#sarah franklin

[cerealbishh]

"So, uh, what dating apps are you on? Uh, no shade, I'm... on all of them."

"Oh! Well, I'm not on them yet, I'm just starting, so... Hi! I'm Kira. I mean, I'm- I'm Sarah. You're Kira, I'm Sarah. Hi..."

[livelovecaliforniadreams]

[findstories]

Happy news gays. There’s a WLW on a prime time CBS show AND she’s already a gay icon.

Check out Leah Lewis on Matlock!

[asexualtuckerfoley]

Oh Sarah is such a disaster gay

[oracleintheshell]

Conclusion: Reevolution

Sarah Franklin

If the most common response to The Dialectic of Sex is a caricature of her position on technology, reproduction, and social change, it is a highly indicative misreading. Like the smoke that indicates a fire, the obfuscation of Firestone points at the core of the problem she set out to diagnose—the “categories that don’t apply,” the “painful” problem that is “everywhere,” in “the very organization of culture itself”62—the problem of the unthinkability of anything outside and beyond the legacies of sexual polarization that limit perception, and above all the invisibility of this problem. From this perspective, the wide variation in feminist responses to new reproductive technology would be expected, especially when, as Firestone repeatedly points out, neither the production nor the application of such technologies can occur outside of the currently male-dominated institutions of science, medicine, and engineering. Variation, division, equivocation, confusion, and ambivalence would be politically predictable in response to the scale, and stage, of the problem.

Given her enthusiasm for technological and scientific progress, a bridge Firestone might want to see strengthened would be that between women scientists and technicians and the new biological possibilities opened up, for example, by stem cells, artificial gametes, cloning, and genetic modification. To a certain extent this is already beginning to occur, as certain areas of biology become more feminized, and as the crossover region between basic research and applications in the areas of human, plant and animal reproduction expands.

In the past, a healthy dose of science skepticism has been justifiably present within feminism—and so it should be given the male-dominated histories of science, medicine, and engineering. But this skepticism must also be ambivalent: it needs to be accompanied by greater integration of feminist perspectives into science, technology design, clinical medicine, and engineering which in turn must involve a greater integration of women scientists into feminism—something that is likely to become more of a priority within feminist scholarship. This integration will be especially difficult for women scientists due to the general taboo that still surrounds mere mention of the F-word in most laboratories. However, “the science question in feminism” may well prove an increasingly important priority in what the Economist has called “the age of biology.”

Ironically, this would mean that an important legacy of Firestone’s manifesto will today be manifest at the level of what is traditionally called a liberal feminist agenda—the concern with issues such as getting more women into science and engineering. Indeed, on this point, Firestone herself is both adamant and strikingly contemporary. In her characteristically blithe and searing manner, she summarizes the situation of women and science (or the “Larry Summers question”) in a single paragraph:

The absence of women at all levels of the scientific disciplines is so commonplace as to lead many (otherwise intelligent) people to attribute it to some deficiency (logic?) in women themselves. Or to women’s own predilections for the emotional and the subjective over the practical and the rational. But the question cannot be so easily dismissed. It is true that women in science are in foreign territory—but how has this situation evolved? Why are there disciplines or branches of inquiry that demand only a “male” mind? Why would a woman, to qualify, have to develop an alien psychology? When and why was the female excluded from this type of mind? How and why has science come to be defined as, and restricted to, the “objective?”

In another ironic twist, the most radical proposal in The Dialectic of Sex—of eliminating sexual difference—may also be gaining some traction in the post-Dolly context of sex-as-mix, albeit in ways Firestone did not anticipate. Now that a skin cell can be made into an artificial gamete, and an artificial egg into an artificial sperm, and an embryoid body into a viable offspring, it is no longer clear what “sexual difference” consists of in “strictly biological” terms.

It is similarly worth remembering that although new reproductive technologies have largely been legitimated through the promotion of normative, heterosexual, nuclear families, they have also, in Marilyn Strathern’s words, “travelled back” to denaturalize some of these same traditional idioms—such as biological relatedness, which, as Charis Thompson has pointed out,66 is now explicitly constructed, or “strategically naturalized,” in complex exchanges of reproductive substance between siblings, across generations, and through complex, multiparty financial transactions. As a consequence, the very meaning of “biology” and “biological” is changing rapidly, and these terms no longer signify conditional or “given” attributes but something more amorphous, malleable, plastic, and fluid.

