Reconstruction 5.4 (Fall 2005)


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Alien(ating) Naturecultures: Feminist SF as Creative Science Studies / Helen Merrick

Abstract: “Alien(ating) Naturecultures” examines the potential of feminist science fictions to act as “cross-cultural” narratives in encounters between the humanities and sciences. Merrick argues that the conjunction of disciplines figured by the term “science fiction” bears re-examination as a resource for science studies, and a potential mediator in science-humanities dialogues.

Specifically, Merrick asks, when we are concerned with critiquing and unpacking technoscientific practices, cultures and knowledges, what can more creative forms such as science fiction (sf) offer? Such questions about “naturecultures” are intimately connected to the ways we construct and understand “life,” the “human” and difference in the discourses of Science. In particular, Merrick wants to consider how feminist and ecofeminist sf might contribute to (and complicate) these complex questions, focusing on the possibilities inherent in human/other confusions. A number of recent eco/feminist sf texts utilize the figure of the alien as a means of interrogating notions of the “human,” “non-human” and our definitions of “life itself.” In these texts, confrontations between human and other are ripe with possibilities for denaturalizing the boundaries and allegiances which infuse traditional depictions of the human/non-human dichotomy. Along with Haraway and other feminist critics of science, Merrick views feminist sf as uniquely suited to re-thinking the contested terrain of “nature” as it is complexly and paradoxically mapped out by both the life sciences and humanities. In the move to re-interrogate problematic inscriptions of the nature/culture binary, Merrick argues that narratives such as eco/feminist sf can be seen as vital engagements with science: in short, as a “creative science studies.”

Mixing, juxtaposing, and reversing reading conventions appropriate to each genre can yield fruitful ways of understanding the production of origin narratives in a society that privileges science and technology in its constructions of what may count as nature and for regulating the traffic between what it divides as nature and culture.

(Haraway, 1989: 370)

<1> A decade and a half on, Haraway’s injunction to mix generic reading conventions bears repeating in a climate where dialogues across the life sciences and humanities remain troubled by what might be termed “translation problems.” Haraway’s framing of primatology as “SF” (science fiction) in Primate Visions was intended as an invitation to her readers to “remap the borderlands between nature and culture” indicating the productive possibilities of “science fiction,” whose very title suggests a co-mingling of the two cultures (Haraway, 1989: 15) Yet, despite the burgeoning fields of posthuman, cyborgian and cybercultural studies which employ SF as exemplary cultural texts (eg, Hayles, 1999), feminist SF has played a surprisingly small role in “cross-cultural” encounters with the sciences.

<2> Following Haraway, it seems that it is primarily in feminist science studies that SF is called upon as useful space, “reading practice” or “dream laboratory” in which to reflect upon and engage with scientific cultures, practices and knowledges. In this paper, I argue that the conjunction of disciplines / cultures figured by the term “science fiction” bears re-examination as a resource for science studies, and a potential mediator (or “translator”) in science-humanities encounters. Specifically, when we are concerned with critiquing and unpacking technoscientific practices, cultures and knowledges, what can more creative forms such as SF offer? How might they contribute to these complex and charged debates?

<3> Along with Haraway and other feminist critics of science, I find feminist SF “useful to think with” in critically reflecting on the practice and cultures of contemporary technoscience. Questions about “naturecultures” (in Haraway’s words) are intimately connected to the ways we construct and understand “human,” other, life and difference in contemporary technoscientific culture/s. In particular, I want to consider how feminist and ecofeminist sf might contribute to (and complicate) these complex questions, focusing on the possibilities inherent in human/other confusions.

<4> Of course, in the imaginative realm of SF, the “other” can literally be figured as the (extra-terrestrial) “Alien’; but this alien often stands metaphorically for all sorts of “non-humans” – from animals to organisms to cyborg hybrids. A number of recent eco/feminist sf texts adopt the alien as a means of interrogating notions of bio-difference on a broad scale: in trying to locate, identify and codify the “non-human” we are inevitably confronted with those tricky questions of “what it means to be human” and questions of defining “life itself.” In these texts, confrontations between human and other are ripe with possibilities for denaturalising the boundaries and allegiances which infuse traditional depictions of the human/non-human dichotomy. These visions of alien nature/s and alienated humans/cultures make feminist science fictions very useful tools in re-thinking the contested terrain of “nature” as it is complexly and paradoxically mapped out by both the life sciences and humanities.

