- PUBLIC DISCOURSE - Mary Harrington - APRIL 30, 2023 -
An honest reckoning with women’s interests today calls on us to reject the cyborg vision of sexless, fungible homunculi piloting re-configurable meat suits. The cyborg era began with women, and women must reclaim the power to say “no.” In its place, we can pioneer a new but ancient moral consensus. We can lead the charge for solidarity between the sexes.
Editor’s note: Below is a lightly edited transcript of Mary Harrington’s remarks at a recent event on her new book, Feminism Against Progress (Regnery 2023). The panel was co-hosted by Public Discourse and the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C. and featured remarks from Alexandra DeSanctis, Christine Emba, and Leah Libresco Sargeant. Later this week, we will publish their responses.
One of the things I discovered when writing Feminism Against Progress is that it’s much easier to make a critique than to suggest what to do about it. When you start suggesting policies, someone is bound to hate it. In the end I gave up trying to please everyone, and just made three arguments I wish someone had offered me when I was university age, so I wouldn’t have needed to spend the following fifteen years reverse-engineering them from first principles, and sustaining a great many scars in the process.
Adquira o livro de Heitor De Paola:
"O EIXO DO MAL LATINO AMERICANO E A NOVA ORDEM MUNDIAL"
These are simple if counter-cultural principles in today’s atomized world.
One: if you want to be a mother, marriage is not a patriarchal institution designed to oppress you. It’s the minimum unit for human-scale solidarity. Unless you’re very rich raising kids in this atomized context, marriage is not the misogynist option but the pro-women one.
Two: co-ed social life has lots to offer, but there are times when single-sex social spaces are important. And this goes for men as well as women.
And three: close to the heart of modern women’s dissociation from our own bodies, and the countless forms of exploitation that follow from this, is a technology that was sold as emancipatory to us: the Pill.
When we put these together, they form the backbone of a micro-scale, women-led fightback against the atomized, dehumanized, and commodified transhumanist social order under which we’ve all been living for half a century. This is an order that’s been marching under the banner of “feminism,” but is better understood as a profoundly anti-women libertarianism of the body.
What Is Reactionary Feminism?
I’ve dubbed this fightback “reactionary feminism.” I use “reactionary” in recognition that “progress” in its contemporary form wages war on human nature. It views “freedom” as best served by reframing embodied men and women as atomized, de-sexed, fungible, and interchangeable “humans” composed of disembodied “identity” plus body parts that can be reordered at will, like meat LEGOs. And I use “feminism” in recognition of the fact that proposing to atomize, de-sex, and remodel “humans” has profound negative impacts on women.
If we are to defend women’s interests under this order, we must do so with a feminism against progress. In the book, I argue that “feminism” as such isn’t evidence of moral progress in some absolute sense. Rather, it comprises the aggregate response to ways that women’s lives were transformed by the Industrial Revolution, and crucially by the departure of work from the home.
This response had many facets but was broadly characterized by a back-and-forth between what I’ve called the feminism of care and the feminism of freedom. The feminism of care makes the case for women’s interests as bound up with our embodied nature, especially as mothers, and the relational ties and obligations that come with this. The feminism of freedom argued that the best means of securing women’s interests is for us to enter the market on the same terms as men, and where necessary to socialize domestic obligations—for example, via institutional childcare.
Predicating access to “personhood” on the right to abort an unborn child is about the strongest possible statement a culture can make in favor of freedom over care, where these are seen to be in zero-sum conflict.
These twin poles formed a rich dialogue until the mid-twentieth century, at which point the feminism of freedom won. It did so via another tech transition: the arrival of the Pill and then, ineluctably, legal abortion. As Erika Bachiochi has argued, these innovations framed women’s personhood—understood in Rousseauesque terms—as best delivered by privileging individual autonomy over obligation to a dependent other. Even one so radically dependent as an unborn child.
Predicating access to “personhood” on the right to abort an unborn child is about the strongest possible statement a culture can make in favor of freedom over care, where these are seen to be in zero-sum conflict. Making this the centerpiece of “women’s liberation” ended the back-and-forth between the feminisms of freedom and care, and left the field to freedom. This is the “feminism” we’ve lived with for over half a century now.
Cyborg Feminism
In doing so, we also entrenched the belief that women can only be “people” to the extent that we use technology to flatten human sex asymmetry. In other words, being a “person” under this model is, for women, to be constitutively at odds with our own biology, and dependent on tech to “fix” us.
So now, to be both a woman and a person is to be a cyborg. In this sense, for all the ways that her conclusions are antithetical to mine, Donna Haraway’s 1985 Cyborg Manifesto is closer to grasping what second-wave feminism is than any number of clichés about having it all.
In this cyborg era, what passes as “feminism” is in truth a radical libertarianism of the body. With Haraway, this feminism rejects rigid definitions: between sexes, between human and animal, between human and machine. To put it another way: cyborg feminism wages war on human nature, in the name of freedom and radical self-fashioning.
And if we’re now at war with our embodied nature, so too must we refuse every given relationship that might otherwise constrain us. This means war on relationships between men and women. Between mothers and babies. And (most fundamentally of all) between ourselves and our bodies. In place of every such given we are promised an order of untrammeled, unbounded, unconstrained self-creation.