The true heir to Firestone is Donna Haraway, who has never allowed science, technology, biology, or the search for “solutions” to be oversimplified. Properly, Haraway is not a dutiful daughter and would not share Firestone’s over-reliance on either bio-pessimism or techno-optimism. Rather, Haraway has devotedly morphed these very categories through (in)tolerance, persistence, love, labor, and imagination. In her own Cyborg Manifesto twenty-five years ago, Haraway rejected the ecological sentimentalism of a return to holistic values in favor of something queerer, less predictable, and more difficult in the form of a situated ethics that is at once principled but uncontrolled. As a way-finding ethics, she has forged a feminist political discipline as a form of companionship within the project of reevolution. This is an approach that shares with Firestone an enthusiasm both for biology and the technological means of changing it. Above all, it shares Firestone’s distaste for substance-based familialism and blood kinship in all of its forms.

Reading Firestone and Haraway together in the first decades of the twenty-first century reminds us of the importance of the constellation of issues they both positioned at the heart of their feminist manifestos, while providing a useful contrast in the way they assembled their arguments. For both Firestone and Haraway the control of biology is inseparable from an evolutionary narrative that is increasingly hybridized with technological Salvationism.

Similarly, for both theorists the relationship of gender to biology is radically denaturalized in the service of a revolutionary agenda that requires the destruction of familiar categories, identities, and ways of life. In particular, the ability to radically reimagine kinship, family, and reproduction is crucial to the liberation of gender categories, and for both theorists a radical rethink of reproduction enables a reimagining of what technological control is in aid of (which is largely the opposite of its normatively presumed function of improving the status quo).

Notable too is the extent to which both Firestone and Haraway part company with their feminist contemporaries on “the question of technology” by placing it at the heart of their feminist visions. This is what they have in common, and what sets them apart from their peers, both in their political aspirations (which are revolutionary) and in their theoretical models (which are in some ways more conventional than they seem in their enthusiasm for science and technology). It is also what establishes them as the origin of a tradition of feminist critical engagement with science and technology that is likely to become increasingly more mainstream as the era of reengineered, transgenic, and synthesized biology begins to regender us all.

[hughschiers]

Getting tired of Texas tipping every single set and allowing Franklin to kill them everytime 😭😭

[risozero]

Conclusão: Re-evolução

Sarah Franklin

Se a resposta mais comum à Dialética do Sexo é uma caricatura de sua posição sobre tecnologia, reprodução e mudança social, é uma interpretação altamente indicativa equivocada. Como a fumaça que indica um incêndio, a obfuscação de Firestone aponta para o cerne do problema que ela se propôs a diagnosticar - as "categorias que não se aplicam", o problema "doloroso" que está "em todo lugar", na "própria organização da cultura em si" - o problema da impensabilidade de algo fora e além das heranças da polarização sexual que limitam a percepção, e acima de tudo a invisibilidade desse problema. A partir dessa perspectiva, a ampla variação nas respostas feministas às novas tecnologias reprodutivas seria esperada, especialmente quando, como Firestone enfatiza repetidamente, nem a produção nem a aplicação dessas tecnologias podem ocorrer fora das instituições atualmente dominadas por homens da ciência, medicina e engenharia. Variação, divisão, equívoco, confusão e ambivalência seriam politicamente previsíveis em resposta à escala e ao estágio do problema.

Dado seu entusiasmo pelo progresso tecnológico e científico, uma ponte que Firestone gostaria de ver fortalecida seria aquela entre as cientistas e técnicas mulheres e as novas possibilidades biológicas abertas, por exemplo, pelas células-tronco, gametas artificiais, clonagem e modificação genética. Em certa medida, isso já está começando a ocorrer, à medida que certas áreas da biologia se tornam mais feminizadas, e a região de interseção entre a pesquisa básica e as aplicações nas áreas da reprodução humana, vegetal e animal se expande.