Why SF Is “Good To Think With”

<5> Just as bio-art draws on the “iconography of images from science” (Reichle, 2003:1) SF has long drawn on – and transformed - the tropes and epistemologies of technoscience. However, most academic considerations of SF are framed within the parameters of literary criticism, with little attention being paid to the central place of “science” in SF – especially feminist SF (see, for example, Donawerth, 1997). The function of science and technology in feminist sf has been largely neglected in feminist sf criticism, which has focused more on the symbolic re-writings of sex, gender, sexuality and possibilities for socio-cultural change (which, following the precepts of “Science” itself, is seen to be an area somehow separate from the functioning of techno-scientific discourses). The potential for a more productive interaction relation between fictional and theoretical writings on science is worth pursuing: especially in a field that opposes the authority of the natural sciences as “crafts for distinguishing between fact and fiction” (Haraway, 1989: 3-4). Indeed, a number of feminist science theorists have found feminist sf texts useful in thinking through various theses, as a sort of “testing ground” for future (and present) feminist theories, critiques and praxis.  Perhaps the best known example is Haraway’s approach, which attempts to deconstruct the “master narrative” of science through an emphasis on the “storyladen” character of the life and social sciences: “Scientific practice may be considered a kind of storytelling practice—a rule governed, constrained, historically changing craft of narrating the history of nature” (Haraway, 1989: 4).

<6> The mixing of science fictions with science “facts” and theories serves the immediate function of undermining universal claims to “truth,” and in emphasising narrativity, potentially opens up scientific discourses to challenge and interpretation. Haraway’s readings of texts like Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark further suggests that because the implicit narratives of science – competition, invasion, colonialisation – are “writ large” in many sf narratives, their destructive implications may be rendered more obvious (Haraway, 1991: 226). Racist, sexist and colonising behaviours are more flagrantly rendered when their setting is virgin planets populated by sentient aliens, than in, for example, scientific “stories” about the operation of cells in the immune system of an organism. Correspondingly, feminist sf may both highlight the negative consequences of such narratives on all levels – from sf to science, microscopic to macroscopic – and investigate the possibility of different narratives or origin stories.

<7> Another reason sf is “good to think with” is that, like other creative forms, it offers an altered perspective: different ways of situating or positioning the observer / reader, whether through the deliberate use of metaphor, cognitive dissonance, or the inherent undermining of the notion of the objective observer.  Attention to perspective and positioning is central to both feminist science studies and feminist sf. Once the notion of objectivity (Haraway’s “god trick’) is abandoned, where does one position oneself, and how is this positioning justified, and privileged over other competing accounts? Additionally, whilst creative forms such as fiction and art may draw on scientific iconography or tropes, they immediately suggest different reading or viewing practices. The particular reading practices and protocols of science fiction make overt the way that “stories” may construct worlds; indeed in sf it could be said what we know of the world cannot be assumed from prior experience or context but must be constructed anew from the observations, actions and actors of the story. Obviously, then, science fictional reading strategies offer fertile ground for re-constructions and revisions of world-shaping stories such as the life sciences.

<8> In the spirit of mixing genres and shifting perspectives, I want to call on a number of diverse, non-obvious theoretical threads as co-conspirators with feminist sf in my argument, including feminist science studies, ecofeminist theories and queer theory.

Queering Science?: Cross–Cultural Conversations

<9> Increasingly, feminist theoretical mediations on nature/ culture are generating “border-crossing” hybrid theories. For example, Karen Barad’s work focuses on the need to promote the “mutual consideration” of feminist, postmodern and queer theory along with science studies, in order to challenge dominant understandings of the relation between discursive practices and materiality and redevelop notions of causality and agency (Barad 2003:803; see also Barad 1998; 1996). In a similar move, ecofeminist theorists such as Catriona Sandilands and Greta Gaard look to queer theory to mediate the often heterosexist and essentialist limitiations of ecofeminism. Such theoretical moves bring together considerations of the agency of nature – which has characterised (in different ways) feminist science studies and ecofeminisms – with the sensibility of queered performativity.

