one by French feminist and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray (1930 ), ‘‘The Mechanics of Fluids’’ (1985), which counters the phallogocentric privileging (that is, the elevation of the logic of the phallic-symbolic) of solid, discrete matters. She calls out what she refers to as the ‘‘complicity’’ between ‘‘rationality and a mechanics of solids’’ (Irigaray 1985, 107). Fluids, on the contrary, breach borders and invite the confluence and collaboration

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of things; they challenge an ordering of the world according to a logic of separation and selfsufficiency. Both science and psychic symbolic systems grant precedence to solids, she contends, and her essay elaborates feminine embodiment in line with fluid mechanics. Also significant is Irigaray’s Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1991), a philosophical imagined ‘‘love letter’’ to German nineteenth-century Continental philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 1900). Nietzsche is a key figure in the canon of Western philosophy, but he is also known for his antipathy toward women. In Marine Lover, Irigaray challenges him on this by reminding him that he also once inhabited ‘‘the fluid world’’ (Irigaray 1991, 67). Here, Irigaray refers primarily to the mother’s womb and the feminine waters to which Nietzsche owes his own body and being but she also connects these amniotic waters to the larger gestational natural element, the ocean. In highlighting the feminine fluid body, Irigaray critiques Nietzsche (and Western masculinist philosophy more generally) for ignoring and even repudiating the value of women’s bodies and women’s watery labors as also connected to elemental environments. Marine Lover is thus an example of a text that ‘‘writes’’ this fluid, gestational feminine body into a philosophical text. Similarly, Algerian French feminist philosopher He´le`ne Cixous (1937 ) and French feminist philosopher Catherine Cle´ment, writing in ‘‘Sorties’’ (1986), link the mother’s body (mere, in French) to the sea (mer), both imagined as gestational and creative sources. Cixous also attends to the woman writer’s bodily flows the ‘‘white ink’’ (Cixous 1976, 881), for example, that reminds her readers that ‘‘women’s writing’’ is a bodily rather than a purely intellectual endeavour. Postcolonial Vietnamese ´ecriture fe´minine theorist Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1952 ) similarly remarks that writerly creativity draws its corporeal fluidity from images of water ‘‘a deep, subterranean water that trickles in the womb, a meandering river, a flow of life, of words running over or slowly dripping down the pages’’; it is a ‘‘keeping-alive and life-giving water [that] exists simultaneously as the writer’s ink, the mother’s milk, the woman’s blood and menstruation’’ (Trinh 1989, 38). These descriptions all invoke a specifically watery body as the wellspring for new understandings of bodies/subjects as creative and interdependent. Again, some of these philosophers’ descriptions of fluid embodiment have been criticized within gender and sexuality studies as being too biologically essentialist. In other words, there is a concern that too much focus on women’s fluidity tethers feminine bodies to female organs and reproductive sexuality. After all, not all women are mothers, not all women menstruate, and not all women lactate. An appeal to a feminine fluidity and biological matter, however, does not have to be read in this way. In fact, calling attention to the watery matters of bodies can also challenge sex stereotypes. The desire of bodily waters to morph, shape-shift, and facilitate new bodies persistently overflows any attempt at capture. Feminist philosophy in the ´ecriture fe´minine tradition can thus open new ways of thinking about bodies as themselves changeable, flowing beyond their bounds, and ultimately uncontainable (by any theory, no less). Of course, the fluid body does not belong only to woman; just as some water deities are male or transgender, ´ecriture fe´minine also acknowledges (in some places) that watery corporeality applies to bodies of all sexes and genders even if feminine flows have their own specific modalities. Rethinking the lived embodiment of all genders as watery could help negotiate long-standing debates among feminisms whereby commonality (identification) and difference (separation) sometimes seem like an either/or proposition. As watery bodies, humans are not all pooling in some amorphous mass; water rather flows across difference sometimes even making the difference (for example, between those bodies that gestate new bodies within their amniotic fluid and those that do not). Nor does water separate us into GENDER: MATTER

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solipsistic isolation. Water circulates through and between bodies. Human bodies can be understood as the very material evidence that contradicts binaristic reductionism and the fallacy (or phallacy) of masculinist understandings of bodies (see Neimanis 2012). In short, while these feminist philosophies register a metaphorical tone, none describes the body’s fluidity in purely metaphorical terms. If water is a metaphor here, it is one that is always grounded in the material world. The matter of water literally makes possible ways of thinking about the world according to water’s logics of connection, creativity, and exchange.

ECOFEMINISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Connections between patriarchal or phallogocentric understandings of bodies and the world are also relevant for the field of ecofeminism. While ecofeminism has been criticized by some feminists as establishing an essentialist relation between women and nature (evident in formulations like ‘‘Mother Earth’’ or ‘‘Earth Goddesses’’), ecofeminism does not necessarily rely on a static relationship between women’s ‘‘nature’’ and a feminized natural world. Gaard defines ecofeminism as an approach to ‘‘the problems of environmental degradation and social injustice from the premise that how human beings treat nature and each other are inseparably linked’’ (Gaard 2001, 158). Ecofeminism is often aligned with environmental justice movements, but while environmental justice tends to have an activist orientation starting from grassroots experiences, ecofeminism often (but not always) begins from feminist conceptual frameworks that theorize how gender oppression is structured and sustained. Ecofeminist views of water thus consider how an understanding of water aligns with patriarchal worldviews in ways that are both socially and environmentally detrimental. Gaard (2001) points out that water is treated in a dichotomous way in the West once spiritually revered, it is now the receptacle for human wastes and toxins, thus paralleling the hierarchical dualisms of culture/nature, man/woman, reason/emotion, and others. As New Zealander and female human rights and environmental activist Marilyn Waring (1952 ) has observed, water traveling through pipes for the purpose of power generation counts within national economics, but neither women carrying water from wells nor water that sustains a nonhuman ecosystem ‘‘count’’ as having value (Gaard 2001, 161). An ecofeminist analysis, moreover, pays particular attention to intersectionality that is, how racism, classism, and colonialism are also tied to the devaluing of water and women. This goes beyond symbolic connections. In Gaard’s analysis of water, she stresses that material hardships are very real effects of the way water is valued. Megadam building and hydroelectric power generation, displacing indigenous and poor communities in the United States, Canada, India, Finland, and many other countries, illustrate these connections. Gaard describes how the damming of the Columbia River in the American Pacific Northwest, for example, devastated the material and spiritual livelihoods of Native American communities situated near the river while also causing lasting environmental devastation. These issues are still very topical. A major protest camp has been set up in northern British Columbia, Canada, in an attempt to stop progress on Site C of the W. C. B. Bennett Dam on the Peace River. According to the citizens group Council of Canadians, this dam would flood seventy-eight First Nations heritage sites, including burial grounds and places of cultural and spiritual significance. The flooding of the land vegetation would also mean that toxins in the soils would be transmitted to fish and other fauna that provide a staple for First Nations diets; 98 percent of fish sampled from nearby dam reservoirs show mercury levels in excess of levels set by provincial health guidelines.

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A key figure who connects ecofeminism with environmental justice is Indian feminist, activist, physicist, and philosopher Vandana Shiva (1952 ). Shiva has been campaigning for water justice as part of a larger environmental justice and anticorporate globalization agenda for over four decades. In 2002 she published Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, which made explicit connections between water scarcity and contamination, global corporate capitalism, and the erosion of systems that were traditionally managed by women. Shiva joins other debates within gender, development, and globalization studies that often focus on neoliberal practices and decentralized resource management and how they impact women’s access to water. Shiva, however, also makes the important connection of these questions to the erosion of beliefs that understood (feminine) entities, like the river Ganges, as sacred. In other words, like other ecofeminists, Shiva links degradation of the environment to both material and symbolic patriarchal systems of power. In Shiva’s words, for example, the scientific revolution that ‘‘transformed nature from terra mater into a machine and a source of raw material’’ reflects the historical, material, and ideological structures of patriarchy (Shiva 1989, xiv). She is critical of science and development programs in particular. Although ‘‘they are thought to be class, culture and gender neutral’’ (xiv), Shiva’s research in India shows that this is not the case. Her work on water continually reveals the way women bear the brunt of many ill-founded ‘‘development projects,’’ from deforestation to dam building to shrimp farming. As Shiva’s work confirms, water is both an ecofeminist and an environmental justice concern, because the social relationship of human species to water is gendered. According to UNICEF, women and girls in developing countries spend around 200 million hours every day collecting water in places where local potable water is not available. In 76 percent of households that UNICEF surveyed, the task of collecting water fell to women and children, and girls are more than two times likelier to be responsible for this job than boys. These disparities largely persist in industrialized settings as well, where accessibility issues in terms of water are often economic. As reported by the Canadian National Network on Environments and Women’s Health, ‘‘As the more poorly paid of the two sexes, women bear the impact of increases in water costs’’ (Hamm 2009, 14). In many if not most places in the world, women bear a disproportionate burden of water-related work: procuring clean water for cooking and drinking (walking long distances, waiting in long lines, allocating sufficient funds from the grocery budget); washing bodies, clothes, and dishes; and caring for children or elderly who require clean water. Together, these social realities explain why water privatization and provision also are gender studies issues, as disadvantage is something women disproportionately have to deal with. At the same time, because of this close social relationship to water, many women have acquired knowledge about water management and particular insights into water justice remedies. Work within ecofeminism and environmental justice focuses on women’s leadership and not only on their vulnerability. For example, Shiva has written extensively about the contemporary Chipko women’s movements in India. In 1986 rural women in the Doon Valley of the Himalayas erected a blockade on the banks of Sinsyaru Khala, a stream that had been severely degraded by mining operations. Other streams in the areas upon which rural life depended had completely dried up. Shiva writes of the work of a particular activist: ‘‘Women like Itwari Devi who co-habitate with the elements, who participate in nature’s cycles, who watch and experience nature’s destruction in their everyday lives even while they produce sustenance with nature, have a kind and level of knowledge that no Western-trained technocrat can have access to’’ (Shiva 1989, 208). Or as Devi herself argues: ‘‘We watch our GENDER: MATTER

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Water protest in Mumbai, India, May 17, 2016. Women, like these protestors in Mumbai, India, are at the forefront of many environmental justice actions against the commodification and contamination of water resources. Women may not be ‘‘naturally’’ better environmental stewards, but their disproportionate social responsibilities for domestic work means that they often experience water hardship most acutely. AP IMAG ES / RAJANISH KAKADE

streams renew themselves and we drink their clear and sparkling water and that gives us Shakti [the female principle of divine energy]. . . . That is why ‘primitive’ ‘backward’ women who do not buy their needs from the market but produce them themselves are leading Chipko. Our power is nature’s power, our shakti comes from pakriti [nature]’’ (quoted in Shiva 1989, 208 209). In quoting Devi, Shiva provides an implicit, ironic counter to problematic stereotypes of the essentialized ‘‘Third World Woman’’ who needs help and knowledge from the West. Even if Devi’s sentiments sound rather essentialist, they recognize the important material relation that women have to water management, which can be magnified in nonindustrialized settings. Devi’s words also crucially emphasize that water is not a matter that can be known only through Western science, engineering, and other quantifiable forms of knowledge about this ‘‘resource.’’ Knowing water and the human relation to it springs from a multitude of cultural sources and knowledge systems.

WATER RELATIONS AND GENDERED SUBJECTS This environmental justice work can be read productively alongside the work of feminist critical geographers and ethnographers who elaborate the ways in which gendered subjectivities are produced not only by social configurations of power but also by the material configurations of one’s environment. UK-based anthropologist Veronica Strang has written

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extensively, for example, on water’s key role in how different groups of water users negotiate identity and agency in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Strang’s research foregrounds how these identities are connected to gendered and racialized understandings of nature and water, as is particularly evident in her essay ‘‘Lording It Over the Goddess: Water, Gender and Human-Environmental Relations’’ (2014). Similarly, US-based professor of geography and gender studies Farhana Sultana’s (2009) ethnographic research in rural Bangladesh explores how gendered subjectivities are both reinforced and challenged, as villagers negotiate access to safe drinking water amid an escalating crisis of arsenic contamination in underground aquifers. Also in Bhopal, India several decades after the Union Carbide explosion that poisoned the air and killed thousands of people groundwater contamination is seriously compromising women’s reproductive health. As with the women of Chipko, the porous relation of women’s bodies to toxic waters has given rise to specific activist subjectivities (see Spiegel 2013). Such scholarship reminds us that gendered subjects are also, in part, created through ‘‘physical location, hydrogeological conditions and spatial relations vis-a-vis water’’ (Sultana 2009, 428). Water itself is thus not really the object of these inquiries; rather they explore water as a catalyst or determinant in social (gendered) relations. As in the feminist philosophies cited, the physical characteristics of water (of flow and interconnection, e.g.) are also examined in order to guide new ways of framing relationships and responses to problems. Dutch ethnographers Rhodante Ahlers and Margreet Zwarteveen explore how neoliberal global water resource management has been detrimental to human and geophysical bodies of water. Their argument underscores the material characteristics of water as salient for rethinking these policies: neoliberal regimes, they assert, ‘‘reify and reproduce boundaries . . . between the natural and the social, nature and human, or between the private and the public,’’ but the material logic of water challenges these discrete separations (Ahlers and Zwarteveen 2009, 410). Attention to water’s material capacities thus informs a new way of thinking about subjectivity in collective rather than individualist terms. Subjectivity is formed, moreover, not within an exclusively human psychosocial domain but comes about through entanglement in a material world. While women are most often associated with water-related tasks as already described a notable exception to this generalization is boating and seafaring, which historically have been mostly male domains. Theories of masculinity, for example, have interesting things to say about masculine identity in novels like Moby-Dick (1851). Heroism and hubris are relevant in equal measures and frame masculinity in relation to water as representative of an element larger than life and more powerful than human beings. In this sense, the matter of water (as dangerous, ominous, and threatening but also needing to be tamed) calls out certain kinds of masculine subjectivities. Zwarteveen’s work also pays attention to ‘‘the construction of gendered power and hegemonic masculinities’’ in relation to water practices such as irrigation management (Zwarteveen 2011, 40). While women may bear a large burden of labor in relation to water, men’s roles in communities are also negotiated in relation to their control over water resources. In other words, such exceptions still prove the general rule: the human relation to water in everyday life and environments is strongly gendered in one way or another. Men’s closer relationship to water in terms of swimming and boating reveals another way in which gendered subjects are differently affected by watery matters this time in relation to water and weather disasters. As North American global environmental policy scholar Joni Seager notes, ‘‘Disaster is seldom gender neutral’’ (Seager 2006, 2). Drawing on United Nations data, she reminds us that in the 1991 Bangladesh floods, five times as many women died as men, and in the 2004 Southeast Asia tsunami, women’s death rates were three GENDER: MATTER

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to four times higher than men’s. One reason, in addition to responsibilities for dependent children and the elderly, is women’s lack of swimming experience and knowledge and their lack of access to boats. In other words, when water is a dangerous threat to terrestrial communities, women bear the brunt. Explicitly noticing, explaining, and addressing these dimensions is a key task for gender studies. The material consequences of these water-related disasters have another, incredible dimension worth considering from a gender studies perspective. As reported by a 2014 study of the most damaging recent US hurricanes by the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, those with female names killed almost twice as many people as those with male names. The study concluded that the threat of hurricanes with female names is simply not taken as seriously. One popular photograph of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, mentioned at the Terra Daily blogging site, shows graffiti that reads, ‘‘Fuck you Whore Hurricane Katrina’’ (Terra Daily 2005) again suggesting that gendered meanings transit swiftly from human to nonhuman worlds. Perhaps this is the contemporary twist on the ‘‘dangerous’’ (and even sexualized) female associated with water and nature, such as the Sirens or Rusalki. In contemporary industrialized societies, the symbolic power of the women-water nexus has been so devalued and sexism so ingrained that this inverted symbolism is killing us. Again, in the matter of water, symbolic and material effects are closely imbricated.

WATER, TRANS-CORPOREALITY, AND THE FEMINIST NEW MATERIALISMS Considerations of contaminated waters have also led to pathbreaking gender and sexuality studies scholarship that is sometimes referred to as material feminisms or feminist new materialisms scholarship that seeks to understand matter in dynamic, theoretically enriching ways rather than relegating it to the realm of a static, essentialist biologism. American feminist theorist Stacy Alaimo’s work in the field of environmental and sustainability studies is notable in this regard. Like the critical geographers and environmental justice researchers cited previously, in Bodily Natures (2010) Alaimo traces links between regimes of power, discourse, and materiality in terms of toxins that travel through bodies. She refers to these transits of matter across and between different bodies and environments as trans-corporeality. Alaimo’s attention to trans-corporeal bodily waters is salient in her discussions of the ‘‘material memoirs’’ of American poet Susan Antonetta (1956 ) and American biologist Sandra Steingraber (1959 ). For both of these women grappling with sick bodies and contaminated environments, their bodily waters link them to communities beyond their own selves. Antonetta, watching her blood being collected for yet another battery of medical tests, begins to see in these vials ‘‘salt water, red cells, ancestors braided and escaping’’ (quoted in Alaimo 2010, 102). Such considerations are echoed by Steingraber, who in her memoir of cancer and contamination reimagines her own body as an extended ecological community during an amniocentesis procedure: ‘‘I drink water and it becomes blood plasma. . . . Before it is drinking water, amniotic fluid is the creeks and rivers that fill reservoirs. . . . The nectar gathered by bees and hummingbirds is in this tube. Whatever is inside the hummingbird eggs is also inside my womb’’ (quoted in Alaimo 2010, 104). In embedding one’s subjectivity into an ancestral past and an ecologically extended present and future, Alaimo argues that the sense of who and what humans are becomes

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complicated: within this ‘‘vast, coextensive materiality’’ the ‘‘self becomes unrecognizable’’ (2010, 24). This does not mean the self disappears but rather that the self disperses through communal waterways. As noted previously, the matter of water is active in the development and negotiation of gendered subjectivities. Here, the concept of trans-corporeality highlights how the matter of water can spur new feminist understandings of what ‘‘the subject’’ consists of in the first place. This is no longer the ontologically discrete and abstract subject of liberal individualism but rather an extended subject. Aided by the matter of water, ‘‘the subject’’ disperses beyond her own skin. Some work in gender and sexuality studies also highlights the links between transcorporeality in terms of environmental justice and the philosophies of fluid embodiment already discussed. Canadian feminist theorist Astrida Neimanis, for example, joins these insights to suggest a theory of ‘‘bodies of water’’ that, like Irigaray’s and Cixous’s work, challenges the Western liberal ideal of individualism. Echoing the objectives of a transcorporeal approach, Neimanis’s work also rejects the long-standing Western cultural paradigm of dualistic thinking that positions ‘‘nature’’ as opposite to and separate from ‘‘culture.’’ Water is an active participant in breaking down these boundaries. In ‘‘Hydrofeminism’’ (2012) and ‘‘Feminist Subjectivity, Watered’’ (2013), for example, Neimanis offers accounts that highlight the links between how bodies are understood within feminist philosophies and the effects of these understandings on environmental waters. If bodies are understood as leaky, with material connections to rivers, lakes, and oceans, then humans can develop different ethical and political relationships to those waters; they are not part of a separate environment ‘‘out there’’ but a part of us too. Caring for waters means caring for humans and vice versa. Thus, while French ´ecriture fe´minine uses the idea of fluid bodies to suggest a specific kind of feminist ethics, Neimanis’s philosophy of embodiment links more directly to the environmental questions raised by Shiva, Alaimo, and others. Material feminisms do not describe water as empirical fact, nor do they treat it as pure metaphor. Water, as these feminist scholars argue, is a physical element in bodily and planetary well-being, and it saturates ethical and political concepts and imaginaries. Indeed, material feminisms have been particularly instrumental in demonstrating how forms of matter, like water, are not just the ‘‘objects’’ of study. Humans learn from water and think with it in order to generate new theoretical insights.

TOXIC FLOWS AND QUEER ECOLOGIES While water toxicity has been a crucial question for activists and scholars concerned with how such toxins affect women in specific ways, toxic waters have also been a site for inquiry within feminist science and technology studies (STS) and in queer perspectives within feminist STS in particular. Scholar of environmental science and policy Giovanna Di Chiro’s (2010) work on ‘‘sex panics’’ is exemplary in this regard. While toxic accumulation is not specific to aquatic species (as toxins bioaccumulate right up the food chain), water is the place where much of human toxic dumping occurs. Coupled with water’s specific chemical properties and its role as a habitat for aquatic creatures, this toxic dumping means that particularly strong changes with respect to sexual morphology and endocrinology have been observed in fish, frogs, and other aquatic species. In some environmental justice work, these changes (particularly as they move up the food chain to affect people) are presented as a troubling question particularly for men who GENDER: MATTER

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are becoming ostensibly ‘‘feminized’’ through the work of endocrine disruptors that change hormonal chemistry. Di Chiro argues that these concerns, however, too often morph into ‘‘sex panics,’’ or fears concerning loss of masculinity and the ‘‘threat’’ that human and nonhuman bodies will become transgender. Certainly, the influx of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other toxins into waterways and human bodies needs to be addressed on many levels. What if these phenomena were also an opportunity to challenge the heteronormative and transphobic assumptions that undergird these debates? In other words, rather than expressing alarm and disgust at the phenomenon of transgendered creatures often represented in thinly veiled homophobic and transphobic terms Di Chiro and others advocate focusing on corporate and government accountability for environmental pollution. Work such as Di Chiro’s is sometimes framed as a subfield of environmental cultural studies called ‘‘queer ecologies.’’ Queer ecologies scholarship brings ecological concerns together with sexual justice concerns. This means challenging how homophobic and heteronormative values and practices inform views and assumptions about what is ‘‘natural’’ or what properly belongs in nature. In Di Chiro’s work specifically, the matter of water articulates queer justice politics with both critical animal studies and environmental justice. Water can be considered a medium, or a milieu, where these questions can converge.

AQUATIC APES AND HUMAN EVOLUTION Within science studies, water has also been instrumental in developing feminist perspectives on human evolution. In the 1960s British evolutionary biologist Sir Alister Hardy (1896 1985) offered a theory of human evolution that was subsequently picked up, further developed, and championed by Elaine Morgan (1920 2013). Morgan, a longtime homemaker and trained journalist, became a leading proponent of what is known as the ‘‘aquatic ape theory.’’ This theory challenged conventional theories of human evolution by arguing that human ancestors were not, in fact, savanna-dwelling apes that ‘‘came down from the trees’’ but instead coastal-dwelling apes that developed specific bodily capacities thanks to their semiaquatic existences. Morgan went on to write numerous books on the subject, including The Descent of Woman (1972) and The Aquatic Ape (1982). According to the savanna theory, major climatic changes resulted in the dwindling of the massive African forests and subsequently gave rise to apes as plains-dwelling hunters who used tools and weapons, ran on two legs, and eventually became ‘‘man.’’ Morgan was skeptical of this theory. Particularly by carefully considering the place of females in evolution, Morgan suggested that water could explain some important differences between humans and existing apes many of which seemed strange, given the exceptionally close genetic alliances. These differences include structural differences in skeletons, muscles, skin, and brains; differences in posture and locomotion; differences in social organization; and differences in speech and specific intellectual capacities. Moreover, humans (unlike apes) give birth to hairless babies who can swim. Humans have an innate diving reflex, and adults are mostly hairless (except on the head) and have large deposits of subcutaneous fat and a propensity for face-to-face copulation. In Morgan’s hypothesis, instead of being hunters of the savanna, some fledgling hominids became semiaquatic coastal dwellers. They spent their days diving and swimming and living along the pebbly shores of these vast bodies of water that existed in Africa at the

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time. This proximity to water, Morgan suggests, explains human differences from primates. In water, instead of body hair humans needed a cushion of subcutaneous insulation. Females retained their thick tresses (allowing it to grow thicker during pregnancy) so that their infants could hold on while mothers paddled in the sea. In water, scent signals lose their usefulness, and subtle visual cues are obscured; therefore, vocal chords developed. Perhaps like all other sea mammals, thwarted by gravitational challenges, these apes developed a tendency to have sex face-to-face, clinging to their partners. Perhaps humans developed balance and bipedality as they waded into increasingly deep water. Because of the fossil record gap, neither the aquatic ape theory nor the savanna theory can be irrefutably proved. Morgan, however, maintains that the aquatic ape theory simply makes more sense. It requires fewer stretches of the imagination and fewer instances of convoluted logic, and not least it takes child care and interdependence more seriously. While Morgan’s theories were initially scorned within the scientific community, more recently evolutionary biologists have been returning to the aquatic ape theory with keen interest (while others remain fervent detractors). Whether or not Morgan’s aquatic ape theory is the right one may not be the point. More saliently, it demonstrates that paying attention to gender and water (two elements undervalued and misused within a patriarchal imaginary) can initiate creative thinking and offer new perhaps even better explanations for why human beings have become what they are. More specifically, by attending to water as a dwelling space, gender differences can be highlighted and taken seriously. Harking back to Di Chiro’s work on toxic ecologies, water can be considered an environment where ‘‘queer’’ stories literally and figuratively flourish. Here, queer is intended in its broadest sense, to indicate those stories that problematize an accepted ‘‘normal.’’

INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVES: WATER IS LIFE Another key, but often marginalized, source for thinking about water in relation to gender studies can be found in the scholarly, activist, and creative work of indigenous women in settler-colonial contexts. This work expresses understandings of and relations to water that provide urgent alternatives to the resource-based, instrumentalized view that dominates thinking and acting in Western contemporary contexts. In indigenous work, the colonization of water is directly and explicitly linked to the colonization of indigenous lands and bodies. As Canadian Anishnaabe scholar and activist Deborah McGregor writes, water is not just an environmental concern; it is a matter of cultural survival. . . . Among Native peoples, water is recognized as the lifeblood of the earth (a living and conscious being). In turn, water is therefore the lifeblood of people in numerous ways (physically, mentally/intellectually, spiritually and emotionally). Water is integrally tied to the cultural survival of people. First Nations activists who have formed alliances to advocate and ‘‘speak for the water’’ are at the same time resisting the genocide of their people. (McGregor 2009, 37) These sentiments, echoed but also nuanced in different ways among indigenous peoples from all planetary corners, confirm water as a vital element for a multifaceted understanding of ‘‘survival.’’ From one perspective, it is problematic to separate these indigenous, aboriginal, and First Nations approaches to water from other discussions of embodiment, ecofeminism, or environmental justice struggles. Indigenous women have certainly been at the vanguard on GENDER: MATTER

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all counts, modeling sustainable and creative responses to water from which others might learn. (Shiva’s accounts of the Chipko movement in India present one example.) However, these contributions are addressed specifically here in part because their context illuminates a clear connection between settler colonialism (with its attendant patriarchal institutions and worldviews) and water justice. Moreover, it should be noted that the indigenous women listed in this section may not identify as feminist and may even question the concept of feminism, because it has historically been monopolized by white, middle-class women and their often very different concerns. Indeed, in this context water is pivotal in underscoring a key feminist debate, namely, the question of the extent to which mainstream feminism includes and learns from indigenous feminism. To what extent does mainstream feminism also serve as a kind of colonization of ideas (see, e.g., Smith 2005)? Leaving aside for the moment these important debates, the diverse work of indigenous women and its attention to water, coloniality, sexual difference, and gendered relations must be noted. Creative expressions are a key part of these contributions. This includes the poetry of Canadian writer and educator Jeanette Armstrong (1948 ), for whom water is ‘‘a welling spring,’’ ‘‘awakening cells’’ and ‘‘to remember’’ (Armstrong 2006, 18) invoking a cosmology that prefigures some of the connections drawn by the philosophers of ´ecriture fe´minine spoken of previously. Canadian Anishnaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s (1960 ) performance piece Fountain Canada’s selection for its pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale connects colonial incursions into a country’s waterways to the blood of that land’s first peoples but also to a gendered burden related to water. In this video installation, Belmore films herself, a contemporary indigenous woman, trying to heave buckets of water out of the sea. At the end of the clip, the bucket is thrown at the viewer (the camera); instead of water, thick red blood drips down the screen. Here, Belmore links the practical issues of water-quality problems in indigenous territories to destruction of Native waterways through mining and damming to symbols of water and blood as marking the colonization of indigenous bodies and lands. The video’s concluding gesture prompts spectators to question how they also are implicated in these acts of colonization. Activism is another key (but never fully separable) dimension of this work. In North America, Native American midwife and environmentalist Katsi Cook (1952 ) spearheaded the mother’s milk project, which made powerful connections between colonial incursion, industrial wastes dumped into waterways, and toxic breast milk. In Canada’s Great Lakes region, Grandmother Josephine Mandamin is one of several indigenous grandmothers whose arduous water walks pay homage to the freshwater that sustains us all. For Mandamin and others, this action is part of their duty as female elders and custodians of the water. In an Australian context, ethnographer Margaret Somerville’s (1942 ) collaboratively researched Water in a Dry Land (2013) offers important research on water as a vital part of every aspect of existence material, spiritual, cultural, economic for Aboriginal cultures. Somerville’s research is strongly anchored in her collaboration with Aboriginal artist and scholar Chrissiejoy Marshall. Somerville’s collaborative work of ‘‘thinking through country’’ demonstrates the potential of water to bridge indigenous and nonindigenous methods and understandings of place. She writes: Water potentially plays a crucial role in moving beyond hierarchical binaries of thought that separate nature and culture, indigenous and nonindigenous precisely because of the qualities of flow, omnipresence and transmutability. . . . Through water we are mutually implicated with other humans, with more-than-human

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others, and with the fabric of the world. Stopping the flow of water in the world has an equal and opposite effect, it blocks the flow of cultural knowledge both literally and metayphysically. (2013, 83) Somerville’s work, drawing on Marshall’s important contributions, reminds us that water helps us develop different kinds of ethical relationships with others. However, water in such contexts is not only symbolic. It is also connected to everyday, contemporary struggles for survival particularly in such a dry land as Australia. These artistic, activist, and scholarly contributions, as in other areas of gender studies, underscore that in the matter of water, material realities and symbolic language and meaning are inseparable. However, these indigenous works specifically connect this realization to the pressing question of ongoing and unequal relations of colonialism. As Okanagan Secwepemc filmmaker and scholar Dorothy Christian and Chinese Canadian poet Rita Wong (1968 ) remind us in their essay in Thinking with Water (2013), decolonization not only includes but indeed demands that humans also decolonize the human relation to water.

Summary Because much work within feminism and gender studies has been committed to challenging binaristic worldviews, thinking with the matter of water has much to offer these disciplines. Water is certainly a form of matter humans need for survival, but water is also an idea that irrigates the imagination and sustains cultures and worldviews no less important for survival. One of the tensions within gender and sexuality studies concerning the matter of water has to do with the way water and fluidity are closely tethered to femininity. Thus, water can be complicit in reifying essentialist notions of women’s bodies and women’s connections to nature. These debates are implicitly or explicitly taken up in gender studies disciplines, such as philosophy, environmental studies, anthropology, and science studies. However, biological essentialism does not have to be the only way to understand women’s relationship to water. Water and its physical properties of flow and connection can also help make room for new understandings of embodiment, subjectivity, ethics, and socially acquired forms of knowledge. This chapter does not seek to answer the question of whether or not women are more (symbolically or materially) connected to water. It does, however, suggest that water in whatever manifestation offers a mode of thinking that can move us beyond such impasses.

Bibliography Ahlers, Rhodante, and Margreet Zwarteveen. ‘‘The Water Question in Feminism: Water Control and Gender Inequities in a Neo liberal Era.’’ Gender, Place, and Cul ture 16, no. 4 (2009): 409 426.

Belmore, Rebecca. Fountain. Video installation. Venice Biennale, Canadian Pavilion. Venice, 2005.

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Christian, Dorothy, and Rita Wong. ‘‘Untapping Watershed Mind.’’ In Thinking with Water, edited by Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, 232 253. Montreal, Canada: McGill Queens University Press, 2013.

Armstrong, Jeanette. ‘‘Water Is Siwlkw.’’ In Water and Indig enous Peoples, edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Moe Chiba, and Douglas Nakashima, 18 21. Paris: UNESCO, 2006.

Cixous, He´le`ne. ‘‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’’ Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875 893.

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Cixous, He´le`ne, and Catherine Cle´ment. ‘‘Sorties: Out and Out; Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.’’ In The Newly Born Woman, translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: Univer sity of Minnesota Press, 1986. Di Chiro, Giovanna. ‘‘Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco Normativity.’’ In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer Sandilands and Bruce Ericksson, 199 230. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Gaard, Greta. ‘‘Women, Water, and Energy: An Ecofeminist Approach.’’ Organization and Environment 14, no. 2 (2001): 157 172. Hamm, Susanne. The Gendered Health Effects of Chronic Low Dose Exposures to Chemicals in Drinking Water. Toronto: National Network on Environments and Wom en’s Health, 2009. Irigaray, Luce. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans lated by Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jung, Kiju, Sharon Shavitt, Madhu Viswanathan, and Joseph M. Hilbe. ‘‘Female Hurricanes Are Deadlier Than Male Hurricanes.’’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (2014): 8782 8787. McGregor, Deborah. ‘‘Honouring All Relations: An Anish naabe Perspective on Environmental Justice.’’ In Speak ing for Ourselves: Environmental Justice in Canada, edited by Julian Agyeman, Peter Cole, Randolph Haluza Delay, and Pat O’Riley, 27 41. Vancouver: Uni versity of British Columbia Press, 2009. Morgan, Elaine. The Aquatic Ape. London: Souvenir Press, 1982. Morgan, Elaine. The Descent of Woman. London: Souvenir Press, 1972.

Thought and Practice, edited by Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Soderback, 85 99. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Seager, Joni. ‘‘Noticing Gender (or Not) in Disasters.’’ Geo forum 37, no. 1 (2006): 2 3. Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. London: Zed Books, 1989. Shiva, Vandana. Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit. London: Pluto Press, 2002. Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. New York: South End Press, 2005. Somerville, Margaret. Water in a Dry Land: Place Learning through Art and Story. London: Routledge, 2013. Spiegel, Jennifer B. ‘‘Subterranean Flows: Water Contamina tion and the Politics of Visibility after the Bhopal Disaster.’’ In Thinking with Water, edited by Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, 84 103. Montreal, Can ada: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2013. Strang, Veronica. ‘‘Aqua Culture: The Flow of Cultural Mean ings in Water.’’ In Water: Histories, Cultures, Ecologies, edited by Marnie Leybourne and Andrea Gaynor, 68 80. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006. Strang, Veronica. ‘‘Lording It Over the Goddess: Water, Gender, and Human Environmental Relations.’’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 30, no. 1 (2014): 83 107. Sultana, Farhana. ‘‘Fluid Lives: Subjectivity, Gender, and Water Management in Bangladesh.’’ Gender, Place, and Culture 16, no. 4 (2009): 427 444. Terra Daily. ‘‘Orleans Waters Cede Foul, Decrepit Waste land.’’ September 10, 2005. http://www.terradaily.com /2005/050910100644.k08c0lmt.html. Trinh, T. Minh ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postco loniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Neimanis, Astrida. ‘‘Feminist Subjectivity, Watered.’’ Femi nist Review 103, no. 1 (2013): 23 41.

West, Alan. ‘‘The Stone and Its Images: The Poetry of Nancy Morejon.’’ Studies in 20th Century Literature 20, no. 1 (1996): 193 219.

Neimanis, Astrida. ‘‘Hydrofeminism; or, On Becoming a Body of Water.’’ In Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies, and Subjectivities in Feminist

Zwarteveen, Margreet. ‘‘Questioning Masculinities in Water.’’ Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 18 (2011): 40 48.

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CHAPTER 13

Environment Rebecca R. Scott Associate Professor, Department of Sociology University of Missouri, Columbia

People in contemporary European and North American societies often imagine the physical environment as a passive backdrop for human social and cultural life, as if human beings were only coincidentally attached to the earth. However, human beings are part of the planet’s biosphere and are inextricably connected to the material environment through our bodies, cultures, and livelihoods (means of making a living). Materialist environmental feminists are concerned with the substance of human bodies, cultures, and economies and examine how networks of living and nonliving matter tangibly express gender and other social relations. Although sociologists often classify gender as a cultural phenomenon, as opposed to a ‘‘real’’ or material one, this chapter suggests that gender inequality is materially expressed in economic practices with environmental consequences. New materialist thought takes into account the vitality of matter, that is, the influence of nonhuman nature on experience. In other words, the physical environment (nonhuman nature) affects the historical development of human categories, such as gender. Rejecting the human-centered view of nature as a fixed and timeless backdrop, feminist scholars Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman argue that ‘‘nature is agentic it acts, and those actions have consequences for both the human and nonhuman world’’ (2008, 5). Indigenous science studies scholar Kim TallBear (2015) argues that American (settler) society not only marginalizes indigenous people and nonhumans but also devalues matter more generally. The assumed separation between humans and the environment, often referred to as human/nature dualism, obscures much of the materiality of society. For example, despite Americans’ reputation for ‘‘materialism,’’ in the sense of buying things (consumption), they seem largely uninterested in the actual matter of that consumption, that is, how things are made and where they go when thrown away. Industrial development produces not only iPhones, electricity, and other commodities but also garbage, toxins, and environmental destruction. If understood narrowly as ‘‘environmental’’ problems, these other, less desirable industrial products may be forgotten or dismissed as the relatively insignificant side effects of progress. Conceptualizing humans and their activity as in relationship with the biophysical earth makes clear how industrial production generates human and nonhuman suffering along with commodities, services, and convenience. Industrial production requires some amount of sacrifice, ranging from workers’ energy or pain to injury or even death. In addition, many of the undesirable products of industrialization (e.g., ozone depletion, global warming, endocrine-disrupting chemicals) are the unintended consequences of processes that escape human

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control. Acknowledging this forces a reckoning with the limits of human agency as well as with the vitality, or agency, of nonhuman matter (Bennett 2010). This chapter maps the connections between matter, gender, and the environment using the example of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR) in West Virginia, United States, and by connecting this process to other relevant examples. The chapter begins with a brief overview of MTR and consideration of coalfield environmentalism as an example of an environmental justice movement. Mining is a highly gendered economic and physical practice, making it an evocative site for exploring the materiality of gender and the environment. The chapter discusses embodied workers, families, and communities; their livelihoods; and the environmental effects of MTR. The chapter then explores how the practice of mining expresses particular ideas about the relationship between humans and nature. This approach requires a ‘‘symmetrical’’ examination of extraction that includes both the biophysical or geologic effects of mining and the human social and political relations that accompany it (Latour 1993, 24). This part of the chapter explores how mining simultaneously reproduces human inequalities and (destructive) environmental relations. Finally, the chapter explores trans-corporeality. Trans-corporeality is a framework for challenging human/nature dualism by emphasizing the webs of interconnection that flow between human bodies and nonhuman nature (Alaimo 2010, 2). For example, mining is a network of human practices and biophysical matter. In the words of science studies scholar Donna Haraway, the mining system is part of a particular ‘‘natureculture’’ (2008, 39), a network of human and nonhuman relations that has specific effects on human biology and nonhuman matter. The politics of mining and the environment reflect these effects.

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL COAL MINING IN WEST VIRGINIA In 1998 an enormous earthmoving machine called a dragline, tall as a skyscraper and known locally as Big John, sat immobilized on a newly flattened mountaintop above the town of Blair, West Virginia. Its stories-high crane occupied the empty space where a forested mountain ridge had formerly existed. This was the site of one of the first major battles in West Virginia against mountaintop removal mining. The almost cartoonishly named Big John, a name that exemplifies the association of mining and technology with masculinity, was too large to move without first being dismantled. ‘‘He’’ loomed over Blair for months, while a lawsuit was argued. The Arch Coal company’s MTR mine in Blair was eventually stopped, but not before the town was destroyed. As recounted in Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields (Scott 2010), Big John and the other enormous equipment used in MTR mines have transformed what it means for mining to be ‘‘masculine.’’ Underground mining has long been considered an expression of extraordinary physical strength on the part of a male miner. In an MTR mine, the masculinity of mining is rearticulated through the association of masculinity with immensely powerful technology (80). An intensive form of surface mining that began in the 1970s, MTR escalated in the 1990s (Fox 1999). MTR is a ruthlessly efficient mining technique from the point of view of the mining companies, because it saves time and money. It looks much less efficient from the point of view of local communities, who live with the environmental effects. MTR starts with clear-cutting the forest from the mine site. Next, large amounts of explosives loosen the rocks and soil above the coal seam. This ‘‘overburden’’ is pushed over the side of the mountain and

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An explosive is detonated at a surface mining operation in the Appalachian Mountains, Wise County, Virginia, April 16, 2012. Using explosives and giant equipment, miners remove the rocks and soil above the coal seam in a mountaintop removal mine, radically transforming the landscape. M ARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES

formed into terraced ‘‘valley fills.’’ Meanwhile, enormous excavators remove the coal. This process can continue downward as long as there are recoverable seams, dismantling the mountain like a layer cake, flattening and homogenizing the landscape. Scattered across the transformed landscape of the mine, retaining ponds of coal slurry (a liquid by-product laced with heavy metals), held back by valley fills, threaten residents below with toxic floods. A 2009 study commissioned by the group Appalachian Voices found that more than a million acres of the central Appalachian region (in the states of West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee) had been mined. The vast expanses of active and reclaimed MTR mines are visible via Google Earth’s satellite imagery. Indicating the speed and scale of this transformation of the landscape, a coal company president commented to a school group touring a mine, ‘‘We need to redo the topographic maps every two years’’ (Scott 2010, 86).

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Multiple grassroots organizations have joined together to fight MTR in West Virginia, including Appalachian Voices, Friends of the Mountains, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Coal River Mountain Watch, and Keeper of the Mountains. These groups reflect the characteristics of environmental justice activism in the United States and around the world. In contrast to the focus on wilderness preservation of the mainstream or traditional American environmental movement, environmental justice activists define the environment as the place ‘‘where we live, work, play, and worship’’ (Stein 2004, 1). The environmental GENDER: MATTER

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justice movement is largely concerned with the unequal distribution of the environmental costs and benefits resulting from industrialization and economic development. Communities of color, indigenous people, and poor communities bear a disproportionate share of the costs of industrialization while receiving few benefits. For example, in the case of MTR, coalfield communities live with high rates of poverty, health problems caused or exacerbated by toxic mine waste, and a devastated landscape, while the coal that is extracted helps generate the electrical power enjoyed by most Americans (Burns 2007). The United Church of Christ (2007) found that in the United States race is the single most significant predictor of who is likely to be exposed to environmental hazards such as toxic waste and garbage, indicating that those with the least wealth and privilege often bear the effects of others’ consumerism. Defined by American studies scholar Julie Sze, environmental racism ‘‘describes the disproportionate balance between high levels of pollution exposure for people of color and the low level of environmental benefits they enjoy’’ (2007, 13). Globally, poor and indigenous communities are also more likely to be affected by toxic wastes, pollution, and extraction (mining, oil and gas drilling, and timbering) (Peluso and Watts 2001). These environmental inequalities reveal how social inequalities are materialized, that is, made manifest in human bodies, places, and environmental destruction. Along with racism, economic inequality, nationality, and other forms of social marginalization, gender is an important factor in understanding environmental justice and injustice. Gender refers to the social categories of masculinity and femininity and is also expressed in discourses of power, including political, economic, and cultural structures, institutions, identities, and ideologies of superiority and inferiority. Unequal gender relations often underlie the industrial processes that generate environmental risk, as in the case of MTR. In West Virginia the coal industry has depended on the heteronormative breadwinner/ caretaker family structure, in which a man’s main responsibility and a major sign of his adulthood and citizenship is his ability to support a family of dependents through his wage (Hartmann 1979). The long hours of work demanded by the coal industry seem to assume that the (male) miner has a wife at home to care for him and his children (Scott 2010, 76). In the environmentally destructive industrial economy exemplified by mining, this severing of caretaking and breadwinning often brings about a contradiction between the interests of men as workers and the health of their families. Environmental inequality is also gendered (that is, implicated in gendered inequalities), because those who do not actually work in a particular industry (i.e., women and children when a job is considered traditionally masculine) can be subject to a unique burden. While the predominantly male workers experience industrial hazards on the job, an often unacknowledged portion of exposure to hazards falls on nearby communities and the families of workers. For example, mine worker health is regulated by the US government through agencies like the Mine Safety and Health Administration, but the effects of mining on coalfield communities is a relatively new area of inquiry (see Hendryx and Ahem 2008). Given the lack of attention from experts, parents are frequently the first to notice the effects of environmental pollution on children’s health (Stein 2004, 3). In addition, developing fetuses and children are disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of toxins (Etzel and Landrigan 2014). Dioxin and other persistent organic pollutants are stored in fatty tissue and are found in breast milk (Stein 2004, 11). As environmental scholars Sze (2007), Shannon Elizabeth Bell (2013), and Joyce M. Barry (2012) note, many women have started grassroots efforts to protect their communities and others from these exposures. One of the leaders of the grassroots movement against MTR

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recounted that it was her grandson’s exposure to toxic waste that galvanized her activism. He came to her with dead fish he had found in their backyard creek, asking, ‘‘Grandma, what’s wrong with these fish?’’ (Scott 2010, 92). Women’s gendered identities as mothers and caretakers often prompt them to participate in environmental justice activism in defense of their families and communities (Bell 2013, 8).

TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE LANDSCAPE, GENDER, AND WORK: LESSONS FROM MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL IN WEST VIRGINIA Women have worked historically and do work currently in coal mines all over the world. Despite this fact, in southern West Virginia mining is a masculine-coded job. When coalfield residents discuss mining, throwaway references to ‘‘the boys’’ and to miners as ‘‘a band of brothers’’ reveal the assumption that coal mining is a man’s job. The women employed in mining are seen as rare exceptions (Scott 2010, 66). In the coalfields, coal mining contributes to historically developed ideals of masculinity, which include providing for a family, enduring great physical hardship, and increasingly, mastering nature through technological dominance. The growing importance of technology reflects that since the 1950s mechanization and labor struggles have shifted the coal-mining industry from dependence on underground mines to increasingly massive open pits in the western United States and to MTR in central Appalachia (140 141). Similarly, the mark of mining’s masculinity has partially shifted from feats of physical endurance to technological power. MECHANIZATION OF MINING

In an MTR mine, a handful of workers uses explosives and moves coal and rock in enormous dump trucks. Thus, an MTR mine produces a lot more coal with much less labor than an underground mine. The relative efficiency of MTR, in terms of time and labor, also increases the number of coal seams that are economically feasible to mine, leading MTR to encroach on residences, parks, and other populated areas. Mechanization in underground mines also intensified in the later half of the twentieth century, especially with the introduction of the longwall shear, a machine that removes all the coal in a seam without the necessity of leaving support walls but also increases the chances of subsidence on the surface. In sum, in the latter half of the twentieth century the negative effects of mining on the environment and people increased, while the number of people employed by the industry decreased. Since the 2008 election of US president Barack Obama (1961 ), some billboards in the central Appalachia coalfield region have read ‘‘Obama’s No Jobs Zone.’’ But any slowdown in coal mining, including MTR, is more likely the result of economic pressures and a drop in the price of coal than of government regulation. The 1999 lawsuit that stopped the mine in Blair, West Virginia, was based on then-existing regulations that essentially made MTR illegal. Valley fills, constructed with the overburden (rocks and soil blasted from the mountain), fill the headwaters of streams that emerged at the tops of mountain hollows. Courts interpreted this as breaking the buffer-zone rule of the federal Clean Water Act, which prohibits dumping waste material in streams. In 2002 the anti-mountaintop-removal movement suffered a setback. The George W. Bush administration reclassified overburden as fill material, not waste, making valley fills legal (Scott 2010, 156). Since then, efforts to fight MTR have concentrated on investigations into the public health of Appalachian communities affected by mining (Appalachian Community Health Emergency 2016; Ward 2016a). GENDER: MATTER

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The controversy over the mine in Blair pitted neighbor against neighbor and, in some cases, husband against wife. Those who opposed the mine, because it was destroying their homes, their quality of life, their water, and the mountain they loved, were met with sometimes violent opposition by miners and supporters of the coal industry. In already poor economic times, given the reduction in demand for labor in the coal industry, mining communities feared losing the few jobs that remained. Coal supporters saw themselves as patriotic, hardworking breadwinners as opposed to the ‘‘backward hillbillies’’ who fought the mine (Scott 2010, 37). In this embattled context, working as a miner, even in a surface mine, was a sign of masculine virtue (33). The courageous daily sacrifices historically made by (underground) miners became a sign of the community’s morality as a whole (150). Meanwhile, opponents of the mine whether they worked outside the coal industry, had retired from the industry, or in some cases were married to men who worked in the industry were reviled by many as backward hillbillies or misguided, emotional ‘‘tree huggers’’ with an irrational aversion to economic progress (90, 112). MINE WORK AND GENDER

This battle over the public issues of environment and economy took place in the intimate spaces of people’s homes. This was especially true for those who at first opposed the mine but eventually were forced to support it in the name of the social and economic stability offered by a male breadwinner with a job in mining. As detailed in Removing Mountains (Scott 2010), coal mining is a paradigmatic case of a gendered economic practice that has serious and permanent environmental effects. These environmental impacts themselves subsequently produce gendered effects. Industrialization, whether through the introduction of plantation agriculture, mining, or factory work, transforms individual livelihoods, landscapes, and gender relations. For example, gold mining and logging in Kalimantan, Indonesia, empowers men as resource entrepreneurs, while the destruction of forests by these industries eliminates women’s access to traditional forest products. Transforming forests into tree plantations creates wage economies (which traditionally privilege men) and thus new family forms (Tsing 2005, 40, 167). These examples illustrate that the cognitive division between domestic relationships and economic practices is an illusion, as industrialization, by transforming people’s access to resources and livelihoods, can disempower women as compared to men. For most of the twentieth century, the southern West Virginia coalfields were a mono economy almost totally dependent on coal mining. Until the affirmative-action initiatives undertaken by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) union in the 1970s started encouraging the hiring of women, mining in West Virginia was an almost exclusively male job, largely but not entirely dominated by white men. By the mid-twentieth century, miners earned a relatively high wage, job security, and benefits, thanks to UMWA efforts. African American miners were recruited as strikebreakers in the early twentieth century, but the union was eventually integrated (Scott 2010, 23). Starting in 1980, however, A. T. Massey, later called Massey Energy Company, and other companies following Massey’s business model, which shifted from long-term union contracts to more flexible short-term nonunion subcontracts, steadily worked to dismantle the UMWA’s influence in the mine industry. Since the 1980s, along with a steady decline in union membership, affirmative action has largely been abandoned, resulting in a largely nonunion, white male workforce (24). A materialist feminist view of mining makes it clear how the extraction of coal happens through the expenditure of physical energy, energy organized in social and cultural forms that reproduce the conditions of possibility for mining. Early mining in West Virginia happened in hundreds of small coal mines, where men’s bodies were used up underground. Women were

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dependent on their relation to men for access to housing in coal camps (company towns) owned by the mining companies (73). However, women also arranged the conditions for the reproduction of the miner’s labor home, family, and sustenance. If they were able to retire, miners were left with black lung (silicosis), permanently bent backs, and missing fingers or limbs (109). As detailed in Removing Mountains (Scott 2010), contemporary coal operators have abandoned the coal camps, and workers commute in pickup trucks from far away to massive mountaintop mines. The geography of the coalfields has shifted from many small underground mines worked by miners from nearby communities to enormous operations like the Hobet mine in Boone County, West Virginia, where a few hundred miners commuting from around the region removed about twelve thousand acres of overburden to mine a thin seam of coal over the course of about thirty years (Ward 2016b). Similarly, the impacts of mining are less concentrated on the individual miner’s body. The impacts of extraction on the community are not reduced, however, but are experienced diffusely through permanent transformations of the landscape and increasing amounts of toxic pollution. In the southern West Virginia coalfields, the legacy of mining as a man’s job is reflected as an almost total lack of options for men without college degrees. Most other types of work available are low-wage, female-coded, service-sector jobs, at Walmart, for example (Scott 2010, 97). The vacuum left by decreasing employment in coal has thus been a gendered vacuum. Because service-sector jobs usually do not pay as well as jobs in mining, the economic prospects of the entire community are negatively affected. This is experienced as an emptying out of the place, leaving vacant storefronts in once bustling small towns and burned-out houses in formerly crowded hollows. This social emptying resembles the physical emptying of the landscape, as trains full of coal exit the coalfields and leave gutted mountains and toxic waste behind. The feeling of nothing left is well expressed in the popular saying, ‘‘Last one out of West Virginia turn out the lights.’’ The association of mining with a family wage (in which one breadwinner supports a family) has made mining essential not only to men’s identities as moral adults and breadwinners but also to the identity of the community at large (99). Working in coal mining has become a badge of honor to coalfield communities, who see this physically challenging, dangerous work as evidence of bravery, toughness, and loyalty to the nation. Echoing the practice of exempting miners from the draft during World War I, in the coalfields mining is seen as reminiscent of military service (139, 149). This sacrifice is also linked to the heteronormative nuclear family, as the miner-father’s time spent underground is understood as an emotionally powerful testament to his devotion to his wife and children (61). Given the history of underground mining and its well-known hazards, a miner’s everyday routine is emotionally and spiritually charged, often involving the whole family in fervent prayer (60). Surface mining, although less likely to kill multiple workers in a single accident, is also hazardous. Workers have died in accidents involving the enormous equipment and the risky task of backing up a load to dump over the shattered edge of the mine (83). The battle over MTR is expressed in starkly dualistic and emotional terms as a case of jobs (and breadwinner/caretaker families) versus the environment. To paraphrase a common refrain among coal-industry supporters, ‘‘Do you love a tree more than my child?’’ (211). This dichotomy of tree versus child rests on a radical spatial and symbolic separation between the dangerous work of earning a wage (for family sustenance) and the practice of raising a family. It operates in a world in which the toxins produced by industrial processes exist in imagined isolation from home, children, and life. GENDER: MATTER

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INEQUALITIES AND ENVIRONMENTS: MATERIAL ENACTMENTS The ideological separation between jobs (and breadwinner/caretaker families) and the environment is increasingly materialized by the coal industry, which seems to be remaking southern West Virginia in its image. As discussed above, mechanization, both underground and in MTR mines, has increased productivity at the same time as it has decreased the need for workers. The destruction of the mountains has continued apace in the early twenty-first century without the need for cooperation from area residents. As the industry increasingly relies on workers from outside the area to dismantle the mountains, place-based Appalachian cultural practices become more and more endangered. This, too, is a gendered economic and environmental problem. LIVELIHOOD AND PROPERTY

Despite the frequently heard claim in the coalfields that ‘‘if it weren’t for the coal industry, we wouldn’t be here,’’ southern Appalachian mountain communities did exist before coal (Scott 2010, 98). In fact, it was the subsistence practices of those communities, carried out by women considered unemployable by the coal industry, that helped cushion people during strikes and industry downturns. For much of the twentieth century, women in coal camps gardened, put up preserves, gathered forest products, raised livestock, and contributed greatly to the survival of their families (Pudup 1990). As one anti-MTR activist put it: ‘‘Mountaineers are always free, and that’s because they can live on the mountains. And the only way they [the coal companies] can stop them from being free is by destroying the mountains’’ (Scott 2010, 124). The gendered dualisms of public and private, breadwinner and caretaker have made this economic productivity invisible in the space of the coal camp, where everything seems determined by coal (101). The invisibility of alternative forms of livelihood (i.e., not wage based) lead to a discounting of the importance of local ecological relationships in residents’ lives. Property structures the material relations of the coalfields. For more than one hundred years, corporations based outside West Virginia have owned over half of the privately held land in the coalfields. The land or the mineral rights were purchased and held in reserve for most of the twentieth century. When underground mining was the main method, many coal seams were impractical to mine. The forests were left undeveloped, leaving space for gardening, hunting, fishing, and gathering forest products. It also left space for a degree of freedom in the outdoors unknown in most settled places in the United States (125). These practices contributed a thriving land-based subsistence economy that predated the coal industry’s dominance in the region. Many of these practices, including relying on foods such as squirrel meat and ramps (wild onions), have been stigmatized as representing a backward and embarrassing hillbilly culture. The traditional habits of land use that persist in the coalfields include gathering ramps, ginseng, goldenseal, firewood, and mushrooms as well as hunting, often on land owned by an absentee corporation (123). Since the 1990s MTR has increasingly encroached on these lands, drawing them into a conflict between the interests of the coal industry in profiting from coal extraction and the continued sustainability of local subsistence practices. The erosion of local subsistence practices necessarily has increased the dependence of residents on the coal industry or other employers for survival. At the same time, land-based practices that have allowed people to survive and limit their dependency on wages from a fickle industry are being destroyed by that very industry. But for some West Virginians, the coal industry represents their best

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chance at meeting the normative standard of US culture, a breadwinner/caretaker family with a family-wage job (74). Moving away from a place-based economy of living off the land to a wage economy is what stands for progress in the eyes of industry and much of mainstream American culture (205). The gendered politics of MTR are therefore a microcosm of the gendered and racialized politics of nature writ large.

DUALISMS AND REDUCTIONISM The gendered politics of nature and matter have a long history in European and North American culture. In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), philosopher Valerie Plumwood traces the historical association between women and nature in European culture to the logical dualisms of classical Greek philosophy. A dualism is a binary of logically connected concepts, in which the first is seen as superior and the second inferior. For example, mind/body dualism portrays the mind as the master of the body. In addition, the relationship between the two terms is elided or denied, as when the mind is imagined to operate independently of the condition of the body (41). Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428 347 BCE) saw the imperfect substance of matter as a flawed reflection of ideal celestial forms. Plato’s cave, a metaphor for the world of appearances, represents a ‘‘lower order, which includes the mother, primal matter, the earth, and all that is conceived of belonging to it’’ (93). The cave is to be transcended through reason (the mind), which leads to the eternal, leaving behind ‘‘materiality, the body, the senses’’ (93). At least since Plato’s time, women have been associated with the body and matter and men with the mind or spirit, reinforcing mind/body dualism via a gendered hierarchy. Seventeenth- through twentieth-century European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Americas echoed this gendered dualism with a racialized one. Non-European people were seen as simpler, more primitive, and closer to nature than European men (107). In The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980), environmental historian Carolyn Merchant traced two similar historical trends. During the rise of modern science in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Europe, nature was increasingly identified as ‘‘a female to be controlled and dissected through experimentation’’ (189). At the same time, ‘‘nature’’ became increasingly imagined as inert matter or as the passive surface upon which human activity takes place (227). The idea of natural resources reduced to dead objects freely available for use by humans slowly overtook the previously predominant belief in the independent vitality of nonhuman nature. This facilitated the extraction of natural resources in support of industrialization, such as the mining of coal and metal ores. Importantly, this extraction and the concurrent industrialization of agriculture were accomplished through coercive labor arrangements, including slavery (Baptist 2014). Plumwood (1993, 43) demonstrates the conceptual linkages between the dualisms of human/nature, master/slave, male/female, mind/body, reason/emotion, and subject/object. In these dualisms, a radical distinction is assumed to exist between the terms, with the second being marked by the absence of what defines the first (49 53). For example, white men are seen as rational, whereas women and people of color are characterized as lacking rationality and being driven by emotion. Members of the second term are also homogenized and objectified as existing to serve the interests of the first term (53). Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856 1939) famously asked what do women want, clearly expecting that it would be the same for all women (Jones 1953, 421). A good or healthy woman was defined as one who served her biological roles of wife and mother (Beauvoir 1952, 39). In the same way that GENDER: MATTER

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nature was increasingly seen in the Industrial Revolution (c. 1760 1840) as inert matter for human use, these dualisms posit the second term as a passive background for the activity of the first (Plumwood 1993, 48). As Plumwood suggests, this backgrounding is reflected in the recording of history as a series of great white men seemingly uninfluenced by women of all races and men of color (48). Historically, these dualisms have structured the relationships between husbands and wives, master enslavers and enslaved people, and colonizer and colonized. MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL AS REDUCTIONISM

These dualisms contribute to the reduction of land to abstract property, with the result that twentieth- and twenty-first-century coal-industry actions on privately owned land are not seen as a harm to the overall health of the human community. Supporters of MTR argue that the flat land left behind by mining can be used as a resource for economic development, although others point out that the resources for this are absent (Scott 2010; Ward 2016b). As coal has left the Appalachian coalfields by the trainloads, the biophysical diversity of the region has been reduced. In objectifying the land as a source of coal, the extraction industry has effectively translated the land into its vision of a coalfield, destroying the hardwood forests and their complex ecological systems in the process. The destruction of local ecosystems reduces the material resources available for local livelihoods and daily experience. In a simplified and flattened landscape, coalfield residents become more firmly attached to mining as the source of livelihood and identity. However, the mining industry’s relation to the region is determined by property and profit. Residents of the coalfields may be attached to the place by affection or homeownership, but companies are far less attached. Economic forces like bankruptcies and competition from the growing natural gas industry threaten to chase coal operators away, leaving the public to pay for reclaiming mine sites and cleaning up the pollution that coal operators leave behind (Mufson and Warwick 2016). In this context, the question ‘‘Do you love a tree more than my child?’’ reveals itself as a false dichotomy. The question reduces loving a child to providing for a family through waged employment, which can happen anywhere and does not require a healthy biophysical environment. The child him- or herself is reduced to a consumer of commodities. The child’s experiences in life and his or her access to forests, forest products, and other biophysical resources, such as clean air and water, are erased in favor of the bare fact of his or her parent’s family wage employment.

TRANS-CORPOREALITY IN THE COALFIELDS Whereas the human/nature dualism discussed above involves a reduction of people, nature, and systems to objectified and simplified forms, the notion of trans-corporeality emphasizes complexity and the interconnections between things often seen as separate categories of existence. Materialist feminist Alaimo (2014) uses the term trans-corporeality to describe the fluid boundaries between human bodies, nonhuman life, and nonlife. The image of plastic in the ocean illustrates a global ‘‘network of harm’’ that connects everyday consumption (of food items wrapped in plastic, for instance) with the accumulation of microparticles of plastic in the ocean, the deaths of marine animals, and the inevitable return of these plastic particles to human bodies as they work their way through the food chain (189). Similarly, transcorporeality in the coalfields draws attention to how coal and coal-mining systems shape the

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lives and bodies of coalfield residents and miners. Silicosis, or black lung, is one vivid example of the permeable boundaries of the human body and its entanglement in coal. Haraway draws attention to the hybridity of the biological and the technological in ‘‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’’ (1990). The cyborg is a way of expressing the complicated interconnections between what we think of as technological and what we think of as natural. Embracing the cyborg means recognizing that the lines separating nature and technology are more political than reality (e.g., when gender inequality is defined as ‘‘only natural’’). Rather than imagining a pure nature outside of human influence, this perspective recognizes that human social forms and technologies, or naturecultures, are part of the biosphere (Haraway 2008, 39). This also means recognizing that what people often think of as natural, such as femininity or masculinity, is a technical achievement. The production of masculinity relies on multiple interconnected cultural practices, such as body discipline, consumption patterns, and other interactions. For example, coal mining is culturally coded as masculine work. This trans-corporeal masculinity is generated through the meeting of nonhuman matter and human bodies. Its existence depends on coal seams, machinery, and large-scale economic networks (Scott 2010, 101). NETWORKS OF DENIAL

In the coalfields, human inequalities operate within a network of relations that has developed historically between coal, men’s bodies, and the powering of a national industrial economy (Scott 2010). Despite the common cultural conception discussed above of nature as the passive backdrop for human action the coal and other minerals unearthed in the process of mining have effects on human health. For instance, medical researchers Michael Hendryx and Melissa M. Ahem (2008) found significant increases in risk of cancer, hypertension, and kidney disease, among other diseases, in the mining areas of West Virginia. Gender and other identity formations also contribute to the way we understand our biophysical surroundings (nature). Human social hierarchies structure the human relationship with the biophysical environment, including the human body, producing gendered and racialized naturecultures (Haraway 2008, 39). Ideas about ownership and control are essential to these power relations between people and nonhuman nature. The material and symbolic relationships between roles, identities, and values are simultaneously a cause and an effect of environmental practices. This complexity is evident in what environmental justice activists call NIMBYism, or the philosophy of ‘‘not in my backyard’’ (Taylor 1993, 54). NIMBYism refers to the fact that wealthy communities are able to protect their biophysical surroundings; these environments are seen as too valuable for destructive activities like mining or the dumping of waste. When wealthy communities protect their environments while enjoying the material benefits of industrial production, other people must bear the environmental costs. In communities of color and poor communities like those in the Appalachian coalfields, environmental destruction occurs hand in hand with political, economic, and cultural marginalization. For example, in the West Virginia coalfields, the political and economic dominance of the coal industry limits the state’s protection of land from mining, and even protected areas, such as the Kanawha State Forest, are vulnerable to the effects of nearby mines (Fox 1999; Steelhammer 2014). Marginalized and targeted for environmentally harmful practices, these communities become ‘‘sacrifice zones’’ designated as expendable for a so-called greater good, whether that be the national interest or economic development in general (Scott 2010, 31). In Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States (2015), historian Carl A. GENDER: MATTER

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Zimring recounts the history of locating dirty industries like garbage collecting and disposal in neighborhoods of color in American cities, creating a material association between ‘‘dirt’’ and communities of color. Racist policies of residential segregation, which saw African Americans as ‘‘polluting’’ white neighborhoods, shaped the urban landscape into one where privileged neighborhoods enjoyed a high degree of hygiene at the expense of ‘‘ghettos seen by public officials as dirty . . . repositories for waste’’ (145). Likewise, in the case of MTR, the communities living in landscapes devastated by coal mining not only bear the physical and psychological effects of that devastation but are imagined as ‘‘human slag’’ (i.e., a waste product of coal) in representations of the region (see Light and Light 2006, 4). These marginalizing representations create social and physical distance between human groups, reinforcing the cognitive separation of everyday practices (e.g., consuming commodities or using electricity) from the biophysical effects of these practices. This social distance permits a kind of forgetting that enables a false sense of safety for the privileged in light of the environmental and economic disasters that seem to afflict only the poor (Scott 2009). Residential segregation by race and class, spatial segregation of industry from middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods, and sharp distinctions drawn between wage earning and caretaking make the connections between everyday practices, biophysical degradation, and human suffering unthinkable. Regarding the ubiquitous plastic bag of US consumerism and its unexpected role in the ocean as a ‘‘predator’’ of sea life, Alaimo writes that it is ‘‘this very unthinkability that trans-corporeality, as a mode of new materialism, material ecocriticism, and object-oriented activism, seeks to disturb’’ (2014, 200 202). UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

The trans-corporeality of coal in the Appalachian coalfields is not limited to the merging of miners’ bodies with coal during the mining process, which is particularly evident in underground mining in the form of silicosis, permanently bent backs, or missing fingers. It is also not limited to the effects of toxins on residents’ bodies in the form of cancer or other diseases. The illusion of distance discussed above is challenged again and again by environmental problems that do not respect human boundaries. The unintended consequences of industrial development are felt beyond the coalfields. One of the most significant agents of these unintended effects is the element carbon, released by burning coal, oil, and natural gas (Cuomo 2011). Rates of atmospheric carbon above 350 parts per million threaten to transform the earth’s climate and create unlivable conditions for people around the world (the 2016 average was 400 parts per million globally). Like people in the coalfields who bear the brunt of the effects of mining, ecofeminist Chris Cuomo (2011) notes that those who are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change have benefited the least from the industrial development that has caused these historically high levels of carbon in the atmosphere. The agency of carbon highlights the ironic dichotomy of tree versus child. The either/or opposition of jobs versus the environment reiterates the human/nature dualism. The tree, which stands for a healthy environment, is at least as essential for the child’s well-being as his or her parent’s wage. As the most feasible forms of carbon sequestration, forests are essential to human life on earth. The choice between tree and child relies on a logic of social distance and human/nature dualism that denies the interdependence of human and nonhuman life. It also reflects the value hierarchy that portrays nature as an inessential backdrop for human activity, such as wage earning. Trees, mountains, and other elements of local ecology are minimized in significance compared to the important business of industry and economic development. A trans-corporeal view makes clear the limitations of this imagined human sphere of control.

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Summary Using the case of MTR, this chapter has mapped some of the connections between gender, the environment, and matter. The environmental justice movement in the US Appalachian coalfields has struggled for decades to draw attention to how the destruction of the mountains brings human suffering along with industrial development. The coal extracted from the West Virginia coalfields has benefited US society through the manufacturing industry it has fueled and the electrical power it has generated, but coalfield communities have seen very few of these benefits. The benefits from economic development powered by coal have been counted separately from the environmental and human costs of mining, leading to an image of unmitigated progress. Coalfield gender relations have historically been shaped by coal mining and the gendersegregated labor market, endowing mining with more than economic significance for men, families, and the community. Coal-mining masculinity is produced in the interaction between men’s bodies, the coal seam, and mining technology and in the context of a societal imperative of industrial growth. The intense labor demanded by the coal industry depends in turn on the breadwinner/caretaker family structure for the reproduction of labor and the survival of communities. MTR is an exemplary case for studying the connections between the human and the nonhuman, because it enacts an objectifying view of nature on the landscape, reducing a complex ecosystem to its component parts (overburden and coal), creating and re-creating human inequalities in the process. As the complex ecosystem of the forest is reduced to a coalfield, workers, families, and communities find themselves more dependent on waged employment and less on place and local networks. The case of MTR also enables exploration of two important concepts in the ‘‘new materialism’’: trans-corporeality and the vitality of matter. As coal miners and their families often put it, coal is in our blood. The concept of trans-corporeality highlights the fluid boundaries between human bodies and the biophysical world they inhabit. Coal-mining masculinities, families, and communities are informed and shaped by interactions at the coalface. The trans-corporeality of coal extends beyond the limits of the coalfields, however, in the atmospheric carbon released by its burning. In the coalfields, human bodies experience the signs of the agency of coal. Globally, humans are experiencing the agency of carbon in the form of climate change.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Appalachian Community Health Emergency: ACHE Act. ‘‘What Is the ACHE Act?’’ 2016. http://acheact .org.

Alaimo, Stacy.‘‘Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea.’’ In Material Ecocriticsm, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman, 186 203. Bloo mington: Indiana University Press, 2014.

Appalachian Voices and Ross Geredien. ‘‘Assessing the Extent of Mountaintop Removal in Appalachia: An Anal ysis Using Vector Data.’’ 2009. http://large.stanford.edu /courses/2011/ph240/durkin1/docs/Assessing the Extent of Mountaintop Removal in Appalachia.pdf.

Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. ‘‘Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.’’ In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 1 19. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

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Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

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Barry, Joyce M. Standing Our Ground: Women, Environ mental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 1952.

Light, Ken, and Melanie Light. Coal Hollow: Photographs and Oral Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Bell, Shannon Elizabeth. Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Bullard, Robert. Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1993. Burns, Shirley Stewart. Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Vir ginia. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2007. Cuomo, Chris. ‘‘Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Respon sibility.’’ Hypatia 26, no. 4 (2011): 690 714. Etzel, Ruth A., and Philip J. Landrigan. ‘‘Children’s Exquisite Vulnerability to Environmental Exposures.’’ In Textbook of Children’s Environmental Health, edited by Philip J. Landrigan and Ruth A. Etzel, 18 27. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Mufson, Steven, and Joby Warwick. ‘‘Can Coal Companies Afford to Clean Up Coal Country?’’ Washington Post, April 2, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business /economy/can coal companies afford to clean up coal country/2016/04/01/c175570c ec73 11e5 a6f3 21ccdbc 5f74e story.html. Peluso, Nancy, and Michael Watts. Violent Environments. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Plumwood, Valerie. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1993. Pudup, Mary Beth. ‘‘Women’s Work in the West Virginia Economy.’’ West Virginia History 49 (1990): 7 20. Scott, Rebecca R. Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Fox, Julia. ‘‘Mountaintop Removal in West Virginia: An Environmental Sacrifice Zone.’’ Organization and Envi ronment 12, no. 2 (1999): 163 183.

Scott, Rebecca R. ‘‘The Sociology of Coal Hollow: Safety, Othering, and Representations of Inequality.’’ Journal of Appalachian Studies 15, nos. 1 2 (2009): 7 25.

Haraway, Donna. ‘‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Tech nology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.’’ In Femi nism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda J. Nicholson, 190 233. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Steelhammer, Rick. ‘‘Mountaintop Mine Adjacent to Kana wha State Forest Draws Protest Crowd to Capitol Steps.’’ Charleston Gazette Mail, August 7, 2014. http://www .wvgazettemail.com/article/20140807/GZ01/140809397 #sthash.8tGJQfgL.dpuf.

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: Uni versity of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hartmann, Heidi. ‘‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Perfect Union.’’ Capital and Class 3, no. 21 (1979): 1 33. Hendryx, Michael, and Melissa M. Ahem. ‘‘Relations between Health Indicators and Residential Proximity to Coal Mining in West Virginia.’’ American Journal of Pub lic Health 98, no. 4 (2008): 669 671.

Stein, Rachel. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In New Perspectives on Envi ronmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, edited by Rachel Stein, 1 20. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Sze, Julie. Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

Jones, Ernest. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.

TallBear, Kim. ‘‘Disrupting Life/Not Life.’’ Keynote address at the Dimensions of Political Ecology, Political Ecology Working Group, University of Kentucky, April 5, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE gaDG kLQ.

Kirby, Vicki. ‘‘Natural Convers(at)ions; or, What If Culture Was Really Nature All Along?’’ In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 214 236. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Taylor, Dorceta. ‘‘Environmentalism and the Politics of Inclu sion.’’ In Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, edited by Robert D. Bullard, 53 61. Bos ton: South End Press, 1993.

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Tsing, Anna. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connec tion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. United Church of Christ. ‘‘Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty, 1987 2007.’’ March 2007. http://www.ucc.org/environ mental ministries toxic waste 20. Ward, Ken, Jr. ‘‘EPA Veto of WV Mountaintop Removal Permit Upheld Again.’’ Charleston Gazette Mail, July 19, 2016a. http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news cops and courts/20160719/epa veto of wv mountaintop removal permit upheld again. Ward, Ken, Jr. ‘‘Tomblin Proposal for Hobet Mine Site a Long Way from Reality.’’ Charleston Gazette Mail, January 16, 2016b. http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/20160116 /tomblin proposal for hobet mine site development a long way from reality. Zimring, Carl A. Clean and White: A History of Environ mental Racism in the United States. New York: New York University Press, 2015. F IL M S The Age of Stupid. Dir. Fanny Armstrong. 2010. A commen tary on global warming politics from the perspective of a future survivor. Another Country. Dir. Molly Reynolds. 2015. Aboriginal Australian actor David Gulpilil (1953 ) narrates the

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tragic story of the town of Ramingining, where Australian government policies have destroyed Aboriginal cultural practices and sustainability. Behemoth. Dir. Zhao Liang. 2015. A documentary exploring the lives and environments of an enormous open pit mine in Inner Mongolia, China. Gasland. Dir. Josh Fox. 2010. A documentary examining the effects of the increasingly widespread practice of hori zontal hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. The Ghosts in Our Machine. Dir. Liz Marshall. 2016. A documentary about the ramifications of considering ani mals as property. Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story. Dir. Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle. 2013. A documentary that exposes the environmental devastation of MTR from the perspective of ecosexuality. Living Downstream. Dir. Chandra Chevannes. 2010. A documentary based on the 1997 book of the same name by biologist and environmental activist Sandra Steingraber (1959 ) examining the role of environmental pollutants in human disease. Overburden. Dir. Chad A. Stevens. 2015. A documentary that focuses on the social costs of MTR and underground mining in the southern West Virginia coalfields.

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Part III. Circulation, Transfers, Interchanges

CHAPTER 14

Labor Kalindi Vora Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies University of California, San Diego

Labor as a category of human activity has long been a central topic of scrutiny, debate, theorizing, and activism in studies of gender and sexuality in sociology, political philosophy, and economics. Labor in this context is distinguished as the effort and energy that humans expend to alter the material world. It is therefore tied to the human body, in all the body’s socially and biologically differentiated forms. In The Human Condition (1958), political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906 1975) describes labor as the activity of providing for basic necessities needed to meet the demands of biology and nature. These necessities include food, shelter, and any other materials that are produced and then immediately consumed to support ongoing life, leaving no evidence of their production. In his three-volume Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867 1883), political philosopher and economist Karl Marx (1818 1883) defines labor as the physical act of working to produce consumables, distinguishing it from the potential of the body and the mind to do work, which he terms labor power. In the early 1970s feminist scholars and activists worldwide began to expand and alter the understanding of labor as a category of valuable activity and as a social and political class. The social sciences and humanities, in particular, approach labor as both a category of social and cultural activity and as marking a social class. This is because during the Industrial Revolution (1760 1830) the term labor became associated with the vast population of people working in manufacturing, that is, the working class. The concept of labor as a class identity and site of theorization and political organizing has been successfully expanded through challenges by European feminist socialists and materialists; black feminists; and postcolonial, Third World, and indigenous feminist theorists, among others. The common thread in these diverse approaches is an investment in labor as intentional and embodied activity that has social and material consequences, whether or not these activities or consequences are visible or measurable. Critiques of labor based on an analysis of gender often focus on the invisible, and therefore undervalued, nature of activities associated with so-called women’s work. One of the earliest critiques of Marx’s materialist labor theory came in 1972 with the global Wages for Housework Campaign. The campaign argued that as wives and mothers, women performed economically essential roles by feeding, clothing, cleaning, and caring for household members; repairing clothes; and keeping the household running as an economic unit. For this reason, argues Marxist feminist Sylvia Federici (2004), among others, women should receive wages like other workers. Postcolonial feminists, as another example, discuss the

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invisibility of concubinage and sex work performed by colonized women under different forms of European colonialism (see the section ‘‘International Sex Work’’ below for examples). These scholars describe the domestic sphere as a zone where intimacy has been colonized. Thus, they analyze the household and its colonized butlers, maids, nannies, and other workers as a site of struggle and resistance under colonialism. Black feminist scholars, including Angela Y. Davis (1983), make another important critique of the category of labor specifically, its failure to account for the nature of women’s reproductive function within transatlantic chattel slavery, in which women labored but also bore children who were legally defined as property and were circulated as commodities. This chapter discusses the core concepts in the history and theory of the relation between labor, gender, and the material world. It begins with the intervention of materialist feminists who argue for the importance of domestic or reproductive labor for society and the economy. It follows with critiques and interventions by postcolonial, women of color, and black feminists who insist that intimacy, labor, autonomy, and power must be analyzed together. It then explores the concepts of emotional, affective, and immaterial labor as they have arisen in scholarship on service industries, sex work, and the global circulation of gendered immigrant labor. Finally, it investigates the ongoing feminist concern with the blurred lines between the self, the body, and work in gendered tasks and connects this with emerging forms of biological and digital labor.

PRODUCTIVE AND REPRODUCTIVE LABOR Marx’s original formulation in volume 1 of Capital defines reproductive labor against productive labor. If productive labor is the investment of ‘‘socially averaged labor time,’’ that is, the time it takes on average for a given social system to produce a commodity, to produce an object for exchange, then reproductive labor is the energy invested in making sure the person doing productive labor is able to return to work each day. Reproductive labor thus re-creates or replenishes the labor power of ‘‘he’’ who works outside the home in the public sphere. This involves the biological reproduction of the worker’s body and strength as well as that of replacement workers in the form of child rearing. Sociologist Rhacel Salazar Parren~as (2000, 561) describes reproductive labor as ‘‘the labor needed to sustain the productive labor force. Such work includes household chores; the care of elderly, adults, and youth; the socialization of children; and the maintenance of social ties in the family.’’ Such reproductive labor, in its care, love, and nurture, also reassures the worker of his humanity, allowing him to continue participating in his own commodification as labor. Contemporary feminists have extended this analysis by redefining such labor as productive in itself, as producing immediate life and not just supporting the male worker who earns the means to immediate life. Queer theorists have further challenged the idea of reproductivity by troubling the meaning of care work as simply reproducing what was already there, arguing instead that new forms of life and family life are produced that do not line up with the imperatives of the heteropatriarchal household economy (see, e.g., Cvetkovich 2003; Mun~oz 2009). Like the historically female work that reproduces life, work that often involves a service rather than a physical object as its commodity, service and care work are undervalued in public labor markets. We can refer to this as the feminization of labor. Service, care, and attention work are considered unskilled, because they originate in a gendered division of

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given city, the types of people doing ‘‘unskilled’’ jobs replicate the history of immigration and racialized class relations in that place. Labor as reproductive means that it provides for all the needs of the public sphere (presumed male) worker: food, shelter, and a child who replaces him when he becomes too old to do his job. Reproductive labor reproduces the worker and his ability to return to work every day, and it thus perpetuates the capitalist system. Racialized labor, as ‘‘unskilled’’ work similar to traditional female work, is part of the service and care labor that upholds the system. MARXIST AND MATERIALIST FEMINISTS

Marx was interested in the labor of industrialized factory workers, who fabricated objects through repeating a single task on an assembly line. Unlike prior modes of producing useful objects for sale, in which one craftsperson fabricated an entire end product, in the capitalist mode of production everyone on an assembly line is responsible for making one end product. Marx developed his labor theory of value in part to explain that factory-made objects contained the energy and mark of all the individual laborers working on the assembly line, even though a single object was no longer made by a single artisan. He argued that this deindividualized, ‘‘productive labor’’ was responsible for generating the entirety of our material world of things. Marxist feminism developed in response to the limited usefulness of Marx’s concept of productive labor for explaining informal work, that is, work done outside the confines of a formal labor contract, and as a critique of Marxist thinkers’ ongoing neglect of theorizing gendered informal labor. Material feminism further advanced work on gendered labor. It is a term first used by French sociologist and feminist Christine Delphy (1941 ) and has roots in socialist and Marxist feminist thought but is distinguished as ‘‘conjuncture of several discourses historical materialism, Marxist and radical feminism, as well as postmodernist and psychoanalytic theories of meaning and subjectivity’’ (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997, 7). Marx argued that every object in the world produced by workers has value only because of the energy the worker invested in that product. When it circulates as a commodity, the product embodies the relationship of workers to one another and to society, whereas in prior eras these social relations were obvious when a worker crafted an object and sold it directly to the person who would use or otherwise consume it. Marx’s labor theory of value was essential for labor organizers who fought for safe workplaces, limited working hours, and holidays, among other protections. But this theory of labor value has difficulty accommodating the necessary but often invisible work of child rearing, domestic chores, sex work, and other forms of care that usually occur in the domestic or private realm. As a result, important fields of study on gender and labor have developed in conversation with the Marxist labor theory of value. Marxist feminists have made paradigm-shifting arguments for the ongoing centrality of women’s labor to the life of capitalism as an economic structure and a social and cultural form of life. Marxist autonomous feminists, a movement originating in Italy in the 1970s and early 1980s, argue that unpaid, feminine (i.e., historically performed by women) labor has economic value in capitalist society. The 1970s Wages for Housework Campaign, initiated by author and activist Selma James (1930 ) and organized by fellow activists Federici (1942 ) and Mariarosa Dalla Costa (1943 ), among others, argued that domestic work including cooking, cleaning, child care, and household management deserved compensation through a ‘‘social wage’’ because of its value in sustaining and reproducing capitalist society and workers. In their works, sociologist Maria Mies (1986), feminist theorist Leopoldina Fortunati (1989), and Federici (2004) articulate that reproductive labor is as important to capitalist society as so-called productive labor. All three scholars argue in different ways that unpaid

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reproductive labor and underpaid women’s labor are a primary source of what Marx called primitive accumulation. For Marx, primitive accumulation precedes capitalist production and is a form of saving the resources that can later become capital. Modern-day capitalism continues to rely on labor that is expropriated, or stolen and dispossessed, because the labor of women in heteropatriarchal household units is not compensated (Mies 1986), and the labor of women workers is often undercompensated (Federici 2004). BLACK FEMINIST AND WOMEN OF COLOR FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF MARXISTS

Women of color feminists have critiqued the racialized nature of domesticity and free labor, that is, labor performed with consent as marked by a contract, which is supposed to exclude coerced or enslaved labor. They point out that capitalism has grown not only because of socalled productive and reproductive labor but also through the exhaustion of life past the possibility of its reproduction (Davis 1983; Hong 2006; Morgan 2004). For example, the reproductive labor and bodies of women under slavery was not comparable to that of unpaid housewives, as enslaved women were legally considered property rather than subjects who could exchange labor for a wage. Children born to women under slavery remained slaves and therefore the property of slave owners. The domination of women under slavery meant that their main concern, overlooked by mainstream white Marxist and material feminists, was first and foremost the fact that they themselves and children they bore would be property of a

Illustration depicting the New Orleans slave Pauline, 1849. Officially it was reported that Pauline abused her mistress and was thus sentenced to death. Other accounts reveal that she was sexually victimized by her master and treated cruelly by her mistress, whom she then struck in retaliation. Pauline was condemned to be hanged, but only after she gave birth to her master’s child. CH RONICLE / ALAMY

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white slave owner by law. As such, these were not women who could sell their labor, and they and many to follow them were not situated in nuclear single-family home economies where issues of safety, health, or general lack of resources were more urgent than receiving wages for housework. Contrary to the logic of reproductive labor, women under slavery were reproducing future workers, they were producing property and could be worked literally to death rather than allowed to use their labor time and energy to reproduce their own lives and that of those around them (Davis 1983; Hong 2006; Morgan 2004). In the early 1980s Davis (1983) critiqued the Wages for Housework Campaign by arguing that black women and other women of color had been performing paid housework for decades as domestic servants in other words, making housework a public rather than a private responsibility and that being paid for such labor had not improved the valuing of that labor; it was still low-wage work. Davis also argued that, historically, the reproductive work of the household in black families has not been socially valued in the United States. Historian Jennifer Morgan (2004) explains that in the antebellum US South, black women’s bodies were as essential to the success of chattel slavery as their labor. ‘‘The obscene logic of racial slavery,’’ Morgan writes, ‘‘defined reproduction as work, and the work of the colonies creating wealth out of the wilderness relied on the appropriation of enslaved women’s children by colonial slave owners. . . . The effort of reproducing the labor force occurred alongside that of cultivating crops’’ (145). Women’s studies scholar Grace Hong (2006, 36) also explains how notions of gendered propriety associated with the housewife were linked to middle-class property ownership. In this way, ‘‘housewife’’ became a category defined against enslaved women and, to a lesser extent, working-class women. The interventions by black, postcolonial, Native, Third World, women of color, and other feminists have shown that universalizing the category of woman or other gendered positions is not accurate or effective. Therefore, though we can analyze the structure of institutions and spaces like the household, the nation, or the global labor market in terms of how labor becomes gendered, this analysis will be successful only when it is part of a larger material analysis of power in those institutions and spaces.

GENDERED LABOR: AFFECT, CARE, EMOTION, AND IMMATERIAL LABOR The category of gendered labor denotes work or actions usually associated with femininity and the female body and the social and cultural valuing (usually devaluing) of women’s bodies and work. Materialist feminists argue that when this unpaid labor takes place in the private sphere, it makes it possible for the family member working in the public sphere to survive on a lower wage (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997). This is because the real cost of hiring that worker is not covered by the wage but is supplemented by the work of an (unpaid) housewife. As should be clear in the discussion above, gendered labor is also always intersected by class, race, sexuality, nationality, and ability, among other variables. Rather than a stand-alone category of labor, then, gendered labor is a framework for understanding social norms and structures through which labor is made invisible or devalued, arising from the history of industrialization and the heteropatriarchal nuclear family. THE GENDERING OF LABOR

The gendering of labor superimposes the organization of labor found within the heteropatriarchal family onto the labor market. Feminization of labor means that a particular task or

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form of work is devalued as ‘‘unskilled’’ because it has been performed historically by women in the private realm. The trend of passing feminized work to people of lower social rank (due to race or class) relies on the distinction of work in the public versus the private sphere. For example, migrant domestic workers laboring in other countries, not to mention other people’s homes, are seen as performing unskilled domestic labor. In this way, as Parren~as (2000) points out, they are still considered to be working in the home. When feminized labor is industrialized and extended into an international division of feminized labor, the values of skilled versus unskilled and masculinized versus feminized may apply to entire laboring populations and sometimes entire nations. Postcolonial and decolonial feminist theorist Neferti Xina M. Tadiar (2004) discusses how the Philippine government built a political and economic infrastructure to support the migration of women overseas as domestic laborers. The support derives not from a governmental mandate to support these women but from a desire for the huge amount of remittance income they produce for the nation. She argues that women are often culturally understood as ‘‘beings-for-others’’ (120). She argues that because the work of a ‘‘being-for-others’’ often engages the actual experience of the emotions and affects necessary to do a good job, it becomes difficult to separate the labor of care, attention, and love performed by nannies and other domestic helpers from the very bodies and personas of these workers. This means that the bodies and psyches of domestic workers can also be sites of resistance to exploitation. Tadiar finds this resistance in the ways that domestic workers form new communities with each other in their host nations and imagine alternate futures for themselves and their communities through their labor. LABOR, AFFECT, AND EMOTION

The relationship between affect, emotion, and work has been central to the study of gender and labor since the first theorizations of housework and reproductive labor. Key concepts in these areas of scholarship include emotional labor, affective labor, care work, and immaterial labor. All involve the body/self separation and the work performed in gendered labor. Scholars ask how we can think about the politics of performing nurture, care, support, and other such forms of labor when these acts are difficult to distinguish from the rest of a worker’s life and subjectivity. In a groundbreaking study of female flight attendants at Delta Airlines in the early 1980s, sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983) argued that this service work depends on the emotional labor of employees. Hochschild explains that emotional labor includes performing emotions for customers when a traveler expects a smile, or it requires calmness in the face of rudeness, drunkenness, or harassment. The ‘‘product’’ of a flight attendant’s labor is a positive, satisfied emotional state or feeling in the consumer, the customer. Hochschild found that flight attendants experienced difficulty drawing a line between their selves and their work performances; managing that separation was, in fact, part of their emotional labor. Hochschild showed how the acts of managing one’s feelings and performance of emotion actually alter the way that flight attendants, and presumably similar workers, experience those emotions. For example, after a long day of performing interest, concern, or pleasure as a job requirement, the performance and experience of emotion in other contexts may feel less authentic or potentially artificial. The term affective labor refers to the intimate level at which commodified actions of care, concern, attention, and empathy are produced and consumed. Affective labor in the form of physical and psychological care and attention performed by people, such as customer service GENDER: MATTER

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agents, maids, nannies, and sex workers, produces commodities of comfort, nurture, and security that are not physical objects yet are consumed in a way that causes others to feel better and more valuable. Building on the concept of emotional labor, postcolonial feminist theory scholar Kalindi Vora (2010, 2015) argues that service workers who are responsible for managing their own emotional states or those of others can perform affective labor in addition to other forms of labor. Examples of affective labor as supplemental work include customer service call-center workers, who are paid to answer a certain number of calls in a limited time but also must manage the moods of callers without compensation for this work, and paid gestational surrogates, whose care and attention to themselves while pregnant are both private and commodified. Political philosopher Michael Hardt (1999) categorizes affective labor as one kind of immaterial labor (described in detail later in the chapter). Current studies in the sociology of gender and labor talk about care work as the performance of emotion and the production of feelings that result in the comfort, nurture, and security of those for whom they care (Hochschild 2002; Parren~as 2010). When a nanny comforts a crying child or a domestic worker creates a tidy and sanitized home environment, this increases the consumers’ quality of life, freeing them to use their time for other things, such as their own paid work or leisure activities. Hochschild (2002) explains that the high number of undervalued immigrant women working in commercial child care is taking the place of necessary structural and public solutions to the wealth gap between the Global North and the Global South. She calls this the global chain of care, a privatized solution to structural problems that is sustained at ‘‘great emotional cost’’ to these workers (16). For example, Hochschild interviewed mothers separated from their children when they migrated to become nannies in wealthier households. These mothers experienced great sadness at this separation. Interviewees said they comforted themselves by putting all the love for their distant children into the children for whom they are paid to care. Parren~as (2000) argues that the distribution of different types of domestic labor, gendered feminine, is part of an international division of reproductive labor that falls along lines of race and class difference. She looks at the chain of support that allows Filipina migrant workers to leave their homes and work in other countries. Migrant women find employment in the homes of middle-class women in other countries, who are then freed to work outside their own homes. These migrants must then themselves find other workers, usually women, who can be hired to care for their own children and families. Given that only 2 percent of families in the Philippines can afford to hire domestic help, those women who are hired to work in the homes of overseas migrants must manage the care of their own homes and families in addition to their waged work. THE INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF CARE

Immigration laws and social and cultural conventions that devalue women and people of color connect low-wage care work and women immigrant laborers. Writer and activist Grace Chang (2000) explains that female domestic laborers in the United States, the majority of whom are immigrants and women of color, are paid the very lowest of wages, lower than any other in the labor market and too low to support the lives of the worker and her dependents. At first this might sound impossible. Who would bother to work for wages so low that despite working forty, sixty, or even eighty hours a week, feeding oneself and one’s family or paying for housing is beyond reach, never mind getting ahead?

