Posthuman Feminism. Rosi Braidotti
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Название: Posthuman Feminism

Автор: Rosi Braidotti

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Социология

Серия:

isbn: 9781509518111

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ imposes a new agenda, which includes what Cooper and Waldby call ‘clinical labour’ (2014: 4). That idea refers to the provision of reproductive and bio-medical services related to technologically assisted reproduction and other forms of bio-medical care. Within the posthuman convergence, these technoscientific practices are often presented as delinked from real-life embodied subjects and focus instead on specific activities such as surrogacy, the exchange, donation or sale of organs, tissues and cells. Similarly, the unmistakably material, carnal nature of this labour contradicts any claim by the new economy to be ‘de-materialized’. A posthuman feminist perspective foregrounds the bodily contribution of sexualized and racialized subjects to the new economy in terms of their biological labour and their genetic capital. This also means that feminists cannot restrict the analyses of contemporary capitalism to the mere claim of technological liberation, or the fear about de-materialization of labour, anymore that we can separate the fourth industrial revolution from the Sixth Extinction. We need to approach this with more dexterity as a convergence, which means focusing on the intersection of these phenomena.

      The urgency of keeping up with recent technological, social and ecological developments is also shown by the extent to which classical humanist ideas and anthropocentric habits are returning in the school of transhumanism. While the transhumanist movement is one of the most dominant trends within mainstream posthumanism, I will argue why this school is problematic and controversial from a feminist posthuman perspective.

      Transhumanism proposes to overcome the current format of the human through technologically mediated enhancement techniques. Transhumanism believes in the fusion of human consciousness with computational networks. The aim is to achieve human enhancement via brain–computer interface and it is proposed that cerebral and neural expansion is a way of fulfilling the potential of rational human evolution. The fusion of human brainpower and biology with technologies, in a phenomenon called Singularity, is presented as the fulfilment of the humanist project of perfecting humanity through scientific reason and technological advancement (Kurzweil, 2006). Human enhancement, far from making humans obsolete, is seen as an evolutionary leap forward of human abilities. However, transhumanism revives humanism insidiously through active interaction with the fluid but brutal workings of cognitive capitalism. Politically, the transhumanists defend liberal individualism and contribute to it. The transhumanists remain indebted to the Enlightenment project of social and political emancipation, through the moral deployment of the universal values attached to rationalist scientific progress (Bostrom, 2014).

      However, from a feminist perspective this is problematic because it entails an explicit template for human evolution, which perpetuates and even exacerbates the patterns of discrimination, exclusion, disqualification (Braidotti, 2013) and de-selection (Wynter, 2015). Posthuman feminism works through the intersectional critical lenses of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ability, age, among others, acknowledging the differences in power and status among humans and between humans and non-human species. Posthuman scholars stress the relational bond and symbiotic continuum to the non-human world (Wolfe, 2010; Haraway, 2017). The transhumanists, on the contrary, dwell within the humanistic tradition (More, 2013), and embrace it for the sake of human enhancement, as indicated by their symbol ‘H+’ as an abbreviation for ‘Humanity Plus’. Science and technology are the means to reach this goal, which is set somewhere in the near future, with some humans becoming posthuman faster than others (Bostrom, 2014). You may remember that I argue instead that the posthuman convergence as the site of convulsive transformations of the human is already here. Contrary to the equivocations of the transhumanists that both support and undermine the ‘Man’ of humanism, posthuman feminism can be seen as a paradigm shift towards posthumanist, post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic ways of thinking and being.

      This creative interpretation of the posthuman predicament is not new, but in fact a recurrent feature of feminist thinking. Feminism produced the very early posthumanist texts, such as Posthuman Bodies (Halberstam and Livingston, 1995). Feminists also focused on the technologies of sexed and gendered bodies (Bukatman, 1993; Stone, 1995; Turkle, 1995; Balsamo, 1996; Plant, 1997). All these СКАЧАТЬ