<10> Over the last twenty or so years, Feminist science studies has emerged as a key strand of feminist enquiry, both in terms of the (often “non-traditional’) subjects it tackles, and also the epistemological ground covered – particularly concerning notions of authority and objectivity. Whilst the struggles to articulate approaches to technosciences that are sensitive to the intersections of gender, race, sexuality etc, reflect trends in feminist theories more broadly, feminist science studies are also uniquely concerned with constructions and understandings of “nature” in the sciences and in complicating the often too-easily assumed binary divide between nature/culture which also continues to inform the humanities (for more discussion on this issue see Kirby, 1999). In feminist science studies, as in feminist theory more generally, there has been a move to more complex notions and understandings of our technoscientific cultures, and cultures of technoscience; that is, an acknowledgement of the “co-construction of categories such as gender, race, class and sexuality within the tangled web of science” (Weasel, 2004: 183.) Such attention to “co-construction” is also very much a hallmark of ecofeminist approaches: as Gaard, for example states, “the ideology which authorises oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species, is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature” (Gaard, 1993: 1) Thus, like many feminist science studies, ecofeminist theories tend to be synthesising, non-reductionist, non-transcendental, interdisciplinary, and holistic.

<11> Although approaches and conclusions may vary, another important thread of connection between ecofeminist theory and feminist science studies lies in the overt problematising of the meanings and uses of “nature.”  Whilst much debate around the “two culture” split has focused precisely on “cultures,” whether the sublimated politics of technoscientific technocultures, or the application of humanities-based cultural critiques to the sciences, increasingly in feminist theories and science studies, attention is turning to “Nature.” As Vicki Kirby observes: “the question of nature, and by implication any discourse that claims to faithfully represent or explain it, has become the exemplary target of cultural analysis” (Kirby, 1999:22). Of course for critics such as Haraway and Latour, “nature” has always been a prime target: whether questioning “what counts as nature” (Haraway 1994) or redefining the “politics of Nature” (Latour, 2004). As Haraway forcefully argues through much of her work, critiques of technoscience are contests over what counts as nature, and associated questions: what counts as human, what counts as “life” (see, for example, Haraway, 1994: 60).

<12> For a number of feminist critics, the question of nature as actor is crucial, despite detrimental associations with essentialist notions of a benevolent – or vengeful – “mother Earth.” As Haraway notes, “Ecofeminists have perhaps been most insistent on some version of the world as active subject, not as resources to be mapped and appropriated in bourgeois, Marxist, or masculinist projects” (Haraway, 1991: 199). The ecofeminist emphasis on nature as category of analysis in conjunction with attention to embodiment and materiality is in alignment with a number of other feminist theorists concerned with re-examining materiality, or as Barad puts it, the need to understand “how matter comes to matter” (2003). For Barad,

Nature is neither a passive surface awaiting the mark of culture nor the end product of cultural performances. The belief that nature is mute and immutable and that all prospects for significance and change reside in culture is a reinscription of the nature/culture dualism that feminist have actively contested.(Barad, 2003)

<13> This focus on nature, matter, or materiality is characterised by Jacinta Kerin as advocating “a “return” to ontology” (1999). That such an enquiry is marked as a “return” highlights the fact that the nature / culture debates are marked by what Latour calls “the impossible distinction, contradicted every day, between ontological and epistemological questions”. Indeed, it is this distinction, he argues, that has “imposed the impossible choice between realism and constructivism” (Latour 2004: 41). For critics such as Barad, Latour and Kerin, these distinctions need to be challenged and blurred, such that we no longer refer to “two distinct sets, with nature on one side and the representations that humans make of it on the other” (Latour: 2004: 36).  Indeed, Barad suggests we need a new way of encapsulating these understandings:

The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. Onto-epistem-ology – the study of practices of knowing in being – is probably a better way to think about the kind of understandings that are needed to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter. (Barad, 2003)

<14> The problematics of mediations between nature and culture, materiality and ideality, ontology and epistemology come to the fore when the focus is the relation between “nature” and “human”; that is, the relation of the ontological figure of the human to both the “pre-critical” category nature and/or our (“cultural”) representations of “nature.”

Human / Non-Human Confusions

[W]hat seems to be at stake is this culture’s stories of the human place in nature, that is, genesis and its endless repetitions.