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Chang explains how immigrant women have been positioned by a specific history of legislation and public policy designed to extract maximum benefit from their labor at one level for their employers’ benefit and at another level for the benefit of the US economy. The history of US welfare policy has often required working mothers, a population historically composed largely of single mothers and women of color, not only to work outside the home but to work exceptionally long hours outside the home. Such policies, in concert with social discourse and expectations that are more difficult to measure, have marked white, middleclass populations of ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘good’’ mothers as being needed at home (nonemployable mothers). Others, however, are employable mothers, understood as not needing to be at home with their children because of race- and class-based assumptions that care and family are not necessities in these populations. In the United States and elsewhere, households that have enough resources often hire out domestic work and child care, frequently to women of color and immigrant workers. The international division of care, in which some nations primarily send domestic labor migrants and others receive them, arose out of the end of European colonialism, which extended from the sixteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Newly independent postcolonial economies in the mid-twentieth century often lacked a self-supporting infrastructure, since many had been organized to support the colonial metropole. As a result, upon independence, emerging nations in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific often did not have industries ready to sell goods on the international market. Selling labor was far easier, and out of this legacy several devalued international labor markets were born. Sweatshops and maquiladoras offering underpaid, largely female textile labor were set up in decolonizing spaces, for example, in Bangladesh and Malaysia in the wake of the departure of British colonial textile production. Many workers migrated to urban centers and former colonial metropoles like London and Paris to fill the growing demand for low-wage care work in the homes of middle-class and elite professionals. As feminist and queer theorist Janet Jakobsen (2012) points out, the Protestant heteropatriarchal household of Northwest Europe and Euro-America has always been an economic unit that depended on unpaid and underpaid domestic labor of wives, slaves, and servants. The international division of care is one recent development in that history (Mies 1986; Spivak 1996; Tadiar 2004; Vora 2015). INTERNATIONAL SEX WORK: EMBODIED AND INTIMATE LABOR

As with the global assembly line and immigrant domestic labor, sex work has been distributed around the world as an international industry. Spaces of sex tourism often, but not always, coincide with spaces of domestic sex work. The history of European colonialism and its unfolding into US military imperialism helps explain the history of the intimate and embodied labor of sex work and the sex tourism industry. Anthropologist and historian Ann Laura Stoler (2002) examines intimate relationships between the Dutch and Indonesians, colonizer and colonized, which often occurred in the private space of the home, and how such relations were often charged with the racial power structure of colonialism. For example, she looks at the relationship between Javanese nursemaids and the Dutch infants they cared for, the relationship between domestic servants and employers, and the complexity of sexual relations within or outside marriage as intimacies effected by the colonial racial hierarchy. Feminist scholar Anne McClintock (1995) argues that British colonial practices organized and disciplined bodies and sexuality by labeling forms of intimacy between the same race as normal and acceptable versus cross-racial intimacies as degenerate, perverse, and unhygienic. GENDER: MATTER

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Feminist theorist Cynthia Enloe’s now-classic Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (1990) explains the relationship between international development, tourism, and the US military. The United States built its Pacific Rim military bases in locations that maximized US political and economic interest in addition to being militarily strategic. Most of the locations for US bases in the Pacific Rim region were built in nations that were formerly colonized. Rest and Relaxation centers for enlisted men, located near these bases, became the infrastructure for global sex tourism based in the decolonizing Third World. Such sex tourism also coincided with these nations offering free trade zones and low-wage garment production (sweatshop labor), which employed poorly compensated women workers. As a result, argues sociologist Kamala Kempadoo (1999), the neoliberal economic reforms imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on these formerly colonized nations have effectively recolonized female, reproductive work. One aspect of global sex work is the capture and transfer of women, children, and less frequently men for coerced sex work, known as sex trafficking. Sex trafficking has become an area of focus and concern for the United Nations (UN) and has been categorized as a domain of international human rights protection. UN participation is necessary, because trafficking engages numerous national systems of law. For many trafficked sex workers, access to human rights must be channeled through being recognized as raced and gendered victims. For example, gender and ethnic studies scholar Julietta Hua (2011) explains how in US discourse, trafficked women and children are usually identified as coming from the Third World. This stereotype imagines a passive, docile, and racialized femininity in which women must be ‘‘saved’’ by civilized nations from their backward and patriarchal home cultures. Hua states that ‘‘these women must argue their own victimization to an economically corrupt, morally backward culture of patriarchy in order to be legible to government officials, law enforcement workers, and social service providers as trafficked subjects’’ (2011, xxi). The labor these women perform simultaneously affirms the United States as progressive, advanced, and liberal in comparison. To prove they are victims, trafficked sex workers seeking refuge or asylum must enact the racialized, gendered, and sexualized assumptions of what makes someone a victim, including performing stereotypes of gender and race that ‘‘prove’’ they are worthy of recognition. National laws concerning health and hygiene have historically been used to discipline sex workers, often in combination with racist practices of the state. For example, historian Nayan Shah (2001) explains the role of prostitutes in northern California’s Chinatowns during the advent of public health as an institution in the mid-1870s. At that time, physicians warned that Chinese prostitutes would infect white male clients and then their families with syphilis. Public health proponents held up the racialized prostitute and the variety of immigrant and other urban low-resource household types (multifamily, multiple men living together, multiple women living together) as antithetical to the modern nation, the emblem of which was the white, suburban heteropatriarchal, middle-class household. Similarly, in her discussion of prostitution in colonial Bombay, Ashwini Tambe (2000) explains how the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1870s 1880s established medical checks intended to eradicate sexually transmitted disease but in fact advanced state control over prostitution. This control resulted in the government’s creation of a racially stratified sexwork trade to serve different strata of colonial society. Tambe explains that the refusal of sex workers to submit themselves to state testing regimes was a substantial obstacle for the state’s implementation of this control.

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Film still from Dirty Pretty Things, 2002. The film follows several immigrants who are not legally allowed to work but must support themselves, illustrating how processes of commodification of the body blend into forms of labor. AF ARCHIVE / ALAMY

Sex work operates on a continuum of gendered activities and skills that employ sexuality, attention, and the body. For example, in her ethnography of bar hostesses in Japan, Parren~as (2010) describes how Filipina hostesses working in Tokyo draw lines of moral discretion between sex work and the work of flirting and giving feminine attention to clients. Sociologist Kimberly Kay Hoang (2015) also focuses on the nuances of bar hostess work in her study of Ho Chi Minh City. She describes how hostesses help create the atmosphere of intimacy and hospitality in which deals between men working in high finance occur. She describes the beauty, need, and poverty of workers that perform to meet the desires of clients in other bars catering to Westerners. The film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) illustrates how processes of commodification of the body blend into forms of labor, particularly among immigrant populations and women of color. Set in London, the film follows several immigrants who are not legally allowed to work yet must support themselves. The character Senay, an asylum seeker from Turkey, must hide her employment as a hotel maid from immigration authorities. When she loses this job to go into hiding, she must engage in increasingly precarious forms of work, including informal sex work and sweatshop garment work. In the choices the characters must make between different forms of commodification of their bodies and activities, we can see how the intersection of race, gender, and national origin delimit their options. The gendered body positions female characters to be solicited or coerced to perform sex acts and attention as part of maintaining employment, the assumption being that there is a blurred line between the work an employer pays for and the body of the worker. GENDER: MATTER

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NEW BIOTECHNOLOGIES AND EMBODIED LABOR

The entanglement of bodies and work in feminized labor extends into the realm of biotechnology. The reproductive ability of human bodies and cells subjects them to many of the same theoretical and political concerns as those attached to reproductive labor and women’s bodies. This is true regardless of whether the bodies and organisms of interest to biotechnology markets are male, female, or ungendered, as in the case of most cells. Scholars of biotechnological labor have created important concepts for understanding the labor of the body, such as the clinical labor of clinical trial subjects (Cooper and Waldby 2014) or the biological labor of the gestational surrogate (Vora 2009). Biotechnology markets, reproductive labor, and women’s embodiment come together in commercial surrogacy, which has required the theorization of the nature of surrogacy as labor. This work has drawn heavily from prior research on gender, sexuality, racism and imperialism, and embodiment and labor. New technologies have historically marked what kinds of labor are considered replaceable and reproducible versus what kinds are considered productive and therefore highly valued. Vora (2015) argues that outsourcing extends the history of colonial exploitation of gendered and embodied labor. Long-distance telecommunications allowed for the outsourcing of voice-based customer service, and the Internet extended this to text- and visual-based labor. Like domestic workers who create the opportunity for middle-class women to work outside the home, outsourced service work is supposed to supply lower-valued, often feminized tasks so that other workers can be freed to do more highly valued, masculine tasks. Other examples of work that has followed this progression include data entry that frees higher-level clerical workers to analyze the data; medical coding that allows physicians to see more patients per hour; and garment construction and stitching, now in the form of piecework and sweatshop labor, that supports the work of designers, marketers, and distributors who reap substantial profits and earn vastly higher wages. First performed by women, then by hired women of color and female immigrant workers, and finally by overseas workers, these tasks do not lose the association of being feminized and therefore unskilled, resulting in low compensation and social valuing. Seemingly new forms of bodily and affective actions of interest to capitalism challenge scholars of gender and labor to keep up with understanding the choices people make in situations of material and political precarity. For example, people in both high-resource regions (like the United States and northern and western Europe) and in low-resource nations (like India and China) are participating in clinical trials for wages or in order to access otherwise unavailable therapies. Political theorist Melinda Cooper and anthropologist Catherine Waldby (2014) describe patient workers who join clinical trials because they have no other options for wages or medical care. Ill and unable to access paid work for reasons of illness or lack of available work, such patient workers are simultaneously seeking treatment and performing unpaid experimental work for the pharmaceutical industry. Middle-class patients in the United States who seek access to unaffordable or not-yet-legal experimental therapies, like unemployed laborers in India or China who seek financial remuneration from such therapies because there are no jobs, become part of the mechanism that encourages people to consent to subjecting their bodies to risk in a way that produces potential profit for others. Commercial Surrogacy. Another form of embodied, reproductive labor that involves a spectrum of intimate and bodily actions is commercial surrogacy. Commercial surrogacy, or paid gestational surrogacy, is a practice in which someone enters into a paid contract to gestate an embryo and deliver an infant for one or more commissioning (also called ‘‘intended’’) parents. Embryos are created by in vitro fertilization, a lab-based process in

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which an ovum from an intended mother or donor is fertilized with sperm from an intended father or donor. The embryo is then transferred to the uterus of the gestational carrier, whose body has been prepared by hormones to be ready for the embryo to attach and thereby to start pregnancy and gestation. In the United States, intended parents are of a class that can afford the technologies of assisted reproduction and the expense of hiring a gestational surrogate, usually a woman of a lower social class who has limited employment options. In transnational surrogacy arrangements, women in India and increasingly eastern Europe, Mexico, and Thailand act as surrogates for wealthy citizens of northwestern Europe, the United States, and, less frequently, of East Asia and Persian Gulf nations. The political economy of transnational surrogacy is that of women from the Global South being hired at relatively low cost by a relatively wealthy and empowered transnational class. The cost is low because these women have few, if any, other employment options. In the Third World, this can be connected to the same economic processes that make labor migration and sweatshop work undesirable necessities. The cost is also low, because, like other forms of gendered, embodied, affective, biological, and therefore largely invisible labor, surrogacy is seen as feminized, unskilled work that does not merit high compensation. Human reproduction in the form of pregnancy, childbirth, breast-feeding, and nurturing of infants and children is at the core of Marxist feminists’ understanding of reproductive labor. When this labor is commercialized, as in commercial surrogacy, it brings together biological processes of gestation and social processes of nurture and parenting into market relationships. As such, Vora (2012) has argued that commercial surrogacy involves both biological and affective labor for example, self-care and surveillance in addition to gestation but also produces value through more than just labor. Sociologist Amrita Pande (2014) has similarly argued that Indian surrogates should organize as laborers to achieve labor protections from the Indian government. Like most forms of gendered labor, these biological and affective processes are difficult to separate from the body and person of the woman acting as a surrogate. Past feminist scholars had to theorize how domestic labor, sex work, and service are economically and socially productive activities. Now, theorists are extending and building upon those theories to encompass not only commercial surrogacy as hired human reproduction but also the work of bodies (i.e., clinical trial subjects) and tissues (novel cells in the lab that come from an individually important body) as sites that generate economic value. Clinical Labor. The use of embryonic cells for research, such as for developing stem cell therapies, engages women’s bodies and reproductivity and can be placed on a continuum of labor with surrogacy and use of the body in clinical trials. Waldby and Cooper (2010, 64, 67) argue that women’s reproductivity at the cellular level and the labor of clinical trial subjects are gendered labor even though some of it occurs at the microscopic level. They use the concepts of regenerative labor and clinical labor to name and understand the microbiopolitics of reproduction. They explain that, as in sex work and the coerced labor of indigenous and colonized peoples, the bodies of the worker or producer are treated as raw materials, not as the property of the worker. In many countries, medical care is prohibitively expensive, particularly for people suffering chronic or life-threatening illnesses. Pharmaceutical companies must gain governmental approval, such as from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States, before they can market and sell new drugs. This system involves lab-based trials GENDER: MATTER

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followed by human trials supervised by medical clinicians. These clinical trials have become a source of indirect medical care for people needing treatments they cannot afford. Some large pharmaceutical companies have moved their trials to the Global South, where they can pay relatively small sums to large numbers of subjects to participate in clinical trials that meet FDA standards. Cooper and Waldby (2014) name the selling of one’s body as a site or experimentation for the pharmaceutical industry ‘‘clinical labor.’’ They group this clinical labor with practices like commercial surrogacy, saying that these are ‘‘services in the self: services that rely on in vivo, biological processing and the utilization of the worker’s living substrate as essential elements in the productive process’’ (65). Scholar of feminist science studies Donna Haraway has argued that nonhuman actors can also perform labor if we do not insist on recognizing a human subject as the precondition of being a laborer. For example, Haraway (1997) discusses the OncoMouse, a mouse genetically engineered and patented for research on human breast cancer. Haraway asks what the difference is between the condition of a mouse whose body becomes a research site for human medical therapies and that of a human clinical trial subject when they both produce economic value. She argues that because of its participation in the web of human social relations, the mouse is performing labor. An example of cells doing labor is in the now-famous case of Henrietta Lacks (1920 1951), whose cancer cells were collected after her death and engineered to become an immortal cell line used in countless research projects all over the world without her knowledge or permission (Skloot 2010). Some of these projects were commercial and generated economic gain. This raises the question of whether cells can be considered part of a laboring body even when the cells are separated from that body. Biotechnology and digital technology are expanding the reach of labor theory, making it necessary to continually interrogate the relationship between bodies and political economy and the resulting impacts on the social and material world. IMMATERIAL LABOR AS GENDERED LABOR

Forms of work enabled by the Internet and other digital technologies require continual historical analysis of the roles of race, class, sexuality, and gender in the accumulation of profit and value, which in turn must be brought to bear upon still-emerging forms of racialized and gendered labor in the global economy. Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), as part of the Italian postautonomous Marxist tradition, classify affective labor as a form of ‘‘immaterial’’ labor. They categorize the work of producing and managing feelings (affective labor) together with knowledge work (cognitive labor) like that performed in paid writing and researching or the coding work in information technology. Like the blurring of boundaries between work and the body/self, as identified in earlier feminist theories of gendered labor, immaterial labor points to the blurring of work and leisure, of production and consumption. For example, clicking ‘‘like’’ on a Facebook page can give one pleasure, as can watching an advertisement, but it also generates data about the user that are valuable to advertisers. Therefore user-generated data, whether from shopping, browsing, or clicking ‘‘like,’’ can be produced both from leisure activity and as a form of unpaid labor. Theorist and activist Tiziana Terranova (2000) calls this ‘‘free labor’’ activities that can mix pleasure and work and that people perform in a way that seems freely chosen but, in fact, generates value for companies that do not pay users for their time. Like the flight attendants Hochschild (1983) studied, Internet users retool their own subjectivity to become more and more effective at

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interacting with targeted marketing. Simultaneously, they produce more and more economically useful data for commercial interests (Beller 2001; Skeggs 2010; Terranova 2000). In addition, growing scholarship points to the laborious efforts required to maintain valorized social identities for example, white middle-class femininity (Morgan 2004) or normative gender binaries (Butler 1990) and to perform publicly demanded affects like happiness (Ahmed 2010) that are part of performing normativity. Most of this scholarship agrees that these social performances and valorization require work in the sense of focused intentional activity. Such emerging forms of work involve the historical roles of race, class, sexuality, and gender and inform new types of neoliberal production, coloniality, and conditions of constraint and unfreedom in the global economy.

Summary This chapter has examined core concepts in the history and theory of the relationship between gender and labor and their materiality. The role of gender in understanding the nature and value of labor has been a central question since the advent of research on labor. Understanding the importance of the working class in society has been an important political project for different types of feminisms. Similarly, interventions by postcolonial, women of color, indigenous, and black feminists have successfully expanded labor as a site of political organizing and theorization. Theories of labor and gender arise from the embodied nature of labor as a human activity, and they focus on the invisible and low-wage work associated with the domestic sphere and women’s bodies. Feminist critiques remind us that while theories of labor have described an important site of human activity and political agency, they have also served to exclude by assuming that all subjects share a similar history of legal and political autonomy and free will. The ongoing feminist concern with the blurring of lines between the self, the body, and work in gendered tasks connects the history of gender and labor to emerging forms of biological and digital labor. Commercial surrogacy, clinical trials, and digital interfaces blur the boundaries between the self and labor, the body and commodity, and pleasure and work. In this way, they require analysis as gendered labor regardless of the gender identification of those performing the labor.

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CHAPTER 15

Economics Christine Bauhardt Professor, Department of Gender and Globalization, Faculty of Life Sciences Humboldt-Universita¨ t zu Berlin, Germany

Since the financial crisis of 2008, feminist social and economic critiques of capitalism have enjoyed a surge of international interest among scholars and the general public. Concurrently, scholars have turned to feminist consideration of society’s relationship to matter, because matter is at the base of economic relations in terms of natural resources, human interaction with those resources, and embodied labor all of which involve gender relations. Global exploitation and appropriation of natural resources, a cornerstone of capitalist development, continues in the twenty-first century: for example, the mining of resources such as gold, iron ore, rare earth elements, or biomass; the continuing spread of genetic engineering in agriculture; massive enhancements in industrial agriculture; and new forms of the marketization of nature (e.g., the trading of pollution permits). Thus, even in the age of information technologies, human economies still depend on the raw matter delivered by nature. This chapter connects the ‘‘old’’ materialist feminism and ‘‘new’’ material feminisms to sketch a queer approach to feminist economic theory. Even if the two approaches at first seem contradictory, together the two illuminate paths by which one can think and live alternatives to capitalism. The chapter begins by explaining both approaches of feminist-materialist analysis and outlining central considerations in the debate around ‘‘materiality,’’ focusing on the core elements of the feminist-materialist analysis of capitalism: labor, bodies, and matter. Next, the chapter sketches the foundations of the feminist critique of capitalism, drawing on various theoretical references. What unites the approaches is the focus on the cheapening of women’s labor in capitalism to the ‘‘reproduction’’ of human labor power and social cohesion. This is what the analytic term social reproduction refers to. The chapter then turns to ecofeminism, which sees social reproduction as the exploitation of women’s and nature’s ‘‘re/productivity’’ (Bauhardt 2013) as a means of safeguarding economic male domination. For the ‘‘new’’ material feminisms, the material environment of both living and nonliving matter is central to analyzing societal power relations. The chapter thus evaluates whether material feminisms can breathe new life into the ecofeminist critique of capitalist-patriarchal domination. The subsequent discussion of queer ecologies reminds readers to avoid legitimizing a two-gendered order of social reproduction as ‘‘natural.’’ The chapter then explores alternative concepts critical of capitalism, asking to what extent they include the feminist critique of capitalist power and domination. The chapter ends with basic considerations for further development of queer-feminist alternatives to capitalism.

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THINKING ABOUT MATTER AND MATERIALITY Feminist theorists Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, in Material Feminisms (2008), distinguish their ‘‘new’’ material feminisms approach from the ‘‘old’’ materialist feminism through a different understanding of materiality. Historical materialism in Marxist terms understands materiality as a congealed, reified structure of labor, class, and exchange relationships an invisible structure that eludes everyday consciousness. Marxist analysis brings this invisible materiality of inequalities and power relations to the surface. It shows that social power is based on the exploitation of human labor and that the exploitation of labor is at the core of political domination by the ruling class. In the classic Marxist critique of political economy, labor means the human struggle to transform matter. This work is considered productive, because it produces use value as ‘‘material substrate, bearer of exchange value’’ (Marx [1890] 1972, 201). Use value describes the usefulness of goods, which is independent from their exchange value if traded as a commodity. The feminist critique of economist and philosopher Karl Marx’s (1818 1883) concept of labor targets his exclusive reference to the production of tradable goods, of things, as the only process that creates value, both use value and exchange value. From a feminist perspective, in contrast, labor does not only transform matter into value and does not take place only in formalized work relations mediated by the market, remunerated (i.e., waged work), and based on exchange value (what the traded labor is worth in terms of other commodities). Rather, labor also encompasses activities beyond the market and creates use value without the intention of creating exchange value. This kind of labor encompasses unpaid housework, rearing children, and care for any dependent individual. This form of labor is based on the creation and preservation of life, it is badly or not at all remunerated, and it is commonly performed by women (see Folbre 1994). This final aspect, the feminization of so-called reproductive labor, is bound up with societal invisibility and/or contempt. This invisibility derives from women’s labor being ‘‘naturalized’’ due to the female body’s capacity to give birth, women’s skills and competences are considered to be bestowed by nature. It is the potential of the female body to procreate that causes the skills and labor of women to be perceived as ‘‘natural.’’ As this work does not create monetary value, both liberal mainstream and Marxist economists consider it not productive but ‘‘only’’ reproductive. Material feminisms stress the vitality, variability, and creativity of matter. In this view, materiality is not a rigid structure as in materialist feminism but ‘‘an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable’’ (Coole and Frost 2010, 9). Feminist theorists who contribute to the debate around new materialisms think of materiality as ‘‘the very ‘stuff’ of bodies and natures’’ or ‘‘the very stuff of life itself’’ (Alaimo 2008, 242). Thus, while Marxist-inspired materialist feminists base their analyses on reified power relations and their material structure, material feminists focus on flexibility and a vital exchange of energies, matter, and discourse. Materialist feminism emphasizes the structural side of societal organization and reified power relations (see Hennessy and Ingraham 1997). Material feminisms try to grasp the vivid entanglement of the material, the social, and the cultural to analyze power relations (see Alaimo and Hekman 2008).

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CORE CONCEPTS OF MATERIALITY: LABOR, BODIES, MATTER In the feminist view of labor, unpaid activities, performed in the context of care relationships for people who cannot yet or cannot any longer care for themselves, count as societally necessary and productive work, even though this work is unpaid and does not create exchange value. Nevertheless, it is indispensable for social reproduction; that is, for the re/production of labor power, whether in the sphere of everyday housework and care work or through generative (i.e., biological) reproduction. This extensive sector of indispensable labor is thus called the ‘‘care economy’’ (see Ferber and Nelson 2003; Rai and Waylen 2014). The labor of social reproduction is labor of the body and labor with other bodies. The female and not the male body is the one capable of re/production of life, even if both the male and the female body contribute corporeal matter to a pregnancy. But heterosexual practices have long since ceased to be necessary to bring about a pregnancy; due to artificial insemination, the male body as an actor in sexual intercourse has become dispensable to biological reproduction. As such, heterosexuality is no longer a precondition for biological reproduction. But social reproduction extends far beyond procreation. Social reproduction is, above all, work on the body and with bodies, for it is in the care economy that humans’ basic needs are met. Care work is concerned with vulnerability and existential dependence on human attention and the need for sociability (see, e.g., Boris and Parren~as 2010). Care work and responsibility for others are time intensive; they deal with the corporeal processes of becoming and growing but also with illness, decline, and the death of the material body. These corporeal processes are reminders that human and nonhuman bodies are the stuff of life. Humans are integrated into natural and material processes they may be lively, vigorous, or energetic but also temporarily or permanently ill, moribund near the end of their lives. This dependence of human existence on material processes preoccupies not only philosophers but also feminist theorists. Feminist scholars argue that since the European Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, political theorists and philosophers have equated nature with womanhood and womanhood with nature and immanence while labeling culture and transcendence as male (Merchant 1980; Nelson 1997). Society has placed and continues to place these polarities of nature and culture, matter and spirit, femininity and masculinity in historical, political, and economic relationship to each other. The hierarchization of activities and spheres occurs along gender lines, though masculinity serves as the benchmark of appraisal. This is why one should understand gender as a social construction (i.e., not natural or innate), as the symbolic and normative hierarchy that pervades many societal processes.

FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM Feminist analyses of capitalism encompass various theoretical currents. Feminist economists of various provenance agree that key for feminist analyses of capitalism is the consideration of social reproduction as equal to, and economically just as relevant as, market-mediated so-called productive gainful work ‘‘productive’’ because it produces goods, exchange value, and profit. In connection with multiple crises of capitalism in the early twenty-first century overproduction crisis, financial crisis, environmental crisis feminist economists identify a crisis of social reproduction. That is, there are excessive demands on caretaking persons to fulfill the care responsibility for others. Feminist economists are concerned with the shortage of care and social provisioning, which are time intensive and not amenable to the rationalization ambitions of the capitalist production mode (i.e., the mandate to achieve the most GENDER: MATTER

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production with the least labor input) and rightly so, due to the nature of re/productive labor. One example of the crisis of social reproduction is the stress experienced by women who take care of children suffering from chronic environmental diseases (e.g., food allergies or bronchial asthma); another is the growing societal need for care for elderly persons affected by dementia. The labor performed for social reproduction is both unpaid in private households and (usually poorly) paid in the labor market, including in the informal sector (i.e., unregulated work in households or sex work). Characteristic of this form of labor is that it cannot be deferred, it necessitates interpersonal empathy, and it requires a high level of commitment. By declaring a crisis in social reproduction, feminist economists mean that with the expansion of capitalist logics of exploitation, care work, too, is being reshaped by the economic imperatives of acceleration, rationalization, and increasing workloads (see Bakker 2007). An intersectional approach to social reproduction is necessary, for social reproduction is, first, where class differences among women are created and upheld along the axis of ethnicity and race and, second, where the symbolic gender order is reproduced. Intersectional means paying attention to overlapping systems of domination that is, analyzing how race, gender, class, and other structural hierarchies intersect in people’s lived experiences. Research on the question of globalization’s effects on gender has exposed new forms of inequality between women. Transnational migration processes, for instance, are linked to gendered global demand for labor power. The male-connoted positions in, for example, construction, agriculture, and certain areas of industrial production seek male labor power, while work in the sphere of social reproduction (including sex work) is primarily coded as female and thus seeks women. For women from countries in the Global South or eastern Europe, housework and sex work in the Global North often represent the only opportunities for gainful employment (Anderson 2000; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). Hence, gendered migration patterns are also a topic of discussion for a feminist-materialist analysis of capitalism. Such gendered migration patterns lead, first, to a shift of housework and care work onto ethnic or racially marked women due to the global wealth differential and the marginalized status of migrants in their destination countries (Parren ~as [2001] 2015). The result is reinforced social and economic hierarchies between women as well as diverging class interests. Second, the global care chain also shows that the work of social reproduction is still exclusively connoted as female. This perpetuates the symbolic gender order that defines what is considered feminine: globally, it is women who undertake social reproduction; there is no division of labor between men and women in the realm of care work, although sharing unpaid work between men and women has been a feminist political demand from the very beginning.

MATERIAL FEMINISM IN ITS ECOFEMINIST VERSION Ecofeminism, as the name implies, applies feminist analyses to ecological issues. The basis of the ecofeminist analysis of industrial capitalism is the connection between the crisis in social reproduction and the crisis in society’s relationship to the environment and nature (Bauhardt 2013; Floro 2012). The pivotal point of this critique is the societal appropriation and exploitation of women’s labor power as if it were an endless and freely available natural resource. The exploitation of nature and women’s labor power is the foundation of growth in market economies: ‘‘The type of economic growth generally pursued worldwide has not only increased the stresses put upon the earth’s resource base but also on care labor capacity, which are wrongly perceived to be of infinite supply’’ (Floro 2012, 15). This analysis builds on the

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basic arguments of ecofeminism as formulated, for example, by ecofeminist academic Mary Mellor in Feminism and Ecology and sociologist Ariel Salleh in Ecofeminism as Politics, both books published in 1997. The ecofeminist approach understands the invisible work of responsibility and care performed by women in social reproduction as material labor. This unpaid and underestimated work is part of the invisible structure of capitalism, just as Marx analyzed wage labor as an invisible structure of exploitation and hegemony in capitalism. Care work by women is invisible, because a large part of it is performed in the private sphere within one’s own four walls. It only becomes really visible as dirt in the home, as neglect of children, as sinking fertility rates in a national economy when it is not performed; the more invisible it can make itself, the more successful it is. The materiality of women’s labor lies, therefore, precisely in its economic and real invisibility. But women’s labor is nonetheless indispensable for the functioning of societies and economies, even if it brings in no money and thus, according to capitalist criteria, no recognition. The relationship between public and private spheres, between visibility and invisibility, between prestige and irrelevance is determined by power relations. The ecofeminist perspective, along with feminism more generally, holds that this invisibility should be lifted and the material nature of care work made clear. This would challenge the power relations that are firmly anchored in economic and symbolic gender hierarchies. The work of social reproduction is accomplished with the body. Only the female body has the potential to give birth, but not all women can or want to have children. Nevertheless, Euro-American societies have traditionally understood the work of social reproduction as female work and have normatively ascribed it to women. Because they can bear children, women are considered predestined ‘‘by nature’’ to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Or expressed differently, in terms of caring for others, society and economists consider women to be to the manner born they do not need to be taught, their skills do not need to be cultivated, and thus they also do not need to be paid. This way of thinking presupposes that women’s care work is virtually natural and self-evident and indeed, no society, capitalist or not, would be able to survive without the labor of women for social reproduction. The analogy of women’s labor to natural resources in ecofeminist analyses emphasizes the material conditions of capitalist production. Similar to how capitalism treats raw matter, such as minerals, water, soil, and air as ‘‘free’’ resources available for human use the work of women in social reproduction is treated as infinite and virtually gratuitous. Ecofeminist analyses consider both natural resources and women’s labor as material preconditions for capitalist production. This is what the term re/productivity means: ecofeminists consider nature to be productive, not the capitalist production process, which at its core is destructive of both the environment and human relations. From an ecofeminist perspective, the relationship between society and nature in capitalism is marked by a double hegemonic relationship: the subjugation and exploitation of matter and nature and of ‘‘natural’’ women’s labor. At the same time, there would be no possibility of survival in capitalism without the productive powers of nature and matter and here the female body and its potential to bear children comes back into view. The re/productivity of the female body is the core concern of feminists and ecofeminists alike. How should one treat this biological difference the only socially and economically relevant difference between male and female bodies both analytically and politically? GENDER: MATTER

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MATERIAL FEMINISMS: A NEW FORM OF ECOFEMINISM? This is where the ‘‘new’’ material feminisms come in. First, material feminisms understand the body as substance and matter, as a natural organism. This body is involved in exchange processes with its surroundings. As feminist political scientist Samantha Frost expresses it: ‘‘If we can grant that we are alive, that we develop, grow, and die, then we also implicitly grant that living bodies grow within, and cannot grow without, habitats. Our habitats are quite literally the conditions of our persistence in living’’ (2014, 317). The field of ecology understands habitats as interwoven communities of living and nonliving matter. The new material feminisms focus on the nature of the body and the vibrancy of nature and matter. It is not surprising, then, that authors in the field of new material feminisms, such as political theorists Jane Bennett and Stacy Alaimo, endorse environmentalism as well as feminism. Bennett, for example, uses her concept of ‘‘thing-power’’ ‘‘the irreducibility of objects to the human meanings or agendas they also embody’’ (Khan 2009, 90) to link new materialism to ecological thinking. Specifically, she writes, there ‘‘is an affinity between thing-power materialism and ecological thinking: both advocate the cultivation of an enhanced sense of the extent to which all things are spun together in a dense web, and both warn of the self-destructive character of human actions that are reckless with regard to the other nodes of the web’’ (Bennett 2004, 354). Bennett similarly criticizes excessive consumption and its associated throwaway mentality ‘‘Too much stuff in too quick succession equals the fast ride from object to trash’’ (351) and connects this critique to the ‘‘ecological project of sustainability’’ (349). Alaimo, in another example, uses the term trans-corporeality to describe the metabolic processes that occur between bodies and both the organic and the abiotic matter of the environment: Trans-corporeality is a new materialist and posthumanist sense of the human as substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments. Activists, as well as everyday practitioners of environmental health, environmental justice, and climate change movements, work to reveal and reshape the flows of material agencies across regions, environments, animal bodies, and human bodies even as global capitalism and the medicalindustrial complex reassert a more convenient ideology of solidly bounded, individual consumers and benign, discrete products. (2012, 476) Both Bennett and Alaimo speak of the body as permeable matter, involved in a continuous exchange relationship with the natural environment and the world of things. They understand human and nonhuman bodies as embedded in natural, unpredictable processes resistant to planning. The body, whether male, female, transgender, in-between, or crossover, is matter that is entangled in ‘‘intra-actions’’ (Barad 2007) with external matter via eating, breathing, and any intake of substances that become incorporated and then metabolized. In this perspective, bodies are not primarily sexualized and reproductive bodies, and they are less different than alike: less sexual, racialized, disabled bodies than common organic and ecological materiality. This is the important contribution of new materialisms to an altered view of the relationship between human bodies and nature. The body itself is ‘‘active matter.’’ Aging processes transform human and nonhuman bodies, illnesses and medical interventions leave behind material traces and scars, the brain’s deterioration process causes dementia. Finally, death brings an end to material, corporeal

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existence. But even in the age of reproductive medicine, bodies that is, people are created by other bodies; female bodies are the material basis for the emergence of new life (even if male corporeal substance in the form of sperm is also required). Like it or not, the female body is the matter of procreative potential: the menstrual cycle; hormones; desired, undesired, hoped-for, and unrealized pregnancy; contraception; abortion; birth. It has become clear, not least through the new global division of labor in biological reproduction, that it still takes the female body to bear other human bodies (Pande 2010). Surrogate motherhood by women in the Global South, who ‘‘hire out’’ their bodies as a resource for the bodies of women from the Global North who are unwilling, incapable, or no longer capable of biological reproduction, is analogous to the exploitation of natural resources. Similarly, a global intersectional perspective on social reproduction reinforces renewed and intensified because they are displaced onto and into the body social, economic, and racial hierarchies among women worldwide. As such, the silence of the authors of new material feminisms concerning the re/productivity of the female body is conspicuous. The sexual difference that lies in the female body’s capability for biological reproduction arouses no particular attention in the positions cursorily sketched out above. Nevertheless, the female body’s potential to give birth and the gender hierarchy this has legitimated have been and remain a central problem for feminist theory.

QUEER ECOLOGIES AND ECOFEMINISM Queer ecologies is an early twenty-first-century research area in which feminist biologists, feminist theorists, critical science studies scholars, and queer environmentalists analyze sexuality, desire, the nature/culture binary, and human and more-than-human worlds. Queer ecologies can help us, as Wendy Harcourt says, ‘‘to move beyond dualisms into complexity in ways whereby we can start to live far more with others as ourselves, rather than destroying what we imagine are others, but in fact are rightly understood as ‘us’’’ (Harcourt, Knox, and Tabassi 2015, 297). Queer ecologies is a useful frame for thinking about ‘‘old’’ and ‘‘new’’ materialism in feminism, because it enables reflection on re/productivity and care beyond the heteronormative gender binary, which posits a ‘‘natural order’’ to the gendered division of labor. Based on zoological and behavioral science research, biologist and queer ecologies thinker Bruce Bagemihl, in Biological Exuberance, describes homosexual, bisexual, and transgender behavior in nonhuman animals, the range of their sexual practices, and the biological abundance and plenitude of nature: Biological Exuberance simply takes our intuitive understanding of the diversity of life and makes it the essence of existence. . . . Biological Exuberance is, above all, an affirmation of life’s vitality and infinite possibilities: a worldview that is at once primordial and futuristic, in which gender is kaleidoscopic, sexualities are multiple, and the categories of male and female are fluid and transmutable. A world, in short, exactly like the one we inhabit. (1999, 262) Alaimo (2010b, 59) sees Bagemihl’s account of sexual and gender diversity in nonhuman animals as indicative of ‘‘the very stuff of a vaster biodiversity.’’ Queer ecologies theorists deconstruct popular assumptions and scientific assertions about the taken-for-granted naturalness of heterosexual desire, heterosexual practice, and GENDER: MATTER

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social reproduction. For example, ecofeminist Greta Gaard explains that ‘‘queer theorists who explore the natural/unnatural dichotomy find that ‘natural’ is invariably associated with ‘procreative’’’ (1997, 120). What is at stake from a queer ecologies point of view is the dissolution of the re/productivity of the female body and that body’s material link to ‘‘compulsory motherhood’’ (120). Yet there is not only a material relationship between the female body and heterosexual motherhood but a symbolic entanglement between the procreative potential of the female body and women’s presumed responsibility for social reproduction. Thus, on a material and on a symbolic level, caring practices are intertwined with mothering and maternity. The field of queer ecologies can help unravel material motherhood from symbolic maternity. The queer environmentalist deconstruction of heterosexual reproduction as ‘‘natural’’ reenvisions the relationship between society and matter. It renders the question of which genes or chromosomes are necessary for the creation of human life beside the point. On the contrary: what is relevant is what society derives from the biological re/productive capacity of some female bodies in certain phases of their lives. In the words of environmental scholar Noe¨l Sturgeon, The politics of gender are often both the politics of reproduction and the politics of production the intertwined ways that people produce more people, manage bringing up children, figure out how to do the work at home at the same time as the work that brings in a paycheck, decide how and where to buy food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, take care of elders, and create and maintain all of the social institutions that surround this work. And all of this is central to whether or not our ways of living cause environmental degradation. (2010, 104 105) Sturgeon points out that the politics of reproduction of people, families, economies, and environments centers around gendered arrangements of work and sexuality and that these arrangements are deeply heteronormative. They presume the normative heterosexual organization of labor and love that social and economic institutions stabilize. The queer ecologies framework makes it possible to look at the nature of generative reproduction without recourse to an unquestioned ‘‘naturalness’’ of heterosexual desire, heterosexual reproduction, and thus socially legitimized heteronormativity. The field of queer ecologies understands biological reproduction as a material entanglement of biological, social, and cultural elements. At the same time, it deconstructs the purported naturalness of heteronormative lifestyles and modes of consumption.

RE/PRODUCTIVITY AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION: A CRITICAL LOOK AT ‘‘GREEN’’ ECONOMIES Due to the crises provoked by speculation-driven finance capitalism (as demonstrated by the 2008 financial collapse), the fear of a coming scarcity of natural resources, and the economic consequences of climate change, the US and European public even in conservative political circles has been paying attention to economic alternatives to capitalism. This section investigates to what degree the various ecofeminist debates over the connection between bodies, reproductive labor, and nature have found their way into discussions about such alternatives. Specifically, from the perspective of material(ist) feminisms, are there critical engagements between ecological and feminist critiques of capitalist dynamics? (For a comprehensive analysis, see Bauhardt 2014.)

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Three approaches claim to offer economically, socially, and environmentally sound alternatives to the early twenty-first-century mode of capitalist production and consumption: the ‘‘Green New Deal,’’ the degrowth (or postgrowth) view, and the solidarity economy. Of note, the analysis that follows refers to heterogeneous bodies of literature that address people in the Global North and their responsibility for economic change rather than blaming the Global South for its increasing resource consumption. In the first approach, the Green Parties of Europe in the early twenty-first century have been strongly advocating for the so-called Green New Deal at the level of the European Union. The Green New Deal looks back to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (1882 1945) job-creation strategy during the Great Depression of the 1930s while at the same time taking into account the finiteness of natural resources. Proponents of the Green New Deal have a far-reaching goal: the ‘‘ecological and social transformation of our economy’’ (Giegold and Mack 2012, 40). This transformation of industrial capitalism would involve the complete replacement of coal-burning and nuclear power plants by renewable energy and new traffic and transportation policy. Advocates intend for the ‘‘energy-and-transport revolution’’ (Green New Deal Group 2008, 3) to promote more efficient use of natural resources. Among the demands of Green New Deal proponents are the end of financial speculation and the financing of sustainable and environmentally sound economic development focusing on the promotion of green (i.e., ecologically sustainable) technologies in the energy and construction sectors. In such a program, states and industries would pool their investments in research and development and push for the creation of jobs in so-called green technologies. This view nevertheless perceives economic activity as industrial development: advocates see the ecological and social transformation of the capitalist economy as the transformation of technology options and of formal jobs that generate income (Green New Deal Group 2008). Green New Deal advocates do not explicitly discuss gender relations and gender equality as part of their proposed economic restructuring. This raises the possibility that any such scheme might reinforce gender hierarchies, especially since the Green New Deal focuses on the energy and construction sectors, which are traditionally dominated by men: ‘‘All these industries are male-dominated, meaning that, for the most part, the Green New Deal will directly affect men and male labour’’ (Kuhl 2012, 13). Proponents of the Green New Deal do not address care work as an important contribution to social and economic welfare. Nor do they take up women’s work in social reproduction and women’s particular integration into the gendered labor market. Thus, the Green New Deal is gendered not explicitly but implicitly in that it emphasizes industrial and male sectors of economic development and disregards unpaid female care work in the private sphere of households. Proponents of the second approach, the degrowth view, criticize the implicit growth logic pursued by the Green New Deal. Sustainable development scholar Tim Jackson (2009), for example, calls the concept of decoupling natural resources and economic output a myth. In contrast, degrowth comprises various strands of thinking that critically address the growth dynamics of market economies (e.g., Jackson 2009; Latouche 2006). In the Germanspeaking context, Postwachstumsgesellschaft (postgrowth society) is a central term (Seidl and Zahrnt 2010); in France, the term is de´croissance (degrowth) (Duverger 2011). The ideas behind degrowth rely on so-called happiness research, which questions the assumption of capitalist logic that ever-increasing material prosperity also leads to ever-increasing satisfaction. In fact, degrowth proponents posit that continuous economic growth does not lead to greater social prosperity and/or individual happiness. At a certain level of material wealth, they claim, GENDER: MATTER

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economic growth actually leads to an increase in individual dissatisfaction, health problems, and social tensions. These growth skeptics criticize the capitalist economy with its tremendous consumption of natural resources and its emissions as the root of not only an ecological crisis but also a societal one. Concerning gender issues, however, the degrowth approach like the Green New Deal has been gender blind: only as of 2015 was there evidence that degrowth proponents were at least partly acknowledging a feminist critique (see D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2015). Yet until insistent critical interventions by feminists, the degrowth debate failed to consider the consequences of an all-embracing definition of work including wage labor and unpaid care work for a postgrowth society. A closer look at the degrowth approach reveals its implicit assumptions about the material and symbolic gender order. For example, the public service sector care for children and the elderly, health care, and education represents a central branch of the labor market, which implies a strong focus on women’s jobs in paid social reproduction, in hospitals, in institutions providing child care, and in nursing homes (see Folbre and Nelson 2000). In all these areas, degrowth proponents call for a fundamental restructuring of social security toward more self-reliance. As expenditure-intensive sectors, these areas have, in the past, largely depended on economic growth and tax revenue or income-related insurance contributions. Dissociating these sectors from economic growth would require new forms of organization and financing. Under favorable conditions, this might entail a revaluation of women’s labor, because such restructuring could strengthen awareness of the social and economic importance of social reproduction, both paid and unpaid. Degrowth advocates consider technological innovations in green industries (e.g., renewable energy, public transport) to be important, but they see care and personal services as the leading sectors for economic transformation. If the postgrowth society is based on profound social and economic change, they argue, it will need a powerful publicly funded service sector. This could imply a revaluation of traditionally female jobs and help create higher-quality workplaces for both women and men. Another essential issue for the degrowth approach is consumption. Growth both determines which goods are produced and drives demand for higher wages, which in turn induces greater demand for consumption a vicious circle. Degrowth advocates, however, believe that less consumption will lead to a higher quality of life for individuals and for society at large (see Coyle 2011; Soper, Ryle, and Thomas 2009). Overwhelmingly, though, consumption decisions are not made by gender-neutral private households but by women. This means that critiquing consumption as a motor of growth neglects that consumption has gendered implications (see Casey and Martens 2007). The idea of a solidarity economy the third approach starts from the assumption that the economy must serve humans, not humans the economy; any economic system’s core task is to meet the concrete needs of human beings: ‘‘It is about value, not profit’’ (Voß and NETZ fu¨r Selbstverwaltung und Selbstorganisation e.V. 2010, 16). A solidarity economy is based ‘‘on the model of a world in which all people, without exception, are entitled to the right and the opportunity to have decent access to whatever they need physically, psychologically, and mentally to lead a good life in the social circumstances they have chosen for themselves on the basis of the fact that they are human beings’’ (14). This far-reaching view focuses more on social aspects of the economy than on ecological ones, but it also maintains

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that modes of social and economic life based on self-sufficiency will result in less strain on natural resources than the capitalist growth economy. Projects and initiatives that pursue solidarity in their economic activities are not dissociated from markets, but they are interested in the utility of the activity or product for the involved parties and not in maximizing profits. The production and distribution of goods and services in such a scheme are organized locally and on a small scale. Rootedness in local and regional settings is also a principle for trade and exchange local projects are considered better able to satisfy the needs of people in diverse cultural and social settings than the global market, or so-called development aid (Gibson-Graham 2006). In a solidarity economy, work is treated not as a commodity traded on the labor market but rather as ‘‘living human labor. . . . People do not work for the profit of others, but for themselves’’ (Voß and NETZ fu¨r Selbstverwaltung und Selbstorganisation e.V. 2010, 18). In addition to demanding the full development of the social capacities of individuals, proponents of a solidarity economy also call for the democratic and emancipatory reorganization of businesses, including management and decision-making. This view also attaches vital importance to the management and use of ‘‘commons’’ (i.e., shared resources) and to debates surrounding private property regulations. Much of the scholarship promoting the solidarity economy does not take into account a feminist critique of the structural and symbolic gender order of work and long-term care responsibility. However, these advocates’ definition of work scholar and activist Elisabeth Voß uses the term living human labor (2010, 18) indicates an implicit feminist-materialist understanding, which takes into consideration both paid and unpaid work patterns. Yet the approach still lacks an explicit gendered analysis of the question of who does what and why. Moreover, advocates ignore social reproduction, both its significance for solidarity and reciprocity in the economic process (concepts at the heart of the approach) and its relevance for gendered hierarchies. This cursory analysis of ecological economic alternatives shows that feminist-materialist ideas have not broken through into green economic consciousness. Neither feminist economic criticism nor the ideas propelling queer ecologies have been taken into account by advocates of economic alternatives to capitalism. Social reproduction and women’s care work are at the core of feminist economics, which brings women’s unseen and taken-for-granted responsibility for individual and societal well-being to light. The field of queer ecologies dismantles the unfortunate entanglements between the re/productivity of the female body, caring needs and practices, and symbolic maternity.

TOWARD A QUEER ECONOMICS There is a huge lacuna in the debate about economic alternatives to capitalism: the societal and economic importance of women’s work in social reproduction. Although each of the approaches sketched above claims to suggest ideas and instruments for the good life beyond capitalist growth dynamics, none takes into account that individual and social well-being depends heavily on the material and social foundations provided through care work. Feminist economists have shown how the structural gender hierarchy of paid and unpaid work is inseparably linked to the symbolic gender order of femininity and masculinity. Economic alternatives must reflect critically on this ongoing gendering of the division of labor and knowledge production and thus on continuing gendered power relations. GENDER: MATTER

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Scholarly and popular discourses continue to see women’s potential to give birth as inseparable from their primary responsibility for social reproduction. The identification of care with femininity and the associated social inferiority and economic invisibility of women’s work are closely related to the re/productivity of the female body. The perspective of queer ecologies dissolves the fusion of sexuality, naturalness, and gender in order to consider social reproduction on a new footing. What does this mean for alternative economies? And who are the actors of change? Both feminist critiques of capitalism and queer economics do not rely on the gendering of individuals for analysis. Social reproduction is an analytic tool for understanding how well-being depends on care for oneself and others: people need to care, and they need to be cared for. This implies responsibility responsibility for the world in which one lives and for the relationships one develops with other people and with nature, independent of an experienced or assigned gender identity. Nevertheless, feminist economics and the ecofeminist critique are not new; the debate within feminist economics and between ecofeminists and ecological and social economists has been ongoing. Why, then, is care still so disturbingly absent not only from mainstream economics but also from alternative economic concepts? Most problematic is the devaluation of symbolic femininity that is linked in material and discursive ways to heterosexual motherhood. Motherhood embodies the woman-nature nexus that Euro-American history and epistemology have used and abused so routinely to legitimize women’s inferiority. Caring responsibility is so deeply intertwined with heterosexual motherhood that one cannot overestimate the rejection of the symbolic femininity of care. Queer ecologies refreshingly deconstructs both popular assumptions and scientific assertions concerning gender and sexuality as cultural constructions rooted in the heterosexual matrix. In short, queer ecologies allows one to think about social reproduction and care for other beings and the environment beyond heterosexual relations and thus to uncouple symbolic femininity from material motherhood.

Summary This chapter has shown how ‘‘old’’ materialist feminism and ‘‘new’’ material feminisms offer new ways of thinking about the materiality of social and economic organization. Materiality for materialist feminists is based on the invisible structure of capitalism, which in turn is based on hierarchical labor relations. Class relations determine the hierarchy between labor and capital, and gender relations characterize the separation of work spheres and their respective appreciation: so-called productive work is paid for, while the labor for social reproduction is considered to be gratuitous. Materialist feminists have shown how tightly this social order is linked to gendered power relations. An intersectional analysis looking at gender, class, and race shows the degree to which racialized practices foster the gender hierarchy of social reproduction. Material feminists stress the materiality of bodies and their entanglement with raw matter and energy flows through metabolic transformation. Bodies and environments are inseparably enmeshed, as they are both living matter. Materiality thus comprises the human body and the material world and the environment. The natural, the social, and the cultural are inextricably intertwined. Material feminisms bring back matter, stuff, and bodies into feminist theory. Queer ecologies similarly focuses on the materiality of desire and

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reproduction and enables a conception of social reproduction from a material perspective the materiality of corporeal existence. One can thus understand biological and social reproduction as independent from ideological social and cultural constructions of maternity. It is important to disconnect social reproduction from femininity and heterosexual motherhood, because the material conditions of people’s lives bodily well-being, enough and healthy food, clothing, shelter, education, friendship, emotions, loving relationships, livable, safe, and ecologically balanced environments all depend on care work for oneself and for others. As long as care and responsibility for others and for the environment are considered ‘‘women’s work,’’ the depreciation of care and responsibility will continue. Queering the economy enables the creation of alternative pathways toward more social and environmental justice than people experience under capitalism.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010a. Alaimo, Stacy. ‘‘Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of ’Queer‘ Animals.’’ In Queer Ecologies, edited by Catriona Mortimer Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 51 72. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010b. Alaimo, Stacy. ‘‘States of Suspension: Trans corporeality at Sea.’’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environ ment 19, no. 3 (2012): 476 493. Alaimo, Stacy. ‘‘Trans corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.’’ In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 237 264. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Anderson, Bridget. Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Poli tics of Domestic Labour. London: Zed Books, 2000. Bagemihl, Bruce. Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosex uality and Natural Diversity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Bakker, Isabella. ‘‘Social Reproduction and the Constitution of a Gendered Political Economy.’’ New Political Econ omy 12, no. 4 (2007): 541 556. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Bauhardt, Christine. ‘‘Rethinking Gender and Nature from a Material(ist) Perspective: Feminist Economics, Queer Ecologies, and Resource Politics.’’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 20, no. 4 (2013): 361 375.

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Bauhardt, Christine. ‘‘Solutions to the Crisis? The Green New Deal, Degrowth, and the Solidarity Economy: Alterna tives to the Capitalist Growth Economy from an Ecofe minist Economics Perspective.’’ Ecological Economics 102 (2014): 60 68. Bennett, Jane. ‘‘The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter.’’ Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004): 347 372. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Boris, Eileen, and Rhacel Salazar Parren ~ as, eds. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Casey, Emma, and Lydia Martens, eds. Gender and Con sumption: Domestic Cultures and the Commercialisation of Everyday Life. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Coole, Diana. ‘‘Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities.’’ Polit ical Studies 53, no. 1 (2005): 124 142. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. ‘‘Introducing the New Materialisms.’’ In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1 43. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Coyle, Diane. The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters. Princeton, NJ: Prince ton University Press, 2011. D’Alisa, Giacomo, Federico Demaria, and Giorgos Kallis. Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. London: Rout ledge, 2015. Duverger, Timothe´e. La de´croissance, une ide´e pour demain: Une alternative au capitalisme; Synthe`se des mouvements. Paris: Sang de la Terre, 2011.

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Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. Ferber, Marianne A., and Julie A. Nelson, eds. Feminist Economics Today: Beyond Economic Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Floro, Maria S. ‘‘The Crises of Environment and Social Reproduction: Understanding Their Linkages.’’ Journal of Gender Studies, no. 15 (2012): 13 31. Folbre, Nancy. Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint. London: Routledge, 1994. Folbre, Nancy, and Julie A. Nelson. ‘‘For Love or Money or Both?’’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 4 (2000): 123 140. Frost, Samantha. ‘‘Re considering the Turn to Biology in Fem inist Theory.’’ Feminist Theory 15, no. 3 (2014): 307 326. Gaard, Greta. ‘‘Toward a Queer Ecofeminism.’’ Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1997): 114 137. Gibson Graham, J. K. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Giegold, Sven, and Sebastian M. Mack. No Stabilization of the Euro without a Green New Deal. Strategic paper by the Greens/European Free Alliance in the European Parliament. May 2012. http://greennewdeal.eu/green economy/publications/2011/en/no stabilization of the euro without a green new deal.html. Green New Deal Group. A Green New Deal: Joined Up Policies to Solve the Triple Crunch of the Credit Crisis, Climate Change, and High Oil Prices. July 2008. http:// www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/a green new deal. Harcourt, Wendy, Sacha Knox, and Tara Tabassi. ‘‘World Wise Otherwise Stories for Our Endtimes: Conversations on Queer Ecologies.’’ In Practising Feminist Political Ecol ogies: Moving beyond the ‘‘Green Economy,’’ edited by Wendy Harcourt and Ingrid L. Nelson, 286 308. London: Zed Books, 2015. Hennessy, Rosemary, and Chrys Ingraham, eds. Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives. New York: Routledge, 1997. Hird, Myra J. ‘‘Naturally Queer.’’ Feminist Theory 5, no. 1 (2004): 85 89. Jackson, Tim. Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. London: Earthscan, 2009. Khan, Gulshan. ‘‘Agency, Nature, and Emergent Properties: An Interview with Jane Bennett.’’ Contemporary Political Theory 8, no. 1 (2009): 90.

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Colonialism Neel Ahuja Associate Professor, Department of Feminist Studies University of California at Santa Cruz

The term colonialism refers to a large-scale political and economic system that allows one geopolitical entity (such as a nation-state or city-state) to establish controls beyond its traditional geographic borders in the service of increased profit or power. Because colonialism is a large-scale process that has shaped human settlement across the planet, it has an intimate relationship to matter. In fact, the very idea of ‘‘matter’’ physical objects making up the universe and its constitutive systems and elements has developed in tandem with the spread of colonial forms of knowledge and settlement over the past five centuries. Modern colonialism involves the development of sciences that describe the material form of the universe as well as the biology of human, animal, and plant life. These sciences, along with capitalist industries that deploy them, have historically helped spread colonial worldviews that separate inanimate matter, the living biological body, human culture, and the spiritual domain into distinct spheres. Modern colonial states, in turn, aim to reshape matter the natural landscapes, resources, and human and animal bodies of the colonized territory in order to sustain the profitability of the colonial system. One of the main justifications for modern colonial projects thus became a claim to a superior materialism, a more efficient and profitable use of nature and labor than that of indigenous societies. Such colonial myths of development serve to mask the widespread violence, hunger, social inequality, and environmental degradation generated by colonial warfare and settlement. Colonialism is an important term for the feminist study of matter, because it has generated specific understandings of the matter of human bodies as differentiated by a gender binary: a two-body system in which male and female reproduce the species and its social organization. Colonialism’s binary gender system perpetuates stereotypes of women’s bodily inferiority and the exploitation of gendered and sexual labor. The violence of colonial settlement and expansion has often involved large-scale sexual violence; the exploitation of women’s domestic work and intimate labors; the development of laws affecting dress, sexual conduct, and marriage; and popular images of nature as feminine and exploitable. In the process, the gendering of matter has also affected the formulation of stereotypes and inequalities related to racial and national difference as powerful empires have expanded forms of control across the planet. This chapter explores how colonialism, especially the modern systems of European colonialism and US empire, have proliferated specific conceptions of body and matter and have used such ideas to control and reshape the actual material formations of numerous human societies. It further examines how postcolonial and feminist theories have responded

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by rethinking colonial worldviews dividing body from mind and humanity from nature. Overall, the chapter makes clear that colonialism and the capitalist organizations of matter it has generated over the past five centuries constitute the single most important force shaping human societies and the planetary ecologies in which they are embedded. Colonialism is thus central to understanding how contemporary concepts and formations of matter have been shaped by social forces.

COLONIALISM: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES One of the best-known examples of colonialism is the establishment of a vast colonial empire by Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This empire oversaw formal, organized colonial settlements stretching across the British Isles, eastern North America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, India, Hong Kong, and Australia. It also exercised informal military and economic power in other areas, including Central America, China, and the Pacific Islands. In this system, British state and corporate interests (often located in the empire’s financial and political capital of London) developed a worldwide system for controlling the laws, labor, ecology, and social organization of distant lands and for promoting the political and economic interests of the English upper and middle classes. If colonialism is a large-scale system for organizing political and economic power, it is a force grounded in the production of specific colonial settlements and the networks connecting them. The British, for example, established small-scale settlements like the city-state of Hong Kong as well as large-scale colonial governments like the British Raj, which stretched across vast tracts of the Indian subcontinent. The term colony usually refers to an organized settlement that individuals from one location establish outside the borders of their place of origin. Historically, the term first referred to military and agricultural outposts established by Roman citizens in newly conquered lands of the western Roman Empire. However, as the European imperial states (first Spain and Portugal; then the Netherlands, Britain, and France; and later, Germany, Belgium, and Italy) built navies and overseas corporations to expand their influence and trade across continents from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, the idea of colonialism came to refer to all manner of economic and political activity characterizing the overseas networks that European settlers, corporations, and states controlled outside of Europe. In its modern usage, colonialism thus refers to the system by which a state or corporate entity creates a network of settlements and governing outposts in geographically distant lands and establishes forms of political, economic, ecological, and military integration between them. Public accounts of world history often whitewash the violent and coercive aspects of colonialism. Colonialism is often portrayed as a politically neutral process of population expansion, as the inevitable march of progress, or as the tragic response of settlers to discrimination in their places of origin. As an example of this phenomenon, literary scholar Ania Loomba quotes the definition of colonialism from the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘‘a settlement in a new country . . . a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors, as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up.’’ Loomba notes that this definition avoids any reference to people other than the colonisers, people who already might have been living in those places where colonies were established. . . . The process of ‘‘forming a community’’ in a new land necessarily meant un-forming or re-forming

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the communities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices including trade, plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide, enslavement, and rebellions. (2004, 7 8) History textbooks often continue to suggest the heroism and modernity of colonial explorers and downplay the violence of settlement and labor exploitation. Scholars sometimes distinguish between settler colonialism (a system involving the replacement of indigenous populations with settler populations through genocide, forced removal, intermarriage, or a combination of those methods) and mercantile or metropolitan colonialism (a system that leaves the native population in place but attempts to exploit the land and labor to the benefit of the colonizer). Given this distinction, the formation of settler colonies like the United States and Israel (which involved the extermination and forced removal of significant portions of the American Indian and Palestinian populations, respectively) exhibit significant differences from that of colonial India (where the British introduced a new class of colonial officials and traders who attempted to profit from reorganizing and managing Indian land, ecology, and labor). However, because colonial projects often involve a mix of settler violence, displacement of indigenous peoples, reorganization of ecological space, and imposition of new forms of trade and labor, the categorical distinction between these two types of colonialism does not always hold. It is necessary to carefully examine the particular forms of colonial domination that manifest under different empires and historical contexts. Although world history is full of the stories of empires that expanded to claim or dominate vast lands and peoples from the Aztecs to the Romans, the Russians to the US Americans today the systems of modern colonialism marked a turning point in history. These empires evolved beyond forms of direct military conquest, tax authority, and agricultural expansion that were common to earlier forms of conquest. Modern colonialism is as much about forcing the circulation, labor, and movement of peoples and goods as it is about the direct domination of people and land in specific territories. The development of world colonial systems violently marshaled natural resources, human labor, and goods to develop the modern global systems of the nation-state and capitalism. While some scholars argue that capitalism was the original process that produced modern European colonialism, it could equally be argued that the reverse formulation is true: beginning with the transatlantic voyages and land claims of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus (1451 1506) in the 1490s, colonialism was the system that allowed early capitalists to expand the material bases (natural resources and unpaid or low-paid labor forces) needed to accumulate profit from the transformation of ‘‘nature’’ into commodities and ‘‘humans’’ into workers on a planetary scale. Colonialism was the enabling condition for the creation of a world capitalist system of nation-states that expanded from its origins in west-central Europe. European colonial expansion was an inherently violent affair. By laying the groundwork for profitable transoceanic trades in minerals, agricultural commodities, manufactured goods, and enslaved human laborers, colonialism allowed the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, and Belgian monarchies to enrich themselves and to engage in ever-more intense economic and military competition with one another. This development of colonial trade networks centered on the development of the Atlantic slave trade, in which approximately 12.5 million people from Africa were turned into tradable commodities and forced to work in a variety of industries in the Americas and Europe, most notably in sugar and cotton production (The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database 2013). This number does not include the progeny of transported slaves, whose ability to reproduce new generations of GENDER: MATTER

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enslaved people was understood as part of their value for the planter class, who claimed ownership. Although the experience of slavery differed widely depending on the particular work arrangement and legal context, enslaved peoples often experienced loss of control over sexuality and family structures to the white masters, who viewed them as property. Many of the early writings by enslaved men and women focused on the cruelties of slavery, ranging from the commonplace rape of female slaves to the separation of children from parents to the brutal use of physical punishment, murder, and torture to suppress slave rebellion. As colonial mercantile economies developed, they progressively helped settlers displace indigenous ways of living, including the subsistence practices of American Indian nations that utilized seasonal forms of agriculture or engaged in nomadic hunting. European colonialism began in earnest with Columbus’s four voyages on behalf of Spain to the Caribbean (1492 to 1503) and expanded as settler armies and corporations moved inland to conquer lands across the Americas and, later, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. At the height of European competition for colonial land claims in the 1890s, over 84 percent of the earth’s landmass had at one time or another been claimed as a possession of a European imperial state (according to David Fieldhouse, cited in Loomba 2004, 3). Even after the US, French, and Haitian revolutions, from 1776 to 1804, signaled the demise of European monarchies and the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of liberalism and republicanism and the creation of many new independent nation-states did not stop the intense exploitation of peoples and ecosystems that attended colonial expansion. After the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, British and Dutch authorities began a new system of indentured labor that moved hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Indian, and Javanese workers from Asia to the former slave plantations of Caribbean colonies, such as Jamaica and Trinidad. This project explicitly aimed to promote competition between the new immigrants and formerly enslaved groups in order to prevent the black majority populations of the Caribbean from taking control from white planters as they had in Haiti (Lowe 2006, 193 194). Women were paid on lower scales in the indenture system despite the fact that the labor recruiters were given incentives to try to recruit them. When reports emerged suggesting the widespread sexual abuse and murder of women in the system, British officials established strict controls over marriage and sexuality that attempted to enforce Victorian Christian gender norms on Indian women who immigrated (Niranjana 2006, 71 72). At the same time that colonial officials used indentured labor to replace formal slavery, colonial expansion continued unabated in the settler colonies that declared independence from Britain, as the United States, Canada, and Australia fought a series of wars against indigenous peoples in order to establish white rule across their respective continents. This involved ethnic cleansing, displacement, and the concentration of indigenous peoples on reservations. During and after these wars, many native children were removed from their parents and forcibly sent to residential schools in order to assimilate them into white settler society. Suddenly transported to faraway locations, children were placed in gendersegregated schools; compelled to do manual labor; subjected to abuse, malnutrition, and poor sanitary conditions; occasionally forced into arranged marriage; and stripped of indigenous customs and language. Noting that education leaders explicitly saw the schools as a place to remove indigenous cultural traits from children, indigenous activists have since described the system as a form of genocide. Disease and mortality rates were strikingly high in the Canadian system, with a 1907 report claiming that 47 to 75 percent of students recently returned from two residential schools had died (Indigenous Foundations 2009). Geraldine Bob, a student at the Kamploops residential school on Secwepemc land in British Columbia,

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described how young girls were forced to do domestic labor in order to keep the school running: ‘‘We were just little kids . . . if you can imagine little kids in this school, cleaning the entire school and being forced to do things that are beyond them really. You know, like cleaning the bathrooms, cleaning the tubs, shining the floors.’’ Another student at a residential school in Manitoba claimed that young girls ‘‘were like slaves’’ (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, 80). The rise of a democratic public culture among the upper and middle classes in the United States, Britain, and France beginning in the late eighteenth century was the result of profits generated by the colonization of land in the Americas; the establishment of corporate controls in mercantile colonies in Asia; and the use of enslaved, indentured, or debt-controlled agricultural labor to produce commodities such as sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco, and cotton. Colonial powers developed increasingly complex methods of control that moved from simple territorial occupation and forced labor to complex governmental agendas of ‘‘free trade,’’ colonial education, land allotment, public health, and colonial police and military force. Thus, even as colonial systems claimed to replace authoritarianism with liberal democracy, the expansion of colonial settlement and trade has continued to reproduce inequality and violence based on race, nation, class, and gender. By allowing for the economic expansion of European nation-states and their emerging industrial mode of production, colonialism developed the material basis of global capitalism and the worldwide system of nation-states that became entrenched during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although large geographic portions of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean achieved formal independence from European colonial powers between 1945 and 1981, the systems of nationalism and capitalism that colonialism set in motion continued to create power imbalances that favored the economies and militaries of historic colonial powers. For this reason, many anticolonial activists in the twenty-first century consider decolonization to be an unfinished process blocked by neocolonial economic relations. In fact, even as the United States emphasized its support of decolonizing states during the Cold War, its growing power over the international financial, military, and diplomatic systems reinforced the dependence of these nominally independent states upon Europe and the United States. As such, US empire represents a historical development in the form of colonial power, combining settler colonialism (the establishment of settler societies across the North American landmass and in Caribbean and Pacific Islands); overseas control of hundreds of military bases and wars of occupation, in Vietnam and Iraq; and power over the international systems of finance that ensured trade domination over many former colonies of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. English colonial writer Rudyard Kipling (1865 1936) thus portrayed in an 1899 poem the 1898 US expansion into the Philippines during the Spanish-American War as a type of historical continuity, with the United States taking on ‘‘the white man’s burden’’ from Britain: Take up the White Man’s burden, Send forth the best ye breed Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives’ need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child. (KIPLING [1899] 1903, 78)

Notably, Kipling’s phrasing suggests that the Anglo-American civilizing mission is a gendered process in which white men expand colonial settlements outward in the hope of materially transforming peoples who, by virtue of their race, are understood to exist outside the sphere of human morality and development (‘‘half-devil and half-child’’). GENDER: MATTER

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RACE AND GENDER: COLONIAL NATURES AND THE MIND-BODY SPLIT The violence of colonialism has always been expressed in the intimate, material terms of controlling bodies, ecologies, and social relations that constitute everyday life. Thus colonialism is a rich topic of study for feminist scholars who wish to understand how gender and sexual power relate to our ideas about the nature of matter and the political and economic forces that organize material inequalities. Although colonial views and uses of nature vary based on context, they have historically tended to justify colonial rule, gender divisions, and the capitalist transformation of land into commodities. Because colonialism involves outsiders appropriating the land, resources, and labor of a place in the service of profit and power, it is always accompanied by forms of violence and coercion that attempt to reshape the material worlds of the indigenous peoples or exterminate them altogether. This violence has a significant gendered dimension aimed at controlling gender roles, sexuality, domestic labor, and reproduction. For example, the rise of modern capitalism in western Europe was dependent on the production of a shipping economy that, on the one hand, appropriated the natural resources of the tropics and the labor and knowledge of colonized American Indian, African, and Asian peoples and, on the other, exploited the labor of the domestic European peasantry, industrial workers, and unpaid women whose biological reproduction and household work helped sustain the colonial capitalist system. By proposing a binary gender system as the natural basis for dividing men’s public, paid labor from women’s private, unpaid labor, this system helped define economic pursuits as masculine as opposed to spiritual pursuits and domestic labor, which were seen as feminine. Such divisions were also projected onto the colonial project itself, resulting in the association of races and nations with greater or lesser degrees of masculinity based on a colonial vision of industrial progress. In Bengal, the seat of the colonial government of the British Raj, both British colonizers and anticolonial nationalists accepted the idea that European colonizers were successful in government because of their domination of the masculine realm of industry, whereas colonized Indians mastered the feminized domain of spirituality. As such, in resistance to British colonialism, Indian nationalists could attempt to lay claim to material industry without sacrificing spiritual traditions that women were understood to embody and reproduce. According to Indian colonial historian Partha Chatterjee (1947 ), Indian nationalists resolved political contests over women’s social status through ‘‘a separation of the domain of culture into two spheres the material and the spiritual’’ (Chatterjee 1990, 237). European colonialism allowed settlers, traders, and explorers to encounter areas of the world with which they had little prior familiarity. Thus Europeans often saw colonialism as a neutral project that expanded knowledge of the planet’s geophysical, cultural, and biological systems. The view of colonialism as part of the neutral and inevitable march of human progress reflects, in part, the association of colonialism with science. European sciences were energized by the discoveries of distant species and by voyages that expanded Europeans’ efforts to understand the physical world, including its biological, astronomical, oceanic, and geologic systems. Colonial travel allowed scientists, including French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769 1862) and English biologist Charles Darwin (1809 1882), to catalog and name the many species of animal and plant life that Europeans encountered on other continents. This close connection of colonialism and the generation of ideas about nature also involved attributing certain supposedly ‘‘natural’’ characteristics to different races and

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Theodor Galle, c. 1580 reproduction of Jan van der Straet’s c. 1575 drawing, America. This image reflects the association of the colonizer with masculinity and indigenous lands and peoples as feminized. DE AGOSTINI PICTURE LIBRARY / GETTY IMAGES

genders. Modern colonial enterprises often portrayed both European women and the colonized peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia as weak, irrational, hypersexual, and subject to the whims of instinct. In his pathbreaking study Orientalism (1978), literary scholar Edward Said writes that colonialism’s scientific ‘‘impulse to classify nature and man into types’’ transforms the conception of the material world into a hierarchical system that separates colonizer from colonized. For Said, ‘‘the typical materiality of an object could be transformed from mere spectacle to a precise measurement of characteristic elements’’ such that a whole network of associations ties geographic, cultural, and physical difference into a vision of natural and inevitable inequalities between social groups (Said 2003, 119 120). In this manner, colonial stereotypes commonly advertised that the colonial state had a patriarchal right to govern subject peoples and undeveloped land as well as to appropriate the labor of subject races (Wolfe 2006, 394 395). Colonialism helped entrench a worldview that radically separated mind from body, thought from nature, and human from nonhuman. As such, it was common for the literature, art, and philosophy of colonial societies to use the bodies of animals, faraway landscapes, non-European races, and women to assemble stereotypes about nature that helped justify colonial forms of settlement and technology (Pratt [1992] 2008; Schiebinger 1993). Many forms of colonial writing and art produced by Europeans used the figure of the woman’s body to suggest that nature formed the physical and mental landscape of the colonized. For example, Flemish painter Jan van der Straet’s (1523 1605) illustration America (1575) features Italian colonizer Amerigo Vespucci (1454 1512) awakening an ‘‘America,’’ represented as a nude native woman rising from her hammock to greet the famed navigator. Closely associated with a passive and idyllic GENDER: MATTER

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nature in contrast to the Christian cross, clothing, and advanced technologies (ships, weapons, compass) of the masculine colonizer, the figure of America both invites the wondrous commodities of the colonizer into the so-called New World and stages the transoceanic encounter of colonization as an inevitable march of progress. This colonial fantasy that the masculine colonizer would seduce the feminized and primitive native with the wondrous material objects of colonial modernity was betrayed by the brutal facts of sexual violence in the process of settlement. The journals of Columbus, which detail early European travels to the Caribbean occurring in the same time frame as Vespucci’s voyages, openly detail the rape and enslavement of native women by Columbus and other men on his ships. In contrast, native artists and writers foreground alternative maps of indigenous life and territories that preexisted colonial settlement and that resist gendered visions of the land as a site of conquest. Chickasaw literary scholar Jodi Byrd (2011) uses the Chickasaw story of eastward migration into northern Mississippi as a story to counter British colonial explorer James Cook’s (1728 1779) westward expeditions that helped to astronomically map the transit of Venus (2011, xvi). When Cook was murdered following a dispute between his ship’s crew and a group of Hawaiians at Kealakekua Bay, European authors and artists widely speculated on the brutality of the Hawaiians, helping to advance a colonial discourse on the ‘‘savagery’’ of the natives (Domercq 2009). In response, Byrd foregrounds the Chickasaw migration story depicting twin brothers, Chikasah and Chatah, who are led to a new homeland with the help of a sacred pole in the earth, a white dog, and observation of the Milky Way. Drawing upon this story that explains how Chikasaw and Choctaw communities separated through migration, Byrd emphasizes how the nation’s indigenous forms of navigation understood humans as part of a broader lifeworld that did not separate humans from spirits and animals who aided their navigation. In the process, Byrd argues for the importance of alternative visions of the material world in understanding the continuing legacies of colonial conceptions of distinctions between nature and culture. Despite continuous indigenous resistance, colonialism generated new ideas that attempted to justify the material violence of conquest, environmental destruction, and labor exploitation as expressions of universal ‘‘freedoms,’’ particularly in liberal political philosophies that asserted that European ‘‘civilization’’ liberated colonized peoples by making rational use of their lands and labor (Lowe 2006). Although Enlightenment thinkers like British philosopher and physician John Locke (1632 1704), Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711 1776), German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 1804), and German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770 1831) are still regarded as key philosophers of human freedom and democracy, their writings suggest that women and non-European races exist in a lower sphere of natural development separated from the heights of reason achieved by European man. Locke ([1689] 1963), who invested in British slave-trading schemes, justified taking Native American territory by claiming a natural right for those who made what he viewed as productive agricultural use of land. This reflected a dismissal of traditional forms of sustainable land use such as the use of common land for subsistence by individuals in England or the intentional creation of fallow plots in North American indigenous agriculture that were widespread in England and the colonies prior to the rise of the large plantation. Why do colonial powers intensify human inequalities even though they proclaim that colonialism is a defense of universal human freedom? This contradiction is often masked, because the logic of colonialism invokes a dualism that separates humans from their material environments. French philosopher Rene´ Descartes (1596 1650) is famous for suggesting a

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radical separation of body and mind and the particular importance of the mind in creating our sense of reality. Elevating reason over the material force of nature, Descartes declared that thought could be conceived as the basis of human existence. Enlightenment thinkers built on this Cartesian dualism of body and mind, extending it to radically separate thinking ‘‘man’’ from unthinking ‘‘nature.’’ Distinguishing European man’s presumed capacity for mental reason from the supposedly animalistic nature-bound bodily impulses of women and the colonized, Enlightenment thinkers created a powerful justification for colonial expansion and the exploitation of labor and environment. These liberal political philosophies continue to underpin imperial control of land and labor within the international system of nation-states. Because liberal political philosophy influenced some early traditions of feminist thought and politics, the activist traditions that challenged liberalism’s abstract and incomplete vision of freedom have progressively abandoned the individualist focus of liberal feminism in the United States and Britain, which from the 1950s to the 1970s often stressed achieving formal legal equality and accepted the principles of colonial sovereignty and capitalist labor. Anticolonial, socialist, critical race, ecological, and queer theorists have all added important insights to radical feminist discourses that attempt to offer a systematic critique of how colonialism, capitalism, and their related liberal philosophies reproduce forms of violence and exclusion.

BLACK AND POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST INTERSECTIONS The roots of the feminist critique of colonial views of matter, including racial and gender stereotypes about the human body, emerge in the anticolonial and New Left social movements of the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1970s and 1980s black and postcolonial feminist scholars developed a robust discussion of the links between race, gender, and colonialism. In the United States, writings by the Combahee River Collective ([1979] 1997) and by black feminist theorists Patricia Hill Collins (1990), Angela Y. Davis (1981), and Kimberle´ Crenshaw (1989) analyzed race in feminist movements and focused on experiences of black women to theorize how race, class, and gender produce complex entanglements of domination. Using the metaphor of a traffic intersection, Crenshaw (1989) suggests that the standpoint of black women could not be understood via universalizing models of either race or gender oppression. Opposing a Cartesian separation of mind and body and scientific hierarchies that naturalized social order, intersectional theorists emphasized the relation between the matter of the body and social discourses and inequalities. Bodies, in this view, do not exist as simple biological expressions of race or sex but are created within an intersecting grid of social power that reproduces race and gender inequality. Integrating Marxist and critical race theories into feminist analysis, the intersection metaphor was utilized by a new generation of feminists across the globe attempting to grapple with the complexity and materiality of domination. As intersectional approaches challenged contemporaneous feminist discourses in the United States that attempted to universalize women’s experience, intersectional theories used race to bridge experiences of women of color with those of women experiencing colonial and neocolonial domination. This development was evident in a debate between two prominent feminists, Mary Daly and Audre Lorde, who attempted to understand how patriarchy creates the ‘‘ecologies,’’ or material worlds, that women inhabit. In the process, feminists debated how the gendered body was forged through capitalist and colonialist domination of mind, GENDER: MATTER

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body, and nature. In Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), Daly describes the material world of patriarchy the social structure that perpetuates male domination of society through the appropriation of women’s labors, bodies, and desires through a metaphor of colonization: ‘‘Patriarchy appears to be ‘everywhere.’ Even outer space and the future have been colonized. . . . Nor does this colonization exist simply ‘outside’ women’s minds, securely fastened into institutions we can physically leave behind. Rather, it is also internalized, festering inside women’s heads, even feminist heads’’ ([1978] 1990, 1). Although Lorde’s 1979 letter to Daly calls Gyn/Ecology an ‘‘important’’ and ‘‘provoking’’ book, it launched a fiery critique of Daly’s reduction of colonialism to a metaphor and of the exclusion of African myths and histories from Daly’s vision of women’s universal empowerment. Lorde suggests that lumping together all women into a single category of oppression perpetuates the silencing and stereotyping of women of color. Describing to Daly her experience reading the sections of Gyn/Ecology dealing with the practices of forced genital cutting of African women, Lorde claims: It was obvious that you were dealing with noneuropean women, but only as victims and preyers-upon each other. . . . Your inclusion of African genital mutilation was an important and necessary piece in any consideration of female ecology, and too little has been written about it. To imply, however, that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy. ([1979] 2007, 67) Lorde’s critique of Daly reflects a persistent challenge to feminist attempts to synthesize how gender power is embedded in both ideas and the material world. In figuring different types of oppression as discrete and parallel, theorists may at times use one structure of violence metaphorically to make sense of another. Daly’s metaphor of colonization, according to Lorde, actually entrenches colonial ways of thinking about African underdevelopment that make African women into inevitable victims of patriarchy rather than understanding their history, agency, and political struggles as embedded in their own material contexts of life. Lorde’s point was echoed by postcolonial feminists who were born in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean and who took up teaching positions in North American and British universities after the 1980s. In a classic essay, Chandra Talpande Mohanty expresses concern that a universal model of gender power worked to obscure or even reinforce colonial power that created inequalities between First and Third Worlds, erasing important differences between women in different social contexts: ‘‘Colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a discursive or political repression of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question’’ (1994, 196). This means that in some Western feminist discourse, the ‘‘Third World woman’’ has been envisioned ‘‘as a singular, monolithic subject’’ whose particular relationships to power relations are obscured (196). The feminist dream of a worldwide liberation of woman from man is thus based on a colonial vision that assumes that the entire world can be incorporated into a single sphere of social activism, despite the fact that women in different social and geographic contexts struggle against different, even contradictory, forces of domination. This has especially been the case in contexts in which the physical bodies of women have become the material site for the articulation of racial differentiation. In her 1987 essay ‘‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,’’ Hortense Spillers echoes Lorde’s concern over the ways African women’s genitals have turned into a kind of object representing the universal vulnerability of woman. Spillers argues that the material of ‘‘black flesh’’ became a significant object that postslavery US racial theories used to pathologize black women. Reflecting later on ‘‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,’’ Spillers notes that she saw

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‘‘black people being treated as a kind of raw material’’ in white feminist discourse, a source for ‘‘inspiration’’ but not for theorizing power (Weheliye 2014, 39). Spillers’s interest in theorizing how the ‘‘flesh’’ of black bodies itself becomes a material for theories and formations of the human connects the worlds of feminist discourse to a physical ecology of the body in which social processes work to manage relations of life and death. Such politicized linkages of gender and sexuality have historically been subject to differences based on national contexts and colonial formations. If Spillers worried that US state racism was reflected in the characterization of black society as matrilineal as a failure of patriarchy discourses on Indian women reflected a situation in which colonialism was posited as the solution to what white writers viewed as the oppression of women by ancient religious superstitions. Take, for example, the controversy over the 1927 book Mother India, published by American women’s advocate Katherine Mayo (1867 1940) and distributed widely across five continents. Mayo, a Christian who wrote sympathetically of the work of missionaries in India, argued that child marriage and women’s illiteracy represented the backward cultural practices of Hindus, who required colonial rule in order to materially and culturally advance into the modern age. Mayo displayed an image of an Indian woman and child prominently Frontispiece from Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, 1927. Mayo’s book utilized depictions of women’s hardships across the title page of the book, suggesting that the in India to encourage and applaud the role of colonial British colonial regime was needed in order to expand missionaries in reforming Indian society. PROJECT protections for Hindu women and children against the GUTENBERG violence of caste, illiteracy, and religious domination as well as from the ecologies of dirt, disease, and physical violence that she saw as endemic to the subcontinent. Although many Indian reformers agreed that Mayo had aired important social problems, they attributed much of the responsibility to another source: the British Raj, the colonial government that ruled in part by dividing Indians along caste and religious lines and by promoting Victorian notions of woman’s modesty and domesticity. Engaging with the problem of how gender, reproduction, and sexuality are shaped by both indigenous cultural practices and forms of colonial exploitation across different geographic spaces, postcolonial feminists contributed important insights about how liberalisms that purport to liberate women, in fact, tend to extend new forms of patriarchal domination across colonial space. Like Lorde, postcolonial feminists were attuned to the specific social and historical contexts of patriarchy rather than viewing it as a universal system. For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1994), colonial prohibitions against widow sacrifice in India were not simply a straightforward exercise in humanitarianism but a reflection of a colonial fantasy of ‘‘white men saving brown women from brown men’’ (92). M. Jacqui Alexander traces how GENDER: MATTER

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colonial legal control of sexuality sets the ground for recently independent Caribbean nations to reproduce heterosexism as a site for distinguishing national culture. Given how gender and sexuality shape political psychology of the colonial civilizing mission and its aftermath even after some colonies attained national independence postcolonial feminists explored, in the words of Deniz Kandiyoti (1988), how women end up ‘‘bargaining with patriarchy,’’ or establishing space and agency within the constraints of different patterns of gender power. From this vantage, postcolonial feminism developed a complex analysis of how transborder social and economic phenomena affected the lives of colonized women as well as the broader forces that produce human society.

POSTCOLONIAL ECOLOGIES These important insights of black and postcolonial feminisms of the 1970s and 1980s are often viewed as distinct from the ideas of ecological feminists and feminist science studies scholars, who are conventionally understood to be more directly ‘‘materialist’’ in their discussion of human relationships to technology, economy, and the natural world. Despite this apparent division, both intersectional and ecological feminist methods foreground how modern colonial understandings of women and femininity are grounded in instrumental views of nature and the human body in a Cartesian materialism. One of the most important advances of feminist theories of the 1980s was a systematic critique of the binary gender system, removing sex from the domain of nature and understanding the body itself as a product of social forces. Judith Butler (1990) famously theorized that gender is performative in the ways it constitutes sex; sex is not the ‘‘real’’ material basis of gender but already an effect of gender’s ability to naturalize our understanding of the body’s material form. By undermining the scientific construction of sex as the body’s material site of gender differentiation, feminist science studies and ecological feminist approaches to nature and matter helped launch queer theories that undermined the binary distinctions between male/female and straight/gay identities. Since colonialism imposed Euro-American understandings of gender and sexuality on other societies, it often masked the complexity of different gender formations and figured indigenous polygamy, homosexuality, and public nudity as sites of moral failure that required reform. Thus nonbinary gender systems (for example, those that include third genders like the Indian hijra, male to female transgender individuals) often faced intensified discrimination under colonial rule, and British and other colonial powers established colonial laws to prohibit homosexuality across their empires (see Bacchetta 1999, 159). Feminist work on science and nature has emphasized parallels and interrelations between patriarchy and humans’ domination of nature. Although early ecological feminists did not always center colonialism in such accounts of domination, colonialism’s control of women’s bodies was related to forms of domination of land and ecosystems that were central to colonization and industrial expansion. Even as settlers and traders viewed their colonial projects as forms of progress for the colonized, they reshaped the material worlds of the colonized in ways that increased death and suffering. For example, environmental historians argue that diseases brought by European settlers to the rest of the world from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries resulted in massive epidemics among native peoples. Exacerbated by the simultaneous effects of war, forced removal, famine, and brutal labor regimes, disease was a significant contributor to the estimated 90 percent decline in population in the two centuries that followed Columbus’s voyages (Arnold 1988; Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).

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Colonialism reshaped the relationships between humans and other species, including animals, plants, and microbes. As indigenous forms of land use were displaced, colonialism often developed large-scale systems of agriculture that resulted in the introduction of nonnative species of plants and animals, which, in turn, competed with native species and altered preexisting ecological balances (Crosby 1972). Another important outcome of colonial rule was the spread of famine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In colonial sites as far separated as Brazil, Ireland, and India, new land arrangements, mass agriculture, war, and taxation schemes increased food prices and produced moments of scarcity worsened by climatic conditions and policies that favored corporations, colonial states, and large landholders over peasants and the poor (Davis 2000). Such processes encouraged the mass migration of large segments of the world’s peasantry away from their traditional lands and into factories and cities. Prominent ecological feminists from around the world, including Franc¸oise d’Eaubonne (1978), Daly ([1978] 1990), Val Plumwood (1993), Vandana Shiva (1999), and Greta Gaard (1998), and feminist science studies scholars, including Sandra Harding (1986), Donna Haraway (1989, 1997), Alondra Nelson (2016), and Elizabeth Grosz (2011), developed important understandings of how human bodies and societies are embedded in ecological and technological processes that cannot be fully controlled by human actors. As such, they posited science, technology, and environment as important topics for feminist study. At times, such writings also reflected a tension between humanist invocations of women’s voices or standpoints (which were crucial to black feminist articulations of intersecting oppressions) and posthumanist approaches to understanding the world-making power of nonhuman species, environmental forces, and technologies. Recognizing that narratives of women’s lived social experience represent both material ‘‘facts’’ and conceptual ‘‘fictions,’’ Haraway proposes that the myth of the cyborg a figure who crosses distinctions between human and animal, organism and machine, and physical and virtual worlds reveals an expansion of objects of inquiry for feminist practice: ‘‘The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion’’ (1991, 149). For Haraway, it is impossible to disentangle gender power from a capitalism that integrates women into new forms of technologically mediated forms of labor, communication, and reproduction. Viewing the transgressive potential of technology alongside its intensifying forms of oppression (evident in the exploitation of women in sweatshops and in the proliferation of modern warfare), Haraway argues that it is necessary to understand how colonialism and capitalism produce complex linkages between bodies, environments, and technologies that open up new sites of feminist politics. Such approaches helped develop methods in feminist thought that dispense with Cartesian distinctions between human and nature. These approaches are less concerned with the ‘‘standpoint’’ of a particular identity and attempt to grasp how the material lifeworld is produced through complex interrelation between human social forms and the broader worlds of nonhuman objects. While there remains significant tension over this move away from human subjects and discourse and toward nonhuman matter, a new generation of feminist scholars is addressing issues such as climate change, human-animal intimacies, and reproductive technologies as vital topics of study for understanding how gender power manifests in complex entanglements of human and nonhuman worlds. More work needs to be done to bring together these diverse traditions and methods of feminist thought. Despite their different topics of study and approaches to matter, GENDER: MATTER

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intersectional, postcolonial, and ecological feminists and feminist science scholars all take on important challenges to the Cartesian worldviews that colonialism has used to distinguish genders, races, and species and to naturalize systems of inequality.

