The "Neutrality" of Refusing the Natural
Mary Harrington on cyborg feminism
On Wednesday, March 8th, I’ll be part of Cardus’s panel for International Women’s Day. The panel is focused on pursing meaningful work, at home and in careers. I’ll be speaking about my utter lack of a career “plan.” I never know what I’ll be doing in two years, but I know how I sift for work that I think is worthwhile but not totalizing.
Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington’s new book, came out last week in England and will come out next month in the United States. I got an early copy, and part of her thesis is very well aligned with the Other Feminisms project.
I like to summarize this substack as holding the following points:
The world is the wrong shape for women.
When the gap is noticeable, society treats us as defective men and expects us to change ourselves to fit a narrow idea of what it means to be human.
A full, just feminism advocates for women to be welcome as women, rather than finding tools to help us more easily reshape ourselves into a male-normed mold.
Harrington is interested in the way the industrial age pushed us to think more of our bodies as raw material, that could be spent or reshaped as needed to make society go faster.
We live in an age when some of our biomedical and digital tools make it easier to imagine that using the body doesn’t just mean pushing beyond your natural limits to exhaustion, but rebuilding your chassis till your limits and capacities change.
Some of the “cyborg feminist” thinkers Harrington engages are actively trying to destabilize our trust in the natural. Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now, narrates all the effects and effluvia of pregnancy and labor and asks, essentially: how much would you need to be paid as a just wage to undergo each of these experiences individually, let alone all together? If someone else took what a baby takes from you, wouldn’t it be a crime of assault?
She cites Zinnia Jones arguing that puberty blockers should be the default treatment for all children, “An inability to offer informed consent or understand the long-term consequences is actually an argument for putting every single cis and trans person on puberty blockers until they acquire that ability.” Puberty is transformational, so shouldn’t it be actively chosen, not passively undergone?
If you could start from a position of ignorance, these arguments ask, where you didn’t know what would happen to the body as it grew and changed, where you didn’t know what its natural capacities were, how would you react to the body as it is?
I’m very suspicious of this approach. We can’t step out of the natural course of human growth, change, and differentiation without departing from what it means to be human. And in a society shaped by sexism, women’s ways of being human will often be seen as insupportable burdens—because we choose not to support women.
Asking how to share or ameliorate these burdens is different than wondering if we can split off gestation or puberty from the human experience. It’s very different to frame it as an expressive choice rather than part of a shared reality of being human.
(At the small scale, I find this very weird about skincare culture, where the default state of “having skin with pores” is becomes a statement about how natural/minimal you want to be in the face of the expectation that you can be airbrushed.)
There’s a dizzying anxiety that comes with making your biology a “choose your own adventure” where every part of your physical self is chosen and expressive, not simply received and lived with.
My grandfather was born missing part of his left ear--he had most of the internal workings, but no outer ear at all. When he was born this could not be surgically corrected, but later on in life new techniques made it possible for his ear to be reconstructed and for him to regain some hearing in this ear. He chose not to receive the surgery because he was too used to living with one ear and didn't want to have to adapt again. This has had really, really direct consequences for our ability to communicate with him as he gets older. Maybe 5-7 years ago he reached the point where it is impossible to have a long or detailed conversation with him. I think it's quite likely that this could have been significantly delayed or avoided had he chosen treatment. Other choices around body modification or refusing treatment are much more upsetting and politically charged, but here I find it relatively simple to say that I think his decision not to receive treatment was unambiguously the wrong one. I wish I could talk to him more and I resent that he chose to say no to treatment that would have enabled it.
I think it's an interesting example that plays with the definition of "natural"--to him, having only one ear was his natural state and he didn't want to change it. Of course, the bioplan of the human body includes having two ears, so there is a convincing argument that reconstructing his ear is using medicine to restore the body rather than to enhance it. I'm not sure whether he was saying no to healing or to transhumanism.
> When have you reconsidered a natural process outside its natural context?
I was thinking recently about the domestication of various food sources. The eggs of a chicken kept in confinement are different from those of a chicken that scratches for most of its food, and those in turn are different (I imagine) from those of a wild jungle fowl. Greens grown in vast monoculture fields are different from wild foraged greens. You can feed bees sugar water, and the result is honey, but is it “really” honey if it isn’t made from nectar? I guess the main insight I’ve come to so far is that virtually everything is touched by technology, broadly defined, in some way, and maybe this too is part of being human. (At least I think this is true in a fallen world where there’s scarcity. Was it supposed to be this way? What will it be like in the renewed creation?)