(Haraway, 1997: 60)

<15> Many science fiction texts, as well as the life sciences, are crucially engaged in re-telling stories about the “human place in nature.” Such stories include, vitally: how we define and codify “life”; where the boundaries between human and other organic and inorganic life lie, or are determined; and the relation of these boundaries to the construction of the “natural.”  Contemporary trends in biotechnologies and the cybernetic turn to translating world, genes and even bodies (consider the Virtual Human Project) into code has led to what many identify as a “posthuman” moment – a space usefully defined by Waldby as one where the stability of the binary human / non-human is being both reinforced and undermined: “How are the self-identity and transcendent status of the human secured as the “not-animal,” the “not-machine” and the “not-embodied” and in what ways does the purity of these categories unravel and contaminate each other?” (Waldby, 2000: 43).

<16> Leaving aside, for the moment, the more cyborgian questions of embodiment and the in-organic, the issue of the increasingly contaminated and challenged boundaries (not to mention hybrids) of human / animal is a central concern in feminist science studies and ecofeminist theory, particularly as it relates to our epistemological and ontological apprehension of “nature.” These distinctions are not as clear cut as they might appear; in a debate on precisely this question (‘what is it to be Human’) geneticist Steve Jones argued that “biology, and genetics in particular, can tell us very little about what it is to be human, concluding that ‘what makes us humans is that we’re not animals’” (Pepperell, 2003: 239).  (A rather disingenuous statement, I would argue, given biotech’s forays between and across precisely such boundaries, and the role played by biological and genetic discourses in both confusing and re-instating such divides.) According to Latour, scientific modernity is characterised by a paradoxical dynamic generated by two opposing practices:

The first set of practices, by “translation” creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by “purification”, creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other. (Latour 1993: 10-11; Waldby, 2000: 43-44)

<17> As Waldby notes, the “sheer volume of hybridisation taking place in contemporary technoscience” has according to Latour, provoked a crisis in “the workability of the distinction between translation, the work of producing hybrids, and purification, the work of declaring and maintaining ontologically distinct boundaries between humans and nonhumans” (Waldby, 2000: 45).

Alien Biology/ies

<18> The resultant instability of species boundaries around the “human” provides perfect opportunities for science fictional imaginings.  Alison Sinclair’s Blueheart (1996), Stephanie Smith’s Other Nature (1995), and Helen Collins Mutagenisis (1992) all deal in various ways with biological change or mutation in humans – often linked to survival in a changed world or circumstance – highlighting the responses engendered by direct interventions into the “sanctity” of what we perceive as “human.” An atmosphere of hybridity and species confusion is also ripe with possibility for the Alien. Butler’s Xenogenesis series is a powerful and disconcerting confrontation with boundary-crossing – which challenges not only our genesis stories but human reproduction at its heart: offering “the monstrous fear and hope that the child will not, after all, be like the parent” (Haraway, 1989: 378). The alien Oankali species -- at once the “saviours” of the human race and ineluctable midwives to a new, only partially human, hybrid species – exist only to confound and cross boundaries, driven by their need to collect and exchange genetic material. In Haraway’s words:  “Their bodies themselves are immune and genetic technologies, driven to exchange, replication, dangerous intimacy across the boundaries of self and other” (1991: 227).

<19> In many of these examples, human stories of genesis and separation from nature are refigured through alien “biology/ies”; suggestive of not only different orders of biological species, but also alien “stories” about how and why life functions, is ordered and evolves – that is, alien life sciences. Such alien biologies articulate challenges to the ways we have traditionally defined “nature,” and human and non-human “life.” Many eco/feminist sf texts posit alien biosciences and technologies that operate on very different premises, and proceed from rather different configurations of naturecultures. For many feminist sf authors, “biology” is their favoured scientific trope, which is perhaps not surprising given that a number have training in biology or related fields, including Joan Slonczewski, Julie Czernada, Judith Moffett, and Vonda McIntyre. (Interestingly, within the genre, the biological sciences have also historically been viewed as more appropriate subject matter for women writers, as opposed to the masculinised “hard SF” based on hard” science such as physics) [1]. Investigations of alternate biological stories often begin with deconstructive critiques of contemporary bio-tech narratives and trends, ranging from the colonialism of Darwinian evolutionary narratives, to the potential consequences of genetic engineering.