Summary Colonialism is arguably the single most important force integrating different indigenous societies into the world systems of capitalism and the nation-state. As such, it is an important topic for women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, as colonialism has involved new ways of managing bodies and environments across the globe. Despite the gendered violence and inequalities generated by 500 years of Euro-American colonial expansion, feminists have attempted to grasp colonialism’s racial, colonial, and ecological legacies. In the process, they have developed new methods for explaining how gender influences ideas and formations of matter. Feminists have battled against Cartesian divisions of mind/body, male/female, human/animal, and organism/machine, working to overturn the colonial ways of thinking that underpin many forms of violence and inequality.

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Byrd, Jodi. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Col onialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Chatterjee, Partha. ‘‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Wom en’s Question.’’ In Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, 233 253. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1990. Combahee River Collective. ‘‘A Black Feminist Statement.’’ In The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory,

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Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Ran dom House, 1981. Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nin ~ o Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 2000. d’Eaubonne, Franc¸oise. Ecologie fe´minisme: Revolution ou mutation? Paris: Editions ATE, 1978. Domercq, Julien. The Death of Captain Cook: Mythmaking in Print. Cambridge University Library. 2009. https:// exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/cook/. Dunbar Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

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Fieldhouse, David. The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century. New York: Dela corte Press, 1967.

Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso, 2014.

Gaard, Greta. Ecological Politics. Philadelphia: Temple Uni versity Press, 1998.

Nelson, Alondra. The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome. Boston: Beacon Press, 2016.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Niranjana, Tejaswini. Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Haraway, Donna. ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technol ogy, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Cen tury.’’ In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149 182. New York: Routledge, 1991. Haraway, Donna. Modest Witness@Second Millenium .FemaleManª Meets OncoMouseTM: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989. Harding, Sandra. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Kandiyoti, Deniz. ‘‘Bargaining with Patriarchy.’’ Gender and Society 2, no. 3 (1988): 274 290. Kipling, Rudyard. ‘‘The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands.’’ In The Five Nations: The Writings in Verse and Prose of Rudyard Kipling, 78 80. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903. First published 1899. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963. First published 1689. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism: An Introduc tion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Lorde, Audre. ‘‘An Open Letter to Mary Daly.’’ In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 66 71. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007. First published 1979. Lowe, Lisa. ‘‘The Intimacies of Four Continents.’’ In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler, 191 212. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Mayo, Katherine. Mother India. New York: Blue Ribbon, 1927. Mohanty, Chandra Talpande. ‘‘Under Western Eyes: Femi nist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.’’ In Colonial Discourse and Post colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 196 220. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. GENDER: MATTER

Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Trans culturation. London: Routledge, 2008. First published 1992. Puar, Jasbir. ‘‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess: Becoming Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.’’ philo SOPHIA 2, no. 1 (2012): 49 66. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 2003. First published 1978. Schiebinger, Londa. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston: South End, 1999. Sinha, Mrinalini. Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. Durham, NC: Duke Univer sity Press, 2006. Spillers, Hortense. ‘‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An Amer ican Grammar Book.’’ Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64 81. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ In Colonial Discourse and Post colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 67 111. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Estimates. 2013. http://slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The Sur vivors Speak. 2015. http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinsti tution/File/2015/Findings/Survivors Speak 2015 05 30 web o.pdf. University of British Columbia. ‘‘The Residential School System.’’ 2009. http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/gov ernment policy/the residential school system.html. Weheliye, Alexander. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemb lages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Wolfe, Patrick. ‘‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.’’ Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387 409.

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Geography Angela Last Research Associate, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences University of Glasgow, Scotland

In geography, as in the social sciences overall, matter has recently made a rapid ascent into discourse. While ‘‘materiality’’ had been there for much longer, in the form of property, objects, and nature, encounters with ‘‘matter’’ were rare, at least outside of physical geography. Even when geographers called for a ‘‘rematerialization’’ of geography to renew attention to ‘‘stuff,’’ such as consumer goods and environments, or challenged the masculine representation of landscape, the desired engagement with materiality was quite different from a more explicit focus on matter. While there is no fixed definition of what constitutes matter after all, not even scientists can agree on one definition one could notice a shift from materiality as a relatively contained and solid entity to matter as a process that cuts across scales. This chapter first highlights what it means to think of geography as a boundless process. The view of the physical environment as not just passively sitting there but as being intensely enmeshed with social life has profound implications for envisioning connections between humans and their planet. It also has implications for how scholars undertake research and write about geography. This new perspective is illustrated here through examples that show how these connections run across the social and material world. In the process, the discussion demonstrates not only how biological categories, such as sex, and social categories, such as gender, matter at different planetary scales but also how a focus on different types of matter can lead to very different perspectives on humans and the environment.

DECENTERING THE HUMAN In human geography, it seems as if matter first forced itself into geographical consciousness as a lethal irritant, in the form of pollution, pathogens, and disease. Books such as American marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson’s (1907 1964) Silent Spring (1964) and German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s (1944 2015) Risk Society (1992) attempted to illustrate how even a tiny particle can have devastating effects on human and ecological health, if it ends up in an inconvenient place. With the use of pesticides and herbicides, for instance, vital plants and animals die, leading to a weakening of local ecological networks and, through wind and groundwater transmission, to accumulation in human tissue and places farther afield. Geography’s view on matter grew even more complex with influences from science studies. These studies allowed the discipline to move away from seeing matter as an exclusively hostile boundary transgression between the human and the nonhuman world. Matter became a

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common link between everything in the world that ‘‘modern’’ human beings should negotiate rather than fear. Further, by looking at matter at all scales, from the subatomic to the cosmic, geographers discovered matter not only as part of themselves but also as a dynamic entity that is capable of affecting the world (Whatmore 2002). Matter, the alien irritant, became socialized and an active participant in shaping geographies. Geographers started to notice the importance of plant and animal migrations to supposedly human histories and the ability of neatly arranged matter, whether in laboratories or on hillsides, to escape human control. At the same time, the capacity of matter to act was explored through a second movement that, by looking at material dynamics within society and landscape formation, sought to materialize the social. Here, people were seen as a form of mobile geology. It was recognized that people were born out of geophysical forces: evolution as well as the use of fire and fossil fuels had an influence on human development and, in turn, affected humanity’s participation in planetary processes such as climate. Most recently, this image has been expressed in the idea of the Anthropocene, a newly proposed geologic era. In this proposed era, humans have started to influence the planetary system to such a degree that the influences are showing up in the planet’s geology. As part of this new connection between the planet’s surface and the planet’s geology, geographers have increasingly looked at the way in which humans and geophysical forces affect one another. This includes the question of what a redefinition of the human as a geophysical force might entail for social, cultural, political, and economic development: What does it mean to be a geologic agent on this planet? Although a similar turn to matter happened in many other disciplines, this turn particularly enabled geography to deal with its disciplinary issues. It strengthened its identity as being concerned with the ‘‘geo’’ the entirety of the planet’s system. Thinking with matter means thinking less anthropocentrically less about human action on the environment. In turn, this viewpoint has helped dismantle the fantasy of control over nature and geographical boundaries. For instance, if humans dump waste into a region thought to be far away, it will eventually reach them again through the interconnection of earth processes. Thinking with matter has allowed geographers to show how everything is related and that humans are, despite their new technologies, still dependent on and vulnerable to other ecological and geological agents. This new materialism thus has necessitated a redistribution of agency and responsibility between the human and everything else. At the same time, geographers know that different people affect geography differently. How is human difference dealt with when looked at through the lens of matter? After all, does not matter imply a basis that is common to all?

THE MATTER OF HUMAN DIFFERENCE While materialism was attractive in its obliteration of differences, such human tensions as racism, sexism, and homophobia kept reminding geographers that a move away from the human would not allow them to sweep away humanity’s problems: people are still being declared ‘‘nonhuman’’ in detrimental ways. Some geographers even believe that matter and human hierarchies such as gender, race, and class are still best discussed in different forums. The danger is too great to rematerialize difference after it has just been shown to be socially constructed. If gender roles vary vastly from culture to culture, why is it necessary to think about basic bodily difference?

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Despite such concerns, the relationship between matter and human difference had to be tackled in order for the new ideas to have meaning. Geographers who use matter as a lens for social issues justify this approach in the following ways. First of all, human difference, even if it is socially constructed, has obvious material consequences in terms of economic opportunities, access to services and living space, personal safety, and food security. Geography is physically reshaped by human hierarchies, such as those of the South African apartheid regime or other forms of racial segregation. The enforcement of separate schools, water fountains, cafe´s, hospitals, and living spaces are very visible geographical manifestations. Less visible geographical inequalities include resource access (e.g., water monopolies), demographic prohibitions (e.g., miscegenation laws), and containment of particular populations (e.g., relocation by force of those considered black under South African apartheid and imposition of severe travel restrictions). Further, the traffic between the physical world and social construction does not flow just one way. Physical difference and change can also have an impact on social construction. If, for example, a nomadic tribe is becoming sedentary through environmental change, such as continued drought, the gender roles within the tribe are likely to change, too, as new occupations (farming), opportunities (education, employment), and other environmental adaptations arise. For instance, women might transgress their exclusive association with the domestic realm by virtue of also becoming producers of crops. Alternatively, their status might be devalued through losing their role as herders. The insistence that matter matters in interhuman relations has also led to arguments that it can function as a meeting ground of struggles, because all humans share earthly or cosmic materiality. This attention is reflected in questions such as these: How are gender, class, race, and ability materialized under particular political conditions? How are gendered, classed, raced, or able-bodied spaces also material? How do material circumstances (droughts, living space, wealth) affect gender, class, race, ability, and vice versa? What difference does it make to imagine oneself as nonhuman or more-than-human? These questions, in a way, continue the historical tension in geography between materiality and representation. Because there is no clearly delineated ‘‘matter and gender’’ discourse in geography, the following sections constitute an experiment in exploring and ordering current trajectories within the discipline. Perhaps controversially, scale has been chosen as a frame for drawing out both differences and links between different approaches. Although scale is often associated with undesirable qualities, such as hierarchy, homogeneity, and distance, attention to scale can move beyond thinking in layers and levels. It can highlight connections by zooming in and out and thus bring out different questions that arise from particular material formations. Through this frame, it is hoped, the diversity of geographical space as well as of geographical materiality in relation to gender can be illustrated. THE MOLECULAR SCALE

The molecular scale appears surprisingly often in recent human geography research. Whether geographers are dealing with pollution, drugs, viruses, new technologies, or even climate change, structural change on the larger scale is tracked to what is happening at scales humans cannot even perceive without specialized scientific equipment. Looking at structural change, in this case, does not involve only material change but also a transformation of social, cultural, and economic practices. Often, these molecular-scale events are connected to gendered practices and constructions. The most obvious examples are sexually transmitted GENDER: MATTER

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illnesses such as HIV/AIDS and syphilis and their ensuing demonization of women, gay men, black men and women, or gender-nonconforming people as vectors of disease. While the molecular scale is often imagined as a space that is everywhere and common to everyone, specific accumulations of molecules are not. Pollution, for instance, tends to literally appear everywhere but also affects particular bodies disproportionally. Environmental racism is one term to mark this uneven exposure of nonwhite populations to toxic waste products and other hazards. Examples include nuclear waste dumping on indigenous American or Australian territories, the export of waste to developing countries, or the location of polluting industries near nonwhite neighborhoods. However, owing to an ongoing gendered division in working practices, caring responsibilities, and social status, there is also environmental sexism at play in human exposure to pathogens. Environmental racism and gender intersect in industries such as mining (men’s exposure to toxic waste in developing country mining) and beauty (mainly female workers’ exposure to fumes in nail salons). American professor of geography Ruth Wilson Gilmore further suggests that ‘‘women take the lead in everyday struggles against toxicities’’ (2002, 15). Through their experience of gendered restrictions on the use of space, they become sensitized to attacks on other communities through insufficient or destructive management of hazards. At the same time, geographers dealing with environmental risk have been diagnosed with gender blindness. Although they have investigated waste-disposal locations, power stations, beauty parlors, megafarms, war zones, and other toxic sites, the gendered dimensions are often neglected. In geopolitics, too, toxic substances used in warfare have been investigated, but their gendered targeting in terms of eliminating enemy soldiers or preventing the reproduction of civilian society has mostly been left to medical researchers.

A female elder of the Cree community protests tar sands development in Alberta, Canada, August 3, 2014. AARON H UEY / NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

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An area where geographers have noted a clearly gendered (and raced, classed) dimension is the life cycle of medicines and illegal substances. In this regard, a geographical division between Global North and Global South is evident. In the developing world, geographers lament the restricted access to medication for the very bodies on which these products have probably been tested. Drug wars and drug-related violence are the other side of the coin lives in countries such as Mexico, Colombia, and Afghanistan are devastated by drug production and trafficking for First World consumption. In Mexico, femicides, or the sexbased killings of women, have drawn attention to the lethal combination of economic and border policies, law enforcement, gender performance, and wealth inequality that surround the cultivation, governance, and trade of illegal substances. Meanwhile, across the planet, access to all kinds of newly synthesized substances, such as antidepressants and hormones, is altering bodies and gendered practices, as well as water, soils, and other organisms. Scare stories about the feminization of fish or men through estrogen from pesticides or female contraceptives are but one example of the involuntary alterations attending the gendered distribution of reproductive responsibility and expected behavior on the molecular scale and vice versa. Even the chemical composition of the atmosphere is affected by gendered practices such as transport use, meat consumption, and household tasks. Yet attention to the molecular scale allows humans to see not only how their practices are altering molecular landscapes but also how the molecular scale affects expressions of human behavior: How much of gendered behavior is determined biochemically? And to what extent could such a materializing move challenge widespread opinions about the ‘‘nature’’ of gender? In the words of American gender and sexuality studies scholar Vanessa AgardJones (1979 ), who researches links between homophobia and fears of pesticide toxicity in the French Caribbean, ‘‘How can we take anxieties about environmental estrogens seriously, about the disruption of the natural, while also refusing a retrenchment into heteronormative fantasies about ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ bodies?’’ (2015). The deliberate altering of the organic and inorganic is also of interest to geographers, as is the mapping of molecular spaces. From genome mapping, reproductive technologies, and genetic engineering to nanotechnology, geographers have attempted to trace agents in the shaping of contemporary and future landscapes. Whether it is humans or nonhumans that are altered, the question of gender keeps surfacing. If genetically modified plants are grown in poorer countries, does this translate to less work and more education for women or debt suicides for men? Can female chickens be drugged or engineered to reproduce more females in order to prevent mass culling of male chicks that are useless to the poultry industry? How are demographies reshaped by reproductive technologies that are, in turn, shaped by human (gendered, raced, ableist) hierarchies? How are geographies altered if science reveals particular differences between men and women? Which gender dominates in making decisions on molecular interventions? Which section of the global population is affected when things go wrong? As such questions should make obvious, what happens at the molecular scale affects all other scales, too. While many of these issues could be discussed without emphasizing the molecular for instance, by focusing on medicines as human-scale products such an emphasis can help draw out not only biological but also geographical anxieties about interconnectivity. As genes, viruses, and other molecular entities keep moving around the globe, passing between humans and nonhumans, the image of boundaries is radically being called into question. As geographer Bruce Braun (1964 ) phrased it, humans no longer think ‘‘in terms of a self-contained body whose genetic inheritance is to be managed and improved, but in terms of a body embedded in a chaotic and unpredictable molecular world’’ GENDER: MATTER

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(2007, 14). It is in this microscopic space of fuzzy boundaries that larger geographies are shaped, often, it seems, to mask or make humans forget this indeterminacy. THE HUMAN SCALE

Most geographers would insist that looking at the body, the built environment, and the natural environment requires very different sensitivities that do very different work. Despite these differences, it is noticeable that matter mainly manifests as materiality at this scale as networks or collections of objects that circulate through various spaces and theoretical directions. Here, such diverse things as clothing, worms, milking machines, destroyed buildings, and flood-prevention measures are encountered. Geographers scrutinize these phenomena with regard to their production, interconnection, or lack of connection or to the effects of their emergence. How did a particular environment come into being? What practices, processes, and geographical conditions led to its assemblage? The human scale is also more obviously gendered than the molecular or planetary scale, with gender relations and their enforcement having a distinctive impact on spatial and material ordering. Such literal geometries of oppression disproportionally affect women, whose bodies tend to be more strongly controlled than those of men. In one of her case studies on gender and global production, for instance, American geographer and gender studies scholar Melissa W. Wright observes a ‘‘gendering of [product] defects’’ that results in stricter medical and social surveillance of women in Chinese factories (2006, 38): mistakes made by men are blamed on the difficulty of the job, whereas mistakes made by women are blamed on the incompetence of women and their volatile biological and social makeup (periods, pregnancies, ‘‘infantile’’ behavior). A classic example of gendered geography is land distribution. Land distribution can happen through a variety of customs, including inheritance, sale, or making land available for communal use. Through colonialism and the imposition of Western trade practices, patriarchal relations became established as a norm. As female negotiation partners were refused, many indigenous societies responded by restructuring their own societies to prevent further land loss in the eyes of the colonizers (Simpson 2014). Today, this problem persists, for instance, in development, where it is often men rather than women who are given technology, tools, machinery, training, and land. In her research, American geographer and land surveyor Deborah Naybor (1957 ) observes how ‘‘women in Uganda continue to lose ground, quite literally, decreasing the possibility of gender equity in terms of land’’ (2015, 884). Colonial norms die hard, and women continue to be deprived of property by new policies.

THE BODY In much geographical literature, humanity remains an unpacked term that disregards how gender, race, class, and other differences constitute divisions that affect human agency in the world. Yet humans have different capacities to act or are struggling against assigned capabilities to act based on their gender, race, and other characteristics that mark bodies out as different. Different bodies will encounter different resistances in their life paths that will also have physical consequences. Despite some progress, humans who do not fit the dominant ideal of the white heterosexual male such as indigenous women or gendernonconforming people often remain unacknowledged in terms of their ability to act on the world.

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For this reason, the body plays a key role in feminist geography. Initially a site of critique in terms of unequal and reproductive labor, the body has become central to many other debates, such as geopolitical violence and environmental issues. Through both its material and its representational dimension, the body frequently constitutes a meeting ground of the human and the nonhuman, the sensory and the rational, the population and the individual, the intimate and the global. In particular, the ambiguous status between individuality and generic matter one of many humans has made the body a powerful tool in overturning persistent natureculture narratives. Despite geography’s appreciation of theorists of gender and sexuality such as American Judith Butler (1956 ), the focus has been less on a deconstruction of the natureculture dichotomy of sex/gender in fact, it has been suggested that this debate has bypassed geography almost completely and more on showing how the human body is also nonhuman. Such posthumanist conceptualizations of the body have increasingly attracted criticism, particularly from postcolonial and feminist science and technology studies scholars, who have accused them of ignoring race and gender inequality. At the same time, however, the body has become a tool for resensitization to the material and emotional dimensions of conflict. In critical geopolitics, for instance, it has become a means to contest the dematerialization and depersonalization of the more traditional discussions of geopolitics. Against the rationalization of war through body count, progress maps, and leading figures, feminist and postcolonial geopolitics poses counternarratives of ‘‘humanized’’ and often gendered violence. Here, gender is embraced both as an analytic sensitivity and as a category of analysis. As an analytic sensitivity, attention to gender uncovers hidden narratives and people, as well as links between the intimate and the global, the mundane and the spectacular: how does the messy reality of war translate into the neat map on a television screen? As a category of analysis, feedback loops between gender dynamics, warfare, land redistribution, and media representation are made visible: how does gender matter in territorial distribution and conflict? Often, the two directions overlap. For instance, the war in the former Yugoslavia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is often cited as an example both of extreme gendered violence (the Srebrenica massacre of Muslim men and boys and the systematic rape of women and girls) and of the deployment of new personalization strategies, which have been described as feminist interventions. In an article on Irishwoman Maggie O’Kane’s journalistic documentation of the war, Irish-born professor of government and international ´ Tuathail (1962 ; also known as Gerard Toal) illustrates not only how her affairs Gearo´id O representation of minor voices adds to personalization but also her detailed and sometimes graphic descriptions of people, events, and environments (1996). In conflicts, bodies have, moreover, been used physically for feminist interventions. Political theorist Hagar Kotef and human geographer Merav Amir (2007) document how women have strategically used their gender to humanize practices at Israeli checkpoints in Palestine. In their discussion of various layers of feminization and masculinization in this conflict, they illustrate how middle-class Israeli women use their bodies in stereotypical heteronormative ways as caregivers or potential sex objects to gain male soldiers’ cooperation to act in more humane ways. In a later study, Amir shows how asymmetric gender empowerment from arms training to economic opportunities can also increase the likelihood of violent conflict. In contrast to the materiality of the built environment, discussed in the following section, that of the body appears to signify a more fixed disposition. A person cannot easily GENDER: MATTER

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change his or her gender, race, or ability, and this fixity determines which spaces one can enter. Looking at the scale of the body, new problems literally materialize. In contrast to the molecular scale, the body denotes difference: different bodies have different material qualities that are attached to particular social hierarchies. As the examples have shown, however, the multiple registers of representation that are embodied gender, race, disability/ablebodiedness, and so on also allow for creative repositioning. The women at the checkpoints are but one example. While such repositioning may work only temporarily, in a particular space, its effect on geography can be significant.

THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT The enforcement of gender (and other) hierarchies is also present in the built environment. Feminist geographers and architectural historians have pointed out how, for thousands of years, men have been overrepresented in the design and construction of the built environment. Because the materiality of the built environment is so enduring, its reflection of habitation patterns endures as well. For instance, in much of the world, private-public separations of architecture and infrastructure continue to disadvantage women, although the image of women may recently have changed. This is reflected not only in continued norms, such as prohibitions on taking children or elderly parents to work, but also in their geographical manifestation, such as in the distance between work and living spaces or the construction of high-maintenance homes away from both workplaces and women’s socializing spaces. As architectural historian Despina Stratigakos points out, Western women’s emancipation was closely tied to greater influence over built and especially urban space. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, women in such cities as Berlin, London, and New York ‘‘used bricks to fight exclusion, but by combining them with mortar rather than launching them through glass’’ (Stratigakos 2008, xvii). This struggle extended across everyday and monumental space, the latter especially being a symbol of patriarchal power, with male figures disproportionally dominating public sculpture. In the present, women are still fighting over topology and, especially, increased access to it, in the form of safe public transport, abortion clinics, breast-feeding spaces, permission to enter private or public spaces during menstruation, and even consideration for jobs in architecture and urban planning. Built space can work against men, too, although the disadvantaged men tend to be from minority or low economic backgrounds. The recent scrutiny of the growth of the prison economy, especially in the United States, has shed light on the structural racism of the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as connections between local and global prison landscapes. It has also given rise to the field of carceral geographies, in which geographers analyze prison life, economy, and infrastructure. Studies document, for instance, the effects of prison construction away from other settlements on prisoners’ family and gender relations or the effects of the impact of heteronormativity on gender-nonconforming people, both in terms of criminalization and captivity. The design of the built environment affects gender-nonconforming people in more general terms, as they navigate heteronormative and patriarchal public space. Urban planner Petra L. Doan reports how transgendered and gender-variant people struggle against gendered division of space, which she terms ‘‘the tyranny of gender’’ (2011, 89). The tyranny of normativity, in general, extends to other groups who are marginalized by those who

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dominate built space people with disabilities, people of color, immigrants frequently forced to form ‘‘ghettos’’ for mutual support.

and are

Ironically, certain transgressive ghettos, such as gay villages, have become associated with creative cities by urban regeneration gurus. More drastically, the West’s supposed openness to gender nonconformity and challenges to patriarchy has been used as a reason to wage war on countries that are seen as fundamentally backward and patriarchal (Puar 2007). Such seemingly contradictory connections highlight that the interplay between material ordering and social ordering of the environment is not straightforward. Despite their material entrenchment, imposed boundaries can be changed through repurposing, redescription, and physical alteration. Thinking with the materiality of the built environment, humans are reminded that this materiality is never neutral, but sometimes it is neutral enough to work as a palimpsest. THE PLANETARY SCALE

In their analysis of planetary systems, geographers are examining not only how the human is interconnected with flora, fauna, geology, and geophysical forces but also how people and materials circulate around the globe. Here, gender affects and is affected by anything from climate change to migration. When it comes to the analysis of planetary systems, geographers have been careful to avoid not only environmental determinism but also, if coming from a country that participated in colonialism, the legacy of enduring colonial representations. In particular, early European geographical writing imagined fantastic connections between non-European geography and sexuality. Many of these imaginations still permeate Western culture, from metaphors such as virgin territories or forests to the association of warmer climates with greater levels of sexual drive and permissiveness. This environmental determinist, racist, and sexist past has sensitized geographers to problematic essentialisms when it comes to considering humanity as a species or nature as feminine. The position of ecofeminism, for instance, came under fire for essentializing both woman and nature, despite the challenge of patriarchy, especially Western capitalist patriarchy’s role in large-scale environmental destruction. In return, the non-Western side of the ecofeminist movement criticized Western liberal feminists for not making the protection and management of nature a priority. As German sociologist Maria Mies (1931 ) and Indian philosopher and environmentalist Vandana Shiva (1952 ) complain, ‘‘Urban, middle-class women find it difficult to perceive commonality both between their own liberation and the liberation of nature, and between themselves and ‘different’ women in the world’’ (1993, 5). Such accusations have again been countered by the argument that it is gendered practices that give women their specific knowledge of ecosystems and not the reverse.

ECOSYSTEMS, GEOPHYSICS, AND GEOPOLITICS In terms of the large-scale matter and gender connection, geography has tended to rely on a historical-materialist approach, inherited from analyses of economic globalization rather than environmental issues. Historical materialism has allowed geographers to look at how things such as landownership and the production of goods are organized around the world and how this organization produces global inequality. Some geographers have argued that this attention to class and labor often has resulted in a conflation of biological sex and gender. At the same time, geographers have used the very same approach to criticize the social construction of gender, such as in the case of development projects in the Global South, GENDER: MATTER

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Prussian Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 1900), German Martin Heidegger (1889 1976), Frenchman Georges Bataille (1897 1962), Frenchman Gilles Deleuze (1925 1995), and Frenchman Fe´lix Guattari (1930 1992). These authors distinguish themselves from others through their attention to the nonhuman and particularly to geologic and geophysical phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and layer formation. They are used to thinking both about the relationship between humans and earth processes and about the earth by itself, apart from humans. An example would be Mexican American writer, artist, and philosopher Manuel DeLanda’s (1952 ) book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), in which the author narrates human history as tied to the geophysical. Feminist and postcolonial geographers have been extending this discussion through authors such as Australian-born Elizabeth Grosz (1952 ) and Jamaican Sylvia Wynter (1928 ), who insist on the value of a materialist inquiry into sex, gender, and race to reimagine difference. These inquiries also extend to questions about the impact of gender and sexuality on geopolitical divisions. Grosz, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, links human and animal practices of creating territory via sexual selection. For humans, as for animals, a territory is a space in which a specific group can reproduce (and reproduce their culture). In the case of humans, the desire to maintain or extend a specific cultural reproduction can lead to geopolitical conflicts. Given this, can humans territorialize differently, and if so, how?

GLOBALIZATION Matter also plays a role in discussions of globalization, which is regarded as having a material and nonmaterial dimension that is difficult to grasp. Here, using matter as a starting point can help make sense of the complexity of interactions. In many cases, geographers have tried to use the materiality of smaller scales, such as the local scale, to render the global more tangible. Against the image of globalization as nonmaterial, geographers have shown the global flows of matter such as raw materials, goods, bodies, waste, pollutants, organs, biomass, and gases. Some of these flows have gendered dimensions, for instance, when it comes to migration, human trafficking, or organ trading. The circulation of people and matter is also strongly related to global inequality, with people from the Global South disproportionally providing services, bodies, or parts to the Global North. Because humans are not the only actors in the material world, geographers have also paid attention to nonhumans, such as animals and plants, which have their own form of migration and globalization, through the global dispersal of seeds or animal species. These dispersals happen either naturally or through human intervention (e.g., via invasive species or agricultural plants). Perhaps surprisingly, these, too, have a gendered dimension, especially when it comes to livestock; in this case, whole animals or eggs/semen are moved around the globe to improve genetics, resistances, and yields. At the same time, the nonhuman world and its circulation through reproductive sex have been used as a model and justification for the naturalness of certain forms of globalization that rely on narratives of replication and growth. For Deborah Cowen, a Canadian geographer who studies global logistics, this raises the following question: ‘‘If this ‘natural’ vision of sex and death is deployed to naturalize the violence of supply chain capitalism, how might different engagements with nature’s reproduction help cultivate alternative futurities, including alternative forms of economic organization?’’ (2014, 222). In short, how can humans imagine different naturalizations or materializations that lead to alternative, less destructive systems of globalization? GENDER: MATTER

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If both directions of inquiry the geophysical and the globalization angles are taken together, uncomfortable questions about planetary materiality arise. At present, the material state of the planet is significantly dependent on material flows produced by humans. These flows are determined by social patterns, including consumption, development, and habitation choices. Gender is but one factor in this mix, and it is one that heavily intersects with global economic inequality. Thinking with planetary matter flows enables humans to see both humanity and the earth as dynamic systems, which are characterized by particular patterns but also the capacity for rapid change. Its relation to gender is perhaps the least radical, because gender is mainly seen in terms of population growth and the male/female division. Conversely, however, it could be seen as radical in its tracking of large-scale shifts in gender relations or its complete disregard for gender at the geophysical level. If the view were always switched to the planetary level, would humans care about how someone dresses or which spaces they use?

Summary By necessity, geography has to deal with the intersection of materiality and human bodies. Depending on the scale of analysis, bodies are not always gendered, sometimes becoming mere units in the research. Likewise, when gender is discussed in geography, its material dimension, or its relation to the wider material environment, is sometimes disregarded. While the intersection of matter and gender may not always be a suitable mode of enquiry, it represents one mode that draws out the uneven entanglement of the human and the nonhuman. This chapter has illustrated how this unevenness extends across all scales and environments, leaving very material imprints from the molecular to the planetary, from the rural to the urban, from the geophysical to the geopolitical. How human societies are organized matters for the planet, and how matter is organized affects human societies in return. One could say that gender is not independent of the earth, even if humans do not always know exactly how it relates to everything else. Therefore, geographers continue to probe such relations to obtain a greater understanding of the world and its problems. Beyond theoretical enquiry, geographers engage in practical experimentation, which is guided by questions such as these: How can research methods and representations of gender (re)materialize gender in productive ways? How might reinscriptions of gender identities alter humans’ relationship to the built or natural environment? Here, too, intersectional approaches for instance, with race or indigeneity are needed to forge new alliances with other discourses that are invested in reimagining the human as part of their struggle against unequal material conditions. With white men and their European-derived culture being overrepresented in global hierarchies from politics to popular movies, feminist and queer activists are not alone in arguing that planetary conditions may change if a different role model is adopted. What if women, indigenous people, and nature were given a different status? How would that, for example, change the politics of resource extraction? Despite its apolitical reputation, matter could comprise an appropriate meeting ground between different groups of people that seek to think and rethink the dominant relationship between humans and the planet. Although interpretations of and relationships with nature differ from culture to culture or even person to person, everything is material and materially related. Such a materialist perspective, however, needs to remain sensitive to the fact that, while matter runs across everything, not everything is materialized evenly. After all, the

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geography that humans produce in its physical and discursive manifestation shows this quite clearly. But it also shows that neither geography nor gender nor the terms of engagement with either one of them are forever fixed.

Bibliography Agard Jones, Vanessa. ‘‘Chlorde´cone.’’ Presentation at the Manufacturing of Rights Conference, Beirut, Lebanon, May 14 16, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv qVkR4Iuqs. Braun, Bruce. ‘‘Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life.’’ Cultural Geographies 14, no. 1 (2007): 6 28. Cowen, Deborah. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping the Violence of Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. DeLanda, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Doan, Petra L., ed. Queerying Planning: Challenging Heter onormative Assumptions and Reframing Planning Prac tice. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011.

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke Univer sity Press, 2014. Stratigakos, Despina. A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Whatmore, Sarah. Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces. London: Sage, 2002. Wright, Melissa W. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism. London: Routledge, 2006. F IL M S

Gilmore, Ruth W. ‘‘Fatal Couplings of Power and Differ ence: Notes of Racism and Geography.’’ Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002) 15 24.

A Closer Walk. Dir. Robert Bilheimer. 2003. Documentary about the global AIDS epidemic, showing the transition of AIDS from ‘‘gay plague’’ to a disease that affects every one everywhere.

Kotef, Hagar, and Merav Amir. ‘‘(En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and the Repercussions of Intervention.’’ In ‘‘War and Terror I: Raced Gendered Logics and Effects in Conflict Zones,’’ edited by Mary Hawkesworth and Karen Alexander. Special issue, Signs 32, no. 4 (2007): 973 996.

Eat Drink Man Woman. Dir. Ang Lee. 1994. Fictional film about a Taiwanese family, tackling relations between gender/family dynamics and globalization through the medium of food.

Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. Halifax, Canada: Fernwood Publications, 1993.

Grown in Detroit. Dir. Mascha Poppenk and Manfred Pop penk. 2009. Documentary about teenage mothers who become urban farmers.

Naybor, Deborah. ‘‘Land as Fictitious Commodity: The Con tinuing Evolution of Women’s Land Rights in Uganda.’’ Gender, Place, and Culture 22, no. 6 (2015): 884 900.

On the Fence: The Chipko Movement Revisited. Dir. Pramod Mathur. 1997. Documentary that emphasizes the active role of women in this environmental movement.

´ Tuathail, Gearo´id. ‘‘An Anti geopolitical Eye: Maggie O O’Kane in Bosnia, 1992 93.’’ Gender, Place, and Cul ture 3, no. 2 (1996): 171 185.

Wallfuckin’. Dir. Monica Bonvicini. 1995. Provocative art film about sex, politics, power, and the related construc tion of gender and the built environment.

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Food Aya H. Kimura Associate Professor, Department of Women’s Studies University of Hawai’i-Manoa, Honolulu

What does food have to do with gender? Everyone has to eat, regardless of sex/gender, so why explore intersections of food and gender? Food is at the heart of many contemporary social controversies, including its safety and quality (such as pesticide residue and genetically modified organisms, or GMOs) and the health effects of over- and underconsumption (such as obesity and malnutrition). In developed countries, it has also emerged as a key focal point for social movements as well. Since the 1980s, social studies of food have increased exponentially, pointing out that food is a complex issue that requires both nature and culture, and thus both biochemical and sociocultural analyses are needed. As such, food invites analyses that are sensitive to gendered dynamics. Food is developed, engineered, produced, advertised, purchased, prepared, and consumed in profoundly gendered contexts. Although the professional ranks of chefs have been dominated by men (Cairns, Johnston, and Baumann 2010), scholars who work in different countries, such as the United States (Shapiro 2008), Italy (Counihan 2004), and Japan (Cwiertka 2006), found that women have been primarily responsible for purchasing food and cooking food at home; women have a central role in the allocation of food, which affects the nutritional status of family members. On the production side, the common image of the farmer might be masculinized (Brandth 1995; Campbell, Bell, and Finney 2006; Little 2002), but the female contribution to food production is significant. Women’s gardens and livestock husbandry have constituted an important element in US and western European farm economies (Sachs 1983; Whatmore 1991). Globally, the female share of the agricultural labor force varies from 20 percent in Latin America to almost 50 percent in eastern and southeastern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2011, 7). But on average, 43 percent of the agricultural labor force of developing countries is made up of women (7). This chapter explores the intersection of matter and gender through an analysis of food. It focuses on two aspects: production and consumption. First, the chapter discusses changes in the production of food through industrialization and globalization. In terms of industrialization of food, the chapter elucidates how a lot of food that consumers in developed countries and the urban areas of developing countries eat is the product of modern technologies, such as hybridization, genetic modification, and breeding specifically designed to create animals and plants suitable for industrial management and capitalist production. These new technologies have raised important questions about the impact of the new

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foods on ecology and human health. They also raise questions as to whose interests and preferences are reflected in the development of new kinds of foods. Globalization also has an immense impact on the contemporary food situation. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) (2009), US imports of food from other countries increased from $41 billion in 1998 to $78 billion in 2007. Japan’s food selfsufficiency rate was over 70 percent in the 1960s but in the early twenty-first century hovers at around 40 percent, a clear reflection of its increasing dependency on imported foods. The globalization of food distribution raises questions about how this trend influences food safety and quality; it also raises questions about the environmental consequences of longer ‘‘food mileage.’’ However, this chapter highlights the labor relations involved in producing and distributing food. The multinational companies that produce foods distributed to supermarkets in developed countries need a particular kind of worker. Who are the workers who produce these global foods? What are their working conditions? The second half of the chapter focuses on the consumption of food. In developed countries and in the United States in particular, the most salient issue in food policy is arguably obesity. Although many including feminist scholars highlight the public health significance of the rise of obesity, many other feminist scholars have pointed out the problems of demonizing fat bodies, because the health consequences of heavier body weight is actually contested. In the developing world, underconsumption of food usually predominates in the food policy discussions. Hunger and malnutrition affect millions, mainly in developing countries, although developed countries also have food insecurity. In the United States in the early twentyfirst century, 14 percent of households are considered food insecure, according to the USDA (2015). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) (2013), women are overrepresented among the hungry and malnourished. Therefore, gender analysis is important in the examination of hunger and malnutrition. However, gender-sensitive analysis should not be equated with the assumption that women are inherently vulnerable. Although biologically rooted causes are present (e.g., women’s menstruation and pregnancy can be risk factors in iron deficiency), such discourse of ‘‘biological victimhood’’ (Kimura 2013, especially chapter 3) obscures the fact that hunger and malnutrition are political issues relating to marginality and power.

PRODUCTION: TRANSFORMING FOODS The genetic modification of corn, 1952 (screenprint). This illustration foreshadows the late twentieth century growth of GMOs. Modern technologies to modify corn for increase in yields and pest and herbicide resistance have also resulted in greater capitalist control over seeds and agriculture. GRAPHICAARTIS / BRIDG EMAN IMAGES

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The manipulation of the biology of food is not in itself new humans have bred crops and animals for a long time but capitalist economies have accelerated the pace and depth. Perhaps the most striking examples include how seeds are manipulated via both conventional breeding and biotechnology. Although the common narrative celebrates that agricultural technologies contribute to increases in yields, critical analyses have pointed out that modern agricultural technologies have resulted in greater capitalist control over seeds and agriculture, which has increased their profit potential. For instance, the modern manipulation of seeds has expanded the need for purchased farm inputs, such as agrochemicals and fertilizers (because the desired traits are expressed only with appropriate inputs, including fertilizer and sufficient water), enabling the corporations that sell both the seeds and the inputs to profit from package deals (Kloppenburg 1990). Although Golden Rice (which is genetically modified to have a higher content of the precursor of vitamin A) has been featured as a prime example of the next generation of GMOs, with direct benefits to consumers and property rights in the public domain, most commercially available GMOs are the property of life science companies, which charge farmers technology fees to use the seeds and prohibit farmers from replanting new seeds produced from the crop. Livestock breeding presents another instance of human modification of food at the genetic level. It too is conducted to overcome biological limits on capitalist accumulation. For instance, broiler chickens have been bred to accelerate the speed of growth, increase the amount of the most profitable parts of meat (such as chicken breasts), and more efficiently convert feed to meat. Another common example is recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), a human-made hormone that is injected into dairy cattle to increase the production of milk. Although agricultural technologies tend to assume that plants and animals can be controlled, sometimes ‘‘nature’’ bites back, so to speak. There are plenty of examples of unforeseen consequences of human attempts to control and modify foods. For instance, the so-called green revolution was intended to increase production of high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice in developing countries, but it was necessary to use agrochemicals to achieve the increase, and the agrochemicals have caused problems of pesticide drift, pesticide residue, groundwater pollution, and loss of biodiversity. In India, Vandana Shiva reported that the green revolution’s focus on selected grains has led to the neglect of other locally and nutritionally important crops and that water pollution has reduced the availability of fish, paradoxically worsening food insecurity (Shiva 1993). GMOs have also resulted in unexpected outcomes. One of the most commonly used types of GMO crops is herbicide tolerant, enabling farmers to spray herbicide and kill weeds but not the crops themselves. Life sciences companies market them as helping to reduce the use of herbicides. Yet paradoxically, widespread use of such GMOs has resulted in the development of herbicide-resistant weeds (so-called super weeds). Genetic contamination is another issue with GMOs. The promoters of GMOs argue that containment mechanisms, such as buffer zones, should prevent gene contamination. However, researchers and activists have been finding genes from GMOs in non-GMO varieties. Modern intensive livestock production causes a host of environmental problems, including groundwater pollution and the release of global warming gas (methane is much more potent than carbon dioxide). In addition, large amounts of water and feed are required to raise the animals. Widespread antibiotic use is another problem associated with industrial animal production, from livestock rearing in the United States to shrimp farming in Southeast Asia. Antibiotics are used not only for treating disease but also for preventing diseases GENDER: MATTER

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that could spread rapidly in intensively managed animal-producing facilities. For instance, in the United States, 88 percent of pigs are fed antibiotics, and more than 40 percent of beef calves that enter feedlots receive antibiotics (Landers et al. 2012). The dairy industry also uses large amounts of antibiotics. Whereas the aforementioned rBGH might increase the volume of milk extracted from dairy cattle, it tends to induce mastitis, which is treated with antibiotics (Dona and Arvanitoyannis 2009). The overuse of antibiotics is problematic, because it leads to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that might pose threats to human health (Landers et al. 2012). When we change crops, animals, and the larger environment, we could well be changing ourselves. In addition to considering the impact of industrial foods on people’s health and the environment, it is also critical to consider what kinds of logic and interests have driven transformations of foods. Whose voices are reflected when foods are manipulated and tweaked? Take, for instance, the case of GMOs. Significant portions of GMOs that are commercially available in major GMO-producing countries, such as the United States and Canada, assume that sales are combined with those of agrochemical/seed packages to farmers, helping to consolidate the grip of agrochemical/life sciences companies that sell both. Research on GMOs has largely failed to respond to the interests of poorer and female farmers (who tend to have smaller and less fertile plots, are less engaged in large-scale monocropping of commodity crops, and tend to have insecure or no land tenure), particularly in developing countries (Tandon 2010). Participation in research and development, extension training, and provision of loans for developing and using new varieties of crops and breeds is highly stratified by one’s social position, including gender.

PRODUCTION: GLOBALIZING FOODS Not only is food increasingly industrialized, but it is also increasingly global. Although spices and tropical plantation crops, such as bananas and coffee, are nothing new to American consumers, more varieties of food are coming from abroad. It is not uncommon to see Mexican tomatoes, Chilean grapes, and Ecuadorian bananas at American supermarkets. When food travels across national borders, the concern tends to be framed around its quality and safety for consumers, but one also needs to think about the bodies that also travel to produce the global food. This section focuses on the workers who produce and transport the food. Although the image of family farms where (male) farmers tend their inherited family land is strong in the popular discourse of agriculture in advanced industrial countries, farming is increasingly corporatized and farm labor internationalized. Agriculture in developed countries relies on migrant farm labor from the Global South. In the United States, about half the agricultural industry workers are undocumented immigrants, and close to a quarter of the undocumented workers are women (Human Rights Watch 2012). In western Europe, many agricultural industry workers come from African countries (Hoggart and Mendoza 1999) and eastern European countries (Rye and Andrzejewska 2010). Many jobs are only part-time or seasonal, and permanent jobs tend to be reserved for men. Some workers, such as Mexican tomato harvesters, move from one place to another, sometimes internationally, to follow the harvest (Barndt 2008). Typically, these workers receive low pay and few, if any, benefits. In the United States, agriculture is exempted from overtime pay and collective bargaining laws (Schell 2002). Conditions among farmworkers are further stratified by immigration status, ethnicity, and gender (Holmes 2013). Undocumented immigrants often have to endure hard working conditions and low pay due to lack of alternatives and the threat of deportation. Female

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farmworkers’ pay is considerably lower than that of male farmworkers (Human Rights Watch 2012). In the United States, many workers are indigenous Mexicans, among whom the women are more likely than the men to lack fluency in Spanish as well as English, making them especially vulnerable to further exploitation (Saxton 2015). In Japan, where immigration is officially discouraged, agriculture nonetheless relies on imported labor in the form of ‘‘trainees’’ from such countries as China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Many of the so-called trainees work in agriculture and food processing. Many are women who suffer from poor working and living conditions and low wages. What about food produced in the Global South? Foods produced in the developing countries for consumers in the North have profoundly transformed the environments and communities in the South. Most emblematic of export-oriented agriculture in the developing world is plantation agriculture, which has its origins in colonial economies and continues to be the source of many traditional export crops, such as cacao and bananas. Stratification by gender/ethnicity has also been an important part of plantation economies. Cynthia H. Enloe (2014), for instance, examined banana plantations in Latin America and noted how jobs on the plantations were distributed along gender/ethnicity lines, which helped the managers control the workers. Women are often allotted lower-paid jobs and are also expected to perform reproductive work; their sexual and domestic services are integral yet invisible in the management of plantations. Because of the growing power of neoliberalism as the main economic thought since the 1980s in international development organizations, there is a growing emphasis on the production of export-oriented items, including food, in many developing countries. Neoliberalism is a school of thought in economics that tends to espouse the greater role of the market and a smaller role for government. Neoliberalism has influenced the overall policy climate of multilateral lending institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and has been the ideological backbone in the promotion of trade liberalization under the World Trade Organization (WTO) and regional trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Multilateral lending institutions encourage the governments of the developing countries to pursue export-led development strategies, and oftentimes fresh fruits and vegetables (and cut flowers in African nations) emerge as attractive export-oriented products. Global supermarket chains constantly stock fresh fruits and vegetables (consumers in the North can no longer imagine supermarkets without tomatoes regardless of the season), thus relying on counterseasonal production sites in the Global South. Producing these nontraditional export crops requires flexible workforces, which has resulted in the feminization of labor (Deere 2005). Deborah Barndt’s book Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail (2008) traces the path of tomatoes produced in Mexico by multinational agribusinesses for North American supermarkets. Female workers predominate in sorting and picking jobs on these farms. Women’s labor is considered flexible because of the gender ideology that sees their primary responsibility as reproduction and family. Furthermore, gender ideology interacts with the physical characteristics of foods to produce a gendered regime of production. Fresh fruits and vegetables go bad quickly, so a system to quickly mobilize labor only when things are in season is as important as a refrigeration system. The labor of women, who are considered more flexible workers due to their presumed prioritization of reproductive work at home, is therefore increasingly dominant. The Western markets also prioritize the material presentation of food as an important marker of quality. The corporate need for foods to look good and be free of GENDER: MATTER

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Farm day laborers work at a tomato field in Los Pinos, San Quintin Valley, Baja California State, Mexico, April 23, 2015. The industrialization of agriculture has progressed in tandem with modification of crops themselves. ALFREDO ESTRELLA / GETTY IMAGES

blemishes and torn skins also has accelerated the feminization of agriculture, as women’s hands are supposedly more dexterous and delicate. Countries that produce deveined frozen shrimp and other frozen processed foods also tend to have highly feminized workforces, again driven in part by the gender stereotype of women as more nimble and gentle with products. To say that the need for timely and gentle handling of produce and processed foods accelerates the demand for female labor might seem like a positive evaluation of women’s work. But the naturalization of these skills impedes fair valuations, as any woman is supposed to have these skills, exacerbating the already strong discourse of the easy replaceability of food industry workers (see Bain 2013; Collins 1995; Raynolds 2001). In both Mexico and the United States, vulnerability rooted in the broader stratifications based on citizenship, gender, ethnicity, and class sets the stage for serious health consequences for the workers. For instance, many farmworkers who work for multinational farms are paid piece rates, so they are under extreme pressure to go without breaks to go to the bathroom or drink water (Human Rights Watch 2012), exposing women especially to health risks, such as urinary tract infections (Ontiveros 2002). Although consumers might be able to get rid of pesticide residue by washing produce thoroughly, farmworkers cannot avoid pesticide exposure. They are often not trained well in the handling of agrochemicals, and they may not use protective gear, even when it is provided by their employers, which is often not the case (Holmes 2013). Farmworkers spend long hours in the field being exposed to pesticides that are carried on the air and that can infiltrate their clothing and thus follow them home as well (Bradman et al. 2009; Quesada, Hart, and Bourgois 2011). The compound and chronic health impacts of long-term, relatively low-dose exposure to agrochemicals are difficult to pin

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down, but diabetes, cancer, reproductive health problems, depression, and others constitute what might be called farmworker syndemics (accumulation of illnesses that exacerbate each other and are worsened by socioeconomic inequalities ) (Saxton 2015). Yet because farmworkers are socially and economically marginalized, healthcare institutions often trivialize their health complaints (Holmes 2013; Saxton 2015). Female farmworkers’ bodies are vulnerable for other structural reasons as well. Human Rights Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting in the United States found that sexual violence against farmworkers was prevalent; many women viewed it as an inevitable part of agricultural work in the United States (Human Rights Watch 2012; Yeung and Rubenstein 2013). Female workers are at the mercy of farm foremen and contractors for their positions and pay, but they are also frequently vulnerable because of their immigration status many of them fear deportation if they report a crime (Human Rights Watch 2012). In Japan, some lawsuits allege sexual violence against agricultural trainees from developing countries. This discussion has so far focused on food consumed in developed countries. However, there is another kind of global food that moves from the Global North to the less developed countries. This movement of food also has material consequences for the bodies of people in the Global South. In contrast to the global food produced for Western supermarkets, in which producers take pride in freshness and quality, global food for the South suffers from low quality, with evident impacts on the health of those who consume it. For instance, over the last several centuries, the diets of people in the Pacific nations have changed significantly owing to colonialism and globalization; imported processed and canned foods have become mainstays of many local diets. Both the demand for exportoriented agriculture for land and the radiation contamination of some land because of nuclear testing by the United States and France have reduced the availability of land for subsistence farming; less subsistence farming means increasing dependence on imported food, a trend that has been accelerated by trade liberalization. These countries also suffer from the dumping of cheap foods that are not wanted in developed countries. The expansion of the branded meat market in the Global North (where meat is already cut up into parts) and consumer preferences for certain cuts of meat (e.g., chicken and turkey breasts) have meant that outlets have had to be found for unwanted meat parts. Lamb flaps (high-fat cuts from the belly), mutton flaps, and turkey tails have flooded the Pacific nations and are increasingly incorporated into local dietary habits despite their high fat content, raising concerns about health effects, such as obesity and diabetes. Some countries have tried to ban the import of such cheap meats based on public health concerns but have been attacked by exporters as obstructing free trade (Gewertz and Errington 2010; Thow and Snowdon 2010). Another example of the convoluted circulation of food is fish in Micronesia. Although it has fisheries, Micronesia has been compelled to sell its fishing rights to foreign countries, particularly Japan. Because Micronesia is an impoverished island nation and not technically and financially equipped to take advantage of the international fish trade, fresh fish, which used to constitute the core of the Micronesian diet, is now exported to wealthier nations, notably Japan. The local people eat cheaper canned fish imported from elsewhere (Cassels 2006). The globalization of food therefore tends to bring benefits to affluent consumers in the form of variety, availability, quality, and affordability but at a high cost to the workers who produce the food and the marginal consumers in poorer nations. The bodies of the latter bear the brunt of the corporate food regime’s practices in which global capital aided by free trade agreements globally sources ingredients and workers to optimize profits (McMichael 2005). GENDER: MATTER

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CONSUMPTION: THE PROBLEM OF OBESITY? In the United States but also in other countries, including Japan, obesity has become a significant public health concern. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2015), more than one-third of adult Americans are now categorized as obese. Geographer Julie Guthman’s book Weighing In (2011) critically examines the idea that the United States is facing an obesity epidemic. She points out that the creation of pathologically fat versus normal bodies depends on the body mass index, which is fraught with problems. She also calls into question the assumed causal relations between weight and higher morbidity and mortality. Furthermore, Guthman and other scholars have pointed out how fat bodies are stigmatized in the United States and how such condemnation is highly racialized, classed, and gendered. Anthropologist Charlotte Biltekoff writes in Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health (2013) that working-class and ethnic minorities have usually been marked as bad eaters, and their eating has been subject to intervention by reformers from higher classes who claim to act in the name of science (see also Biltekoff 2013). The demonization of the fat body is particularly relevant for women, because thinness is one of the pillars of contemporary hegemonic femininity (Bordo 1993; Hesse-Biber 1997). The contemporary American ideal woman’s body is extremely thin, making body size one of the visible signs to mark many women of ethnic and racial groups and working-class people as inadequate. The idea of the obesity epidemic further accelerates what Sharlene Hesse-Biber calls ‘‘the cult of thinness.’’ Body dissatisfaction is high among women, who are much more likely to develop eating disorders than men are. The efforts to become thin and fit to conform to an ideal body type have complex meaning for women’s subjectivity. Dieting programs like Weight Watchers construct a particular kind of self for women, who learn to feel a sense of autonomy and pleasure in watching their food and weight (Cairns and Johnston 2015; Heyes 2006). Women might feel pleasure and a unique sense of identity in sculpting their bodies to fit social expectations. But the thinness ideal produces a docile body (Bordo 1993) that is subject to the disciplinary power of patriarchy. The appetites of women figure in the patriarchal understanding that women need to be restrained and controlled. The idea of the obesity epidemic also increases already intense social pressures for mothers to conduct good mothering. The demonization of fast food and processed food as culprits for the obesity epidemic might be rooted in lamentation for the days of home-cooked meals and mothers whose lives centered on their domestic duties (Firth 2012). But cooking from scratch and avoiding fast foods and processed foods might be extremely difficult for those who are not upper-middle-class women with ample time and resources. Pregnancy and breast-feeding is another phase when women are supposed to be ‘‘eating for two’’ and thus need to be vigilant about what they drink and eat. Although the early twentieth-century marketing of formula claimed it was nutritionally superior, the message that ‘‘breast milk is the best’’ has gained prominence in the public discourse since the 1970s. Breast-feeding is seen as a hallmark of good mothering (Shaw 2007). Mothers who fail to breast-feed are seen as not as good and are stigmatized as morally deficient (Wall 2001). However, women who breast-feed are asked to control their activities and diets, as the quality of breast milk is seen as dependent on lifestyle choices. Indeed, official documents tend to see women’s bodies as ecosystems from which babies’ food is procured (603). Recent attention to

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obesity’s link to the mother’s prepregnancy and pregnancy diet (Warin et al. 2012) may exacerbate already powerful pressures mothers feel to calibrate their dietary choices to maximize the benefits for their children. But breast-feeding imposes many restrictions on mothers’ bodily autonomy (such as avoiding eating and drinking certain foods and beverages) and is physically taxing for many women. Many mothers also face structural constraints against breast-feeding, including the lack of maternity leave, child care near the workplace, and breast-feeding breaks or places to store pumped breast milk. These constraints and structural impediments are usually obscured. Although the health consequences of obesity have been given much attention, dieting can also have significant health implications. The pressure to be thin influences many women from an early age, driving them to try to lose weight, often by extreme dieting and disordered eating habits. There are material consequences of dieting, including loss of menstruation, osteoporosis, and cardiovascular malfunctions. Furthermore, dieting does not usually work, and most dieters eventually regain any lost weight. The efforts to reduce weight and (the inevitable) gaining back of some weight might crucially alter the metabolism of the body, increasing the odds of diabetes and heart disease (Guthman 2011). Although dieting and fatness might seem like extreme opposites, Guthman argues that they are different sides of the same coin. Either way people eating too much or trying to lose weight benefits capitalism. Food processors, the beverage industry, fast food restaurants, and large grain traders have pushed for bigger portions, more addictive engineering, and the ubiquitous presence of food in their pursuit of profits. At the same time, the fitness, dieting, and self-help industries have capitalized on women’s anxiety about fat bodies. The diet industry is worth billions of dollars in sales annually in the United States alone, and various foods are reconstituted to be marketable as fat free, sugar free, and zero calorie, which allows them to be sold at higher prices (Hesse-Biber 1997). Guthman’s concept of the political economy of bulimia highlights how capitalism needs gluttonous bodies with large appetites to maintain the bottom line, while it also profits from bodies that desire to limit the appetite. Guthman points out that the American discourse on the obesity epidemic tends to place responsibility on individual consumers for making wrong choices, such as eating too much and eating the wrong thing (Guthman 2011; Lupton 1996). Putting accountability for managing one’s weight and eating patterns in the hands of individuals obfuscates the structural forces that shape them. However, what one eats is profoundly shaped by socioeconomic status. For instance, food deserts areas without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable foods tend to exist in the United States in poor neighborhoods with concentrations of minorities. Other issues are also in play: science is increasingly pointing to a more complex picture in which issues such as pollution, sleep patterns, chronic stress, and intestinal biota also affect obesity (Guthman et al. 2014). Further, sociopolitical marginalization attributed to racism, colonialism, and poverty might also be underlying causes for diabetes, hypertension, and other pathologies commonly linked to diet (Ferreira and Lang 2005). Women are supposed to control their appetites to control their body sizes, but bodies are even more permeable than previously imagined, and body weight is not simply a function of input-output of calories. The body and its largeness and fitness are not solely the result of what is eaten but of interlinked ecologies beyond individual bodies. Yet the concept of the ideal body type implies that individual women should be able to control their bodies at will, failure of which then is equated with a lack of willpower and discipline. GENDER: MATTER

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CONSUMPTION: HUNGER AND MALNUTRITION Lack of food and malnutrition are serious global concerns. According to the United Nations, there are more than 790 million undernourished people in the world (IFPRI 2015), 60 percent of whom are women and girls (FAO 2013). Micronutrient deficiencies, or hidden hunger, have attracted attention from international development organizations as a new aspect of hunger in the Third World (Kimura 2013). Micronutrient deficiencies of crucial vitamins and minerals result in such conditions as vitamin A deficiency and iron deficiency anemia. Unlike traditional hunger, micronutrient deficiencies tend to lack visible cues hence the nickname ‘‘hidden hunger.’’ The World Health Organization (2001) estimates that half of all pregnant women in developing countries suffer from anemia, particularly in South Asia and central and West Africa. Based on her work in Indonesia, Aya H. Kimura’s book Hidden Hunger: Gender and the Politics of Smarter Foods (2013) unpacks the contestations over antihunger projects. Because of the heightened interest in hidden hunger since the 1990s, there are many micronutrient projects carried out by donor agencies, such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and international organizations, such as the World Bank. In Indonesia, foreign aid organizations have distributed micronutrient-fortified cookies and instant noodles to residents of urban slums. Fortification of wheat flour with micronutrients was mandated in the late 1990s. The case of Indonesia is a reflection of the global push to address micronutrient deficiencies in developing countries. Kimura situates these hidden hunger projects in a longer history of interventions into food in the Third World by developed countries, international development organizations, and philanthropic groups. Historians of colonial regimes have documented how hunger problems in Asia and Africa attracted interventionist policies by the colonial regimes, which were partly motivated by the desire to ensure economic profitability and political stability (Arnold 1993). The post World War II era also saw a strong global concern about the imminent ‘‘population bomb’’ in developing countries, resulting in not only a push for population control but also agricultural modernization projects. At the insistence of American philanthropic organizations and the US government in particular, Indonesia, for example, undertook in the 1970s often coercive forms of population control programs while also promoting the green revolution the package of high-yielding crop varieties and agrochemical inputs given to its peasants. Indonesia was not an isolated case. Evident in the slogans of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, such as ‘‘Rice, Roads, and Schools’’ and ‘‘Progress Is a Grain of Rice,’’ and of Dudley Senanayake in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), such as ‘‘Grow More Food’’ (Cullather 2010, 172), other countries began to promote agricultural modernization projects. Developed countries also had a stake in agricultural modernization in the Global South, as they saw global food security as critical for containing pro-Soviet factions in the context of the Cold War (Perkins 1997). The antihunger projects in developing countries need critical historical and social analyses. First, these interventions tend to result in technological fixes in the case of concern with the quantity of food, the solution promoted was the package of high-yielding varieties and agrochemical inputs. The green revolution increased per acre productivity of wheat and rice, but critics have pointed out that it benefited relatively well-resourced farmers more than the poorest in rural areas. In the case of hidden hunger, the typical solution has been to fortify and biofortify (that is, to genetically modify plants to increase the micronutrient contents) foods to make so-called smart foods that add a select group of featured nutrients.

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Yet hunger and malnutrition are much more complex than the simple lack of calories and nutrients. They are the result of social, political, and economic problems: As Nobel laureate Amartya Kumar Sen (1981) demonstrated, even when famine strikes, it is not the lack of food per se that makes people hungry it is the lack of economic and social means (such as employment to earn wages and a social network where one can ask for help) that puts people into the situation of not having sufficient food. This structural analysis should help put in perspective the prevailing idea of biological victimhood, which explains women’s propensity to hidden hunger as a biologically destined propensity. In Indonesia, for example, female workers are paid much less than their male counterparts, and women’s ownership of farm land is much less formalized. Without addressing these fundamental causes, hunger and malnutrition cannot be effectively tackled. One also needs to ask who benefits from food interventions in the name of solving hunger and malnutrition. Taking the example of food aid, the United States has long boasted about its role in combating world hunger, but its food aid programs have been profoundly shaped by domestic economic interests. US Public Law 480, first adopted in 1954, is ostensibly a ‘‘food for peace’’ program, but its other purpose is to dispose of surplus grain to help US farmers. But such in-kind food aid might not suit local tastes, and it tends to depress grain prices in the recipient countries and thus exacerbate the poverty of peasants. Shipping grain long distances also makes it vulnerable to damage (Clapp 2012). More recently, the United States has been criticized for including genetically modified crops in food aid despite concerns about domestic legality, social and cultural acceptability, and environmental impacts in the recipient countries (Clapp 2005). Kimura also argues that gender is a critical analytic lens to use to understand hunger and malnutrition projects. Hidden hunger projects are often framed as gender-sensitive projects. For instance, women menstruate and give birth, making them more prone to iron deficiency anemia. In Indonesia, for instance, pregnant women and all women of reproductive age have been targeted in the distribution of fortified foods. Although these programs might deliver a certain amount of nutrients, they do nothing to address, for example, how female Indonesian factory workers are paid one of the lowest wages in the region and how such a low-cost and docile labor force has been used to attract foreign direct investment to the country. Furthermore, nutritional fixes to hidden hunger, such as the fortified wheat flour that is used in Indonesia, help the development and health experts avoid directly engaging with poor women, who are the presumed beneficiaries of these programs. Their ‘‘needs’’ in the form of the amount of vitamins and minerals can be estimated from nutritional surveys, and then the nutrients can be added at the processing factories all without any contact with the recipients. There is little in the way of hearing what the lived experiences of the hungry and the malnourished are and how they would envision addressing their problems. Hunger and malnutrition result from layers of biological, historical, and sociocultural problems. Tackling social injustices including gender-based ones is critical to addressing them.

Summary Food production and consumption are analyzed in this chapter as issues that need nuanced understanding, since food is both socially and biologically shaped. On the production side, industrialization has transformed the biology of many foods to achieve higher productivity and profitability. Readers are urged to think about who sets the agenda for research and development GENDER: MATTER

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of these new foods. Globalization, which has accelerated under neoliberalism, also strongly affects food production. The chapter has pointed out the critical importance of female workers who are usually exploited on the basis of gender, ethnicity, and immigration status. On the consumption side, obesity is analyzed from the critical perspective that situates it as a problem of environmental contamination, social inequality, and capitalism. Malnutrition and hunger are also affected by social structures; they are not simply biological responses to the lack of calories, vitamins, and minerals. Therefore, reductive nutritional fixes cannot address their root causes. The chapter also points to the danger of the idea of biological victimhood, which locates a woman’s vulnerability to hunger and malnutrition within her body, obscuring the much more complex situation of access to food.

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CHAPTER 19

Breast Cancer Nadine Ehlers Department of Sociology and Social Policy University of Sydney, Australia

In her widely circulated essay ‘‘Welcome to Cancerland’’ (2001), feminist scholar Barbara Ehrenreich claimed that, by the turn of this century, breast cancer was the ‘‘biggest disease on the cultural map’’ (45). This disease has been examined through broad and diverse feminist and queer perspectives across multiple disciplines, discursive methods, and practices. The common thread among these perspectives, however, has been that they have historically labored to move breast cancer out of its once-sheltered place in the private sphere and clinical and biomedical discourse, and they have been invested in foregrounding the realities of those who live with and die from breast cancer (see, e.g., Lorde 1980; Eisenstein 2001; DeShazer 2013). This emphasis on making subjects present has long been essential to feminist praxis, for, as feminist psychologist Nancy Datan has noted, ‘‘it is . . . an axiom of feminism that the personal is political’’ (quoted in Potts 2000, 4). In making the subject present, feminist and queer investigations of breast cancer have insisted not only that attention be paid to the embodied experience of the disease but also to how breast cancer is mediated by broader social, political, environmental, and economic factors and relations of power. This chapter examines these various scales, first exploring the broader issues related to breast cancer namely, the public administration of the disease and wider factors that condition breast cancer and the materiality of the body. The chapter then scales down to examine the material effects of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in terms of how the disease is subjectively experienced at the level of the body. Before moving on to this analysis, however, it is important to note that this disease has been such a focus in feminist and queer studies for several key reasons. First, breast cancer is the most common cancer among women globally: 1.5 million women worldwide are diagnosed with the disease each year; 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer during her lifetime in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Moreover, race, class, and sexuality as they intersect with gender heavily condition disease incidence and survival rates for breast cancer: economically disadvantaged, nonheterosexual, and racial and ethnic minority women are diagnosed later, receive disparities in care, and experience higher mortality rates in relation to breast cancer (see below). Second, this disease affects a part of the body the breast that is central to social understandings of femininity, motherhood, and sexuality. Indeed, ‘‘while other cancers and other diseases are undoubtedly as significant in terms of their ultimate outcomes, a contemporary diagnosis of breast cancer is also saturated with murkier concerns about identity, body image, and self worth’’ (McCarthy 2005, 12)

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precisely because of the way the breast is inextricable from gender and notions of ‘‘femaleness’’ (see Young 1992). Because breast cancer attacks what Susan Sontag names as ‘‘parts of the body . . . that are embarrassing to acknowledge’’ (1989, 17), breast cancer had long been hidden within the ‘‘architecture of the closet’’ (Klawiter 2008, xviii) with both the disease and the patient confined within the silent walls of the clinic and the private sphere. Since the 1980s, however, activists have worked to destigmatize the disease, increase support programs, fund research, and move breast cancer into the public realm. This has clearly been achieved in ways that perhaps even Ehrenreich could not have anticipated in 2001. In her study The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Cultures of Disease and Activism (2008), sociologist Maren Klawiter observes that discourse around breast cancer has become increasingly visible and politicized and notes also that the disease is increasingly central to ‘‘new identities, networks, solidarities, and sensibilities’’ (278). Nonetheless, breast cancer in the first decades of the twenty-first century is still underscored by enduring social, economic, and environmental factors that continue to condition the disease. Scholars and activists must attend to these factors if they are to alter the very material realities of breast cancer itself.

ADMINISTERING RISK One of the core concerns in thinking about breast cancer is to consider how the disease is ‘‘administered’’ at the level of the population: that is, how women as a population are managed in relation to the risk and reality of breast cancer. This question might be productively analyzed through the lens of biopolitics (see, e.g., Klawiter 2008; Krupar 2012; Ehlers 2016). French philosopher, historian, and theorist Michel Foucault (1926 1984) defined biopolitics as a form of power that emerged in the late eighteenth century to deal with the population as a political problem. Biopolitical power focuses on taking control of life and the biological processes of the population in order to manage biological threats and promote the general well-being of the population (Foucault 2003, 245 247). German sociologist Thomas Lemke calls it a ‘‘form of power that seeks to administer, secure, develop, and foster life’’ (2011, 35). As such, it functions as a ‘‘technology of security’’ (Foucault 2003, 249), one that is exercised over the mass of bodies that constitute the population. Biopolitics is a life-administering power, and as such it operates as a form of governing. As Lemke has noted: ‘‘The notion of biopolitics refers to the emergence of a specific political knowledge and new disciplines such as statistics, demography, epidemiology, and biology. These disciplines make it possible to analyze processes of life on the level of populations and to ‘govern’ individuals and collectives by practices of correction, exclusion, normalization, disciplining, therapeutics, and optimization’’ (2011, 5; emphasis added). In relation to the management of disease, diffuse and pervasive biopolitical mechanisms regulate the population in particular ways, shaping the ‘‘vital lives of those who are governed’’ (Rose 2007, 3). Thus, the biopolitics of breast cancer must be understood as a technology of social control: it shapes how the disease is understood and how it is managed, which in turn shapes how people, both collectively and as individuals, come to experience themselves, their bodies, and the disease and how they live and die. Breast cancer is biopolitically administered through various means, including public health education and health promotion, screening campaigns, epidemiology and population health surveillance, and biomedicine and the health sciences. In the early to mid-twentieth

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century, biopolitical attempts to manage breast cancer emerged in the form of publiceducation campaigns and new social-control programs. Campaigns primarily focused on combating the silence that had surrounded the disease and on urging women to submit themselves to medical authority once the evidence of breast cancer had manifested. During this time, medical jurisdiction extended across areas of life not previously governed by medicine and, through efforts to ‘‘fight cancer with publicity’’ (Lerner 2001, 43), national organizations such as the American Society for the Control of Cancer (now the American Cancer Society) sought to lower the collective threat within the family unit, the community, and the nation as a whole. The population and health was administered during this time, then, as a social enterprise: health was not positioned as an individual pursuit but instead as an undertaking to protect society at large. By the latter part of the twentieth century and particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, the biopolitical administration of breast cancer became increasingly expansive and preemptive. As Klawiter (2008, xxviii) has noted, new screening practices extended the regulation of the disease into asymptomatic populations, effectively bringing all women under the everpresent purview of visual biomedical surveillance. For example, mammography only became widespread in the United States in the 1970s, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tests and genetic testing for breast cancer are even newer methods of surveillance. With the emergence of these technologies, evidence of disease is sought out at the molecular level, even if no ‘‘warning signs’’ are evident to the individual involved, and all women are now positioned as prepatients. Moreover, with the decline of the welfare state and diminished public support for viewing health as a collective concern, biopolitical efforts have become tied to the rise of consumer medicine and increasingly frame the quest for health optimization as an individual enterprise. These efforts now encourage the population to take an entrepreneurial approach to their own health through actively orchestrating their own biomedical care (see Rose 2007; Cooper 2008). This, of course, assumes that one is able to do so. Thus, the move from health as a social to health as an individual enterprise reflects the way that the pursuit of well-being and optimal health has increasingly become a private and privatized concern that is largely dependent on social status (financial means, educational background, racially and ethnically stratified access to care and resources, among other things).

RISKY BODIES/SUBJECTS These organizing logics and biopolitical practices position, interpret, and indeed produce certain understandings and experiences of female embodiment in relation to breast cancer. Fundamentally, they position women as diagnostic subjects and, specifically, as risky subjects. This risk of developing breast cancer is viewed as residing within and being inherent to the female body (despite male incidence), and ‘‘the body is continuously produced as a source of danger to the subject’’ (Broom and Kavanagh 1997, 440). Because of this risk, individuals are then subjected to what Foucault calls disciplinary power. This form of power works at the level of the individual body and is a technology of power that supervises and controls the body. Many feminist and queer scholars have examined how the disciplining of individual bodies is exercised through external mechanisms that is, through various biomedical and clinical practices and technologies (note that biomedical protocols both administer to the population en masse and discipline individual bodies) (see, for instance, Potts 2000; Press, Fishman, and Koenig 2000; Szymanski 2002; Klawiter 2008; Krupar 2012). But because risk of breast cancer has increasingly been GENDER: MATTER

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understood to be individual and, importantly, to be the responsibility of the individual, scholars have perhaps been most attentive to the ways individuals internalize discipline and come to regulate the self. Public health and bioethics scholars Nancy Press, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Barbara A. Koenig, for example, in a paper for the journal Nursing Ethics titled ‘‘Collective Fear, Individualized Risk: The Social and Cultural Context of Genetic Testing for Breast Cancer,’’ highlight that, while women are advised to partake in vigilant breast monitoring through self-exams or mammography they are also urged to minimize their lifestyle risks (through regulating their diet, reproductive behavior, stress, and exercise), to research and document their family history (and if necessary undergo genetic screening), and to keep up-to-date with the latest biomedical knowledge. These practices can be seen as strategies or forms of self-governing or self-care that women must themselves accept and manage in order to mitigate the risk of (developing) breast cancer (Broom and Kavanagh 1997; Yadlon 1997; Lo¨wy 2007; Ehlers 2016). As feminist researcher Laura K. Potts notes in the introduction to the anthology Ideologies of Breast Cancer: Feminist Perspectives (2000), ‘‘The increased technologically and empirically-driven surveillance of health and potential disease states demands that women take on the scientific discourse of breast cancer and match the supposed clinical vigilance with a personal attentiveness to changes in their breasts, which they are then supposed to refer to the health and illness authorities’’ (7). If this risk is realized and an individual is diagnosed with breast cancer, the person is encouraged to submit to biomedical authority and the disciplinary machinery of breast cancer treatment (see below). What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that even though women might see themselves as freely choosing to engage in such self-discipline, they are actually ‘‘channeled towards that choice’’ through these practices (Press, Fishman, and Koenig 2000, 239). Additionally, the various forms of discipline related to breast cancer are not necessarily positive: forms of discipline and dominant power/knowledge relations limit both what can be known about the disease and an individual’s embodied experience of breast cancer surveillance and treatment. Finally, some have argued that the injunction to self-care is genocidal, particularly for women of color (Krupar 2012) and nonheterosexual women (Jain 2007). In the first instance, rather than looking at broader factors that contribute to breast cancer, this operation puts the onus of responsibility on individual women and, thus, puts lives in danger. And in the second instance, not all women are actually called on to participate in the same ways, nor do they have the same opportunities for self-care. The biopolitics of breast cancer, as geographer Shiloh Krupar notes, largely targets and fosters the lives of white women, and it is white, middle-class heterosexual women who have more ability through access to education, health, and biomedical intervention to undertake self-care: ‘‘women of color are not called on to be diagnostic subjects in the same way as white women. They are not positioned as valuable citizens in the same way, and, because of this, they are not incited to pursue detection or think of themselves as projects within biomedical fields of power’’ (2012, 63 64). Such disparities are clearly illuminated through various statistics that show that in the United States death rates from breast cancer among African American women were 38 percent higher than among white women in 2006, and by 2009 this figure had risen to 41 percent. Latino women have a 20 percent higher mortality incidence related to breast cancer than white women, and the five-year relative survival rate for Native American women is the lowest of any racial or ethnic group (American Cancer Society 2009; also see American Cancer Society 2013). Such discrepancies can be largely attributed to lower frequency of mammograms and early screening, lack of insurance or lack of access to health care (or both), and the unequal receipt of prompt, high-quality treatment.

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Queers and lesbians also have higher levels of late detection and lowered survival rates, which may be because they are not actively addressed in public campaigning and intervention strategies and because they are more likely than heterosexuals to experience medical discrimination (Jain 2007, 520).

RISK/BODY/ENVIRONMENT TRANSFERS Risk is clearly not simply individual: in terms of developing breast cancer, data has shown that fewer than one in ten women has a genetic history of the disease and fewer than 50 percent of all breast cancer cases are related to individual lifestyle risk factors (Lubitow and Davis 2011, 140). What activists and scholars have powerfully demonstrated is that the incidence and survival rate for breast cancer is heavily conditioned by socioeconomic status, structural racism and other forms of discrimination, unequal access to medical care and health insurance, and differentials in population targeting. The result is the unequal biopolitical fostering of life. While biopolitical administration ostensibly optimizes the capacities of the population as a whole, not all lives are supported in the same ways, with the factors listed above highlighting the disparities within and impediments to health. Activists and scholars have also shown that risk is environmental. Indeed, experiential, body burden, and ecological research has found numerous connections (and suspected connections) between environmental factors and breast cancer. For instance, individually and collectively, people are exposed to increased breast cancer risk through the foods that they eat: pesticides on fresh produce, rBGH and Zeranol (growth hormones) in dairy products and beef, phytoestrogens from soy feed in meat products, BPA in food packaging such as cans and plastics, and chemicals in the nonstick coatings on cookware have all been linked to breast cancer. Moreover, the contamination of groundwater from pesticides, low-grade chemical exposure, and radiation makes its way into produce, animals, and ultimately humans. These food-related products either have carcinogenic effects that increase breast cancer risk or act as endocrine disruptors, which alter mammary development and have also been associated with increased incidence of breast cancer (see American Medical Women’s Association and the Breast Cancer Fund 2013; Knower et al. 2014; World Health Organization 2016). Other environmental causes of breast cancer are present in commonly used consumer products. For example, phthalates (found in products such as PVC plastics, nail polish, and perfumes) and parabens in personal care products and cosmetics; nonyphenols in cleaning products, detergents, shampoos, and paints; polybrominated diphenyl ethers, a group of chemicals found in furniture and electronics; and hormones in birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy have all been linked to heightened breast cancer risk. In addition, exposure comes from breast cancer causing agents that exist in the broader environment. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), for example, which are used in insulation fluids, plastics, adhesives, paper, inks, paints, dyes, and floor polish, have been shown to act as endocrine disruptors. While PCBs were banned in the United States in 1979, products that contain them still circulate, and discarded products reenter the environment through soil, air, and water (and thus the foods we eat) because they were put in landfills. DDT a powerful pesticide that mimics estrogen when it enters the human body and thus has been linked to estrogen-receptive breast cancers was also banned in the 1970s in the United States. Since that time, though, it has been exported to numerous countries in the Global South (Knopf-Newman 2004, 174), and studies have found that 85 percent of California GENDER: MATTER

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dust samples still contained the pesticide thirty years after the ban (Dunagan, Dodson, Rudel, and Brody 2011). As environmental activist Sandra Steingraber notes in the documentary Rachel’s Daughters: Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer (1997), a ‘‘woman can be diagnosed with breast cancer, leave her doctor’s office, stand in the rain at the bus stop, and there’ll be breast carcinogens falling on her’’ (cited in Knopf-Newman 2004, 169). What becomes evident, then, is that the materiality of risk and the very matter of breast cancer the cancer cell is inextricable from the environment around us: environmental factors have altered the material composition of human bodies and contributed to rising cancer rates. Moreover, the environmental causes of breast cancer are particularly harmful to minority and economically disadvantaged populations, who are more likely to live in highly contaminated areas and have increased exposure to toxins as a result of working in manufacturing, agriculture, or service occupations. Racially and ethnically marginalized women thus experience unequal exposures and have higher body burdens of certain chemicals and other cancer-causing factors (Lorde 1980; Knopf-Newman 2004; Pezzullo 2007), highlighting the complicated intersections of health, classism, racism, and sex.

BREAST CANCER CULTURE Feminist and queer scholars and activists have long argued that disease prevention especially through reducing toxic exposure needs to be at the forefront of how breast cancer is addressed. These primary causes, however, are generally eclipsed or absent in dominant breast cancer culture. But critics have also identified other problematic aspects of this dominant culture of breast cancer which includes public-education campaigns, large nonprofit organizations and their attendant rallies and marches, breast cancer related consumer products, and the like that have implications for how the disease is socially understood and how it is embodied. First, critics have argued that breast cancer culture largely focuses on a sentimental politics associated with the pink ribbon. For Ehrenreich (2001) and many others, the pink ribbon and the culture that surrounds it are viewed as hyperfeminized and as offering only positive, comforting, and palatable images of the disease. As award-winning medical anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain explains, pink ribbon culture shrouds breast cancer in a ‘‘sea of rosy hopefulness,’’ making invisible the reality that ‘‘cancer is about terror’’ (2007, 527). Moreover, pink cancer culture both draws on and reproduces dominant norms of white heterosexual femininity: as pure, infantile, dependent, docile, sexually desirable, and valuable. As Krupar has noted, pink campaigning ‘‘is essentially modeled on the image of the feminine white woman, as one who is in need of help and must be made aware of her risk (because society must protect her).’’ She goes on to note that ‘‘women of color have been excluded from this historical production of white femininity because social conditions have eclipsed the possibility of their participating in and embodying this kind of femininity’’ (2012, 65). Such exclusion is reproduced in dominant breast cancer culture, where the face of breast cancer is largely white. This culture also marginalizes nonheterosexuals. Butch women, for example, ‘‘literally cannot be tough in ‘battling’ cancer and still maintain a gender identity as butch,’’ because ‘‘being ‘tough’ in the face of breast cancer [in the terms offered in breast cancer culture] means healing by recuperating ‘lost’ femininity’’ (Jain 2007, 521). Pink breast cancer culture can thus be seen to augment the biopolitical fostering of only certain populations of women, and the heterosexualization of the disease disciplines women to

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think about themselves and their bodies in limited terms and both reproduces and polices norms of femininity (Jain 2007; Ehlers 2014). Second, pink ribbon culture is overwhelmingly produced through a corporate care/ market nexus that focuses on consumption rather than activism. In her 2008 study Pink Ribbons Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy, culture theorist and researcher Samantha King traces how, as breast cancer was destigmatized, it became the darling of corporate America (and beyond) and has been transformed into a market-driven industry. Companies have emblazoned their products with the ribbon with the supposed aim of raising awareness and money for the breast cancer ‘‘cause.’’ For many feminist critics, however, this focus on awareness is problematic, because it ‘‘has failed to address and end the breast cancer epidemic’’ (Breast Cancer Action 2014). Critics have also shown that while it is difficult to know where the money raised goes, what is clear is that companies and organizations have been able to capitalize on the wide appeal of the pink ribbon using it to buoy both their public images and their profits. In 2008, for example, American Airlines entered a corporate partnership with the Susan G. Komen Foundation (one of the largest breast cancer ‘‘nonprofit’’ organizations) that saw the company’s performance improve by $440 million in the first quarter of 2010 through the Mile for the Cure program (which included gift cards, annual celebrity golf and tennis events, and other promotions). And Ford Motor Company, which launched the Warriors in Pink campaign in 2006 (producing limited-edition pink-themed Ford Mustangs that per sale contributed $250 to Komen), saw the company move from a 32 percent deficit in sales in 2008 to a 62 percent profit in 2009 (Breast Cancer Consortium 2016). During Breast Cancer Awareness Month October in particular, the marketplace fills with pinkberibboned products from nail polish to soup cans, candy, electric drills, wheeled bins, teddy bears, jewelry, water bottles, and even handguns (see Ehlers and Krupar 2014) in a fanatical saccharine frenzy of consumption. Importantly, the ability to profit from breast cancer relies on avoiding negative images of the disease (death and fear do not sell), and the use of the ribbon in this way enables consumers to participate in an ethos of generosity to ‘‘feel good’’ and as if they are doing something for those with breast cancer through consumption. Both of these operations sanitize the disease and remove it from the realities of those living with the effects of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Another problematic aspect of the breast cancer corporate care/market nexus is the phenomenon known as pinkwashing: an activity that involves a company or organization simultaneously claiming to care about breast cancer (by positioning themselves as leaders in the effort to eradicate breast cancer) and producing, manufacturing, or selling products that are linked to the disease (see Sulick 2010). For example, pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca began and continues to support Breast Cancer Awareness Month and produces the breast cancer treatment drugs Tamoxifen and Amiradex. At the same time, its parent company manufactures carcinogenic insecticides and pesticides, and Tamoxifen has been identified as a known carcinogen (causing ovarian cancer) by the US National Institutes of Health (2000). Cosmetic giant Avon is a breast cancer awareness juggernaut, organizing the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer and sponsoring the Look Good . . . Feel Better campaign (which runs beauty workshops for women undergoing breast cancer treatment). Yet more than 250 of the company’s products have been listed on a health-risk database in the highest concern category ‘‘due to the presence of hormone disruptors, neurotoxins, and possible carcinogens’’ (Lubitow and Davis 2011, 142). Effectively, then, such companies harm the bodies of those they are claiming to help. GENDER: MATTER

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Finally, many feminists have been critical of the way breast cancer culture (and society more broadly) calls on women to ‘‘fight’’ cancer through a form of militant individual action and privileges the figure of the ‘‘survivor.’’ While cancer has long been considered the target of war (that is, as something to wage war against), in the age of mass campaigning and organized breast cancer activism the discourse of survival and the trope of ‘‘survivorship’’ have intensified to produce what Ehrenreich has named a ‘‘mindless triumphalism’’ and ‘‘the cult of the survivor’’ (2001, 51). At mainstream breast cancer marches, for instance, participants celebrate their ‘‘victory’’ over breast cancer, their ‘‘battle scars,’’ and their place among fellow veterans of the ‘‘war on breast cancer’’ through the proud display of pink banners, ‘‘survivor’’ T-shirts (along with hats, headbands, and the like), and by singing rallying songs of survival. Survivors are positioned as warriors who should ‘‘take on a masculine sentimentality [that is, fighting militarism] routed through feminized guiles,’’ writes Jain (2007, 522). As Ehrenreich has argued, this means that breast cancer culture ‘‘celebrat[es] survivorhood by downplaying mortality’’ (2001, 52) it eclipses the struggle with uncertainty that is situated at the center of being diagnosed with breast cancer and treats as invisible both death and the fact that cancer haunts society. As Australian health researcher Dorothy H. Broom laments in her own account of breast cancer, ‘‘No widow’s weeds, no black armbands, no ritual keening, shaved heads or body paint distinguish the bereaved’’ (2001, 254). Survivorship is also linked to the idea of the biomedical ‘‘cure’’ because it is through this, supposedly, that true survival is to be realized. This privileging of the cure is limited for several reasons. First, it positions women as individual actors who can beat cancer through biomedical compliance by disciplining themselves according to biomedical norms. Second, the cure is elusive, and focusing on this limits scientific efforts to pharmaceutical and treatment-based approaches to the disease. And third, focusing on a (perhaps distant) cure detracts from the political imperative to both highlight class- and race-based disparities in survival and demand a focus on the causes of the disease: that is, the need to reorient the biopolitics of breast cancer.

