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The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
Science and Sisterhood
Science and Sisterhood: Technology and Postmodern Feminist Science Fiction In the early morning hours of July 16, 1945, scientists from Los Alamos gathered in the Journada del Muerto to split a few nuclei among friends and instead set off a chain-reaction the effects of which are still felt around the world today. The fallout from the bomb that debuted that morning left sensitive postmodern poets like Allen Ginsberg crouched in the dust, howling of vidi which he had snatched from vini and scraped clean of vici. The shockwaves from the explosion gave Thomas Pynchon�s grave Tyrone Slothrop an elliptic erection pointed downward like a dowsing rod toward the future. And gender and science, which had always been strange yet comfortable bedfellows, were fused by the exergonic blast into a completely new substance. In the confusion that followed the command performances of Fat Man and Little Boy in Japan, feminists managed to liberate a map of the future from the white capitalist patriarchy that had engineered dreaded eventuality down to minutia. Crossing out �patriarchy,� they set off with their prize to build a shining land of progress towards equality. Aiding them in this quest were the connoisseurs and publishers and critics of literature who gallantly leveled the playing field by setting Hustler equal to Hamlet, single-handedly cleared the arena of interested spectators, and then handed the whole shebang�hook, line, and sinker�to women and interested female impersonators. It was only about thirty years before feminists began to realize that maybe white and capitalist were also hindrances rather than helpmates and the fight over the future really began. The movement splintered, and some sisters were left to take up the slack, technologically speaking. It was around this time that writers like Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood stepped up to imagine a future for us, a future in which they dreamed of feminism and technology. But women and science have always had an uneasy relationship. Mary Shelly knew this in 1818 when she put pen to paper to create a monster in Frankenstein. Though she set out to explore themes of humanity and inhumanity, desire and rejection, she was also channeling a long-standing fear inspired by the new, by science, by technology. Women, however, seem to have come a long way when it comes to feelings towards engineered men. Fears of fiendish scientifically created beings have progressed over the last century and a half to include the idea of love and tenderness towards obedient and benevolent women-made cyborgs. In He, She and It, Marge Piercy�s 1991 science fiction novel, the future may look (as many futures do) like a toxic, domed, labyrinthine wasteland of men and women plugged into artificial experience via �spikes and stimmies� (34) embedded in their skulls, but there are concessions. Among these concessions is Yod. Yod is the woman-created, gynocentric Lieutenant Data of the feminist future: a cyborg who despite his staggering intelligence has only literal and not common sense. He must be taught by his eventual owner and programmer Malkha, a wise old Jewish code-writer, and her granddaughter, Shira, how to appreciate a rose, how to pass for human, how to love. In the creation of Yod, what Piercy and these characters eventually create is what many women want: freedom from the difficulties that accompany love and desire in a patriarchal society�even if this freedom takes the form of a knight made of shining armor slip-covered with artificial skin, a being who himself will never grow old yet who will always bear �no prejudice against a woman because of age,� and to whom� [w]rinkles and infirmities mean nothing� (168). Luckily for these aging, unloved women, Yod discovers like so many men that �that he like[s] sex more than anything� (169), but, unlike his un-metal brothers, is still able to offer �his friendship, his attention, his pure scathing luminous desire, almost too bright to endure, his unpracticed bountiful tenderness, his endless desire to please. . .� (169). He is also designed to protect his women, as when he saves Shira from a boatload of pirates bent on harvesting her transplantable organs and marvels, �This is the first time I have truly defended. It was highly pleasurable. Yet my philosophical and theological programming informs me I�ve committed wrong.� (111). Yod as the stunning, articulate, programmable �walking vibrator, . . . real and quirky� (257), reads child-care manuals in his spare time, kills to protect with guilt-ridden pleasure and pleasures guilt-free women. His problematic nature has nothing to do with sports or breaches of toilet-seat etiquette and everything to do with innocence about the world�an innocence that can only be alleviated by his contact with women. Yod, the pure fantasy man, is cyborg-perfect in every way, down to his perfect guilt, down to his perfect faults and doubts. Unfortunately, Yod�s cyborg counterpart, the perfect cyborg woman, is a house. She�s the wife every woman wants, the old punchline of a wife who, when she sits around the house, really sits around the house, and really sits within the house, who can really never leave the house, who is so domestic that she is the house. She is known only as �the house.� And like the re- and depressed housewives from whom she is descended, she not only has a personality that seems real and is not, she also expresses her disapproval via silent reproach: �The house did not answer immediately. This was one of those times when she felt as if the personality of the house . . . were not artificial but real. She could not help feeling that the house was disapproving of her request� (94). She exists to wake her charges and deliver messages speaking only �sotto voce, an apologetic cast to the warm female voice� (171). She exists to act as an amateur therapist and as a receptacle for feelings, coaxing gently, �Are you in pain?. . . Tell me. You know I keep secrets� (56). Unlike Yod�s love which is varied and complex, the house�s love is one-dimensional, easily replaced. One can imagine hauling Yod from domicile to domicile, but one�s house always stays put. True enough, there are real, non-cyborg women characters in Piercy�s novel, futuristic women who have not lived out their lives in the shadow of a stuffed and mounted June Cleaver accessorized with pearls and