<20> An early example of the latter is Naomi Mitchison’s Solution Three (1975) a highly critical parable of genetic engineering which posits a world which has eliminated sexism, heterosexism, racism, aggression - in short, most forms of biologically- (and socially) marked difference through biotech and cloning.  Written in 1970, Mitchison’s text is an astounding, early critique of bio-engineering as technological fix, and cautionary tale of the detrimental loss of genetic (and biosocial) diversity (Squier, 1995: 173-4). More recently, authors such as Nancy Kress, in her Beggars trilogy, (Beggars in Spain,1993; Beggars and Choosers, 1994; Beggars Ride, 1996) experiment with possible futures in genetic manipulation, focusing on the attendant consequences in a society still governed by racial, gender and class differences.

<21> Other texts disrupt our notions of what scientific practices and cultures look like – often through depictions of biotechnologies that are more “organic,” embodied and “everyday,” rather than facilitated by external, mechanistic, in-organic technologies and the specialised (often masculinised) spaces of laboratories.  An author whose work consistently explores this area is the biologist/ sf author Joan Slonczewski. In works such as A Door Into Ocean (1987), Slonczewski plays with our perspective and understandings of biological practices through her depiction of the (female) Sharer society, which “feminises” the sciences through the intermingling of day-to-day living, childcaring and science into communal social space, where “laboratories look just like homes … In this society, the person who cleans the labs is very likely the same person who does the science” (Donawerth, 1997:10).

<22> Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-89), features the alien Oankali who are compelled to cross and blur boundaries – in their bodies, bio-technology and encounters with humans – suggesting a complex disruption of “biology and human nature.” As a species, Oankali categorise themselves primarily as “traders” who are driven to trade, deal and incorporate new and different genetic material. As Haraway notes, the very bodies of the Oankali “themselves are genetic technologies”: “unlike us, the hydra-headed Oankali do not build non-living technologies to mediate their self-formations and reformations. Rather, they are complexly webbed into a universe of living machines, all of which are partners in their apparatus of bodily production, including [their] ship” (1989: 379). As a complex form of organic technology, the Oankali live in a “postmodern” network of living machines “all of which are partners” (Haraway, 1989: 379). The Oankali are a radical example precisely of Haraway’s cyborg metaphor in the sense that they are part of a cybernetic system, and confuse the boundaries between human and machine, self and other, technoscience and nature. There are many other examples of “alien biology/ies” that display similar traits: the Aleutians of Gwyneth Jones White Queen trilogy; the Sheppies in Marti Steussy’s Dreams of Dawn, and the Tendu in Any Thomson’s Color of Distance (discussed more below) are all “organic” bio-technicians. All employ living, embodied biotechnologies which function as partnerships with their organisms, characterised by a lack of definitive boundaries between (alien) “scientist,” their apparatus, and their “scientific” knowledge.

Alien(ated) Human/s

<23> As well as the mediations on human constructions and representations of “nature” pursued through alien biology/ies, feminist sf texts also play with traditional notions of the differentiated, objective positionings from which we tell these stories. Rather than just disrupting the objectivist “god trick,” alien species and cultures can be used to “alienate” a human-centric perspective.  In a departure from the conventional science fictional trope, as an exoticised “other” which metaphorically acts to “shore up” definitions of human, the “alien” is redeployed as a means of destabilising human/non-human taxonomies.  In this section, I want to explore these possibilities through a close reading of Amy Thompson’s The Color of Distance, which features a striking use of the alien to explore alien biologies and to situate the human as “other.”

<24> The book begins with Ani, one of the central female characters, who has spotted two strange looking animals in the forest. One being dead, Ani and her teachers turn their attention to the second:

This one was darker brown, with a finer, sparser covering of hair … underneath the masklike head-covering was a flat, uninteresting face with a fleshy nose like a bird’s beak, and a small mouth with fat, swollen lips … stripped the creature was ugly and clumsy-looking… Its thick, awkward feet had tiny, weak toes, useless for climbing. …It lay there, laboring for breath like a dying fish. How could such a poorly adapted animal manage to survive? (2)

<25> The reader quickly realises that this strange, ugly, and useless animal is in fact Juna, the central human character, and that Ani and her companions are Tendu, an alien species. From the very start of the text, our positioning and perspective is skewed, as what is familiar and taken for granted about “humanness” is judged strange, lacking and “unnatural.” Indeed humans are not equipped to survive on this planet, with any caught outside their environmental suits dying of anaphylactic shock, which Juna only escapes thanks to the intervention of the Tendu.