MATTER RETHOUGHT What is perhaps most striking about breast cancer culture and wider public representations of the disease is that the body is conspicuously absent (images of the actual embodied effects of breast cancer do not circulate in the cultural realm), despite the fact that breast cancer is lived out at the level of the body. Feminist and queer theorists have challenged this absence by foregrounding the material effects of breast cancer surveillance, detection, and treatment showing how they alter the terrain of the body and how individuals are often compelled to renegotiate the body-self relation. Each of the methods involved in breast cancer surveillance, detection, and treatment is ostensibly concerned with mitigating risk and maintaining or returning the body-self to normativity and a state of wholeness a view of the subject as closed, complete, and invulnerable, with a body that functions in accordance with normative conventions of ‘‘controlled embodiment.’’ This body is understood as singular, unitary, defensible, and complete with all anatomical parts in their ‘‘proper’’ places, and it is marked by a sense of bodily consonance or a seamlessness of bodily experience. Biomedical interventions might be viewed, then, as modalities that discipline the body according to this idea. What feminist and queer theorists (among other critics) have demonstrated, however, is that these very same

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procedures actually often produce new corporeal risks, new configurations of matter, and they initiate a whole range of other concerns at the level of the body. Even seemingly innocent methods of surveillance and detection have corporeal effects. For instance, Krupar has argued: Breast cancer detection procedures . . . [and] technological interfaces . . . make the subject’s vulnerability extremely palpable: the often painful mashing down of the breast by the arm of the mammogram machine; the dangling of breasts in a plastic trough and the injection of contrast into the patient’s bloodstream as she is inserted, lying face down, into the MRI tube; the rejection of the actual flesh of the breast by the mobile ultrasound wand that roves over breasted surfaces to find subsurface abnormalities on the computer monitor; the removal of a sliver of breast by core biopsy needles with the sound of a staple-gun ‘‘snap.’’ (2012, 60) Detection efforts can also result in forms of bodily injury ‘‘tissue damage from the biopsy, vein collapse from injected testing contrasts, residual pain’’ (60). If risk is realized and breast cancer actually found, the individual is then subjected to a whole range of possible corporeal interventions. According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the pioneer of queer theory who died of breast cancer at the age of fifty-eight, these interventions operate ‘‘in the service of imagining and recovering . . . [the] ‘natural’ healthy body in the face of its spontaneous and endogenous threat against itself’’ (1999, 154). But with these forms of treatment, ‘‘the dumb old body is . . . transmogrified into an evil clown puking, trembling, swelling, surrendering significant parts, and oozing post-surgical fluid,’’ writes Ehrenreich (2001, 44). Indeed, for feminist author Susan Gubar, who has written about her experience with ovarian cancer, cancer surgery and treatment results in the body being ‘‘multiply unmade’’ (2011). Other scholars writing about their own experiences of cancer, such as Catherine Lord and Jackie Stacey, echo this sentiment, describing how this unmaking of the body occurs through rendering the body alien. Biomedical protocols for the treatment of breast cancer produce what Stacey, British author of Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997), refers to as a now ‘‘unfamiliar body,’’ one that ‘‘refuses the usual behaviours . . . and has lost its form and integrity’’ (85). Chemotherapy, for instance, is used to ward against the vulnerability of the body to cancer, but it also increases corporeal vulnerability and renders the body alien. In her 2004 memoir The Summer of Her Baldness, Lord compares chemotherapy to ‘‘mainlining weed killer’’ (2004, 48). She says that ‘‘to invoke the perversely feminized metaphor oncologists prefer, [this is what] my particular ‘recipe’ sounds like. Adriamycin and Cytoxan: they fit right in on the pesticide shelf’’ (48). According to Lord: Chemo is medieval, enough poison to make you crazy miserable but not enough to put you out of your misery. . . . Lights are too bright, noises are too loud, your skin is not only too tight but much too thin, every pressure point in your body hurts, and so does your entire skull. The soles of your feet burn, everything going into your mouth, even the water you must drink because you are desperately thirsty and because if you don’t the drugs will sit in your bladder and corrode it from the inside out, everything feels like a bad idea. (47 48) Chemotherapy drugs kill all rapidly dividing cells in the body: they cause hair loss (on the head, face, pubic region, and inside the nose and ears); mouth and throat ulcers; and thrush, nausea, and vomiting. Drugs to stop the nausea cause constipation, the use of steroids cause GENDER: MATTER

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bloating, and the body is increasingly in danger of infection from low white blood count. A body undergoing chemo looks different, it feels different, and it functions differently unrecognizably, its habitual ways interrupted. A number of writers have described how chemotherapy can have effects that produce a genderlessness or a troubling of the separation between adult and child (or both) (Stacey 1997; Lord 2004; Ehlers 2014). Chemo can affect how gender registers, because it removes certain corporeal markers that are commonly used to construct and identify gendered subjectivity, such as facial and body hair. Without these markers, the body appears oddly alien- or infant-like. This infant- or alien-like body further rendered like a child through its inability to control bodily functions paradoxically prefigures an aged body. As such, with chemotherapy, the body and ‘‘time has nothing to tell’’ (Stacey 1997, 84). Surgery for breast cancer whether in the form of lumpectomy (where the cancerous mass is removed) or mastectomy (where the entire breast is removed) cuts out or off what are seen as ‘‘dangerous parts’’ of the body. Feminist accounts show that while surgery is used to mitigate danger, it also opens the body to increased vulnerability, creating the possibilities of infection and necrosis and the agony of having portions of the body sliced off. Perhaps most significantly, feminist perspectives have highlighted that, for many women, these procedures fundamentally compromise their sense of a gendered self. If breasts are central to the way women identify and are identified as women, then without breasts a sense of gendered self is disturbed: they have ‘‘lost’’ that which is essential to their concept of femininity (see Hallowell 2000). Queer theorists have noted that, indeed, ‘‘mastectomy necessarily queers a woman in a homophobic world’’ (Jain 2007, 522). At the same time, the issue of mastectomy has different effects for those who are not normatively gendered. For example, journalist Zak Szymanski, a boy-identified dyke, writes: ‘‘I was getting rid of my breasts. I never liked them anyway, and they weren’t worth all

Jolene and Bruce, 2010. Photograph by David Jay for The SCAR Project. ª DAVID JAY PHOTOGRAPHY

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the worry. . . . [M]y multigendered identity made a mastectomy all the more desirable’’ (2002). In dominant logics, breast reconstruction supposedly enables an individual to feel whole again, by ostensibly restoring what has been ‘‘lost.’’ But for many feminists, breast reconstruction is viewed as a form of regulatory discipline that conditions the postsurgical body-self in line with normative conventions and expectations for female embodiment: that is, reconstruction brings women in line with dominant norms by ‘‘returning’’ breasts to the female body. In her memoir The Cancer Journals (1980), for example, the lesbian poet and essayist Audre Lorde insists that breast reconstruction ‘‘encourages women to dwell in the past rather than a future . . . prevent[ing] a woman from assessing herself in the present, and from coming to terms with the changing planes of her body’’ (57). And in the field of feminist disability studies, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson argues that reconstruction ‘‘is used exclusively to eliminate disability’’ (2002, 14): it ‘‘pressures people . . . to become what Foucault calls ‘docile bodies’ . . . pliable bodies to be shaped infinitely so as to conform to a set of standards called normal and beautiful ’’ (11). Shante S., 2009. Photograph by David Jay for The SCAR While such accounts have made essential contribuProject. ª DAVID JAY PHOTOGRAPHY tions to thinking through the politics of breast cancer, alternative viewpoints have been raised. For instance, Diane Price-Herndl (2002), interdisciplinary scholar of feminism, culture, medicine, and disability studies, questions the claim that ‘‘a cosmetically created normality [is] a sign that one is giving in to the cultural demands for a specific femininity,’’ and she asks instead if it might be viewed through the lens of ‘‘a disavowal of the whole idea of the normal’’ (154). Regardless of how reconstruction is viewed, the possibility of experiencing the body as normative and whole following reconstruction surgery would seem to be always already vexed: material traces of mastectomy and the reconstruction surgeries remain, bodily capacities are altered (through muscle weakness, the pulling of scars, the weight of implants, and skin without sensation), and individuals are compelled to renegotiate the changing terrain of the body and, thus, their sense of self (Ehlers 2012).

What becomes evident through these various examples is that breast cancer transforms the materiality of the body. Indeed, for Stacey, the diagnosis of cancer initiates a recognition that ‘‘this matter is all I am’’ (1997, 85) the threat of cancerous growth and the rituals and effects of treatment become the overriding reality. As already noted, this material precarity the life-and-death realities of breast cancer is rarely represented in a cultural context that overwhelmingly associates the disease with pink ribbons. It would seem, however, that an ethical imperative exists to engage with the body as it is lived in relation to breast cancer: to raise cultural awareness and compel witness of the aftermath of biomedical interventions and the stark realities of those who live with and die from the disease. One example where such realities are represented is in a photographic collection by David Jay, The SCAR Project (2011), which has been shared as both a traveling art exhibition and a website. Guided by the tagline ‘‘breast cancer is not a pink ribbon,’’ these photographs show GENDER: MATTER

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Eliza H., 2011. Photograph by David Jay for The SCAR Project. ª DAVID JAY PHOTOGRAPH Y

broken bodies bodies with lost parts, bodies with parts out of order and rearranged through breast reconstruction, bodies burned through radiation, and bodies threatened by mortality. By giving visual form to disease, images in The SCAR Project importantly resituate the focus away from the idea of ‘‘the cure’’ and toward more tangible aspects of the disease. The project directly contests the cheeriness, sentimentality, and heroic aesthetics that define the disease in the broader social arena and, by representing women sometimes only months before their deaths, shows that facing breast cancer is not always about successful endurance and survival. The call for recognition of these realities has been pervasive in feminist and queer approaches to breast cancer. Lorde who is inarguably still the most recognized queer feminist voice on breast cancer so long ago posed the yet-unrealized sentiment that ‘‘there must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it or giving in to it’’ (1980, 13). And Adrienne Rich implored, ‘‘From here on / I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening’’ (1993, 58). More than simply focusing on breast cancer as an individual tragedy, these approaches have insisted that the individual life and death drama of being diagnosed with the disease be linked to a transformed politics one that, as Jain notes, ‘‘yearns to account for loss, grief, and betrayal, and the connections between economic profits, disease, and death in a culture that is affronted with mortality’’ (2007, 90). Such a transformed politics would demand that there be more sustained scrutiny of the administrative, institutional, economic, environmental, and biomedical processes that unequally

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attend to or actually distribute the very cancer that society labors toward eradicating. Ultimately, it would transform how life is fostered in relation to breast cancer.

Summary This chapter has traced some of the primary concerns and debates related to breast cancer as they have been raised from feminist and queer perspectives. The chapter began by noting that this disease is the most common among women globally, and because it impacts the lives of so many and is so intimately tied to notions of gender and the matter of the female-sexed body, it has received sustained feminist attention. Fundamentally, scholars and activists have highlighted that breast cancer must be analyzed at various scales: both in terms of how it is shaped by social, economic, and environmental factors and how it is lived out at the level of the body. At the broader scale, breast cancer is biopolitically administered in order to reduce risk and foster the lives of women as a population. The organizing logics of the biopolitics of breast cancer position risk as inherent to the female body and have increasingly come to frame health optimization (that is, the mitigation of breast cancer risk) as the responsibility of the individual. What feminist and queer perspectives have highlighted, however, is that the biopolitical fostering of life is unequally distributed (breast cancer incidence and mortality rates are conditioned by structural racism, poverty, and homophobia, such that white heterosexual women’s lives are fostered more than others), not all populations of women have the same opportunities to take responsibility for their health and self-care, and risk is often largely out of the individual’s control. Feminists have been particularly attentive to how breast cancer risk is conditioned by environmental factors, and they have demanded that this issue be placed at the forefront of breast cancer politics. However, dominant breast cancer culture not only elides focusing on environmental causes of breast cancer (indeed, it is at times complicit in these causes), it also fails to represent how the disease impacts individuals at the level of the body how it is materially experienced. This individual corporeal experience is the second scale that feminist and queer scholars and activists have insisted needs attention in the broader social sphere. Without representing and witnessing how breast cancer surveillance, diagnosis, and treatment registers at the level of matter how it alters the very materiality of the body approaches to breast cancer are unable to do justice to those who live with and die from this disease. These realities, many argue, must push into the public politics of breast cancer and, indeed, be used as the platform to transform that politics: to account for the reality of vulnerability and death and how these are unequally metered out and work toward more affirmative, attentive, and just ways of fostering life.

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Press, Nancy, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Barbara A. Koenig. ‘‘Collective Fear, Individualized Risk: The Social and Cultural Context of Genetic Testing for Breast Cancer.’’ Nursing Ethics 7, no. 3 (2000): 237 249. Price Herndl, Diane. ‘‘Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body Twenty Years after Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals.’’ In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Synder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thompson, 144 155. New York: Modern Lan guage Association of America Press, 2002. Rich, Adrienne. ‘‘A Woman Dead in Her Forties.’’ In The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974 1977, 53 58. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. First published 1978. Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. ‘‘Breast Cancer: An Adventure in Applied Deconstruction.’’ In Feminist Theory and the

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Yadlon, Susan. ‘‘Skinny Women and Good Mothers: The Rhetoric of Risk, Control, and Culpability in the Produc tion of Knowledge about Breast Cancer.’’ Feminist Stud ies 23, no. 3 (1997): 645 677. Young, Iris Marion. ‘‘Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling.’’ Philosophy and Medicine 43 (1992): 215 230. F IL M S Pink Ribbons, Inc. Dir. Le´a Pool. 2011. Documentary high lighting the pervasiveness of pinkwashing. Rachel’s Daughters: Searching for the Causes of Breast Can cer. Dir. Allie Light and Irving Saraf. 1997. Independent documentary about the causes of breast cancer in the United States. WEBSITE Jay, David. The SCAR Project. 2011. http://www.thescar project.org/. Photography collection by David Jay.

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CHAPTER 20

Endomaterialities Celia Roberts Professor of Gender and Science Studies, Department of Sociology Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Women’s health, our reproductive futures

and ‘‘nature’’

could well be at stake.

Lynda Birke, ‘‘Sitting on the Fence’’ The planetary present not some speculative future ‘‘reproductive failure,’’ human and nonhuman.

exhibits a staggering scale of

Neel Ahuja, ‘‘Intimate Atmospheres’’ Endocrine systems are core elements of human and other-than-human animal life. Constituted by glands, hormones, and organs (including brains), they message among and between internal and external environments, stimulating and retarding cellular activity, promoting physical growth and health, stimulating sexual development, and contributing to safety-oriented, sexual, and nurturing behaviors. Since the 1990s widespread changes to endocrine systems have become matters of significant concern for environmentalists, environmental scientists, epidemiologists, and scientifically literate publics. As documented by international organizations, such as the interdisciplinary Scientific Committee on Problems in the Environment and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, a diverse range of negative effects relating to reproduction, sexual development, and cancer and thought to be caused by endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) is now evident in human and nonhuman animals. Such effects include increased risk of reproductive system cancers and infertility, early and/or atypical sexual development, and atypical sexual and caring behavior (e.g., altered patterns of nesting and feeding of young in birds). Constituting a wide array of human-made and natural compounds, EDCs are understood to be globally ubiquitous. Found in water, soil, food, and human-made products, they flow in and out of human and nonhuman bodies, objects, and environments in ceaseless, invisible, and often uninterruptible ways. EDCs are inextricably part of contemporary lives, material worlds, objects, and bodies. Importantly, research into EDCs demonstrates that their effects are complex and sometimes paradoxical: although the effects of compounds accumulate over time and interact with each other, small amounts of or low exposures to some can sometimes have more profound effects than larger amounts or higher exposures (Langston 2010). Despite the burgeoning interest in theorizing this era as the Anthropocene a geologic period in which human activity has irrecoverably marked the nature of the planet EDCs have attracted relatively little scholarly interest from the social sciences or the humanities. Hoping to stimulate interest in addressing this gap, this chapter articulates the movements of EDCs as flows, describing moments and places when these flows jellify as ‘‘endomaterialities.’’ Including, for example, the bodies of ‘‘lesbian’’ birds, sexually ambiguous fish, early

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developing children, and certain kinds of plastic, endomaterialities demand attention, care, and politics. Although discussions of the Anthropocene tend to focus on climate change, rocks, and oil rather than toxic chemicals, endomaterialities speak volumes to current conditions on Earth, articulating the complex and seemingly inextricable ways in which human and nonhuman animals live with and through the results of industrial processes at all levels, including the biochemical. Often involving ‘‘disrupted’’ sexual and reproductive systems, endomaterialities also provoke important questions for feminist and queer theory, such as: What is the nature and significance of sex, in all its meanings? How might the biological materialities of sexual difference, sexuality, and sexual reproduction be theorized and politically addressed in these toxic times? And what do feminism and queer theory have to offer environmental thought and politics? Exploring these questions, this chapter first introduces four endomaterialities nonhuman animals, women’s and children’s bodies, political representations, and new plastics selected to demonstrate the wide range of actors and issues in play here. Working through the small but exciting body of feminist and queer writing on EDCs, it then explores how critical understandings of sex/gender might both contribute to and be affected by EDCs’ contemporary entanglements with bodies, worlds, and lives. In what ways can researchers and thinkers theorize and politically address endomaterialities today?

CONTEMPORARY ENDOMATERIALITIES NONHUMAN ANIMALS: POLAR BEARS, BIRDS, FISH

Scientific and related news media and environmentalist discourses often describe the effects of EDCs on nonhuman animals. This literature is populated by iconic figures, such as crocodiles and polar bears, which are described as no longer the purely wild creatures of the popular imagination (see Ziser and Sze 2007). The bodies of such creatures are described as saturated with toxic chemicals despite their physical distances from the cities and factories that produce these compounds (Roberts 2007, chap. 6). Less iconic birds and fish also appear as endomaterialities, engaging in non-normative reproductive behaviors, such as less active courting of mates, atypical nest-defending behavior, and egg neglect (see, for example, Saaristo et al. 2009). Such behaviors are related to EDCs (heavy metals, pesticides, and fertilizers) in the blood, which change internal flows of reproductive and stress-related hormones associated with mating, reproduction, and care for young. Some news media reports use human categories to articulate these surprising changes in ‘‘natural’’ behavior, describing EDC-affected seagulls, for example, as ‘‘lesbian’’ when they nest in female pairs (Colborn, Dumanoski, and Myers 1996). Such terms inappropriately import cultural ideas and values about human sexuality into discussions of nonhuman life. Importantly, endocrinologically disrupted creatures are not easy to spot. Although EDCs sometimes affect the physical appearance of genitalia or other sexual markers, their effects are often behavioral, requiring a keen or highly trained eye to recognize atypical patterns. They thus remain largely in the domain of experts (scientists, naturalists, and activists) who educate publics to care about the invisible transformations occurring within nonhuman animal bodies. Environmentalist campaigns sometimes play on the shock of the reproductive disruptions involved. In a 2004 poster campaign, for example, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) used images of polar bears with human heads living in suburban houses to represent the ‘‘unnatural’’ mixing of human-made chemicals and wild animal

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bodies involved in EDC flows (Roberts 2007, 185). Other campaigns play on the invisibility of EDC effects by using pictures of seemingly healthy animals and fish next to alarming text about reproductive and other pathologies. Routes of EDC movements are also depicted (see, e.g., World Wildlife Fund). In each case, environmentalists link the endomaterialities of wild animals to human production and consumption of technologies, furnishings, medications, and food. CHILDREN’S AND WOMEN’S BODIES

Although the scientific evidence is less clear, new human endomaterialities are also appearing. Perhaps most significantly, EDCs materialize child bodies as living with difficult present and future (reproductive) risk. Scientific papers and reports (from the World Health Organization [WHO] and environmentalist organizations, such as the WWF) describe, for example, increasing rates of cryptorchidism (undescended testicles) in young boys, linking this to concerns about decreased sperm counts in adults, increased risk of reproductive cancer, and compromised future fertility. These texts also conjure the early developing girl, whose pubertal timing is outside the norm and who may, in consequence, enter into sexual relations too early, threatening her heteronormative future and increasing her risk of breast cancer (Roberts 2015). In environmentalist and news media accounts of this scientific work, the early developing girl and the cryptochordic boy stand in for two broader losses: the loss of innocent childhood and, more significantly, human reproductive futures. Describing her book on parenting in a toxic environment, well-known environmentalist writer Sandra Steingraber writes: In Raising Elijah I call for outspoken, full-throated heroism in the face of the great moral crisis of our own day: the environmental crisis. And, because the main victims of this unfolding calamity are our own children, this book speaks directly to parents. . . . Current environmental policies must be realigned to safeguard the healthy development of children and sustain planetary life-support systems on which their lives depend. Only within a new regulatory framework can parents carry out our two most fundamental duties: to protect our children from harm and provide for their future. (2011, xii xiii, xvii) Concerns about EDC-affected children are shot through with race, class, and gender. Although all humans are like nonhuman animals affected by EDCs, economically deprived children may be exposed to higher-than-average concentrations and accumulations of toxins, exacerbated by additional challenges, such as malnutrition, violence, and poor education. Environmentalist campaigns, such as Greenpeace’s (2011) Hidden Consequences, highlight the vulnerability of the world’s most economically insecure humans, who may depend directly on rivers and agricultural land for water, food, and income. People drink and bathe in the same toxic chemicals that affect the reproductive lives of fish, causing declining stocks and loss of income and food. These connections expose the profound interrelation of endomaterialities: humans, nonhuman animals, and environments are all (more or less jellified) toxic flows. Campaigns around scrapped electronics or e-waste similarly highlight the effects of toxins on humans living in the Global South. Studies of children and adults working in ewaste recycling centers and dumps in India and China, for example, have highlighted their exposure to EDCs, arguing that the chemicals and metals used in the production of industrial objects are also necessarily associated with their deconstruction and/or recycling. As various studies and public expose´s have demonstrated, a huge percentage of technical objects, such as computers and mobile phones (but also solar panels and electric car batteries), are shipped to GENDER: MATTER

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low-income countries for dismantling at the end of their consumer lives. Economically deprived workers in India and China separate these devices into components, which are then sorted, sold, or melted and skimmed for constitutive metals (McAllister, Magee, and Hale 2014). Such processes frequently involve EDC flows in the heavy metals and plastics constituting and seeping from objects, in the fumes and leaching chemicals absorbed by workers’ bodies and clothing, and in the air and soil of workplaces and homes. In such work arrangements women and girls are most often ‘‘the lowest of the low,’’ taking on the most dangerous work and bearing the heaviest burden of toxicity. Children are affected by the exposure their mothers experience, and girls’ reproductive futures are threatened: Compounding the concerns about the gendered distribution of labor, which themselves are a matter of justice, fairness, and rights, are women-specific health concerns stemming directly from these dangerous tasks. E-waste specifically affects women’s morbidity/mortality, and fertility, as well as the health of any children. Of the 14 general types of hazardous chemicals commonly found in e-waste, more than half affect women’s general reproductive and endocrine functions. . . . E-waste work may also be tied to fertility problems. Lead and mercury exposure within the first trimester of pregnancy may affect fetal development, resulting in potential neurobehavioral development problems, low birth weight, or spontaneous abortion and birth defects. Ambient air pollution, a consequence of burning e-waste in open-air pits, is also linked to reduced fertility. The damage to reproductive function after several years of exposure to this pollution is irreversible. For many women, this damage has occurred before they even reach reproductive age. (McAllister, Magee, and Hale 2014, 172) Human endomaterialities are both intergenerational and inevitably tied up with the materializing effects of gendering processes, such as the sexual division of labor. These intergenerational effects raise daunting responsibilities for informed parents, many of whom, as Steingraber points out, recognize the ‘‘disconnect between the enormity of the problem and the ability of individual acts of vigilance and self-sacrifice to fix it’’ (2011, xvi). In their entwinement with the economic and material flows of global capitalism, endomaterialities also produce huge challenges for regulatory agencies. POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS

All of these human and nonhuman endomaterialities become objects of discourse in various political/scientific forums in which the interests and missions of profit-driven industrialists and their supporters in governments clash with those of environmentalists and health activists wanting to highlight the damage caused by EDCs. Endomaterialities are contested and enacted, to use Dutch ethnographer and philosopher Annemarie Mol’s (2002) phrase, in the formal debates taking place in the pages of scientific journals and nongovernmental organization reports; in events hosted by universities and governing bodies, such as the European Commission; and in informal and creative stagings performed by activist organizations. Activist organizations employ the Internet to articulate concerns about EDCs. In a 2014 campaign, for example, Greenpeace used vibrant, high-quality photographs of Chinese garment factories to emphasize the toxins to which both workers and consumers are exposed in the manufacture and wearing of dyed and printed cottons. Linked to pressure campaigns targeting high-profile clothing brands through Twitter petitions, press releases, and publicity stunts, these images are designed to stick in consumers’ minds when shopping for clothes. Here, the ‘‘innocent’’ and colorful appeal of children’s clothing is reshaped into a monstrous

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Workers prepare their workspace for the next set of fabrics to be screened with paints and dyes in a textile factory, China. In 2014 Greenpeace launched a study to investigate the hazardous and toxic residues in children’s clothing. Clothing from Zhili Town of Huzhou City in Zhejiang Province and Shishi City in Fujian Province the two largest distribution centers for children’s clothing in China were tested for nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs), phthalates, antimony, and other toxic chemicals. ª JEFF LAU / GREENPEACE

endomateriality: ‘‘Toxic chemicals are the little monsters in children’s clothing,’’ the campaign tag line reads (Greenpeace 2014). Endomaterialities are also enacted in formal bureaucratic settings. In June 2015, for example, the European Commission hosted the conference ‘‘Endocrine Disruptors: Current Challenges in Science and Policy.’’ Documented in detail by video (available online in real time) and transcriptions (European Commission 2015), this event provoked a range of Twitter feeds from both engaged participants and resistant followers. Part of a long-term program in which the European Commission aims to document the effects of EDCs, debate the scientific literature, and produce a strategy for managing EDCs in Europe, the conference brought together scientists, policy makers, and activists to discuss the best ways to designate, measure, and control the flows of EDCs. In this format, endomaterialities are both figured and contested; facts are made and unmade. Importantly, and in contrast to environmentalist stagings, scientific evidence was counterposed to emotions at this conference. Bureaucrats chairing sessions called for ‘‘less emotion,’’ highlighting the need for facts and evidence. In this conventional move, science was figured as a route to truth and resistant or impassioned politics as muddying the waters. As debate at this event shows, the attempt to disentangle feelings from endomaterialities is profoundly challenging. People care about EDCs because, as Steingraber noted, they disrupt what are widely perceived as the foundations of life: sexuality, sex, and reproduction. GENDER: MATTER

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Although establishing good-enough facts to work with may involve processes designed to minimize the effects of workers’ feelings (the processes of systematic literature review, for example), the attempt to debate endomaterialities without emotions seems almost perverse. From a feminist science and technology studies (STS) perspective, the separation of matters of fact from matters of concern or care is conceptually unjustifiable and politically unhelpful (Bellacasa 2011). NEW PLASTICS

As well as enacting forms of EDC-related harms, these modes of politics produce important new endomaterialities designed to reduce future harms. The existence of ‘‘BPA-free plastic,’’ for example, stems from successful campaigns focused on bisphenol A (BPA), a carbon-based synthetic compound found in many plastics, including those lining metallic food cans, and in the thermal paper used in receipts printed from cash registers. Active also in dental-filling sealants, plastic containers and film, eyeglass lenses, and the lining of water pipes, BPA has been subjected to intense international scientific and political debate around its endocrinedisrupting effects. Through enormous collaborative effects, environmentalists and health activists have managed to achieve European bans on its use in baby bottles (starting in 2011), which is a relatively small but potentially significant legal recognition of the effects of EDCs. However, it has come to light that some BPA-free plastics contain bisphenol S, a closely related compound that may have more serious endocrine-disrupting effects than BPA (Worland 2015). These ‘‘new’’ endomaterialities may turn out to be equally or even more damaging in hormonal terms. The endomaterialities presented here are a small selection from a vast range of possibilities chosen to indicate the broad range of concerns and interests at stake in thinking about EDC flows. They also demonstrate the profound interconnections between different moments and places where these flows jellify into something more solid. In these Anthropocenic times, the bodies of fish and children, oceans and rivers, toxin-producing industrial processes, and national and international regulatory practices are literally (hormonally) entangled. But how to theorize the toxic flows and endomaterialities now constituting the planet? What might feminist, queer, and new materialist theorists have to say about EDCs and their materializing effects? And how might thinking about EDCs challenge thinking about sex/ gender, bodies, race, inequalities, and environmental justice?

THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF TOXICS: FEMINIST AND QUEER TAKES NARROW VIEWS OF SEX/GENDER

Endomaterialities are frequently associated with changes in sexual reproduction, sexual behavior, and physical sex, creating important connections to feminist and queer theory and politics. Early feminist work on EDCs highlighted the ways in which particular understandings of sex/gender were at stake in scientific accounts of hormonal disruption. In an important early paper, ‘‘Sitting on the Fence: Biology, Feminism, and Gender-Bending Environments’’ (2000), feminist biologist Lynda Birke argued that limited notions of sex and gender ‘‘pepper’’ scientific and popular reports of EDCs’ effects on human and nonhuman animals. In ‘‘Drowning in a Sea of Estrogens: Sex Hormones, Sexual Reproduction, and Sex’’ (2003), Celia Roberts similarly argues that scientific and environmentalist accounts rely on and reproduce narrow understandings of sexed embodiment and gendered behavior in

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exploring and representing EDC flows. Giovanna Di Chiro’s ‘‘Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco-Normativity’’ (2010) brings this work up to date, exploring how scientific, environmentalist, and media discourses on EDCs mobilize ‘‘socially sanctioned heterosexism and queer-fear in order to generate public interest and a sense of urgency’’ in the 2000s (210). One of her examples is the popular public discourse of scientist and advocate Tyrone Hayes, who agitates globally for the control of EDCs based on his research into amphibian physiology. To provoke concern for sexually and physiologically deformed frog bodies, Di Chiro shows, Tyrone mobilizes his own reproductive heterosexuality, showing pictures in his lectures of his parents and children to imply a ‘‘threat to gender norms, the family, and the stability of society’’ (214). Focusing on the reproductive capacity of male frogs means downplaying other negative effects of EDCs. Tapping into ‘‘culturally acceptable queer-fears,’’ Tyrone’s discourse both limits coalitional possibilities and contradicts broader objectives of social justice. All of these critiques both acknowledge the significance of EDCs on human and nonhuman bodies and problematize the ways in which these effects are figured in scientific, media, and environmentalist discourses. Situated at the nexus of feminist and/or queer and environmentalist politics, they insist that EDCs be taken seriously as actors in contemporary materializations of bodies while maintaining a critical relationship to the ways in which figurations of sex/gender, race, and/or class are at play in accounts of these effects (see Seager 2003). Working within an environmental justice tradition, Di Chiro draws a distinction between the effects of EDCs (which she describes as facts) and representations of these effects and their significance (Di Chiro 2010). Writing as a biologist who wants to be able to make claims about the material bodies of the animals she studies, Birke (2000, 587, 596) describes her approach as ‘‘contingent realism,’’ a ‘‘tricky’’ practice of ‘‘fence-sitting.’’ In contrast to both of these and in building on an STS understanding of the inextricable intermingling of meaning and matter, Roberts (2007) elaborates an analysis in which hormones and EDCs are understood as material-semiotic actors in the production of sexed bodies. Here, hormones are understood as messengers that both carry cultural meanings (semiotics) and have material effects on cells, organs, bodies, and environments. BREAST FEEDING AND CONTAMINATED MILK

Other feminists have engaged with EDCs through work on breast-feeding and environmental toxins in human milk. Sometimes this work takes a critical approach to scientific, environmental, and news media discourses describing the possible negative effects of toxins on breast-fed children, analyzing the ways in which EDCs are presented as threats to breastfeeding, a practice positioned as a natural, even sacred, act ideally involving the transmission of ‘‘pure’’ fluids. In contrast, these scholars argue that women’s bodies are always already contaminated and that breast-feeding is an environmental justice concern. Critically reading Steingraber’s writing about breast-feeding, for example, Bernice L. Hausman writes: ‘‘Our sometimes desperate gestures to purify ourselves, however promoted by medicine and public health, are enacted against the material conditions of modern embodiment. As such, they represent the impossible dreams of a sacred motherhood separated from the world, its dirt, and its communicable diseases’’ (2010, 29). Hausman’s research focuses on rhetoric. In arguing that concerns about EDCs seem rather insignificant when compared to worries about HIV transmission, she writes: ‘‘This is not to diminish the biological accounting of the effect of environmental contaminants on human bodies, but to locate the rhetorical effect of the discourses drawing our attention to them and outlining their risks’’ (28). Maia Boswell-Penc’s Tainted Milk (2006) has a more sociological orientation, highlighting the uneven distribution of toxins along racialized and classed lines. GENDER: MATTER

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ECOFEMINISM AND WOMEN’S HEALTH ACTIVISM

Concerns about the physical effects of EDCs are expressed rather more forcefully in both ecofeminist writing and activism and women’s health activism, particularly around breast cancer prevention. As analyzed by Maren Klawiter (2008), Samantha King (2006), and Greta Gaard (2012), breast cancer activists have since the 1990s increasingly turned their attention to EDCs as possible causes of breast malignancy. This focus puts them into conflict not only with industrialists and governments but also with more mainstream activists who are invested in supporting medical and scientific enterprises (which antitoxin activists perceive as producing carcinogenic substances). These activists display a critical and strategic attitude toward science and an ‘‘unmitigated anger targeted at the cancer industry’’ (Klawiter 2008, 47). This ambivalent or ‘‘strategic’’ relationship to science stems from the complex desire to both contest biomedical (and specifically pharmaceutical company derived) knowledge about the safety of drugs and other industrially produced substances and to harness the power of science to expose the carcinogenic effects of toxins. Distinctions between good and bad scientific knowledge here tend to relate to political questions of investment, allegiance, and profit: Whom do the activists perceive this science is for? What is it hiding or exposing? Whose interests are at stake? Exploring the development of ecofeminism, Gaard (2012) makes strong links between these activist questions and theoretical feminist engagements with the nature of scientific knowledge production, highlighting also the significance of antiracist ideas and politics in contemporary contestations of the unequal distribution of toxic effects on bodies. ANTIRACIST ENVIRONMENTALIST ACTIVISM

Antiracist environmental activists have long pointed out the unequal distribution of toxins and their effects on human bodies. Di Chiro’s early piece ‘‘Bearing Witness or Taking Action? Toxic Tourism and Environmental Justice’’ (2000) discusses this history, exploring the ways in which a particular group of black American women activists highlights the unequal distribution of EDCs through ‘‘toxic tours.’’ In later work Di Chiro (2010) similarly explores the ways in which mainstream scientific, media, and environmental accounts of EDCs focus on the reproductive effects of toxins work to sideline and even normalize other effects (increased risk of cancer, e.g.) highlighted by minoritized communities (211). A similar, more elaborately theorized analysis of environmentalist and health activist discourses on toxins is in Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures (2010). Reinvigorating understandings of ‘‘the environment’’ to acknowledge ‘‘its blood, its lively creatures, its interactions and relations,’’ Alaimo introduces the term ‘‘trans-corporeality’’ to describe the traffic between bodies and worlds that are epitomized in contemporary environmental memoirs (2). This term, she suggests, ‘‘reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures’’ articulated in these texts and demonstrates the impossibility of separating bodies from environments (2). Toxins constitute one of Alaimo’s key examples. Figured as ‘‘traffic,’’ they appear as one of a diverse set of agents (including biological bodies, environments, and forms of writing) enacting contemporary worlds. Thinking through memoirs of people suffering from multiple chemical sensitivities (MCSs), Alaimo argues that toxins demand a ‘‘nearly unrecognizable sort of ethics’’ that acknowledge the significance of invisible, known and not-yet-known, effects of chemical compounds (18). Supporting the use of the precautionary principle in addressing endomaterialities, Alaimo agrees with antitoxin environmentalists that it does not make sense to wait for detailed documentation of harm before acting to reduce exposure: ‘‘If the material

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environment is a realm of often incalculable, inter-connected agencies, then we must somehow make political, regulatory, and even personal decisions within an ever-changing landscape of continuous interplay, intra-action, emergence, and risk’’ (21). This new materialist approach to toxins, like the earlier feminist work, tries both to take seriously the differentiating actions of EDCs and to problematize the ways in which such actions are discursively articulated and/or ignored. QUEER THEORY AND EDCS

A group of scholars that includes Mel Y. Chen (2011, 2012), Bailey Kier (2010), Neel Ahuja (2015), and Malin Ah-King and Eva Hayward (Ah-King and Hayward 2013; Hayward 2014) takes these feminist, environmental justice, and new materialist concerns in a somewhat new direction, radically questioning claims that toxins are harmful and asking whether there might be something to celebrate in the effects of EDCs. This orientation builds on the embrace and revaluation of negativity in some queer theory accounts of sexuality, most notably Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), which refuses to engage in sentimentality around sex or reproduction or to believe in a redemptive future for homosexual people. It powerfully resists the valuation of reproductivity and heteronormativity underpinning scientific and environmentalist claims about EDC flows. Hayward, for example, puts thinking around trans and EDCs into conversation, describing the actions of estrogenic compounds on bodies as ‘‘transxenoestrogenesis.’’ Alongside acknowledging the harmful entanglements of EDCs, Hayward argues, must come recognition that sometimes, and in some bodies, xenoestrogens can be health and life affirming. Transwomen’s use of the equine urine based ‘‘hormone-replacement’’ medication Premarin is one example. Hayward argues that EDCs simultaneously produce danger and promise: Neither utopic nor dystopic, transxenoestrogenesis invites the realization that bodies are lively and practical responses to environments that change over time, even when those environmental changes involve exposure to carcinogens, neurotoxins, asthmagens, and mutagens, to possibilities of cancer, diabetes, immune system failure, and heart disease. But where danger lies, promise might also be found: in the double binds of biochemistry, some phytoestrogens and mycoestrogens promote heart health and cancer prevention in humans; such is the emergent nature of the conditions of life and death. (2014, 257) Like Di Chiro and others, Hayward is particularly keen to reevaluate the moral panic with which the sex-changing effects of EDCs are articulated in mainstream media accounts. Somewhat perilously, then, Hayward argues for a kind of embrace of the already ‘‘ruined’’ environmental condition: ‘‘As much an environmental concern as a transgender one, transxenoestrogenesis is not a forecast of disaster but rather a reminder that we are already living in ruination’’ (258). A paper coauthored with Ah-King titled ‘‘Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption’’ (2013) makes a similar argument. Refusing to align themselves with moral panic about sexual purity, Ah-King and Hayward write: ‘‘‘Toxic sex’ foregrounds sex as an ongoing process influenced by endocrine disruptive chemicals, describing our shared vulnerability to one another; our bodies are open to the planet’’ (2). This foregrounding, they argue, indicates a more practical approach in which the physical changes constituting new endomaterialities are figured as potentials rather than harms (6). As in Hayward’s GENDER: MATTER

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solo-authored piece, this argument is pragmatic insofar as it accepts the current situation as unstoppable and tries to name something politically positive within it. EMBRACING TOXICITY

The key potential Ah-King and Hayward see in endomaterialities is the disruption of binary sexual difference as fixed and immutable. The actions of EDCs, they suggest, affirm that sex and sexing are dynamic processes of exchange between and among bodies and environments in which bodies are not passive recipients of toxins but active participants in the opening of new possibilities (some harmful, some not). Analyzing endomaterialities, they argue: Already, sexual life as we know it is dissolving in kinds; through the unwilled transformation of toxicity and biochemical materiality, the call-and-response formation of bodies and their relations has re-dynamized corporeality. In this way, the supremacy bestowed to sexual difference its ontological force is out-paced not only by social or political movements, but also by metabolizing pollutants, xenotransplanting toxicants, and intravenous banes. (2013, 7) This argument leaves Hayward and Ah-King in a highly contemporary if rather surprising position in which they simultaneously envision a hopeful future that leaves behind oppressive regimes of sex and recognize the serious risk of human extinction in such a world: ‘‘We are entwined through our descent (and, possibly, our extinction), but also through our coexistence in shared environments. Nonhumans and humans are vulnerable, but also exuberant, adaptable, resilient and constantly changing in interaction with environments. We are living in environmental catastrophe, certainly some organisms will survive; perhaps only humans will not’’ (9). This acceptance of catastrophe and possible extinction fails to estimate the immense and unequally distributed human and nonhuman suffering involved in such processes. Kier (2010) also argues that it would be better to embrace the bodily effects of current ecological conditions than to respond with fear. Like Hayward, Kier uses a trans approach to sex and sexuality to come to this more affirmative (less morally panicked) view of contemporary endomaterialities, naming our current condition one of ‘‘interdependent transsex.’’ Calling for a focus on systems constituted by human and nonhuman actors, Kier advocates a move away from understanding trans as a human category, claiming instead that the term transsex describes both humans and nonhumans well: ‘‘This perspective situates humans as merely one component among many in re/productive relations and one which has a great deal to learn from the politics of interdependent transsex, or the various interrelated decisions systems and things make’’ (300). Kier’s focus on interrelations forms the basis of a different ethical approach to EDCs. This new ethics centers on resilience rather than sustainability, arguing that it must be accepted that current northern lifestyles are not possible for everyone in the world and therefore should not be a goal. Kier works with the example of so-called transgender fish and the claim that the reproductive physiology and behavior of fish in many rivers and oceans are being altered by the release of EDCs from factories and sewers. Resisting the framing of both public and scientific concern about these fish, Kier asks if it would be possible instead to think of their transsexuality as a resilient adaptation to toxic conditions, something from which humans could learn (2010, 309, 314). Noting the clear connections between the effects of EDCs on humans and on fish (the interrelations of interdependent transsex), he asks: But if we are to de-center the human in this unfolding problem, what does it really matter that humans absorb lower concentrations of EDCs than fish, if EDCs are

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possibly creating marine ‘‘dead zones’’ in rivers, water tables, bays and estuaries that are used to hydrate and feed glocal populations? Instead of eating locally and coastally, the majority of humans in the United States now eat from the agricultural and factory farms which are themselves their own tributaries for EDCs, draining to create ‘‘dead zones’’ of the world’s major bays and estuaries. EDCs are part of the food, productive and re/productive chain of non-human and human life and we will need to devise ways, just like fish, to adapt to their influence. (315) Here again, there is a tone of realist acceptance: this is the ways things are, and humans and nonhumans must adapt. The essay ends with asking what it would mean to see transgender fish as ‘‘the ‘fittest’ in the dance of life and death that is survival’’ (316). This question seems to deny the material effects of EDCs on the possibility of fish reproduction and their survival as groups or species. How can the concept of ‘‘fitness’’ be stretched to refer to creatures that are unable to reproduce? In ‘‘Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections’’ Chen makes a related argument, using queer theory to negotiate a path between recognizing the ‘‘screamingly negative affects’’ associated with EDCs and refusing to ignore their more positive actions in some bodies: I would of course be naive to imagine that toxicity stands in for utopia, given the explosion of resentful, despairing, painful, screamingly negative affects that surround toxicity. Nevertheless, I do not want to deny the queer productivity of toxins and toxicity, quite beyond the given enumerable set of addictive or pleasureinducing substances, or to neglect indeed to ask after the desires, the loves, the rehabilitations, the affections, the assets that toxic conditions induce. (2011, 281) Elaborated in the book Animacies (2012), Chen’s key examples are lead poisoning and MCSs. Chen’s 2011 paper discusses a particular 2007 American scandal about lead content in toys manufactured in China. In a far-reaching analysis, Chen unpacks a New York Times article’s concern about young white boys licking Thomas the Tank Engine toy trains and thereby ingesting lead. These concerns, Chen argues, are underpinned by anxieties about race (journalists do not mention high levels of lead in poor black American children or the Chinese workers making the toys), masculinity (Thomas the Tank Engine is an iconic boys’ toy), Americanness (Chen discusses the significance of trains in the creation of the American West), and heterosexuality (as phallic objects, trains should be pushed, not licked, by boys). The second part of the article explores the ways in which humans and nonhumans are in relation via toxins and other invisible particles to which Chen has a keen sensitivity. Using autobiography, Chen both describes the serious physical effects of metal poisoning and explores the affectionate relationships that are part of toxic flows (describing a relationship with a lover, a positive encounter with a worker at a craft shop, and experience of time spent on a favorite sofa) (2011, 276). Chen articulates how the experience of MCSs changes relations between objects, people, air, and bodies, opening up questions about how to understand boundaries both between animate and inanimate and between and among particular subjects and objects. Walking down a street, Chen writes, humans literally ingest the bodies of others, their exhaled breath and sloughed-off skin and their perfume, smoke, and hormonal excretions (280). While sometimes physically dangerous to someone with MCSs, these relations are sometimes also positive, loving, or pleasurable. Chen’s absorption of a favorite sofa, for example, can be deeply comforting (281). GENDER: MATTER

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THEORIZING ENDOMATERIALITIES: SUFFERING, SCIENCE, AND POSSIBLE JUSTICE Although clearly articulating many of the inequalities involved in exposure to toxic chemicals, queer work on endocrine disruption is oriented toward exploring the radical potentialities of contemporary endomaterialities. This focus risks minimizing significant forms of suffering and loss associated with apparent changes to long-established patterns of sexual reproduction in nonhuman and human animals. The concern here is not only directed toward the future but also to present forms of suffering: infertility, cancer, species loss. As Ahuja writes, ‘‘The planetary present not some speculative future exhibits a staggering scale of ‘reproductive failure,’ human and nonhuman’’ (2015, 370). The uneven distribution of endomaterialities, noted by many scholars, raises serious and urgent questions about embodiment and suffering. The paradox is that although everyone is exposed to toxic compounds, ‘‘race and class have been cited as the most important determinants of potential environmental harm’’ (Alaimo 2010, 82). Questions of embodied difference, usually tied to environmental justice politics, must therefore remain at the forefront of considerations of endomaterialities. Such differences must be understood as lived rather than genetic or ‘‘simply’’ biological (Roberts 2007, 2015). For Alaimo, the views of environmental justice movements ‘‘epitomize a trans-corporeal materiality, a conception of the body that is neither essentialist, nor genetically determined, nor firmly bounded, but rather a body in which social power and material/geographic agencies intra-act’’ (Alaimo 2010, 63). As jellified flows of toxins, endomaterialities are similarly moments of intra-action (Barad 2007) of meaning, materiality, and power. Here, significant differences are made and remade. Critical work on endocrine disruption demonstrates the importance both of eschewing automatic panic about changes in the behaviors or bodies of either human or nonhuman animals and of listening carefully to what biologists, clinicians, epidemiologists, patients, health activists, and ecologists (among others) have to say about the problems associated with contemporary changes to hormonal systems. Keeping a critical eye on ‘‘the science’’ in all its forms means neither disregarding claims nor cherry-picking appealing examples. It means, rather, paying close attention to science as material-semiotic practice, both a diverse form of labor and a set of specific knowledges. Such attention requires time-consuming, collective, and sometimes tedious effort. In theorizing endomaterialities, it is important to ask American science and technology theorist Donna J. Haraway’s (1944 ) core question, borrowed from Susan Leigh Star (1990): ‘‘Cui Bono?’’ or ‘‘Who lives and dies?’’ (Haraway 1997, 113). Borrowing Alaimo’s and Di Chiro’s framings, this could also be described as insisting on questions of environmental justice. Importantly, such theorizing of the question involves shifting away from large-scale, crisis-oriented accounts toward more detailed examinations of particular materializations. Ahuja argues that critical approaches to climate change involve ‘‘rethinking our casual reproduction of forms of ecological violence that kill quietly, outside the spectacular time of crisis’’ (2015, 372). Endomaterialities, similarly, result from forms of ecological violence that kill quietly. As such, they should neither be ignored nor embraced. In Ziser and Sze’s analysis of climate change discourses, a downward shift in analytic scale means maintaining the possibility of activist and justice projects that have material

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effects. Such downsizing is also important for feminist and queer accounts of endocrine disruption. Ziser and Sze write: As the GCC [global climate change] phase of environmental discourse develops, it will be crucial to ensure that the original ecological and social goals of traditional environmentalism and environmental justice are not swept aside in favor of a counterproductive emphasis on national, cultural, and racial difference on scales at which no biological and community justice is practicable. We suggest that environmental justice aesthetics ought to reject the sublime scale invoked by some GCC narratives and instead remain focused on the human, ecological, and social justice dimensions of environmental change. (2007, 407) Although this exhortation runs the risk of remaining within the humanist bounds so eloquently critiqued by queer and feminist scholars, its call to focus on issues of practical, achievable justice and in the case of EDCs, on health and reproductive freedom is important. This is a form of pragmatism that acknowledges and tries to ameliorate specific forms of present and future suffering. Critical scholarship should resist leaping from a nuanced and significant critique of the panicked discourses of endocrine disruption straight into a search for something to embrace in endomaterialities. Despite the urgency of these profoundly political issues, scholars need to slow down enough to keep an eye on the unequal distribution of human and nonhuman animal suffering and to work carefully and collectively through and with the myriad scientific and environmentalist claims about EDCs, even while critiquing them. Focusing on the specificities of particular flows and their moments and places of jellification might be one way to achieve this.

Summary EDCs are significant actors in the making of contemporary human and nonhuman bodies. Said to alter human and nonhuman animal sexual development, reproductive biology, and sexual and caring behaviors, these compounds are ubiquitous in food, air, water, bodies, and objects. Theorizing EDCs as flows and moments and places of their semisolidification or jellification as ‘‘endomaterialities,’’ this chapter explores how feminist and queer theorists might address the issue of endocrine disruption. A strong line of argument about the importation of cultural concerns about sexual difference and heteronormativity in scientific, environmental, and media discourses is evident across a range of existing critical work on environmental toxins. Such arguments, importantly, also express concerns about the embodied effects of EDCs and the uneven distribution of these along multiple vectors of inequality (race, age, gender, nationality, and class). In the 2010s a strand of queer and trans writing has looked for something to embrace in endomaterialities, most often claiming the dissolution of clear sexual distinctions in human and nonhuman animals as a positive shift. Critically exploring and building on this work, the chapter suggests retaining focus on the unequal distributions of suffering and loss and questions of social justice involved in endomaterialities. GENDER: MATTER

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Bibliography Ah King, Malin, and Eva Hayward. ‘‘Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption.’’ O Zone: A Journal of Object Oriented Studies 1 (2013). http:// www.academia.edu/6368781/Toxic sexes Perverting pollution and queering hormone disruption.

European Commission. ‘‘Endocrine Disruptors.’’ 2015. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/endocrine /index en.htm.

Ahuja, Neel. ‘‘Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions.’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2 3 (2015): 365 385.

Gaard, Greta. ‘‘Greening Feminism.’’ In Greening the Acad emy: Ecopedagogy through the Liberal Arts, edited by Samuel Day Fassbinder, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Richard V. Kahn, 199 216. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2012.

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Greenpeace. ‘‘Hidden Consequences.’’ 2011. http://www .greenpeace.org.uk/hiddenconsequences.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Greenpeace. ‘‘In Pictures: The Toxic Truth of Your Child ren’s Clothes.’’ 2014. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk /blog/toxics/pictures toxic truth your childrens clothes 20140116.

Bellacasa, Maria Puig de la. ‘‘Matters of Care in Technos cience: Assembling Neglected Things.’’ Social Studies of Science 41, no. 1 (2011): 85 106. Birke, Lynda. ‘‘Sitting on the Fence: Biology, Feminism, and Gender Bending Environments.’’ Women’s Studies Inter national Forum 23, no. 5 (2000): 587 599. Boswell Penc, Maia. Tainted Milk: Breastmilk, Feminisms, and the Politics of Environmental Degradation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Chen, Mel Y. ‘‘Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, nos. 2 3 (2011): 265 286. Colborn, Theo, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers. Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fer tility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story. New York: Dutton, 1996. Di Chiro, Giovanna. ‘‘Bearing Witness or Taking Action? Toxic Tourism and Environmental Justice.’’ In Reclaim ing the Environmental Debate: The Politics of Health in a Toxic Culture, edited by Richard Hofrichter, 275 300. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Di Chiro, Giovanna. ‘‘Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco Normativity.’’ In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 199 230. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

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Haraway, Donna J. Modest Witness@Second Millennium .FemaleManª Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Tech noscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Hausman, Bernice L. Viral Mothers: Breastfeeding in the Age of HIV/AIDS. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Hayward, Eva. ‘‘Transxenoestrogenesis.’’ TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1 2 (2014): 255 258. doi: 10.1215/23289252 2400190. Kier, Bailey. ‘‘Interdependent Ecological Transsex: Notes on Re/production, ‘Transgender’ Fish, and the Management of Populations, Species, and Resources.’’ Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20, no. 3 (2010): 299 319. King, Samantha. Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy. Minneapolis: University of Min nesota Press, 2006. Klawiter, Maren. The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism. Minneapolis: Univer sity of Minnesota Press, 2008. Langston, Nancy. Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. McAllister, Lucy, Amanda Magee, and Benjamin Hale. ‘‘Women, E Waste, and Technological Solutions to Cli mate Change.’’ Health and Human Rights 16, no. 1 (2014): 166 178. Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

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Roberts, Celia. ‘‘Drowning in a Sea of Estrogens: Sex Hor mones, Sexual Reproduction, and Sex.’’ Sexualities 6, no. 2 (2003): 195 213.

Worland, Justin. ‘‘Now It’s Harder Than Ever to Be ‘BPA Free’: Report.’’ Time, June 3, 2015. http://time.com/3905842 /bpa free canned food/.

Roberts, Celia. Messengers of Sex: Hormones, Biomedicine, and Feminism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

World Wildlife Fund. ‘‘How Chemicals Reach the Arctic?’’ http://assets.panda.org/custom/flash/toxic arctic.

Roberts, Celia. Puberty in Crisis: The Sociology of Early Sexual Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Ziser, Michael, and Julie Sze. ‘‘Climate Change, Environ mental Aesthetics, and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies.’’ Discourse 29, nos. 2 3 (2007): 384 410.

Saaristo, Minna, John A. Craft, Kari K. Lehtonen, and Kai Lindstrom. ‘‘Sand Goby (Pomatoschistus minutus) Males Exposed to an Endocrine Disrupting Chemical Fail in Nest and Mate Competition.’’ Hormones and Behavior 56, no. 3 (2009): 315 321. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2009.06.010. Seager, Joni. ‘‘Rachel Carson Died of Breast Cancer: The Coming of Age of Feminist Environmentalism.’’ Signs 28, no. 3 (2003): 945 972.

F IL M S Invisible. Dir. Roz Mortimer. 2007. This is a beautiful inde pendent film about the effects of endocrine disruption and the toxic contamination of traditional seafood on Inuit communities in the High Arctic.

Star, Susan Leigh. ‘‘Power, Technology, and the Phenomen ology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions.’’ Sociological Review 38, no. S1 (1990): 26 56.

Pink Ribbons, Inc. Dir. Le´a Pool. 2011. Based on a feminist academic study, this gripping documentary critically explores North American breast cancer activism, raising important issues of the role of EDCs in causing breast cancer.

Steingraber, Sandra. Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2011.

Safe. Dir. Todd Haynes. 1995. Starring Julianne Moore, this film explores the difficulties of living with MCSs in the North American setting.

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CHAPTER 21

Reproductive Technology Carla Lam Department of Politics University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Reproductive technology (RT) refers to any of the ‘‘conditions, technologies, procedures and practices’’ that intervene in reproduction (or conception, pregnancy, and birth) (Government Services Canada 1993, 4). Such an all-encompassing definition makes it difficult to say when such interventions began, because women have used dung pessaries, for example, as a spermicide to prevent pregnancy since ancient times. However, the advent of massproduced and widely accessible contraception came in 1960, when the first oral contraceptive pill was approved in the United States. In addition, the landmark legal decision Roe v. Wade in 1973 decriminalized abortion and became foundational for women’s abortion rights, which highlights how integral legal or political contexts are to reproduction and technoscientific development. The widely recognized milestones for conceptive technologies are the births of the first baby conceived in a petri dish through in vitro fertilization (IVF), Mary Louise Brown in 1978, and the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, Dolly the sheep in 1996. RT involves technological intervention in reproduction to prevent or end a pregnancy or to enable and enhance the opportunity for one. Such reproductive interventions are often separated into old reproductive technologies (ORTs) of the contraceptive kind (for instance, the birth control pill or abortion) and new reproductive technologies (NRTs) of the conceptive kind (for example, artificial insemination, IVF, or surrogacy), but RT refers to technological intervention in ‘‘natural’’ reproductive processes for either end. In addition, old and new technologies are seen as naturally divided, because they address the separate issues of fertility and infertility, respectively, which are seen as mutually exclusive. As such, the term reproductive technology blurs the old and new distinction but highlights the perhaps more controversial division between ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘unnatural’’ (or technologically mediated) reproduction. These terms are value laden, not clear-cut, and deeply entrenched in the nature versus nurture (or biology/society) debate, whereby the natural is given normative significance or has the power to frame what ought to be the case. For example, arguments against abortion and the genetic modification of embryos (‘‘designer babies’’) that claim such interventions are equivalent to ‘‘playing God’’ take for granted that natural is good and technology is unnatural or bad. Such divisive and difficult debates over the meanings of nature (or biology) and its relevance in the advanced technosociety of the contemporary affluent world are long-standing and well established in Western sociopolitical thought. Most importantly, they are highly gendered: nature and technology are associated with women and men, respectively. In twenty-first-century affluent societies

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Mary Louise Brown, the first child born through in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the United Kingdom, at the age of three in January 1981. Reproductive technologies such as IVF have attracted controversy from their first successful use to the present day. Dubbed the first ‘‘test tube baby,’’ Louise Brown has become an emblem of fears about scientific intervention in ‘‘natural’’ reproduction. Some thirty years on, and millions of IVF procedures later, questions of matter or materiality originally raised by the nature/nurture debates of such technologies have not been resolved. MIC HEL ARTAULT / GETTY IMAGES

thoroughly saturated with technology, it is increasingly difficult to discern a hard line between what could be considered natural as opposed to technological, and the maintenance of that line indicates something of its political significance. Further, what we consider natural shifts over time, and technology (especially biotechnology) plays a central role. Significantly, because these terms are gendered, RT has implications for relations between men and women and women’s equality, something feminists have written about extensively. Although there are benefits of looking at each technology individually, approaching them in terms of their broader social, ethical, and political significance enables a clearer view of their relevance to gender and matter.

TECHNOLOGY AND REPRODUCTION When philosopher of communications Marshall McLuhan stated that ‘‘the medium is the message’’ (1964, 1), he captured how the significance of technological change was not in a particular technology’s ‘‘apparent content’’ for example, ‘‘the transportation that a car provides or the news program that the television supplies’’ but in ‘‘the systemic changes that they catalyze.’’ For instance, regarding RTs since at least 1960, when the contraceptive pill became available in the affluent world, sexual and reproductive freedom for many women became synonymous with the choice to use technologies (including drugs) as part of birth control. That is, it let women separate sex and reproduction for the first time on a mass scale

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and in a reliable way. Before the introduction of accessible contraception that women could control (at least to some extent), reproduction carried the significant risk of death. Up until the twentieth century, being a woman meant a high risk of dying young, usually from childbirth-related complications. Maternal mortality rates are still high in many parts of the world. In the twenty-first century, reproduction does not involve just the corporeal capacity to be pregnant and give birth (though it does include it) or just the considerably fraught choice to not birth that contraceptive technology offers. Greater technological and social intervention provides for the ‘‘choice’’ to specify what kind of children to have and when and how. For example, with prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion (such as for sex selection), the capacity to impose social and cultural norms on biological process has never been greater. New reproductive or conceptive technologies also allow lesbians, gay men, and women with disabilities, among others, to reproduce biologically, which is a significant sociocultural and political shift as well as a biomedical one. Whereas all of human life is fundamentally biological in the sense that it is experienced through material bodies, in the history of the West, women have been more closely associated with biological nature as a result of their reproductive difference from men. The way that women’s bodies are naturalized because of their capacity for pregnancy and men’s are not is a

Reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, or the fusing of sperm and ovum in a petri dish, offer women new ways to become pregnant. As such, new reproductive technologies have the potential for greater reproductive choice and control for women. They also raise unavoidable questions about the meaning of natural (biological) versus unnatural (technologically mediated) reproduction in technologically advanced societies and engage the difficult nature/nurture debate. A range of theories concerning matter and gender as biosocial processes complicate such simplistic dualisms and present new ways to think about reproduction in the twenty first century. BLOOMBERG / G ETTY IMAG ES

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problem, because the social or technological is prized over the biological. More specifically, the gendered social versus biological dualism misrepresents nature/biology as passive matter to be acted upon or rendered valuable through social, including technological, intervention. Feminists (and others) have challenged not only the association of women with nature and men with technology but also this notion of biological matter as passive, inert, and fixed (e.g., Birke 1986, 1999; Barad 2003). Most importantly, the biological body understood as a complex interplay of both biological and social domains and their many associations is captured in the term matter or material/ity. Such an approach takes us away from biological determinism and undermines this notion of biological reproduction as meaningfully outside technology, because it is contrary to the lived experience of human embodiment in contemporary societies where technology is pervasive. As a starting point for understanding reproduction as biosocial process, it is necessary to investigate what is at play in feminist calls for reproductive control. The technological dimensions of reproductive life in the twenty-first century bring up broader ethical and political questions associated with, on the one hand, gender (or the way women and men come to understand themselves and their relationships to reproduction and to each other) and, on the other, liberty. For example, when do individual women’s rights outweigh women’s (or indeed society’s) collective good(s)? Is reproduction a fundamental right that should be guaranteed to all? To what extent are law and public policy driven by changes in reproductive practice, including the use of new technologies, such as artificial insemination (especially by single people and gay and lesbian couples), or vice versa? RT engenders a multitude of such questions, many of which lead us back to the biology/society debate. Such complexities highlight the paradoxical nature of women’s reproduction as imbricated in competing understandings of liberty and the inconsistent or confusing uses of choice discourse in calls for reproductive control.

THE PARADOX OF REPRODUCTION Conceptive technology is like contraceptive technology in creating a division between sexuality and reproduction for women. What is new about conceptive RTs, however, is that they take conception outside women’s bodies, which changes women’s reproductive experiences. Whereas contraceptive technologies allow women to choose not to bear children, at least in ideal circumstances and for some women, the NRTs take this for granted and add the options of whether to have children, when and how to have those children, and increasingly, what kind of children to have. This presentation of contraceptive technologies as increasing choices for women requires qualification, because it misrepresents women as inherently fertile (see especially Nordqvist 2008), indicating a source of the paradox of RT more generally in the diversity of women’s reproductive experiences. However, the paradox of new reproductive or conceptive technology is that, on the one hand, it offers a greater degree of technological control over reproduction which can be perceived as a threat to the embodied integrity of women who bear children and, on the other, it can also potentially liberate women from the toils of traditionally conceived reproduction and sexuality, including biological timelines and heteronormative family building. In New Zealand around two-thirds of donor sperm recipients at the nation’s largest chain of fertility clinics are lesbians or single heterosexual women, yet they fall outside the norms implicit in the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act (Managh 2004). Eligibility criteria for publicly funded fertility treatment implicitly

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excludes lesbians and single heterosexual women, whose infertility stems from social rather than biological origins (Batty 2002; Health Funding Authority 2000). Unfairly, a woman in a heterosexual couple who is biologically capable of becoming pregnant and giving birth to a live child and whose male partner is infertile is covered under New Zealand’s National Clinical Assessment Criteria. As Carolyn Michelle (2006) notes, it is involuntary childlessness rather than biological infertility that is addressed by these eligibility criteria, and heterosexual couples are treated when they experience it, but lesbians or single heterosexual women in the same situation are not. This invisible normative prohibition is difficult to address, as the law officially forbids discrimination based on disability, family status, or sexual orientation and yet ‘‘eligibility criteria remain predicated on a hetero-normative presumption that effectively excludes the vast majority of these individuals requiring use of the technologies from receiving publicly funded fertility treatment’’ (citing Lynne Batty in Michelle 2006, 14; see also Bryld 2001). Significantly, the eligibility criteria also exclude women aged forty and older. In Canada the Act Concerning Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Related Research (2004) theoretically protects the extension of NRTs to all, regardless of sexual orientation or marital status. However, although the ‘‘infertile’’ in general are the primary intended market for NRTs, there are numerous cases that reveal that many infertility clinics refuse services to lesbian, disabled, and even unmarried women (Government Services Canada 1993, 17). Most notably, the Canadian Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies found that fertility services were routinely refused to women who were single, lesbian, or disabled (Government Services Canada 1993). In Australia debate has raged about whether single women and lesbians who are believed to suffer from ‘‘psychological infertility’’ should be eligible for the procedures, because they are, in theory, biologically capable of reproducing without the technologies (Bennett 2000; Cannold and Gillam 2003; Costa 2001; Daniels and Burn 1997; see also Arditti 1997). Nonetheless, NRTs, in certain legal and cultural contexts, could enable the transcendence of current prejudices: ‘‘Technology could free women from the biological limitations of age and compulsory heterosexuality, while revamped social institutions could extend child care and educational services to all children’’ (Taylor 1997, 285). With RTs, it is possible for women to have better control over their reproductive lives, undermining sex/gender inequities by making reproduction a genuine choice and ‘‘family planning’’ more than a marketed slogan. Many herald NRTs for enabling women who are infertile, lesbians, and women with disabilities, for example, to become genetic parents without sexual reproduction. Some members of these groups take advantage of the technologies, leading to demographic changes such as the ‘‘gaybie boom,’’ a shorthand Liz Galst and Joan Hilty use to explain the situation in the United States since the mid1980s, when ‘‘lesbians began having children together as couples’’ (2003, 17) as opposed to incorporating children from previous heterosexual couplings (see also Agigian 2004; Epstein 2009). Family forms in the affluent democratic world are thus changing, as are laws, and egg banking for women (up to age thirty-nine at least) could provide personal ‘‘insurance’’ against the reproductive liabilities of singledom beyond age forty. Facebook and Apple have fed into this debate, making waves by publicly announcing their willingness to pay for their female employees to freeze their eggs, thereby accommodating (and encouraging?) delayed childbearing (Bennett 2014). GENDER: MATTER

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FEMINISM AND REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY Reproduction matters and is a political issue, because it is an inescapable feature of women’s lives, even at a time when freedom from babies is largely taken for granted. For many, NRTs provide more possibility for reproductive choice than ever before. Yet Harold Lasswell’s (1936) definition of politics as ‘‘who gets what, when, how’’ could not be more true in the realm of reproduction, as is evident in recent debates about issues ranging from the provision of free contraception to welfare beneficiaries in New Zealand to statistics about the rising age of first motherhood throughout affluent societies and the regulation and use of everdeveloping NRTs. The potential for childbirth is also the catalyst for the most significant life choices, which is only magnified by RTs. Reproduction is a central paradox for women because of its signification as that which links women to nature. This naturalization of women because of their reproductive capacities has been both a source of reverence and power and the point of women’s disempowerment from ancient times to the present day. From Aristophanes’s ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata to current disputes over ‘‘rent-a-womb’’ or surrogacy contracts, the powers of women’s sexuality/reproduction have been made apparent through the issue of control. In Lysistrata, women fed up with the Peloponnesian War go on a sex strike to bring the war to an end, revealing the power of women’s sexuality (in social consciousness, if not in reality) if they can control it. When Quebec politician Lucien Bouchard in 1985 decried the failure of FrancoQue´becois women to produce enough children, he revealed this power. Similarly, in debates about feminist defenses or rejections of the newest RTs, the discourse remains about who will control women’s sexuality and reproductive powers and what kinds of choices women can make about them. In navigating such reproductive debates, it is helpful to think about the paradox of women’s reproduction as the source of both power and vulnerability in patriarchal cultures based on liberal individualism (Lam 2015). This framework enables a reading of feminist responses to NRTs to make sense of calls for reproductive control, especially in terms of their often underlying notions of liberation. Varying notions of liberty are rooted in distinct assumptions about the body’s natural status, which translate into particular dispositions toward technological intervention as on the whole either beneficial or harmful. With such an approach it is possible to evaluate various feminist responses to RT on the basis of their ability to transcend the biology versus society dualism, focusing on how each draws on or subverts the gendered technology versus nature value dualism. For example, the embrace of such technology as rooted in the radical and materialist feminist manifesto of Shulamith Firestone is quite a different response than that of feminists who resist NRTs and are inspired by the radical and ecofeminist principles of thinkers such as Germaine Greer and Vandana Shiva (Lam 2015). Feminist resisters who were most active from roughly 1984 to 1991 constitute a ‘‘first phase’’ (Thompson 2005) of feminist critique of NRTs; a ‘‘second phase’’ (roughly 1992 to 2001) coincided with the linguistic turn in social science of the late 1980s and early 1990s and was influenced by it. With regard to the biology/society debate, the first resistance phase is characterized by biology-centric views of motherhood (whether valorized or challenged), whereas the second phase involves an opposition to the former’s focus on women’s reproductive biology or ‘‘essentialism.’’ Although NRTs have engendered a diversity of responses within AngloWestern feminism not to mention complex, ongoing debates, this section focuses mainly on calls for reproductive control among the first phase of feminists who resisted NRTs, most

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often on the basis of women’s reproduction as a source of power and identity. This group is well represented by members of the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) and is more biosocial (or about materiality) than quick summaries in polarized disputes convey, as explored in a later section. Although there are still calls for reproductive control that caution against unbridled development and use of RTs, in many respects these arguments have been overtaken by more middle-ground perspectives. In the twenty-first century it is common to approach the use of technologies, such as the birth control pill, and contraception in general as a normal and beneficial part of contemporary sexual and reproductive life. Choice has become synonymous with reproductive freedom, and it dominates reproductive debates to such an extent that it may be difficult for those born well after the advent of the pill to imagine how arguments for reproductive control could be made otherwise. Ultimately, all feminists approach reproduction and its regulation with the belief that women must be able to ‘‘control’’ their own reproduction, but their ideas are inevitably framed by the discourse of ‘‘choice’’ that has dominated Western feminist abortion debates. The ability to make decisions about one’s own body is a basic and fundamental feature of human dignity that implies reproductive control and in turn necessitates choice, but what is meant by these terms and how they relate to each other are questions that remain unsettled. The seemingly simple notion of choice is colored by the significant differences between ORTs and NRTs, and competing notions of liberty reveal the highly contextual character of choice. For example, because surrogacy arrangements and egg donation are legally commercialized in many countries and illegally in many more, the monetary incentive for women who offer their eggs or the use of their wombs can undermine any simplistic understanding of free choice. On the global scale, reproductive tourism offers prospective parents the ability to pay for reproductive services in countries where the economic costs are lower than in their home countries. For example, in Mumbai, India, reproductive clients from Britain and the United States can find surrogate mothers for about one-third of the cost at home. The surrogate’s fee of about US$7,500 is more than she would otherwise make in fifteen years (Sandel 2009). Such gross global inequalities must be challenged, and they highlight the wrongheadedness of oversimple representations of RT as captured in a reproductive choice versus reproductive control analytic framework. Reproductive rights activist Judy Rebick employs the same discourse, arguing that the reality of class- and race-divided societies means that protecting some women from exploitation associated with NRTs justifies the limiting of other women’s individual freedom of choice (1993). REPRODUCTIVE CONTROL AND THE QUESTION OF CHOICE

Early feminist opposition to NRTs was based on deep and long-standing feminist distrust of Western medicine and technoscience (Corea 1985). Charis Thompson writes, ‘‘Feminist writings that were critical of reproductive technologies grew out of and in turn developed several themes that were core parts of second wave feminist scholarship on science, medicine, child-birth, and reproductive rights’’ (2005, 57). Women’s right to control their bodies, including their reproduction, was intrinsic to the feminist politics in the early resistance to NRTs, in which NRTs became associated with a risk to such reproductive control. However, because few rejected contraceptive technology on the same basis, this led to a fundamental contradiction in feminist critique of NRTs (Rowland 1992) and in feminist discourse concerning the technological mediation of reproduction more generally. Any resolution is GENDER: MATTER

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linked to their advocacy for women’s reproductive control, namely, that such feminist resistance to NRT recognized in women’s sex/reproduction both a source of vulnerability in patriarchal cultures and a source of liberation and power, provided that women control it. Feminist scholars such as Barbara Katz-Rothman (1984), Patricia Spallone (1989), and Rosalind Pollack Petchesky (1995) sought to reveal the sociopolitical inequalities masked by the benevolent presentation of NRT as the best ‘‘choice’’ for the infertile in light of the reality of a culture marked by power differences. Ultimately, resistance feminists argued for women’s collective control over their sexuality and reproduction (rather than individual ‘‘choice’’) and freedom from NRT as a patriarchal technology that entrenched control over women in various patriarchal institutions, whether medical, scientific, or of the capitalist state. For example, FINRRAGE (1985) called for a moratorium on the use of NRTs, arguing that IVF allowed the ‘‘take-over of our bodies for male use, for profit making, population control, medical experimentation and misogynist science.’’ In summary, then, the argument of the early resistors to NRTs is built upon claims that such technology is a male-centered tool used to control women and their reproductive processes. When seen within the Western biology/society dualistic frame of reference, this argument presents women as closer to nature. Although resistance feminists believed that the oppressive dimensions of womanhood and motherhood came from patriarchal and capitalist definitions of women’s biology and not biology itself (see Corea 1985; Mies 1985; Shiva 1997), such arguments could be associated with biological determinism (see Nordqvist 2008). Put differently, a major critique of such a radical argument about NRTs is that it inadvertently upholds patriarchal dualism while arguing against it in associating women with their biology. Also, the fact that these feminists were highly critical of the new technologies in spite of being open to older technologies of abortion highlights both the complexity of reproductive life in the era of advanced RTs and a hitch in their argument. Social psychologist Robyn Rowland, for example, reconciles the contradictory opposition to NRTs and support of contraceptive technologies on the basis of choice by noting that ‘‘a woman’s right to choose’’ is ‘‘a woman’s right to control,’’ where abortion enables women ‘‘to control their lives in a less than perfect world’’ (1992, 285). When it came to conceptive technologies, however, she argued that the choice to use them decreases women’s reproductive control. Ultimately, she defended the ‘‘right to choose’’ ORT but not NRT by making it fit within an argument for control based on the negative ‘‘freedom from’’ NRTs rather than the positive ‘‘freedom to’’ use them (Raymond 1993), endorsing contraceptive technologies because they offered women freedom from babies. Political theorist Ingrid Makus offers an explanation of the seeming contradiction of feminist positions that are at once against NRTs and in support of abortion, explaining that the more extensive and varied types of intervention involved in conceptive technologies disperse women’s first access to the child. The fear, Makus argues, ‘‘is that they threaten to undermine women’s right to govern their own bodies and labour power which is secured by women’s right to abortion’’ (1996, 142). Nonetheless, in particular instances, such as the simultaneous feminist argument for the unconditional right to abortion espoused by most and the rejection of the use of NRTs such as prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion, feminists find themselves at risk of undermining their own argument for women’s right to choose (149). Such seeming contradictions are actually rooted in the false depiction of women’s reproductive experiences in contemporary society as simply about either choice or control and not in feminism itself. A range of feminist theories that complicate any simple dualism, such as that of control and choice, may open the way to negotiate such seemingly impossible conundrums.

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REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE

BEYOND CHOICE AND CONTROL?

Women with disabilities provide valuable insights that foreclose easy assessments. Disability theorist Susan Wendell causes feminists to confront their dependence on a particular understanding of ‘‘control’’ over their bodies and to consider the inseparability of a fuller conception of ‘‘choice’’ and ‘‘control’’ for some women. She reminds us that overemphasizing patriarchal control over the body permits feminists to ignore women with bodies that are chronically painful, otherwise unavoidably burdensome, or infertile. She insightfully challenges traditional feminist theory of the body by forcing us to recognize that bodies are never fully under control (our own or anyone else’s); that they will inevitably ‘‘fail’’ us (we will die); and that women’s bodies differ dramatically in ways that shatter normative assumptions at the foundation of feminist thought, including fertility and heterosexuality as starting points in feminist resistance to NRTs (Nordqvist 2008). For many women with disabilities, true reproductive choice is synonymous with control over their reproductive bodies, given a history of eugenics, forced sterilization, desexualization, and other forms of denial of their sexual and reproductive agency (Finger 1984; Kaplan 1988). As Gwyneth F. Matthews writes: ‘‘The paradox of disabled women and sexuality goes far beyond the sexual act itself. Reproductive rights . . . [for them] include the right to have a baby, the right to adopt children, the right not to have children and to have access to abortion clinics’’ (1983, 16), among others. Matthews interviewed forty-five women with disabilities for Voices from the Shadows and found that many would consider abortion if prenatal diagnosis revealed a congenital defect (102). Similarly, surveys on selective abortion demonstrated that both mothers with congenitally disabled children and those without supported abortion at similar rates (Arditti 1997; Kallianes and Rubenfeld 1997). These less technoskeptical feminist positions reveal the difficult ethical dimensions of freedom of choice and its centrality for women’s reproductive control. The simultaneous feminist resistance to NRTs and acceptance of ORTs highlights how ‘‘choice’’ is a problematic strategic discourse from the point of view of contemporary reproductive politics. Even within the earlier context of abortion politics in North America, the language was fraught with difficulty, indicating a deeper problem with its feminist appropriation. The language of ‘‘choice’’ presents a number of difficulties related to its invocation of a market logic that individualizes reproductive rights that ought to be guaranteed collectively. It disguises reproductive inequality by invoking the language of the free market, with the underlying assumption that all have equal access to the benefits of reproduction (and the ability to minimize burdens related to it) and the resources needed to reproduce in the first place. In this way, it conceals the systemic bias that gives certain women access to legitimate motherhood while excluding others. For example, the language of choice often implies a distinction between ‘‘legitimate choice-making mothers’’ (for example, with postsecondary education, financial stability, and in heterosexual relationships) and ‘‘bad choice-making mothers’’ (for example, socioeconomically disadvantaged, single, or of uncertain relationship status and orientation) (Thompson 2006, 10). Aware of the pitfalls of choice and control discourse when applied to RTs, academics and activists look to transcend that paradigm in favor of reproductive justice more attuned to the differences among women, including between those who use the technology and those who do not. The experience of lesbians building families with these technologies can be instructive here, because the frame of reproductive justice ‘‘allows us to focus on something we haven’t, which is the connection to supporting women to have kids, not just choose not to have kids’’ (Yeung 2008, 59). Ultimately, any kind of argument for a GENDER: MATTER

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viable reproductive justice must recognize the biosocial character of reproduction. As a key example, feminist theorist of technology Carol A. Stabile argues that we must insist on the interpenetration of the biological and social realms as the defining character of reproduction that includes both pregnancy and mothering. In this way, feminists can ‘‘argue coherently for prenatal care and day care for support for women who ‘choose’ to mother at the same time that they argued for abortion rights’’ (1994, 94). Stabile’s proposal undermines dualistic paradigms of thought and practice. In breaking down or deconstructing binaries, it is transdualistic in its attempt to convince one of the falsity of the biological and social distinction when it comes to processes considered most natural, such as pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. Human reproduction like bodies is always already inscribed by social forces, because we live within cultures defined in large part by our technosocial practices, including RTs. On both collective and individual levels, when, how, why, and under what circumstances we get pregnant, gestate, and give birth (or not) are matters profoundly circumscribed by intertwined biological and technosocial, or material, forces. Autonomous choice, understood as disencumbered from cultural and political contexts, is an inadequate conceptual lens in light of such a reality.

REPRODUCTION, GENDER, AND MATTER IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY The notion of matter is directly related to gender, biology, and nature; hence, it is foundationally important in feminist theory. Matter (or materiality) can best be understood as circulations, transfers, and interchanges between human bodies and more-thanhuman worlds, as discussed so far in terms of the biology/society dualism. As a starting point, whereas technology magnifies the relationships between realms considered natural or technocultural (for example, in the normalization of technosocial interventions, such as the pill or artificial insemination), more recent theory reveals this has always been the case. For example, feminist theorist Vicki Kirby’s chapter title for her contribution to Material Feminisms (2008) nicely illustrates this transdualism, asking, ‘‘What if culture was really nature all along?’’ The kind of matter relevant to reproduction, including RTs, is the breakdown of the human/nonhuman nature divide that feminist scholars of new materialisms Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (2008), the posthumanists (Barad 2003; Braidotti 2013), and many others refer to. Such work starts from the understanding of human bodies as inseparable from more-than-human worlds to highlight the practical, political, and philosophical dimensions of this interaction. More fittingly, in new material feminist writing, the notion of intra-action often replaces interaction, because the latter reinforces a separation of the world into actors (for example, humans) and passive matter (for example, nature and nonhuman animals) something that new materialists wish to undermine. Feminist scientist Karen Barad’s (2003) concept of ‘‘intra-action’’ is important to new materialism, because it signifies interconnection (rather than separation) as enacted everywhere, all of the time, through each human engagement with the environment. For example, in each daily interaction in the world, individuals act and also are acted upon or changed. Eating, moving, absorbing heat, cooling down, and exercising are all intra-actions or

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engagements with the material world of which we are irreducibly a part and in which we are changed by and effecting change on the environment. Thus, in an important sense, we both make and are made by our daily biosocial or material engagements with the world, no matter how mundane or seemingly insignificant. Intra-action marks a ‘‘profound conceptual shift’’ in the subject/object relationship, making bounded and autonomous subject/objects not the precondition of relationship but rather its outcome. Similarly, reproduction, according to feminist theorist Mary O’Brien, is a complex biosocial process rather than belonging to one or the other realm of biology or society. Hence, it overlaps with these new materialist negotiations and intra-actions (Lam 2015). RT, by extension, adds an interesting new dimension to this understanding of reproduction as never outside the complicated interplay of things considered biological (e.g., bodies, cells, genes, sperm, and eggs) and those considered social (e.g., medical institutions, technoscience, and social norms about sexuality and family formation). New material feminist theories are dedicated to elaborating upon a complex materiality that refuses to separate biology and society or to make one prior to the other. These new material feminisms are associated with a major paradigm shift within Western academia that undermines taken-for-granted boundaries between human and nonhuman nature, body and environment, and mind and matter by focusing on material life as biosocial process, or materiality, which dissolves the duality in its multiple manifestations. The point of difference between new materialism and previous approaches is that biology or matter has agency. Even though human reproduction has (and women by association have) largely been defined in Western cultures according to norms of biological passivity, many women’s experiences of reproduction align with the notion of the intra-action of their bodies and the wider social, medico-technological, and political environment (which varies historically and culturally). Agency is fundamentally reconceptualized, as in Barad’s (2003, 827, 829) notion of intra-action rather than interaction, which further departs from the view that we are placed in the world rather than constantly becoming a part of and in cocreation with it. Put differently, pregnancy constitutes a kind of embodied intra-action, perfectly illustrating materiality and specifically gendered materiality, because it is the experience only of women. Moreover, the experience of pregnancy is intra-active in the sense of literally changing into something new, physically and otherwise. For example, a woman becomes a pregnant person encompassing a growing human body other than but integrally a part of her own. At the same time, she is inculcated with her society’s ideas of how a pregnant woman, a mother-to-be, and finally a mother is to behave and look. These profoundly life-changing experiences affect each woman uniquely but similarly blur the lines of social and biological life at the most intimate level. Intra-action makes definitive the active relationality of actors (both subject and object at the same time) that are only illusorily understood as preexisting their interactions. Boundaries are fictional in a sense they are established in relation between things and only seem to preexist these encounters. A more political example of this focus on materiality as a biosocial process involving technology (as part of social practice) is how ultrasound has become a routine part of perinatal health care in the affluent world. Such use is most often seen as the uncontroversial, rather routine intersection between actor (medical technician operating the machine) and matter (pregnant body and fetus within being acted upon by the technician/ machine). By contrast, Barad and others examine how it is the intra-action of bodies, technology (or apparatuses), and ideas (or social norms about who is in control in various situations) that calls the fetus into being. Such an approach allows us, for instance, to imagine how the fetus, which only since early modern times has been considered a being with legal, GENDER: MATTER

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political, and visual status, came to be seen as such. Imagine how it was different before ultrasound technology brought the fetus as we know it into existence. What ideas and beliefs did we hold about unborn humans then? In this way, new materialist theory views biology as encompassing biosocial elements that each are active agents in a reconceptualized notion of becoming that radically undoes the biology/society dualism. The new material turn understands its object of analysis, the ‘‘material,’’ as itself an active participant in the processes of life rather than something that precedes human life activity (in its complex natural sociality). Furthermore, this radical move encompasses the macro (institutional) to the micro (genetic or subcellular) levels. For example, the term posthumanities refers to highly transdisciplinary fields that subvert the nature/culture dichotomy by subjecting to analysis the notion of the human (understood as separate from the nonhuman) for instance, as we see in the migration of IVF from the farm where it was first developed to human use in the various disciplines constituting social and human studies. Such undoing of humanism with its focus on human interests and agency also questions the meaning of separating social and natural sciences. Significantly, Cecilia A˚sberg, Redi Koobak, and Ericka Johnson (2011) include materialist feminist theorizing under posthumanities or posthuman studies (214). Posthumanities signifies no simple breakage but an ongoing and productive reworking of the defining features of the human subject at the foundation of social sciences, especially in the wake of highly technologized contemporary affluent life (225). Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 238) similarly explodes the nature versus culture (including technology) separation by breaking down the notion of the human as neatly separate from the greater environment (or human bodies and more-thanhuman worlds). Some good examples of how fitting this concept is in contemporary global life include issues of environmental health (for example, human use of antidepressants and birth control pills that change aquatic life, including fish DNA, which is then recycled in human consumption) and genetic engineering (for example, tomatoes with fish genes and xenotransplantation that involves growing human hearts in pigs for human transplantation) (239). Ultimately, a material feminist approach to women’s reproduction enables a clearer understanding of the significance of RT in the twenty-first century, because it starts with reproduction as a biosocial or material process. New material feminisms focus on materiality or ‘‘nature’’ in feminist debates and question the automatic subordination of biological, material processes to cultural, technological ones, because it de-emphasizes the separation in the first place (Alaimo and Hekman 2008). The insights provided by their complex notion of biology (in matter) that does not prioritize social over biological (or vice versa) also offer a way to override ORT and NRT and gendered natural/technological distinctions, because matter is at the foundation of both. Further, new materialisms destabilize the normative significance of both the natural and the technological by focusing on the dynamic intra-action between them. This is a tricky task, because any statement of interaction or intra-action seems to reassert an initial separation of the terms that new materialists fundamentally undermine. Similarly, the application of this complex concept to contemporary life is difficult but in process across a wide range of fields and topics. Currently, it is applied in feminist studies to issues such as the environment (for example, pollution and natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina) and health (for example, Alzheimer’s disease and hormones). It is more broadly being taken up in multiple areas of study excluding a gender focus, including international relations, but

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women as those most closely related to the less valued half of the gendered biology/society dualism perhaps have the greater stake in its dissolution. Although this work as applied to reproductive politics is still emerging, it is important to explore the advantages of biosocial or material embodiment when it comes to pregnancy, especially as a much-needed alternative to the mainstream biology/society dualism at the foundation of gender inequality in Western cultures (Lam 2015). Attendance to differential embodiment, especially those reproductive bodies associated with pure nature, body (instead of mind), and vulnerability (instead of power), is needed, particularly at a time when it is technologically possible to mediate such differences. Finally, matter matters in a larger, more profound way, because dualistic representations of biology and society betray a greater struggle with the reality of human (inter-)dependency. As embodied agents, we all are reliant on others for instance, when we are infants, ill, elderly, and dying. Attending to an embodied material engagement with the world, on a personal and a political level, provides the opportunity for negotiating the felt dissonance of our dis/integrated selves in body-phobic cultures that may affect us differently but fundamentally affect us all.

Summary Reproduction is most often understood as natural, biological procreation and technology as a set of socially constructed neutral tools for better human living. In practice, however, neither reproduction nor technology is about either biology or society. Rather, both are complex biosocial, or material, processes. These terms are also gendered in that women are associated with reproduction because of their capacity for pregnancy and birth, whereas men are aligned with technology (and its development, control, and use). Because the notions of natural and technological are normative, reproduction is deeply controversial as entrenched in complex, overlapping debates. The paradox of reproduction is that women’s reproductive experiences are a source of both power and vulnerability in patriarchal cultures. Yet women’s bodies are predominantly portrayed only in terms of vulnerability rather than as part of the continuum of power and vulnerability. Such representations are underpinned by the biological/social dualism and misunderstanding of matter as passive biology rather than as a complex biosocial negotiation. In contemporary Western societies, reproductive control has become synonymous with the discourse of choice largely because of the dominance of abortion debates. The paradox of reproduction emerges in these debates of choice and control and is particularly clear in feminist calls for control that accept ORT but not NRT by employing the same terms. Reproductive justice moves beyond the polarizing discourses of control versus choice and helps negotiate the related dualism of biology/society by recognizing the biosocial, material character of reproduction and RT (across the old/new divide). It does so by starting from the need for technology for some women’s reproductive control, whether to enhance the chances for or to prevent reproduction. Matter, and transdualism more broadly, considers control and choice as not mutually exclusive but as coming together for those who use technology to reproduce or not. Reproduction (and RT by association) would not be seen as paradoxically either good or bad if it were understood as matter or biosocial process that has much broader transdual GENDER: MATTER

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implications. Matter draws on the bio/social negotiation in the ways mentioned but holds the promise to take it further. Currently it is applied in feminist studies to a range of issues, including the natural environment (for example, pollution and natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina) and human health (for example, Alzheimer’s disease and hormones). Most importantly, materiality has transdual implications for the more fundamental dualistic misrepresentation between human bodies and more-than-human worlds with which new materialism and particularly new materialist feminisms are concerned.

Bibliography Agigian, Amy. Baby Steps. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Uni versity Press, 2004. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Arditti, Rita. ‘‘Commercializing Motherhood.’’ In The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right, edited by Alexis Jetter, Annelise Orleck, and Diana Taylor, 322 333. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997. ˚ sberg, Cecilia, Redi Koobak, and Ericka Johnson. ‘‘Beyond A the Humanist Imagination.’’ NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 19, no. 4 (2011): 213 216. Barad, Karen. ‘‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Under standing of How Matter Comes to Matter.’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801 831. Batty, Lynne. ‘‘Assisted Reproductive Technology: The Aotearoa/New Zealand Policy Context.’’ MA thesis. Uni versity of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2002. Bennett, Belinda. ‘‘Reproductive Technology, Public Policy, and Single Motherhood.’’ Sydney Law Review 22, no. 4 (2000): 625 635. Bennett, Jessica. ‘‘Company Paid Egg Freezing Will Be the Great Equalizer.’’ Time, October 15, 2014. http://time .com/3509930/company paid egg freezing will be the great equalizer/?xid=emailshare.

Cannold, Leslie, and Lynn Gillam. ‘‘A New Consultation Man agement Process for Managing Divergent Community Views: Lesbian and Single Women’s Access to Artificial Insemination and ARTs.’’ In The Regulation of Assisted Reproductive Technology, edited by Jennifer Gunning and Helen Szoke, 203 224. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2003. Corea, Gena. The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technol ogies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Costa, Gabrielle. ‘‘Backdown on ‘Psychological Infertility.’’’ Age, November 21, 2001. Daniels, Ken, and Ian Burn. ‘‘Access to Assisted Human Reproduction Services by Minority Groups.’’ Australia and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology 37, no. 1 (1997): 79 85. Epstein, Rachel, ed. Who’s Your Daddy: And Other Writings on Queer Parenting. Toronto: Sumach Press, 2009. Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE), ed. Feminist Inter national Network New Reproductive Technologies and Genetic Engineering: International Conference Lund, Sweden. Stockholm, Sweden: Author, 1985. http://www .finrrage.org/wp content/uploads/2016/03/Finrrage Con ference Lund Sweden 1985.pdf.

Birke, Lynda. Women, Feminism, and Biology: The Feminist Challenge. Brighton, UK: Wheatsheaf Books, 1986.

Finger, Anne. ‘‘Claiming All of Our Bodies: Reproductive Rights and Disability.’’ In Test tube Women: What Future for Motherhood?, edited by Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli Klein, and Shelley Minden, 281 297. London: Pandora Press, 1984.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013.

Galst, Liz, and Joan Hilty. ‘‘Lesbians with Strollers: The Gaybie Boom on Wheels.’’ Ms. Magazine, Spring 2003, 17 18.

Bryld, Mette. ‘‘The Infertility Clinic and the Birth of the Lesbian: The Political Debate on Assisted Reproduction in Denmark.’’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 8, no. 3 (2001): 299 312.

Government Services Canada. Proceed with Care: Final Report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies. Ottawa, Canada: Minister of Government Services Canada, 1993.

Birke, Lynda. Feminism and the Biological Body. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

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Health Funding Authority. Gynaecology Referral Guidelines and Prioritisation Criteria. Wellington, New Zealand: Author, 2000.

The Global Politics of Reproduction, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, 387 406. Berkeley: Univer sity of California Press, 1995.

Kallianes, Virginia, and Phyllis Rubenfeld. ‘‘Disabled Women and Reproductive Rights.’’ Disability and Soci ety 12, no. 2 (1997): 203 221.