No passado, uma dose saudável de ceticismo em relação à ciência esteve justificadamente presente dentro do feminismo — e assim deve ser dada a predominância masculina na história da ciência, da medicina e da engenharia. Mas esse ceticismo também deve ser ambivalente: ele precisa ser acompanhado por uma maior integração de perspectivas feministas na ciência, no design de tecnologia, na medicina clínica e na engenharia, o que, por sua vez, deve envolver uma maior integração de cientistas mulheres no feminismo — algo que provavelmente se tornará mais prioritário dentro da academia feminista. Essa integração será especialmente difícil para as cientistas mulheres devido ao tabu geral que ainda cerca a mera menção da palavra "F" na maioria dos laboratórios. No entanto, a "questão da ciência no feminismo" pode se mostrar cada vez mais importante no que o Economist chamou de "a era da biologia".

Ironicamente, isso significa que um legado importante do manifesto de Firestone será hoje manifesto no que tradicionalmente é chamado de agenda feminista liberal — a preocupação com questões como a inserção de mais mulheres na ciência e na engenharia. De fato, nesse ponto, Firestone mesma é enfática e surpreendentemente contemporânea. Em sua típica e leve forma direta, ela resume a situação das mulheres e da ciência (ou a "questão Larry Summers") em um único parágrafo:

A ausência de mulheres em todos os níveis das disciplinas científicas é tão comum que leva muitas pessoas (caso contrário inteligentes) a atribuí-la a alguma deficiência (lógica?) nas próprias mulheres. Ou às predileções das mulheres pelo emocional e subjetivo em detrimento do prático e racional. Mas a questão não pode ser facilmente descartada. É verdade que as mulheres na ciência estão em território estrangeiro — mas como essa situação evoluiu? Por que existem disciplinas ou áreas de pesquisa que exigem apenas uma mente "masculina"? Por que uma mulher, para se qualificar, teria que desenvolver uma psicologia alienígena? Quando e por que a mulher foi excluída desse tipo de mente? Como e por que a ciência passou a ser definida como, e restrita ao, "objetivo"?

Em outro giro irônico, a proposta mais radical na Dialética do Sexo — de eliminar a diferença sexual — também pode estar ganhando algum espaço no contexto pós-Dolly de sexo-combinado, embora em formas que Firestone não tenha antecipado. Agora que uma célula da pele pode ser transformada em um gameta artificial, e um óvulo artificial em um espermatozoide artificial, e um corpo embrião em uma prole viável, não está mais claro o que a "diferença sexual" consiste em termos "estritamente biológicos".

Também vale lembrar que, embora as novas tecnologias reprodutivas tenham sido amplamente legitimadas por meio da promoção de famílias normativas, heterossexuais e nucleares, elas também, nas palavras de Marilyn Strathern, "retrocederam" para desnaturalizar alguns desses mesmos idiomas tradicionais - como a relação biológica, que, como apontou Charis Thompson, agora é explicitamente construída, ou "estrategicamente naturalizada", em complexas trocas de substâncias reprodutivas entre irmãos, ao longo de gerações e por meio de transações financeiras complexas e multipartidárias. Como consequência, o próprio significado de "biologia" e "biológico" está mudando rapidamente, e esses termos não significam mais atributos condicionais ou "dados", mas algo mais amorfo, maleável, plástico e fluido.

A verdadeira herdeira de Firestone é Donna Haraway, que nunca permitiu que a ciência, a tecnologia, a biologia ou a busca por "soluções" fossem simplificadas. Adequadamente, Haraway não é uma filha obediente e não compartilharia da super-dependência de Firestone no bio-pessimismo ou no tecno-otimismo. Ao invés disso, Haraway transformou essas próprias categorias através da (in)tolerância, persistência, amor, trabalho e imaginação. Em seu próprio Manifesto Ciborgue há vinte anos, Haraway rejeitou o sentimentalismo ecológico de um retorno aos valores holísticos em favor de algo mais estranho, menos previsível e mais difícil na forma de uma ética situada que é ao mesmo baseada em princípios mas descontrolada. Como uma ética orientadora, ela forjou uma disciplina política feminista como forma de companheirismo dentro do projeto de re-evolução. Esta é uma abordagem que compartilha com Firestone, um entusiasmo tanto pela biologia quanto pelos meios tecnológicos de mudá-la. Acima de tudo, compartilha a aversão de Firestone pelo familialismo baseado em substâncias e pelo parentesco sanguíneo em todas as suas formas.

