This week, my new book Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism started landing on the doorsteps of readers (and the bookshelves of some of my favourite bookshops). It’s an odd moment, the publication of a book, during which you are both desperate for everyone to read it and also keen to never have yourself or your work be perceived ever again. Writers: we don’t make sense.
This book, diminutive though it is at 20,000 words, is the culmination of something I’ve been ruminating and reading on for about seven years; if you know me, you’ll have been subjected to some of this, for which I can only apologise. Sex robots, and what they say about us, has been all up in my head for ages. But in writing and researching the book, I’ve become much more interested in something else: futurist feminisms.
When I say futurist feminism, I don’t mean a female-led version of the fascist-adjacent artistic philosophy of the early 20th century (although the batshit manifesto is worth a read, if you are a person who loves a manifesto, which I distinctly am). What I mean is a philosophy that looks to the future and embraces technology as a part of female emancipation. I am, of course, talking about A Cyborg Manifesto.
I wasn’t even born when Donna Haraway, American writer and academic, published the essay that would influence so much of the fourth chapter of my latest book. Haraway is a professor emerita in the fields of consciousness and feminist studies, best known for her 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto, which rejects a traditional feminism based on binaries and boundaries, and instead focuses on a new ontology bringing together the organic and the machine. Through the 20th century, she argues, traditional binaries broke down to the point where they are no longer either helpful or accurate; nature is no longer separate from the synthetic; the human is no longer distinct from the machine. They were never helpful to an emancipatory project, she argues, because binaries are always part of the definition of the Other, and create relationships of domination. If I insist on a binary of male/female, not only will I gatekeep who enters those definitions, but I am setting up a struggle of one over the other. Women, then, have been dominated.
Enter the cyborg. The cyborg, she writes, is both the thing of social reality and of invention: ‘The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century.’ The book, like all manifestos worth their salt, is both an ironic provocation and a site of ‘serious play’; part thought experiment, part rhetorical device, part combative declaration.
In saying that the dichotomy between nature and technology is out of date, Haraway is asking us to reject the nation of biological purity (which, weirdly, is so prevalent in certain social media communities these days; anti-vax groups, the ‘divine feminine’ instagram accounts, any argument that insists upon the physical body as a thing unsullied by outside forces). It is Haraway’s position that the cyborg is a much more realistic reflection of who we are these days, and I feel strongly that she’s right.
Think about it: we take on biochemical or electrical or otherwise ‘non-organic’ modifications to our bodies all the time. This applies to the more obvious examples—people who’ve had pacemakers fitted, or prosthetics, or the man who lived for seven decades in an iron lung—but it also applies to any of us who’ve had braces, or operations, or had something removed or replaced or implanted or transplanted. We replace our bone hips with titanium versions. We have errant cells scraped out or removed or blasted with radiation or chemicals. We take our premature babies and put them in plastic boxes to keep them alive. We inject ourselves with vaccines so we don’t catch typhoid and take meds so we don’t get malaria. Many of us take vitamins and supplements and long-term medications; many take hormones to alter our biochemistry, including about 15% of women from 45 to 64.
I have a plastic implant injected into my dermis layer every three years. There’s a thin strip of metal on this implant and it’s imbued with enough hormone to keep me unpregnant for that whole period. Over the three years, my body accepts this implant, pulling it deeper inwards and growing new tissue around it; at the end, I have to be cut open and the implant is wriggled out, the tissue severed in order to get my body to give it up. This modification is one of the primary factors of my current freedom, a feminist freedom that allows me to make what I want of my life. For others, that’s IVF, or postnatal interventions, or surrogacy. For others still, it’s a radical and permanent modification of the body, a removal of a part that has caused pain and suffering. I think of the woman I know who voluntarily had the lower part of her leg amputated, the prosthetic giving her back her life; a truly cyborg existence.
Haraway, in A Cyborg Manifesto, asks us to reject notions of femaleness that rely on the physical body, to not be the ‘guardians of human purity’, trying to decide who fits into definitions that have always been exclusive, and malleable, and have always functioned as tools of oppression, but instead build a feminism that is based on affinity. She goes as far as to say this:
'There is nothing about being 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices.'