Raymond, Janice. Women as Wombs: Reproductive Tech nologies and the Battle over Women’s Freedom. San Francisco: Harper, 1993.

Kaplan, Deborah. ‘‘Disability Rights Perspectives on Repro ductive Technologies and Public Policy.’’ In Reproductive Laws for the 1990s, edited by Sherrill Cohen and Nadine Taub, 241 247. Clifton, NJ: Humana Press, 1988. Katz Rothman, Barbara. ‘‘The Meanings of Choice in Repro ductive Technology.’’ In Test tube Women: What Future for Motherhood?, edited by Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli Klein, and Shelley Minden, 23 34. London: Pandora Press, 1984. Kirby, Vicki. ‘‘Natural Convers(at)ions; or, What If Culture Was Really Nature All Along?’’ In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 214 236. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Lam, Carla. New Reproductive Technologies and Disem bodiment: Feminist and Material Resolutions. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015. Lasswell, Harold. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. New York: McGraw Hill, 1936. Makus, Ingrid. Women, Politics, and Reproduction: The Lib eral Legacy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Managh, Cushla. ‘‘He Was Worth Every Dollar I Spent.’’ Dominion Post, August 16, 2004. Matthews, Gwyneth F. Voices from the Shadows: Women with Disabilities Speak Out. Toronto: Women’s Educa tional Press, 1983. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge, 1964. Michelle, Carolyn. ‘‘Transgressive Technologies? Strategies of Discursive Containment in the Representation and Regulation of Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Aotearoa/New Zealand.’’ Women’s Studies International Forum 29, no. 2 (2006): 109 124. Mies, Maria. ‘‘‘Why Do We Need All This?’ A Call against Genetic Engineering and Reproductive Technology.’’ Wom en’s Studies International Forum 8, no. 6 (1985): 553 560. Nordqvist, Petra. ‘‘Feminist Heterosexual Imaginaries of Reproduction: Lesbian Conception in Feminist Studies of Reproductive Technologies.’’ Feminist Theory 9, no. 3 (2008): 273 292. Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. ‘‘The Body as Property: A Fem inist Re Vision.’’ In Conceiving the New World Order:

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Rebick, Judy. ‘‘Is the Issue Choice?’’ In Misconceptions: The Social Construction of Choice and the New Reproductive and Genetic Technologies, Vol 1., edited by Gwynne Basen, Margrit Eichler, and Abby Lippman. Prescott, Ontario: Voyageur Publishing, 1993. Rowland, Robyn. Living Laboratories: Women and Repro ductive Technology. London: Lime Tree, 1992. Sandel, Michael. ‘‘A New Citizenship: Morality in Politics.’’ BBC Reith Lectures, June 16, 2009. http://www.bbc .co.uk/programmes/b00l0y01. Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1997. Spallone, Patricia. Beyond Conception: The New Politics of Reproduction. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education, 1989. Stabile, Carol A. Feminism and the Technological Fix. Man chester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994. Taylor, Diana. ‘‘Redefining Motherhood through Technolo gies and Sexualities.’’ In The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right, edited by Alexis Jetter, Annelise Orleck, and Diana Taylor, 285 287. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997. Thompson, Charis. Making Parents: The Ontological Chor eography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Thompson, Mary. ‘‘Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Motherhood.’’ Genders OnLine Journal 43 (2006): 10. Yeung, Miriam. ‘‘Conceiving the Future: Reproductive Justice Activists on Technology and Policy.’’ Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture 40 (2008): 58 63. F IL M S Beautiful Sin. Dir. Gabriela Quiro´s. 2014. Focuses on the struggle for conceptive freedom in Costa Rica, following three couples who seek in vitro fertility treatments. Grandma. Dir. Paul Weitz. 2015. Fictional comedy about three generations of women and their experiences with abortion and motherhood.

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Juno. Dir. Jason Reitman. 2007. Award winning drama about a teenager’s unplanned pregnancy and her choices.

surrogacy by focusing on a Texas couple and a surrogate mother in Mumbai.

Made in India: A Film about Surrogacy. Dir. Rebecca Hai mowitz and Vaishali Sinha. 2010. Documents the com plicated economic and power relations in international

Splice. Dir. Vincenzo Natali. 2009. Science fiction horror about genetic engineering and monstrous reproduction.

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CHAPTER 22

Sexecologies Louis van den Hengel Assistant Professor, Centre for Gender and Diversity Maastricht University, The Netherlands

What is the nature of unnatural desire? And when does the love of nature itself become an unnatural passion? In his Psychopathia Sexualis, the influential medical catalog of sexual perversions that was published in twelve editions between 1886 and 1903, Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840 1902) describes the case of a man with a particular predilection for roses. The thirty-year-old B., a scholar from Berlin, was ‘‘a great lover of flowers,’’ writes Krafft-Ebing: ‘‘He incessantly bought roses; kissing them would produce erection . . . He would dream of roses of fairy-like beauty and, inhaling their fragrance, have ejaculation’’ (Krafft-Ebing [1886] 1906, 280). Krafft-Ebing viewed this attraction to roses as a form of ‘‘material fetishism,’’ where nonhuman objects like fur, silk, or velvet cause sexual arousal. Like the other hundreds of cases collected in the Psychopathia Sexualis, material fetishes like this would typically manifest themselves in ‘‘strange, unnatural, and even criminal acts’’ (223) and were therefore of both medical and forensic significance. Krafft-Ebing’s account of rose fetishism indeed merges seamlessly with his discussion of other fundamental perversions like sadism, masochism, and the series of unnatural and illegal dispositions referred to in the nineteenth century as contrary sexual feeling. Fast-forward to the Caribbean, on a beautiful January day in 2016. Roughly twenty people have gathered at the Playa Azul on the island of Puerto Rico to declare their love to the beach, and to each other, in a celebration of the personal, social, and spiritual connections between themselves and the natural world. It is the second ‘‘plural wedding’’ organized by the activist scholar SerenaGaia Anderlini-D’Onofrio, one of the pioneers of what has been termed ecosexuality, an emerging movement where sexual activism and environmental consciousness meet in co-shaping motion. By nightfall, as the golden light of dusk melds water, sand, and sky into a shimmering whole, the congregants slowly enter into the ocean’s potent embrace. In a ceremony evocative of the ancient Festa della Sensa, in which the whole city of Venice marries the sea, they promise to protect, honor, and respect Playa Azul as a loving partner and as a natural ecosystem from which no life on Earth can be divorced. A world of cultural and political differences stands between Krafft-Ebing’s fin-de-sie`cle neurotic rose fetishist and the polyamorous ‘‘ecosexuals’’ of the twenty-first century. Yet both examples hinge around the complex ways in which modern Western conceptions of sexuality are shaped by specific ideas about nature and, conversely, how sexual norms and values regulate what are considered natural or unnatural behaviors, identities, desires, and environments. The aim of this chapter is to unravel the entangled relations between discourses, institutions, and imaginations of nature and sexuality. Specifically, it seeks to explore how

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sexuality, understood as both the physical capacity for erotic experience and as a distinctly modern mode of organizing bodies and pleasures, comes to matter in and through the interchanges between human and nonhuman bodily natures, as well as between nature, culture, and society. The following discussion is organized around three sections. The first and second sections examine how in modern Western societies the nature of human sexuality has been understood and classified according to biomedical and psychological narratives of health and illness. By discussing the history of same-sex sexuality in particular, the chapter will explain how medical sexology, the scientific study of human sexual interests, behaviors, and functions that evolved in the late nineteenth century, has shaped both historical and contemporary understandings of sexuality as a driving natural force in human life. The third section traces how modern nature spaces are formed, and transformed, through specific ideologies and imaginations of sexuality, especially in relation to the institutionalization of heterosexuality. It does so through a discussion of the contemporary ecosexual movement, as exemplified by the collaborative work of artist couple Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle. Ecosexuality refers both to ‘‘the act of partnering with the Earth and treating the Earth with the respect and care of an intimate partner’’ and to the strategy of using sex and sexuality to raise awareness about global environmental concerns (Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Hagamen 2015, 305). It is approached here as a creative counterpoint from which to rethink and resist dominant articulations of nature, matter, and sexual desire. As a whole, this chapter argues for a generative shift of traditional conceptions of sexuality as a distinctly human attribute toward a more holistic understanding of erotic desire as a dynamic sexual and political orientation that encompasses both human and morethan-human worlds. The critical value of ecosexual art, or what we might term its particular forcework (Ziarek 2004), lies precisely in how it enacts this shift in and through the materiality of sexual bodies and pleasures. Adopting an ecosexual perspective invites us not merely to activate our physical senses in the fight for environmental and sexual justice but also to enter into an alternative relationality with the material world as a whole that is, to grasp and be grasped by the profoundly erotic nature of matter itself.

THE MATTER OF MODERN SEXUALITY What, exactly, is sexuality? Sexuality is often considered as a natural fact, a pattern ‘‘hardwired’’ in male and female bodies and in physical sexual attractions: a matter of bodies and brains, genes and hormones. At the same time, sex has a fundamentally social character: sexuality is connected to social institutions, sexual health, and sexual policy, while sexual differences, in turn, are at the core of the organization of every society. Finally, as a set of acts and desires, sexuality is thought to be something private and personal and is often experienced as a very intimate part of human life. But the meanings of sexuality are not as straightforward as they seem: not only is there little agreement among scholars and scientists about how to interpret the nature of sexual desire, but the notion of sexuality itself is an unstable social and historical construction as well. Many historians of sexuality have demonstrated that the contemporary Western notion of sexuality was shaped beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the discourses of emerging scientific disciplines such as psychiatry, psychology, and criminology (Katz 1995; Seidman 2003; Weeks 1985). Following French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926 1984), they particularly underline the way in which

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sexuality started to be conceptualized within the new academic discipline of sexology in the latter part of the nineteenth century. An array of social, political, and economic forces (increased urbanization, the rise of the middle classes, an expanding capitalist economy encouraged by colonial conquest) rapidly transformed the way family structures and personal lives were organized in this period. The science of sexology arose in Europe and North America as a response to the social unrest caused by these changes, and it was also associated with the broader professionalization of scientific research in the nineteenth century. Medical sexology emerged in a scientific and social climate obsessed with taxonomy, or the identification and classification of natural and cultural diversity into discrete categories. Physicians like Iwan Bloch (1872 1922), Carl Westphal (1833 1890), Albert Moll (1862 1939), and the aforementioned Krafft-Ebing were therefore particularly interested in peripheral or so-called abnormal sexualities. But where socially deviant sexual behavior was previously viewed primarily from religious and legal perspectives, the early sexologists developed a scientific discourse on sexuality in terms of physical and mental health and illness. Although their work was not free from normative judgments, its scientific status provided medical definitions of sexuality with an aura of objectivity and truth. As sexological research gained currency in Western culture, sexual passion became increasingly seen, and experienced, as an individual matter: a character trait deeply rooted in the essence of what it means to be a human person. THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY

In the first volume of his History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault describes sexuality as ‘‘the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations by a certain deployment deriving from a complex political technology’’ (127). With this he means that sexuality should be seen as a historical and sociocultural phenomenon that quite literally comes to matter only within the history of Western modernity. Of course this does not imply that sexual desires or behaviors did not exist prior to the nineteenth century. The issue is rather that sexuality, in the sense of a driving sexual orientation or deep-seated personal identity, is not simply a natural feature or physical fact of life but also a constructed category of experience specific to a certain time and place. Before modernity, sexual activities and tendencies were not seen as signs of personal identity or as physical expressions of individual sexual preferences (Halperin 1990). In the late nineteenth century, in contrast, sexuality became ‘‘naturalized,’’ which means that it was increasingly understood as a self-evident natural fact: a matter of biology rather than of social and cultural processes. Foucault traces this biological conception of sexuality to the emergence of capitalism and the modern nation-state, which took the bourgeois nuclear family as the central unit for the reproduction of a healthy workforce. With the term political technology cited earlier he refers to the mechanisms of modern state power, which not only target the capabilities of individual human bodies but also seek to regulate and control the biological processes of the population as a whole for example, through demographic studies and public health campaigns. Although such control initially comes from the outside, it is internalized by individuals through self-regulating practices and behaviors, so that the way in which people govern their own lives becomes inseparable from the welfare of the state. Sexuality, says Foucault, lies at the pivot of these two poles through which power in modern Western societies operates: its regulation allows for the control of both human individuals and entire populations (1978, 145). GENDER: MATTER

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Foucault, then, was less concerned with the question of what sexuality is than with what it does and how it works. His History of Sexuality does not try to uncover the truth of human sexuality, but instead it examines the history of its production in relation to social institutions and practices of power and knowledge. In particular, he points to the constitutive role of the natural sciences in the construction of sexuality from the nineteenth century onward: modern medicine, especially, recoded sexual behaviors as expressions of a physiological and psychological condition intrinsic to the materiality of the human body. Same-sex desires and behaviors, as aberrations from the procreative norm that was assumed to be central to the preservation of the bourgeois social order, became seen in this context as specific problems that needed to be addressed scientifically. The next sections will discuss the history of same-sex sexuality as it has been produced by biomedical paradigms, further to clarify Foucault’s ideas and to shed light on the importance of the matter of the body within cultural configurations of sexuality. THE BIRTH OF HOMOSEXUALITY

The emergence of male homosexuality as a category of sexual identity in the nineteenth century can help us to understand the modern nature of sexuality in Western culture. Before that time sex between men was seen in Europe and North America as a form of sodomy, a category of forbidden acts that not only included anal penetration but also every sexual act that was not aimed at human reproduction. Sodomy was an immoral and sinful act rather than a way of being: it was seen not as a lasting sexual predisposition but as a temporary deviation from the norm. Forensic medicine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries considered sodomy a crime, but all attention was focused on the bodily consequences of such unspeakable acts; the physiological or psychological causes of sodomy or the character of sodomites were of no concern.

French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault, c. 1969. In The History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault describes sexuality as not merely natural but also a historically and socioculturally constructed phenomenon. INTERFOTO / ALAMY

Late nineteenth-century sexologists, by contrast, replaced the older forensic classification of vices with a ‘‘psychiatry of perversions’’ (Hekma 1989, 181). It is at this point that historians situate the birth of the modern homosexual as a specific type of person: not merely the perpetrator of singular acts but the subject of a particular sexual sensibility. Within this framework, homosexual behavior was generally no longer regarded as a passing aberration but as the symptom of an innate pathological condition linked to disorders of the brain and nervous system. ‘‘Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality,’’ writes Foucault; ‘‘It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. . . . Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality

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when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul’’ (1978, 43). What does this mean? Early studies of sexual psychopathology made no clear distinction between sex (the physical anatomy of a person), gender (the way in which people identify themselves in relation to masculinity and femininity), and what today would be called sexual orientation or object choice. Same-sex attraction was seen as a form of what Westphal (1869) had termed contrary sexual feeling (kontra¨re Sexualempfindung), an expression for various forms of sexual or gender inversion that in the twentieth century would be further specified as homosexuality, bisexuality, androgyny, transvestism, and transsexuality. Although the need for sexual and, as we will see later, racial taxonomies was clearly embedded in the cultural attitudes of that time, sexually deviant behavior was reduced to physical characteristics for the most part: individuals who did not meet the prevailing standards of gender and sexual desire were labeled as members of a ‘‘third sex.’’ Inspired by Charles Darwin’s (1809 1882) theory of evolution, most sexologists explained sexual perversion as a congenital abnormality, a matter of hereditary degeneracy that would manifest itself as a mental illness. At the same time, inversion was also seen as an acquired disorder that could be contracted by allegedly harmful habits and events such as masturbation and sexual seduction, by social developments, or by environmental factors. Thus, some physicians held the feminist movement responsible for the socially deviant behavior of the female ‘‘invert,’’ whose masculine aspirations to matters like financial independence or the right to education and political self-realization were seen as an offense against not only societal conventions but also nature itself. Others traced the origins of sexual perversion to the ‘‘unnatural’’ pace of life in modern cities, thus aligning questions of sexual health to ecological concerns about the changing relationships between humans and the environment in an industrializing world. UN/NATURAL PASSIONS

Seemingly contradictory visions often go hand in hand in the writings of the sexologists. Krafft-Ebing, for example, believed that sexual disorders were the result of the stresses that modern civilization exerted on the human nervous system and that acquired degeneration could be transferred from one generation to the next, yet at the same time he mentioned hypochondria, fear of pregnancy, and ‘‘mental or moral weakness’’ as possible causes of ‘‘contrary’’ sexuality (Krafft-Ebing quoted in Bristow 1997, 32). And while Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which would eventually set the tone for the scientific and popular classification of sexual deviations, initially considered the ‘‘acquired’’ cases as the most important, later editions of the book would increasingly emphasize the congenital nature of homosexuality. Inconsistencies like these would set the stage for the nature versus nurture debate that continues to dominate discussions on the origins of same-sex sexuality. At this point an interesting paradox manifests itself. On the one hand, same-sex sexuality was naturalized as a biological condition, a more-or-less irreducible and unalterable sexual orientation. On the other hand, however, homosexuality was considered an unnatural phenomenon, an aberration of the primary and natural sexual relationship between man and woman or, more precisely, between husband and wife. Crucially, the concept of heterosexuality as the healthy and normal counterpart of homosexuality only came into being after the latter was defined as a pathological identity. Heterosexuality, as a sexual attraction to the opposite sex not aimed at procreation, was initially also seen as a perversion. GENDER: MATTER

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This would change in the mid-1890s under the impact of Krafft-Ebing’s work, which shifted attention away from the traditional distinction between reproductive and nonreproductive sexual acts to a more affective understanding of sexuality as a matter of personal intimate relationships (Oosterhuis 2012, 146). At that moment in time, the cultural dichotomy between homosexuality and heterosexuality took center stage in the thinking about human sexual natures, while conversely sexual passion itself came to represent an irresistible natural force in need of sociocultural regulation and control. The human body the physical interface between the self and the social world has since that time become the intersection, as it were, where sexualized ideas about the natural and the unnatural, the normal and the abnormal, the biological and the cultural, continuously meet. As the object of clinical surveillance and diagnosis, the body’s materiality became an area to identify and measure perverse desires, a kind of map that both doctors and patients could read to look for moral character and civilization (Terry 1999, 41). The fundamentally Victorian notion that socially maladjusted individuals would somehow differ physically from ‘‘normal’’ people, along with the view of same-sex attraction in terms of inversion or gender confusion, has set the tone for many scientific, popular, and political ideas about sexual identity in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.

DEVIANT BODIES In late nineteenth-century Western science, the constitution of the body was not differentiated sharply from the psyche nor from the social, political, and physical environments in which both mind and matter operate. Therefore same-sex sexuality was considered a matter of ‘‘constitutional degeneracy’’ (Terry 1999, 49), which manifested itself as a simultaneous biological, mental, and moral deficiency. Moreover, sexual degeneration was thought to be caused by an overload of the nervous system, which would cause the sexual functionality of individuals to return to the more so-called primitive state of sexual inversion. Paradoxically, this condition was characterized by both a lack of sexual differentiation and by the presence of insatiable appetites, or ‘‘hypersexuality’’: thus the constitutional weakness of sexual inverts manifested itself in sexual urges of abnormal strength. Furthermore, from an evolutionary perspective, homosexuality was also seen as a pathological response to the advanced development of modern Western societies: the homosexual’s presumed refusal to procreate represented ‘‘cultural complexity taken to the point of biological sterility’’ (Terry 1995, 132). Biological arguments were used almost routinely in the nineteenth century to support the prevailing assumption that certain marginalized groups were socially and intellectually inferior by nature. In addition to those of homosexuals, the bodies of the working class or poor, criminals, and nonwhite people also carried the stigma of degeneration. It is no coincidence that the classification of human beings as either homosexual or heterosexual emerged at the same time as social anxieties about race led to an increasingly aggressive policing of the boundaries between black and white bodies (Somerville 2000). In the United States, most notably, existing discourses of scientific racism infused emergent theories of sexual deviance, while conversely norms of proper heterosexuality were central to the many antimiscegenation laws that were implemented from the 1890s onward to enforce racial segregation.

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While gender-nonconforming characteristics and behaviors such as cross-dressing or atypical grooming were seen as telltale signs of sexual inversion, physicians also turned attention to the internal and external sexual anatomy as physiological evidence of constitutional deviance. Many doctors, for example, found a link between lesbian sexuality and the presence of an enlarged clitoris. In doing so they strengthened the association between female inverts and other women who because of their ‘‘dirty’’ work and alleged lack of sexual selfcontrol were believed to disrupt the natural and social order: in particular, working-class women, black women, nymphomaniacs, and prostitutes (Gibson 1997). Just as in medical and anthropological literature so-called primitive races were associated with sexual perversion, ‘‘clitoral hypertrophy’’ was seen as a form of not only sexual degeneration but also racial and class degeneration, which supposedly proved that the white race had reached its evolutionary limits (Gibson 1997, 121). Life in industrialized Western society with its technological progress was once again held responsible for this unhealthy condition; thus the vibrations of the sewing machine a tool used mainly by working-class women was often mentioned as a source of ‘‘clitoral corruption’’ because of its indirect genital stimulation (120). While the stereotype of the hypersexual black woman had long been used to legitimize the sexual abuse, rape, and murder of black women, it was especially damaging to the lives of black lesbian women, whose so-called deviant sexuality was marginalized both within and outside black communities (Hammonds 1997). In reality, the association between female inversion, racial degeneration, and clitoral hypertrophy was little more than a phantasmatic construction on the part of the white, male sexologists, a regulatory fiction that enabled them both to maintain white supremacy and to project their fear of female same-sex sexuality on a range of de´classe´ women, whose sexualized and racialized Otherness was at once produced and contained within discursive practices of medical classification. Although most physicians in the first decades of the twentieth century rejected the myth that female inverts were by nature endowed with abnormally large sexual organs, the racialized figure of the ‘‘mannish lesbian’’ did have far-reaching consequences. In the past, socially sanctioned romantic friendships between certain (white, upper-middle-class) women had not been uncommon, and when feminism in the second half of the nineteenth century opened the doors to higher education and careers outside of marriage, many college-educated women openly shared their lives together in intimate long-term relationships (Faderman 1981). These so-called Boston marriages were seen as harmless, even beneficial, not so much because of an actual lack of emotional and physical affection but because by Victorian standards respectable women were supposed to be passionless by nature (Cott 1978). By the turn of the century, however, sexology had changed these ‘‘friendships’’ into signs of an illness in need of medical attention, and even though many sexologists believed no real cure existed for inversion, they recommended a range of treatments from general hygienic measures and hypnosis to radical surgical procedures such as clitoridectomy. FREAKS OF NATURE

The biomedical, psychiatric, and juridical surveillances of sexual deviance in the early twentieth century not only functioned as mechanisms of control and domination but also enabled the formation of ‘‘reverse discourses’’ in which sexuality emerged as a target of selfknowledge and self-creation. As Foucault notes, same-sex sexuality ‘‘began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the GENDER: MATTER

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same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’’ (1978, 101). Reverse discourses do not simply reproduce normative categories of knowledge and truth; rather, they generate new forms of resistance by assenting to the very terms in which marginalized identities are articulated. Thus, the clinical study of sexual perversions helped mobilize the resistant practices of early sexual-rights activists who sought to decriminalize same-sex erotic behavior, and at the same time it allowed so-called sexual deviants to reclaim their ‘‘true nature’’ as homosexuals or lesbians. A good example for this is the novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) by English author Radclyffe Hall (1880 1943), the first and arguably most influential lesbian novel of the twentieth century. The book clearly dramatizes the theory of sexual inversion through the story of its tormented hero, Stephen Gordon, who is depicted as a true ‘‘congenital invert’’: a woman born with a man’s soul, who recognizes herself in the work of Krafft-Ebing she finds hidden in her father’s study. Like the sexologists, Radclyffe Hall uses the trope of gender reversal to indicate the nature of lesbian sexuality and to highlight Stephen’s body ‘‘a monstrous fetter imposed on her spirit’’ as an ardent site of psychological conflict (Hall [1928] 2005, 169). But even if The Well fails to abandon the negative stereotype of the invert as a pathetic freak of nature, Hall did provide her contemporaries with a potent model for self-identification by establishing Stephen as the subject, rather than object, of sexual knowledge and speech. The novel ends with a passionate plea for the recognition of lesbian identity and love: ‘‘Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!’’ (399). It has been argued that Radclyffe Hall and many other feminists embraced medical figurations of sexual perversion, however ambivalently, because they ‘‘desperately wanted to break out of the asexual model of romantic friendship’’ (Newton 1984, 560). The image of the mannish lesbian indeed offered some women, like Radclyffe Hall, the possibility to be sexually active in ways that were socially and morally unacceptable for heterosexual women. In any case, the huge success of Hall’s novel, for which British sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859 1939) even wrote a preface, points to the function of literary fiction in the popularization of scientific discourses of same-sex sexuality, and at the same time it testifies to the vital importance of literature and art as models for sexual self-stylization and for the development of new discourses of acceptance (Castle 1993; hoogland 1997). THE POLITICS OF NATURAL SEX

The naturalization of sexuality as a biological matter has been essential in shifting hegemonic conceptions of same-sex sexuality from pathologization to positive self-identification. In fact, several sexologists used biological arguments to press for the abolition of penal codes such as Paragraph 175, a provision of the German Criminal Code from 1871 that made sexual acts between men punishable by imprisonment and a loss of civil rights. One of the most outspoken advocates on behalf of the so-called third sex was Jewish German physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868 1935), who firmly believed that a better scientific understanding of homosexuality would prepare the way for social reform. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee, established by Hirschfeld two years after the infamous trials against Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854 1900) in 1895, was founded on the assumption that sexual inversion was congenital and therefore innocent. Through his writing, as well as with the trailblazing film Anders als die Andern (1919, Different from the Others), Hirschfeld

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aimed to counter homophobia and discrimination by educating people about the ‘‘fundamental naturalness’’ of homosexuality (Steakley 1997, 141). Efforts like these did not result in the repeal of Paragraph 175, which despite its culmination in the widespread persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust would remain part of German law in various versions until 1994. But Hirschfeld’s biology-based defense of homosexuality, along with the destruction of much of his life’s work by the Nazis, did establish him as a pioneering activist for gay and transgender rights. It was also Hirschfeld’s work that encouraged Krafft-Ebing significantly to revise his perspective on same-sex sexuality. The strict distinction Krafft-Ebing initially made between normal and abnormal sexuality would gradually give way to a perception of sexuality as a sliding scale of quantitative (rather than qualitative) differences; he therefore came to view homosexuality as a natural variation in the human species rather than as a physical anomaly. This reversal was also prompted by the extensive correspondence Krafft-Ebing maintained with his homosexual patients, many of them highly educated white men who assured him they were perfectly healthy and that the disease actually existed in the social hostility of their surroundings. By incorporating such life stories in his work, Krafft-Ebing shifted the emphasis from a physiological to a more psychological approach of sexuality (Oosterhuis 2000), while at the same time firmly anchoring the notion of sexuality as a fundamental natural human urge in the popular imagination. In the early twentieth century the theory of sexual inversion was increasingly rejected, most notably by Austrian founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856 1939), who viewed sexuality primarily as a matter of psychosocial development. Together with Havelock Ellis’s work, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of desire underlies the modern distinction between gender identity and sexual object choice. Moreover, Freud made a clean break with the sexological view of the sexual instinct as a reproductive and naturally heterosexual force. Pleasure, not procreation, was the purpose of sex in his view: the intensification and discharge of erotic energies that are not limited to the genitals but embrace all possible areas of the human body. Perversion, as deviation from the norm of procreative sexuality, was viewed by Freud ([1905] 1962) as a normal component of any sexual relationship, fantasy, or action. He considered same-sex sexuality as a form of arrested psychosexual development, and although he did not exclude the possible influence of biology on the formation of sexual identity, he thought it was impossible to regard homosexuals as a group with a separate or fundamentally different sexual nature that could be found in the material constitution of the body. Nevertheless, the search for the physical origins of nonheterosexual desire has never faded away, and scientists have continued to try to locate the differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals in the body. Contemporary research into the biology of sexual orientation harnesses the cultural capital of Western science to trace the etiology of same-sex desires on neural, genetic, and molecular levels. Even though such studies consistently fail to produce conclusive or even reliable evidence, the popular appeal of research into the everelusive ‘‘gay gene’’ (Hamer and Copeland 1994) or the ‘‘gay brain’’ (LeVay 1993) testifies to the enduring power of medical discourses to define the sexual self. The problem with much of the research on sexual variation, as critics like Rebecca Jordan-Young (2010) and Cordelia Fine (2010) have shown, is not only that it often fails to meet common standards of scientific method but also that it is informed by biased assumptions about what constitutes maleness and femaleness. A neuroscientist like Simon LeVay (1943 ), for example, assumes that sexual GENDER: MATTER

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orientation arises from a sexual differentiation of the brain influenced by prenatal hormones, but at the same time he bases his definition of ‘‘sex-typical’’ characteristics upon cultural conceptions of a gender binary to which the norm of heterosexuality is central. The result is not only that this kind of research remains tied to outdated models of gender inversion but also that the naturalness of homosexuality has to be established continuously, whereas heterosexuality is simply assumed to be the default position. It is remarkable how many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) rights advocates, including scientists such as LeVay, will rely on naturalizing discourses of sexuality, even in the twenty-first century, because biological arguments have been historically used especially to support the exclusion or elimination of marginalized groups (Terry 1995, 161). Foucault, however, was especially critical of the emancipatory possibilities of Western sexual science, which in the name of ‘‘social hygiene’’ has been utilized to serve both the imperatives of a conventional bourgeois morality and the legitimization of state racism. According to Foucault, we have to release the erotic power of sex itself from the fetters of sexuality, if we really want to oppose the grasp of the institutions that control sexual life. The remainder of this chapter will discuss the contemporary movement of ecosexuality, also referred to as ‘‘sexecology,’’ as a productive counterpoint to the scientific deployment of sexuality an approach that resists the framing of sexuality through dominant conceptions of nature by releasing the matter of sex-desire itself into what Foucault (1978, 159) would call ‘‘a different economy of bodies and pleasures.’’

FROM SEXOLOGY TO SEXECOLOGY Historically specific ideas of sexuality have turned the matter of nature into a territory where cultural ideologies of sex and gender are played out in paradoxical ways. On the one hand, sexual science has positioned nature as the standard from which queer bodies and desires are said to deviate, which would seem to imply that nature is valued as a force to be respected and obeyed. On the other hand, Western culture has constructed the naturalness of sex itself as an object that needs to be measured, managed, and controlled in the name of social order and stability. Effectively this means that the notion of nature itself has been framed to a great extent through the normative paradigm of heterosexuality, so that any appeal to nature as we know it is bound to reproduce the cultural dichotomy between ‘‘straight’’ and ‘‘deviant’’ sexual identities. How, then, can this dominant pairing of nature and heterosexuality be uncoupled? And how can the matter of erotic pleasure be explored and affirmed beyond the human-made categories of sexuality? Sexecology, as a burgeoning grassroots movement where sexology and ecology merge, provides some imaginative ways to answer these questions. The term was coined by interdisciplinary artist and activist Elizabeth Stephens (1960 ) and sex educator, filmmaker, and performance artist Annie Sprinkle (1954 ); Sprinkle is also a certified sexologist with a PhD in human sexuality. For more than a decade these two artists have been collaborating with each other, and with various international communities, to make the environmental movement ‘‘more sexy, fun and diverse’’ (Stephens and Sprinkle 2012, 66) by using tactics of civil disobedience, artistic activism, theory, humor, and sex-positive feminism. In their Ecosex Manifesto (2011), Stephens and Sprinkle describe ecosexuality as a strategy to create more loving and sustainable relationships with planet Earth: ‘‘We shamelessly hug trees, massage the Earth with our feet, and talk erotically to plants. We are skinny dippers, sun worshipers, and stargazers. We caress rocks, are pleasured by waterfalls, and admire the Earth’s curves

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often. We make love with the Earth through our senses. We celebrate our E-spots. We are very dirty’’ (Stephens and Sprinkle 2011). By shifting the metaphor from ‘‘Earth as mother’’ to ‘‘Earth as lover,’’ Stephens and Sprinkle invite us to engage our physical and emotional intimacies in acts of environmental preservation, and at the same time they develop an ecological perspective on sex as the mutual interimplication of human and nonhuman bodily natures. Ecosexuality, then, entails an environmental politics with a renewed perception of love, or Eros, as the ecology of life itself (Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Hagamen 2015; Stephens and Sprinkle 2016). Thus, the traditional scientific and social understanding of sexuality as a distinctive property of human bodies and identities is replaced with a more holistic view on erotic desire as a set of material forces that join together human and more-than-human worlds. In this view ecological consciousness is essential to the way humans engage with the physical, social, and cultural dynamics of sexuality, while in its turn sex itself is reconfigured as a crucial vector of environmental sustainability. Ecosexuality is a movement that has arisen in a contemporary Western context, but ecosexual thinking in many ways resonates with certain indigenous understandings of nature and matter. Although ecosexual and indigenous worldviews cannot easily be mapped onto each other, as Kim TallBear cautiously notes, both propose an ecological thinking that ‘‘stretches the ‘sexual’ experience into one that transcends matter and physical stimulation’’ (2012), thus relocating human sexuality into the worlds of nonhuman animals, spirits, minerals, and plants. Intimate, sense-based relationships between humans and the more-than-human world are central to many native cosmologies and knowledge systems, and several aboriginal cultures in North America and northern Eurasia feature stories about nonhuman animals interbreeding with human beings. That such relations refuse to ‘‘cohere’’ into the modern Western notion of ‘‘sexuality,’’ as TallBear also points out, testifies to the autonomy of indigenous sex and gender configurations in light of the attempts of US settler nationalism to force native peoples into the straightjacket of AngloAmerican heterosexual norms and values (Rifkin 2011). Ecosexuality enacts a similar challenge to regimes of heteronormative whiteness by disrupting the spirit/matter and mind/body oppositions that are central to modern Western scientific thought, as well as the hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality that have historically been maintained through such binaries. ECOLOGIES OF DESIRE

In an ecosexual worldview, all life both human and nonhuman is part of an interdependent web of existence that, like the matter of nature itself, is as spiritual as it is sensual. To communicate this message, Stephens and Sprinkle make creative use of the social and cultural script of marriage (Stephens 2010). Over the past ten years, they have produced nineteen public ‘‘ecosex weddings’’ in nine countries, during which they have married both each other and various nature entities, including the Earth, the sky, the sea, the moon, snow, and the Appalachian Mountains. Although their work has clear historical precedents within the genre of land and environmental art, and it especially evokes the ‘‘earth-body’’ artworks of Ana Mendieta (1948 1985) during the 1970s, Stephens and Sprinkle are most directly inspired by the work of performance artist Linda Mary Montano (1942 ). Following Montano’s focus on spiritual energy states, the themes and colors of the weddings were based on the colors associated with the seven primary chakras of the body in yoga philosophy, and at the same time they constituted sites of environmental activism and community engagement. The Purple Wedding to the Appalachian Mountains, for example, was performed in 2010 in GENDER: MATTER

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Athens, Ohio, to protest the practice of mountaintop removal in the area. This form of surface mining uses explosives to extract coal seams from the summit ridge of the mountains, while the remaining toxic debris is dumped into neighboring valleys. To date, mountaintop removal mining throughout the Appalachians has destroyed more than five hundred mountains; more than one million acres of forest have been decimated, and close to twenty-five hundred miles of headwater streams and rivers have been buried beneath mining waste, while many more have been irreversibly polluted. Marrying the mountains was not only an attempt to raise awareness about the devastating environmental and health impacts of the coal industry but was also a ritual affirmation of ecological and erotic interconnectedness. Indeed, the persistent exchange of ecosexual vows by the artist couple and their audience is not so much about establishing new partnerships but rather is an acknowledgment of physical and spiritual unions that already exist: since we are an intrinsic part of the material world that surrounds us, we are always already wedded to the beauty and suffering of the Earth as a whole. By promising to love, honor, and cherish the Earth ‘‘until death brings us closer together forever,’’ Stephens and Sprinkle (2011) push the institution of marriage beyond its human-centric form, and at the same time poke fun at the opponents of same-sex marriage who have complained that, if gays and lesbians are given the right to marry, people will want to marry anything and everything. But more fundamentally, their ecosex weddings challenge the ways in which nature itself has been shaped according to dominant conceptions of sexuality and, conversely, how particular environmental practices are used to support prevailing social and sexual norms. What does this mean? The rise of scientific sexology in the late nineteenth century coincided, historically and ideologically, with the development of Western ecological science as well as with the beginnings of modern environmentalism. Ecological science, as the study of interactions among organisms and their environments, was influenced by the same evolutionary narratives that prompted the early sexologists to pathologize nonreproductive sexualities like homosexuality. The paradigm of heterosexuality, viewed as the most natural manifestation of the biological drive to reproduce, was therefore central to both evolutionary and ecological views on species health. Heterosexual activity, as Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (2005, 10) has noted, consequently became a defining feature of ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘healthy’’ environments, because the perceived ability of a species to survive and thrive in its surroundings was tied to the notion of reproductive fitness. By contrast, the environment of modern industrial cities came to be seen as a breeding ground of unnatural and unhealthy sexual passions. Environmental historians have pointed out that this ‘‘repro-centric’’ perspective on sexuality has had a profound influence on the modern formation of public green spaces (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010). For example, environmentalism and wilderness preservation arose in North America in the late nineteenth century partly out of the cultural association of sexual and racial degeneration with the artificiality of cities, which were seen as being polluted by the increasing presence of nonwhite immigrants, emancipated women, and effeminate homosexuals (Mortimer-Sandilands 2005, 5). National parks such as Yellowstone or Yosemite and urban open spaces like New York’s Central Park were created in turn as sites for the physical and moral regeneration of elite white men, who could set their masculinity straight by engaging in wholesome recreational activities such as hiking, swimming, or mountain climbing. Even though same-sex activities actually flourished there, wilderness spaces like these served to institutionalize heterosexuality by linking practices of environmental preservation to matters of sexual health and racial purity. It is also important to remember that national parks like Yellowstone were inhabited when they were created, so

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that ‘‘in order to become sufficiently pristine for travelers in search of picturesque wilderness they were physically and legislatively emptied of their aboriginal populations’’ (MortimerSandilands 2005, 5). Early environmental and ecological discourses were thus just as instrumental as medical sexology in shaping the emergence of same-sex sexuality as a so-called unnatural passion, a modern illness rooted in the body and located in the artificiality of cities (Mortimer-Sandilands 2005, 14). It is precisely this convergence of sexology, ecology, and heteronormativity that is disrupted in and through the contemporary movement of ecosexuality or sexecology. Ecosexuality does not start from the notion of human sexual identities, nor does it seek to evaluate sexuality according to preestablished views on natural and unnatural practices, desires, or environments. By shifting the focus away from human constructions of sexuality to the materiality and relationality of sex itself, ecosexuality invites us to look at sexual desire not as a property of human subjects but as a process of creative transformation, an everchanging production of erotic intensities and interrelations that connect human beings not only to each other but also to the vital energies of the more-than-human material world. THE EROTICS OF MATTER

This chapter has traced how sexuality in Western modernity has come to matter through particular ideas of nature and natural science, and conversely how sexual norms and values have shaped the perception and organization of human and nonhuman natures. It has outlined how biomedical research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has naturalized sexuality by differentiating it into normative categories that both enable and constrain human sexual subjectivity. And it has explored how the contemporary movement of ecosexuality develops an alternative and arguably more affirmative perspective on the interchanges between nature, matter, and desire. In light of the history of sexual science, then, it is perhaps not surprising that Krafft-Ebing was unable to make sense of the so-called strange and unnatural desires of a ‘‘great lover of flowers’’ outside the normative framework of human sexuality. Indeed, it is precisely because sexuality has been made to represent the essence of human nature that a sexologist like Krafft-Ebing could not consider sexual attraction to flowers as anything other than a fetish that is, as an artificial rather than natural variation in desire. From an ecosexual perspective, by contrast, it becomes clear that love for the nonhuman world does not deviate from a primary human sexuality but that rather it constitutes the erotic principle that allows sex itself, in its myriad forms and expressions, to flourish and bloom. Sexuality, in this view, is not about the direction one takes toward an object of desire; in fact, in an ecosexual world there are no clear distinctions between subjects and objects of desire, because both come into existence only within a relation of mutual entanglement. It is first and foremost within this relation that the matter of sexuality resides, not merely the materiality of its embodiment in human form, but the material dynamism from which nature and culture themselves emerge in their interconnectedness. Matter, in this sense, is both a medium for the flow of sexual desire and a desiring force in and of itself. If the very nature of materiality, as feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad (1956 ) asserts, entails an ‘‘exposure to the Other’’ (2007, 392), then the openness of matter the indeterminacy of its capacity to connect is always already erotic indeed. The shift from sexology to sexecology enacted in this chapter therefore not only enables a renewed understanding of human sexuality as ‘‘always intermeshed with the more-thanhuman world’’ (Alaimo 2010, 2) but also allows us to grasp and be grasped by the profoundly erotic nature of matter itself. GENDER: MATTER

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Summary The central aim of this chapter has been to examine how the matter of sexuality has emerged in Western modernity through discourses of nature and natural science and conversely how sexual norms and values have shaped the perception and organization of human and nonhuman natures. To this end, it has traced how sexuality has historically been constructed and classified according to biomedical and psychological narratives of health and illness. Through a discussion of the medicalization of same-sex sexualities in particular, it was shown how the scientific study of sex from the nineteenth century onward has shaped both historical and contemporary understandings of sexuality as a driving natural force in human life. Special attention was paid to the contradictory effects of this ‘‘naturalization’’ of sexuality, which has served to enforce Eurocentric racist, sexist, and heteronormative hierarchies but at the same time also enabled the positive self-identification and emancipation of various sexual minorities. In addition, the chapter discussed how modern nature spaces have been organized according to normative conceptions of heterosexuality. It was demonstrated that environmental and ecological discourses were just as instrumental as medical science in establishing same-sex sexuality as a supposedly unnatural passion ostensibly rooted in the materiality of the body. The chapter as a whole has been framed by a discussion of emerging practices of ecosexuality, an artistic and activist movement that uses sex and sexuality to raise awareness about environmental issues. The last section examined the collaborative work of American artist couple Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, who employ ecosexual performances and public weddings to entities of nature as tactics in the fight for environmental and sexual justice. Ecosexuality has served in this chapter as a creative counterpoint from which to rethink and resist the dominant scientific articulations of nature, matter, and sexual desire that were discussed earlier. In its entirety, this chapter advocates a shift from sexology to sexecology, which entails replacing the conventional understanding of sexuality as an attribute of human identity with a more holistic conception of sexual desire as a matter of sensual and erotic entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds. The conclusion to this chapter has therefore presented a new conception of sexuality as a vital force that connects human beings not only to each other but also to the erotic dynamism of matter itself.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Anderlini D’Onofrio, SerenaGaia, and Lindsay Hagamen, eds. Ecosexuality: When Nature Inspires the Arts of Love. Mayaguez, Puerto Rico: 3WayKiss, 2015. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Cott, Nancy F. ‘‘Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victor ian Sexual Ideology, 1790 1850.’’ Signs 4, no. 2 (1978): 219 236. Faderman, Lilian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renais sance to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981.

Bristow, Joseph. Sexuality. London: Routledge, 1997.

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Oosterhuis, Harry. ‘‘Sexual Modernity in the Works of Richard von Krafft Ebing and Albert Moll.’’ Medical His tory 56, no. 2 (2012): 133 155.

Gibson, Margaret. ‘‘Clitoral Corruption: Body Metaphors and American Doctors’ Constructions of Female Homosexual ity, 1870 1900.’’ In Science and Homosexualities, edited by Vernon A. Rosario, 108 132. London: Routledge, 1997.

Oosterhuis, Harry. Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft Ebing, Psy chiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

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Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. London: Routledge, 1990.

Seidman, Steven. The Social Construction of Sexuality. New York: Norton, 2003.

Hamer, Dean, and Peter Copeland. The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behav ior. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

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Steakley, James D. ‘‘Per scientiam ad justitiam: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Sexual Politics of Innate Homosex uality.’’ In Science and Homosexualities, edited by Ver non A. Rosario, 133 154. London: Routledge, 1997. Stephens, Elizabeth. ‘‘Becoming Eco sexual.’’ Canadian Theatre Review 144 (2010): 13 19.

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Jordan Young, Rebecca M. Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Katz, Jonathan N. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Dutton, 1995. von Krafft Ebing, Richard. Psychopathia Sexualis, with Espe cial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico Forensic Study. Translated from the twelfth edition by F. J. Rebman. New York: Rebman, 1906. First published 1886. LeVay, Simon. The Sexual Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Mortimer Sandilands, Catriona. ‘‘Unnatural Passions? Notes toward a Queer Ecology.’’ Invisible Culture 9 (2005). https://www.rochester.edu/in visible culture/Issue 9 /sandilands.html. Mortimer Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloo mington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Newton, Esther. ‘‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.’’ Signs 9, no. 4 (1984): 557 575.

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Stephens, Elizabeth, and Annie Sprinkle. ‘‘On Becoming Appalachian Moonshine.’’ Performance Research 17, no. 4 (2012): 61 66. TallBear, Kim. ‘‘What’s in Ecosexuality for an Indigenous Scholar of ‘Nature’?’’ June 29, 2012. http://www.kimtall bear.com/homeblog/whats in ecosexuality for an indig enous scholar of nature. Terry, Jennifer. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. Chicago: Univer sity of Chicago Press, 1999. Terry, Jennifer. ‘‘Anxious Slippages between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: A Brief History of the Scientific Search for Homo sexual Bodies.’’ In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, 129 169. Blooming ton: Indiana University Press, 1995. Weeks, Jeffrey. Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1985. Westphal, Carl F. O. ‘‘Die Kontrare Sexualempfindung: Symptom eines neuropathologischen (psychopathischen)

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Zustandes.’’ Archiv fur Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 2 (1869): 73 108.

ecosexual movement as exemplified by thirty of its most prominent proponents. http://ecosexbook.com/.

Ziarek, Krzysztof. The Force of Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Lesbian Herstory Archives. The world’s largest collection by and about lesbians and their communities. http:// www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/.

F I LM S Anders als die Andern [Different from the Others]. Dir. Richard Oswald with Magnus Hirschfeld. 1919. The world’s first feature film to deal explicitly with homo sexuality and to defend it. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=cJHlH19hbJo. Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story. Dir. Beth Stephens with Annie Sprinkle. 2013. Documentary about two artists and lovers who use ecosexual art and activism to protest mountaintop removal in West Virginia. Film trailer available from https://vimeo.com/49723643. W EB S I TE S Annie Sprinkle. Website of artist, sexologist, and sex educa tor Annie Sprinkle. http://anniesprinkle.org/. Ecosexuality: When Nature Inspires the Arts of Love. Web site devoted to the first book about the contemporary

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Love Art Laboratory. Online archive of the seven year Love Art Laboratory project with which Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens galvanized ecosex activism. http://love artlab.org/. Out History. Website founded by historian Jonathan N. Katz that tells stories about the queer past, including visual material and oral histories. http://outhistory.org/. People with a History: An Online Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans* History. Website that addresses LGBT history in all periods and in all regions of the world, including hundreds of original texts, discussions, and references. https://legacy.fordham.edu/Halsall/pwh /index.asp. SexEcology: Where Theory Meets Art Meets Practice Meets Activism. Website for the collaborative work of Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle. http://sexecology.org/.

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Part IV. Future Matters

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Genetics and Epigenetics Kelly E. Happe Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies and Institute for Women’s Studies University of Georgia, Athens

When the completion of the Human Genome Project a thirteen-year, nearly $3 billion federal project was announced in 2003, it was touted as a key step in furthering our understanding of normal biological development, as well as the relationship between heredity and disease. The reigning metaphor at the time (one that remains popular today) was that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) containing three billion chemical base pairs composed of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine acts as a ‘‘code’’ or set of instructions necessary for biological development. Alterations of this master code, such as inherited mutations of genes (genes are thought to be sections of DNA that code for particular proteins), could then be studied to determine who is at risk for gene-linked diseases (through the practice of genetic testing) and how this information could be used to prevent or treat these conditions. Metaphors are never value-free, transparent figurations, however. Rather, they play an inextricable role in constructing the very objects they are employed to explain. The metaphor of code, for example, assumes DNA to be a form of abstract information that unilaterally directs biological development. This metaphor inevitably plays a role in how the genome is studied and how scientific knowledge about it makes its way into medical settings. What has been lost in the metaphor of code is the way in which DNA itself is a kind of matter (chemical nucleotides) that acts and is acted on by the other material objects in the cell, the body, and the body’s environment. What also gets lost, and is of particular importance to a feminist analysis of genetics, is the ways in which bodies even their genes materialize social norms. Linking genes and behavior, for example, always happens in a larger context in which notions of normal and pathological behavior are inextricably linked to social structures of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability. And when genes are linked to disease risk, bodily norms inevitably inform decisions about prevention and treatment, as when a woman who tests positive for an ovarian cancer linked genetic mutation must decide whether to have her ovaries which play a role in health and reproduction surgically removed. This chapter considers the various ways in which DNA and genes ‘‘matter’’: how genetic information is never merely that but also materializes bodies as well as the social relations of which they are part. The chapter begins with a discussion of eugenics science and activism in the United States in the early twentieth century. Eugenics provided progressives and reactionaries alike with the ‘‘objective’’ means with which to locate individual and social pathologies within the body, whether it was to justify social reform or repressive sterilization laws. Women’s bodies and their presumed role as mothers both of which were marked by

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the intersection of class and race figured prominently during this time. The chapter then discusses two areas of research in which the legacy of eugenics is arguably present: prenatal genetic testing and research on chromosomes, sex, and behavior. With prenatal genetic testing now a routine practice in obstetric care women face complex decisions about whether to terminate pregnancies in the face of a positive result and within a context of declining support for differently abled children and adults, itself reflective of societal norms about what counts as a livable life. The ways in which gender norms play a role in research on chromosomes and behavior, particularly research on the relationship between genetics and violence, are subsequently taken into account. The chapter then looks at the impact of the Human Genome Project on medicine and, in particular, gendered medicine. An example is the specific case of the BRCA genes, the mutations of which increase a woman’s risk for breast and ovarian cancer. The analysis of this case complicates familiar narratives in which a woman is empowered with genetic testing information to make lifesaving medical decisions. It does so by considering how that information provided to women is already gendered and so can be considered to ‘‘materialize’’ the very norms it presumes to be distinct from, as when a woman contemplates removing her breasts and ovaries both of which are culturally inscribed as a form of preventive medicine. These norms, however, are routinely contested. As social theorists have shown, it is not possible to reduce the lived experience of genes and genetic testing to any one dominant ideology, because much of that ideology informs the kind of scientific knowledge that is produced and how it is circulated throughout various institutions. By coining the term biosociality, these theorists provide a theoretical framework for understanding the complex ways in which individuals and groups alike create social relations organized around bodily matter and the (biosocial) identities that emerge from it. These lived experiences may or may not align with the intent of the researchers, physicians, and policymakers who produce and advocate for the use of genetic information. By studying the actual practices and experiences of persons for whom genetic material ground their identities and social and political beings, it is then possible to look for ways in which ideologies of the body are resisted or transformed in some way. The case of the BRCA mutation carriers are one example in which the gendered, lived experience of biosociality is complex and unpredictable. The chapter closes with an examination of theories of biological development that call into question the dominant understanding of DNA and heredity that informed the Human Genome Project and in fact date back to the first description of DNA by molecular biologists James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick (1953b). What is herein termed postgenomics encompasses a variety of concepts, including the epigenome, that arguably call into question the very language used to describe biological development and what is meant by DNA and the environment as particular forms, or modes, of matter and materialization.

EUGENICS, MOTHERHOOD, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Around 1900, US-based scientists such as Charles Davenport (1866 1944) ignited interest in heredity with the uptake and popularization of the largely forgotten work of Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel (1822 1884). Mendel, as it turned out, had established that organisms may or may not express particular traits (this is now known as the difference between genotype and phenotype; the word gene would be coined in 1909). The discovery of

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Mendel’s experiments coincided with the rising popularity of eugenics among scientists and the public alike. Eugenics, a term meaning ‘‘good birth,’’ was part theory of inheritance and part social movement, consisting largely of the white middle class. During the Progressive Era (roughly the years 1900 to 1919), eugenics sparked the interests of reformers whose agenda consisted of managing, but also preventing, what they considered the ‘‘social costs’’ of industrialization. For progressives, the problems of poverty, crime, and labor unrest required better regulation of otherwise unfettered capitalist exploitation and the building of a better safety net, as well as innovative, objective, scientific thinking. The science of eugenics was seized on as just the kind of science that could solve social problems and in a way that did not side with a particular political party or a particular social class (Happe 2000). Despite the progressive bent to eugenics in its early years of popularity, it was always informed by racist and classist theories of biological difference. The rise of eugenics and its discourse of ‘‘race suicide’’ coincided with the needs of elites to quell labor activism both in the South and in northern factories whose workforces consisted more and more of southern and eastern European immigrants (Roberts 2011). Particularly in the period after World War I (1914 1918), eugenics informed reactionary immigration restriction laws and involuntary sterilization laws. As Dorothy Roberts observes, these laws represented the intersection of eugenics and long-standing racist practices in the United States: ‘‘Forced sterilizations, eugenicists’ favorite remedy for social problems, were an extension of the brutality inflicted on black Americans. Slaveholders’ total domination over the bodies of enslaved Africans including ownership of enslaved women’s wombs, which they exploited for profit provided an early model of reproductive control’’ (2011, 37). On the same day in 1924, for example, Virginia passed two laws, one legalizing sterilization in prisons, the second requiring universal racial classification and banning marriage between blacks and whites (Roberts 2011). Between 1907 and 1963, thirty states had sterilization programs, and over sixty thousand people were forced to undergo this surgery (Reilly 1987). As of 1987 sterilization laws were still on the books in twenty-three states (Reilly 1987), with African American women being the primary target. If poor, working-class women of color were the primary targets of both positive and negative eugenics, white middle-class women were called on to save civilization and prevent ‘‘race suicide.’’ As medical historian Wendy Kline (2001) documents in her history of eugenics and gender, motherhood became a critical social institution through which eugenicist ideals could be enacted. Through the dual figures of the ‘‘mother of tomorrow’’ and the ‘‘moron,’’ motherhood was depicted as both the reason for civilization’s decline and its salvation. Incentives to procreate with intention or to submit to forced sterilization required a reworking of sexuality and gender norms so that reproduction could be a topic of public discourse and politics (Kline 2001). Mendel’s recessive trait theory sparked a great deal of anxiety, because individuals did not know whether they carried copies of genes linked to socially undesirable behaviors. In addition to being the subject of outreach and activism (e.g., ‘‘better baby’’ contests), eugenics became a topic covered in mainstream magazines in the United States in the early twentieth century, including those targeted to white middle-class women (Happe 2000). Eugenicists appealed to women readers primarily by calling on them to procreate only with those men who had been thoroughly vetted (e.g., through a careful examination of genealogical data to determine whether or not they came from good ‘‘stock,’’ defined by vibrant health, sound intelligence, financial stability, and the absence of any known criminal activity). Gender norms for women and for men were a key feature of popular eugenics discourse. Eugenically fit women were middle class and white and expressed GENDER: MATTER

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conventional gender norms in good proportion, such as by exhibiting sound maternal practices. Eugenically fit men were masculine, intelligent, and hard working ideally managerial types who were financially secure; not necessarily considered fit were rich capitalists, who tended to exhibit undesirable traits defined by excess (or, worse, were old money types who were lazy, weak, and effete). For example, Albert Edward Wiggam (1871 1957), a popular magazine writer, appealed to women who not only may have otherwise disregarded scientific knowledge as the domain of men but also might have embraced the fields of social work and education both of which were demonized by eugenicists, who saw these institutions as supporting the propagation of undesirable traits. Wiggam was one such writer who attempted to distance women from popular ideas of the Progressive Era in part by articulating the ‘‘new woman’’ as one who embraced eugenics. Women should be ‘‘candid’’ about sex so as to pick a eugenically fit mate. After the demise of the eugenics movement, many geneticists retreated to the lab, electing to focus instead on insects and plants. Some interest in human genetics continued, however, largely through the development of genetic counseling. Prenatal genetic testing, now a routine practice of reproductive medicine, is one development in which genetics has had an indisputably differential effect on women. An early version of testing is that which identifies chromosome abnormalities linked to diseases such as trisomy 21 (previously called Down syndrome) through methods such as amniocentesis, in which a small amount of amniotic fluid is extracted from a pregnant women’s womb and analyzed. Prenatal testing now involves predictions regarding a fetus’s risk of a number of diseases, many of them linked to ancestry (although more often than not broadly linked to ethnicity and race, rather than specific founder mutations that can be traced back to a specific ancestral line). Conventional bioethics provides some protections for women, largely through the practice of informed consent and by training genetic counselors to engage in nondirective discussions with women about the results. Some feminists, including feminist bioethicists, argue that prenatal genetic testing is nevertheless a concern for women because it renders them gatekeepers who must often make difficult choices about whether to terminate a pregnancy (or indeed, whether to become pregnant at all). Also lacking are robust discussions about public health and material resources discussions that would better serve the goals of gender justice and feminism. For example, geneticist and feminist activist Abby Lippman (1991) has used the case of prenatal genetic testing to coin the term geneticization, which denotes the growing importance placed by doctors, public health officials and researchers, and biologists on exploring the genetic basis of disease at the expense of exploring other causes. This particularly affects women because, in the case of prenatal genetic testing, better prenatal care and other crucial material resources may be of much greater significance than the information produced by a prenatal test. Furthermore, assumptions about material and social support by genetic counselors reflects and in turn further solidifies dangerous assumptions about racial, ethnic, and class differences. Prenatal testing and counseling can be a troubling source of the surveillance and disciplining of pregnant women’s bodies, as when women of different classes and racial and ethnic backgrounds, assumed to be unable to care for a child with a disability, are indirectly and subtly encouraged to terminate pregnancies by genetic counselors (Rapp 1999). Moreover, genetic counselors take for granted the necessity and validity of biomedical approaches to pregnancy while ignoring or playing down the role of experiential knowledge in the decision regarding whether to undergo genetic testing at all (Rapp 1998).

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CHROMOSOMES: MATTER AS SEXED AND GENDERED As is shown above with the rise of prenatal genetic testing, normative ideas about ‘‘good birth’’ have remained, albeit now situated within the province of individual women’s autonomous decision-making during prenatal obstetric care. Although prenatal care is principally carried out with the intent to reduce instances of debilitating gene-linked diseases, it is nevertheless the case that genes are still seen as linked to behavior. This is most evident in discourse surrounding the putatively ‘‘female’’ chromosome. According to a 2012 study by historian and philosopher of science Sarah S. Richardson, it was during the early part of the twentieth century that sex chromosomes were first described, and it was assumed at the time that the X chromosome was the one that determined the body’s sex (it is now assumed that the Y chromosome serves this function). Demonstrating the ways in which sex is always already gendered, the X chromosome has been used as scientific evidence of gender differences, in particular of the inferiority (e.g., lack of intelligence) of women and, paradoxically, their superiority (as when the extra X provides surplus genetic material imputing, among other things, longevity). Even after the X chromosome was found to have no role in sex determination in 2001 and in fact carries genes for male sperm, the circulation of beliefs about chromosomal sex and gender continued unabated. The theory of the genetic mosaicism of females (the term used to describe the phenomenon whereby cells express either the maternal X chromosome or the paternal X chromosome) continued to be associated in popular and technical discourse alike as explaining women’s ‘‘complicated’’ and ‘‘unpredictable’’ behavior. It also resulted in methodologically unsound and misleading medical research into the believed association between genetic mosaicism and autoimmune diseases (see also Fausto-Sterling 2000 for a general history of biological sex). Violence research is another example of the intersection of genetics research and behavior. During the eugenics era, inherited genetic defect was linked broadly with criminality. Even after the demise of eugenics, the links between violence and genetics continued, epitomized by the federal Violence Initiative of the 1990s. The Violence Initiative purported to explain the genetics of violence by studying young black and Latino subjects. It was canceled before receiving any funding, although what was canceled was the initiative (a coordinating effort), not violence and race research per se (Sellers-Diamond 1994). Although not explicitly articulated in the Violence Initiative, there was clearly a gendered and racial component, as the primary concern driving the research was reducing violent behavior among men, especially black men. Related to this is the so-called XYY syndrome, popularized in the 1960s in the wake of a mass murder in Chicago. The theory behind the syndrome rests on the assumption that because the Y (‘‘male’’) chromosome is associated with violence owing to its connection with elevated ‘‘masculine’’ hormones, the presence of two Y chromosomes increases the risk for criminal activity substantially. Yet research on the relationship between hormones and gendered behavior (whether explaining behaviors among men or women) has been fraught with a variety of methodological problems, not the least of which is the inability to clearly define violence (or ‘‘aggression’’) and the tendency to see elevated hormone levels as the cause of violent behavior rather than the result of (socially conditioned) behavior (Fausto-Sterling 1985). In Myths of Gender, the first edition of which was published in 1985, feminist science studies scholar Anne Fausto-Sterling (1944 ) wrote that the theory no longer held any credibility among scientists. Nevertheless, it is still taught in undergraduate biology classes, and the National Institutes of Health’s Genetics Home Reference website includes an entry on XYY syndrome, associating it with emotional and behavioral problems, thereby testifying to the lasting influence of the belief that men’s behaviors can be reduced to their biological makeup. GENDER: MATTER

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BRCA AND INHERITED BREAST CANCER: THE MATERIALIZATION OF GENDER NORMS In 1990, the same year the Human Genome Project was officially launched, a group of researchers led by American human geneticist Mary-Claire King published an article in Science announcing the identification of a gene, the variants of which may predispose women to breast cancer. Researchers were able to locate the gene in part by studying women from families that showed dramatic evidence of a hereditary form of breast cancer, including multiple cases of breast cancer among women relatives (in some cases as many as eight out of thirteen women across just two generations), breast cancer diagnoses in both breasts, male family members with breast cancer, and individuals diagnosed at very early ages (some in their twenties). As a result of the fanfare around the Human Genome Project and because of rising awareness of breast cancer at the time, the BRCA genes (BRCA is short for ‘‘breast cancer,’’ and researchers would soon locate a second BRCA gene) were a popular news item. Although the BRCA genes are thought to explain only around 5 percent of all breast cancer cases, it was hoped at the time that the research would lead to diagnostics and treatment preventions for all forms of breast cancer, hereditary or not. Thirteen years later, actress Angelina Jolie (1975 ) placed hereditary breast cancer back in the spotlight with the 2013 publication of her op-ed in the New York Times in which she disclosed her decision to undergo a double mastectomy to reduce her risk. Jolie, as it turns out, is a BRCA1 gene mutation carrier, and her risk for breast cancer is substantially higher than it is for women who are not carriers. The phenomenon whereby women such as Jolie undergo more extensive procedures than women who actually have breast cancer (there were several news reports that mistakenly claimed that she in fact had breast cancer) marks a subtle yet indelible shift in what it means to be classified as a ‘‘patient.’’ Women with BRCA mutations are ‘‘treated’’ for their risk, which suggests that risk, for all intents and purposes, is a form of disease that necessitates intervention (see Happe 2006). We may call this the materialization of the breast cancer patient, one that is belied by public and specialized discourse about genomics that describes genetic information as just that: chemical base pairs of DNA further abstracted by way of their symbolic representation as so many As, Gs, Ts, and Cs. These symbols then convey risk as percentages: BRCA mutation carriers are told they have anywhere from a 45 to 90 percent risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in their lifetime. The treatment of risk marks not only a conceptual shift but also a material one, insofar as risk an abstraction represented by percentages takes on, quite literally, the features of cancer itself. There may not be a tumor per se, but the body itself becomes a theater of disease for which no less than a procedure such as mastectomy is required. Importantly, this body is never not gendered. As American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler (1956 ) has argued, beginning with her groundbreaking book Gender Trouble (1990), the biological body (which may also be specified as the genetic body) is not the value-free, factual counterpart to gender. Rather, sex remains a powerful force in regulating and disciplining women’s bodies. Norms, says Butler, materialize bodies starting with the announcement at birth ‘‘It’s a girl!’’ This is not to say that bodies never trouble these very norms many forms or modes of embodiment exceed a society’s frameworks for ‘‘making sense’’ of gender, and it is in these moments that the norms are revealed as just that: social conventions that are historical, constructed, and therefore open to change. BRCA-related risk is therefore risk that is made sense of within a context of shifting, contested, yet dominant gender

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norms. Prophylactic mastectomy, for example, is on the rise for women with breast cancer, in no small part because of improved surgical techniques and because it can help women opt out of sometimes painful, life-altering cancer treatments. And arguments for preserving breasts based on the assumption that surgery robs women of their femininity (an argument that led to the reform of breast cancer medicine namely, by reducing the widespread abuse of the radical Halsted mastectomy) are not as persuasive given the influence of feminist arguments that gender need not, and should not, be tied to hegemonic notions of a true or pure femininity. Nevertheless, the practice of reconstructive surgery after mastectomy raises important questions about whether breast removal ought to be the medical community’s primary way of reducing breast cancer risk and whether reconstructive surgery is performed with the purpose of conforming to familiar gender norms. Jolie’s op-ed and later decision to have her ovaries surgically removed also raised awareness about the relationship between BRCA mutations and ovarian cancer risk (see Happe 2013b). It also highlighted further ways in which the sexed body is also a gendered body. Research on preventive removal of ovaries (known as an oophorectomy) is almost always framed as a cancer-reducing procedure, playing down the possible increase in heart disease risk that may accompany the surgery a familiar disregard for women and heart disease that has been the subject of criticism of the medical community for some time. It also demonstrates how the medical community privileges the ovary’s role in reproduction over its role in the endocrine system more generally, providing contemporary evidence that ovaries are as much historically specific symbolic markers of femininity as are breasts. There is, moreover, the clinical recommendation that women with BRCA1 mutations should wait no longer than age thirty-five to have their ovaries removed (beyond thirty-five is considered advanced maternal age in the obstetrics/gynecological literature), again demonstrating the degree to which ovaries are as much a social construction as brute material entity. This is so to the extent that ovary removal is inextricably tied to its reproductive function, which is further linked with norms about the timing of motherhood. If ovaries are not being used for reproduction, the dominant view in the BRCA field is that they function predominantly as a cancer risk. What emerges is a calculus wherein the exercise of reproductive autonomy is increasingly a risk to one’s health over time. Women with BRCA mutations, then, exercise reproductive choice (or defy it altogether) within a constrained field of risk. Genetic matter thus becomes a vector of sorts for pathologizing feminist gains.

BIOSOCIALITY: MATTER AS FOUNDATION FOR IDENTITY AND CITIZENSHIP Social theorists, largely following the work of French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault (1926 1984), have argued that with developments both in the biological sciences and in medicine namely, the sequencing of the human genome a new form of sociality has emerged (Rabinow 1992; Rose 2007). According to this view, eugenics and sociobiology were political projects that relied on explicit ideological appeals calling for surveillance and other punitive, disciplinary practices in an effort to compensate for the putatively disadvantageous effects of heredity (e.g., the American eugenics movement). By contrast, the age of genetic sequencing and mapping augurs a different kind of biopolitics, one animated by everyday embodied practice, such as the management of risk and maximization of health. The interests that these practices serve and the identities they enable cannot be anticipated in advance (and in fact can be quite empowering). GENDER: MATTER

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Sociologists have documented ways in which gendered biosocialities have emerged at the intersection of bodily practices, medicine, and genetic testing. For example, medical anthropologist Sahra Gibbon’s work has demonstrated how women in the United Kingdom who test positive for BRCA mutations enact biosocialities grounded in new meanings of the terms patient, disease, and care, all of which must be understood from the perspective of gendered embodiment as well as the ‘‘valorization of preventative health or individual vigilance’’ dating to the early 1990s (2007, 46). While it is the case that BRCA testing produces new versions of patienthood (and as described above, these patients may engage in prevention practices that are hardly insignificant), it is nevertheless also the case that the meanings of the ‘‘tools’’ of the clinic are ‘‘multivalent and mutable’’ (17). They can even be empowering: ‘‘The agency of individuals far from being curtailed by being labeled a patient from ‘above’ is by contrast an identity which seems actively sought and pursued in pursuit of empowerment or control and what are seen as legitimate claims to health care interventions’’ (41). Gibbon further explores the enactment of biocitizenship as a particular mode of biosociality in the context of breast cancer research charity work. In this institutional context, the hope for a reduction in the number of breast cancer cases is inextricably linked with the potential of genetic susceptibility research to be part of an overall push for expanded, and targeted, breast cancer research. Her ethnographic research, which considers multiple sites such as genetic screening clinics and breast cancer charities, ultimately shows how the enactment of biosociality far exceeds that of ‘‘patient.’’ She writes, ‘‘It may be that it is the hunt for and hopes of half-glimpsed yet-to-bediscovered genes, or the immanence of genetic knowledge which best facilitates the need to witness and transcend loss in a breast cancer research charity, rather than the complexity generated by their actual materialization’’ (167). In other words, feelings and actions around genetic testing are hardly contained to the clinic itself but instead are key components of an open-ended narrative of breast cancer research, prevention, survival, and advocacy. Other scholars have expressed some skepticism regarding the potential of biopolitics (such as that described by Gibbon) to serve the social justice goals of feminism. While it may be the case that BRCA breast cancer mutation carriers interpret genomics within a complex framework of an ethic of care, patient advocacy, and intersecting identities, it is nevertheless also true that, in the final analysis, the biosociality that genomics enables ‘‘limits the kinds of alliances and, by extension, politics that are possible. More important, the actions of biosocial communities are concerned principally, even exclusively, with disease, and a biomedicalized version of disease at that’’ (Happe 2013b, 184). This raises the question, then, of how and whether these forms of biosociality can ever result in challenges to ideologies of health and the gendered body. Indeed, since the BRCA genes were first described in the early 1990s, the geneticization and biomedicalization of breast cancer remains a pressing issue: genetic research has not yet made an appreciable difference in the treatment of breast cancer, rates continue to climb (and cannot be attributed to inherited genes), and what environmental breast cancer advocates call ‘‘true’’ prevention (cleaner environments as a way to reduce the large number of breast cancer cases not attributable to more popular risk factors such as lifestyle) remains an elusive goal. Feminists have further shown how bodily matter is also a form of capital or, more specifically, biocapital, thus mapping one way in which biosociality is inextricably tied to the current economic system. For example, organs and other bodily tissues such as blood and ova that are donated or ‘‘gifted’’ generate considerable value (in the US context) for a for-profit medical care system. Moreover, their extraction requires a not insignificant amount of what has been termed biomedical labor (Waldby and Cooper 2008). BRCA testing is a particularly

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salient example of how biocapital is generated: women pay for the test, thus generating revenue for testing companies such as Myriad Genetics. What is more, the sequence information produced is not mere ‘‘knowledge’’ for the patient but produces value as data that is used by genomics companies for research and development on future pharmaceuticals and other medical interventions. Indeed, the data itself provides the basis for securing investment funds in the form of speculative finance capital. And when women elect to have their BRCA risk ‘‘treated’’ (via, e.g., prophylactic surgery, visual screening, or the administration of cancer drugs), additional profit is generated. Additionally, matter is often racialized in specific biomedical contexts. While attention to the risk of breast cancer among African American women can be the positive outcome of patient advocacy based on racial identity, in the context of inherited breast cancer, the role of ancestry in risk can easily, and insidiously, become one of biological race. A close examination of the language of geneticists betrays a logic of racialization (Happe 2013b). For example, despite the failure to find BRCA mutations linked to African ancestry, there nevertheless exists a persistent emphasis on the ‘‘unique’’ genetic profile of the African American mutation carrier, as well as a considerable emphasis on the unique phenotypic similarities among the breast cancer tumors diagnosed in both African American and African women. Breast cancer tumors, in other words, have become new vectors for the materialization of racial difference (Happe 2013a).

POSTGENOMICS AND RETHINKING THE GENEENVIRONMENT BINARY Most people are familiar with the model of biological development wherein the human genome, composed of DNA and sections of DNA called genes, provides instructions for cellular growth and specialization and also can predispose individuals to both rare genetic diseases and more chronic illnesses such as cancer. This model dates back to Francis Crick’s central dogma theory, holding that DNA is an unchanging molecule directing biological development in a unidirectional and strictly causal manner (the DNA-RNA-protein sequence). Although the Human Genome Project privileged this view, largely by focusing on sequencing the entirety of DNA and mapping genes, developments in the biological sciences have called into question many of the assumptions of the central dogma (Lewontin 1991). For example, geneticist Barbara McClintock (1902 1992), during her work in the 1940s and 1950s at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the state of New York, put forth the theory of transposition, which became a foundational theory of gene regulation and expression that challenged the then-dominant Mendelian paradigm (see Keller 1983). Transposition holds that the position and function of genes can change in response to environmental conditions internal and external to the organism. In addition, it is now known that a single gene can code for more than one protein, and several different genes can code for the exact same protein. (In 2001 geneticists announced that the human genome contained approximately 30,000 genes a significantly lower figure than the 100,000 figure when the Human Genome Project began. The number has since been revised again, to 19,000.) During a process called alternative splicing, spliceosomes (a type of protein) can code for development by rearranging RNA. Researchers have also analyzed prions proteins that code for other proteins but do not comprise amino acids, thus violating the central dogma postulate that there can be no transfer of genetic information other than through the DNA-RNA-protein sequence. Epigenetics provides yet another alternative view to the otherwise central role of DNA. GENDER: MATTER

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Epigenetics is a term used to describe the process by which chemical compounds and proteins can influence development (e.g., the expression of genes) without altering the actual DNA sequence of the cell. Put another way, the marks that these chemical groups and proteins make on DNA change the way cells use DNA coding information. One example is methylation, whereby a chemical compound called a methyl group attaches to DNA and can suppress gene expression. These postgenomic theories have led feminist biologist Evelyn Fox Keller (1936 ) to write that biological development should be understood as a ‘‘distributed program in which all the various DNA, RNA, and protein components function alternatively as instructions and as data’’ (2000, 146). In other words, DNA is as much acted on as acts, calling into question the importance of environments internal and external to the organism. Postgenomics thus holds considerable promise to displace the dominant role of DNA in discussions of health and disease, especially in areas that have disproportionately affected women. More radical still, rather than elevating the importance of environment over and above heredity, postgenomic theories of development promise to displace the nature-nurture binary entirely and with it the assumption of bounded, distinct entities interacting with one another. The current state of affairs arguably requires replacing altogether the language of biology and culture (and with it gene-environment interaction) with one that is ontologically and epistemologically new (Keller 2010). It makes no real sense, says Keller, to acknowledge, on the one hand, that DNA is effectively an inert molecule that has no ‘‘meaning’’ outside its interactions with environments and insist, on the other hand, that there remains something called geneenvironment interaction (because the term interaction assumes two preexisting entities). If the language of gene-environment interaction must be rethought, so too does research that aims to tease out the putatively independent roles of genes and environments in disease causation and prevention. (When the two are conceptualized as distinct, says Keller, it is almost always the case that genes take on more importance, especially when considering the allocation of research dollars.) Indeed, these postgenomic theories give considerable hope to environmental researchers and activists, many of whom identify as feminist, that the role of the environment in chronic illness will finally take center stage, leading not only to new and innovative theories of causation but also, and more importantly, to the passage of badly needed environmental laws. From a feminist perspective, this is all the more important given the ways in which environmental pollution disproportionately affects persons of nondominant gender, race, and class positionalities. Beyond the potential benefit of postgenomics for enabling progress in the context of environmental pollution and health disparities, theories of non-DNA environmental entities and their role in development has and will continue to inform feminist debates about matter and materialization. Australian philosopher and gender studies scholar Elizabeth Grosz (1953 ), in Volatile Bodies (1994), makes the case for what has been called corporeal feminism. Feminists, Grosz wrote, had privileged theories of language and culture at the expense of the material body. Although well intentioned (theories of biology have, for some time, constrained women, thus the desire and need to make conceptual distinctions between sex and gender), the priority of culture meant that an important component of actual lived experience embodiment had been left unexplained. Grosz put forward the visual metaphor of the Mo¨bius strip to capture how the somatic and psychic are never not intertwined in any given instance of lived experience. Some time later, feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad (1956 ) also questioned feminist theory’s privileging of language and discourse, observing that ‘‘the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter’’ (2003, 801). Over and against interaction, Barad proposes intra-action, a performative process through which ‘‘boundaries

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and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful’’ (815). Epigenetics is one example of intra-action insofar as it holds that one form of biological matter (e.g., genes) does not exist as an entity prior to its relations with other forms of matter (e.g., chemical compounds in the cell). The distinctions between the two ‘‘matter’’ only when observed and described by scientists in highly local, contingent contexts. Some feminists, especially those working from the theoretical perspectives of new materialism, have embraced epigenetics as a theory of biological development that holds the promise not only of privileging the study of environments but of radically rethinking the very notion of gene-environment interaction. For feminist theorist and scholar Noela Davis (2014), the implications of epigenetics for feminist theory are twofold: first, ‘‘binary theorizations of bodies and the social are not sustainable’’ (70), and second, it does not make sense to invert the binary, as ‘‘we are always already environmental, always already social, and the relations of difference, between body and environment, biology and the social, are relations of externality within us or, as [Vicki] Kirby says, a ‘difference [that] already inhabits the identity it would discriminate’’’ (70). Feminist philosophy and critical philosophy of race scholar Shannon Sullivan claims that epigenetics can ground feminist and antiracist politics. Drawing on evidence that the effects of white racism can be transgenerationally inherited, she writes that epigenetics ‘‘can be part of a critical race and feminist arsenal for combatting white racism by fully comprehending the extent of white supremacy and white privilege. Simply put, whether we like it or not, the social often becomes durably and transgenerationally biological, and thus so do social injustices such as white domination. Epigenetics shows us one way that this happens’’ (2013, 206). For example, toxic chemicals, which disproportionately contaminate the environments of African Americans in the United States, can initiate epigenetic changes in the body, thereby increasing one’s risk for chronic health problems. These health risks can beset subsequent generations, making them a pressing issue for policy makers and regulators. The health effects of stress and social isolation associated with racism can also exert epigenetic effects across generations. What makes epigenetics an especially powerful scientific tool in efforts to fight racism is that it privileges the social and environmental as fundamental for antiracist social activisms and policy reform, especially as its main operating principle is that epigenetic effects can be effectively reversed. This reversal is tantamount to broad reform in the name of social justice. Taking the example of prenatal care, Sullivan writes, ‘‘nonmedical aspects of contemporary black people’s lives, such as community building and urban renewal, improved schools and educational opportunities, wage equality, and support for working mothers and families, are closely tied to the health and well-being of future generations of African Americans and thus should be considered a fundamental part of prenatal care, rather than incidental or unrelated to it’’ (2013, 212). Despite the radical potential of epigenetics and other postgenomic theories of biology, feminist scholars have shown that normative assumptions about difference inform a substantial amount of this research just as they influenced earlier genetic research. Sarah S. Richardson has written that ‘‘rather than conceptualizing genes as agents in a linear causal chain, epigenetics and related postgenomics disciplines see genes as difference makers within embodied contexts’’ (2015, 211). Richardson has looked closely at the ways in which researchers conceptualize the maternal body in their pursuit of epigenetic explanations of fetal development. The problem, says Richardson, is that paternal contributions to the epigenetic process are deemphasized, and the research has not led to the improvement of women’s lives the result being that pregnant women (and women with reproductive capacity) will continue to be targets of discipline and surveillance (see also Mansfield and Guthman 2015; Happe, forthcoming). GENDER: MATTER

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Summary The genome and epigenome may comprise chemical matter, but because this matter is part and parcel of human bodies, it is inextricably bound with cultural beliefs. As Judith Butler (1990) argues, bodies are never not gendered and racialized, and so what is true about the visible body is equally true about its most elemental, basic components. Whether it is the gendering of the X chromosome or the surgical removal of breasts to reduce inherited risk for cancer, genes materialize bodily norms. And although new developments in postgenomics promise to displace the central and privileged position of DNA in scientists’ understanding of biological development, sustained feminist analysis is necessary to see this promise fulfilled. This discussion further shows that bodily matter occupies historically specific relations with material resources. During the period of popular eugenicist science and policy, bodily matter was blamed for both the consequences of industrialization and the responses to it (as when eugenicists placed the blame for labor unrest on unfit genes). Today, genetic testing, whether used for prenatal diagnosis or the assessment of lifetime risk for chronic illness such as breast cancer, also situates bodily matter as a privileged space of intervention rather than the realm of environmental and public health policy. Nevertheless, feminist scholarship has fruitfully documented how scientific knowledge about genetics and epigenetics is sometimes used to improve the everyday lives of women, often in unexpected ways, as when genetic risk information is used to advocate for better allocation of resources for women’s health. The power to surveil and control women’s bodies and lives is never absolute, and so debates within feminist studies about the relationship between matter, the body, culture, and politics will continue to be both necessary and robust.

Bibliography Barad, Karen. ‘‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Under standing of How Matter Comes to Matter.’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801 831. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subver sion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Davis, Noela. ‘‘Politics Materialized: Rethinking the Materi ality of Feminist Political Action through Epigenetics.’’ Women: A Cultural Review 25, no. 1 (2014): 62 77. doi:10.1080/09574042.2014.901101. Fausto Sterling, Anne. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Fausto Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Gibbon, Sahra. Breast Cancer Genes and the Gendering of Knowledge: Science and Citizenship in the Context of the ‘‘New’’ Genetics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Fem inism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

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Happe, Kelly E. ‘‘The Body of Race: Toward a Rhetorical Understanding of Racial Ideology.’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 2 (2013a): 131 155. doi:10.1080/ 00335630.2013.775700. Happe, Kelly E. ‘‘Epigenetics and the Biocitizen.’’ In Biocitzen ship: Lively Subjects, Embodied Sociality, and Posthuman Politics, edited by Kelly E. Happe, Jenell Johnson, and Marina Levina. New York: New York University Press, forthcoming. Happe, Kelly E. ‘‘Heredity, Gender, and the Discourse of Ovarian Cancer.’’ New Genetics and Society 25, no. 2 (2006): 171 196. doi:10.1080/14636770600855226. Happe, Kelly E. The Material Gene: Gender, Race, and Heredity after the Human Genome Project. New York: New York University Press, 2013b. Happe, Kelly E. ‘‘Race Betterment and Class Consciousness at the Turn of the Century, or Why It’s Okay to Marry Your Cousin.’’ In Turning the Century: Essays in Media and Cultural Studies, edited by Carol A. Stabile, 166 186. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000.

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Jolie, Angelina. ‘‘My Medical Choice.’’ New York Times, May 14, 2013, A25. Keller, Evelyn Fox. The Century of the Gene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Keller, Evelyn Fox. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. San Francisco: W. H. Free man, 1983. Keller, Evelyn Fox. The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. King, Mary Claire, Ephrat Levy Lahad, and Amnon Lahad. ‘‘Population Based Screening for BRCA1 and BRCA2.’’ Journal of the American Medical Association 312, no. 11 (2014): 1091 1092. Kline, Wendy. Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Lewontin, R. C. Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. Lippman, Abby. ‘‘Prenatal Genetic Testing and Screening: Constructing Needs and Reinforcing Inequities.’’ American Journal of Law and Medicine 17, nos. 1 2 (1991): 15 50. Mansfield, Becky, and Julie Guthman. ‘‘Epigenetic Life: Bio logical Plasticity, Abnormality, and New Configurations of Race and Reproduction.’’ Cultural Geographies 22, no. 1 (2015): 3 20. doi:10.1177/1474474014555659. Rabinow, Paul. ‘‘Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Soci obiology to Biosociality.’’ In Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, 234 252. New York: Zone Books, 1992.

Richardson, Sarah S. ‘‘Maternal Bodies in the Postgenomic Order: Gender and the Explanatory Landscape of Epige netics.’’ In Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology after the Genome, edited by Sarah S. Richardson and Hallam Ste vens, 210 231. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Richardson, Sarah S. ‘‘Sexing the X: How the X Became the ‘Female Chromosome.’’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37, no. 4 (2012): 909 933. Roberts, Dorothy. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re create Race in the Twenty First Cen tury. New York: New Press, 2011. Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Sellers Diamond, Alfreda A. ‘‘Disposable Children in Black Faces: The Violence Initiative as Inner City Containment Policy.’’ University of Missouri at Kansas City Law Review 62, no. 3 (1994): 423 469. Sullivan, Shannon. ‘‘Inheriting Racist Disparities in Health: Epigenetics and the Transgenerational Effects of White Racism.’’ Critical Philosophy of Race 1, no. 2 (2013): 190 218. doi:10.5325/critphilrace.1.2.0190. Waldby, Catherine, and Melinda Cooper. ‘‘The Biopolitics of Reproduction: Post Fordist Biotechnology and Wom en’s Clinical Labour.’’ Australian Feminist Studies 23, no. 55 (2008): 57 73. doi:10.1080/08164640701816223. Watson, James D., and Francis H. C. Crick. ‘‘Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid.’’ Nature 171, no. 4361 (1953a): 964 967.

Rapp, Rayna. ‘‘Refusing Prenatal Diagnosis: The Meanings of Bioscience in a Multicultural World.’’ Science, Tech nology, and Human Values 23, no. 1 (1998): 45 70. doi:10.1177/016224399802300103.

Watson, James D., and Francis H. C. Crick. ‘‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.’’ Nature 171, no. 4356 (1953b): 737 738.

Rapp, Rayna. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. New York: Rout ledge, 1999.

Wiley, Harvey W. ‘‘Making the New American.’’ Good Housekeeping, September 1919, 68, 164 167.

Reilly, Philip R. ‘‘Involuntary Sterilization in the United States: A Surgical Solution.’’ Quarterly Review of Biology 62, no. 2 (1987): 153 170.

WEBSITE

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National Institutes of Health. Genetics Home Reference. https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov.

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CHAPTER 24

Science Fiction Sherryl Vint Professor, Department of English University of California, Riverside

Science fiction (sf) envisions the world as different from people’s habituated assumptions about reality. The genre has strong ties to utopian literature, and feminist sf has long used the genre’s techniques to question hegemonic assumptions about gender and sexuality. Indeed, themes of sexuality and gender are so central to sf that the James Tiptree Jr. Award named for American writer Alice Sheldon (1915 1987), who published works about sexuality and gender under the (male) Tiptree pseudonym annually recognizes a work that best explores and expands understanding of gender and sexuality. This chapter provides an overview of a number of ways that sf and feminist materialisms share perspectives on the world and offer tools for thinking about matter in ways that challenge complacent notions of reality, sexuality, gender, and even human identity. It explores these parallels through five conceptual frameworks that define critical intervention of new materialisms, novel ways of thinking about matter that sf can illuminate via concrete example: 1. the extension of agency to organisms other than humans, including the idea that matter itself has agency; 2. concern with the environment, particularly with an ethics theorized at the level of ecosystems rather than individuals; 3. an understanding of machines as extensions of ourselves and even as autonomous beings in their own right; 4. a commitment to thinking about the world, matter, agency, and ethics beyond the priorities and perceptions of humans; and 5. a sense of matter as fluid and dynamic, of the world as a series of processes rather than a set of fixed objects. Science fiction at its core asks for contemplation of the nature and limits of the human, and it joins with feminist materialisms in prompting a more inclusive consideration of ideas about science, nature, and matter. The worlds sf imagines can make visible questions that feminist materialisms explore. Both the genre and the theory push people beyond their comfort zones, prompting them to imagine not only how the world might be otherwise but indeed to recognize how it is more and other than some customary ideas might suggest. The genre allows entrance into a world that steps outside the taken-for-granted image of reality conveyed by mainstream fiction, transcending the limited ideologies of sex and gender often emblematized by such fiction.

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American feminist writer Joanna Russ’s (1937 2011) The Female Man (1975), for example, demonstrates the deforming effects of patriarchal ideology on women by showing how radically different the same woman, J (Joanna, Janine, Ja-el, Janet), becomes through living in worlds with diverse gender ideologies. The novel uses a structure of parallel worlds to show how a material body that is exactly the same on each world becomes four distinct people with different bodily morphologies as a result of different social experiences of gender. The J individuals function as foils or ideals for what any might have become, a structure that highlights the way gender ideology changes the matter of the body. Janine, whose world sees women as inherently weaker than men, is a pale shadow of Janet, in whose world all men have died, and so she grew up without needing to understand herself as the ‘‘other’’ of man. Joanna and Ja-el, whose worlds are shaped by female resistance to hegemonic patriarchy, are both damaged in different ways by this struggle. In an sf world, nothing can be taken for granted. The Female Man shows how patriarchy shapes women’s bodies and minds in ways that damage their senses of self-worth and often damage their capacities as well, as women are unable to achieve their full potential when discouraged by ideologies that convince them they are incapable. Similarly, American sf and fantasy writer Melissa Scott’s (1960 ) Shadow Man (1995) questions heteronormativity and rejects the idea that gender binaries are given by nature. In the world of the novel, a drug taken to cope with the effects of faster-than-light travel increases intersexed births, resulting in a culture of five distinct genders (marked by permutations of chromosomes, secondary sexual characteristics, primary sexual morphological characteristics, and orientation). The novel explores the encounter between this world and an isolated, antiquated colony that never experienced this shift and hence believes only two genders and heterosexuality are ‘‘normal.’’ This estranged point of view on the world most like the world external to the novel encourages readers to question their own assumptions about gender and sexuality. Scott’s projection is more than just an abstract thought experiment: it draws on work by American gender studies scholar Anne Fausto-Sterling (1944 ) that focuses on the wider biological basis for variation in human sexuality and gender than is allowed for by social ideologies. These examples point to key ways in which gender and new materialist theory are entwined. While an earlier era of feminist thought resisted dominant Western assumptions that conflated women with the body and with nature, devaluing all three, new feminist materialisms focus on reconceptualizing the material world as active instead of passive. Such scholars see this world as vital and productive of multiple meanings and identities, not as a fixed reservoir of narrowly defined gender, racial, and sexual norms. American science and technology scholar Donna Haraway’s (1944 ) essay ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto’’ (1991) reveals the powerful connections between sf thinking and such theory. She argues that the cyborg, a creature outside the nature/culture binary, is an apt figuration for feminist subjectivity, one that ‘‘can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves’’ (181). Crucially, Haraway insists that feminism must embrace science and technology to understand that the material world and the social meanings attached to it are multiple. The genre’s interest in the cultures of science, then, is one of the reasons sf is well suited to exploring ideas within feminist materialisms. Like such theories, sf understands that ‘‘complex issues such as climate change or global capital and population flows, the biotechnological engineering of genetically modified organisms, or the saturation of our intimate and physical lives by digital, wireless, and virtual technologies’’ (Coole and Frost 2010, 6) require an interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis attentive to

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both material and social worlds. The sections that follow show how sf texts can create worlds that allow for a more ready understanding of how the material and the social shape one another. Such narratives encourage understanding of and engagement with the world in a new way and envision matter as new materialisms envision it.