<26> Whilst resembling enormous tree frogs with fan-like ears, the Tendu are expert healers with highly advanced skills in bio-manipulation, using their own bodies rather than external technologies to monitor and effect change on a cellular level. Ani’s teacher, Ilto changes Juna to enable her to live as the tendu do – growing a protective “skin” over her whole body and making other physiological alterations. The first time we meet Juna is when she awakes from the cocoon-like sac to discover her transformations:

Juna awoke to darkness and confinement. She was inside some kind of damp, leathery sack. She tore her way out and found herself staring down at a fifty-meter drop. She moaned and clutched the tree branch she was on, her claws sinking deep into the bark. Claws?

Her fingernails were gone. Instead sharp, catlike claws protruded from the ends of her fingers. Her skin was a brilliant orange…

Fleshy red spurs protruded from the insides of her arms just above the wrist. They looked swollen and angry, as though they should hurt, but they didn’t. (15-16)

This is no subtle biotechnological breach of species purity, nor of individual human subjectivity, as Juna’s body literally and visibly is transformed into something other-than-human.

<27> Much of the rest of the book continues this trend of shocked discovery and alienation with Juna having to learn everything about her environment from scratch, whilst all her human knowledge, both individual and collective, is rendered useless. (Indeed by the end of the book, it becomes a running joke how little use all her training as a scientist has become, and how many “alien contact protocols” she has broken!) Another core issue raised by this text is that of communication both across and about difference: How is communication or dialogue possible when, figuratively (and even literally in sf) we are “speaking” different languages? Or when one side of the conversation is not even recognised as “language’? In Color, direct communication with the aliens only becomes possible when Juna agrees to yet another alteration, as the tendu communicate through highly nuanced coloured patterns and images on their skin, called “skin speech.”

<28> As Juna learns more about the world and species she is now stranded with alone for the next four years, she – and ourselves as reader – struggle to reconcile the Tendu’s scientific prowess with their “unsophisticated” way of life, which does not converge with a western scientific world view of nature/culture. With an obvious nod to colonialist narratives, Juna reflects: “the Tendu were capable of prodigies of biotechnology. Her transformation and the amazing feats of healing she had seen proved that. … It was hard to square their primitive lifestyle with their incredible abilities” (229). The Tendu “live lightly” upon their world, dwelling in trees, and existing in a carefully managed system of environmental sustainability. The central cultural code governing this system is called an atwa. Simply, each adult tendu chooses a portion of the world – whether it be a group of plants or animals, or a particular tree-based ecosystem –which they must look after and “make sure that their part of the word is in harmony and balance with all of the other parts” (206). Juna has some difficulty understanding this, particularly when learning that Ani’s atwa is her and the other humans:

“I think I understand more, en, but not all. I’m not a plant, or animal. I’m a person…”

Anito spread her ears in amazement. “What you say is impossible! You eat, you drink, you shit. How can you say that you’re not an animal?”

“Yes,” Eerin [Juna] told her, “I am an animal, my people are animals, but we are different from other animals. We change the world we live in. We make things.”

Anito’s ears spread even wider. The new creature seemed to believe that it was separate from the world it lived in. (206)

<29> This and other “cross-cultural” confusions in the text resonate with N. Katherine Hayles observations on traditional objectivity, which “can be defined as the belief that we know reality because we are separated from it. What happens if we begin from the opposite premise, that we know the world because we are connected to it?” (Hayles, 1995:16; cited in Wallen, 2003:183). The text also emphasises the notion that such understandings constitute a partnership or interaction, reflecting Barad’s observations on this subject:

practices of knowing cannot be fully claimed as human practices, not simply because we use nonhuman elements in our practices, but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part. Practices of knowing and being are not isolatable, but rather they are mutually implicated. (Barad 2003)