Hoover vacuum cleaner, and like the rest of womankind they seek an end to the drudgery of childcare and housework which is still the domestic plague of the future. The house, the ghost in the machine that does laundry and washes dishes and keeps secrets is traditionally--if not necessarily�female and, in the fantasy future, must display the semblance of intelligence if the women of today are to face lives wasted on such repetitive and unsatisfying tasks. The perfect female cyborg, like the perfect male cyborg, like the perfect woman, never complains�but she also never thinks, questions, fucks, or raises her voice in praise of her maker. In the midst of all this artificial intelligence, Piercy�s future may have a place for one or two real women, �half artist, half scientist� (19) women who are still grappling with many of the same problems that women in 2001 are still grappling with, but it is also a future in which these problems are partially solved by a displacement of traditional gender roles onto cyborgs, technological darlings which, in futuristic robotic obedience, complacently shoulder the weight of tradition so that women may call themselves liberated. Margaret Atwood, however, has another idea about the future. In Atwood�s future, technology provides not a means of liberation, but a further means by which women are dominated and oppressed. The Handmaid�s Tale, published in 1985, mirrors the reality of current technology, especially reproductive technology, which is modeled after the metaphor of war, with women as enemies, victims, and objects of technology. In Atwood�s novel, women, men and children have been reduced to categories: The women become Aunts (who train recruits), Marthas (maids), Wives, and Handmaids (as well as prostitutes and laborers who refuse to participate in the new order); the men Commanders and Guardians; the children, Angels. In this vision of the future, traditional gender roles cannot be shunted off onto cyborg compatriots, but must be shouldered anew by the men and women who created them in the past. This new order is accomplished in an oddly simple way, with relatively little insurrection: One day a �Compunumber� card works to buy cigarettes at the corner store, the next, if you�re a woman, it doesn�t (226-227). One day the law permits you to have a job, the next, if you�re a woman, it doesn�t (228-229). One day your reproductive rights are in place, the next, if you�re a woman, they�re gone. And a new kind of fictional nightmare begins, but one which was, in the 1980�s descending onto an America already seemingly half-asleep. The book preceded, but just barely, America�s decline of reproductive technology into industrialization with all its franchised in vitro fertilization clinics and the rise of biotechniques such as embryo flushing and sex predetermination, processes which had become common to animal husbandry. In the same time period, surrogate mothers like Mary Beth Whitehead made the news by refusing to give up their offspring, and Gena Corea, from the Institute on Women and Technology coined the term �reproductive slavery� to describe the phenomenon of surrogate mothering (Corea 131). This eruption of a national discourse of reproductive rights and advances may be why many women identified and continue to identify with Offred, the novel�s narrator, who overnight loses the luxury of taking her freedom for granted, and the next is dressed like a scarlet nun and waiting for the Ceremony, sex with the Commander, to begin. This novel of a nightmarish future in which all ethical, legal, and medical analyses of the risks of biotechnology to women are razed seemed too close to this reality in which all ethical, legal, and medical analyses of the risks of biotechnological advances to women were being raised. In Gilead, Atwood�s fictional country, �the need for. . .birth services was already recognized� and being �inadequately met by �artificial insemination,� �fertility clinics,� and the use of �surrogate mothers,� who were hired for the purpose� (386). In America, the need for services such as artificial insemination, fertility clinics and hired surrogate mothers had long been expressed and . But in America, the expense the technology, particularly surrogacy, was prohibitive for the middle class. Just as the Commanders of Gilead looked to the women within their borders as a source of surrogate mothers, the head of one �surrogacy operation,� in 1983 suggested that, to bring the price of surrogate mothers down, Americans should looks outside their borders for a source of surrogate mothers, � use of poverty-stricken women� and women from the economically depressed areas in the North of England, and Thai, Filipino, and Mexican women (Corea 157) who would take less money and who might gain the opportunity to come to America through the process. Atwood�s solution of compulsory surrogate mothering would probably be even more cost-effective and, carried out in such a way as to make Gileadean women the surrogates, would have none of the medical side effects associated with poor women�s offspring. However, in Gilead, as in America, the emotional investment of women in the direction of reproductive rights and technology has less to do with economics and fear than it does have to do with an intense desire for autonomy. Because of this, Atwood�s novel seems to show American women at least a future not possible, but definite. Women�s relationship to technology has never been easy. Women all too often are the commodities of technology rather than its beneficiaries and scientific advances have seemed too often to offer the means by which oppression could be more efficiently achieved, which has made feminists and other women fear for their rights, their safety and their lives in the face of progress. Postmodern feminist writing that deals with technology questions the ownership of this technology and questions its direction in a way that society at large as not gotten around to doing. This type of questioning may, of course, lead nowhere: science�s longstanding dearth of feminist scientists all but for now ensures this. But the hope exists that this kind of steady imagining of the future will not only improve with practice, but will eventually be powerful enough to bring about real and beneficial scientific and technological changes which are not modeled on traditional gender roles and relationships and which are, by extension, beneficial to all.
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