WHAT IS SCIENCE FICTION? Pages of academic and fan discussion have been devoted to defining sf and differentiating it from, on the one hand, mainstream fiction that might engage science and technology and, on the other, fantasy, which, like sf, is set in a world different in some way from the world of the reader. As American professor of English John Rieder notes, genres are historically malleable categories by which texts are organized, and other kinds of political and social struggles inform and motivate the conversations in this intellectual (and often commercial) work of genre definition. The key point, he explains, is to recognize that genre is a social category as much as an aesthetic one. The term science fiction was popularized by Luxembourgian American Hugo Gernsback (1884 1967), an influential magazine editor in the 1920s, and he proclaimed it as the label for what he anticipated would be forward-looking fiction rooted in an experience of twentieth-century technologized modernity, a new kind of literature for a world in which science was the most important kind of knowledge. In contrast, the most influential scholarly definition of sf is that put forward by Croatian-born Marxist critic Darko Suvin (1940 ), who defines it as the ‘‘literature of cognitive estrangement’’ (Suvin 1979, 4). Suvin argues that sf is a literature premised upon discontinuity from the empirical world, yet it is one whose features are ‘‘not impossible’’ (viii) in that world. He feels that sf is ‘‘allied to the rise of subversive social classes’’ and contrasts it favorably against an ‘‘opposed tendency toward mystifying escapism’’ (ix) that he associates with religious visions of otherworldly fulfillment and genre fantasy. He rejects as mere escapist literature most of what Gernsback celebrates and seeks an origin for the genre instead in utopian literature and European traditions of surrealism that use techniques of alienation for social critique. Thus, although the term science fiction conveys to most readers a certain set of expectations about the text so described, the boundaries of the genre are blurry rather than sharp. At certain historical moments, differentiating sf from related genres has been viewed as an important critical project, but currently most critics see this as a minor issue at best, acknowledging that fantasy too, contra Suvin, can do important political and ideological work. Similarly, writers are interested in the kinds of worlds they can create as they think beyond realism and do not police themselves to create texts that definitely can be categorized under a genre label. Indeed, many people use the broadly inclusive term speculative fiction to denote that shared techniques and intellectual investments are more important than definitive genre labels. The relationship between science and sf, while it is not simply a matter of fidelity or inspiration, is one criterion that continues to set much of it apart from other speculative genres, and this relationship to science is key to the connections drawn here between sf and new materialisms, given that this philosophical orientation toward matter finds its counterpoint in new scientific research that requires a recognition that the world is more vibrant and spontaneous than anyone might have once believed. In sf studies, the critical conversation has moved away from understanding the genre through specific formal characteristics and toward seeing it as a mode of engagement with the material world. Such perspectives suggest that sf is something more like a tendency within texts, a way of questioning the status quo of reality, a mode that extends across a number of GENDER: MATTER

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media: textual, visual, and interactive. Indeed, although much of the history of sf criticism concerns its print form, from its earliest days the genre has included visual art, films, comic books, radio plays, and more. Many critics note that scenarios and icons of sf are converging with those of fiction overall as material science continues to create entities that once were restricted to sf. Far from disappearing as contemporary life becomes more like sf, the genre now exerts an influence over much of cultural production. It is best understood as a politically enabling mode of mythmaking that aids exploration and reflection upon the unfolding dialectical exchange between imaginative vision and material reality. Although the mere presence or absence of certain icons that have come to be associated with sf spaceships, robots, aliens, and so on are not the definitive criterion for identifying a text as part of the genre, such entities are powerful metaphors for thinking about agency, materiality, and ethics in new ways, and the centrality of these icons within sf explains why the genre shares so many affinities with feminist materialisms.

AGENCY AND ACTANTS The most important way that sf may be understood as a genre of new materialisms is that its characters are not limited to humans. A key premise of new materialist theory is that agency does not belong exclusively to humans. Instead of seeing the world as made up of objects (animals, molecules, rocks, proteins) waiting for human actors to use them, French philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour (1947 ) proposes the term actants to designate that all meanings result from collaborations among all these various entities, including humans. His Aramis; or, The Love of Technology (1996) is both a work of science studies and a novel of sorts, indebted to British writer Mary Shelley’s (1797 1851) Frankenstein (1818). It argues that the Creature (in Latour’s case, an eponymous commuter train) must be allowed to speak for itself if humans hope to understand how technological objects are born. As Latour shows in his travels among various stakeholders, ‘‘Interpretations of the project cannot be separated from the project itself’’ (Latour 1996, 172), because what constitutes Aramis is different for different agents. Both human and nonhuman actants politicians and engineers but also load-bearing materials and electrical forces of magnetic couplings have their roles to play in this collaboration. All of them are given voice by Latour’s prose, a technique that links sf style with new materialist vision. Similarities are evident between the kinds of characters possible to imagine in sf and a mode of theorizing matter that is distinctive of new materialisms. In Vibrant Matter (2010) American political theorist Jane Bennett (1957 ) seeks to understand things themselves rather than the human experience of things, to recognize in the world a ‘‘vital materialism,’’ not just ‘‘dull matter’’ (Bennett 2010, vii). For Bennett, this requires a transformed practice of science implicit in seeing nature as actant rather than resource. ‘‘The desire of the craftsperson to see what a metal can do, rather than the desire of the scientist to know what a metal is,’’ she argues, ‘‘enable[s] the former to discern a life in metal and thus, eventually, to collaborate more productively with it’’ (60). Such orientations are not mere abstractions but rather shape how humans live in the world and the kinds of futures produced through their choices. Bennett’s intervention is premised on her belief that ‘‘the image of thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’’ (ix). Like Haraway’s cyborg, Bennett’s vital materialism insists on a politics of responsibility for other life. A story that beautifully captures this ethos is American-born Irish writer Anne McCaffery’s (1926 2011) ‘‘Velvet Fields’’ (1973), about a colonial expedition that discovers a planet complete with abandoned cities designed for humanoid use, lush agricultural fields (but no

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herbivores), and the remnants of a cultural practice that seems to worship trees, although trees too are absent. After ten years of occupation, during which they use these fields and cities, the humans discover an aspect of the local ecosystem they could have recognized sooner had they been more attentive to anomalies: this world ‘‘had not, after all, been abandoned by its occupants . . . but had simply been lying fallow with the indigenous natives quiescently in residence’’ (McCaffery 1973). These indigenes grow in an initial vegetative form following a life cycle whose differences from the human are significant enough that the species is not even recognized as alive until irreparable damage has been done. The story ends with the colonists recognizing that the damaged flesh of the new generation of indigenes is precisely the same flesh that has enabled occupying Terrans to thrive and their choosing to take responsibility for this debt. In a world in which science increasingly materializes visions once found only in sf, such materialist feminist perspectives on ethics are indispensable. This becomes clear in contrasting Bennett’s notion of someone seeking to see what a metal can do with this description of science in American biotechnologist J. Craig Venter’s (1946 ) Life at the Speed of Light (2014): ‘‘Since the birth of the Scientific Revolution, in the sixteenth century, a principal goal of science has not only been to investigate the cosmos at its most basic level but also to master it’’ (10). Venter is one of the most influential genomic scientists of the present age whose J. Craig Venter Institute has created Mycoplasma laboratorium, the first artificially created living organism. Venter tells the story of this bacterium’s creation, calling to mind Frankenstein and its investigations of scientific responsibility. Like Victor Frankenstein, Venter seeks to master life and death, and it is clear that to him the material world is not vital: it is merely chemicals he can understand, manipulate, and reassemble in desired forms. Feminist criticism has long recognized that this fantasy of mastery emerges from Western constructions of masculinity: indeed, Shelley’s own critique of Victor Frankenstein in her novel rests on a vision of his hubris as a creator entwined with his irresponsibility in failing to foster new life as a parent. Ongoing work in feminist science studies continues to make this point about the myopia of such scientific practice, seeing more promise in a feminist science that recognizes that ‘‘we are not in charge of the world. We just live here and try to strike up non-innocent conversations by means of our prosthetic devices, including our visualization technologies’’ (Haraway 1991b, 199). By ‘‘non-innocent’’ Haraway means that knowledge cannot be formed from some neutral and abstract position: the processes of making knowledge are always embedded in exchanges with an active material world, a world that is changed by such interactions. Far from collaborating with the material world, Venter seeks to remake it through an agency he attributes to humans alone, a vision that does not erase the fact that his actions materially affect the world but merely allows him to deny or ignore this fact. The point here is not to portray Venter as a ‘‘mad scientist’’ but rather to point out that the lessons of Shelley’s text remain fundamental. Venter’s title comes from research that ‘‘is perfecting a way to send the digitized versions of DNA code in the form of an electromagnetic wave and then use a unique receiver at a distant location to re-create life’’ (Venter 2014, 162), and he paints a compelling portrait of some of the benefits that such technology might enable instant distribution of vaccines, 3-D printing of synthetic tissue for medicine, the creation of synthetic bacteria to combat destructive environmental contaminants. Yet his view of DNA as mere software implies a level of mastery belied by experience, such as the unexpected consequences of massive antibiotic use. The techniques of sf, which narrate a world of more-than-human agency and require the portrayal of both science and the social, illuminate implications of scientific research that are often otherwise invisible. GENDER: MATTER

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ENVIRONMENT AND ECOLOGY Even the world can be the protagonist in an sf text, and indeed the genre is often understood to be more interested in the worlds it creates than in the inner lives of the humans who populate them. While this focus on world instead of character has led to the dismissal of sf as an inferior mode of literature by some, this same quality makes the genre a rich resource for innovative theoretical and philosophical approaches to the world, including new materialisms. There is a long history of environmental sf that helps envision the world as a living system that humans shape and change by their actions, and this makes the genre ideal for thinking in complex ways about climate change and environmental contamination. American ecocultural theorist Stacy Alaimo argues that ‘‘environmental justice insists upon the material interconnections between specific bodies and specific places, especially the peoples and areas that have been literally dumped upon’’ (Alaimo 2010, 28) and notes that the ‘‘unequal distribution of environmental benefits and environmental harms’’ (28 29) often mirror historical patterns of discrimination along axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Environmental sf makes this reality more visible through extrapolation, such as in British novelist John Brunner’s (1934 1995) Stand on Zanzibar (1968), which mixes a future narrative with extracts from books, overheard moments of conversation, lyrics from popular songs, and more. Brunner’s chapters are organized under four rubrics ‘‘Continuity,’’ ‘‘Tracking with Closeups,’’ ‘‘The Happening World,’’ ‘‘Context’’ that suggest the overlapping worlds of science and the social, the personal and the political, the individual and the global. ‘‘Context’’ sections mix in-text commentary with real headlines from the 1960s contemporary to the book’s publication. Thematically concerned with overpopulation, the novel traces the convoluted chains of events that connect colonial politics of economic ‘‘development’’ and resource extraction with politics of reproductive privilege in an overcrowded First World, with genetic engineering of a nature that has its own agency. The novel’s innovative structure reveals how the material and the social intersect and interact, a perspective similar to Alaimo’s arguments about the material self of trans-corporeal feminism. Because ‘‘the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial,’’ Alaimo argues, ‘‘what was once the ostensibly bounded human subject finds herself in a swirling landscape of uncertainty where practices and actions that were once not even remotely ethical or political matters suddenly become the very stuff of the crises at hand’’ (Alaimo 2010, 20). It is difficult and challenging to think of human beings as always engaged in political choices even when doing the most ordinary things, such as shopping for groceries or taking antibiotics, because the complex systems that sustain the range of choices deemed viable are generally hidden from view, just part of the background of ‘‘how things are.’’ The power of sf is that it creates a new world it must explain to readers: this emphasis on how things came to be the way they are thus foregrounds questions of historical contingency. Thinking about how sf worlds are made can prompt thinking about how the human world is made, how humans continue to make it through daily choices. By now the fact that environmental consequences attach to human actions, such as the continued reliance on oil or the environmental costs of eating meat, is familiar, but at times these networks are challenging to trace and have capricious implications difficult to foresee. American screenwriter and director Ramin Bahrani’s (1975 ) short film Plastic Bag (2010) shows how sf can offer novel insights. Narrated by the eponymous bag and voiced by German filmmaker Werner Herzog (1942 ), the film tells its life story, from first use in a grocery store

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to final community among thousands of its kind in the great Pacific garbage patch. The personification of the bag is a reminder of how much such manufactured entities are a part of daily existence. When it is discarded, the bag experiences all the existential angst of Frankenstein’s creature, unloved and abandoned by its creator and left to become monstrous in a world in which it lacks a purpose. The plastic bag experiences a classic fate of fictional artificial beings, the loneliness of longevity, a life span beyond that of the people whom it ‘‘serves.’’ The film encourages thinking about the environment in sf time frames of hundreds or thousands of years instead of merely within the human life span, a necessary perspective for environmental ethics that includes future generations and nonhuman actants. A further meaning of the film emerges when it is read through Alaimo’s trans-corporeal feminism, which refuses a binary of human and world and ‘‘underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’’’ (Alaimo 2010, 2). Although it is tempting to think of such exchanges between human bodies and the material world in romanticized terms such as the ‘‘bounty’’ of nature, Alaimo insists on the necessity of thinking about the toxic bodies produced by such interactions as well, and the example of plastic is particularly instructive here. At first glance, plastic seems firmly in the realm of object, a thing and not an organism. Yet as recent research on polyvinyl chloride (PVC) forms of plastic reveals, the phthalates that make such plastic malleable mimic hormonal activity in human and other bodies. Biologically, these ‘‘thing’’ chemicals of nonorganic plastic are very close to the organic chemicals that interact with endocrine systems. Trans-corporeality shows how substances travel both across and within the human body and materially enact change in ways that prevent thinking of the self as separate from the world. What seems science fictional the plastic bag as actant, the plastic page as materially part of the human body proves more aptly to capture a reality of how plastics function in daily life than could a realist text that would see the plastic bag as inert object.

LIVELY TECHNOLOGIES Robots, augmented bodies, and intelligent machines are among the first icons that come to mind when one hears the label sf, and here too affinities exist with new materialisms. The sf understanding of the material world as alive extends beyond the organic and includes the vitalism of machines. Such posthumanist thinking asks questions about subjectivity that resist the narrowness of the category ‘‘human’’ as it has been historically defined. Italian-born material feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti (1954 ) finds in the posthuman a figuration as potent as Haraway’s cyborg but one that better conveys more recent turns toward the subjectivity of animals and entities such as immortal cell lines. Asking questions about whether such organisms are alive requires decoupling understandings of ‘‘living’’ and ‘‘conscious,’’ and asking whether they are human similarly requires recognizing that humanity is both a biological identity and a social designation, one not always granted to all Homo sapiens. Material feminist analyses show how deeply gender ideology penetrates depictions of artificial beings and thus how much the default concept of ‘‘human’’ has been premised on a default masculinity. The provocative film Ex Machina (2015) explores this heritage. It concerns a Turing test conducted on an artificial intelligence (AI), Ava, who is embodied in humanoid form. Unlike a typical Turing test, in which the tester tries to guess if the interlocutor is human or AI, in the film Caleb sees that Ava is a machine, and the question becomes whether he can nonetheless be convinced that she has consciousness. The dilemma turns on a distinction between seeming and GENDER: MATTER

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Scene from Ex Machina, 2015. Gender and the human: Kyoto and Ava as others to humanist ‘‘man.’’

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being: Can a machine truly be conscious, or can it merely simulate consciousness? The film hints at the degree to which humans are already in social and emotional exchange with machines: most of Caleb’s interactions with others are mediated through technology, and Ava’s ability to perform and read human expressions comes from data harvested from smartphones. The difference between machine and human, Caleb reveals through a research anecdote, is having knowledge of the property called color versus having the phenomenological, material experience of perceiving color. Ex Machina makes embodiment central to Ava’s ability to convey consciousness, putting an emphasis on materiality that some early AI theory overlooked by suggesting that thinking was an abstract activity that could be done in the virtual realm entirely. Most of Ava’s body is transparent, with some gleaming silver and glowing lights, but her upper torso is opaque mesh that molds curving breasts, while her lower torso is similarly opaque across her buttocks and upper thighs. Her face, hands, and feet are flesh colored and humanoid, but the rest of her limbs are transparent plastic. Ava is thus overtly gendered, many medium and long shots framing her sexy, feminine silhouette. Yet she is equally and powerfully inhuman, only later donning clothing and a wig to hide her robotic parts. The film thus asks viewers to think about gender as a constructed performance, given Ava’s ability so effectively to convey her femininity even when her machinic embodiment is visible on screen. Eventually learning that Ava very clearly is conscious pushes viewers to ask the question of whether gender is a property of machines. The plot centers on Ava’s seduction of Caleb. She persuades him to see her as vulnerable and abused by her creator, Nathan. Nathan’s aggressive behavior and callous attitude toward Ava and his female companion, Kyoko, mark him as unlikable, but it is only near the end of the film, when Kyoko is revealed to be a robot, that the commonality becomes evident in how a certain kind of patriarchal gaze can reduce women as well as AIs to things. Nathan’s real test is to see if Ava is capable of the emotional connection required to embroil Caleb in her plans for escape. Viewers watch an eroticized Ava on-screen just as Caleb watches her, and the film confronts viewers with their investment in seeing female bodies when Kyoko later peels away the flesh covering her robotic body in striptease-like gestures. Viewers have become accustomed to watching Ava’s body on-screen, and so Kyoko’s actions are enticing, but when she uses similarly graceful gestures to peel skin from her face, the emotional register quickly tips to horror.

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The film concludes with Ava escaping but leaving Caleb trapped in her place. One last opportunity to watch her body on display transfixes Caleb as he waits patiently for her to return. In this disturbing sequence, Ava views a number of other female robots kept in closets, each with a mirror on the door, like so many waiting sex dolls. Where Ava mainly has robotic parts visible, these robots, like Kyoko, are covered with flesh, so that they appear to be women in boxes. Ava chooses the synthetic flesh of another Asian body, Jade, to cover her robotic form and leaves the compound. It is unclear whether this conclusion reflects her dangerous inhumanity in her disregard for Caleb now that her use for him is gone she does not even glance at him as she leaves or simply shows the consequences of treating other entities as things: Nathan has given her little reason for generosity. The strong parallels between treating women as things and treating robots as things that recur throughout the film should cause discomfort about the simultaneously intimate and instrumental relationships humans have with machines in daily life, such as the smartphones that are Ava’s distant ancestors. Moreover, Ava’s choice of Jade’s flesh and her escape in contrast to Kyoko’s death may point to the increased dangers of commodification for women of color and perhaps even act as a reminder of the globalized system of exploited labor, often labor by women of color, that produces such shiny electronics, as Haraway pointed out long ago in her essay ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto.’’ Ava emerges as someone with agency by the film’s conclusion, but unlike most earlier stories of robots and AIs, her intelligence and desires are not anthropomorphic. The film participates in an sf tradition that has long used figures of robots or AIs to stand in for oppressed classes of humans, and such entities frequently aspire to be regarded as human, such as Star Trek’s well-known Commander Data. Ex Machina presents the far more difficult idea of recognizing the agency of a truly nonhuman consciousness, prompting considerations beyond the human as the locus for ethical responsibility even as it simultaneously reminds us of a history of women and people of color who have often been excluded from this designation of fully human. This is most evident in connections between the film and Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972), which imagines a group of men whose wives are increasingly politicized by second-wave feminism and who replace these difficult ‘‘models’’ with compliant robotic upgrades: here the sympathy is entirely with the destroyed women, and the robots are merely things. Ex Machina is compelling, because it pushes thinking beyond the platitudes of these earlier texts. Before viewers know that Kyoko is a robot, Nathan’s treatment of her evokes a disturbing reality of marginalized and often female immigrant labor, and so it comes as something of a relief when the realization dawns that it is a robot rather than a human he treats so dismissively. Yet should this be the case? The film presents the difficult demand that viewers think about ethical duties toward the nonhuman but ends before it interrogates these issues very deeply. Read through new materialisms, Ava and Kyoko’s stories point toward theorizing the parallels among a masculinist scientific culture that would see all of nature, women, people of color, and lively machines as mere things to be used for (male) human ends.

BEYOND ANTHROPOCENTRISM Each of these conceptual frameworks thus far agency, environment, machinic life points to the way in which both materialist feminisms and sf are interested in thinking about matter and life beyond the human. Within sf these questions are often explored through posthuman characters, that is, characters who are machinic or animal/alien or augmented beyond what is thought of as ‘‘natural’’ human embodiment. Braidotti urges taking a further step in thinking GENDER: MATTER

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about the connections between posthumanism and new materialisms, arguing that instead of seeing the posthuman as a figure of augmented embodiment, such as a cyborg or a genetically modified being, posthumanism may be construed as a new orientation for thinking about matter ‘‘an assumption about the vital, self-organizing, and yet non-naturalistic structure of living matter itself’’ (Braidotti 2013, 1). Thinking about matter and ethics from a posthuman perspective raises a number of new questions about nature, culture, science, and agency, chief among them, as Braidotti outlines, ‘‘what new forms of subjectivity are supported by the posthuman?’’ (3). Twenty-first-century politics struggles with questions of posthumanism on a regular basis, grappling with issues in which the default of ‘‘human rights’’ is no longer sufficient. For example, how does one adjudicate between the value of life embodied in a transgenic animal used for research versus that embodied in the still-growing cell cultures extracted from a human who is no longer alive? Are either of these organisms human? Should they be regarded as human? Put otherwise, what is at stake in ethical practice if the world is theorized as divided between active humans and inert matter? What are the limitations of a posthumanism envisioned only as a transcendence fantasy of technological disembodiment, and how might sf aid in imagining other kinds of posthuman becomings? American writer Paolo Bacigalupi’s (1972 ) ‘‘The People of Sand and Slag’’ (2004) shows what it would mean to technological posthumanism that simply extends the human, evident in visions of uploading human minds to achieve eternal digital life or inhabiting invulnerable genetically engineered bodies. Told from the point of view of such posthumans, the story depicts them as alien and even dreadful in their casual indifference to material bodies. Guardians of mining activity who destroy intruders and spend their spare time playing violent video games or physically drone bombing ‘‘Antarctic Recessionists’’ for fun, these protagonists have no sense of the material world as vital it is neither important nor alive to them. Their offhand descriptions of recreational activities delineate a world of great violence in which they routinely inflict massive physical injury on bodies that are designed to heal quickly, unlike organic life-forms that do not possess these special properties. They can eat anything, including inorganic matter, and are undaunted by the dangers of the polluted landscape around them with its oil-slick seas, razor wire, and pools of acid rain. Improbably, they discover a dog. Unaugmented organic beings are unknown to them, and they are stunned when it fails to heal after they violently force it into a cage. Despite such treatment, the dog bonds with them as the result of thousands of years of species coevolution, programming these posthumans have simply discarded in their redesign. They consult a biologist, whose job is to study DNA sequences for their strategic use in a ‘‘biojob’’ (Bacigalupi 2004); the idea of studying living animals is inconceivable. The biologist tells them that ‘‘in the past, people believed that we should have compassion for all things on Earth,’’ but they find this idea impenetrable. They are briefly amused by the novelty of the dog and keep it, even though ‘‘it’s as delicate as rock. You break it, and it never comes back together.’’ Its capacity to learn tricks is unsettling, ‘‘like sending signals to aliens,’’ because their only experience with nonhuman life is with that designed to serve them. In the end, keeping such a delicate organism alive in their environment proves too expensive and inconvenient; looking down at the injured dog needing treatment from razor wire cuts, ‘‘a mass of panting, trusting animal’’ (Bacigalupi 2004), they decide to eat it instead. Yet materiality has left its haunting presence, and the narrator ends by saying how he misses things such as ‘‘when the dog licked my face and hauled its shaggy bulk onto my bed.’’ Humanity is unquestionably impoverished by its distance from other life. The story does

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not overtly address gender: its posthumans include both male and female characters, and they are so detached from their own bodies which they treat as infinitely malleable prosthetics that any notion of a ‘‘natural’’ gender is but a distant memory in this world. Yet the story points to a distinctively feminist conception of new materialism, one that imagines a deeper knowledge of reality and a richer experience of the world in becoming attentive to other beings as ethical entities. On the surface, the lives of these augmented posthumans should be glorious: they are powerful and impervious to harm. Yet the introduction of the dog shows their lives to be diminished rather than enhanced by their technotranscendence. The story thus aligns with a tradition of feminist critique of humanism that sees embodiment as ‘‘on the side of anomaly, deviance, monstrosity and bestiality,’’ according to logic that ‘‘is inherently anthropocentric, gendered, and racialized in that it upholds aesthetic and moral ideals based on white, masculine, heterosexual European civilization’’ (Braidotti 2013, 66). Bacigalupi’s story shocks the reader with its image of the environment radically transformed by pollution and climate change and provides an image of the technotranscendent posthumans who might thrive in such a world as monstrous rather than marvelous.

MATERIALITY AND REALITY In Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), American feminist theorist Karen Barad (1956 ) argues that a feminist new materialist understanding comes closer than the conventional understanding of matter as fixed and inert to capturing the true nature of the universe. Far from inhabiting a world made of stable things, she points out, people inhabit one in which the basic unit of matter, the atom, is primarily composed of space and electrical charges. For Barad, the basic unit of reality is the phenomenon, produced by ‘‘intra-actions’’ (Barad 2007) among humans, nonhumans, and other materialities, none of which preexist their interrelations. From this perspective, the most scientifically accurate description of the material world sounds something like an sf story. Drawing on understandings of indeterminacy in physics, which implicates the viewer in what is observed, and noting that both the position and the momentum of a particle cannot be known simultaneously, Barad offers a theory of ‘‘agential realism’’ (Barad 2007) that refuses to separate epistemology, ontology, and ethics. For Barad, such intra-actions are not limited to laboratory experiments but rather form all materiality: ‘‘The object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them’’ (Barad 2007, 128). Our concepts and physical choices have material consequences for Barad, and theorizing itself is a material practice: one cannot observe without simultaneously making, and ‘‘ethics is about accounting for our part of the entangled webs we weave’’ (Barad 2007, 384). Jeff Vandermeer’s compelling Southern Reach trilogy Annihilation (2014), Authority (2014), Acceptance (2014) captures this world of agential realism. The trilogy investigates the mysterious Area X, in which normal biology and physics no longer seem to function. Protagonists hypothesize that it may have been created by alien entities, but almost no conclusive facts can be learned about Area X. Contemporary technology does not function within it, results of analyses of biological samples are inconsistent, and human researchers disappear from Area X and reappear in locations significant to them with no memory of the transition only to die shortly thereafter from aggressive forms of cancer. GENDER: MATTER

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Annihilation is the first-person account of a researcher known only as ‘‘the biologist.’’ Authority focuses on the experiences of the interim director of the Southern Reach (the agency managing these expeditions), referred to mainly via his nickname, Control. He seems to interview the biologist after she is mysteriously returned from Area X, but it is eventually revealed that this character, referred to as Ghost Bird (a nickname the biologist’s husband called her), is a duplicate entity created by Area X and sent into the world beyond its borders. The original biologist, the novel states, became part of the Area X ecosystem, as did all expedition members before her. The final novel, Acceptance, is told through multiple viewpoints; even as the trilogy concludes, aspects of this reality remain a mystery, as they should. The point, ultimately, is acceptance of a world beyond what is ‘‘catalogued, studied, and described,’’ of life ‘‘irreducible down to any of that’’ (Vandermeer 2014b, 175). The complexity of this remarkable work cannot be fully drawn in this limited space; this analysis focuses on the experiences of the biologist, as they seem most pertinent to a material feminism. Her observations reveal a world that is alive and interactive, whose transformations transform her. An entity that seems to be a tower or a tunnel becomes fleshy and breathing when her perceptions are not impeded by hypnotic conditioning, and she encounters a creature writing words on a wall via fruiting bodies that produce spores, which infect and change her. These cells prove to be saprotrophic, that is, they are involved in the digestion of dead matter, and the words themselves suggest a transformation into new life: ‘‘Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead’’ (159). The expedition is troubled by sounds from a moaning creature that at times seems threatening, and the natural world around them often seems monstrous. They observe weird creatures that are fusions of human elements with animal forms, and some of the biologist’s tests reveal human cells structuring nonhuman life-forms. Yet the biologist, whose attentive sensitivity to nonhuman lives is emphasized throughout, refuses to see this otherness as menace, enabling her to survive and learn more than do her companions. In his Horrors of Philosophy series, professor of media studies and writer Eugene Thacker draws attention to the gap between the ‘‘world-for-us,’’ that is, the one people ‘‘interpret and give meaning to,’’ and the ‘‘world-in-itself,’’ that is, ‘‘in some inaccessible, already-given state’’ (Thacker 2011, 4 5). For Thacker, realizing this gap necessarily presents the frightening abyss of the contingency of existence and the indifference of the universe to humanity. This is a postanthropocentric view but one that forecloses possibilities for openness toward and encounters with this world-in-itself. Feminist new materialist thought arrives at radically different conclusions, in large part because it sees the world as in process. This difference is especially evident in Braidotti’s thinking about the ethics of death and dying, which is also an ethics of sustainable life. She encourages thinking outside a logic in which life is always intrinsically valuable and instead thinking in more nuanced terms about ‘‘the traumatic elements of this same life in their often unnoticed familiarity’’ and recognizing that life ‘‘is at best compelling, but it is not compulsive’’ (Braidotti 2013, 133). Instead of seeing death only as absence or end, she offers a vital notion of death, one that requires embracing an sf technique of estranged perspective in the struggle to grasp what it might mean to think of death as something other than the enemy of life. From such a perspective, life is intense energy that ‘‘reaches its aim and then dissolves’’; thus dying can be ‘‘another expression of the desire to live intensely’’ (133). The generativity of saprotrophic processes in this trilogy is an excellent emblem of such material feminist sensibilities. The Southern Reach trilogy envisions flourishing without privileging the human. Speaking of her interactions with organisms in Area X, the biologist tells us, ‘‘Imagine that this communication sometimes lends a sense of the uncanny to the landscape because of the narcissism of our human gaze, but that it is just part of the natural world here’’ (Vandermeer

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2014b, 192). She calls the agency changing her ‘‘the brightness’’; her companions find her transformation threatening, and in response to one’s comment that she has changed, the biologist muses: ‘‘I think she meant I had changed sides. It isn’t true I don’t even know if there are sides, or what that might mean but it could be true. I see now that I could be persuaded’’ (192). The brightness transforms her materially and ideologically, and only pain halts this process; by the end of Annihilation, she concludes, ‘‘The thought of continually doing harm to myself to remain human seems somehow pathetic’’ (194) and gives herself over fully to Area X. This is death of her human life but a kind of vital death embraced by Braidotti. The novels never reveal what the agency of transformation is: alien entity, deity, some vital power of nature itself. What is clear is that nonhuman life thrives in Area X: the returned Ghost Bird is ‘‘healthier now than before she’d left, the toxins present in most people today existed in her and the others at much lower levels than normal’’ (Vandermeer 2014c, 23), and samples taken from Area X show ‘‘no trace of human-created toxicity remained in Area X. Not a single trace. No heavy metals. No industrial runoff or agricultural runoff. No plastics’’ (125). The Southern Reach’s faith in their border and security protocols proves futile: the external world is full of entities from Area X that mimic other life-forms, including a cell phone that moves like a small mammal when not watched. Whatever this agency is, ‘‘it creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters’’ (Vandermeer 2014b, 191). Although at moments this reads like ecohorror, ultimately the novel exemplifies the vibrant possibilities for a humanity that can embrace rather than try to control the vital material world.

Summary Material feminist theory emphasizes the agency of the world of matter, refuses to privilege human over other kinds of life, and demonstrates ways humanity itself can change into something new if humans transform their sense of their place within the rest of the material world. Its theoretical tools help make sense of the myriad interactions among material and social, political and physical factors that shape the world and the ethical challenges presented, from the creation of synthetic beings to the crisis of climate change to the transformation of ecosystems through pollution and other contaminants. As a genre premised on imagining the world otherwise and one that regularly gives agency and voice to nonhuman entities, sf is in a privileged position to aid in imagining the worlds envisioned in material feminism and in making choices that can lead to greater social justice within them.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. ‘‘Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.’’ In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 1 18. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

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Bacigalupi, Paolo. ‘‘The People of Sand and Slag.’’ Wind upstories.com. 2004. http://windupstories.com/books /pump six and other stories/people of sand and slag/. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

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Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. ‘‘The Context of the New Materialism.’’ In New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 5 7. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Fausto Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Haraway, Donna. ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technol ogy, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Cen tury.’’ In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149 181. New York: Routledge, 1991a. Haraway, Donna. ‘‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Ques tion in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.’’ In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 183 201. New York: Routledge, 1991b. Latour, Bruno. Aramis; or, The Love of Technology. Cam bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. McCaffery, Anne. ‘‘Velvet Fields.’’ Lightspeed Magazine, 1973. http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction /velvet fields/. Rieder, John. ‘‘On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History.’’ Science Fiction Studies 37, no. 2 (2010): 191 209. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet. Horrors of Philosophy, Vol. 1. Arlesford, UK: Zero Books, 2011. Venter, J. Craig. Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life. New York: Penguin, 2014.

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NO VE LS Brunner, John. Stand on Zanzibar. New York: Orb Books, 2011. First published 1968. Levin, Ira. The Stepford Wives. New York: Random House, 1972. Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. First published 1975. Scott, Melissa. Shadow Man. Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2009. First published 1995. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 2nd ed. Edited by D. L. MacDonald and Kathleen Schriff. Peterborough, UK: Broadview Press, 1999. First pub lished 1818. Vandermeer, Jeff. Acceptance. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014a. Vandermeer, Jeff. Annihilation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014b. Vandermeer, Jeff. Authority. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014c. FI L MS Ex Machina. Dir. Alex Garland. 2015. A computer science researcher creates a female android and engineers a sexually charged situation to test whether or not she is conscious, creating a situation in which the android must seduce another male researcher. Plastic Bag. Dir. Ramin Bahrani. 2010. A short film narrated from the point of view of a plastic bag that finds itself in daily situations of use and abandonment such as blow ing as trash in the street or floating in an ocean of plastic waste to draw attention to the longevity of the plastic waste people create.

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CHAPTER 25

Digital Materialities Radhika Gajjala Professor, School of Media and Communication Bowling Green State University, OH Dinah Tetteh Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Arkansas State University, Jonesboro Anca Birzescu Independent Researcher Bowling Green State University, OH

This chapter examines how the digital (wireless, Internet, computer, and mostly screen-based technologies) and the material (three-dimensional objects one touches, feels, and smells every day) come together in what can be termed digital materialities. Matter is often defined as the substance of physical objects with which we interact. When interacting with physical matter, often using touch and feel to define it, one makes assumptions about what such matter is. The digital is defined as that with which we interact on-screen the visual, the discursive, the coded interface (even though, in actuality, these digital interfaces are also produced through material infrastructures). This complexity of the relationship between the digital and the material therefore is reduced to a mutually exclusive binary between the ‘‘digital’’ (assumed to be nonphysical and located in the audiovisual) and the ‘‘material’’ is important to note. The examples given here approach the idea of materiality as based in the act of doing of everyday practice in relation to both digital space and analogue physical place. Thus materiality in this chapter is defined as more than the substance of the physical objects that one touches and feels. Materiality is far more complex than the division between tactile physical matter and digital code or visual image and written discourse suggests. Dividing the ‘‘digital’’ from the ‘‘material’’ into discrete, mutually exclusive categories is fairly difficult when one thinks about everyday activities. Thus the examples in this chapter draw on two definitions of materiality. The first example engages the issue of tactility and the digitizing of physical objects, and the second example unpacks how what can be perceived as a purely virtual/digital monetary exchange, in effect, produces changes in lived praxis through the shift from material exchange of money to purely digital transactions in the promotional representations of the desirability of a cashless society. Specific examples are mostly taken from continuing research that Radhika Gajjala has been conducting, some of it in conversation with the coauthors of this chapter and some of it on her own. In addition to qualitative ethnographic research, critical visual analyses and

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interviews with users and participants of digital environments have been conducted. Gajjala, for instance, has conducted immersive online ethnographic studies where she has inhabited online gaming and textual environments to understand who one becomes when one is in these digital spaces. She has also interviewed more than sixty do-it-yourself (DIY) fiber crafters who inhabit various online networks. All authors have conducted interviews in various settings to understand the use of technology in everyday life and have also closely examined websites, YouTube videos, and social media texts. The use of such research methods has allowed each of us to gain insight into how digitality is interwoven with everyday physical existence, where body and mind are both engaged and immersed in work and leisure activities. Various scholars have discussed and defined digital materiality as a concept in media studies and digital culture research. This chapter first describes the main approaches to this idea of digital material and then examines two digitally mediated contexts that allow a discussion of digital materiality through feminist and postcolonial studies frameworks. One project is an examination of mostly women-centered DIY hand/fiber craft community formations based on tangible and tactile fiber-crafting skills and digital sharing (Gajjala 2015). The second project looks at the production of digital subalternity, where people with limited access to mainstream power structures are represented in digital space in marketing promotions of mobile/virtual money for a cashless society (Gajjala, Tetteh, and Birzescu 2015). Specifically, M-PESA (a mobile money-transfer program offered in Kenya) marketing is examined along with the ways in which the removal of the materiality of cash transactions is idealized in such marketing, as the subaltern body is promoted as the perfect user of these services. Both of these projects reveal a tension between agency and digitality. In one instance, groups of women invested in non-machine-made fiber crafting engage in a particular kind of ‘‘digital materiality’’ to reclaim agency in domestic and Internet-mediated public space, thus reshaping both private and public space through their intervention. In the other instance, the everyday experience of the material economy of cash exchange is restructured through financial infrastructures that sell the promise of a cashless economy that will supposedly allow gendered agency through the bypassing of physical infrastructures.

MATERIALITY IN DIGITAL SPACE Discussions of digital materialisms cover a range of understandings of the relationship of the digital to the physical, material body supported by analog infrastructures and architectures. Researchers (Latour 2014) argue that the activity of computer coding and its relationship with analog materials, such as wires, electrical voltage structures, mechanisms based in signal systems, and so on, reveals the materiality of code. Some researchers maintain that people experience embodiment within virtual environments, where senses such as touch and other modes of motor-sensory perception are reproduced in digital environments (Hansen 2012), sometimes referred to as haptic interfaces. Other researchers examine the materiality of the digital by investigating how socioeconomic and philosophical foundations of the design of these technologies and infrastructures themselves create inequality. Thus they note the unequal ways in which the digital produces and reproduces social shaping of race, gender, and marginalized identities (Nakamura 2008; Gajjala and Birzescu 2010). Still others study the potential for augmentation of reality and prosthetic enhancement for (disabled, differently abled) bodies, which shapes materiality and access to physical place (Latour 2005; Suchman 2007).

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Discussions of digital materiality also replay already existing debates regarding the social construction of reality and the materiality of existence and culture versus nature debates. These binaries, like the binary of virtual and real, are based on an understanding of materiality as tangible referring to substances that can be physically touched and felt, like wood, cloth, stone, and flesh. In this view of materiality, which posits the digital (virtual) as the opposite of the material (real), digital representations of physical objects are considered virtual, and the material of the screen, computer chip, keyboard, and other mediating infrastructures are not taken into account. Thus there are different ways in which this connection between materiality (which is equated with physical reality) and digitality (equated with virtuality) is theorized so as to make visible the multiple tools of mediation that connect us digitally and materially. Much of the existing literature that describes the relationship between digitality and materiality draws from theoretical debates and binaries between reality as discursively produced or socially constructed and nature as essentially out there and based on physical materiality. As activists and academics blur these binaries, they also posit theories of digital materiality that contest the binary that postulates materiality as a physical reality in opposition to ‘‘nonreal’’ digitality. For instance, some digital feminists have argued that people live in ‘‘an environment where a comfortable online/offline dichotomy becomes increasingly difficult to maintain’’ (Shephard 2013), while the introduction of augmented reality games, such as Google’s Ingress have led to modes of digital game play that can hardly even pretend to a separation of digital and material. Bodies of work that intersect with cultural studies, feminist studies, critical race studies, and digital media attempt to create a subtle distinction by focusing on specific intersections of the digital and the material. Digital materiality is not an umbrella term, method, or theory for the multiple ways in which researchers, artists, social justice activists, and software engineers have revealed how the digital is material or how materiality is shaped by the digital and vice versa. A close examination of this vast body of work, which touches on issues of digitality, materiality, affect, virtuality, gender, race, and technology, among others, reveals two broad points of entry into digital materiality. These two approaches are not distinct or mutually exclusive; rather, they overlap and intersect. However, for purposes of examining what contributes to feminist, postcolonial, and critical race researchers’ dilemmas and controversies around digitality, embodiment, access, and the contradictions of inclusion and exclusion, it helps to consider these as two broad points of entry into looking at digital materiality. One perspective approaches digital materiality from the idea of the tangibility of a digital presence by creating better technological environments that are clearly more embodied through the use of immersive, complex, and three-dimensional technologies or by arguing that our use and relationship with technology is always already embodied and material. (Some of this can be seen in Mark B. N. Hansen’s work, in Mathew Fuller’s writings, and in the work of scholars and artists examining cave automatic virtual environments, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality.) Another perspective analyzes the materiality of digital environments, platforms, and technologies from a socioeconomic-political stance, particularly from the standpoint of the people marginalized from digital access populations sometimes referred to as subaltern. Simply put, while one approach presumes access to digitally mediated environments, the other starts from the outside, asking what it means to enter digitality; who is permitted to enter; and how, when, and where they enter. In a sense, then, there is an epistemological difference in how digital materiality is approached based on location and relation to global digitality. In GENDER: MATTER

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relation to the digital, materiality enters from the outside, but in relation to issues of social justice and those with inadequate access to structures of power, digitality is the outside. The implicit hierarchy that privileges the digital over human well-being is sadly based on a global economy and a progress trajectory that privileges the digital. Critical scholars are working with a given binary, and the continuous struggle is to bring to the surface and make visible the laboring bodies that simultaneously inhabit and produce the digital while trying to make sense of the bodies that labor on the peripheries. Yet the center is built by the labor of those at the peripheries as much as by the labor of those inhabiting the center. Further, with the increasing emphasis on the marginalized users and consumers (in the name of access), the center is pointed toward particular marginalized groups as targets as bodies to be controlled, feared, marketed to, or made indebted. Personal data is collected when one, either knowingly or unknowingly, releases information online, thus leaving behind a digital footprint. These digital footprinting processes locate the body within social and global hierarchies. Anna Munster notes in her entry on digital materiality in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media: In the context of debates about how digital technologies affect and are affected by the social, cultural, political, and aesthetic spheres, materiality is used in two main ways. It refers both to the physicality of hardware, software, digital objects, artifact, and processes and to the material conditions including the social relations, political context, and aesthetic experience of production of all ‘‘things’’ digital. (Munster 2014, 328) Thus digital materiality is a complex concept influencing and influenced by multiple factors that together explain how the digital and the material are connected. Conceptualizations of the term vary as do the ways in which the term can be applied.

AGENCY IN DIGITAL SPACE Taking into account different notions of materiality, this chapter focuses on the entry of women and socioeconomically marginalized populations into digital space. In the two instances of digitality described, the chapter examines how each group of people who either use or are represented in digital media is able to utilize digitality to redefine its own context. Thus the question is asked if they are able to assert even if partially and in relation to the given materiality of the infrastructure their own right to define the social space of action and narration. While both groups of people who either use or are represented in the digital contexts described are examples of how digital materiality is manifested, one group produces materiality at the intersection of tangible handcrafting and digital image/text sharing, while the other appears to be given control or access or both to the creation of materiality through the promise of digital connectivity. In the former context, the women continually reclaim their agency in the face of the restructuring of the social and the economic in digitality, while in the latter context, they are handed structured tools with the promise of quick access to money as evidence of connectivity to the digital. In one instance, users assert control over their digital materiality, and in the other, users are merely represented as in control of their digital materiality. The intersections examined in order to reveal this control or lack of control over one’s digital materiality draw on gendered and raced formations online. It should be noted that

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these are also formations situated in unequal geographies of what have come to be termed the Global North and the Global South and urban and rural, which complicate issues of class, race, and gender. In considering these categories, our work here implicitly and explicitly raises the following questions:  How do gender and matter intersect in the digital? 

How do gender, race, and geography intersect with the digital?



Why do these intersections matter?



Does matter imply the physical and tangible or socioeconomic and political value, and can these categories be separated?



In speaking of digital materiality, should the categories of virtual and real be retained?

DIY HANDCRAFTING COMMUNITIES In the early twenty-first century, DIY fiber handcrafting communities have formed across the globe through the use of the Internet. These communities have developed digital community building practices that include everyday rituals of sharing predicated on the user’s ability (to varying degrees) to produce tangible handcrafted items. The knowledge of the touch, feel, and skill of crafting is conveyed through a detailed description of process that is mostly recognizable only by others who also engage in this sort of handcrafting practice. The tangibility of the offline artifact or creation invokes a sensory understanding of the shared digital images and text-based descriptions. It is this constant harking back to the tangible objects and the ritual of making that keeps it ‘‘real.’’ A constant process of verification of the materiality and reality of the digital object occurs in the discussions about shared digital representations of the handcrafted items. In a broad sense, the communities are inclusive (even inviting) in that anyone who is able to participate in the relevant handcrafting activity and has Internet access can be part of these networks (Ravelry, for instance). Research reveals several socioeconomic categories and different racial and cultural backgrounds and time zones among participants in such online networks. A common connecting point seems to be the drive to revive handcrafting as an everyday activity sometimes categorized as a hobby or a passion and at other times talked about as an attempt at entrepreneurial small-business intervention into the contemporary machine-made ethos. In all these instances (as evidenced in the over sixty interviews Gajjala conducted), there is a clear indication of a move to own the production process and to counter the alienation experienced through the consumption of products without knowledge of their production process and of where they come from. A sense of tangible achievement and satisfaction through the materiality of creation engaging the tactility and color or the fiber at hand was expressed by many of the interviewees. This sense of pleasure and ownership through the process of creation is also evident in online knit podcasts, fiber-craft blogs, Ravelry discussions, and so on. Digital materiality in these instances comes about through the exchange and sharing of images and processes among the participants in these communities. Tangible production is a prerequisite to the communal and networking process based on social exchange through digital images, textual narrations, and YouTube videos. This sociality and gift-economy framework is based on work within the domestic space and through domestic-associated skills traditionally women’s work. Yet as the interviews GENDER: MATTER

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with women crafters from these communities show, participants scoff at any suggestion that they might be ‘‘domesticated.’’ Their rejection of the category of ‘‘new domesticity’’ (as suggested in Matchar 2013) reveals that a networked materiality has emerged through this sociality that simultaneously challenges the public/private binary and requires the production of tangible fiber/material products through domestic space. Inclusion in these communities is based on the ability to produce tangible fiber-crafted things the digital fosters a specific tangible relationality. The women handcrafters assert their agency through digital materiality that combines tangibility with digital sharing with an emphasis on the experience of tactile creation, skill, and an appreciation for the ‘‘handmade only’’ aesthetic. There is also a sense that these women are engaged in leisurely pursuits even as a social competitive and entrepreneurial drive through is activated through this online community and network sharing. The women choose the activities, even if they reinstate them physically into the domestic space as they perform what used to be viewed as women’s work and what was women’s labor within previous modes of production (preindustrial textile production).

M-PESA In the case of the second context examined, however, choice and agency are presented visually, as a discourse. The discourse is presented through marketing materials about the M-PESA program offered in Kenya. This program represents a trend toward seeing digital financial tools as a way to provide both digital and financial inclusion for the marginalized poor in developing world (Global South) contexts. Thus programs such as M-PESA are promoted as fostering easy banking access and financial inclusion to poor and marginalized populations of the world. Here, the visual staging and the narrative discourse work simultaneously to present populations who previously had no access to a bank account and who are known as creditworthy in the digital financial sphere. Yet the ideal representations are not concretely based on the tangible, offline contextual conditions of the people represented. In fact, the representations in the marketing material are aspirational, and they directly and indirectly function as regulators of behavior. The representation is staged for a viewership that is upwardly mobile in both Global South and Global North settings. It produces material aspirations for how to exist within global digital cultures. Because of what is visible through these venues as they set global trends and because the interactivity makes it seem accessible to distant viewers, it gives rise to a desire to emulate what is seen through these online images, videos, and discussions. The staging, however, does not actually engage the voice or agency of the marginalized bodies that are promised agency and self-determination through digital microfinance programs. Researchers such as cultural anthropologist Lamia Karim (2011) have examined the offline contexts of financial inclusion programs and have noted how such microfinance programs are, in fact, used as tools for disciplining women through surveillance and monitoring. Thus, seen in the overall context of how these programs are implemented in most developing world contexts and contrary to how digital materiality functions in the case of the DIY handcrafters, financial inclusion promised through the M-PESA promotional material in actuality has the potential to increase structural surveillance and limit choice and agency. Compared with the DIY handcrafters, users of the M-PESA service are limited in terms of how they express their agency, as they have to operate within the structures and by the rules set by owners of the service. The mobile money transfer platform has already been

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created, and all users have to do is participate and help sustain it through consumption of the product and indirect production, for which they are hardly given recognition. Thus the comparison between DIY crafters and the M-PESA promise reveals a difference in how social relations are restructured in both cases. In one, the women are restructuring social relations through their acts of choice, and in the other, ‘‘choice’’ is a discourse, a lure offered as the restructuring happens from the outside. What is demonstrated here is how the opportunity to exercise agency and choice leads to a construction of forms of materiality that suggest a need for constant engagement with issues of power, access, and control in the investigation of digital materiality. Gajjala’s (2012) previous interviews and ethnographic research in developing world rural contexts have revealed that the connectivity of poor populations in the developing world creates access mostly to faraway marketplaces and to Western consumer goods. Even so, access and connectivity to the global are limited in comparison with that of the DIY crafters from the Global North. The choice and agency offered to them through digital connectivity are more controlled than in the case of the DIY crafters, for whom the kind of tangible digital materiality they engage in produces agency and choice. The access the marginalized poor are supposedly given to the global and digital is often mediated, as they have to be vetted and deemed creditworthy and trustworthy before being allowed to participate in practices of empowerment, including microborrowing (i.e., borrowing on a small scale) and technological inclusion. For instance, on microfinance platforms such as that of Kiva, profiles of borrowers are created on their behalf by ‘‘agents’’ who aim to project an appearance of the empowered poor. Thus the online self of the poor is staged for the audiences from more materially privileged social spaces. The marketing materials examined in the next section visually stage the Global South based and poor user of digital technologies for banking. In this case the tool focused on is the M-PESA program offered by Safaricom. The strategy for production of identity of the user in M-PESA marketing emulates and captures the idea of having fun with social media and gadgets. The empowerment experienced by users of digital money and connectivity is narrated through promotional images and videos, such as ‘‘Relax, You’ve Got M-PESA’’ (Safaricom Kenya 2012). This form of financial inclusion through the mobile money program also supposedly breaks down conventional notions about gender, class, and geography, as explained later. M-PESA serves Kenyans and others in surrounding countries, and it claims to restructure the livelihood of users, bringing them convenience and comfort and a notch closer to the affluent in society. M-PESA, through its digital promotional materials and the community it builds with its online platforms, promises new ways of conceptualizing the poor woman from the Global South, for instance. Through the deliberate placement of people, words, and other artifacts in ads, the promotion of M-PESA blurs the lines between rich and poor, urban and rural, and developed and developing, opening them up to new interpretations. However, not fully visible and accounted for through these representations is how all this is a ‘‘staging’’ of the real it is not the full truth about the actual context. It comes at a cost, often in the form of sacrifices in labor, time, and sometimes happiness, because the promised convenience is unattainable for most people. The following analyses of selected M-PESA promotional materials illustrate how the idea of the poor having access to the digital is staged through marketing materials that present the idea of empowerment through digital mobility. GENDER: MATTER

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M-PESA PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS The first M-PESA promotional image examined presents two young people, a man and a woman, smiling and looking intently at their cell phones. The image shows paper bills of money material money/cash floating between the characters without a clear indication of the direction in which these bills are traveling. Underneath the floating bills are the words ‘‘with Vodacom M-PESA, it’s fast, safe, and easy to send money’’ (Ned Bank). The message communicated through both the image and the words is one of convenience and leisure made possible by technology. This promotional material sells M-PESA by highlighting the nature of the service and what the associated technology can help the customer accomplish and in what manner. Absent from this image is the digital labor both tangible and intangible that the customer has to invest in the process. The materiality of the M-PESA service is emphasized through items in the promotional material, including the bills of money, the mobile phones, the man and woman pictured, and the invitation to visualize how the mobile money service can transform the lives of users. M-PESA is marketed as having the capacity to make the lives of viewers fun and comfortable. Here the concept of materiality is underscored through a reference to money. Therefore access to finance both empowers and implies that if there is real money involved, the representation is grounded in reality. In this promotion of M-PESA, the binary of gender (and the assumed role and power it connotes) and geographic boundary/location are made invisible and ineffective. Contrary to the conventional view that the man is the provider of money, the fact that the bills flow in no particular direction in this promotional material makes it possible to think that the woman could also be the sender. Thus as gender and geography intersect with the digital, as shown in this promotion, these concepts are presented as fluid and open to diverse interpretations. A restructuring of the gender binary and associated roles is evident in the everyday experience of the material, as is the case with the mobile money transfer. The second M-PESA promotional image (from Buzzkenya) shows a young lady with a mobile phone in her hand who is smiling and looking into the camera. In the background is what appears to be a shopping center with a store clerk sitting at the counter. The young woman seems to have used M-PESA to make payments for the goods bought from the shop; she looks content and independent and as if she is in the middle or upper class. The other half of the photo has the words ‘‘Introducing ‘Nunua na M-PESA’ the convenient way to pay for goods and services.’’ This ad suggests that the leisure and worry-free lifestyle promoted by M-PESA is available to everyone. The materiality of the mobile money-transfer service is made clear by highlighting how it can be put to practical use, including paying for goods at the supermarket. The consumer is shown one practical use to which digital money can be put. A shift is evident from the previous presentation of the mobile money transfer service, where the impression was that someone, usually a male working in the city, sends money to poorer family members in the countryside for their upkeep. This image shows no third party, and it does not convey the idea that the young woman is dependent on anyone for money. This is an independent, modern young woman; the agency and autonomy of the woman are made manifest in this image. The agency of the woman is further stressed in the placement of the people in the ad the woman is in the forefront, whereas the man is in the background. Also evident is the reversal in roles: the role of sales clerk is one typically assumed by women, and normally it is men who are portrayed as wielding the purchasing power. Here, digital materiality is portrayed through the social and economic discourse around M-PESA without much input from the subaltern; the projected financial inclusion and agency are mainly aspirational.

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Next, M-PESA promotional material from Hapa Kenya (2013) shows a newlywed couple taking a ‘‘selfie’’ with a mobile phone and smiling into the camera. The couple is still in wedding attire; no one else is pictured in the image. This ad promotes a short-term M-PESA pay-bill account, where users can lease an M-PESA number that they can use to collect funds. Here again, users are shown one practical, material application of M-PESA: using an M-PESA account to collect funds toward a wedding. While this promotional material projects autonomy and convenience, it also ironically points to dependence; the young couple needs the support of friends and family to fund their wedding. Once again, leisure and convenience are given material value by highlighting how M-PESA can make one’s life a little less stressful. This is presented as within the reach of everyone. In the last M-PESA image examined (Safaricom Blog 2014), a Kenyan shepherd is smiling and focused intently on his cell phone. The M-PESA symbol the red cloth is flying in the background, meaning that the shepherd has just made a money transfer or received money via M-PESA. In the background is a plain field and a little hill. The shepherd looks happy, presumably because M-PESA has made it possible for him to transact business even while he is tending his flock. Digital transfers are presented as a common practice that can be integrated into daily life. The service is available not only to the affluent but also to common folks, such as the shepherd. M-PESA thus claims to help bridge the class binary. M-PESA can provide the same level of happiness and comfort to both the rich and the poor. Comfort and leisure are inherent in M-PESA, not in the individual people who use the service. As noted earlier, however, the seeming empowerment provided through the service is constrained by the limited power/ agency the consumer has and may not correspond to what the visual staging suggests. Mobile phones and the Internet are used to stage an identity of the poor person that seems physically and socioculturally accessible and comprehensible without revealing the problems and differences inherent in such presentations. This creates a seemingly level playing field. This staged identity of the marginalized poor (sometimes called subaltern) is referred to as the ‘‘digital subaltern 2.0’’ (Gajjala, Tetteh, and Yartey 2014). The digital subaltern 2.0 is simultaneously an enactment and a recoding of the marginality (or subalternity) that perpetuates and renews race- and caste-based hierarchies through digital space. The production of a digital subaltern allows access to a particular decontextualized (staged with selective context and background narration and images), individualized global labor force (Gajjala, Tetteh, and Yartey 2014). The concomitant presence of such subaltern bodies in spaces of leisure, finance, and work through virtual enactments recodes and uproots by coding a monitored relational space (Parisi 2009) and has real material impact and consequence, as it makes social spaces through the interactions enabled. In this situation, reality has been shaped by virtuality people make actual changes in the way they live based on who they think is watching them. These spaces reconfigure access as relational access between individuals of the Global North and the Global South through a common link with a standardized global financial and market space that is materialized through digital networks and platforms. These digital networks and platforms occupy and connect producing a place of interaction mediated by algorithms and infrastructures that go beyond the click interface of graphics and text. On the one hand, the digital subaltern reignites issues of representation in terms of images of the apparently globally networked agent reaching out to connect with the rest of the world, and on the other, it produces relational contexts where hierarchical transactions of philanthropy 2.0 are made possible. Yet the staging of the digital subaltern is based on a formulaic and flat process of connecting. It is disembodied and algorithm driven, even if based on ideas of upward mobility. GENDER: MATTER

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DIFFERENT DIGITAL MATERIALITIES As noted earlier, digital materialities manifest differently in the case of the DIY handcrafting communities compared with the M-PESA advertisements. Each case encourages different connections between visual consumption and everyday material practice. Thus the digital circulation of the visual representations of tangible craft products within online handcrafting communities may be perceived as contributing to the transformation of these items into commodified objects and thus to the primacy of the exchange value of the produced items over the much more complex human and social relations involved in their production. Yet the process of digitizing solely for visual, disembodied consumption is disrupted by the narrative interventions that clearly connect to the skills and processes involved in the creation of the tangible, tactile offline object. In this sense, the tangibility and materiality of intricate social relations and power dynamics accompanying the crafting are reflected in many of the members’ comments and narratives. In contrast, however, the visual consumption of the M-PESA advertisements is indeed informed by commodity fetishism, as the global socioeconomic power dynamics are mainly obscured in these advertisements. They promise empowerment through technology by setting up digital structures and layers requiring technical and related literacies and gadgets. This not only rearranges the everyday activities and rituals, it also makes them more reliant on the one or two multinational corporate entities that control these services. The material existence of the M-PESA user is presented to us in a mystifying, virtual form. Users of M-PESA are sometimes glimpsed through their interactions with the promotional material in the YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook comments, but these are in spurts, and their presence online is not as sustained and widespread as that of the DIY handcrafters.

Summary While with both DIY handcrafters and M-PESA marketing there is a material restructuring of everyday practices from the use of digital technologies, there is a clear definition in the restructuring and negotiation of the digital by the DIY handcrafters. The handcrafters use the material to connect digitally with others with similar interests. They independently manage and negotiate their virtual representations, reclaiming the right to define how their activities and creations are interpreted. In the case of the digital banking access offered through M-PESA marketing, the access to banking and money (where money is equated with materiality) is offered as a freeing tool but in reality this access requires a very scripted use of these tools. While a renegotiation of where and how the tools might be used may be possible, such a renegotiation would happen after a significant enforced shift in the everyday lives of the people who will use the tools. The key point here is that while in both the examples the way in which digital materiality rearranges the everyday is evident, in the case of the DIY handcrafters the digital and the material work in complementary ways to accentuate the agency of the participants, whereas in the M-PESA promotional materials the digital representation comes to the fore without much of the material component of the supposed empowerment.

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Bibliography Gajjala, Radhika, ed. Cyberculture and the Subaltern: Weavings of the Virtual and Real. Lanham, MD: Lexing ton Books, 2012. Gajjala, Radhika. ‘‘When Your Seams Get Undone, Do You Learn to Sew or to Kill Monsters?’’ Communication Review 18, no. 1 (2015): 23 36. Gajjala, Radhika, and Anca Birzescu. ‘‘Voicing and Place ment in Online Networks.’’ In Post global Network and Everyday Life, edited by Marina Levina and Grant Kien, 73 92. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Gajjala, Radhika, Jeanette Dillon, and Samara Anarbaeva. ‘‘Prosumption.’’ In International Encyclopedia of Media Effects, edited by Liesbet Van Zoonen. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Gajjala, Radhika, Dinah Tetteh, and Anca Birzescu. ‘‘Stag ing the Subaltern Self and the Subaltern Other: Digital Labor and Digital Leisure in ICT4D.’’ In Produsing Theory in a Digital World: The Intersection of Audiences and Production in Contemporary Theory, edited by Rebecca A. Lind, 159 174. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. Gajjala, Radhika, Dinah Tetteh, and Franklin Yartey. ‘‘Dig ital Subaltern 2.0: Communicating with, Financing, and Producing the Other through Social Media.’’ In Commu nicating Colonialism: Readings on Postcolonial Theory(s) and Communication, edited by Rae Lynn Schwartz DuPre, 246 261. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. Hansen, Mark B. N. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2012. E book. Karim, Lamia. Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh. Minneapolis: University of Minne sota Press, 2011. Kirschenbaum, G. Matthew. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Latour, Bruno. ‘‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.’’ New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014): 1 18. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Matchar, Emily. Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013.

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Munster, Anna. ‘‘Materiality.’’ In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, edited by Marie Laure Ryan, Lori Emer son, and Benjamin J. Robertson. Baltimore: Johns Hop kins University Press, 2014. E book. Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Nilsen, Alf Gunvald, and Srila Roy, eds. New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parisi, Luciane. ‘‘Symbiotic Architecture: Prehending Digi tality.’’ Theory, Culture, and Society 26, nos. 2 3 (2009): 347 379. Premchander, Smita, with V. Prameela, M. Chidambarana than, and L. Jeyaseelan. Multiple Meanings of Money: How Women See Microfinance. New Delhi, India: Sage, 2009. Shephard, Nicole. ‘‘Where Have All the Cyberfeminists Gone? Part 2.’’ Engenderings. London School of Econom ics and Political Science. June 10, 2013. http://blogs .lse.ac.uk/gender/2013/06/10/where have all the cyber feminists gone/. Suchman, Lucy. Human Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. PR O MOT IO N AL MAT ER I A LS Buzzkenya.com. http://buzzkenya.com/wp content/uploads /2014/04/M pesa.jpg. Hapa Kenya. ‘‘Want to Raise Funds Urgently? Use a Short Term MPESA Paybill Account.’’ August 13, 2013. http:// www.hapakenya.com/2013/08/13/want to raise funds in a hurry use a short term mpesa paybill account/. Ingress. https://www.ingress.com/. Ravelry. https://www.ravelry.com. Safaricom Blog. ‘‘What’s Given Safaricom’s M PESA the Midas Touch.’’ July 24, 2014. http://www.safaricom.co.ke/blog /whats given safaricoms m pesa the midas touch/. Safaricom Kenya. ‘‘Relax, You’ve Got M PESA.’’ September 17, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1IqjY88YuM.

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Bodily Technologies Alison Kafer Professor of Feminist Studies Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX

Although in everyday use the term technology often refers only to electronic devices, such as laptops and smartphones, scholars tend to take a much broader view, calling any sort of tool a form of technology regardless of its complexity, composition, or origin. Using a stick to extend one’s reach or increase one’s balance, for example, can be a use of bodily technology. Because effectively using a stick in this way will likely require modifications to the stick and adjustments to one’s positioning or stance, knowledge comes into play as well, so one can think of technology as, in the words of anthropologist Linda L. Layne (2010, 3), ‘‘tools plus knowledge that enhance or extend our human capacities.’’ Scholars such as Layne argue for understanding technologies not only as extending existing capacities but as imagining and developing new ones devices that allow humans to breathe underwater or in space, for example. All these kinds of technologies, from the tool to knowledges about the tool, also affect one’s understanding of self and the world. Bodily technologies, then, can also be understood as informing, constructing, or expressing a ‘‘self’’ or ‘‘identity.’’ Technologies are not only tools used to solve problems but also ways of thinking, orientations, and modes of expression. Bodily technologies fall into all these categories or frameworks: they are used to solve problems, transcend limits or extend capacities, create new abilities, construct identities, and so on. They encompass everything from practices of bodybuilding to prosthetics, artificial joints, and pacemakers; from sonograms to Fitbits; from surgery protocols to hair-braiding skills; from colostomy bags to peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) lines. As historian Katherine Ott (2015) notes, bodily technologies vary by duration and location, as some are implanted or integrated, others detachable; by purpose, as they may be seen as functional or purely cosmetic; and by mechanism, as some use sensory feedback, others draw on thought control. She offers a partial list to accentuate the broad range of bodily technologies in use: from ‘‘peg legs, split-hook hands, and myoelectric limbs that yoke nerve signals from remaining muscles, to artificial skin, replaced hip joints, eyeglasses, hearing aids, strap-on penises, and reconstructed bones’’ (140). Layne contributes another list, this one focused on reproductive bodily technologies: ‘‘menstrual-suppressing birth control pills, home pregnancy tests, tampons, breast pumps, Norplant, anti-fertility vaccines, and microbicides’’ (3) as well as sonograms and specula. Knowledges about and practices of the body are also a kind of bodily technology. Gender, for example, as a set of practices, discourses, identities, norms, and expressions, can be seen as a technology of the body (e.g., Balsamo 1996; Terry and Calvert 1997).

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Highlighting technologies of gender makes clear that bodily technologies encompass not only tools and techniques a curling iron and the skill to use it, for example but also policies, practices, and ideologies: the knowledge that only some bodies are supposed to use curling irons, they must use them in specific ways, and using them (or not using them) can factor into one’s sense of self or identity. ‘‘Technologies function as systems that shape our lives,’’ explain cultural studies scholars Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert (1997, 4), ‘‘structuring not just what we do and how we do it, but even fashioning our vision of social relations and what it means to be human.’’ Bodies, then, do not exist separately from technology but are always experienced, mediated, or constructed through technologies; body and technology are inextricable. Thinking through the lens of matter or materiality allows us to recognize these intertwinings among bodies and technologies. Using feminist, queer, trans, disability, and critical race theories, this chapter charts how a broad range of scholars and activists have approached questions of technology. Rather than separate out each theory or field, however, presenting them as discrete silos of knowledge, this chapter brings them together to analyze key concepts and questions. In addition to examining figures such as the cyborg and the monster, both of which are intended to disrupt the culture/nature (or technology/body) binary, this chapter offers an overview of bodily technologies: what they include, how they function, what they do. What are the ethical and political dimensions of various bodily technologies? How do bodily technologies enable and restrict different mobilities, identities, pleasures, and relations?

THE MATTER OF BODILY TECHNOLOGIES Attending to the materiality of bodily technologies requires recognizing that technology has concrete effects on the body itself. There is not a clear dividing line between the body and technology, especially in the era of digital, genetic, psychopharmacological, and nanomedical technologies technologies, in other words, designed to (re)form or infiltrate the body, to be inhaled or injected, to be incorporated (Preciado 2013, 271). One’s immune system, memory, sleep patterns, exercise habits, hunger, perception, mood, heart rate, and more all are targeted by particular bodily technologies. Moreover, argues feminist theorist Elizabeth A. Wilson (2008), even this targeting has broader effects: antidepressants may be intended for the central nervous system, but they also permeate a body’s muscles, fat, viscera, and skin. ‘‘Drugs work with the whole body,’’ she explains, suggesting that readers recognize the body as being in a symbiotic relationship with the technologies used in it (381).

FEMINIST BODILY TECHNOLOGIES? Can bodily technologies be feminist? Is it possible not only to offer feminist analyses of technology but also to develop feminist technologies? Some scholars have extended feminist science and technology studies to explore this very possibility, speculating as to what criteria would serve as appropriate measures for such a determination. Is it sufficient for a technology to have been designed by women for women’s bodies? Are there circumstances in which a technology designed by men or for men’s bodies can be feminist? Or would feminist bodily technologies be those without binary gender associations (Layne 2010; Terry and Calvert 1997)? In the introduction to the anthology Feminist Technology, Layne (2010, 7) offers a list of critical questions: ‘‘If one engages in feminist design practices, does one necessarily end up

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with a feminist design? Can one end up with feminist technologies without engaging in a feminist design process? What are the consequences if one begins, explicitly, with a feminist agenda for product design and innovation?’’ Many feminist scholars and activists, including Layne, have criticized the cynical ‘‘pinking’’ of technologies as a way of marketing products to women pink cell phones, for example noting that such makeovers merely demonstrate that the products were originally designed for men, not people. (Disability studies scholars have made similar arguments about retrofitting buildings to accommodate disabled users; access technologies such as makeshift ramps reveal that those buildings were designed for those who can easily ascend and descend stairs.) As Layne’s questions suggest, there is no single definition of feminist technology, and feminists will inevitably disagree as to whether a particular bodily technology can be considered feminist. Moreover, the same technology can be used for radically different purposes. Longacting contraceptives, such as implants and shots Norplant and Depo-Provera are two infamous examples have vastly different valences depending on one’s perspective or location. From one angle, they serve feminist ends by increasing women’s autonomy. From another angle, they have been used to racist, antifeminist ends, as when judges coerced poor women and women of color into using them to avoid jail time (Flavin 2009; Roberts 1999).

NETWORKED TECHNOLOGIES AND USERS One insight of science and technology studies is that technologies and their users are fundamentally related, even coconstituted. Users, in other words, both shape and are shaped by the bodily technologies with which they interact. Some of this ‘‘shaping’’ is readily apparent as decoration, as when wheelchair users cover their wheelchairs with stickers or amputees personalize their prosthetic limbs with patterned sleeves. Other users might make more substantive aftermarket modifications, such as adding a ‘‘cruise control’’ function to mobility scooters (Henry 2012) or a ‘‘cane rack’’ to bicycles (Hendren 2014a). Modification can also take the form of appropriation or subversion, as when technologies are used for purposes other than or even counter to their original intent or design. Terry and Calvert (1997) offer the Internet as a prime example of such subversion. Although the Internet has proven to be a powerful tool for activists and dissidents, including those working against the state, it was originally developed as a military technology. Whether on the level of surface decoration or fundamental redesign, users actively remake the technologies with which they interact. Yet users can play a significant role in more official design processes too, as in the case of cochlear implants. Science and technology studies scholar Mara Mills (2011) traces the impact that early test users of cochlear implants have had on their design. Overlooking the improvements and innovations of these ‘‘lead users’’ narrows one’s understanding of the design process, obscuring the feedback loops among designers, users, and technologies. She reveals that the observations and experiences of Charles Graser, a key early user, spurred numerous changes to the device: ‘‘carrier waves that received less interference from environmental electricity; microphones worn at the head rather than in the pocket (where they picked up too much ‘clothing noise’); [and] continued miniaturization, so the processor could also be worn behind the ear’’ (331). Uncovering these kinds of stories of how users modify, adapt, and transform technologies both during and after the design process makes clear how designers are not the only experts. Users too have expertise in the possibilities and limitations of technology (Hendren 2014a, 2014b; Mauldin 2016; Mills 2011). GENDER: MATTER

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Given this interplay among users, designers, and technologies, many scholars have underscored the extent to which the relationship between body and machine should be imagined as a network or web. Prosthetic limbs are a good illustration of such webs, as their use requires the interaction of researchers, designers, surgeons, prosthetists, physical and occupational therapists, insurers, manufacturers, distributors, and amputees (and often their family or support networks). And this web includes not only ‘‘outside’’ actors and agencies but the matter of the body itself. Bodies and technologies grow and change together, as anthropologist Zoe¨ H. Wool (2015) discusses in her work on disabled veterans in the United States. Amputees wanting to use prosthetics must first wear ‘‘special elasticized sleeves called shrinkers . . . to make the stump conform to an ideal shape so that it will sit comfortably and work well in a socket. New sockets are made and remade as the stump approaches the imagined perfection of a straight and narrow limb with a smoothly rounded edge, or as the soldier and his body disobediently swell’’ (43). Stump, socket, and sleeve develop ‘‘symbiotically’’ together (45). This codevelopment is not always easy or straightforward. As many disability studies scholars and activists have noted, immense physical, mental, social, and economic resources are required in using bodily technologies, from white canes to braces to artificial limbs. The process of ‘‘remaking’’ stumps to fit prosthetics can take months and often causes pain; many other human/technology interfaces involve a similarly intensive process. Writer Anne Finger (2006) describes the pain induced by splints and other treatments intended to improve form and/or function, a phenomenon familiar to many people whose daily lives involve intimate relations with splints, braces, and other orthotics. Even those technologies that are not physically painful may require a steep learning curve. Historian Catherine Kudlick discusses her experiences at a ‘‘blind boot camp’’ (2005, 1590) learning Braille, cane skills, and other technologies of living.

BODIES AND TECHNOLOGIES HAVE HISTORIES: PLACING BODILY TECHNOLOGIES IN CONTEXT Although cyberspace is often understood in the popular imagination to offer freedom from the physical and material body, people continue to use their bodies in order to access cyberspace. Brains, hands and fingers, eyes, ears, and/or voices allow people to navigate different technologies. Remembering the embodied nature of interactions with technologies not only highlights the potentially debilitating effects of such technologies through their repeated use but also acknowledges the material realities in which people engage with technologies (Rodrı´guez 2003, 127). Critical race and sexuality theorist Juana Marı´a Rodrı´guez, for example, prefaces her analyses of cyberspace with a thick description of her daily life, stressing the importance of attending to the body, even in studies of cyberspace. She notes everything from her address (‘‘a studio apartment on Hyde Street between Eddy and Ellis in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco’’) to the time and weather (‘‘morning,’’ ‘‘a sunny day’’) (119). More to the point, she stresses that her experiences in cyberspace are not separable from her experiences outside it: I have never been assaulted here, but I live surrounded by many subtleties of violence. I have kissed women on the steps of my apartment building. I have been asked ‘‘how much?’’ on the street. I have seen undocumented residents sitting handcuffed outside the door to my building and teenage dykes overdose before my

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eyes. As I have sat writing, the sounds of gunshots and sirens, birdcalls and children’s laughter have crept their way into the audioscape of the private world where I sit at my computer. (119 120) Rodrı´guez is not alone in stressing the contextual nature of bodily technologies. The mainstream promise of technology may be that it will free us from the limits of human bodies and minds, transcending the biases and inequalities of culture, but technologies are deeply informed by the ideologies of the cultures in which they appear. Designers and users bring their own biases and assumptions to bear on the technologies they desire, create, and use. Ideas about what constitutes technological success are determined by cultural norms, as are protocols for use. Assumptions about gender, race, age, and disability pervade the practice of plastic surgery, for example, as documented by media studies scholar Anne Balsamo (1996) in her analyses of medical textbooks, advertisements, and surgery protocols. White faces are assumed to be the ideal, the goal of cosmetic surgeries, while ‘‘black and Asian facial features are defined as abnormal, sometimes requiring special ‘corrective’ surgery, as in the case of the ‘oriental eyelid’’’ (160). Skin-lightening and -whitening creams can be seen as similar bodily technologies stemming from and perpetuating a racist cultural imperative for light skin. This preference for whiteness has been built into a range of other technologies, from automatic soap and water dispensers that struggle to recognize darker skin to autotagging image recognition software that fails to properly recognize people with dark skin. So-called fleshcolored prosthetics from Band-Aids to dildos are other examples. Many scholars have traced the race and class divide in terms of Internet access, but it is important to remember that differential access to and use of technology is not limited to digital technologies but rather spans a wide range of bodily technologies (Nakamura 2000; Nelson 2002). Disparities in access to health care, especially high-tech health care, are staggering. Take the example of cochlear implants in the United States: white and Asian children have far higher rates of implantation than black children, Latina/o children, and children from non-English-speaking families. Even when implantation rates are more similar, children from minoritized households tend to receive inadequate follow-up care (Mauldin 2016). But these differences reach far beyond cochlear implants, in some cases pushing poor people and people of color into greater reliance on bodily technologies while in other cases placing barriers in between those communities and bodily technologies (Roberts 2011). Compared to white patients, black patients are less likely to be referred to kidney- and liver-transplant lists and less likely to receive aggressive curative treatments for heart disease, but they are more likely to have lower limbs amputated or testicles removed (102). Contextualizing bodily technologies also means examining their histories, and many scholars in disability studies have drawn attention to the role of the military in technological innovation and development. The field of prosthetics has long been driven by governmentfunded research into war-related injuries, and newer developments in how best to treat and rehabilitate veterans with brain injuries are similarly situated (Ott 2015; Serlin 2004; Wool 2015). For disability scholars, it is essential to attend to such complexities, namely, that the very technologies that enable some disable others (e.g., Erevelles 2011; Kurzman 2001). To take but one example, exoskeletons, such as eLEGS, make it possible for some paralyzed people to walk under certain conditions. This very technology is the basis of the Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC), exoskeleton that enables soldiers to carry heavy weapons in the field with reduced risk of back pain or repetitive-stress injuries. HULC, in other words, is intended to prevent disability in US soldiers while increasing their ability to kill and disable others. GENDER: MATTER

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Racial justice scholars and activists have undertaken similar examinations of the racist histories of bodily technologies, noting the frequency with which people of color have unknowingly been the test subjects of some technologies and the forced or coerced recipients of others. J. Marion Sims (1813 1883) is often credited as the father of modern gynecology based on innovations he developed in his experimental surgeries and treatments of enslaved black women in the United States, all without the use of anesthesia (Roberts 1999). Writer Harriet Washington (2006) documents the long history of such trials, of which the twentiethcentury Tuskegee syphilis study, which tracked the intentionally untreated development of syphilis in black men without their knowledge or consent, is perhaps the most infamous. Reproductive technologies have often been the site of such abuses. Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts (1956 ; 1999), historian Jane Lawrence (2000), sociologist Jeanne Flavin (2009), and filmmaker Renee Tajima-Pen ~a, director of No ma´s bebe´s/No More Babies (2015) have all detailed the widespread coercion of women of color to use long-acting contraceptives despite potential health risks and the forced sterilization of women of color and indigenous women.

CYBORGS: PROMISES AND PERILS ‘‘Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin’’ (Haraway 1991, 178)? This question appears in the middle of ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’’ a landmark essay in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women by science and technology theorist Donna J. Haraway (1944 ) that paved the way for decades of feminist scholarship on the politics of bodies, technologies, and their interactions. Haraway’s question challenges readers to reject conceptions of the body as a discrete, natural entity. She was particularly concerned about feminist conceptions of the body that understood it as separate and separable from technology hence her refusal of skin as necessary for recognition and relationship. In order to facilitate awareness of our ‘‘joint kinship with animals and machines’’ (154), Haraway proposes thinking through the figure of the cyborg, ‘‘a hybrid of machine and organism’’ that serves as ‘‘an imaginative resource’’ for understanding bodily technologies as networked webs of power and domination (149, 150). In insisting on the inextricability of bodies and technologies and, more importantly, casting their interactions as a vital site for feminist analysis, Haraway disputes the assertion among some feminists that technology is hopelessly embedded in patriarchal logics (e.g., Raymond 1987). Yet Haraway is equally critical of the European and North American progress narrative and its assumption that technological advancement leads only and always to better futures for all. She is quick to remind readers that the cyborg is ‘‘the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,’’ but she locates the promise of the cyborg in its illegitimate blasphemy it always has the potential to be ‘‘exceedingly unfaithful to [its] origins’’ (Haraway 1991, 151). Thus for Haraway, the cyborg represents a rejection of both technophilia and technophobia, casting the work of feminism as a critical inquiry into the assumptions, uses, and implications of bodily technologies. Perhaps one reason ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto’’ continues to resonate is that the theoretical problems Haraway identified are not unique to feminism. Other fields and movements, such as disability studies, have also seen technological developments as so wrapped up in militarism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and ableism that they have often concentrated on criticizing bodily technologies for their violent normalizing impulses. But many activists, scholars, and artists have, like Haraway, taken these critiques beyond blanket dismissals, posing critical

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questions concerning what specific technologies might make possible, what they might preclude, and for whom (e.g., Mauldin 2016; Mills 2015; Ott 2015). Disability studies scholars have suggested that the cyborg figure’s hybridity blending human, animal, and machine makes it a useful model of embodiment for disabled people, many of whom have integrated prosthetics, personal attendants, and/or service animals into their daily lives (e.g., Garland-Thomson 1997). As a boundary-blurring amalgamation of human, animal, and machine, the cyborg suggests that ‘‘purity’’ and ‘‘wholeness’’ are neither possible nor desirable, a position that resonates with work in disability studies that challenges the rejection of bodies and minds deemed deficient or incomplete. Disability studies scholars have also found in the cyborg a useful metaphor for disrupting the able-bodied/disabled binary. With its focus on fluidity, partiality, and multiplicity, cyborg theory provides a productive framework for rejecting the ableist imposition of a fixed, permanent, or stable boundary between disabled and nondisabled people (e.g., Brueggemann 2009; GarlandThomson 1997; Herndl 2002; Reeve 2012). But other scholars of disability disagree with this reading of the cyborg, arguing that cyborg theory too often erases or ignores the material realities of disabled people’s lives. Many of the technologies so often touted in cyborg theory are far too expensive to be within the reach of most disabled people; casting the cyborg figure as a role model for disabled people’s (alleged) interface with technology both obscures and leaves intact this economic reality. Celebrations of cyborgian hybridity also tend to downplay the possibility that such body/machine interfaces may be painful. The same leg brace that facilitates movement and renders one cyborgian can lead to sores where it meets the skin, but this irony is rarely noted in cyborg theory. As disability studies scholar Tobin Siebers (1953 2015) cautions, prosthetics are seen as ‘‘a source only of new powers, never of problems’’ (Siebers 2001, 745). Attending to the material realities of cyborg theory from a disability studies perspective requires a focus not only on the potential users of these bodily technologies but also on their producers. Given that ‘‘the manufacture of prosthetics and assistive technology is dependent on an exploitative international division of labor,’’ one that produces disability among many communities and populations, critical race and disability theorist Nirmala Erevelles (2011, 130) warns that simply blurring the boundaries between bodies and machines does not necessarily lead to liberation. Scholars working in race and ethnic studies have also raised concerns about the cyborg’s limits, suggesting that it is overly narrow in its approach to bodily technologies. Cyborg theory has rarely engaged with aural technologies, notes African American studies scholar Alexander G. Weheliye (2002), and this gap has likely contributed to the field’s whiteness. Feminist studies scholar Susan Bordo (2008) agrees, highlighting the lack of attention to African and African American hairstyles in theories of body modification even though such practices can certainly be seen as cyborgian bodily technologies. How might theories of the cyborg expand if we thought not only beyond the skin but also beyond the follicle? As Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman (2000) argue in their introduction to Race in Cyberspace, references to the gendered cyborg abound, but texts exploring the race of the cyborg are fewer and farther between. Or to take up a different line of critique, cyborg theory has been used so frequently in theories of technology that its attention to nature and animals has been lost, suggests environmental studies scholar Stacy Alaimo (2000). How might theories of bodily technologies shift if the bodies of all animals, not just humans, were included? Or how might cyborg theory develop differently if theorists recognized that nonhuman animals are also interfaced with technologies? GENDER: MATTER

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MONSTER TECHNOLOGIES Haraway (1991) often describes her cyborg as a kind of monster, and monstrosity itself has figured largely in critical approaches to bodily technologies, especially among transgender theorists. Historian Susan Stryker (1994) uses the character of Frankenstein to theorize a critical relationship between medical science and transgender experience. Speaking back to antitrans and antitechnology feminists such as Janice Raymond (1987), who condemn transgender women as unnatural man-made monsters, Stryker reclaims both monstrosity and technological construction. ‘‘The transsexual body is an unnatural body,’’ she writes. ‘‘It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born’’ (Stryker 1994, 238). Yet Stryker warns her readers: ‘‘You are as constructed as me. . . . Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself’’ (241). The monster figure refuses assumptions about pure, untouched nature, insisting that such purity does not exist. As with the cyborg, the claiming of the monster as a way to navigate bodily technologies can be a strategy that works better for some than for others. As gender studies scholar Katrina Roen (2006, 663 664) argues, ‘‘If we think of colonisation as a process of rendering racialised bodies monstrous, how might we approach differently the reclaiming of transsexual bodies as monstrous?’’ How might one’s class position, racial location, and/ or citizenship status affect one’s interest in taking up the figure of the cyborg or the monster? How might such figurations be more available to some people than others? Such questions suggest that there is no single feminist approach to complicated figures like cyborgs and monsters. They may offer us new ways of thinking about bodily technologies, but they do not guarantee resistance to or subversion of oppressive manifestations of those technologies.

MEDICALIZATION AND NORMALIZATION One of the ways of classifying bodily technologies is to distinguish them by function. Some technologies are marked and marketed as ‘‘assistive,’’ for example, while others go unmarked. Medical technologies are often characterized by terms such as assistive, elective, therapeutic, cosmetic, and corrective. Although these classifications are intended to mark technologies as fundamentally different from one another, so that limb-lengthening and limb-straightening surgeries are seen as therapeutic while nose jobs are seen as cosmetic, many scholars have disputed these divisions (e.g., Balsamo 1996; Chase 1998; Ott 2015). Disability studies would challenge the assumption that limb-lengthening surgeries are always therapeutic, for example, noting that such surgeries often result in little change in function but significant increases in pain. Such outcomes suggest that these kinds of surgeries actually serve more cosmetic purposes normalizing the body’s appearance than therapeutic ones. Intersex scholars and activists, such as Cheryl Chase (1988), have raised similar challenges to treatment protocols that encourage surgical intervention in infants and children, interventions that often lead to reduced sexual sensation and alienation from one’s own body. Guidelines for determining what constitutes ‘‘gender ambiguity,’’ such as what size clitoris is ‘‘too big’’ to ‘‘be’’ a clitoris, are reliant on cultural norms of gender and sexuality. The bodily differences highlighted in such guidelines often pose no functional limitations but are rather limitations only in the sense that they violate cultural norms and expectations (Chase 1988; Karkazis 2008).

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Scholars have described this approach to difference as a ‘‘medical model’’ approach or as the ‘‘medicalization’’ of difference (e.g., Balsamo 1996; Garland-Thomson 1997; Karkazis 2008). In this framework, disability or deviation is understood as an individual problem located in the body or the mind, independent of social structures that may privilege some bodily configurations or ways of thinking over others. Residing at the level of the individual, the problem of disability can best be solved through a biomedical or technological fix. There is no need for discussion of cultural norms and expectations or for social changes to alleviate inequalities, rather only a need for greater technology. White, young, healthy bodies are the norm against which other bodies are measured, a stance that medicalizes and pathologizes age, illness, disability, and nonwhiteness.

TRANS, QUEER, CRIP: RESISTANCES TO MEDICALIZATION In what could be described as an ironic, cyborgian move, one that refuses both technophilia and technophobia, many disability and transgender scholars and activists have taken up a more complex stance toward medical interventions. These thinkers demonstrate that it is possible to support or even desire medical intervention while opposing medicalization to, in other words, recognize that medical intervention does not necessarily have to serve ableism or transphobia. Cochlear implants have been a rich site for such explorations. Psychologist Irene W. Leigh (2009) and sociologist Laura Mauldin (2016) suggest that understanding cochlear implants solely in terms of a binary conflict between Deaf culture and normalization or medicalization ignores the possibility of users who may desire both Deaf culture and implantation. Some deaf people continue to use sign language, participate in deaf communities, and embrace deaf identities even after receiving cochlear implants (Brueggemann 2009; Leigh 2009). Although many medical practitioners and educators have asserted that cochlear implants cannot exist alongside sign language, there is nothing inherent in the implant technology that would be damaged by such coexistence. Rather than assume that the two bodily technologies sign language and cochlear implants cancel each other out, Leigh and Mauldin argue for a more nuanced approach to medical intervention. Medical approaches need not simply be rejected but can be a site of sustained engagement and interrogation. Like disability studies, transgender studies offers many generative examples of this kind of contradictory or ambivalent response to medicalization. Positioning her own use of pharmaceuticals within a wider political economy, sociologist Michelle O’Brien (2013) traces the manufacturer of each of her medications, discusses where she obtains the syringes she needs for injections, and describes the politics of health care that lead her to purchase these medications out of pocket, online, and away from a ‘‘proper’’ provider. As a trans woman, she is ‘‘invisible’’ to her health insurance company yet dependent on her medications; she may be interfacing with corporate medicine, but she does so ‘‘improperly.’’ O’Brien makes clear that simply rejecting medical intervention or the products of the medical-industrial complex is not an option for those whose survival depends on pharmaceuticals and medical treatment, but one can still be critical of the economies in which such drugs or treatments circulate. Diagnoses also merit this kind of critical response, and gender identity disorder (GID) offers another useful illustration of the need for a contradictory approach to the politics of medicalization, both drawing on and critiquing medical frames. According to legal theorist GENDER: MATTER

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Dean Spade (2003, 35), the diagnosis is too easily used by mental health professionals as a justification for mistreatment, promotes ‘‘a regime of coercive binary gender,’’ and is inaccessible for many low-income people. He is therefore loathe ‘‘to make trans rights dependent upon GID diagnoses.’’ At the same time, because ‘‘many trans people’s lives are entangled with medical establishments,’’ their best hope is a medical diagnosis and the recognition and access to services it entails (35). Although the American Psychiatric Association (2013) replaced GID with gender dysphoria in the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), revising some of the criteria for the diagnosis, Spade’s cautions still resonate. Diagnosis can be seen as a bodily technology that determines one’s access to other bodily technologies (to hormones or surgery, for example), occurs within a context of ableism (the stigma of being ‘‘diagnosable’’), and is more available to some people (those with adequate and accessible health care, those with medically accepted conditions) than others. In arguing for this kind of deeply grounded analysis of transgender experiences and identifications, Spade and O’Brien are practicing what some transgender theorists have referred to as a somatechnics approach, a rejection of the bifurcation between body and technology and an insistence that all bodies not just transgender bodies are modified by, experienced through, coconstituted by, or interfaced with technologies (Cotton 2014; Sullivan 2014). Rather than viewing surgery as the primary lens through which transgender lives are experienced or theorized and viewing trans surgery itself in very narrow terms (i.e., completely focused on genitalia), scholars can expand their view to include a much larger range of technologies, including individual and ‘‘collective resistance, organization, and struggle’’ (Cotton 2014, 205).

