a manuscript excerpt

I’m in the final stages of my second round of edits for my manuscript, now tentatively titled ‘Here Be Monsters.’ The publishers have slated it for publication in September, 2023.

While much of the original material continues on into this iteration of the manuscript, I’ve chosen to re-narrate much of the ideological and historical shifts that resulted in what is often called “Woke” politics now through the figures of monsters.

Our word “monster” comes from a Latin word that meant “to show.” The appearance of monsters was a divine omen or warning, a sign from elsewhere of some shift in society.

This is a short excerpt from one of the new chapters in the manuscript in which I discuss the first of these monsters, the Cyborg.

Ideological shifts do not merely happen in a vacuum, and they are rarely if ever born only in academic, political, or scientific discourse. Larger events occurring in society itself often initiate these changes.

It’s well known, for example, that the transformation of industrial societies during the second World War changed the composition of the labor force. While millions of men were pulled into the war efforts as soldiers, millions of women filled the industrial and agricultural positions those men no longer filled. Women worked as machinists, miners, assembly-line workers, and in many other “traditionally-male” roles.

Often this is seen as a moment of liberation and progress for women and women’s political rights, since prior to this period women in those societies were generally often not employed in such jobs. However, because many of those women lost those jobs after the war, or married and became housewives, it would seem this moment of liberation was only quite temporary. Also, the following decade, the 50’s, saw a resurgence of strict gender roles for women especially through the figure of the dutiful suburban housewife, eager to please her work-traumatized husband in every way possible.

In the meantime, technological changes promised to alter domestic work itself. The mass production and consumer availability of household domestic appliances such as washing machines, tumble dryers, and dish washing machines appeared to make life easier for women, but they did not actually change the societal role of housewives as the people doing that work. Instead, advertising during that period often showed women happy and relieved to have more time to take care of their husbands, rather than being able to pursue their own goals.

One bit of technology did radically alter the situation of women, however: the birth control pill. Invented in the 50’s and approved for prescription sale by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1960, the pill offered to women a technological escape from the inevitability of pregnancy and a degree of control over the decision to raise a child or not.

The introduction of the birth control pill heavily shaped feminist thought in the 1960’s,1 and is sometimes seen as the true starting point of second-wave feminism. Feminists began to think about pregnancy and motherhood not as natural fates of women, but just one potential role that they could have. It also meant that pregnancy was less of a risk in sexual relations with men, thus freeing women to explore their sexual desires with fewer economic consequences.

In 1973, the Federal decriminalization of abortion through the Supreme Court ruling of Roe vs. Wade furthered this apparent trajectory towards liberation in the United States. Not only could women choose to avoid conception, they could also choose to terminate a pregnancy after conception.

Both widespread availability of the birth control pill and then the decriminalization of abortion seemed to give women full control over their reproduction, and yet feminists noticed that society wasn’t becoming more equal. Men still dominated their professional lives and the instruments of political governance, and men continued to physically dominate women. Rape and other sexual assaults continued as they had before: all that had really changed was a woman’s options after such assaults.

The point here is that the technological changes which influenced and shaped feminist thought never quite delivered the liberation which they promised. Though machines appeared in almost every home to make work easier for women, those machines never changed the fact that it was women who must do that work. Though women could now mostly control whether or not their bodies would carry a child after sexual relations with a man, their bodies were still subordinate to the bodies of men.

This meant that second-wave feminists started looking elsewhere for the roots of the problem. One influential current which arose in response to these observations was called radical feminism. Radical feminism saw inequality between men and women as a “transhistorical phenomenon” arising out of the system they identified as patriarchy. Men had always arranged societies in such a way that women would be subjugated, inferior, and barred from political and economic access. Thus, the only way for women to achieve liberation and have an equal status with men was a radical re-ordering of society on all levels.

When we now hear people speaking of “dismantling” or “smashing” the patriarchy, this is why. The influence of radical feminism on the rest of feminism was substantial, and even though radical feminism has now become synonymous with criticism of transgenderism (as in “Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists”), all contemporary feminist thought—as well as queer, anti-racist, and other radical movements—were shaped by radical feminism’s framework.

Some radical feminist writers and tendencies were virulently anti-man in ways that have come to overshadow feminism itself. Lesbianism for some became not just a sexual orientation but rather a radical act, considered the only kind of sexual act that could be free from patriarchal domination of women. The reasoning behind this idea was that, until society itself changed, women would always be in positions of submission to men—even in sex. Some even argued that it was impossible for a woman to have truly consensual sex with a man.

Not all radical feminists saw the patriarchy as the ultimate root of all inequality for women. Some feminists, most notably Silvia Federici, focused instead on the way inequality between men and women was a key feature of capitalism. Using Marxist analysis of historical forces, Federici proposed that the core site of women’s exploitation was in their different kind of labor.