Ler Firestone e Haraway juntas nas primeiras décadas do século XXI nos faz lembrar da importância do conjunto de questões que ambas posicionaram no cerne de seus manifestos feministas, ao mesmo tempo em que fornece um contraste útil na forma como montaram seus argumentos. Para ambas, o controle da biologia é inseparável de uma narrativa evolutiva cada vez mais hibridizada com o salvacionismo tecnológico.

Da mesma forma, para ambas as teóricas, a relação de gênero com a biologia é radicalmente desnaturalizada em prol de uma agenda revolucionária que exige a destruição de categorias familiares, identidades e modos de vida conhecidos. Em particular, a capacidade de reimaginar radicalmente parentesco, família e reprodução é crucial para a libertação das categorias de gênero, e para ambas as teóricas, uma reconsideração radical da reprodução possibilita uma reimaginação do objetivo do controle tecnológico (que é em grande parte o oposto de sua função presumida normativamente de melhorar o status quo).

Notável também é o quanto tanto Firestone quanto Haraway se afastam de suas contemporâneas feministas sobre "a questão da tecnologia" ao colocá-la no cerne de suas visões feministas. Isso é o que elas têm em comum, e o que as diferencia de seus pares, tanto em suas aspirações políticas (que são revolucionárias) quanto em seus modelos teóricos (que são de certa forma mais convencionais do que parecem em seu entusiasmo pela ciência e tecnologia). É também o que as estabelece como origem de uma tradição de engajamento crítico feminista com a ciência e a tecnologia que provavelmente se tornará cada vez mais mainstream à medida que a era da biologia reprojetada, transgênica e sintetizada começa a redefinir a todos nós.

[giddyaunt425]

[lizshaw]

Doctor Who BBC Portraits: The Third Doctor Era (1970-74)

[demifiendrsa]

Dune: Prophecy | Official Trailer – Power

The Dune prequel series, Dune: Prophecy, will premiere on Max on November 17, 2024.

Poster

[cerealbishh]

"But, you've obviously been useful. So... stop feeling bad for yourself! And pull up whatever granny panties you wear and fix it!"

[livelovecaliforniadreams]

[tricornonthecob]

soft headcanon.

[pettyshippen]

[oracleintheshell]

Reproductive Rights, New Reproductive Technologies

Sarah Franklin

As has been documented in the many excellent histories available of the development of birth control, the pursuit of a safe, reliable, and efficient means of contraception based on modern scientific principles represents one of the longest and most important feminist struggles to enable women to exercise greater choice and control over their reproductive biology.

This effort has yielded a range of options that have brought a significant number of benefits to women, but human fertility control remains a good example of the limits of technology to bring about social change, as well as the limits of social change to bring about technology. Women still bear the vast brunt of the physical, emotional, and organizational labor involved in contraceptive use—whether any devices are available at all, whether they are safe or not, and when they fail. For the majority of the world’s women modern contraceptive measures such as the pill, condoms, injectibles, or IUDS are simply not an option—a situation that is exacerbated by the matricidal policies toward abortion and family planning by many of the world’s wealthiest countries (only family planning based on abstinence was supported under the “pro-Africa” Bush administration—a policy with extremely deleterious consequences for the ability of anti-retroviral treatment to prevent the spread of AIDS as well as for rates of maternal and child mortality).

Access to safe, affordable, or free abortion is similarly limited. Famously, there is no country in the world where women have the legal right freely to make up their own minds about termination or continuation of pregnancy. Thus, despite the emphasis by many modern democratic nations on the protection of various individual rights and freedoms, women’s reproductive rights remain in an essentially pre-modern condition—a condition decried by both Firestone and Beauvoir as biological feudalism.

As generations of feminists have pointed out, no amount of legislative, regulatory, or technological change is likely to significantly increase women’s reproductive rights until gender inequality is less rigidly enforced and policed by the institutions of marriage, the sexual division of labor, and the nuclear family. So long as naturalized patriarchal authority, the codes of competitive (and violent) masculinity, religiously sanctioned sexism, and the everyday fraternal contract celebrated daily on the sports pages remain so dominant as to appear unquestionable, it will be, as Firestone repeatedly argued, impossible (if not “insane”) even to imagine genuine alternatives.