FUTURE POSSIBILITIES, POSSIBLE FUTURES The film Fixed: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement (2013), directed by Reagan Pretlow Brashear, includes excerpts from person-on-the-street interviews about the bodily technologies people wish they had. Although some of the desired enhancements are expected to fly, for example others are not; one person wants the ability to cook noodles instantaneously with his fingers. As these comic interviews demonstrate, pleasure can be found in speculating about the future of bodily technologies. What amazing things will future designers make possible? Recognizing that these imaginings can easily move in unpredictable directions, however, Brashear surrounds them with more formal ruminations from philosophers imagining futures without disability and social justice activists warning of the dangers of eugenics, both past and future. Her film thus offers a reminder that people do not share the same imagined futures for technology and that bodily technologies in the future as in the past and present can be used to disparate and divergent ends. It does seem likely that future bodily technologies will extend practices of surveillance. Public and private surveillance cameras and DNA databases are already being used to target minoritized communities, and such uses will likely continue in the name of security (Generations Ahead 2009; Roberts 2011). As more and more people begin hooking into networked bodily technologies, the possibilities for surveillance only increase. Many such practices may even be ‘‘voluntary’’ if people’s embrace of personal monitoring systems such as Fitbits are any indication. It also seems likely that as groups embrace some technologies as ways of expressing their identities or developing communities, their use of such technologies may open them up to increased regulation. Cultural studies scholars Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (2013, 7) worry

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that ‘‘as trans subjects become ‘countable,’ we also become vulnerable to new modes of biopolitical regulation, including the increasingly tight management of precisely what combination of surgical and hormonal transformations are required to legally define a person’s sex or transgender status.’’ Kim Tallbear (2013) sounds similar notes of caution regarding the possibility of DNA as the ultimate arbiter of tribal belonging and Native American identity. But such moves will also generate resistances, and those resistances will similarly draw on bodily technologies in unexpected and unpredictable ways. In theorizing technology from a social justice perspective, it is important to remember that ‘‘exclusion can be a source of innovation, as [when] a device or technical system is transformed by the imperative to accommodate disability’’ (Mills 2015, 177). Future developments in bodily technologies will stem from exactly these kinds of imperatives. In ‘‘Cripping Feminist Technoscience,’’ science and technology studies scholar Aimi Hamraie (2015) not only conjures a new field into being ‘‘crip feminist technoscience studies’’ but also points to the kinds of knowledge such a field might produce. Hamraie hints at the possibilities of ‘‘crip ‘hacktivism,’ such as disabled people self-inventing adaptive technologies, designing accessible restrooms, and developing low-cost, 3D printed prosthetics’’ (311). Abler, the blog of designer Sara Hendren (2014a), showcases exactly these kinds of projects, encouraging other designers and engineers to think creatively about disability and bodily technologies (see also Hendren 2014b).

Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi, Embrace, 2011. Yi creates adornments for disabled bodies, or wearable pieces of art intended to showcase different bodily formations rather than ‘‘correct’’ or hide them. In Embrace, white plastic braces cradle a user’s hands; each brace culminates in billowy white fabric cuffs accentuated with pink and coral embroidery. ª C HUN-SHAN YI

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Various social movements certainly hint at how such projects might unfold. Black women’s speculative fiction such as that by authors Octavia Butler (1947 2006) and Nalo Hopkinson (1960 ) is a rich resource for examples of how to imagine otherwise in resistance to racist, colonial logics, as is Afrofuturism more broadly. Afrofuturism draws on the intellectual histories, artistic legacies, and political work of African American and African diasporic peoples and communities to imagine possible futures, futures that do not locate blackness only as a sign of deviance or lack (Nelson 2002). Disability culture artists are similarly imagining new technologies and potential relationships to them. Lisa Bufano (1972 2013), for example, created spectacular prosthetics that allowed her to look and move in more-than-human ways, suggesting a fluidity between human, animal, and machine bodies; Sue Austin (1965 ) works with a team to allow her to ‘‘swim’’ in her power wheelchair underwater, expanding ideas about what kinds of bodily technologies belong where (and making quite evident that ‘‘functional’’ technologies can be used purely for pleasure); and Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi (1981 ) creates adornments for disabled bodies, or wearable pieces of art intended to showcase different bodily formations rather than ‘‘correct’’ or hide them.

Summary All the theorists showcased here trans, queer, crip, Afrofuturist, somatechnic, cyborg position bodies and technologies as intimately related, refusing simple binaries of culture/ nature or machine/human. They map possible relationships to technology, offering theoretical frameworks for how to approach bodily technologies from social justice perspectives. In sharp contrast to popular understandings of technology as freeing us from the limits of the body race and gender are irrelevant in cyberspace, disability can be eliminated through technological fixes these scholars and activists insist on contextualizing bodily technologies and their users in material realities. Rather than position all technology as liberatory or oppressive or distinguish good technologies from bad, they examine how a particular technology is used, by whom, to what purposes, and under what circumstances. Many also reject an instrumentalist view of technology in which individuals freely choose which technologies to use or avoid, so that technologies and bodies are seen as separate and separable in favor of a networked view, in which bodies and technologies are understood as inextricable. We are made by and through our technological interfaces. In such a networked world, it is impossible simply to reject bodily technologies, but we can become more critically engaged in our interactions with and expectations of them.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

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Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Read ing Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

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Brueggemann, Brenda Jo. Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

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Chase, Cheryl. ‘‘Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism.’’ GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 4, no. 2 (1988): 189 211.

Karkazis, Katrina. Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Cotton, Trystan T. ‘‘Surgery.’’ TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1 2 (2014): 205 207.

Kolko, Beth E., Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Race in Cyberspace, edited by Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, 1 14. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Erevelles, Nirmala. Disability and Difference in Global Con texts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Finger, Anne. Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Flavin, Jeanne. Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figur ing Physical Disability in American Culture and Litera ture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Generations Ahead. ‘‘California Forensic DNA Databases: Impacts on Communities of Color.’’ April 2009. http:// www.generations ahead.org/files for download/articles /GenAheadReport CAForensicDNAReport.pdf. Gray, Chris Hables, Steven Mentor, and Heidi J. Figueroa Sarriera, eds. The Cyborg Handbook. New York: Rout ledge, 1995. Hamraie, Aimi. ‘‘Cripping Feminist Technoscience.’’ Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2015): 307 313. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hendren, Sara. ‘‘Adaptive Hacks: A Cane Meets a Bike.’’ Abler, June 24, 2014a. https://ablersite.org/2014/06/24 /adaptive hacks a cane meets a bike. Hendren, Sara. ‘‘All Technology Is Assistive: Six Design Rules on ‘Disability.’’’ Backchannel, October 16, 2014b. https:// backchannel.com/all technology is assistive ac9f7183c8 cd#.eq72bmn13. Henry, Liz. ‘‘Cruise Control Hack on My Scooter!’’ Composite, August 9, 2012. http://bookmaniac.org/cruise control hack on my scooter/. Herndl, Diane Price. ‘‘Reconstructing the Posthuman Body Twenty Years after Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals.’’ In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by

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Kudlick, Catherine. ‘‘The Blind Man’s Harley: White Canes and Gender Identity in America.’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 2 (2005): 1589 1606. Kurzman, Steven L. ‘‘Presence and Prosthesis: A Response to Nelson and Wright.’’ Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 3 (2001): 374 387. Lawrence, Jane. ‘‘The Indian Health Service and the Sterili zation of Native American Women.’’ American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2000): 400 419. Layne, Linda L. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Feminist Technology, edited by Linda L. Layne, Sharra L. Vostral, and Kate Boyer, 1 35. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Leigh, Irene W. A Lens on Deaf Identities. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Mauldin, Laura. Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children. Minneapolis: University of Min nesota Press, 2016. Mills, Mara. ‘‘Do Signals Have Politics? Inscribing Abilities in Cochlear Implants.’’ In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, 320 346. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Mills, Mara. ‘‘Technology.’’ In Keywords for Disability Stud ies, edited by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, 176 179. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Nakamura, Lisa. ‘‘‘Where Do You Want to Go Today?’: Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet, and Transnationality.’’ In Race in Cyberspace, edited by Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, 15 26. New York: Routledge, 2000. Nelson, Alondra. ‘‘Introduction: Future Texts.’’ Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 1 15.

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O’Brien, Michelle. ‘‘Tracing This Body: Transsexuality, Pharmaceuticals, and Capitalism.’’ In The Transgender Studies Reader, vol. 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 56 65. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Stryker, Susan. ‘‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein about the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 3 (1994): 227 254.

Ott, Katherine. ‘‘Prosthetics.’’ In Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, 140 143. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Stryker, Susan, and Aren Z. Aizura. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In The Transgender Studies Reader, vol. 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 1 12. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Ott, Katherine, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm, eds. Artifi cial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Pros thetics. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Preciado, Beatriz. ‘‘The Pharmaco Pornographic Regime: Sex, Gender, and Subjectivity in the Age of Punk Capital ism.’’ In The Transgender Studies Reader, vol. 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 266 277. New York: Routledge, 2013. Raymond, Janice. Preface to Man made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women, edited by Gena Corea, Renate Duelli Klein, Jalna Hanmer, et al., 9 13. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Reeve, Donna. ‘‘Cyborgs, Cripples, and iCrip: Reflections on the Contributions of Haraway to Disability Studies.’’ In Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, edited by Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes, and Lennard Davis, 91 111. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Roberts, Dorothy. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re create Race in the Twenty First Cen tury. New York: New Press, 2011. Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduc tion, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage, 1999. Rodrı´guez, Juana Marı´a. Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Roen, Katrina. ‘‘Transgender Theory and Embodiment: The Risk of Racial Marginalization.’’ In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 656 665. New York: Routledge, 2006. Serlin, David. Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Post war America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Siebers, Tobin. ‘‘Disability in Theory: From Social Construc tionism to the New Realism of the Body.’’ American Literary History 13, no. 4 (2001): 737 754. Spade, Dean. ‘‘Resisting Medicine, Re/modeling Gender.’’ Berkeley Women’s Law Journal 18 (2003): 15 37.

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Sullivan, Nikki. ‘‘Somatechnics.’’ TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1 2 (2014): 187 190. Tallbear, Kim. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: Uni versity of Minnesota Press, 2013. Terry, Jennifer, and Melodie Calvert. ‘‘Introduction: Machines/Lives.’’ In Processed Lives: Gender and Tech nology in Everyday Life, edited by Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert, 1 13. New York: Routledge, 1997. Washington, Harriet. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colo nial Times to the Present. New York: Doubleday, 2006. Weheliye, Alexander G. ‘‘‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music.’’ Social Text 71 20, no. 2 (2002): 21 47. Wilson, Elizabeth A. ‘‘Organic Empathy: Feminism, Psycho pharmaceuticals, and the Embodiment of Depression.’’ In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 373 399. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Wool, Zoe H. After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. FI L MS Fixed: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement. Dir. Regan Pretlow Brashear. 2013. Disability artists and acti vists, philosophers, prosthetists, bioethicists, and repro ductive justice activists debate the promises, dangers, and histories of bodily technologies. No ma´s bebe´s/No More Babies. Dir. Renee Tajima Pen ~ a. 2015. A documentary about women of color mostly immigrant women from Mexico who were sterilized without their knowledge or consent in 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles. Sound and Fury. Dir. Josh Aronson. 2000. A documentary about the decisions an extended family, containing both hearing and deaf members, makes about cochlear implants.

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CHAPTER 27

Posthumanism Jeffrey Marchand Enhanced Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of English University of Texas at Arlington Connor Stratman Enhanced Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of English University of Texas at Arlington

What does it mean to be human? This question has engaged philosophers, artists, and writers for centuries. In the Euro-American (i.e., Western) tradition, the image of the idealized human form has been associated with Italian Renaissance painter and sculptor Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452 1519) Vitruvian Man (c. 1490): a white, geometrically proportioned, able-bodied male figure that demonstrates the ‘‘correct’’ range of motion. Various critics from feminist, animal, and postcolonial studies have challenged this representation, questioning this image’s naturalization of the white, European, male form as primary, which subsequently privileges human transcendence over the natural world. This persistent image of ‘‘man’’ places the human as the dominant form raised above all other forms of life, invoking an exceptionalist account of the human ability to defy nature through imagination, ingenuity, and intervention: an instance of ‘‘I think, therefore I am [better].’’ This quote plays on French philosopher Rene´ Descartes’s (1596 1650) ‘‘I think, therefore I am’’ statement, found in Discourse on the Method (1637). Descartes was a major figure in Enlightenment philosophy, which yielded Western humanism and continues to influence contemporary thinking. Posthumanism seeks to challenge this Cartesian vision of an idealized hierarchy in which the human, with his exceptional (here deliberately gendered) propensity for reason and self-reflection, is the central figure acting against a backdrop of a passive, dead, and mechanistic world. The goal of this chapter is to introduce readers to some basic concepts and fields related to posthumanism. The term posthumanism is notoriously difficult to define, and scholars and theorists have taken the term in many different directions. One place of agreement is that the post in posthumanism critiques the idea of the human as defined by Western models of knowledge steeped in the intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment, which assume that the world is a site of passive resources for human use. This chapter explores some major trends of posthumanist scholarship. Specifically, it focuses on the fields of animal studies, plant studies, science studies, new materialisms, and gender hacking. It shows how posthumanism links up with the concerns of feminist, gender, and race studies, particularly through the lens of matter and materiality. Indeed, most chapter sections include the term matters to emphasize how posthuman trends reflect a growing focus on the material world.

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Italian Australian feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti writes that posthumanism ‘‘object[s] to the unitary subject of Humanism . . . [and] replace[s] it with a more complex and relational subject framed by embodiment, sexuality, affectivity, empathy, and desire as core qualities’’ (2013, 26). In other words, posthumanism aims at the dissolution of assumptions about the nature/culture divide, striving to understand nature and culture as intimately entwined systems rather than as fundamentally different from and opposed to each other. In the end, as Canadian gender studies scholar Katherine McKittrick writes in an essay on Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Humanas Praxis, ‘‘The struggle to make change is difficult within our present system of knowledge; the struggle can, and has, reproduced practices that profit from marginalization and thus posit that emancipation involves reaching for the referent-We of Man’’ (2015, 7). This ‘‘referent-We’’ is the fiction of the Western Vitruvian Man, by Leonardo da Vinci, based on the universal figure, which forces individuals to participate in ancient Roman architect Vitruvius’s correlation of its conceptual framework by striving to identify with what ideal human proportions and geometry. Posthumanism counts as ‘‘man’’; those who fall outside the white, male, participates in moving away from the Western normative and able-bodied parameters are doomed to remain forever human as represented in Vitruvian Man: white, able bodied, outcasts of this imagined community. The decentering male, depicted as the center of the universe. UNIVERSAL HISTORY of ‘‘man’’ within posthumanism seeks to disrupt modes ARC HIVE / GETTY IMAGES of knowledge that rely on assumptions that are no longer viable, thus pointing to opportunities for significant change. That is, posthumanism conceives of alternatives to the hegemony of humanism by destabilizing assumptions of universality, which open up possibilities for new forms of ethics, ontologies (theories of being), and communal assemblages (of diverse humans and other beings).

THE PROBLEM OF DEFINING POSTHUMANISM One of the reasons that posthumanism is famously difficult to define is that a wide array of scholarly possibilities can fall under this term. Many scholars often confuse posthumanism with the more technologically specific and hybrid human/machine vision of transhumanism, best exemplified by American postmodern literary scholar N. Katherine Hayles (1999), though she utilizes the term posthuman rather than transhumanism to designate her theory. Posthumanism as discussed in this chapter moves beyond transhumanism by taking into account diffuse fields such as biology, physics, geology, ecology, and ethology, to name just a few. Cary Wolfe, a major American figure in posthumanism and animal studies, argues in What Is Posthumanism? (2009) that posthumanism sets itself, through various means and methods, against humanism, the dominant scientific and philosophical model of Western epistemology whose contemporary form originated during the Enlightenment (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). Generally speaking, humanism emphasizes human dignity, rationality, and agency. This model, Wolfe writes, assumes that human beings are fundamentally separate from their surroundings in the sense that humans are active minds, while the world around them is a passive resource for them to observe, interfere with, and

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consume. Thus, posthumanism ‘‘names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms’’ (xv xvi). In other words, posthumanism seeks to destabilize the assumptions that human beings are superior and separate from the world in which they live. This is a radical notion, because it undermines many inherent biases in previous human endeavors of knowledge making in which the more-than-human world was configured as a site of human resource. This definition of posthumanism also runs counter to other associations produced by the term, such as those that emphasize human beings through science and technology, suggesting transcendence of biological bodies and merging with the artificial. Such is the view, Wolfe argues, of theorists such as Hayles. Wolfe identifies this model as transhumanism to contrast it with his own. The significant difference between these two approaches is that posthumanism, in Wolfe’s model, is a radical form of immanence, which means that humans are invariably connected to the material world, whereas transhumanism focuses on transcendence, asserting that human beings are capable of moving beyond their physical constraints. So for Wolfe, posthumanism destabilizes and questions the long-held belief in human autonomy and forces reconsideration of the classical human figure and its relational place in the world, a notion with which Braidotti would likely agree. Braidotti suggests that posthumanism should be viewed as a ‘‘generative tool’’ in which understandings of the human can and should be modified to reflect that we indeed are only one piece of a much bigger puzzle. In other words, Braidotti conceives of posthumanism as a reconciliation between the human, as defined in Western intellectual tradition, and the nonhuman world, which requires us to seek new ‘‘common points of reference and values in order to come to terms with the staggering transformations that we are witnessing’’ (2013, 196). This echoes what French intellectual team of Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari (1987) term a deterritorialization. This means that humans rethink the assumption of themselves being the common measure of all things, followed by a subsequent reterritorialization of the human as one creature among many who cohabitate and coconstitute the world in all of its specificity and diversity. As a consequence, humans have to rethink how they view not only themselves but also other types of beings. Though posthumanism need not be gendered, the rejection of humanism necessarily disrupts the centrality of the gendered concept of ‘‘man’’ as the standard of measurement. As Braidotti argues: ‘‘The human norm stands for normality, normalcy, and normativity. It functions by transposing a specific mode of being human into a generalized standard, which acquires transcendent values as the human: from male to masculine and onto human as the universalized format of humanity’’ (2013, 26; emphasis in original). Braidotti thus implies that the critical motivations between posthumanism and feminism are aligned toward similar goals. As feminism seeks to disrupt patriarchal norms of gender relations, so too does posthumanism seek to disrupt masculine, white hegemonic structures that promote visions of the human as the only legitimate dominating force in the world. ‘‘Feminist inquiry,’’ writes American science and technology theorist Donna Haraway (1944 ), ‘‘is about understanding how things work, who is in the action, what might be possible, and how worldly actors might somehow be accountable to and love each other less violently’’ (2003, 7). One could easily swap feminist for posthumanist in this formulation, as the latter seeks similar understandings of relations between various entities. GENDER: MATTER

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ANIMAL MATTERS One of the most popular and rapidly expanding fields in posthumanism is that of animal studies. Though animal studies scholars differ in their approaches, what brings them together is their critique of the assumption that human animals have the right to use nonhuman animals for their own ends. The diverse topics that fall under the canopy of animal studies include studies in ideology, companionship, sociopolitical and economic systems, and affinities that offer human animals new ways of understanding themselves, though this is an incomplete list. Overall, critical animal studies describes a field that attempts to intervene in the assumption that human animals are an especially privileged form of life in terms of their intellect, culture, and self-determination. This humanist attitude justifies human domination and exploitation of other animal species by relegating the latter to a subordinate position in a naturalized hierarchy. Animal studies scholars attempt to challenge this oppressive mode of thought and to conceive of new ethical relations between the human and the more-than-human world. In his book A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934), German zoologist Jakob von Uexku¨ll (1864 1944) argues against forms of understanding animals as machinelike objects that lack anything resembling consciousness or agency. He posits that each kind of animal understands its environment (Umwelt) in specific ways according to the needs of its bodily processes. One famous example he gives is that of the tick. The tick’s world is determined by its need for butyric acid, which it finds in the flesh of mammals. Thus, its perceptive capabilities are geared toward this object. This means that a tick in this situation is a living subject that intentionally acts upon the world as it perceives it. As Uexku¨ll writes: ‘‘All animal subjects, from the simplest to the most complex, are inserted into their environments to the same degree of perfection. The simple animal has a simple environment; the multiform animal has an environment just as richly articulated as it is’’ (50). This early text can be considered a precursor to the subset of posthumanist thought known as animal studies. Animal studies, as the name suggests, is a theoretical approach to complicating and rethinking the relations between human and nonhuman animals. The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), a late work by French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930 2004), explores some of the ways in which human discourse has made it possible for humans to subjugate, torture, and kill nonhuman animals for human beings’ gain. Derrida famously argues that one of the most important facilitators of this violence is the human tendency to group all different types of nonhuman animals under one category: the Animal. Derrida challenges this permitted violence by dismantling this singularizing category: ‘‘There is no Animal in the general singular, separated from man [sic] by a single, indivisible limit. We have to envisage the existence of ‘living creatures,’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity’’ (47). This means that in order to break free from linguistic conventions that group all animals under one umbrella term, humans need to actively recognize the specificity and uniqueness of any given species of nonhuman animal. Many posthumanists take Derrida’s text as a launching point for new and different approaches to rethinking nonhuman animals within Euro-American epistemological models. Haraway contributed a major work of animal studies with her 2008 book When Species Meet. In her earlier ‘‘Cyborg Manifesto,’’ Haraway argues that human life is undergoing a major transformation in which boundaries between itself and other forms of life and being are continually transgressed: ‘‘A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities

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in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines’’ (1991, 154). Haraway explores this notion of kinship further in When Species Meet by engaging with complex ethical, scientific, and economic problems surrounding human/nonhuman animal relationships. One central concept that Haraway articulates is that of ‘‘companion species.’’ This means that relationships between animals of different species (particularly human/ nonhuman animal relationships) coconstitute the participants in that particular relationship. As Haraway writes: ‘‘Companion species designates webbed bio-social-technical apparatuses of humans, animals, artifacts, and institutions in which particular ways of being emerge and are sustained. Or not’’ (2008, 134). Thus, material relationships between biological beings, social systems, and technologies act together to determine the possibilities of the lived experiences of all entities involved. In this sense, Haraway is attempting to formulate a new understanding of human/nonhuman animal relations that disrupts the dominant model with which humans usually approach nonhuman entities. Similarly, Canadian animal studies scholar Nicole Shukin in Animal Capital (2009) investigates how dominant biopolitical models justify the use of nonhuman animals under capitalist modes of production and consumption. Shukin’s overall argument is that a continual policing of the human/animal divide provides the conditions that allow for this form of exploitation. This shifty dividing line, she writes, ‘‘hinge[s] on the zoo-ontological production of species difference as a strategically ambivalent rather than absolute line, allowing for contradictory power to both dissolve and reinscribe borders between humans and animals’’ (11). In simpler terms, this means that structures of power get to determine who and what falls into particular forms of valued life. That is, there is a political reason many Americans do not eat dogs but do eat cows. Likewise, there is a reason certain human animals are allowed within certain borders, while others are made to live in refugee camps. Shukin critiques this political setup and provides a devastating attack on the biopolitics of contemporary commodity production and consumption. In ‘‘More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves’’ (2008), American gender studies scholar Eva Hayward discusses how the starfish lends insight into her own experience as a transsexual woman. In thinking through the starfish’s materiality and its ability to regenerate after losing a limb, Hayward comes to the conclusion that ‘‘‘we’ (as in you and me) are ourselves specific parts of the world’s ongoing refiguring; ‘we’ are part of the world in its (and our) dynamic structuration, its (and our) differential becoming . . . we live in a process of constant enfolding that . . . encourages a deeper and more expansive regard for ways that life comes together’’ (67). What Hayward demonstrates is a deeper affinity between human and nonhuman animals that is only possible when human animals are willing to seek similarities between themselves and other species. As Hayward is able to understand her own trans body by observing the vital materiality of the starfish, so too can other humans understand their own embodiment and embeddedness that they share with all other life.

PLANT MATTERS The vegetal world, though abundantly various like the multitude of nonhuman animal worlds, has traditionally been grouped under the general term plants. Plants are often conceptualized in negative terms, as lower forms of life that are part of a mechanistic nature, separate from the human realm. A growing trend within posthumanism, plant studies, much like the work being done in animal studies, challenges this generalized treatment of vegetal life from various perspectives and with various aims. Several major thinkers in this field have GENDER: MATTER

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embarked on innovative ways of investigating the world of plants that may in fact challenge humans as fully autonomous beings, ultimately helping to form new ethical frameworks for how to approach interactions and interventions with(in) the more-than-human world. American journalist and natural history writer Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World (2001) is an early serious consideration of plant life that questions the human as the dominant figure of the world. Pollan focuses on the spread and domestication of four plant species: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. Pollan inventively takes on the viewpoint of the plant, which significantly alters the humanist understanding of the term domestication. Pollan suggests that ‘‘it makes just as much sense to think of [domestication] as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests’’ (xvi). In fleshing out this idea, Pollan likens the human and our agricultural practices to the pollinating activities of insects, bees in particular, where the interspecies activities of animals and plants are reconfigured as a reciprocal relationship that benefits both species involved. This vegetal perspective contests the idea that conventional Western cultural practices (e.g., agriculture and plant breeding) shapes the natural world in whatever manner meets human wants and needs and instead entertains the notion that certain plant species may use human movements to spread their influence into novel territories. Pollan’s, however, is not the only approach to studying plant life that challenges an anthropocentric understanding of the world. In Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), Continental philosopher and environmental thinker Michael Marder investigates Western human assumptions about plant life in terms of classical metaphysics. Marder outlines how human understanding of plants has fueled the understanding of nonhuman nature as a site of domination and utilitarian resource. Similar to Derrida’s (2008) deconstruction of humans as ‘‘the Animal,’’ Marder argues that the catchall term plants betrays an epistemic violence that has led to the domination and disregard of plants as integral cohorts in creating our common world, a position that has had devastating ecological effects. In contrast, writes Marder, ‘‘the practical outcomes of considering the plant as the signpost of philosophy’s finitude . . . will include a drastically different comportment toward the environment, which will no longer be perceived as a collection of natural resources and raw materials’’ (2013, 31). Marder considers that plant life, although celebrated in its full alterity, shares with other forms of life the capability of creatively responding to its surroundings, highlighting the similarities between the animal (human or not) and the vegetal. This understanding or affinity, according to Marder, could lead toward more inclusive and cooperative ethical frameworks for enacting ecological programs. This would be beneficial for the multitude of lively creatures with whom humans share a common world. Plants, according to both Pollan and Marder, have long been considered passive, part of the backdrop of nature as a human resource. In Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (2011), philosophical botanist and research scientist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh Matthew Hall implicates this way of thinking in many contemporary environmental crises. ‘‘Within the imprecision of the term nature,’’ Hall points out, ‘‘the global domination of the plant kingdom is seldom recognized’’ (3). But a driving factor in scholars’ turn toward the vegetal, Hall observes, is that ‘‘most places on Earth which contain life are visibly plantscapes’’ (3; emphasis in original). So although animal studies is a vibrant field, it has left on the margins instrumental forms of life that contribute directly to the material conditions for humans’ and other beings’ existence, and in doing so we risk ‘‘losing sight of the knowledge that we humans are dependent ecological beings’’ (14). Understanding the human as an embedded figure among many other lively and active entities in a common more-thanhuman world is integral to the posthuman project.

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More importantly for this volume, Western epistemological traditions not only construe nature as passive but also mark it as distinctly feminine. Although none of the plant theorists previously mentioned specifically address gender, their methods of critiquing human treatment of the vegetal world are heavily influenced by feminist thought, as they all attempt to destabilize the naturalized dominant figure of ‘‘man.’’ American feminist philosopher Elaine P. Miller, in The Vegetative Soul (2002), investigates how the association of nature with the feminine might provide a space for equating femininity and nature in a positive way. As Miller argues, ‘‘The vegetative soul is radically opposed to the figure of organism as autonomous and oppositional; its stance to the world is characterized by the promise of life and growth . . . its individuation is much less radically defined, is subject to metamorphosis, and maintains an identity that transfigures itself over time’’ (5). Thus, for Miller, the transformative properties of plants mark these radically embedded beings as allies for feminists who seek to overcome the limiting oppositional category that ‘‘women’’ have traditionally occupied in Euro-American society. Similar to Hayward’s (2008) thinking through the starfish, Miller identifies a vitalism in the materiality of plants that provides an opportunity to reinterpret the human body as intimately connected with the vast more-than-human world. Taking cues from scientific studies of plants and animals, these feminist writers trace the mundane links between all life in order to create new and viable senses of connectivity and community through kinships with traditionally ‘‘Othered’’ forms of being. That plant studies to date seems to lack a specifically feminist perspective suggests that the field contains fertile ground for innovative research in gender studies.

SCIENCE MATTERS In light of the expanding interest in the nonhuman material world as demonstrated by animal and plant studies, science itself takes on a new and prominent role in the practice of criticism, specifically within posthuman thought. Posthuman theory and practice are intricately entwined with questions and problems of scientific understanding and knowledge production. Posthumanism as a critique and reconfiguration of models of knowledge is intimately connected to questions of science and scientific method. Generally speaking, posthumanism calls into doubt notions of objectivity and rationality, which are benchmarks of the humanist model of scientific inquiry. But contemporary theories of science indicate a significant departure from this humanist approach. French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour’s (1947 ) We Have Never Been Modern (1991) critiques strict distinctions between science, nature, and society common to modernity, which he suggests is a multiply constituted process that separates the present from a stabilized past and also human beings from all other forms of being. The nature/culture divide is a prominent example. Latour, by contrast, argues that elements previously assumed to be distinct entities actually form a network of interaction in which they mutually inform and constitute each other. ‘‘Science studies,’’ he writes, is ‘‘always attempting to retie the Gordian knot by crisscrossing, as often as we have to, the divide that separates exact knowledge and the exercise of power let us say nature and culture’’ (3). This suggests interdependence between entities previously assumed independent. All entities, then, are perhaps more accurately understood as hybrids, or ‘‘mixtures between entirely new types of beings’’ (10). Such insights question current taxonomical distinctions, suggesting that they need to be rethought and reworked. GENDER: MATTER

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American theoretical physicist Karen Barad (1956 ), in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), takes this hybridizing approach much further. Building on models of interdependence and networks such as those of Latour, Haraway, and Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885 1962), Barad presents a radical new interpretation of these theories. Responding to Haraway, Barad notes her emphasis on the instability of perceived physical boundaries between objects (and subjects), which informs Haraway’s challenge to the nature/culture divide, ‘‘but also the separation of epistemology from ontology’’ (41). In other words, knowing and being are inseparable. To separate being from knowing is to impose an artificial and unjustified boundary between the natural and the cultural that does not accurately reflect the complexity of the world in its continual becoming. Barad instead emphasizes particular forms of complex entanglements between entities and reconfigures accepted understandings of agency and intentionality, concepts usually reserved exclusively for human beings. Agency (the capacity to act) is not necessarily tied to intentionality (the will to act) in Barad’s framework. Instead, she configures agency as a cooperative force achieved through the enactment of certain material relationships. And intentionality, for Barad, rather than being attributable to a specific individual, ‘‘might be better understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents, including historically specific sets of material conditions that exceed the traditional notion of the individual’’ (23). Thus, Barad rejects models in which human agents act upon nonhuman entities to produce scientific knowledge; instead, she recognizes that nonhuman entities are themselves active agents in the production of scientific knowledge. For example, in laboratory experiments, the specific material relationships enacted between the scientist and the subject of study are what enable scientific knowledge to surface; however, if these relationships change, different knowledges may come into being. Building on Latour’s (1999) observation that the design of scientific apparatuses directly affects the knowledge that experiments produce, Barad pushes further, claiming that because much scientific knowledge is produced within Western patriarchal societies, these scientific facts are not only not objective (representing some a priori, unbiased state, free from cultural influence) but are also necessarily gendered. Barad terms this assemblage of entangled, active agencies of various types, both social and natural, ‘‘agential realism.’’ In agential realism, there is no separation between observer and observed; instead, both intra-act with each other in knowledge production in laboratory settings and beyond. The notion of intra-action is paramount here. Simply put, to say that entities interact implies that separate entities exist prior to and outside their relationship. Intra-action, by contrast, asserts that entities come into being through their relationship. This agential realist philosophy is radical, because it completely decenters human beings, making them equal participants in worldly events with all other nonhuman entities. American feminist science studies theorist Stacy Alaimo (1962 ), in her concept of trans-corporeality, builds on Barad’s agential realism in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010). Trans-corporeality reconfigures the human body as a porous site of intra-action between various flows of material forces. This formulation erases inside/ outside distinctions. As Alaimo puts it, ‘‘Thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is in fact a world of fleshy becomings with their own needs, claims, and actions’’ (2). Like Barad, Alaimo emphasizes the agency of nonhuman entities, but Alaimo filters agency through the prism of the body. While Barad largely focuses on physics, Alaimo takes a decidedly ecocritical approach, tracing how gender, class, and race contribute to the lived

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experiences of various marginalized material bodies that are more likely than other more privileged bodies to come into contact with dangerous chemicals and toxins. Posthumanist thought in general is concerned with issues of ecology, particularly of climate change and pollution. Alaimo’s trans-corporeality is thus a highly specified reconfiguration of agential realism through the lens of posthuman environmentalism. For Barad, many science studies scholars fail to recognize that the issues raised by feminists, queer studies scholars, and critical race scholars are an ‘‘integral part of questioning the nature-culture dichotomy and the work it does: not only that it matters, but how it matters and for whom’’ (2007, 87; emphasis in original). Alaimo (2010) recognizes this and illuminates how science studies, gender, and race intricately intersect through her discussion of environmental justice and the health problems that women of various class and racial backgrounds face due to so-called environmental factors, which are in turn influenced by varying systems of oppressions. The theories of Barad and Alaimo, both of which are grounded in and contribute significantly to feminist theory and feminist science studies, are highly influential on a specific school of posthumanism called new materialisms, to which the chapter now turns.

MATTER MATTERS In contrast to materialist philosophies that define nonhuman entities as mechanistic and lifeless, the field of new materialisms recognizes a fundamental vitality in the material world. Similar to posthumanists, new materialist thinkers take disparate approaches in critiquing materialist philosophies. The common thread among new materialist thought is the agency of physical matter. So, for example, new materialists often think about social constructionist ideas of race, gender, and class (to name a few categories) in terms of their material consequences. Thus, new materialisms tries to overcome the idea that cultural norms are merely linguistically constructed to investigate how these ideological constructs have detrimental physical and mental effects on those who fall outside conventional ideals. In their introduction to the collection Material Feminisms (2009), Alaimo and American feminist political science scholar Susan Hekman (1948 ) explain that feminism that takes matter seriously is an extension of the post-structural, language-centered approaches of thinkers such as American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler (1956 ). Such theories focused their critiques of gender and patriarchy almost exclusively on ideology and discourse. New materialists do not deny or reject these arguments. Rather, they claim that ‘‘focusing exclusively on representation, ideology, and discourse excludes lived experience, corporeal practice, and biological substance from consideration. It makes it nearly impossible for feminism to engage with medicine or science in innovative, productive, or affirmative ways’’ (4). Material feminism, while not rejecting the important insights that ideological and linguistic critiques have garnered, want to put the material body back into play, because oppressive representations of the body have detrimental material effects on the lived experiences of multiple beings: ‘‘not only to nonhuman nature, but to various women, Third World peoples, indigenous peoples, people of color, and other marked groups’’ (4). New materialist thinkers want to extend the insights of the ‘‘linguistic turn’’ into the realm of material consequences, to illuminate how social categories that marginalize certain groups of people have lasting and detrimental physical effects on both their bodies and their lived experience. GENDER: MATTER

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Furthering this material turn, Italian philosopher Serenella Iovino and Turkish ecocritic Serpil Oppermann, in their introduction to Material Ecocriticism, claim that new materialisms and its rich array of trajectories suggest that ‘‘the world’s material phenomena are knots in a vast network of agencies, which can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories’’ (2014, 1). This runs counter to the traditional Western view of matter as ‘‘dead’’ or mechanistic. Thus, new materialisms breathes life back into the material world, so to speak, recognizing that it has a life of its own. Indeed, it is a multiplicity of lives in a constant contact zone of a ‘‘natureculture,’’ to borrow a term from Haraway (2003). Recognizing lively cohabitation should compel creation of new ethical frameworks for interventions in a shared common world. But one still might wonder, does posthumanism exclude study of the human? The answer is a definite no.

MOLECULAR MATTERS The term posthumanism can imply that the field’s theories and practices forego study of the human entirely. Far from ignoring the human, however, certain posthumanist thinkers pursue innovative ways of approaching questions of human identity, materiality, and political possibility. For instance, some contemporary theorists investigate human beings’ relationship to chemicals and molecules, complicating the traditional Western model of human autonomy and identity, particularly in matters of gender and sexuality. Taking Haraway’s (1991) analysis of the cyborg to a more minute level, Spanish gender theorist Beatriz (Paul) Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) details an experiment with hormones that reconfigure sexual and gender identities, demonstrating that even sociocultural definitions (especially sex and gender) are made of matter and molecules, like human beings themselves. Preciado’s innovative mixture of materialist gender theory with autobiographical elements could be termed autotheory. That molecular self-experimentation is possible indicates to Preciado that there is an emerging ‘‘new age of political economy, not by its quantitative supremacy, but because the control, production, and intensification of narcosexual affects have become the model of all other forms of production. . . . [This new economic and political structure] infiltrates and dominates the entire flow of capital, from agrarian biotechnology to high-tech industries’’ (40). This new political-economic structure colludes with pharmaceutical giants and the pornography industry in policing bodies. In other words, the intersection of biotechnological capitalism and biopolitical control a political system that operates by controlling life itself through various population control measures signals an age in which political, economic, and scientific elites actively attempt to produce and control forms of sexual subjectivity and gendered identities through exploitation of bodies at the molecular level. This power structure compels a flow of labor and capital through the exploitation of what Preciado calls ‘‘potentia gaudendi,’’ defined as an ‘‘orgasmic force . . . the sum of the potential for excitation inherent in every material molecule’’ (42). Thus, political power attempts to maintain control of populations from the smallest possible base: the molecular base that comprises the human body. The goal of this sort of chemically based power structure is the ‘‘normalization and transformation of living beings’’ (111). By controlling the chemical and molecular processes of human bodies, this power structure can mold these bodies to fit conventional Euro-American visions of gender

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and sexuality. This is evident in methods such as hormone therapy and surgical sex ‘‘correction’’ of intersexed infants. These methods reproduce the conventional, oppositional categories of ‘‘men’’ and ‘‘women.’’ Genders are in fact fictional categories assigned to bodies; they are neither predetermined nor essential. In other words, this medical-commercial-political regime interprets the bodies of those under its control for its own purposes. Preciado’s experiments with testosterone gel, a substance that is forbidden to women, are an attempt to disrupt this flow of control by committing a form of ‘‘gender hacking’’ in which one ignores the rules of the status quo by ignoring instructions on the prescription box. By experimenting on oneself at the chemical level, one can actively resist the predetermined identities projected onto bodies by the dominant power structure. As Preciado writes, ‘‘There is no universal human body, but a multiplicity of gendered, racialized, and sexualized living beings and organic tissues’’ (179). That is, any system in which bodies are modeled after predetermined conventions is selling lies to those bodies, manipulating them for motives of profit and political control. Preciado’s gender hacking is posthuman insofar as it finds material methods of theorizing and acting against reductive, confining, and essentialist definitions of human sexual and gender identity. By taking control of the means of molecular production (i.e., at the material level), human bodies can queer themselves in new and radical ways, refusing to accept interpretations of bodies from forces of sexual oppression and exploitation.

RACE MATTERS Posthumanism’s focus on dismantling hegemonic structures makes it a possible tool for theorization in race studies. But while most of the fields discussed above can be seen as intrinsically related to the posthuman project, race studies and postcolonial theorists are not convinced that posthumanism can be useful in creating ethical frameworks for relationships between human populations. Many scholars have begun to see the value of a new materialist or science studies approach to race for instance, Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota indigenous studies scholar Kim TallBear, American philosopher Shannon Sullivan, and American communication studies scholar Kelly E. Happe. But many such thinkers have notably avoided animal and plant studies or, in the case of black studies and cultural theorist Alexander G. Weheliye, have strongly critiqued posthumanism as a privileged viewpoint. Similar to Preciado’s view of molecules and pharmaceuticals as key to destabilizing naturalized notions of gender and sexuality while at the same time affirming their material base, a new materialist approach to race seeks to eliminate reductive and essentialist notions of racial superiority and inferiority while not abandoning race as an ontological reality that can negatively affect the lived experiences of racialized bodies. Two notable new materialist analyses of race are Sullivan’s ‘‘Inheriting Racist Disparities in Health: Epigenetics and the Transgenerational Effects of White Racism’’ (2013) and Happe’s chapter in this volume. Both use the lens of epigenetics the scientific study of how external environmental factors can affect the internal genetic makeup of living beings to explore how institutionalized racism can have lasting material effects on future generations. Along the same lines but from a critical perspective, TallBear (2007) questions the validity of tracing ancestral and tribal purity to prove tribal affiliation in the United States, arguing that a reliance on genetic science, which she terms a scientific ‘‘gloss’’ (because it is unnecessary and inaccurate), erases GENDER: MATTER

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the movements and relationships between and among heterogeneous populations. The link between science studies and new materialist race critiques is in its nascent stages but gaining momentum. In contrast, the posthuman position on race is more difficult to locate in scholarly work of the early twenty-first century. It seems that postcolonial and race studies could embrace the various fields of posthumanism animal studies, plant studies, science studies, new materialisms as tools for expanding ethical considerations to populations who have been historically disenfranchised within Euro-American epistemological paradigms. As suggested in this chapter’s introduction, the Western normative human represented by Vitruvian Man white, able-bodied, male, depicted as the center of the universe has long been critiqued by race scholars, and posthumanism participates in moving away from this narrowly configured model. But some critics claim that posthumanism nevertheless relies on this model. For instance, in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), Weheliye argues that many forms of posthumanism, especially animal studies and cyborg figures, actually ‘‘reinscribe the humanist subject (Man) as the personification of the human by insisting that this is the category to be overcome, rarely considering alternative versions of humanity’’ (10). Weheliye goes further, claiming that ‘‘these discourses also presume that we have now entered a stage in human development where all subjects have been granted equal access to western humanity’’ (10). Though critical, Weheliye does not condemn all posthuman accounts. For instance, he celebrates Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (2011), in which she ‘‘rearticulates and reframes Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts, creating novel assemblages and insights that only become possible when these ideas are put into work in milieus . . . beyond the snowy masculinist precincts of European philosophy’’ (Weheliye 2014, 47). Weheliye’s critique and limited acceptance of posthumanism raise important questions. By considering anew humanity’s relationship with the world, do posthuman theorists necessarily abandon the humanist projects of liberation and equality? Or might it be possible that the posthumanist critique exposes a categorical error in how the West has defined the human in the first place, as an exceptional being who holds court over all those deemed ‘‘less’’ or ‘‘Other’’? Furthermore, is it possible that posthumanism, including plant and animal studies, could be useful tools in critiques of race and colonialism? These questions cannot be answered definitively here, but they do show that more work needs to be done to reconcile sometimes competing modes of inquiry.

Summary This chapter has explored several emerging trends, loosely gathered under the term posthumanism, that are critical of Western humanism. From critiques of the foundations of contemporary science and philosophy to reconfigurations of the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world to new readings of race and gender, posthumanism is a reevaluation of traditional Western intellectual heritage. Given its diverse methods and areas of study, posthumanism eludes easy generalization and categorization, which is in fact one of its most important attributes. Posthumanism enacts its critique of singular narratives about the nature of knowledge, meaning, and existence by refusing to be a clean and orderly distinct discipline. It finds its strength in multiplicity rather than unity, and as such it is among the most exciting and fertile areas of contemporary scholarly research.

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This chapter’s brief introduction to the concerns and interests of posthuman theory and practice is necessarily limited, and promising areas for further reading await. As noted in this chapter, posthuman studies of matter and other forms of life owe a large debt to feminist theory and practice insofar as posthumanism is also a liberatory method for reconfiguring and dissolving traditional Western ideals that reinforce exploitative and destructive patterns of domination. Swedish gender studies Cecilia A˚sberg, for example, often writes from a posthuman feminist perspective. In ‘‘Beyond the Humanist Imagination’’ (2011), A˚sberg, Swedish gender studies scholar Redi Koobak, and Swedish scholar of technology Ericka Johnson suggest that feminists (and posthumanists alike), in response to ‘‘a cacophony of both human and non-human voices’’ and various emerging material conditions, must spark a renewed interest in ‘‘how the constituency of human as well as non-human populations can coexist in a world that nowadays is defined just as much by finitude and vulnerability as by endless possibility’’ (220). A˚sberg and her colleagues claim that posthumanism participates in this ethical project, which up until the early twenty-first century has been the exclusive domain of the human. Thus, feminism and posthumanism share a mutually beneficial relationship and probably will continue to do so. Forays into animal studies, plant studies, science studies, new materialisms, gender hacking, and critical race theory seek to extend the parameters of ethical consideration to the multiplicity of partners that coconstitute the material becoming of the human and the more-than-human world. This widening of the ethical field is continuous with the feminist and queer projects of liberation, and the future holds exciting possibilities for these partnerships. Though all these fields are diverse in their focus, their ultimate goal is the same, which is to challenge human beings to question their sense of superiority and exceptionality. The question remains, then, what will the world look like if and when these various projects succeed? What sorts of praxes may follow from such a radical renegotiation of ethical frameworks? And at the disciplinary level, what is next for the humanities as the border between itself and other disciplines dissolves?

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Fe´lix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Mas sumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

˚ sberg, Cecilia, Redi Koobak, and Ericka Johnson. ‘‘Beyond A the Humanist Imagination.’’ NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 19, no. 4 (2011): 218 230.

Hall, Matthew. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. London: Polity, 2013.

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Haraway, Donna. ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technol ogy, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Cen tury.’’ In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149 182. New York: Routledge, 1991.

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Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: Uni versity of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chi cago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hayward, Eva. ‘‘More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves.’’ Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2008): 64 85. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann, eds. Material Ecoc riticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. First published 1991. Lin, Maya. What Is Missing? 2016. http://www.whatis missing.net. An interactive art memorial to the nonhu man victims of the human induced sixth great extinction. Marder, Michael. Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. McKittrick, Katherine, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Miller, Elaine P. The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. New York: Random House, 2001. Preciado, Beatriz. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce Benderson. New York: Feminist Press, 2013. Rifkin, Mark. ‘‘Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sover eignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples.’’ Cultural Critique 73, no. 1 (2009): 88 124.

TallBear, Kim. ‘‘Narratives of Race and Indigeneity in the Genographic Project.’’ Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 35, no. 3 (2007): 412 424. von Uexkull, Jakob. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Translated by Joseph D. O’Neil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. First published 1934. Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemb lages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: Univer sity of Minnesota Press, 2009. F IL M S Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. 2009. Cameron portrays a more than human world community where all biologi cal life is cognizant of its entanglement in a web of life. Blackfish. Dir. Gabriela Cowperthwaite. 2013. A documen tary depicting the abuse of orca whales at SeaWorld, suggesting that orcas have intelligence and culture and making a plea for their liberation and autonomy. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Dir. Matt Reeves. 2014. Reeves creates a vision of animal cognition and culture in this reboot of the original 1968 Planet of the Apes film (dir. Franklin J. Schaffner), challenging conventional Euro American human/animal boundaries. Godzilla. Dir. Garth Edwards. 2014. In Edwards’ world, which is similar to the contemporary one, radioactive conditions affect the possibilities for life on a global scale. Jurassic Park. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1993. In this action film set in a tropical dinosaur theme park, Spielberg questions the science of genetic engineering and humankind’s sense of superiority and domination over the ‘‘natural’’ world.

Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Planet Earth. Created by the British Broadcasting Corpora tion (BBC). 2006. An eleven episode television nature documentary that overwhelms the viewer with the vast ness and variety of the nonhuman world.

Sullivan, Shannon. ‘‘Inheriting Racist Disparities in Health: Epigenetics and the Transgenerational Effects of White Racism.’’ Critical Philosophy of Race 1, no. 2 (2013): 190 218.

The Tree of Life. Dir. Terrence Malick. 2011. Malick lends a sense of wonder to viewers of the material world by connecting the life experiences (both joyful and tragic) of the characters to an overarching cosmic dance.

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Glossary

A Ableism: A system of beliefs, practices, policies, and ideologies in which illness, disease, debility, disabil ity, and bodily/sensory/mental difference serve as justification for discrimination, exclusion, disavowal, and other violences. Ableism works in conjunction with other categories or taxonomies of difference, such as racism, sexism, settler colonialism, and het erocentrism. Some activists and scholars prefer the term disablism for the way it centers disability as the site of discrimination; others use ableism for its atten tion to the social construction of able bodiedness and able mindedness as the normative ideal. Afrofuturism: An artistic and intellectual movement that centers on the experiences, cultural and theore tical productions, and insights of the African dia spora, with a focus on imagining futures for and reclaiming the pasts of black people and commu nities. Afrofuturist texts include not only speculative fiction but also music and music videos, film, visual art, and theoretical analyses. Part of the work of Afrofuturism is to identify theoretical and political engagements with technology and its effects in the work of diasporic writers, artists, and activists. Agency: The ability to act in such a way as to produce particular results. Although most social theory, including gender theory, attributes agency only to humans, some material feminist and posthumanist theories, such as those of American theoretical physicist Karen Barad, emphasize material agencies. See also Agential realism. Agential realism: A theory developed by American theoretical physicist Karen Barad, based on the phi losophy physics of Danish physicist Niels Bohr, that posits that relata (things) come into being by coming into contact with other relata. In this configuration, there are no individualized objects that pre exist the

relationships they enter into; instead, they come into being in specific ways due to specific relationships. This theory also describes materiality as agential. See also Agency. Androcentrism: A focus on men, male experience, or the male point of view. Anthropocene: A contested term coined by scientists to describe the contemporary geologic epoch in which the activities of humans are literally shaping planet Earth. Anthropocentrism: A philosophical orientation that puts humans at the center of our understanding of the world, attributing certain qualities such as agency or intelligence to humans alone and viewing the rest of the world, including other organisms, as passive things whose purpose is to serve human ends. Apartheid: A system of racial segregation enforced in South Africa from 1948 to 1994 by the white min ority National Party. Assemblage: In posthumanism, a collective or gather ing of things or people that are co constituting; often used instead of community. In archaeology, the com bination of things recovered at one place through excavation.

B Bioarchaeology: A specialized interdisciplinary scho larly field that uses methods from biological anthro pology to examine human remains recovered by excavation of archaeological sites. Bioart: Art that incorporates and/or manipulates live tissues, life forms, and life processes, including plant tissues, live plants, and plant genes. Bioart that involves plant matter can highlight the life processes of plants, create new plant human and plant machine hybrids, or simply signal the presence of plants in human living space.

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Biological determinism: The idea that human charac teristics, behavior, and future potentials are deter mined solely by biological components such as genes, hormones, brain morphology, and brain size. Biological essentialism: Reducing the value or meaning of a body to its biological function. In gendered terms, this usually refers to reducing women to their repro ductive functions as bearers of children, menstruators, lactators, and passive objects of heterosexual inter course. In gender theory biological essentialism is usually contrasted with social constructionism. See also Social constructionism. Biological victimhood: The reductive idea that the ill health of subaltern groups, such as women, is the result of their biology. Biopolitics: A concept introduced by French philosopher Michel Foucault and discussed by many others such as Italian philosophers Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben denoting networks of power that seek to control populations through all aspects of biological life. Such a network involves cooperation among state, commercial, scientific, medical, and social spheres of power in a loosely organized program of producing and disciplining bodies and forms of subjectivity. Biosocial: A term that challenges the essentialism constructionism split as a false dichotomy and involves an understanding of biology and society as a complex interrelation or mutually constitutive material process. Biocitizenship is an example of the enactment of bio sociality, as when groups of persons advocate for gov ernment funding of disease research. See also Biological essentialism; Social constructionism. Botany: The scientific study of plants, including the study of plant structures, functions, biology, genetics, biodiversity, relationships to the environment and other life forms, evolution, and use as food and fuel. Breast cancer culture: A term used by scholars, activists, and cultural critics to refer to the dominant culture (the norms, sensibilities, slogans, and forms of repre sentation) that surrounds breast cancer in contexts including the clinic, public campaigning, patient advocacy, and biosocial groups. Breast cancer culture is marked by the ‘‘pinking’’ of the disease, tropes of sentimentality and survivorship, heightened (and often militant) feminization, and overwhelming commodi fication. See also Pinkwashing.

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Breast reconstruction: Biomedical techniques of recon structing breasts, often following breast cancer surgery. Breast reconstruction takes two dominant forms: (1) standard, ‘‘tissue expander to implant’’ reconstruc tion and (2) ‘‘autologous,’’ ‘‘autogeneous,’’ or ‘‘living tissue’’ reconstruction, in which portions of a woman’s own body (back, buttocks, thigh, stomach) are har vested and repositioned to construct a new ‘‘breast.’’

C Cartesian dualism: The idea, championed by philoso pher Rene´ Descartes, that mind and body exist as separate entities and that the mind is the central domain of human existence because it is the source for human perception of matter. Central dogma: The theory that DNA is the primary source of genetic information and that proteins can never code for other proteins, for DNA, or for RNA. Clan: An organization of familial relations within societies. In indigenous societies where they are present, clans are genealogically significant ways of organizing social energies and responsibilities among familial and political relations in communities and indigenous places. In some places, clan membership is traced through women’s lineages (e.g., among the Mohawk peoples in the US Northeast and Tlingit peoples on the western coast of Canada). Both mater nal and paternal clans involve relations that can be called on for support and reciprocal responsibility. Clans vary widely and are significant in the politics of indigenous governing. See also Indigenous place. Clinical labor: A term coined by sociologists Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby that refers to the selling of one’s body as a site of experimentation for the pharmaceutical industry. Colonialism: A large scale political and economic system that allows one geopolitical entity to establish formal or informal controls beyond its traditional geographic borders in the service of increased profit or power. Settler colonialism refers to a form of colo nialism involving the replacement of the indigenous population by settlers through extermination, displa cement, intermarriage, or a combination of these factors. Metropolitan colonialism refers to a form of colonialism in which a small class of colonial officials rules over a largely intact indigenous population. See also Settler colonialism. MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

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Conceptive technology: Types of reproductive tech nology, including artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and surrogacy, that take con ception outside women’s bodies and may offer women a greater degree of technological control over reproduction. The widely recognized mile stones for conceptive technologies are the birth of the first baby conceived in a petri dish through IVF in 1978 and the first mammal cloned from an adult cell in 1996. Also called new reproductive technologies. Contraceptive technology: Also called old reproductive technologies, used to prevent pregnancy or birth. Since 1960, when the contraceptive pill became widely available in the affluent world, contraceptive technol ogies have offered sexual and reproductive freedom for many women and have become synonymous with the choice to use technologies (including drugs) as part of birth control. Corporeal feminism: A stance in feminist scholarship that underlines the need to reimagine and re evaluate the concept of the body outside dualisms and essen tialist reductionism; its aim is to capture the multi faceted notion of the body, its intertwinement with meaning and psyche, and the open ended nature of materiality that is vulnerable to being shaped by cultural and social norms. Corporeal vulnerability: At the level of individual experience, denotes the state of bodily dis ease that stems from an interruption to generally accepted notions of bodily mastery, wholeness, and integrity. Although it is the very condition of existence, vulner ability is generally seen as a shortcoming: it positions the subject as weak or unfortunate and marks the subject as potentially beyond the normative standards of being as they have been formulated within the medico discursive model of health. Crip: An abbreviation of cripple or crippled, reclaimed by many disability activists and scholars as a signifier of disability pride; also used in reference to disability theories informed by feminist and queer critiques of identity. Some disabled people as well as disability activists and scholars cast the term as irredeemably offensive and others as too academic or narrow. Critical plant studies: An interdisciplinary dialogue begun by philosopher and environmental scholar Michael Marder that challenges the view of plants as GENDER: MATTER

somehow less alive than animals, reinscribes the plant into the history of Western metaphysics, and critiques the common perception of plants as passive raw mate rials available for human use. It also advocates for describing the human in terms that are not animalistic but vegetal. Cyborg: An entity described by feminist science scholar Donna Haraway that combines human and animal, organism and machine, and physical and virtual characteristics through the interaction of biology, technology, and capitalism.

D Darwinism: An approach to evolution stemming from the work of British naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin, who argued that species evolve through the inheritance of small variations selected over genera tions through the twin principles of natural and sexual selection. Darwinists since Darwin have devel oped the biologist’s initial insights in a variety of different directions but remain interested broadly in the role of chance, temporality, and variation in the evolution of species. Deep time: The timescale of geologic processes and events that can be in the millions of years. Humanoids have existed for a very short period of time 7 or 6 million years compared to the age of Earth 4.5 billion years. The epochal qualities of the nonhuman present a challenge to thinking about human time and existence within much longer timelines and within material worlds quite different from the ones we cur rently inhabit. Deterritorialization/reterritorialization: A concept put forth by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari that suggests that in order to challenge the conception of a hierarchical world in which the human possesses ultimate reign, humans need to restructure their perceptions of the world and recon figure the human as only a small part of a much larger material configuration. Digital materiality: An approach for discussing the relations and interrelations between the digital and the material, including the materiality of bodies and technologies. Digital subaltern 2.0: The staging of an empowered subaltern via technology, including the mobile phone and the Internet. See also Subaltern.

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Disablism: See Ableism. Discipline: According to French philosopher Michel Foucault, a form of power that focuses on the individual body and works through coercion (rather than force) to modify and manipulate the body to conform to social norms. Rather than simply becoming the object of power, individuals also become the instrument of power. Discipline relies on individuals incorporating dominant norms into their own formations of self and thus, according to Foucault, constructs subjects. Division of labor: In anthropology, the concept of a formal assignment of different tasks to groups of people on the basis of age, sex, or other kinds of identity. Marxist theory and materialist feminisms also pay keen attention to how the division of labor according to class, gender, and other categories is caused by and results in economic and power differentials. Dualism: A conceptual pair of linked concepts in which one term is considered superior and the other inferior (e.g., human/nature); the common ground and inter connections between the two terms are denied. The pair operates through hyperseparation, objectification, definition through lack, and homogenization.

E Ecocriticism: A form of literary and cultural criticism that emphasizes issues of environmental concern. Ecofeminism: A feminist approach to analyzing capit alism and its double exploitation of human work and natural resources. Ecofeminism criticizes the societal and economic devaluation of care and responsibility for the environment and links this devaluation to the fact that care for humans and the environment are feminized. It often explicitly addresses the links between the degradation of women and the degrada tion of nature as connected to hierarchies of race, class, coloniality, sexuality, species, and other cate gories of difference. See also Ecological feminism. Ecological feminism: A feminist method that places systems of gender inequality within the broader context of the human domination of nature and analyzes how the domination of nature is often inflected with gendered conceptions and values. See also Ecofeminism. Ecology: A branch of science concerned with the rela tionships between and interactions among organisms and their environments as well as the principle of interconnectedness and interdependence of all living

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things within and across ecosystems. Ecology may also refer to social and political movements con cerned with environmental protection. Ecosexual: A person who identifies his or her sexual identity in terms of environmental values and ecolo gical consciousness, acknowledging that human life is intrinsically connected to the natural world as a whole. See also Ecosexuality. Ecosexuality: The cultural practice of treating the Earth as a lover or intimate partner. Also, a social movement in which sexual and environmental con cerns converge around a conception of love, or Eros, as the ecology of life, and the activist strategy of using sex and sexuality to raise awareness about global environmental problems. Also referred to as sexecology. See also Ecosexual. EDCs: See Endocrine disruptors. Embodiment: Meanings, values, and understandings pertaining to having a material body. Emotional labor: A term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild describing the performance of emotions that creates a positive, satisfied emotional state or feeling in the consumer. Empiricism: A philosophical approach to knowledge that relies exclusively on observation of the visible characteristics of things. Endocrine disruptors: Chemicals that may affect reproduction, development, and immune systems in both humans and animals; also known as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Endomaterialities: Celia Roberts’s neologism describ ing a wide ranging array of materialities arising from environmental endocrine disruption. Environmental justice movement: A civil rights oriented movement that emerged in the 1980s in the United States when people of color and the poor began resisting unwanted land uses in their local com munities. Environmental justice focuses on the unequal distribution of environmental benefits versus environ mental harms, particularly in terms of race and class. Epigenetics: The study of how various biological com ponents or external environmental factors can influ ence development in an organism without altering the actual sequence of DNA. Epistemological: Of or pertaining to the way some thing is known. See also Epistemology. MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

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Epistemology: A branch of philosophy that focuses on how knowledge works and is produced. See also Epistemological; Indigenous epistemologies. Essentialism: The philosophical position that there is a real, unchangeable world behind appearances a set basis for culture and society. Also, the belief that human beings possess a vital, in built feature that endows them with their identities. See also Biological essentialism. Ethnography: The anthropological practice of describ ing cultures studied through participant observation; also, the written account of such observations. Eugenics: A system of beliefs, practices, and policies in which social concerns are addressed through the sur veillance and control of reproduction and the pursuit of ‘‘better breeding.’’ Positive eugenics refers to the practice of encouraging reproduction among those determined to be most fit, whereas negative eugenics refers to the discouragement or prevention of repro duction among those deemed unfit. Both rely on the assumption of a white, middle class, able bodied, able minded norm. Although eugenics is usually understood as beginning in the 1890s and ending in the 1940s, some scholars identify strains of eugenic thought that have persisted in genetic prac tice and research in to the twenty first century. See also Scientific racism.

F Feminism: An attempt to expand what is considered human and what/who can act in the world by chal lenging the ongoing norm of heterosexual (white) masculinity in areas such as politics, culture, religion, and economy. Feminism focuses on gender and sexu ality but also on the way in which these categories intersect with race, class, colonialism, ableism, ageism and other social hierarchies. See also Corporeal fem inism; Ecofeminism; Feminist science studies; Intersectionality; Postcolonial feminism. Feminist science studies: An interdisciplinary area of feminist scholarship that explores how gender is articulated in scientific discourse and practice. Financial inclusion: The provision of financial access/ possibilities to previously excluded groups. Food desert: Area without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable foods. GENDER: MATTER

G Gaia hypothesis: A proposal initially put forth by scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock that the planet and surface sediments and the atmosphere are an inter connected self regulating system. Lovelock and evolu tionary theorist Lynn Margulis later posited that the Earth’s ecosystem is integrated but not self regulating. Neither Lovelock nor Margulis advocated the idea that the planet is purposeful in its systems (i.e., teleological). Gender binary: A classification of bodies as separated into two distinct and opposite gender/sex forms, masculine and feminine. Genome: The complete sequence of deoxyribonucleic acid in organisms. See also Genomics. Genomics: The study of the function and structure of genomes; in medicine, the study of inherited altera tions of the genome that predispose one to or protect one from disease. See also Genome. Genotype: The genetic composition of an organism, or the combination of alleles of a gene or set of genes possessed by an organism. Geology: The discipline in earth sciences that studies Earth’s physical structure, dynamics, and history espe cially as told through its rocky matter. Also, a particular region’s rocks, soils, topography, and other features (e.g., the geology of the southern Andes). Geophysics: The study of Earth’s physical processes and properties, including magnetism, gravity, seis mology, meteorology, oceanography, plate tectonics, and volcanism. Geopower: A term introduced by philosopher and gender studies scholar Elizabeth Grosz that describes the power of geologic forces that extend to all forms of biologic life. Geopower has parallels with biopower, but whereas biopower is concerned with the government of the living, geopower can be seen as a way to understand how the indeterminate, overdeterminate, and radically open forces of the universe, or geophysics, materially order both life and nonlife. Green revolution: Agricultural policies and programs that promoted high yield varieties of wheat and rice, mostly in developing countries.

H Hagiography: A highly conventionalized genre narrat ing the events of a saint’s life and death, usually with the aim of authorizing his or her identity as a saint.

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Hardwiring: In neuroscience, the theory that genetic influences and hormonal exposures experienced early on in fetal development create specific neuronal path ways that are permanently established and cannot be changed in adulthood. Herborizing: An eighteenth and nineteenth century term that denotes the specific examination of plants in the field. Women’s herborizing in the eighteenth century was often associated with their ability to explore local and small worlds, allowing them to study plants firsthand and to question received ideas about both plant life and femininity. Heteronormativity: Denoting or relating to a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation as enforced by institu tional customs, norms, attitudes, images, and other social structures. Sexuality is the main content of the heteronormative view, but it also extends to norms related to masculinity and femininity and various moral codes regarding monogamy, repro duction, and female subordination. See also Homonormativity; Normativity. Hidden hunger: Term for micronutrient deficiencies, or deficiencies in important minerals and vitamins. See also Nutritional fixes. Historical materialism: An approach proposed by German philosopher and socialist Karl Marx that looks at the way the development and structure of a society are connected to how people have organized the production (and distribution) of goods. See also Materialist feminism. Homonormativity: The adoption of heteronormative standards by nonheteronormative people such as gays and lesbians. An example is the desire for gay marriage rather than the contestation of marriage as a system. See also Heteronormativity; Normativity. Homophobia: A range of antagonistic or negative attitudes and practices toward homosexuality or people who are identified or perceived as being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT). See also Transphobia. Homosocial: Relating to the social association of groups of people of the same gender. Human sexuality: The capacity of humans to have erotic experiences, feelings, and responses. The term points to dominant modern Western modes of orga nizing personal and social identities around the notion

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of ostensibly natural sexual preferences or orientations such as heterosexuality or homosexuality. Humanism: A school of thought usually associated with the European Enlightenment (c. 1650 1800) that stresses that human rationality is the ultimate good in the world and marks humanity as an exceptional species, often denigrating nonhuman species. Hydraulic fracturing: A process of drilling that enables the extraction of oil and natural gas from shale rock below the Earth’s surface. The process entails digging a deep vertical shaft and then a long horizontal shaft through which fluids are forced under high pressure to fracture shale rocks, allowing the oil pressed into the rocks to be released and pumped to the surface.

I Indigenous epistemologies: Knowledge made by indi genous peoples, which is historically observant, interactive, oral, and place based, and embedded in story, ceremony, dance, art, and demonstration. Some traditions are committing stories to print, film, and audio to enable current and subsequent generations to build on their own specific knowl edges. See also Indigenous place. Indigenous place: A concept of interactive relations in a geographical space wherein indigenous peoples make societies in relationship with other life and matter. Many indigenous peoples understand other life and matter as having the ability to perceive and relate, if not always on human terms. See also Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Intersectionality: A framework used to identify and describe the ways in which oppressive institutions and systems (racism, sexism, homophobia, transpho bia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, speciesism, and others) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another. Intersex: The biological condition of belonging to neither male nor female categories but existing some where between the two. Intersubjectivity: A connection or subjective state shared between at least two minds. Intra action: A concept developed by American theo retical physicist Karen Barad as part of her theory of agential realism that asserts that the basic unit of MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

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reality is the phenomenon, not the particle or other entity. An intra action describes an understanding based on the physics of indeterminacy, in which the entities themselves do not exist before the encounter but instead emerge from the intra action. Materiality is a dynamic agency in this model. See also Agential realism.

L Labor, gendering of: The superimposition of the orga nization of labor within the heteropatriarchal family onto the labor market. Also known as the feminization of labor, in which a particular task or form of work is devalued as ‘‘unskilled’’ because it has his torically been performed by women in the private realm. The trend of passing feminized work to people of lower social rank (due to race or class) relies on the distinction of work as being in either the public or the private sphere.

M Material feminism: Also known as feminist new mate rialism and distinguished from materialist feminism, a theory that focuses on the significance and agencies of bodies, environments, and other forms of materi ality. Feminist science studies, corporeal feminisms, environmental feminisms, and feminist posthuman isms feature prominently as material feminisms. Material feminisms may also focus on economic systems and overlap with materialist feminisms. See also Corporeal feminism; Feminist science studies; New materialism. Material discursive apparatus: A term coined by American theoretical physicist Karen Barad and used by scholars of feminist science studies, material feminism, and new materialism to indicate the multi tude of previously unaccounted for factors and agents that influence experiments and their outcomes. These factors could be material in nature (e.g., the breath of the scientist as it mingles with the laboratory atmo sphere), or they could be discursive phenomena involving ideas, texts, or practices (e.g., the gender of the scientist or the laboratory assistant). Materialist feminism: A theory that grew from Marxist and socialist theory that focuses on labor, reproduc tive labor, class, and economic systems as they inter sect with gender, race, sexuality, and other categories. GENDER: MATTER

See also Historical materialism; Labor; Reproductive labor; Social reproduction. Material semiotic: Term coined by feminist science scholar Donna Haraway that describes the inevita bly doubled nature of human and nonhuman enti ties as both ‘‘real’’ and articulated through discourse. Matriarchal: Relating to a society in which authority is given to the mother’s line. See also Matrifocal. Matrifocal: Relating to a society in which the mother and her social group are central. See also Matriarchal. Matter: In an economic feminist analysis, raw matter, bodily matter, and matter as the work accomplished by women in social reproduction. Matter is not a significant term for mainstream economics, but matter is the foundation of capitalism, which eco nomically undervalues and socially appropriates the work of social reproduction as if it were a natural resource. Material feminisms, also known as feminist new materialisms, focus on the significance and agency of matter as substances, bodies, or environ ments. See also Material feminism; Materialist femin ism; New materialism; Social reproduction. Medical transition: The use of certain medical proce dures, such as electrolysis, synthetic sex hormones, or surgeries, to alter a person’s reproductive/sexual organs or secondary sex characteristics from the sex he or she was assigned at birth. Medical transition may entail some or all of these procedures, and it is often required for legal changes of gender designa tion. See also Sex reassignment surgery. Metaphysics of presence: A philosophical paradigm whose basic premise is that something either exists or does not, it is either present or is not. This is a fundamentally binary proposition that fails to account for the multiple potentialities for existence, nonexistence, potential existence, and superpositions of probabilities for existence that are inherent in the quantum paradigm. Mo¨bius strip: A mathematical concept that describes a surface that has only one side and one edge. More than human world: The physical, material world, including nonhuman animals, plants, and environments. Commonly used in ecological movements to point to earthly nature as a set of living relationships that both enable and exceed human existence.

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M PESA: A mobile money transfer program in Kenya aimed at empowering the populations with no access to bank accounts.

N Naturalization: The process of making social and cul tural values and practices seem as if they originate automatically from human nature. Naturalization is often a mode of normalizing dominant categories, hierarchies, and practices. Natureculture: A term coined by science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway to emphasize the inter connections between things we think of as social and things we think of as natural; it refers to the assemblage of technologies, institutions, categories, and ideas that shape how people interact with biophysical nature and how biophysical nature shapes the production of social categories, institutions, and the like. Neuroendocrinology: A branch of neuroscience that studies the interactions between the brain and hor mones secreted by endocrine glands. Neurological turn: The position put forward primarily by humanities and social science scholars that research on the brain has been afforded too much authority and attention, and that many disciplines have turned to incorporating findings from the neu rosciences to frame their own research questions. Neurosexism: An approach to the human brain that simultaneously depends upon and reinforces cultural beliefs about gender. New materialism: An approach adopted by philoso phers of science and feminist theorists that aims to abolish dualisms such as body mind or nature culture and argues that social constructionism’s pri vileging of discourses and cultural ideas has led to a neglect of material practices and living bodies. New materialist scholars seek to open up our view to entangled constellations, in which material, discur sive, political, human, nonhuman, corporeal, and technological aspects all matter and are agentic, crea tive, affective, and generative. By affirming matter’s agentic capacity, the new materialisms have initiated a paradigm shift in fields such as ecophilosophy, feminism, science studies, cultural theory, and the environmental humanities. NIMBY: Not in my backyard. Acronym used by the environmental justice movement to express a limited

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type of environmental activism characterized by pro tecting valued spaces (such as one’s own backyard) while sacrificing other areas deemed less valuable. See also Environmental justice. Normativity: The imposition of an ideal of what is considered normal; examples include discriminations on the grounds of homosexuality, disability, and non European culture. See also Heteronormativity; Homonormativity. Nutritional fixes: An example of technical (as opposed to political and structural) solutions to hunger and malnutrition that reduces the problem to the defi ciency of select groups of nutrients and tries to solve the problem simply by offering these nutrients. See also Hidden hunger.

O Ontological: Of or pertaining to something’s existence. See also Ontology. Ontology: The philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, and the basic categories of being and their relations. Ontology explores the question ‘‘What is?’’ or ‘‘What exists?’’ Oral tradition: A body of knowledge accumulated and continuously built within indigenous societies through story, dance, song, and performance. Oral traditions are often described as ‘‘constellations’’ because of their interconnected, relational, nonlinear patterns of coher ence. See also Indigenous epistemologies. Overburden: Rocks and soil above a coal seam blasted from the mountain in mountaintop removal coal mining.

P Patriarchy: A system that naturalizes a gender binary between men and women and perpetuates male domination in all areas of life, such as culture, politics, property, and moral authority, through the organized exploitation of women’s labor, bodies, and desires. Performative ontology: A way to think about the matter of bodies as being capable of both responding to and influencing their environment through biolo gical plasticity and the potential for change, rather than defining biology narrowly as being predeter mined by its components and functions. MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

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Performativity: A concept that underlines the power of words to actually do things (such as in the oath) and expresses how iterated practices and behaviors shape and generate the reality and materiality of bodies. Phallogocentrism (or phallocentrism): The tendency in Western philosophy that centers or prioritizes male power (the phallus, a symbol of men’s power) and masculine logic (logos) as dominant in philoso phy, politics, and values. Phenotype: The observable traits and behaviors of an organism. An organism’s phenotype is sometimes understood as the expression or manifestation of the genotype, but organisms with the same genotype may give rise to different phenotypes as a result of the relative responsiveness of the phenotype to the envir onment (i.e., its phenotypical plasticity). Pinkwashing: In relation to breast cancer, the use of dominant imagery (such as ‘‘breast cancer pink’’ or the pink ribbon) by a company or organization in its advertising to show concern about the disease and for those who have been diagnosed with it, while simul taneously producing or distributing products that may cause or increase the risk of the disease. See also Breast cancer culture. Plasticity: The ability of an organism to change in response to environmental factors. In neuroscience, the idea that the brain is capable of modifying its structure and synaptic networks in response to changes occurring within the body or in the external environment. Positivism: A philosophical approach to knowledge that requires the demonstration of each assumption through verification or falsification. Postcolonial feminism: A feminist method that focuses on how colonialism and the social movements that challenge it affect the material form of gender and the social relations it generates. See also Colonialism; Postcolonialism. Postcolonialism: A theoretical approach that engages with power relations that have resulted from imperi alism and colonialism, addressing issues such as social, economic, and cultural hierarchies. See also Colonialism; Postcolonial feminism. Postgenomics: Biological research that de emphasizes the role of DNA in development and disease onset; epigenetics is one example of postgenomics science. See also Epigenetics. GENDER: MATTER

Posthumanism: A philosophical position that moves away from human centered accounts of life and explores how human social worlds are produced through entanglements with nonhuman species and complex ecologies of physical matter. Posthumanism challenges the predominant Western assumption that the human species is separate from and superior to all other species. Progressive Era: Period in US history (1890s to 1919) marked by intense social activism and political reform aimed at reducing government corruption, limiting the destructiveness of unfettered industrial expansion, and improving and expanding the social safety net.

Q Queer ecologies: A theoretical framework that decon structs the nexus of re/productivity, symbolic maternity, and heteronormativity. In the context of economics, the queer ecologies perspective on social reproduction dis entangles care from femininity and questions heteronor mative assumptions about the economy, such as the gendered division of labor and women’s responsibility for care work. In an environmental context, queer ecol ogies explore how conceptions of nature have been con structed as heteronormative and how new alliances between LGBTQI peoples and ecological movements can be created. See also Ecosexual; Ecosexuality; Heteronormativity.

R Race: The Western concept of race is deeply embedded in racist hierarchies. Most scholarship on race would stress that racial categories are historically and socially constructed, critiquing any biological essen tialist or reductionist notions of race. Some science studies scholars and scholars in critical race studies investigate in what ways racial categories used in medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, law, politics, and other areas can be considered ‘‘material’’ and how the sciences of genetics and epigenetics should be considered. See also Biological essential ism; Epigenetics; Genetics; Intersectionality; Reductionism, Scientific racism. Reductionism: A practice of representing certain aspects of a person or thing as more significant in determining the nature of that person or thing, and thus reducing attention to its other aspects. For example, biological

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reductionism reduces a person to the physical material of which he or she is composed. Reproductive labor: A concept mentioned briefly by German philosopher and socialist Karl Marx and then taken up by materialist feminists as a site of theoriza tion. Reproductive labor provides for all the needs of the worker (e.g., food, shelter) and performs the child rearing necessary to transform children into replace ment workers. It reproduces the worker and his ability to return to work every day, and it perpetuates the capitalist system. See also Materialist feminism; Social reproduction. Reproductive technology: Any of the conditions, tech nologies, procedures, and practices that intervene in ‘‘natural’’ reproductive processes. Often separated into old and new reproductive technologies, technological interventions in reproduction are used to prevent or end a pregnancy or to enable and enhance the oppor tunity for one. See also Conceptive technology; Contraceptive technology. Re/productivity: The potential of the female body to give birth. Since the European Enlightenment (c. 1650 1800), political theorists and philosophers have considered women’s procreative potential to be the fundamental difference between men and women that legitimizes women’s inferior position in society.

S Scientific racism: The use of scientific frameworks, often including measuring or assessing the physical body, to support theories of racial hierarchies. See also Race. Settler colonialism: An undertaking whereby colonists forcefully take land from indigenous peoples by mili tary means, forced assimilation (e.g., child removal), or calculated land grabs in order to supplant, depopulate, and minoritize the indigenous popula tions. Settler colonialism figured in the founding of nation states such as Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. Settler states have ingrained structural inequality built into their governance, with measures to control, manage, and keep indigenous populations colonized. See also Colonialism. Sexecology: See Ecosexuality. Sexology: The scientific study of sex and sexuality focused especially on the sexual interests, behaviors, and func tions of human beings. Sexology is an academic

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approach established in Western culture during the late nineteenth century and currently spanning several aca demic fields including biology, medicine, neurology, psychology, epidemiology, and criminology. Sex reassignment surgery: Most commonly, surgical procedures that alter the genitals to align with a sex category other than the one assigned at birth. Surgery may be required for legal changes of gender designa tion and may be performed involuntarily on intersex infants and children. See also Medical transition. Sexual difference: A feminist term used to describe the difference between individuals in terms of sex and/or sexuality in appreciation of those differences without attempts to restrain one sex and/or sexuality to the other. Sexual inversion: An outdated term used by sexologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to refer to same sex sexuality. The theory of sexual inversion explained same sex desires and attractions as the result of an inborn reversal of masculine and feminine gender traits. Social constructionism: A philosophical standpoint that sees the world as constructed by social and cultural practices. According to this view, there is no ground that could determine the development of social life; instead, social practices by their repetition and naturalization shape the social order. In gender theory, often contrasted with biological essentialism. See also Biological essentialism. Social reproduction: In Marxist and materialist feminist theory, the biological and social regeneration of a society. Capitalism cannot function without the labor force constituted by human bodies born by female bodies; the care work of social reproduction makes sure that bodies exist, are looked after, and are kept alive. See also Materialist feminism; Reproductive labor. Sociobiology: The study of and attempt to explain group social behaviors through a reliance on biologi cal and evolutionary understandings of humans. Somatechnics: A term that blends the Greek words for body and skill to denote the inextricability or inter twining of body and technologies, in which all bodies are modified by and mediated through technology. As a theoretical framework or orientation, somatechnics is grounded in transgender theory, although other scho lars also deploy its central insight that corporeality and technology are bound up together. MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

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Subaltern: A person who is socially, politically, cultu rally, and geographically outside the mainstream. Subjectivity: In gender studies, the meaning, agency, and social standing of a person within social contexts. Subjectivity is forged through relations of power and marginality. In many conceptions of the term, to be a subject one needs to be recognized as such by systems of power and authority; subjectivity can be granted, but it can also be fought for, contested, and claimed. Feminist poststructuralism and psychoanalysis often emphasize that one becomes a subject and gains agency, paradoxically, through the very systems that one is also subjected to. Surrogacy, gestational: A practice in which a person enters into a paid contract to gestate an embryo and deliver an infant for one or more commissioning (‘‘intended’’) parents; also called commercial surrogacy. Embryos are created by in vitro fertilization, then trans ferred to the uterus of the gestational carrier, whose body has been prepared by hormones to be ready for the embryo to attach and thereby to start pregnancy and gestation. See also Conceptive technology.

T Task differentiation: In archaeology, a methodology to formally define labor in order to associate different kinds of work with different kinds of people. Technoscience: A word used in feminist science studies, made popular in discussions of science fiction by feminist science scholar Donna Haraway, that recognizes the ways that science and technology are entwined in material experience. Technoscience also implies an awareness of how the language used to describe something shapes our understanding of the thing thus described. See also Material semiotic. Teleology: The explanation of a phenomenon, especially a natural phenomenon, with regard to its (predeter mined) function, goal, or end. A teleological theory of evolution, for example, may suggest that evolution entails the gradual perfection of species. Whereas some of evolutionary biologist Darwin’s contempor aries equated evolution with development or progress, Darwin developed a markedly antiteleological under standing of evolution as a directionless and chance driven process. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK): Also called traditional indigenous knowledge, a way of knowing GENDER: MATTER

produced in relation to historical and ancestral asso ciations with an indigenous place; that is, indigenous contextual knowledge of place positioned within an indigenous ontology. See also Indigenous epistemol ogies; Indigenous place. Trans corporeality: A term, coined by ecocultural the orist Stacy Alaimo, denoting the transit of matter and substances across bodies, including human and nonhu man or more than human bodies, such as animals, bodies of water, or other environmental entities. Trans corporeality suggests that bodies are neither self sufficient nor fully contained in their own skins. It also suggests that humans are not transcendent or immaterial but instead always enmeshed within multi ple material networks and systems. Transdualism: A concept that involves the breaking down (or deconstruction) of the biology society dualism as a central feature of feminist biology, which undermines dualistic paradigms of thought and practice. Transgender: A term developed in the 1960s to describe those who live as a gender other than that assigned to them at birth but who do not engage in medical transition; more recently, commonly used as a broad term encompassing a variety of non norma tive gender practices. Transgenic: Referring to an organism into which an exogenous gene (i.e., a gene from another species) has been introduced. Transgenic animals are frequently created as research tools and used in both research practice and in the medical industry to produce biolo gical substance for therapeutic reasons. The practice of inserting genes that code for useful pharmaceuticals into host plants and animals is called pharming. Transphobia: A range of antagonistic or negative atti tudes and practices against transsexuality and trans sexual or transgender people. Transsexual: A term developed by medical profes sionals in the 1950s to describe someone who lives (or wants to live) full time as a gender other than the one assigned at birth; often used to specifically des ignate someone who changes (or wants to change) his or her physical body in ways that align it with a different gender. Transxenoestrogenesis: Trans theorist Eva Hayward’s term for the queering action of estrogenic com pounds on human and nonhuman bodies.

425

GLOSSARY

Turing test: A test to determine whether or not a computing system can exhibit behavior indistinguish able from human intelligence. Named for pioneering computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing, the test consists of having a conversation via text only in which one of the participants is human and the other a machine, with the judge being required to determine which is which. Two Spirit: A term created by early urban indigenous gay and lesbian liberation activists to denote a person in their community whose body is occupied by both feminine and masculine spirits; it is both a spiritual and political identity. The term is not used by all indigenous peoples, some of whom have words in their own languages to signify gender variability (e.g., the Navajo word Nadleeh).

U Universalizing: The practice of generalizing any aspect of a situation to all similar situations. More specifi cally within queer theory, queer theorist Eve

426

Kosofsky Sedgwick contrasted universalizing the ories of gender and sexuality with minoritizing ones in order to distinguish paradigms that place genders and sexualities along a continuum, such as the notion of a universal ‘‘bisexual potential’’ vs. those that pose homosexuals as a distinctive minor ity category.

W Wave particle duality: The fundamental paradox of quantum physics, asserting that all matter is simulta neously both a particle and a wave and will exhibit either set of properties depending on how the matter is tested.

Z Zoophytes: In the history of botany, both legendary plants that resemble animals and, from the late seven teenth century, actual plants and animals that are difficult to assign to either category (e.g., the fresh water polyp and the mimosa in the eighteenth century).

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

Index

The index is alphabetized in word by word order. Page references in boldface indicate chapter topics; page references in italics indicate photographs and illustrations.