Silvia Federici names this “reproductive labor,” which includes not just child birth but all personal domestic activities (caretaking, eating, housework, socializing) that both men and women engage in. For her, the role of housewife is the primary site of this exploitation:

This fraud that goes under the name of love and marriage affects all of us, even if we are not married, because once housework was totally naturalised and sexualised, once it became a feminine attribute, all of us as females are characterised by it. If it is natural to do certain things, then all women are expected to do them and even like doing them—even those women who, due to their social position, could escape some of that work or most of it (their husbands can afford maids and shrinks and other forms of relaxation and amusement). We might not serve one man, but we are all in a servant relation with respect to the whole male world.2

Marxist Feminism (and a related tendency, Eco-Feminism) differ from the rest of feminism on whether there is anything actually different about women and their labor. Subsequent feminists—especially Butler and those who came after—reject any sort of natural difference between men and women. For Marxist Feminists, women are different from men because of sexual reproduction, while for Eco-Feminists, women also possess a deeper innate capacity to nurture that men do not. For both, these differences derive from the physical difference of women from men: women have the biological capacity to give birth to children and to feed infants directly from their body, as well as other biological differences (menstruation, the higher presence of estrogen in their bodies and accompanying differences in perceptions and emotional states).

Marxist Feminism and Eco-Feminism saw the difference between men and women as physical and argued that any radical shift towards equal relations would need to accommodate for those physical differences.

This is an idea that has been discarded by third-wave feminism’s framework of gender and sex as constructs or “discursive subjects.” In this newer framework, even if there are any real differences between the bodies of women and men, they are irrelevant to the larger issue of patriarchal domination. In fact, it’s that patriarchal domination itself which is proposed as the reason we even think of men and women as different categories and mistakenly believe that sex or gender are “real” things.

To understand how it was that this newer framework of gender—which completely rejects any natural difference between men and women—became the dominant feminism, we need to meet our first monster: the Cyborg.

Unlike any of the other monsters which arise to show us (monstrum) something, the Cyborg is a very new creation. It arose in 1960, the very same year as the birth control pill first became approved for prescriptions in the United States. It then took the Cyborg some time before making its way out of the mind of the men who first identified it into our societal consciousness.

In their article for the journal Astronautics, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline introduced the Cyborg as the solution to human’s biological limitations and the slowness of our evolution:

Space travel challenges man not only technologically but also spiritually, in that it invites man to take an active part in his own biological evolution. Scientific advances of the future may thus be utilized to permit man’s existence in environments which differ radically from those provided by nature as we know it.

The task of adapting man’s body to any environment he may choose will be made easier by increased knowledge of homeostatic functioning, the cybernetic aspects of which are just beginning to be understood and investigated. In the past evolution brought about the altering of bodily functions to suit different environments. Starting as of now, it will be possible to achieve this to some degree without alteration of heredity…

…The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.3

For the two authors of that paper, the Cyborg was the solution to the many natural limits which prevented humans from exploring space. This monstrous Cyborg (from “cybernetic organism”) would be both the human itself as well as all the machines which take over the aspects of that human’s survival: eating, breathing, waste elimination, exercise, hygiene, and even the extension of his consciousness and the satisfaction of his “erotic requirements.”

In other words, the Cyborg was an extended human, a hybrid being both natural and mechanical. The mechanical aspects would take care of all the things that Silvia Federici later identified as “reproductive labor.” Cybernetics would perform the functions of mother, of wife, and of nurse, dutifully making sure the organism part of the Cyborg was alert, fed, clean, healthy, and with no unmet sexual desire.

It didn’t take very long for the Cyborg to appear again in fiction as a creature both of fear and potential. Sci-fi fantasies and horrors of humans augmented by machines became a staple of comics and television series, while philosophers and technological optimists argued the Cyborg was humanity’s inevitable, liberated future.

Already, medical and scientific advances seemed to point to the Cyborg as our collective destiny. The pill had proven that the biological processes of conception could be altered and prevented. The first mechanical heart valve transplant in a human occurred six years later. Decades before, machines had already successfully performed external dialysis for failing kidneys. Two years before the Cyborg appeared, wearable artificial pacemakers had been developed, and better designs on artificial respirator machines allowed them to be mass-produced five years before the Cyborg arose. Humans had already begun the process of becoming part-machine before 1960, but the pace of this hybridization accelerated after the monster appeared.

Medical science and technology seemed to blur the distinctions on what was human and what was machine, just as it had changed the relationship women had to sex and reproduction with the advent of the pill. Other advances also blurred those distinctions. Recall that sexologist John Money’s first published introduction of the idea of gender as something separate from sexual difference was in 1955. Five years before he wrote that, the first person in the United States to identify as a trans-sexual had undergone surgery in Denmark. In 1966, John Money opened the first sex-change clinic in the United States through Johns Hopkins University, a practice that involved not just surgery but also the administration of hormones to help the transition, just as the Cyborg would administer hormones to better steer the human.

The Cyborg was everywhere expanding what it meant to be human, taking over bodily functions or even changing them according to its divine objective hidden in the first part of its name. Cybernetics comes from the Greek word kybernetikos, meaning “to steer” or “to pilot,” as a steersman pilots a ship to its destination. The Cyborg was guiding us, steering us past our natural, biological limits.

But to what shores was the Cyborg actually steering us?