If we remember that the bulk of Firestone’s manifesto was based on an analysis of what has held a certain gender stratification in place for millennia, and in particular on the difficulties of fully comprehending the consequences of women’s subordination (and the structures that uphold it), the emphasis on one aspect of her views of new reproductive technology seems misplaced. Read as an analysis of why women still do not have adequate scientific and technological support to control their reproductive health, or to more fully and freely exercise reproductive choice, Firestone’s account takes some bettering.

The situation presented by the proliferation of assisted conception techniques is very different from the history of the oral contraceptive pill, but equally telling in terms of the ongoing relevance of Firestone’s many accurate predictions about the relationship of reproductive control to feminist politics.

The most prominent issue here in relation to The Dialectic of Sex is the rapid expansion of IVF from the mid-1980s onward, and the increasing range of options enabled by the IVF platform (such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis [PGD], intracytoplasmic sperm injection [ICSI], gestational surrogacy, egg donation, and sex selection). This expansion raises a wide range of issues that exceed the space available here, but that represent a contrasting point of convergence (from birth control) with Firestone’s emphasis on technological control of fertility.

One of the most divisive issues for feminists is the tremendous popularity of IVF in spite of its significant failings and considerable health costs to women (and, it increasingly appears, risks to their offspring). From one point of view, new reproductive technologies (NRTS) such as IVF represent an intensification of the exploitation of women via their reproductive capacity. As in Firestone’s day, feminist attitudes toward maternity, reproduction, and technology differ to the point of easily becoming polarized, and since much of the demand for IVF comes from women, the technique is not incorrectly recognized to give women options they value and seek to maximize. Similarly, the media enthusiasm for polarizing women’s options, and then “debating” them (work vs. family, care for others vs. “having it all,” unattractive vs. too sexual, etc.) has not abated. Thus, feminist positions on NRTS have ranged from outright opposition to critical acceptance.

Yet other feminists, in the tradition of the women’s health movement, have written feminist guidebooks to new reproductive technologies aimed at empowering women who use them. Within the genre of feminist literature that is based on a more ethnographic or sociological analysis of IVF, the best adjective to describe the “position” taken by feminist authors over the past two decades, beginning with a string of early studies in the 1980s and early 1990s might be “ambivalent.” Other empirically based studies of women’s experience of IVF are more explicitly critical of the technology—essentially arguing that it is, to use Judith Lorber’s phrase, a “patriarchal bargain” through which women are subordinated rather than empowered.

Ultimately, it would be difficult to know which “side” Firestone might take in the longstanding, extensive, sophisticated, thorough, and often passionate but ultimately inconclusive feminist literature on NRTS (a literature that of course now also includes a literature about itself). However, the real lesson from Firestone may be that this is not the most helpful question to ask. Indeed, it may be the very form of this question which Firestone’s early, prescient, and sensible analysis of “the question of technology and society” enables us to reconsider. It might also help us understand the enduring hold of the Firestone feminist fallacy, whereby the question of reproductive technology stands for Firestone, and Firestone stands for feminist folly. So long as feminist debates do not have any serious role in public policy-making concerning the regulation of new reproductive technologies, we are returned to the persistent situation concerning women’s health and birth control, which is that of basic political exclusion.

In relation to a future in which a differentially sexed biological contribution to the reproduction of the species was likely to remain one of the most intransigent obstacles to “the overthrow of sex polarity,” Firestone’s vision of prosthetic gestation is fundamentally different from today’s increasing range of fertility enhancement options. Indeed they are entirely opposite—while the former seeks to eliminate reproductive difference the latter intensifies it.

If there is any take-home lesson from the literature on IVF or surrogacy, it is that they are costly, painful, and labor-intensive procedures in which women are not less defined by sex, gender, or biology but more so.

As a consequence, this highly medicalized and increasingly commercialized—but almost wholly unregulated, undocumented, and unmonitored—sector, which is largely oriented toward the production of nuclear families (even, controversially, among lesbians), is unlikely to become a force that liberates women. What Firestone provides is a helpful set of insights into precisely how and why this would be exactly what we would expect to happen, much as she might be as unlikely as any of her feminist contemporaries to prescribe a solution (though one suspects she would have told women to abandon the take-home baby aspiration along with the quest for a perfect bustline).

[salmonthecat]