A A. T. Massey Company, 192 Abject, body as, 52 Ableism, 393, 396 Abler (blog), 397 Abortion, 155 Abstract/material dichotomy, 114 Act Concerning Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Related Research (Canada), 317 Actants, 364 365 Active/passive dichotomy, 114 Adornment, bodily, 397, 398 Aesthetics and sexual selection, 31 32 Affective labor, 75, 211 212, 217, 218 Africa, 276 African American women breast cancer, 284 endomaterialism, 304 genetics, 355 African Americans archaeology, 15 environmental racism, 197 eugenics, 349 genetics and epigenetics, 357 miners, 192 Afrofuturism, 398 Against Nature (Huysmans), 159 Agard Jones, Vanessa, 257 Agarwal, Sabrina C., 13 14 Age differentiation, 11 Agency archaeology, 5, 10 bodily linguistic vulnerability, 57 58

digital materialities, 378, 380 Indigenous matters, 98 intra action, 323 patients, 354 posthumanism, 408 science fiction, 364 365, 369, 371 373 Agential realism, 371, 408, 409 Agriculture, 164, 267, 268 273, 276 278 Agrochemicals, 272 273 Ah King, Malin, 26 27, 305 306 Ahlers, Rhodante, 179 Ahuja, Neel, 305, 308 AIDS, 165 Aizura, Aren Z., 75, 396 397 Alaimo, Stacy biology, 147 bodily technologies, 393 Darwinian feminisms, 22, 23 ecofeminism, 228 environmental justice, 308, 366 interconnectedness of all life forms, 162 mining and trans corporeality, 196 nature as agentic, 187 neuroscience matters, 90 new materialism, 198, 224, 322 posthumanism and trans corporeality, 408 409 queer ecologies, 229 reproductive technology and trans corporeality, 324 science fiction and trans corporeality, 367 toxins, 304 305 water and trans corporeality, 180 181 Alexander, M. Jacqui, 247 248 America (van der Straet), 243, 243

American Anthropological Association, 5 American Psychiatric Association, 396 Amir, Merav, 259 Amiradex, 287 Amnesty International, 102 Amputees, 390 Anatomy and bioarchaeology, 13 Anderlini D’Onofrio, SerenaGaia, 329 Anders als die Andern (film), 336 337 Anderson, Kim, 102, 103 Androcentrism geology textbooks, 128 medicine, 42 traditional evolutionary biology, 28 woman as complementary to man, 54 Anglo Saxon England. See Medieval genders Anglo Saxon Medicine (Cameron), 42 Anglo Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Lockett), 39 Animacies (Chen), 307 The Animal That Therefore I Am (Derrida), 404 Animals. See Nonhuman entities Annihilation (Vandermeer), 371 Antarctica, 125 Anthropocene, 123 124, 130, 132 134, 262, 297 298 Anthropocentrism exploitation of plants, 164 materialist philosophy, 161 162 Anthropometry, 67 68, 81, 140 Anthropos, 133 Antibiotics and livestock, 269 270

427

INDEX

Antitechnology feminism, 394 Antitrans feminism, 394 Antonetta, Susan, 180 Anzaldu´a, Gloria, 113 Appalachian Voices, 189 Apparatuses (medieval medicine), 43 44 The Aquatic Ape (Morgan), 182 Aquatic ape theory, 182 183 Aramis; or, The Love of Technology (Latour), 364 Arber, Agnes Robertson, 157 Arch Coal, 188 Archaeology, 3 18, 6, 7, 9, 12 case studies, 8 15 theoretical frameworks, 3 8 Architecture, 260 Archiving Eden (Doherty), 167 Aristotle, 158, 160, 161 Armstrong, Jeannette, 107, 184 Art bodily technologies, 398 botany, 155, 155 157, 165, 166 167 colonialism, 243, 244 water, 184 Artificial intelligence, 367 369 A˚sburg, Cecilia, 324, 413 Asia, 276 Assisted reproductive technology, 216 217 Assumptions archaeology, 5 8 classical ontology, 115 scientific experiments, 21 22 sociobiology, 145 AstraZeneca, 287 Atlantic slave trade, 239 240 Augmented reality games, 377 Austin, Sue, 398 Australia, 101, 184 185 Autotheory, 410 411

B Bacigalupi, Paolo, 370 371 Backgrounding and dualism, 195 196 Bacteria, 133 134 Bagemihl, Bruce, 229 Bahrani, Ramin, 366 367

428

Bakken Formation, North Dakota, 131 132 Bald’s Leechbook (medical text), 41, 42 Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (Enloe), 214 Bangladesh, 213 Banham, Debby, 40 Banking and digital technologies, 381 Bar hostesses in Japan, 215 Barad, Karen erotics of matter, 341 interconnectedness of all life forms, 162 intra action, 84, 322 323, 371 material discursive apparatuses, 43, 45, 46, 57 posthumanism, 408, 409 quantum epistemology, 116 119 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 156 Barndt, Deborah, 271 Baron Cohen, Simon, 145 Barry, Joyce M., 190 Basseporte, Madeleine Franc¸oise, 156 Bataille, Georges, 263 Battiste, Marie, 97 98 ‘‘Bearing Witness or Taking Action?’’ (Di Chiro), 304 Beauchamp, Toby, 74 75 Beauvoir, Simone de, 24, 49 Beck, Ulrich, 253 Becker, Lydia, 22 Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Grosz), 30 32 Be´dard, Rene´e Elizabeth Mzinegiizhigo kwe, 104 Beer, Gillian, 22 Behavior biology, 83 genetics and violence, 351 neuroendocrinology, 88 neuroscience, 82 Beings for others, 211 Bell, Shannon Elizabeth, 190 Belmore, Rebecca, 184 Benjamin, Harry, 69 Bennett, Jane, 163, 228 229 Bentley, Gladys, 70 Benton, Michael J., 129 Bergson, Henri, 87 A Better Nectar (Rath), 166

‘‘Beyond the Humanist Imagination’’ (A˚sberg, Koobak, and Johnson), 413 Bhopal chemical explosion, 179 Bias and biology, 144 Biennale, Venice, 184 Biltekoff, Charlotte, 274 Binarism. See Dualism Bioarchaeology, 8, 12 16, 36 Biocapital, 354 355 Biocitizenship, 354 Bioengineering, 106 Bioethicists, 350 Biological determinism, 320 Biological Exuberance (Bagemihl), 229 Biological infertility, 317 Biological sex archaeology, 7 8 critiques of, 24 evolutionary theories, 25 26 geography, 261 as natural, 67 Biology, 139 152 Darwinian feminism, 23 destabilizing the biological brain, 81 82 disability, 147 148 epigenetic research, 84 evolutionary biology, 133 134 feminist biologists, 80 feminist evolutionary biologists, 28 29 genetics, 356 homosexuality, 336 338 intersex and transgender, 148 149 intersubjectivity and trans corporeality, 146 147 language of, 143 144 material bodies, 60 origins of modern biology, 139 142 reproductive technology, 323 325 society/biology dualism, 316, 318 319, 322, 324 sociobiology and neurosexism, 144 146 Biomedical labor, 354 355 Biomedicine breast cancer, 288 289 genetics, 350 sexuality categories, 341

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

Biopolitics bodily technologies, 397 breast cancer, 282 287 posthumanism, 405 The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer (Klawiter), 282 Biosociality genetics, 348, 353 355 reproduction, 316, 323 326 Biotechnology body as shaped by, 150 embodied labor, 216 218 food, 269, 269, 270 posthumanism, 410 411 Birke, Lynda, 139, 148 149, 302, 303 Birth control pill, 150, 285, 319, 387 Bisphenol A, 302 Bivins, Roberta, 144 Black feminism colonialism, 245 248 labor, 205, 206, 209 210 Black men endocrinology studies, 70 XYY syndrome, 351 Black women and the hypersexual stereotype, 335 Blackmore, Chelsea, 7 Blackness and Afrofuturism, 398 Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, 20 22, 23 Blackwell, Elizabeth, 156 Blair, Patrick, 158 Blanton, Virginia, 36 Bleier, Ruth, 80 Bloch, Iwan, 331 Bob, Geraldine, 240 241 Bodies, material, 49 63, 50 Butler, Judith, 56 58 etymology, 39 40 Grosz, Elizabeth, 58 61 intensification, 32 Irigaray, Luce, 53 56 labor and changes in, 35, 46 Wittig, Monique, 49 53 Bodily humors, 40, 40, 43 Bodily Natures (Alaimo), 180, 304 Bodily technologies, 387 400, 397 biology, 150 contextual nature of, 390 392 cyborgs, 392 393 GENDER: MATTER

feminist bodily technologies, 388 389 future of, 396 398 medicalization and normaliza tion, 394 395 monster technologies, 394 networked technologies and users, 389 390 posthumanism, 410 411 science fiction, 365 trans, queer, crip resistance to medicalization, 395 396 transgender matters, 65 66, 75 Body anthropometry, 67 68 boundarylessness, 117 118 breast cancer, 283 285, 288 293 as changeable, 149 150 commodification of, 215 disability, 147 148, 321 ecofeminism, 228 229 endomaterialities, 299 300, 302 303, 306 307 environmental estrogens, 257 feminist bodily technologies, 388 389 food, 274, 275 gendering of, 352 353 geography, 258 260 and land, 103 posthumanism, 408 409 sex hormones and body fluidity, 69 70, 75 sexuality theories, 334 338 transgender people and medical regulations, 68 69 unintended consequences of industrial development, 198 water and trans corporeality, 180 181 Body modification, 393 Body/mind dualism. See Mind/body dualism Bohr, Niels, 111, 112, 116 117, 408 Bone mass and archaeology, 13 14 Boston marriages, 335 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 142 The Botanic Garden (Darwin), 156, 159, 162 Botany, 153 169, 154, 155 art, 166 167 geography, 263 materialism, 161 164

medieval medicine, 43 45 plant sexuality, 158 160 posthumanism, 405 407 queer botany, 164 166 Western philosophical approaches to, 160 161 women and the practice of, 155 157 Botany of Desire (Pollan), 406 Boundaries geography, 253 254 physics, 117 121 unintended consequences, 198 water, 179 Bouquet II (sculpture), 50 BPA free plastics, 302 Bradley, Richard, 158 Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer), 106 Braidotti, Rosi botany, 162, 163 posthumanism, 402, 403, 412 science fiction, 367, 369 370 Brain. See Neuroscience Brain Initiative, 79 ‘‘Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity’’ (Vidal), 84 85 Brashear, Reagan Pretlow, 396 Braun, Bruce, 257 BRCA genes, 348, 352 355 Breadwinner/caretaker dichotomy, 194 195 Breast cancer, 281 295, 290, 291, 292 administering risk, 282 283 BRCA testing, 354 355 culture of, 286 288 environment, 285 286 genetics, 348, 352 353 material effects, 288 293 risky bodies/subjects, 283 285 Breast Cancer Awareness Month, 287 Breast reconstruction, 291, 353 Breastfeeding, 274 275, 303 Breeding, 269 Brilliant Green (Mancuso and Viola), 163 Britain archaeology, 13 14 colonialism, 213, 240, 242, 247 plants and sexuality, 159 Broca, Paul, 81 Broom, Dorothy H., 288

429

INDEX

Brosse, Guy de la, 161 Brown, Mary Louise, 313, 314 Browne, Thomas, 164 Brumfiel, Elizabeth M., 5 Brunner, John, 366 Bufano, Lisa, 398 Bug, Amy, 112 Bush, George H. W., 79 Bush, George W., 191 Business and pink ribbon culture, 287 Butler, Judith archaeology, 6, 11 12 gender as fluid, 24 Gender Trouble, 352 geography, 259 material bodies, 56 58, 62 neuroscience, 81 82 postcolonial ecologies, 248 posthumanism, 409 Butler, Octavia, 398 Byrd, Jodi, 244 Byrhtferth of Ramsey, 40

C Cajete, Gregory, 105 Calgary University, 4 California sex workers, 214 Two Spirits, 67 Calvert, Melodie, 388 Cameron, M. L., 41, 42 Campbell, Harry, 25 Canada colonialism, 240 241 Indigenous matters, 96 97, 101 reproductive technology, 317 tar sands mining, 104, 256 water, 176, 184 Canadian National Network on Environments and Women’s Health, 177 Canadian Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, 317 Cancer endomaterialities, 304 genetics, 348, 352 353 mining areas, 197 water, 180 See also Breast cancer The Cancer Journals (Lorde), 291

430

Capital (Marx), 205, 206 Capitalism bodily technologies, 392 brain plasticity, 89 clinical trial participants, 216 colonialism, 239, 241, 242 extraction businesses, 126 feminist critique of, 225 226 food, 275 geography, 261, 263 green economies, 231 233 human/animal divide, 405 Indigenous matters, 101 102, 106 plants, exploitation of, 164 violence, link to, 104 Carcinogens, 287 Care work feminization and racialization of, 206 208 gendered labor, 211 213 social reproduction labor, 225 226 woman nature nexus, 234 Carson, Rachel, 253 Cartesian dualism, 86, 98, 245, 249 250, 401. See also Mind/body dualism Categories and classification colonialism, 243 endocrinology studies, 70 homosexuality, 332 333 ideology of enslavement, 50 51 nonhuman animals, 404 plants, 154, 154, 158 sexuality, 341 Cell biology, 133 134, 143 144 Cemeteries, 13 14 Center for Investigative Reporting, 273 Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, 105 Center/periphery dualism, 51 Chamovitz, Daniel, 163 Chang, Grace, 212 213 Changeability. See Transformability Changing Sex (Hausman), 71 72 Chase, Cheryl, 394 Chatterjee, Partha, 242 Chemotherapy, 289 290 Chen, Mel Y., 305, 307

Chenoweth, Alice. See Gardener, Helen Hamilton Chicago, Judy (The Dinner Party), 53 Child care. See Care work Child sexual development, 299 Children and endomaterialities, 299 China, 258, 300 301 Chinatown, 214 Chinchorro culture, 7 8 Chinese Americans, 15 Choice digital materiality, 380 reproductive technology, 315, 318, 321 Christian, Dorothy, 185 Christianity, 37 39 Chromosomes. See Genetics and epigenetics Civilizing mission, Anglo American, 241 Cixous, He´le`ne, 175 Claassen, Cheryl, 4 Clan, 99 100 Clark, Emilie, 157 Class issues archaeology, 6, 13, 16 bodily technologies, 391 breast cancer, 284 Classic Maya archaeology, 11 environmental practices, 197 eugenics, 349 medieval England, 38 reproductive labor, 212 See also Poverty and the poor; Socioeconomic status Classic Maya archaeology, 11 13, 12 Classical ontology, 113 115, 121 Classification. See Categories and classification Clean and White (Zimring), 197 198 Clean Water Act (US), 191 Cle´ment, Catherine, 175 Climate change endomaterialities, 308 309 geology, 129, 130 unintended consequences, 198 Climate Change Conference, 131 Clinical trial participants, 217 218 Clitoral hypertrophy, 335 Clothing industry, 300 301

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

Coal geology, 125 Purple Wedding to the Appalachian Mountains, 339 340 See also Mountaintop removal Coal River Mountain Watch, 189 Cochlear implants, 389, 391, 395 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 355 Cold War, 127, 241, 276 Colebrook, Claire, 129 Collaboration, 30 ‘‘Collective Fear, Individualized Risk’’ (Fishman and Koenig), 284 Collins, Patricia Hill, 245 Colonialism, 237 251, 243 black and postcolonial feminism, 245 248 cultural genocide, 67 dualism, 195 food, 273 geologic excursions, 125 historical perspectives, 238 241 hunger and malnutrition, 276 Indigenous matters, 101 102, 107 labor, 214 medicalization of gender nonconformity, 69 postcolonial ecologies, 248 250 race and gender and the mind body split, 242 245 sexuality and power, 106 water, 183, 185 Columbus, Christopher, 239, 240, 244 Comandon, Jean, 165, 167 Combahee River Collective, 245 Commercial surrogacy, 216 217 Commodification of the body, 215 Commodity fetishism, 384 Commons, use of, 233 Companion species, 405 Conkey, Margaret, 4, 5, 9, 10 Connellan, Jennifer, 145, 146 Conquest, 244 Consumption breast cancer, 285 digital materialities, 384 green economies, 232 human/animal divide, 405 M PESA promotional materials, 382 pink ribbon culture, 287 GENDER: MATTER

Contagious Diseases Acts (Bombay), 214 Continental drift theory, 125 Contraceptives, 150, 389, 392 Control and reproductive technology, 316 321, 325 Controlled substances, 74 75 Cook, James, 244 Cooper, Melinda, 216, 217, 218 Copa´n, Honduras, 11, 13 Corporeal feminism, 356 Corpus callosum, 82 Correlation and causation, 82 Cosmology and water, 173, 184 Coulthard, Glen, 101 Cowen, Deborah, 263 Craniometry, 81 Creation accounts, 98 99, 173 Crenshaw, Kimberle´, 245 Crick, Francis, 139, 348, 355 Criminality research, 351 ‘‘Cripping Feminist Technoscience’’ (Hamraie), 397 Critical animal studies, 404 La croissance des ve´ge´taux (film), 165 Cryptorchidism, 299 Cult of home religion, 14 Cult of true womanhood, 14 Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science (Shteir), 156 Cultural genocide, 103 Cultural norms. See Social norms Culture biology, 80, 139 142 body as shaped by, 35, 46, 150 botany, 154 breast cancer, 286 288, 291 epigenetic research, 84 evolutionary biology, critique of, 29 experience dependent plasticity, 88 89 gender, 67 gendering a fetus, 120 material bodies, 58, 60 medieval medicine, 44 nature discourse, 56 57 nature/culture dichotomy, 181, 324, 377, 388 neurosexism, 146 oil and gas extraction, 132

plants, 156, 159 160, 163, 166 167 sex hormones, regulation of, 74 75 sociobiology, 145 Cuomo, Chris, 198 Cyberspace and bodily technologies, 390 391 ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto’’ (Haraway), 369, 392 393, 404 405 Cyborgs bodily technologies, 392 393, 394 colonialism, 249 environment, 197 labor, 369 science fiction, 362, 367, 370 Cyrano de Bergerac, 161, 162

D Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, 208 Dallesandro, Joe, 160 Daly, Mary, 245 246, 249 Damico, Helen, 36 Dams, 176 177 Darwin, Charles colonialism, 242 correspondence with women scientists, 22 The Descent of Man, 24 26 geology, 126 modern biology, origins of, 139 plants, 165 sex as material and changeable, 26 sexology, 333 sexual selection, 19, 31 32 on Studies in General Science (Blackwell), 20 21 transformability of matter, 20 Darwin, Erasmus, 154, 156, 159, 162 Darwin, Francis, 165 Darwin Correspondence Project, 22 Darwinian feminisms, 19 34 biology, 146 147 The Descent of Man (Darwin), 24 26 evolutionary biologists, 28 29 geology, 130 131 Grosz, Elizabeth, 30 32, 60 61 plasticity theory, 26 27 politics of evolutionary science, 22 24 social construction of knowledge, 29 30 sociobiology vs., 27 28

431

INDEX

Darwin’s Pharmacy (Doyle), 163 Darwin’s Women (documentary), 22 Datan, Nancy, 281 Dauenhauer, Nora, 99 Davenport, Charles, 348 Davis, Angela Y., 206, 210, 245 Davis, Noela, 357 DDT, 285 286 de Waal, Frans, 145 Deaf culture, 395 Death breast cancer, 284, 288, 292 job fatalities, 132 science fiction, 372 The Death of Nature (Merchant), 195 Decade of the Brain, 79 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 97, 101 Decolonization of place, 100 101 Deegan, Marilyn, 42 Deep time, 129, 130 Deer, Sarah, 102 Degrowth economic view, 231 232 DeLanda, Manuel, 263 Delany, Mary Granville, 156 Delaporte, Franc¸ois, 153 154, 158 Delessert, Madeleine Catherine, 156 Deleuze, Gilles, 161, 263, 403, 412 Delphy, Christine, 208 Democracy and colonialism, 241 Denetdale, Jennifer Nez, 101 102 Denial, networks of, 197 198 Derrida, Jacques, 404 Descartes, Rene´, 95, 115, 244 245, 401 The Descent of Man (Darwin), 19, 21, 23, 24 26, 32, 130 The Descent of Woman (Morgan), 182 Design, technology, 388 390, 391, 397 Destabilizing the biological brain, 81 82 Deterritorialization, 403 Developed countries, 276 Developing countries hunger and malnutrition, 268, 276 M PESA program, 380 384 water, 177 178

432

Development food production, 271 geography, 261 262 water, 177 Devi, Itwari, 177 178 Di Chiro, Giovanna, 181 182, 183, 303, 308 Diagnoses, medical, 395 396 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association), 396 Dichotomies. See Dualism Diet and dieting, 13, 273, 275 Difference anthropometry, 67 68 archaeology, 6 breast cancer, 355 geography, 254 258, 260 intersectionality and archaeology, 10 11 medicalization of, 395 See also Sex differences Differences in the Nervous Organization of Man and Woman (Campbell), 25 Differentiation archaeology, 10 11 Darwinian feminisms, 31 32 Digital materialities, 375 385 agency, 378 379 approaches to, 377 378 DIY handcrafting communities, 379 380 M PESA program, 380 384 The Dinner Party (Judy Chicago project), 53 Dirty Pretty Things (film), 215 Disability biology, 147 148 bodily technologies, 390, 391, 394 395, 397, 398 cyborgs, 393 fertility treatment criteria, 317 reconstructive surgery, 291 reproductive technology, 321 Disciplinary power, 283 Discourse evolutionary biology, critique of, 29 30 material bodies, 56 57 nineteenth century scientific discourse, 20 21

‘‘The Discourse on Language’’ (Foucault), 56 Discourse on the Method (Descartes), 401 Disease. See Health issues Displacement of people, 176 Distance, illusion of, 198 Division of labor, 5, 6 DIY handcrafting communities, 379 380, 381, 384 DNA. See Genetics and epigenetics Doan, Petra L., 260 261 Doherty, Dornith, 167 Dolphijn, Rick, 86 Domestic labor colonialism, 241 as feminine, 242 gendered labor, 211 212, 213 global distribution by sex, 207 Marxist feminist thought, 208 racialization of, 207 208 Domestic relationships and mining, 192 Domestic space and digital material ities, 379 380 Domestic violence, 102 103 Domestication of plants, 406 Double Agents (Lees and Overing), 36 Doyle, Richard M., 163 Driskill, Qwo Li, 100 ‘‘Drowning in a Sea of Estrogens’’ (Roberts), 302 303 Drug related violence, 257 Dualism biology, 148 150 breadwinner/caretaker dichot omy, 194 195 Butler, Judith, 248 center/periphery binary, 51 classical ontology, 113 114 colonialism, 237, 244 245 culture/biology binary, 85 Darwinian feminisms, 29 ecological feminism, 249 endomaterialities, 306 experience dependent plasticity, 88 89 gender hacking, 410 411 genetic/environment binary, 355 357 human/animal binary, 405 Indigenous thought, 95, 98

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

lesbian body, 51 52 life/matter binary, 131 metaphysics of presence, 115 116, 121 mind body soul tripartism, 36, 39 mountaintop removal, 194 natural/unnatural binary, 230 nature/culture binary, 181, 324, 377, 388 nature/matter binary, 195 196 neuroscience, 82 plant sexuality, 158 159 primitive/modern binary, 102 real/virtual binary, 377 reproductive technology, 320 science fiction, 362 sexual difference, 53 56 sign language/cochlear implants binary, 395 social hierarchy, 49 social reproduction, 225 society/biology binary, 316, 318 319, 322, 324 325 technology/body binary, 388 transgender matters, 67, 71, 396 tree vs. child (mining debate), 193, 196, 198 Duality in physics, 116 Dulac, Germaine, 165 Dungeness Garden, 165 166 Dussauge, Isabelle, 81 Dutch colonialism, 213

E E. Coli bacteria, application of sex roles to, 144 Earth as female, 98 99 Gaia hypothesis, 134 violence to, 103, 104, 308 Eastern thought and gendered violence, 102 103 Eating Right in America (Biltekoff), 274 d’Eaubonne, Franc¸oise, 249 Ebert, Teresa, 120 Ecofeminism economics, 226 230, 234 endomaterialities, 304 geography, 261 postcolonialism, 248 250 unintended consequences, 198 water, 173 174, 176 178 Ecofeminism as Politics (Salleh), 227 The Ecological Thought (Morton), 163 GENDER: MATTER

Ecological violence, 103, 104, 308 Ecologies, hormonal, 75 Ecology Indigenous matters, 97 100, 100 101 plants, 164 posthumanism, 406, 408 409 science fiction, 366 367 Economically disadvantaged people. See Poverty and the poor Economics, 223 236 biomedical labor, 354 355 brain plasticity, 88, 89 capitalism, feminist critique of, 225 226 clinical trial participants, 216 coal industry, 197 colonialism, 239 240, 242 digital materialities, 380 384 embodied labor and biotechnology, 218 endomaterialities, 299 fertility treatments, 316 317 food, 271, 275, 277, 278 green economies, 230 233 immaterial labor as gendered labor, 218 219 Indigenous matters, 101 102, 104 105 material feminism and ecofemin ism, 226 230 mountaintop removal, 192, 194 195 pink ribbon culture, 287 prison economy, 260 queer economics, 233 234 violence, 102 103 water, 176, 177 Economy of the same, 53 Ecosexuality. See Sexecologies Ecosystem of Excess (Yolda), 59 Ecosystems geography, 261 262 mountaintop removal as reduc tionism, 196 science fiction, 365 E´criture fe´minine, 174 175, 181 Ecuador, 131 EDCs. See Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) Edelman, Lee, 305 Edgeworth, Frances Anne Beaufort, 156 Education Amendments of 1972, 79

Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums (art exhibit), 166 Egalitarianism and Indigenous matters, 102, 103 Egyptian mythology, 174 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 281, 286, 288, 289 Eighteenth century biopolitics, 282 botany, 153 158, 161, 164 colonialism, 241 geology, 125 sex categories, 67 Einstein, Albert, 111 Eisler, Riane, 173 El Salvador, 11 Electronic waste, 299 300 eLEGS, 391 Eller, Cynthia, 9 Ellis, Havelock, 25 26, 67, 141 Embodiment endomaterialities, 308 fluid embodiment, 181 labor, 216 218 virtual environments, 376 Embryonic development, 83 Emotions, 292. See also Affective labor ‘‘The Empire Strikes Back’’ (Stone), 72 Empires, 239 The Enchantment of Modern Life (Bennett), 163 ‘‘Endocrine Disruptors: Current Challenges in Science and Policy’’ (conference), 301 Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), 27, 75, 182, 285, 297 309 Endomaterialities, 297 311, 301 behavioral neuroendocrinology, 88 breast cancer, 285 children’s and women’s bodies, 299 300 environmental sex determination, 27 nonhuman animals, 298 299 political representations, 300 302 suffering, science and environ mental justice, 308 transgender matters, 70, 75 water toxicity, 181 182 Enlightenment biology, 140 colonialism, 244 humanism, 401

433

INDEX

Enloe, Cynthia, 214 Enslavement, ideology of, 50 Environment, 187 201 agrochemicals, 269, 272 273 biology, 80 contingency of sex, 26 27, 31 development projects in the Global South, 261 262 ecofeminism, 226 230 environmental racism, 197 198 estrogens, 257 experience dependent plasticity, 88 89 geography, 256, 261 green economies, 230 233 mountaintop removal, 191 198 oil and gas extraction, 131 132 politics, 104 105 postgenomics, 355 357 posthumanism, 408 409, 411 science fiction, 366 367 sexecologies, 339 341 water, 179, 180 See also Endomaterialities Environmental justice coal industry, 199 endomaterialities, 304 305, 308 309 mining, 189 191 science fiction, 366 water, 176 178, 181 182 Environmental racism genetics and epigenetics, 357 geography, 256 sacrifice zones, 197 198 Epicurus, 161 162 Epigenetics. See Genetics and epigenetics Epistemology classical ontology, 114 Indigenous matters, 98 99, 100, 105 106, 107, 131 posthumanism, 404, 406, 408 quantum epistemology, 116 117 terminology, 96 traditional Western thought, 407 Epochal time, 129, 130 Epstein, Jean, 165 Equality of nature, 131 Equity and Indigenous matters, 104 Erotics of matter, 341 Esau, Katherine, 157

434

Essentialism geography, 261 Irigaray, Luce, 55 sociobiology, 27 28 Estrogen receptive breast cancers, 285 Estrogens, 257 Ethnicity and archaeology, 16 Ethnography archaeology, 5, 10, 11 digital connectivity, 381 water use, 179 Eugenics biopolitics, 353 354 genetics, 349 350 Eurocentrism, 128 Europe archaeology, 8 11, 12 colonialism, 213, 239 245 geography, 261 transgender surgery, 68 transnational surrogacy, 217 European Commission conference on endocrine disruptors, 301 European Union and green economies, 231 Evolution aquatic ape theory, 182 183 archaeology, 4 coevolutionary relationship with plants, 163 geology, 126 rape, 144 145 sexuality, 333 See also Darwinian feminisms The Evolution of Woman (Gamble), 22 Evolutionary biology, 29 30, 31 32, 133 134 Evolutionary psychology, 88 Evolution’s Rainbow (Roughgarden), 27 Ex Machina (film), 367 369, 368 Excitable Speech (Butler), 57 Exoskeletons, 391 Experience and plasticity, 87 89 Exploitation colonialism, 239 240 ecofeminism, 226 227 human/animal divide, 405 natural resources, 125 Exploration, era of, 125 Extinction events, 129

Extraction industries geology, 125, 126, 131 132 Purple Wedding to the Appalachian Mountains, 339 340 tar sands mining protest, 104, 256 See also Mountaintop removal

F Faculty, biology, 142 Fatalities. See Death Fausto Sterling, Anne archaeology, 13 Darwinian feminisms, 28, 29 neuroscience matters, 80 science fiction, 362 XYY syndrome, 351 Federici, Sylvia, 205, 208 Fedigan, Linda, 28 Fell, Christine, 36 Female as default status in embyronic development, 83 The Female Man (Russ), 362 Females as unevolved, 21 Femininity archaeology, 11 12, 14 15 breast cancer, 286, 291 mastectomy, 353 nature, 160 161, 407 plants, 167 science fiction, 368 traditional vs. feminist evolution ary biology, 28 water, 173 Feminism and Ecology (Mellor), 227 Feminism and Evolutionary Biology (Gowaty), 28 Feminism and feminist theories archaeology, 6, 10 11, 16 biocapital, 354 355 biology, 80 bodily technologies, 388 389 breast cancer, 292 293 Butler, Judith, 56 58 capitalism, critique of, 225 226 Classic Maya archaeology, 11 colonialism, 245 248 digital feminism, 377 disability studies, 147 148, 291 dualism as limiting, 49 endomaterialities, 302 307

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

genetics and epigenetics, 350, 356 357 geography, 259 geology, 128 131 Grosz, Elizabeth, 58 61 humanism, critique of, 371 Indigenous scholarship, 95 interspecies thinking, 106 107 Irigaray, Luce, 53 56 metaphysics of presence, critiques of, 115 116 neuroscience theories, 81 84 physics and gender, 112 113 plasticity, 88 89 postcolonialism, 248 250 posthumanism, 407, 413 quantum physics, 117 119 science fiction, 362, 365, 372 trans corporeality and posthu manism, 408 410 transgender matters, 65, 71 74 water and embodiment, 174 176 Wittig, Monique, 49 53 See also Darwinian feminisms Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE), 319, 320 ‘‘Feminist Subjectivity, Watered’’ (Neimanis), 181 Feminist Technology (Layne), 388 389 Feminization of agriculture, 271 272 botanical knowledge, 154 of botany, 157 158 endocrine disruptors, 182 fish, 257 of labor, 206 207, 210 219, 216, 217, 224 sex reassignment surgery, 75 Fertility theories (archaeology), 9 10 Festa della Sensa, 329 Fetal development, 83 Fetal status, 323 324 Fetishism, 329, 341 Feynman, Richard, 117 ‘‘A Field Guide to Brazen Harlotry’’ (Meloy), 160 Filipina bar hostesses, 215 Film male gaze, 54 plants, 159 160, 164 167 science fiction, 366 369

GENDER: MATTER

Financial issues. See Economics Fine, Cordelia, 87, 145 146, 337 Finger, Anne, 390 FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering), 319, 320 Firestone, Shulamith, 49, 318 First Nations. See Indigenous matters Fish, 257, 306 307 Fishman, Jennifer R., 284 Fitbits, 396 ‘‘The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough’’ (Fausto Sterling), 29 Fixed (film), 396 Flavin, Jeanne, 392 Flight attendants, 211 Floods, 179 180 Fluid embodiment, 181 Folklore, 44 Food, 267 280, 268 breast cancer, 285 Classic Maya, 13 consumption, 274 277 production, 267, 268 273, 272 Food aid, 277 Food and Agriculture Organization, 268 Food and Drug Administration, US, 150 Food deserts, 275 A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (von Uexkull), 404 Ford Motor Company, 287 Fortified foods, 276, 277 Fortunati, Leopoldina, 208 209 Fossil fuels, 129 Fossils, 126 Foucault, Michel, 332 biopolitics, 282, 283, 353 botany, 160 disciplinary power, 283 ‘‘The Discourse on Language,’’ 56 docile bodies, 291 homosexuality, 335 336, 338 materialism, 87 sexuality, 330, 331 332 Fourth World Conference on Women, 104 Fracking, 131 132

France, 68 Frankenstein, 364, 365, 394 Franklin, Rosalind, 139 Free labor, 218 Freedom and reproductive technol ogy, 316 317, 318 320 French feminism, 174 175 Freud, Sigmund, 54, 195, 196, 337 Friedan, Betty, 49 Friendships, romantic, 335 Frost, Samantha, 228 Funding of fertility treatments, 316 317

G Gaard, Greta, 173, 230, 249, 304 Gaia hypothesis, 134 Gajjala, Radhika, 375, 381 Galen, 114 Galenic theory, 40 Galst, Liz, 317 Gamble, Eliza Burt, 22, 23 Gardener, Helen Hamilton, 22 23 The Gardener (film), 160 Garland Thomson, Rosemarie, 147 Garment workers, 300 301, 301 Garrone, Benoˆıt, 157 Gatens, Moira, 148 Gathering Moss (Kimmerer), 105 Gay studies, 95 Gazzaniga, Michael, 84 Geller, Pamela L., 7 8, 16 Gender as existing through relations with other entities, 100 as technology of the body, 387 388 Gender gap in biology, 142 Gender hacking, 410 411 Gender identity disorder, 69, 395 Gender nonconforming people. See Transgender matters Gender norms and eugenics, 349 350 Gender roles Indigenous matters, 100, 107 medieval England, 36 transgender matters, 72 water, 177 Gender Trouble (Butler), 24, 352 Gender based skills, 82

435

INDEX

Gendered labor. See Labor Gendered Neurocultures (Schmitz and Hoppner), 88 Gendering of a fetus, 120 of product defects, 258 Genetic contamination, 269 Genetic engineering, 257, 268, 269, 270 See also OncoMouse Genetic testing, 350, 354 355 Genetics and epigenetics, 347 359 archaeology, 16 biology, 139, 141 biosociality, 353 355 bodily technologies, 397 breast cancer, 352 353 chromosomes, 351 embryonic development, 83 eugenics, motherhood, and social justice, 348 350 postgenomics, 355 357 posthumanism, 411 412 research, 84, 106 science fiction, 365 Genocide, 103, 107 Genomics, 106 107 Genotype vs. phenotype, 26 27 Geography, 253 265, 262 body, 258 260 built environment, 260 261 ecosystems, geophysics, and geo politics, 261 263 globalization, 263 264 human difference, 254 258 planetary scale, 261 Geologic Society of London, 125 Geology, 123 137, 124 body, relationship to the, 128 129 education, 127 128 gentleman geologists, 124 126 women’s role in, 126 127 Geophysics, 126, 263, 264 Geopolitics, 262 263 Geopower, 130 131 George, Samantha, 154, 156 Gerlach, Walther, 43 Germany, 336 337 Gernsback, Hugo, 363 Gero, Joan M., 4 Gestational surrogacy, 216 217

436

Ghettos, 261 Gibbon, Sahra, 354 Gift economy, 379 380 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 159 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 256 Gimbutas, Marija, 9 ‘‘Glacier Bay History’’ (Dauenhauer), 99 Gleditsch, Johann Gottlieb, 158 Global chain of care, 212 Global North digital materialities, 383 food, 273 medicines and illegal substances, 257 migrant labor in, 226 social reproduction, 229 Global South agricultural production, 276 child care labor, 212 DDT, 285 diet, 273 digital materialities, 383 electronic waste, 299 300 geography and development, 261 262 medicines and illegal substances, 257 migrant farm labor, 270 271 M PESA program, 380 social reproduction, 229 transnational surrogacy, 217 See also Third World Globalization food, 268, 270 271, 273, 278 geography, 263 264 transnational migration and labor, 226 water, 177 ‘‘Globalization as Racialized Sexualized Violence’’ (Kuokkanen), 103 Goddess narrative, 9 10 Goeman, Mishuana, 100 Golden Rice, 269 Google, 377 Gordon, Jessica, 104 Gowaty, Patricia Adair, 28, 30 Graeco Roman medicine, 40, 43 Graser, Charles, 389 Grassroots environmentalism, 190 191 Greek mythology, 173

Green revolution, 269, 276 Greenpeace, 299, 300 Greer, Germaine, 318 Grey, Katherine Charteris, 157 Grief and breast cancer, 292 Grosz, Elizabeth corporeal feminism, 58 61, 356 Darwinian feminism, 30 32, 147 ecological feminism, 249 geography, 263 geology, 130 131 inhuman matter, 129 material bodies, 54, 62 Guattari, Fe´lix, 263, 403, 412 Gubar, Susan, 289 Guthman, Julie, 274, 275 Gynecology, 392 Gyn/Ecology (Daly), 246

H Ha, Nathan Q., 142 Haa Shuka´, Our Ancestors (oral histories), 99 Habeas Viscus (Weheliye), 412 Hadley, Dawn, 36 Hales, Stephen, 154 Hall, Matthew, 406 Hall, Radclyffe, 336 Halle´, Francis, 157, 163, 164 Hamlin, Kimberly, 22 Hammond, William A., 23 Hamraie, Aimi, 397 Handcrafting communities, 379 380, 381, 384 Hapi, 174 Happe, Kelly E., 411 Happiness, 231 232 Haraway, Donna bodily boundarylessness, 118 bodily technologies, 392 393 Darwinian feminisms, 29 ecological feminism, 249 endomaterialities, 308 feminist inquiry, 403 neuroscience matters, 84, 85, 86 nonhuman labor, 218 posthumanism, 106, 404 405, 408 science, engagement in, 150 science fiction, 362, 365, 367, 369 sociobiology, 146 trans corporeality, 197 Harcourt, Wendy, 229

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

Harding, Sandra, 29, 142 Hardman, Philippa, 22 Hardt, Michael, 218 Hardwiring, 82 83, 87, 145 146 Hardy, Alister, 182 Hausbeck, Kathryn, 128 Hausman, Bernice L., 71 72, 73, 303 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 159 Hayes, Tyrone, 303 Hayles, N. Katherine, 402, 403 Hayward, Eva, 26, 27, 31, 305 306, 405 Health insurance industry, 74 Health issues biosociality, 354 diet, 273 endomaterialities, 304 food production, 272 273 genetics, 348, 352 353 geography, 255 256 hunger and malnutrition, 276 277 mining, 190, 191 192, 197 obesity, 274, 275 water contamination, 180 See also Breast cancer Heape, Walter, 141 Heezen, Bruce C., 127 Hegel, G. W. F., 244 Heidegger, Martin, 263 Heisenberg, Werner, 116 Hekman, Susan, 90, 187, 224, 322, 409 Henderson, James Sakej Youngblood, 98 Hendon, Julia A., 11 Hendren, Sara, 397 Hendryx, Michael, 197 Herbal medicine, 42 43 Herbarius of Pseudo Apuleius (medical text), 41 Heredity, 348 349 Hermaphroditic organism as ancestor of all life, 24 Hermaphroditism, 158 Herzog, Werner, 366 Hesse Biber, Sharlene, 274 Heteronormativity archaeology, 3, 7, 8 9, 12 13, 14 biology, 149 breast cancer, 284, 286 endomaterialities, 299, 305, 309 environmental injustice, 190 GENDER: MATTER

gendered labor, 213 geography, 257, 259, 260 261, 262 mining, 132, 193 national parks and the institutio nalization of, 340 351 neuroscience, 81 queer ecologies and ecofeminism, 229, 230 reproduction, 316 science fiction, 362 sexecologies, 339, 340 341, 342 water, 183 Hidden Consequences campaign, 299 Hidden hunger, 276 Hidden Hunger (Kimura), 276 Hierarchy anthropometry, 81 colonialism, 103, 243 dualism, 49 endocrinology studies, 70 gendered violence, 102 103 scientific knowledge model, 113 social reproduction, 225 Higher education biology, 142 geology, 127 128 Hildegard of Bingen, 155 Hilty, Joan, 317 Hinduism, 173 Hird, Myra J., 134, 149 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 336 337 The History of Sexuality (Foucault), 331 332 Hoang, Kimberly Kay, 215 Hochschild, Arlie, 211, 212 Holberg, Ludvig, 162 Holistic medicine, 40 Hollis, Stephanie, 36 Holocaust, 337 Homosexuality. See Same sex sexuality Homosocial groups and archaeologi cal theories, 11 13 Honduras, 11, 13 Hong, Grace, 210 Hopkinson, Nalo, 398 Hoppner, Grit, 88 Hormonal ecologies, 75 Hormones. See Sex hormones Horror films, 159, 163 Horrors of Philosophy series (Thacker), 372

Household archaeology, 11 Housekeeping genes, 143 Housewife and race, 210 Housing, mining communities, 193 Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer, 28 Hua, Julietta, 214 Hubbard, Ruth, 29 Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act (New Zealand), 316 317 The Human Condition (Arendt), 205 Human Genome Project, 347, 348, 352, 355 Human rights science fiction, 370 sex trafficking, 214 Human Rights Watch, 273 Human scale and geography, 258 Human Universal Load Carrier, 391 Humanism. See Posthumanism Humans anthropos, 133 men as personification of, 412 Hume, David, 244 Humors, bodily, 40, 40, 43, 114 Hundleby, Catherine, 142 Hunger and malnutrition, 268, 276 277, 278 Hurricane Katrina, 180 Hustak, Carla, 157, 166 Huxley, Thomas, 21 Huysmans, Joris Karl, 159 Hybridity cyborgs, 393 posthumanism, 407 408 ‘‘Hydrofeminism’’ (Neimanis), 181 Hypersexual stereotypes, 335

I I Am Woman (Maracle), 95 Ice Age, 8 11 Identity bodily technologies, 387 digital materialities, 383 homosexuality as sexual identity category, 332 333 posthumanism, 410 411 sex hormones, regulation of, 75 transgender matters, 65 66, 72, 74 water users, 179 Ideologies of Breast Cancer (Potts), 284

437

INDEX

Ideology archaeology of the racialized United States, 14 15 of enslavement, 50 evolutionary biology, critique of, 29 30 Idle No More Movement, 104 Illicit drug market, 74 Immaterial labor, 212, 218 219 Immigrants commodification of the body, 215 gendered labor, 212 213 labor, 207 208 migrant farm labor, 270 271 Impregnation, narratives of, 143 144 In Praise of Plants (Halle´), 157 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 160 In vitro fertilization (IVF), 216, 313, 314, 315, 320, 324 Indentured labor, 240 Indeterminacy, 371 India colonialism, 242, 247 electronic waste and endomateri alities, 300 reproductive tourism, 319 transnational surrogacy, 217 water, 177 178, 178 Indigenous Environmental Network, 104 ‘‘Indigenous Masculinities’’ (Anderson, Innes, and Swift), 103 Indigenous matters, 95 110 bodily technologies, 397 botanical knowledge, 155 breast cancer, 284 capitalism, critique of, 101 102 colonialism, 239, 240 241, 244 economics, 104 105 egalitarianism, 102, 103 environment, 187 genomics and interspecies think ing, 106 107 geography, 256, 258 geology, 131 132 national parks, 341 natural resources, 125 nonbinary gender, 67 posthumanism, 411 412 science and traditional Indigenous knowledge, 105 106

438

sexecologies, 339 terminology, 97 water, 176, 183 185 ‘‘Indigenous Place thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non humans’’ (Watts), 98 Individualism and evolutionary biology, 29 30 Indonesia, 213, 276, 277 Industry environment, 187 188 gendering of defects, 258 as masculine, 242 unintended consequences, 198 See also Extraction industries Infertility, 300 Ingress, 377 ‘‘Inheriting Racist Disparities in Health’’ (Sullivan), 411 Inhuman matter. See Nonhuman entities Innes, Robert Alexander, 103 Inside/outside dualism, 52 Intelligence Darwinian feminism, 22 plants, 163 164 Intensification, bodily, 32 Intergenerational thinking, 104 International Geophysical Year, 127 International Monetary Fund, 271 International relations and colonialism, 241 International sex work, 213 215 International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, 297 Internet access, 391 endomaterialities, 300 labor, 218 219 technology subversion, 389 Interrelatedness biology, 146 147 endomaterialities, 306 Indigenous matters, 98, 99 100, 107 plants, 162 science fields, 113 Intersectionality archaeology, 6 7, 11, 16 bioarchaeology, 14 colonialism, 245 248 digital materialities, 378 379

new material feminisms, 234 social reproduction, 226 trans corporeality and posthu manism, 409 water policies, 176 Intersexuality archaeology, 8 bioarchaeology, 13 bodily technologies, 394 Darwinian feminisms, 29 Intersubjectivity and biology, 146 147 Intimate labor, 213 215 Intra action genetics and epigenetics, 356 357 knowledge as, 118, 120 posthumanism, 408 reproductive technology, 322 325 science fiction, 371 The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (film), 164 Iovino, Serenella, 410 Irigaray, Luce fluids and embodiment, 174 175 material bodies, 53 56 materialism, 87 metaphysics of presence, critique of, 115 plants and femininity, 161 Italy, 68

J Jackson, Maria, 156 Jackson, Tim, 231 Jacobs, Sue Ellen, 95 Jahren, Hope, 157 Jain, Sarah Lochlann, 286, 288, 292 Jakobsen, Janet, 213 James, Selma, 208 James, Susie, 99 Japan, 215, 268, 273, 274 Jarman, Derek, 165 166 Jay, David (The SCAR Project), 290, 291, 291 292, 292 Joel, Daphna, 82 The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media (Munster), 378 Johnson, Ericka, 324, 413 Jolie, Angelina, 352, 353

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

Jordan Young, Rebecca, 87, 337 Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground (Holberg), 162 Joya del Cere´n, El Salvador, 11

K Kaiser, Anelis, 81, 87 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 248 Kant, Immanuel, 244, 262 Karim, Lamia, 380 Katz Rothman, Barbara, 320 Keeper of the Mountains, 189 Keepers of the Water, 104 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 29, 30, 356 Kelley, Theresa M., 154, 156 Kenya, 380 384 Keystone XL Pipeline, 104 Kier, Bailey, 75, 305, 306 307 Kimmerer, Robin Wall, 105 106 Kimura, Aya H., 276, 277 King, Helen, 43 King, Mary Claire, 352 King, Samantha, 287, 304 Kinship, 99 100 Kipling, Rudyard, 241 Kirby, Vicki, 162, 322 Klawiter, Maren, 282, 283, 304 Klein, Stacy, 36 Kline, Wendy, 349 Knowledge empiricism, 115 Indigenous knowledge, 96 as intra action, 118 posthumanism, 408 Koenig, Barbara A., 284 Kolbl Ebert, Martina, 127 Kolko, Beth E., 393 Koobak, Redi, 324, 413 Kotef, Hagar, 259 Krafft Ebing, Richard von gender difference, 67 material fetishism, 329, 341 same sex sexuality, 337 sexology, 331 sexual disorders, 333 334 The Well of Loneliness (Hall), 337 Kramskoi, Ivan Nikolayevich, painting of, 172 Kraus, Cynthia, 88 89 Krupar, Shiloh, 284, 286, 289 GENDER: MATTER

Kudlick, Catherine, 390 Kuokkanen, Rauna, 103

L La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 162 La Mothe le Vayer, Franc¸ois, 161 Lab Girl (Jahren), 157 Labor, 205 221 affect and emotion, 211 212 archaeology, 11 12 bioarchaeology, 13 14 biomedical labor, 354 355 biotechnologies, 216 218 black feminist critiques of Marxists, 209 210 body changes as a result of, 35, 46 coal industry, 199 colonialism, 239 241, 242 digital materialities, 378, 380 383 ecofeminism, 227 230 electronic waste and endomateri alities, 299 300 endomaterialities, 300 301, 301 food production, 267, 270 273, 272, 277, 278 gendering of, 210 211 globalization, effects of, 226 green economies, 231 233 immaterial labor, 218 219 international division of care, 212 213 international sex work, 213 215 Marxist and materialist feminists, 208 209 mining, 188, 190, 191, 192 195 oil and gas extraction, 131 132 science fiction, 369 sex reassignment surgery, 75 water, 177, 179 Lacan, Jacques, 115 Lacks, Henrietta, 218 Lacnunga (medical text), 41, 44 LaDuke, Winona, 104 Land colonialism, 244 distribution of land ownership by sex, 262 gendered geography, 258 Indigenous matters, 107 natural resource exploitation, 125 ownership, 262, 277 Lang, Sabine, 95

Language biology, 143 144 etymology of matter and material, 39 40 feminist science studies, 29 30 material bodies, 56 58 science, 81 See also Metaphors Laqueur, Thomas, 140 Latin America Chinchorro culture, 7 8 food production, 271 Latino women and breast cancer, 284 Latour, Bruno, 363, 407 Lawrence, Jane, 392 Layne, Linda L., 387, 388 389 Lead poisoning, 307 Learning, 80 Leechbook III (medical text), 41 Lees, Clare, 36 Legal issues fetal status, 323 324 mountaintop removal, 191 name and gender changes, 68 Legislation eugenics, 349 fertility treatment criteria, 316 317 homosexuality, 336 337 sex workers, 214 Leigh, Irene W., 395 LeMenager, Stephanie, 133 Lemke, Thomas, 282 Leonardo da Vinci, 401 The Lesbian Body (Wittig), 52 Lesbians bodies, 51 52 breast cancer, 285, 291 fertility treatment criteria, 316 317 reproductive technology, 321 322 sexology, 335 The Well of Loneliness (Hall), 336 Lettres ´ele´mentaires sur la botanique (Rousseau), 156 LeVay, Simon, 82, 337 338 Levin, Ira, 369 Liberalism, 240 Life at the Speed of Light (Venter), 365 Life of matter, 99 Light, duality of, 116

439

INDEX

Lighting the Eighth Fire (Be´dard), 104 Linguistic turn, 409 410 Linnaeus, Carl, 154, 158 Lippman, Abby, 350 Lips metaphor, 54 55 Literature Afrofuturism, 398 botany, 162 homosexuality, 336 medieval England, 36 plants, 159, 160, 164 See also Science fiction Little Bear, Leroy, 105 Lives of Grass (Roussel), 167 Livestock breeding, 269 270 Living human labor, 233 Local economies, 233 Locke, John, 244 Lockett, Leslie, 39 Logophobia, 56, 58 London, 13 Loomba, Ania, 238 239 Lord, Catherine, 289 Lorde, Audre breast cancer, 291, 292 colonialism, 245 246 neurosciences, 84, 85 Lovelock, James, 134 The Loves of the Plants (Darwin), 159 Lysistrata (Greek comedy), 318

M Maaori, 69 Machines cyborgs, 392 393 mining, 191 192, 194 Mairs, Nancy, 147 Makus, Ingrid, 320 Malaysia, 213 Male as norm anthropometry, 81 evolutionary theories, 21 women as not men, 114 Male gaze, 54 Malpighi, Marcello, 154, 158 ‘‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe’’ (Spillers), 246 247 Mammography, 283, 284, 289 Man a Machine and Man a Plant (La Mettrie), 162

440

Man and Woman: A Study of Secondary Sexual Characters (Ellis), 25 26 Manchester Ladies’ Literary Society, 22 Mancuso, Stefano, 163 Mandamin, Josephine, 184 Mann, Abigail, 22 Mannish lesbians, 335 Mapping excursions, 125 Maracle, Lee, 95 Marcos, Ferdinand, 276 Marder, Michael, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 406 Marginalization labor, 206 208 M PESA program, 380 384 plants, 160 Margulis, Lynn, 133 134 Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (Irigaray), 175 Mark My Words (Goeman), 100 101 Marriage ecosex weddings, 339 340 eugenics, 349 Two Spirit people, 102 Marshall, Chrissiejoy, 184 Martin, Emily, 141, 143 144 Marvell, Andrew, 164 Marx, Karl, 205, 206, 208, 209 Marxist feminism, 208 210, 217, 218 Masculinity apparatuses (medieval medicine), 43 archaeology of the racialized United States, 14 15 as benchmark of appraisal, 225 coal mining, 199 colonialism, 242 endocrinology studies, 70 Maya archaeology, 12 mining, 188, 191, 192 national parks, 340 351 science fiction, 365, 367 traditional vs. feminist evolution ary biology, 28 trans corporeality, 197 water, 179 Masculinization of science, 142 143 Masculinization of the brain, 83 Massey Energy Company, 192

Mastectomy, 289, 290 292, 352, 353 Material bodies. See Bodies, material Material feminisms ecofeminism, 226 230, 228 229 economics, 224, 228 229 posthumanism, 409 410 reproductive technology, 322 325 science fiction, 367, 372 373 water, 180 181 Material Feminisms (Alaimo and Hekman), 224, 409 Material Feminisms (Kirby), 322 Material fetishism, 329, 341 Materialist feminisms botany, 162 capitalism, critique of, 225 226 economics, 223, 224, 234 Grosz, Elizabeth, 32 labor, 208 209, 210 mining, 192 193, 196 postcolonialism, 248 250 reproductive technology, 318, 324, 326 science fiction, 361, 365, 369 Materialists archaeology, 5 geography, 261, 263, 264 265 plants, 161 164 posthumanism, 409 412 Materiality new materialism, 86 87 science fiction, 368 Materialization of breast cancer, 352 Materials and transgender matters, 75 Mathematic ecology, 29 30 Matriarchal societies, 9 10 Matter as changeable, 20, 98, 99 Mattering and physics, 118 Matthews, Gwyneth F., 321 Mauldin, Laura, 395 ‘‘Maxims II’’ (Old English poem), 37 38 Maxwell, Martha, 157 Maya archaeology, 11 13, 12 Maya figurine, 6 Mayo, Katherine, 247 Maze of Injustice (Amnesty International), 102 McAdam, Sylvia, 104 McCaffery, Anne, 364 365

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

McClintock, Anne, 213 McClintock, Barbara, 157, 166, 355 McGregor, Deborah, 183 McKittrick, Katherine, 402 McLean, Sheelah, 104 McLuhan, Marshall, 314 Meaning and material bodies, 55, 56 ‘‘The Mechanics of Fluids’’ (Irigaray), 174 175 Medicine and medicalization bodily technologies, 392, 394 396 botany, 153 classical ontology, 114 gender hacking, 411 homosexuality, 336 intersex, 149 medieval England, 39 46, 40 pathologizing the female body, 141 professionalization and masculi nization of, 143 research subjects, 216, 217 218 sex hormones, 71 sex work, 214 sexuality, 331, 335 traditional Indigenous knowledge, 106 transgender matters, 68 69, 71 74 Medieval botany, 155 Medieval genders, 35 47 body changes as a result of culture, 35 Britain, 13 14 medicine, 39 46 religious matters, 37 39 reproductive model, 114 Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad), 43, 371, 408 Mellor, Mary, 227 Meloy, Ellen, 160 Men labor market, 231 as personification of humans, 412 technology, association with, 314 316 Mendel, Gregor, 348 349 Menstruation, 141, 150 Merchant, Carolyn, 195 Merian, Maria Sibylla, 155, 155 156 Mermaids (painting), 172 Mestiza sciences, 113 Metal poisoning, 307 GENDER: MATTER

Metaphors biology, 143 body as a Mobius strip, 59 60 breast cancer war analogy, 288 colonization, 246 genetics, 347 geography, 261 lips metaphor, 54 55 plants, 158 159, 166 Plato’s cave, 195 science, 81 Metaphysics and plants, 160, 406 Metaphysics of presence, 115 116, 121 Meteorites, 125 126 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 166 Mexico, 217, 272 Meyerowitz, Joanne, 67 Michelle, Carolyn, 317 Micronesia, 273 Middle class breast cancer, 284 clinical trial participants, 216 eugenics, 349 350 Mid ocean ridges, discovery of, 127 Midwifery, 143 Mies, Maria, 261 Migrant labor, 212, 270 273, 272 Migration and globalization, 262, 263 Mile for the Cure program, 287 Militarism and bodily technologies, 391, 392 Military bases, 214 Miller, Elaine P., 160 161, 164, 407 Million, Dian, 102 Mills, Mara, 389 Mind/body dualism classical ontology, 114 colonialism, 245 Indigenous matters, 95 social hierarchy, 49 Mind body soul tripartism, 36, 39 Minh Ha, Trinh T., 175 Mining environmental justice, 189 191 geology, 125 Purple Wedding to the Appalachian Mountains, 339 340 tar sands, 104, 256 See also Mountaintop removal Minorities obesity, 274 prison economy, 260

Miranda, Deborah A., 67 Mobile money transfer, 380 383 Mobius strip, body as a, 59 60 Mohanty, Chandra Talpande, 246 Mol, Annemarie, 300 Molecular scale breast cancer, 283 geography, 255 258 Moll, Albert, 331 Monsters, 163, 388, 394 Montano, Linda Mary, 339 ‘‘More Lessons from a Starfish’’ (Hayward), 405 Morgan, Elaine, 182 183 Morgan, Jennifer, 210 Morgensen, Scott, 103 Mortality. See Death Mortimer Sandilands, Catriona, 162, 165, 340 Morton, Samuel G., 140 Morton, Timothy, 163 Mosaicism, genetic, 351 Moscucci, Ornella, 26 Mother Earth Water Walkers, 104 105 Mother India (Mayo), 247 Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (Hrdy), 28 Motherhood archaeology, 15 biology centrism, 318 319 breastfeeding, 274 275 eugenics, 349 350 queer ecologies and ecofeminism, 230 woman nature nexus, 234 Mother’s milk project, 184 Mountaintop removal, 189 dualisms and reductionism, 195 196 environmental justice, 189 191 livelihoods and property, 194 195 machinery, 188 189 mechanization of, 191 192 mine work and gender, 192 193 networks of denial, 197 198 Purple Wedding to the Appalachian Mountains, 339 340 unintended consequences, 198

441

INDEX

M PESA program, 380 384 Multiple chemical sensitivities, 304 305 Multitude, body as, 55 Mulvey, Laura, 54 Munster, Anna, 378 The Museum Archive, 166 Mutability. See Transformability Myers, Natasha, 157, 166 Myriad Genetics, 355 Mythology, 172, 172 174, 174 Myths of Gender (Fausto Sterling), 351

N Nakamura, Lisa, 393 Names and naming hurricane names, 180 linguistic vulnerability, 57 58 Narcosexual experiments, 410 411 National Clinical Assessment Criteria (New Zealand), 317 National Institutes of Health, 79, 87, 351 National parks, 340 351 Nationalism, 241 Native American DNA (TallBear), 106 Native Americans. See Indigenous matters Native Science (Cajete and Little Bear), 105 Native Studies Keywords, 97 Native Youth Sexual Health Network, 103 Natural binary sex, 149 feminization of reproductive labor, 224 homosexuality as, 336 337 sexuality, 331 violence of capitalism, 263 Natural disasters, 129, 179 180 A Natural History of Rape (Thornhill and Palmer), 144 145 Natural resources exploitation of, 125 green economies, 230 233 women’s labor compared to, 227 See also Mountaintop removal

442

Natural sciences and sexuality, 331 332 Natural/unnatural binary, 230 Nature binary sex categories, 67 categories as natural, 50 51, 56 colonialism, 242 244 ecofeminism, 226 227 erotics of matter, 341 material bodies, 58 plants, 166 167 reproductive technology, 322 325 science fiction, 361 status of, 131 women, association with, 225, 234, 313 316, 407 Nature/culture binary, 181, 324, 377, 388 Naturecultures, 85 86, 197 Nature/matter binary, 195 196 Nature’s Second Kingdom (Delaporte), 153 154 Naybor, Deborah, 258 Nealon, Jeffrey T., 161 Negative body, 148 Negri, Antonio, 218 Neimanis, Astrida, 181 Nelson, Alondra, 249 Nelson, Melissa K., 105 Neoliberalism brain plasticity, 89 food production, 271, 278 water policies, 177, 179 Networked technologies, 389 390 Neurocultures, 88 Neuroeconomics, 88 Neuroendocrinology, 83, 88 NeuroGenderings Network, 90 Neuroimaging technologies, 82 Neurons, personification of, 85, 86 Neuroplasticity, 87 88 Neuroscience, 79 92 correlation and causation issues, 82 destabilizing the biological brain, 81 82 hardwiring concept, 82 83 homosexuality, 337 338 new materialisms, 84 87 Neurosexism, 145 146 New domesticity, 380

New materialism agential character of matter, 62 biology, 146 147 botany, 161 164 economics, 228 229, 234 endomaterialities, 305 environment, 187 genetics and epigenetics, 357 Indigenous matters, 95 mountaintop removal, 199 neuroscience, 84 87, 88, 89 posthumanism, 409 410, 411 412 reproductive technology, 322 325, 326 science fiction, 362, 364, 370, 372 trans corporeality, 198 New technologies and labor, 216 218 New York Times, 23, 352 New Zealand, 316 317, 318 Newton, Isaac, 111 Nguyen, Mimi Thi, 75 The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Grosz), 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 87, 175, 263 NIMBYism, 197 Nineteenth century archaeology, 14 15 biology, 140 141 Boston marriages, 335 botany, 154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163 colonialism, 238, 241, 248 Darwinian feminisms, 19, 20 26 evolutionary science, 22 24 geology, 125, 126, 127 phrenology, 82 scientific discourse, 20 21 sexology, 67 68 sexuality, 329, 330, 331 334, 340 water, 175 ‘‘The Wife’s Lament,’’ 38 No Future (Edelman), 305 No ma´s bebe´s/No More Babies (film), 392 Nomadic Subjects (Braidotti), 412 Nonessentialism, 84, 89 Non European geography, 261 Nonheterosexual women breast cancer, 284, 285, 286, 290 291

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

reproduction, 316 317 See also Lesbians Nonhuman entities bodily technologies, 393 ecological feminism, 249 endomaterialities, 297 298, 298 299, 302 303, 306 307 geography, 262 geology, 129 globalization, 262, 263 Indigenous matters, 99 100 interspecies thinking, 106 107 labor, 218 livestock breeding, 269 270 medieval medicine, 43 44 mountaintop removal, 199 posthumanism, 404 405, 408 409, 412 science fiction, 364, 369 370 as vegetables, 163 Nonlinear biology, 146 147 Non normative gender. See Transgender matters Nonnormative sexuality plants, 160 sexecologies, 341 Nontraditional export crops, 271 272 Nontranssexuality, 73 Normalization and bodily technologies, 394 395 Normativity, performing, 219 North America archaeology, 5 North American Free Trade Agreement, 271 North Dakota, 131 132 Norton, Heidi, 166 Norway, 68 ‘‘Notes towards a Corporeal Feminism’’ (Grosz), 58 Nottingham University experiments, 41 42 Nursing Ethics (journal), 284 Nylin, Soren, 26 27

O Obama, Barack, 79, 191 Obesity, 274 275, 278 Object status of women, 54 O’Brien, Michelle, 395 Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, 189 GENDER: MATTER

Oil and gas extraction. See Extraction industries O’Kane, Maggie, 259 Old English Herbarium, 42 43, 45 Old English terms, 39 40 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 19, 32 OncoMouse, 218 One sex model, 139 140 Ontology biological plasticity, 86 Darwinian feminisms, 30 32 Indigenous matters, 98, 131 neuroscience, 89 posthumanism, 408 terminology, 96 Oophorectomy, 353 Oppression botanical knowledge, 155 educating the oppressor, 84 geography, 258 ideology of enslavement, 50 51 Oral tradition, Indigenous, 98, 99 100 Organizational/activational hypothesis of sexual differentiation, 83 Orientalism (Said), 243 Original Instructions (Nelson), 105 Otherness erotics of matter, 341 medical classification, 335 posthumanism, 407 Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective), 142 Outsourcing, 216 Ovarian cancer, 348, 353 Overing, Gillian, 36 Oxford English Dictionary, 238

P Paleolithic Europe, 9 11 Palmer, Craig T., 144 145 Pande, Amrita, 217 Paradox of reproduction, 316 317, 318, 325 Parren˜as, Rhacel Salazar, 206, 212 Particle accelerators, 112 Passivity nature/biology, 316 passive/active dualism, 52 plants, 160

Pathology female body, 141 homosexuality, 333 334 Patients, 352, 354 Patriarchy bodily technologies, 392 built environment, 260 colonialism, 243, 245 246 gendered labor, 213 geography, 260, 261 reproductive technology, 318, 320, 325 science, 408 science fiction, 362 transgender matters, 71 water, 176, 177 PCBs (Polychlorinated biphenyls), 285 Performance of gender, 11 12, 43, 368 gendered labor, 211 material bodies, 57 58 social identity and performing normativity, 219 Performative ontology, 89 Personification of neurons, 85, 86 Plastic Bag (film), 367 Pesticides, 269, 272 273, 285 Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack, 320 Petroleum. See Extraction industries Phallocentrism and material bodies, 54, 55 Pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical companies bodily technologies, 388 Indigenous knowledge, 106 labor, 217 218 pinkwashing, 287 posthumanism, 410 411 Phenotype vs. genotype, 26 27 Philippines, 211, 276 Phillips, Jaime, 128 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Newton), 111 Philosophy botany, 160 161, 162 colonialism, 244 245 feminism of difference, 53 56 geopolitics, 262 263 somatophobia, 58 of time, 31 water and embodiment, 174 176 Photography, 167

443

INDEX

Phrenology, 82 Physics, 111 122 classical ontology, 113 115 gender’s connection to, 112 113 metaphysics of presence, 116 metaphysics of presence, critiques of the, 115 116 producing a fetus, 119 121 quantum epistemology, 116 117 quantum physics as feminist physics, 117 119 Piezoelectricity, 119 Pilgrimages, 38 39 Pink ribbon culture, 286 288 Pink Ribbons Inc. (King), 287 Pinking of technologies, 389 Pinkwashing, 287 Pipeline leakage, 112 113 Pipelines, 104 Pitton de Tournefort, Joseph, 158 Place Indigenous matters, 97 101, 105, 107 water, 184 185 Place thought, Indigenous, 96, 98, 102, 103 Planck, Max, 111 Planet Z (film), 167 Planetary scale, 261 Plantation agriculture, 271 Plants. See Botany Plants as Persons (Hall), 406 Plant Thinking (Marder), 406 Plastic Bag (film), 366 367 Plasticity theory, 26 27, 86, 87 88 Plastics breast cancer, 285 endomaterialities, 302 Plastic Bag (film), 366 367 Plato, 113, 161, 195 Pliny the Elder, 158 Plumwood, Val, 249 Political philosophy, 244, 245 Political technology and sexuality, 331 Politics botanical knowledge, 155 coal industry, 197 endomaterialities, 300 302, 302 307 environmental politics, 104 105

444

evolutionary science, 22 24 geopower, 130 131 reproduction, 318 of reproduction and production, 230 science fiction, 370 transgender matters, 72, 74 75 Pollan, Michael, 406 ‘‘Polluted Politics?’’ (Di Chiro), 303 Pollution breast cancer, 285 286 endocrine disruption, 27 geography, 256 mining, 190, 193 water, 179, 180, 181 182, 184 Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), 285 Popular Science Monthly, 23 Population control, 276 Population genetics, 29 30 Positivism, 4 6, 11 Postcolonialism black and postcolonial feminist intersections, 245 248 ecologies, 248 250 gendered labor, 213 geography, 259 Postgenomics, 348, 355 357 Postgrowth society, 232 Posthumanism, 401 414 animal matters, 404 405 botany, 162 defining, 402 403 geography, 259 Indigenous matters, 106 107 matter matters, 409 410 molecular matters, 410 411 physics, 118 plant matters, 405 407 race matters, 411 412 reproductive technology, 322 323 science fiction, 367, 369 371 science matters, 407 409 Posthumanities, 324 Post World War II era eugenics, 349 population control, 276 Potts, Laura K., 284 Poverty and the poor digital materialities, 380 384 environmental justice, 190 food, 275

residential segregation, 198 trans rights, 396 water, 176 See also Class issues; Socioeconomic status Power breast cancer, 282 283 colonialism, 241 digital materialities, 384 economics, 227 ideology of enslavement, 50 51 people and nonhuman nature, 197 reproductive technology, 318, 325 sexuality in colonial contexts, 106 water, 173, 177, 179 Preciado, Paul B. (Beatriz), 150, 410 Predator prey relationship, 104 ‘‘Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Anglo Saxon Medical Texts’’ (Deegan), 42 Premenstrual syndrome, 144 Prenatal genetic testing, 350 Price Herndl, Diane, 291 Priestley, Joseph, 154 Primate behavior, 145 Primitive accumulation, 209 Primitivism, 102 Procreation, 230 Production DIY handcrafting communities, 379 380 human/animal divide, 405 labor, 206 Professionalization of biology, 142 143 Profit pink ribbon culture, 287 sex hormones, 411 Progressive Era, 349 Property, 194 195 Prophylactic mastectomy, 352, 353 Prosthetics bodily technologies, 387, 389 391, 393, 397, 398 science fiction, 365, 371 transgender matters, 65, 66, 74, 75, 76 Prostitutes, 214

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

Protests Purple Wedding to the Appalachian Mountains, 339 340 water protest, 178 Proust, Marcel, 160 Psychoanalytical framework of homosexuality, 337 Psychopathia Sexualis (Krafft Ebing), 329, 333 334 Puberty and endomaterialities, 299 Public and private spheres built environment, 260 coal camps, 194 power relations, 227 Publicly funded fertility treatments, 316 317 Purple Wedding to the Appalachian Mountains, 339 340

Q Quality of life, 232 233 Quantum biology, 113 Quantum mechanics, 111 Quantum physics, 113, 116, 117 119 Queenship, 36 Queer Indigenous Studies (Driskill et al.), 100 Queer theory archaeology, 6 7, 11 12, 14 botany, 164 166 breast cancer, 292 293 ecologies, 182, 229 230, 234 235 economics, 233 234, 235 endomaterialities, 303, 305 306, 307 Indigenous matters, 100 mastectomy, 290 291 neuroscience, 81 84

R Race Afrofuturism, 398 anthropometry, 67 68 archaeology, 6, 15, 16 biological difference, 140 141 bodily technologies, 391 394 breast cancer, 285, 355 colonialism, 241, 242 endomaterialities, 304 305 environmental racism, 190 GENDER: MATTER

eugenics, 349 gendered labor, 213 geology textbooks, 128 posthumanism, 411 412 primitivism, 102 reproductive labor, 212 sex hormones, 70 71 sexual deviance theories, 334 Race in Cyberspace (Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman), 393 Rachel’s Daughters (Stengraber), 286 Racialization biomedicine, 355 labor, 209 210 of labor, 75, 207 208 Rankin, Dominique, 99 Rape colonialism, 244 sociobiology, 144 145 Rappaccini’s Daughter (Hawthorne), 159 Rath, Jessica, 165, 166 167 Raymond, Janice G., 71 Reaction norm, sex as a, 26 27 Realism, agential, 371, 408, 409 Reality and the metaphysics of presence, 115 116 Rebick, Judy, 319 Reconstructive surgery, 291, 353 Red Skin, White Masks (Coulthard), 101 Reductionism, 195 196 Regulations Title IX, 79 transgender matters, 69, 71 75 Relativity, theories of, 111 Religion medieval England, 36, 37 39 medieval medicine, 44 monotheism and hierarchies, 102 Removing Mountains (Scott), 188, 192, 193 Repro centrism, 340 Reproduction biosocial framework, 323 electronic waste and fertility problems, 300 embodied labor, 216 217 endomaterialities, 298 299 geography, 263 justice, 325 narratives of, 143 144

paradox of, 316 317, 318, 325 physiology, 83 sexual difference, 30, 148 149 transgender people, 68 Reproductive labor, 206 212, 216 217, 224 227 Reproductive models, classical ontology, 114 Reproductive technology, 313 328, 315 feminist resistance to, 318 322 new materialism, 322 325 paradox of reproduction, 316 317 reproduction and technology, 314 316 Reproductive tourism, 319 Re/productivity, 230 233 Republicanism, 240 Research archaeology conference papers, 4 cells doing labor, 218 evolutionary biology, 28 29 feminist neuroscience, 83 84 gender based discrimination in, 79 Indigenous studies, 96 materiality of the digital, 376 377 medieval medical experiments, 41 42, 43 44 Research subjects, 216, 217 218 Residential segregation, 198 Respect for non human entities, 100 Rich, Adrienne, 292 Richardson, Sarah S., 351, 357 Richter, Anne, 159 Rieder, John, 363 Rifkin, Mark, 103 Rights of nonhuman animals, 404 Ripe (Rath), 166 167 Rippon, Gina, 87 Risk and breast cancer, 282 285, 288 289, 352 353 Risk Society (Beck), 253 Roberts, Celia, 302 303 Roberts, Dorothy, 141, 349, 392 Robots, 367 369 Rock carvings, 7 Rodman, Gilbert B., 393 Rodrı´guez, Juana Marı´a, 390 391 Roe v. Wade, 313

445

INDEX

Roen, Katrina, 69, 394 Rogers, Leslie, 80 Romantic friendships, 335 Roscoe, Will, 95 Roughgarden, Joan, 27 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 156 Roussel, Mathilde, 167 Rowland, Robyn, 320 Rulers, 12 Rural areas, 13 14 Russ, Joanna, 362 Russett, Cynthia Eagle, 23

S Sachs, Julius von, 65 Safaricom, 381 Sahney, Sarda, 129 Said, Edward, 243 Salleh, Ariel, 227 Same sex sexuality biology, 149 neuroscience, 82 sexecologies, 341 sexuality, theories of, 332 338 See also Lesbians; Sexual inversion Samoans, 69 San Jose, CA, 15 Savanna theory of evolution, 182 The SCAR Project (Jay), 290, 291, 291 292, 292 Schelling, Friedrich, 262 Schiebinger, Londa, 143, 154, 155, 158 Schmitz, Sigrid, 88 Science colonialism, 242 243 ecological science, 340 endomaterialities, 304, 308 gender based discrimination in, 79 homosexuality, 336 338 knowledge production, 118, 121 language of, 81 nineteenth century, 20 21, 23 posthumanism, 407 409 posthumanities, 324 sexecologies, 340 sexuality, 330 331 traditional Indigenous knowl edge, 105 106 See also Botany; Geology; Physics Science (magazine), 352

446

Science and technology studies, 88, 181, 259 Science fiction, 361 374, 368 agency and actants, 364 365 definition, 363 364 lively technologies, 367 369 materiality and reality, 371 373 posthumanism, 369 371 Science studies biology, 139, 142 143, 146 Darwinian feminisms, 22, 28, 29 30 environment, 187, 188 genetics and epigenetics, 351 geography, 253 254 geology, 123, 135 labor, 218 neuroscience, 79 80, 81, 84, 85, 88 physics, 112, 116 postcolonialism, 248 posthumanism, 401, 407 409, 411, 412, 413 queer ecologies and ecofeminism, 229 science fiction, 364, 365 water, 172, 182, 185 Scientific Committee on Problems in the Environment, 297 Scientific racism, 334 Scott, Joan Wallach, 51 Scott, Melissa, 362 Screening, breast cancer, 283 Seager, Joni, 179 The Second Sex (Beauvoir), 24 Secondary sex characteristics, 20, 23, 25, 362 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 289 Seed banks, 167 Segregation, 198 Selective abortion, 315, 321 Self experimentation, 410 411 Sen, Amartya Kumar, 277 Senanayake, Dudley, 276 Sentience and plants, 163 Serlin, David, 70 Service work, 206 208, 211 212 Seto, Momoko, 167 Settler colonialism, 107, 184, 239, 240 Settler states, 101 102, 103

Seventeenth century botany, 155 156, 161, 164, 167 Sex as changeable, 149 150 as process, 23, 31 reproduction, separation from, 314 315 Sex chromosomes, 351 Sex determination, 351 Sex differences and collaboration in reproduc tion, 30 Darwinian feminisms, 23, 31 32 endomaterialities, 305 306, 306 307, 308, 309 feminism and the paradox of, 51 Grosz, Elizabeth, 60 Irigaray, Luce, 53 56 material bodies, 61 modern biology, history of, 140 neuroscience, 82, 83 nineteenth century debate on, 25 26 plasticity, 87 88 sexual reproduction, 148 149 social norms, 141 Sex hormones, 66 body fluidity, 69 70 geography, 257 posthumanism, 410 411 transgender matters, 65 66, 70 71, 72, 74 75 ‘‘Sex in an Evolutionary Perspective: Just Another Reaction Norm’’ (Ah King and Nylin), 26 27 Sex panic, 181 182, 257, 303, 305 Sex reassignment surgery, 65 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 75 Sex roles biology frameworks, 144 body changes as a result of, 35, 46 environmental determination of sexuality, 26 Sex tourism, 214 Sex work, 213 215 Sexecologies, 329 344 ecologies of desire, 339 340 Ecosex Manifesto (Stephens and Sprinkle), 338 339 erotics of matter, 341 history of sexology, 330 332 homosexuality, theories of, 332 338

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

The Sexes throughout Nature (Blackwell), 21 22, 23 Sexlessness and plants, 164 Sexology, 67 68, 69, 331 334 Sexual development and endomateri alities, 299 Sexual dimorphism, 24, 31 Sexual inversion, 333 336 Sexual morphology, 181 182 Sexual orientation. See Lesbians; Same sex sexuality; Sexual inversion Sexual politics, 302 307 Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Russett), 23 Sexual selection Darwinian feminisms, 19, 21, 22 24 geography, 263 indetermination, 31 32 material bodies, 61 Sexual status and medieval medicine, 44 46 Sexual violence colonialism, 244 farm workers, 273 Sexuality geography, 261 homosexuality, 332 338 Indigenous matters, 106 plant sexuality, 154, 158 160, 162, 164 165 postcolonialism, 248 postslavery US racial theories, 246 247 settler societies, 103 theories of, 330 332 Sexually transmitted infections, 255 258 Shadow Man (Scott), 362 Shah, Nayan, 214 Shape shifting, 173, 175 Sheldon, Alice, 361 Shelley, Mary, 364, 365 Shields, Stephanie A., 141 Shiva, Vandana ecological feminism, 249 geography, 261 green revolution, 269 reproductive technology, 318 water, 177 178 GENDER: MATTER

Shteir, Ann B., 154, 156 Shukin, Nicole, 405 Siebers, Tobin, 393 Signatures, archaeological, 5 Silent Spring (Carson), 253 Simpson, Leanne, 98 Sims, James Marion, 140 141, 392 Single women and fertility treatment criteria, 316 317 ‘‘Sitting on the Fence’’ (Birke), 302 Skeletal anatomy and archaeological theories, 13 Slavery, 209 bodily technologies, 392 colonialism, 244 eugenics, 349 labor, 209 210 slave trade, 239 240 ‘‘The Sleep of Plants’’ (Richter), 159 Smith, Frank Percy, 167 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 96 Smuts, Barbara, 28 Social body, 55 Social class. See Class issues; Poverty and the poor; Socioeconomic status Social construction disability, 147, 148 gender, 225 geography, 261 knowledge, 29 32 material bodies, 56 57, 58 new materialists, 409 ovaries, 353 physical difference and change, 255 reality and materiality, 377 Social difference archaeology, 6 intersectionality and archaeology, 10 11 Social factors and epigenetic research, 84 Social hierarchy. See Class issues; Hierarchy; Socioeconomic status Social infertility, 317 Social norms biological notions of sex differ ence, 141 bodily technologies, 394 395 eugenics, 349 350 material bodies, 58 Social performance, 219

Social relations digital materialities, 379 384 gender and Indigenous thought, 100 ideology of enslavement, 50 51 Indigenous matters, 102 water, 177 Social reproduction, 223, 227, 230 233 Social wage, 208 Sociality and digital materialities, 379 380 Society/biology dualism, 316, 318 319, 322, 324 325 Sociobiology, 27 28, 144 145, 146 Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Wilson), 27 Socioeconomic status breast cancer, 285 digital materialities, 380 384 food, 275 prison economy, 260 See also Class issues; Poverty and the poor Sociology, 212 Sodomy, 332 Soffer, Olga, 10 Solidarity economy, 232 233 Somatechnics, 396 Somatophobia, 58 Somerville, Margaret, 184 185 Somerville, Siobhan B., 67 68 Sonography, 119 120 Sontag, Susan, 282 ‘‘Sorties’’ (Cle´ment), 175 Soul, 36, 39 South America, 7 8 Southern Reach trilogy (Vandermeer), 371 373 Space, 115 Spade, Dean, 396 Spallone, Patricia, 320 Spanier, Bonnie, 143 Spector, Janet D., 5 Speculative realist approach to bot any, 162 Spelman, Elizabeth V., 49 Spencer, Herbert, 21 Spencer Wood, Suzanne M., 14 ‘‘Spider City Sex’’ (Hayward), 31 Spillers, Hortense, 246 247

447

INDEX

Spinoza, Baruch, 86, 87, 90 Spirituality as feminine, 242 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 247 Sprinkle, Annie, 338 339, 342 Squatting facets, 35 SRY gene, 83 Stabile, Carol A., 322 Stacey, Jackie, 289, 291 Stafford, Pauline, 36 Stand on Zanzibar (Brunner), 366 Star, Susan Leigh, 308 Starfish, 405, 407 State power and sexuality, 331 Steichen, Edward, 166 Steingraber, Sandra, 180, 201, 286, 299, 303 Stengers, Isabelle, 84 The Stepford Wives (film), 369 Stephens, Elizabeth, 338 339, 342 Stereotypes archaeology, 4 colonialism, 237, 243 endocrinology studies, 70 reproduction narratives, 143 144 Third World Woman, 178 trafficked sex workers, 214 transgender matters, 71 watery embodiment, 175 Sterilization, involuntary, 68, 349, 392 Stern, Otto, 43 Stigma of obesity, 274 Stoler, Ann Laura, 213 Stone, Sandy, 72 Stopes, Marie, 157, 166 Storey, Rebecca, 13 Strang, Veronica, 178 179 Stratigakos, Despina, 260 Stryker, Susan, 65, 72 73, 394, 396 397 Studies in General Science (Blackwell), 20 21 Sturgeon, Noel, 230 Subaltern populations, 377 Subalternity, 376, 382 383 Subjectivity fetus as subject, 120 plants and femininity, 161 water, 178 180, 181 Subject/object dualism, 52, 117

448

Subramaniam, Banu, 86 Subsistence living, 194 195 Subversion, technology, 389 Suffering and endomaterialities, 308 Sullivan, Shannon, 357, 411 The Summer of Her Baldness (Lord), 289 Super weeds, 269 Surface mining, 188 198 Surgery bodily technologies, 394, 396 breast cancer, 289, 290 292 mastectomy, 352, 353 Surrogacy, 229, 319 Surveillance, 396 Survivors, breast cancer, 288 Susan G. Komen Foundation, 287 Sustainability and green economies, 231 Suvin, Darko, 363 Swann, Marjorie, 164 Sweatshop labor, 213, 215 Sweely, Tracy L., 11 Swift, John, 103 Sylvia Wynter: On Being Humanas Praxis (Wynter), 402 Symbiogenesis, 133 134 Symbols, 180 System, body as, 60 Systema Naturae (Linnaeus), 158 Szapocznikow, Alina (Bouquet II), 50 Sze, Julie, 190, 308 309

T Tadiar, Neferti Xina M., 211 Tainted Milk (Boswell Penc), 303 Tajima Pen˜a, Renee, 392 take me to the apple breeder (Rath), 166 TallBear, Kim bodily technologies, 397 ecosexuality, 339 environment, 187 Indigenous matters, 97, 106 107 posthumanism, 411 Tambe, Ashwini, 214 Tamoxifen, 287 Tangibility and digital materiality, 377 378 Tangled Routes (Barndt), 271 Tanum, Sweden, rock carvings, 7

Tar sands mining, 104, 256 Task differentiation, 5 Technology breast cancer, 283, 284, 289 electronic waste and endomateri alities, 299 300 food, 269, 270 fracking, 131 132 green economies, 232 labor, 216 218 mining, 191 192 mountaintop removal, 188 producing a fetus, 119 121 science fiction, 362, 367 369, 370 See also Bodily technologies; Reproductive technology; Science and technology studies Technophilia and technophobia, 392, 395 Telecommunications and outsour cing, 216 Telling It (Telling It Book Collective), 95 The Tempest (film), 166 Teratologies (Stacey), 289 Terminology colonialism, 238 239 epistemology and ontology, 96 Indigenous, 97 technology, 387 transgender and transsexual, 66 67 Terranova, Tiziana, 218 Terry, Jennifer, 388 Testo Junkie (Preciado), 410 Testosterone gender hacking, 411 regulation of, 74 75 Textbooks biology, 143 144 geology, 127 history, 239 Textiles, 10, 213, 300 301, 301 Thacker, Eugene, 372 Thailand sex reassignment surgery, 75 transnational surrogacy, 217 Tharp, Marie, 127 Theophrastus, 158 Therapeutic Nations (Million), 102 Thing power, 228

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

Thinking with Water (Christian and Wong), 185 Third gender, 67 Third World colonialism, 246 educating white people, 84 hunger, 276 labor, 205, 210, 214, 217 malnutrition, 276 stereotypes, 178 See also Global South Thomas, Wesley, 95 96 Thompson, Charis, 319 Thornhill, Randy, 144 145 A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (DeLanda), 263 Time epochal time, 129, 130 philosophy of, 31 Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Grosz), 31 Time lapse photography, 165, 167 Title IX, 79 Tools archaeology, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11 medieval England, 35, 40, 46 technology, 387 Towns, mining, 193 ‘‘Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections’’ (Chen), 307 ‘‘Toxic Sexes’’ (Ah King and Hayward), 27, 305 306 Toxins breast cancer, 286, 287 endomaterialities, 298, 299, 300, 302 308 environment, 190, 191, 193, 198 epigenetics, 357 garment industry, 300 301 genetics and epigenetics, 357 geography, 256 257 mountaintop removal, 340 posthumanism, 409 science fiction, 367, 373 water, 176, 179, 180, 181 182, 184 Trade, food, 268, 271 272 Traditional Indigenous knowledge, 105 106 Trans corporeality biology, 147 coalfields, 196 198 ecofeminism, 228 229

GENDER: MATTER

endomaterialities, 304 mountaintop removal, 199 plants, 162 posthumanism, 408 409 reproductive technology, 324 science fiction, 367 Transdualism, 322, 325 326 Transformability matter, 20, 98, 99 science fiction, 372 373 water, 171, 175, 181 182 Transgender History (Stryker), 65 Transgender matters, 65 77 anthropometry, 67 68 biology, 149 150 bodily technologies, 394, 395 396 built environment, 260 261 deviant bodies, 335, 337 endocrine disruptors, 182 endomaterialities, 305 306, 306 307 feminist debates, 71 74 Hapi, the Egyptian god of the Nile, 174 material effects, 75 normativity through hormones, 70 71 posthumanism, 405 sex hormones, regulation of, 74 75 sex hormones and body fluidity, 69 70 surgery, hormones, and pros theses, 65 66 terminology, 66 67 transitioning, 31 Transgressive ghettos, 261 Transnational labor practices, 75 Transnational surrogacy, 217 Trans Pacific Partnership, 271 Transposition, theory of, 355 The Transsexual Empire (Raymond), 71 Transsexual matters. See Transgender matters The Transsexual Phenomenon (Benjamin), 69 Transxenoestrogenesis, 305 Traweek, Sharon, 112 Treat, Mary, 157 Tringham, Ruth E., 9

Tripartite mind body soul structure, 36, 39 ´ , 259 Tuathail, Gearo´id O Tuskegee syphilis study, 392 Two Spirit People (Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang), 95 96 Two Spirits, 67, 102 Tyranny of gender, 260 261

U Uncertainty principle, 116 Underground mining, 188 Undocumented immigrants, 270 271 Undomesticated Ground (Alaimo), 23 UNDRIP. See Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Unintended consequences, 198 Union Carbide, 179 Unions, 192 United Church of Christ, 190 United Mine Workers of America, 192 United Nations Climate Change Conference, 131 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, 97 Fourth World Conference on Women, 104 sex trafficking, 214 United States archaeology of the racialized United States, 14 15 colonialism, 241 food aid, 277 food imports, 268 Indigenous peoples, 97 lesbians’ use of reproductive tech nology, 317 livestock antibiotics, 270 military bases, 214 name and gender change laws, 68 obesity, 274 scientific racism and sexual deviance, 334 sex hormones, regulation of, 74 75 sexual violence against female farmworkers, 273 tar sands oil pipelines, 104 transnational surrogacy, 217 water, 176 University of Cambridge, 22 Unpaid labor, 208 209

449

INDEX

Unskilled labor, 206 207, 211, 216, 217 Urban areas archaeology, 13 14 built environment and patriar chal power, 260 US Agency for International Development, 276 US Mine Safety and Health Administration, 190 Utopian literature, 162, 361 Uukw, Delgam, 100

V Valentine, David, 73 Vallayer Coster, Anne, 156 van der Straet, Jan, 243, 243 van der Tuin, Iris, 86 The Vegetative Soul (Miller), 407 ‘‘Velvet Fields’’ (McCaffery), 364 365 Venter, J. Craig, 365 Venus of Willendorf, 8 11, 9 Vespucci, Amerigo, 243 Vidal, Fernando, 84 85 Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft), 156 Viola, Alessandra, 163 Violence against animals, 404 capitalism’s link to, 104 colonialism, 238 239, 244 endomaterialities, 308 geography, 257, 259 Indigenous matters, 102 103 oil and gas extraction, 131 132 plant matters, 406 research, 351 science fiction, 370 Virginia, 349 Virginity, 44 46 Virtual environments. See Digital materialities Vital materialism, 364 Vitalism, 407 Vitruvian Man (Leonardo da Vinci), 401, 402, 412 Voß, Elisabeth, 233 Voices from the Shadows (Matthews), 321 Volatile Bodies (Grosz), 58, 59 60, 356

450

von Sommerring, Samuel Thomas, 140 von Uexkull, Jakob, 404 Vora, Kalindi, 212, 217 Voyages to the Moon and the Sun (Cyrano de Bergerac), 162, 164 Vulnerability naming, 57 58 reproductive technology, 318, 320, 325

W Wages, 212 213, 271, 277 Wages for Housework Campaign, 208, 210 Wakefield, Priscilla, 156 Waldby, Catherine, 216, 217, 218 Walde, Dale, 4 Walker Bynum, Carolyn, 38 39 War bodily technologies, 391 breast cancer war analogy, 288 geography, 259 Ward, Mary, 157 Waring, Marilyn, 176 Warren, Karen, 173 ‘‘Warriors, Heroes, and Companions’’ (Hadley), 36 Warriors in Pink campaign, 287 Washington, Harriet, 392 Water, 171 186, 178 aquatic ape theory, 182 183 breast cancer, 285 ecofeminism and environmental justice, 176 178 embodiment, 174 176 endomaterialities, 299 gendered subjects, 178 180 Indigenous perspectives, 183 185 mythology, 172 174 protection of, 104 105 toxicity and queer ecology, 181 182 trans corporeality and new materialisms, 180 181 Water in a Dry Land (Somerville and Marshall), 184 185 Water walks, 184 Water Wars (Shiva), 177 178 Watson, James, 139, 348 Watts, Vanessa, 98

We Have Never Been Modern (Latour), 407 Weaving, 12 Weddings, ecosex, 339 340 Wegener, Alfred, 125 Weheliye, Alexander G., 393, 411, 412 Weighing In (Guthman), 274 Weismantel, Mary, 7 ‘‘Welcome to Cancerland’’ (Ehrenreich), 281 Welfare policy, 213 The Well of Loneliness (Hall), 336 Wendell, Susan, 148, 321 West Virginia, 191 198 West Eberhard, Mary Jane, 28 Western thought botany, 160 161 dualism, 113 114 humanism, 401 403 Indigenous matters, 95, 105 106 medicalization of gender non conformity, 69 sexuality, 330 332, 330 334, 337 Westin, Monica, 166 Westphal, Carl, 331, 333 Wharram Percy, Britain, 13 What a Plant Knows (Chamovitz), 163 What Is Posthumanism? (Wolfe), 402 403 When Species Meet (Haraway), 405 White, Christine D., 13 Whites bodily technologies, 391 breast cancer, 284, 286 eugenics, 349 350 Whitten, Barbara L., 113 ‘‘The Wife’s Lament’’ (poem), 38 Wiggam, Albert Edward, 350 Wilde, Oscar, 336 Wilderness spaces, 340 341 Wilkie, Laurie A., 15 Williams, Bryn, 15 Williston, ND, 132 Willows, Noreen D., 4 Wilson, Edward O., 27 Wilson, Elizabeth A., 146 147, 388 Wilson, Nina, 104 Wilson, Shawn, 96

MA C MI L LA N IN T E RD I S CI P LI NA R Y H AN D BO O K S

INDEX

Wittig, Monique, 49 53, 56, 62 Wolfe, Cary, 402 403 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 156 ‘‘Woman as Body’’ (Spelman), 49 ‘‘Woman in Politics’’ (Hammond), 23 The Woman in the Body (Martin), 141 ‘‘Woman’s Brain Not Inferior to Men’s’’ (New York Times), 23 Women botany, practice of, 155 157 climate change, impact of, 129 endomaterialities, 299 300 geology, role in, 126 127 natural resources compared to labor of, 227 nature, association with, 225, 234, 313 316, 407 as not men, 114 object status of, 54

GENDER: MATTER

Women of color breast cancer, 284, 286 colonialism, 246 commodification of the body, 215 critiques of Marxism, 209 210 eugenics, 349 gendered labor, 212 213 Women’s rights and evolutionary science, 22 Wong, Rita, 185 Wool, Zoe H., 390 Word origins, 39 40 Working mothers, 213 World Health Organization, 299 World Trade Organization, 271 World Wildlife Fund, 298 Wright, Melissa W., 258 Wylie, Alison, 4 Wynter, Sylvia, 263, 402

X XYY syndrome, 351

Y ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’ (Gilman), 159 Yi, Chun Shan (Sandie), 397, 398 Yolda, Pinar (Ecosystem of Excess), 59 Yoruba, 173

Z Zeedyk, Suzanne, 145 Ziser, Michael, 308 309 Zita, Jacquelyn N., 144 Zoophytes, 162 The Zuni Man Woman (Roscoe), 95, 100 Zwarteveen, Margreet, 179

451