It’s horribly gauche to quote yourself, but I’m going to do so, just because on this topic I can’t do better than what I wrote in chapter 4 of Electric Dreams:
This is an intersectional perspective; it attempts to acknowledge that the ‘femaleness’ of a white able-bodied middle class woman from America is not the same ‘femaleness’ experienced by a Black woman or a disabled woman or a poor woman in the global south. It is gesturing towards the fact that the category of ‘female’ has often excluded these types of women, and does the same today, but with slightly shifting methodologies; contemporary exclusions from womanhood might take the form of forcing Black athletes to take testosterone-reducing drugs to alter their naturally occurring hormone levels so they can compete in the women’s category, or forcing masculine-presenting women in public bathrooms out of that space on the suspicion that they might be trans. This method ties womanhood to an increasingly narrow set of physical characteristics that closes out many more people than it intends to, forcing radical feminist arguments into ever greater contortionism, to argue on more minute and interior physical proofs of femaleness.
There is an alternative, says Haraway. We can embrace the freedom of the cyborg, of the self-defining being. We can reject the female purity narrative and build a new feminism that’s more reflective of the reality of ourselves and our bodies now. Feminists, Haraway says, must code a self based on the model of the cyborg, a ‘disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self’. And a cyborg, of course, can be anything it wants.
Thanks to a recommendation from a friend (thanks, Lauren!), this last week I’ve been reading another writer’s version of this disassembling of the female self. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto is a book by American writer and curator Legacy Russell, which takes the landscape not of the cyborg but of the internet and virtual places as a site in which a futurist feminism can formed.
The glitch of the title is an ‘error, a mistake, a failure to function’; a failure to perform, a refusal, a nope. What Russell means here is a failure to function within strict binaries categories, within categories that have been specifically formulated, and historically used, to exclude Black and queer women. She writes on the power of the internet as a space beyond the constraints of the physical body, of imposed categorisations based on physical attributes. She explores with great insight the world of the avatar, and how this allows the user to be unencumbered with the material self.
It is in the glitch, the errors in the predominant systems, that othered people can find space:
To exist within a binary system one must assume that our selves are unchangeable, that how we are read in the world must be chosen for us, rather than for us to define—and choose—for ourselves. To be at the intersection of female-identifying, queer, and Black is to find oneself at an integral apex… Black people invent ways to create space through rupture. Here, in that disruption, with our collective congregation at that trippy and trip-wired crossroad of gender, race, and sexuality, one finds the power of the glitch.
The glitch, then, is the crack in binaries, in the established world, that allows a truly free self-definition to take place; she argues that this is especially pressing for people who exist at the intersections of various oppressions (race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc). The book is a provocation, as all manifestos are, but it is speaking to something very real, very necessary. The glitched body, she says, which does not ‘align with the canon of white cisgender heteronormativity’ poses a threat to the established order. It is something else, something self-defining, something ‘range-full and vast.’
What the internet offers, in this philosophy, is a place to code a self. You are not a racialised or gendered body online; you are free to ‘just be’, and in that freedom you might encounter yourself in a completely new way. Without judgement making you feel concerned with some elements of yourself, you might find that other parts of you are the strongest parts, the more important parts.
What Haraway and Russell seem, to me, to agree on is that a feminism that insists upon the body is a limited one. A conversation about whose body is ‘correct’ is one that both reproduces methods of oppression and excludes more women than it can ever include. It fails to recognise a reality in which femaleness is modified by, solidified with, and shifting through technology. Both these writers are saying that emancipation requires a rejection of binary systems that we have long laboured under. Whether that rejection takes the form of the cyborg or the avatar, what’s important is that we must find the crack in the oppressive systems and see what occurs there, what selfhood—and what feminist community—we might find.
This is the key: The feminist self must be coded, in a space free from the physical confines of the past, and this must be an ongoing project, embracing the tools that allow for this free self-definition, a project that never ends.
In Haraway’s words`:
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.
As Legacy Russell puts it:
This state of opacity is a ripe error to reach toward, an urgent and necessary glitch.
Something that changed the way I saw this down in my bones was learning that our jaws can only be as slim as they are because we eat cooked food— as we have used fire for millions of years, what we consider to be the natural body is already shaped by technology. Knowing that made any distinction between the technological and the natural break down a bit for me