<30> The Tendu’s “scientific” knowledge and bio-tech practice exemplify this notion of a “connected” and “mutually implicated (onto-)epistemology. Their observation and manipulation of other organisms is accomplished through “allu-a” – referred to as “linking” – which entails an intimate physical and psychological  connection with their subject, be it plant, animal or other Tendu. The Tendu link by means of the red “spurs” on their forearms (which Juna has also been endowed with) which are used to pierce the flesh of another creature. When linking with Tendu, the connection allows total awareness of the others’ thoughts and emotions, and of the genetic structure and function of non-sentient creatures. This connectedness has its dangers, particularly when trying to effect genetic change or healing; indeed, the Tendu who effects Juna’s life-saving changes is poisoned by his intimate dealings with her “otherness” and subsequently dies.

<31> As their cultural practice of “atwa” also suggests, the Tendu’s knowledge of themselves and their world is dependant on their connection to, rather than separation from, their world. This is evidenced by the fact that they extend their principles of environmental management to themselves. As they produce their tadpole-like young (narey) in such large quantities, the bulk are used as a food source, ensuring that only limited numbers survive to be “tinka,” and only a few of these are chosen to be become “bami” (young adult apprentices). Additionally, when population numbers have grown too large in the past, the enkar (special elders whose atwa is the Tendu species itself) released a virus-like disease which culled more than half the Tendu population. Thus for the Tendu, (and increasingly, the alien/human Juna) nature and society are not distinct, there is no rigid taxonomy delineating Tendu from non-Tendu, and most importantly, the “practices of knowing and being” that Barad talks of cannot be separated.

Towards Creative Science Studies

Thinking ontology must be acknowledged as a creative act.

(Kerin, 1999:101).

<32> It is the potential function of feminist sf as a “thought laboratory,” not just for the construction of a utopian ideal of future science, but as medium for experimenting with “non-innocent” knowledges and positionings such as “strong objectivity” and the “modest witness,” that situates feminist sf as an important resource for feminist science theorists. Haraway alerts us to an important distinction in critical negotiations with technoscientific discourses: that between representing (or translating?) technoscience, and her preferred mode of articulating (or “witnessing’) technoscientific “processes, subjects, objects, meanings, and commitments” (1997:63). The point of exploring what worlds, cultures, even technosciences, might look like from a non-humancentric viewpoint is, I think, precisely to articulate or bear (modest) witness to multiple perspectives and narratives.  It is for this reason that I see forms such as feminist SF as an important participant in feminist dialogues around and between the sciences – in short, as part of what could be termed creative techno-science studies.

<33> The recognition of such forms as participating in creative yet critical conversations around the sciences also works to underscore the fact that “science is cultural practice”; a perspective that opens the door for “a motley crew of interlopers to take part in shaping and unshaping what will count as scientific knowledge, for whom, and at what cost” (Haraway, 1997:67). Further, the more accessible nature of creative forms such as fiction widens the field of potential “interlopers’; not an insignificant attribute, given the importance of continuing public debates about our techno-cultural futures, and those “othered” by this culture. Fittingly, the new perspectives and visions that I argue might result from reading feminist sf as science studies are neatly encapsulated by Haraway’s hopeful intentions in reading primatology as “sf”:

I want the readers to find an “elsewhere” from which to envision a different and less hostile order of relationships among people, animals, technologies, and land … I also want to set new terms for the traffic between what we have come to know historically as nature and culture. (1989: 15)

Endnotes

[1] There have been a number of debates within the sf community concerning divides between hard and soft sf. Often women writers or a “feminine” presence have been equated with “soft” science fiction, which is typified as focusing on subjects and themes (such as a concern with “character”) that are removed from the “harder” concerns of sciences such as physics. In contrast to the “proper” concerns of hard sf even biology is rendered a softer, more feminine science. Lisa Goldstein for example makes this point in discussing Charles Platt’s attack on “soft” sf writers such as Vonda McIntyre and Joan Vinge: “[Platt is] annoyed that ‘soft science’ has crept into the field in these women’s work. Like anthropology… And biology! … it’s funny how the definition of ‘soft science’ changes depending on if it’s a man or a woman writing it”. As Pat Murphy mischievously adds, “It’s because biology deals with soft, squishy things”! (Counsil 1990: 27; see also Platt 1989). [^]

Works Cited

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