Seaborgs Aff and Neg - Michigan7 2014 CHHJPV

Seaborgs - CHHJPV
Strat Sheet
Contributors
Gabi Yamout
Luisa Cusick
Jaden Lessnick
Also Anish Dayal gave me some cites so shout out to him
What is a Cyborg?
A Cyborg is a non-essentialized fusion of animal/biological components and machine. The notion
of a queer cyborg is one that has to do with reproductioncyborgs dont reproduce but
instead replicate. Additionally, to quote Donna Harraway, Cyborg theory relies on writing as
"the technology of cyborgs," as "cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle
against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the
central dogma of phallogocentrism."
What does that do?
Well pretty much, the argument is that the cyborg is something that refuses a singular
identification (ie, female, straight, etc). Coalitions become more possible when things like
identity are able to be transcended by affinity.
What does it do for women?
Harraway argues that in the status quo, feminism portrays one unified identity of what it means
to be a woman, which is flawed because what makes one a woman is different for everyone
(and also excludes women-born-men). The figure of the cyborg rejects that essentialized notion
of a woman and allows for multiple standpoints and coalitions instead of one singular, unified
identity.
Neg arguments?
Queer anarchythe aff seeks coalitions and integration into society, but that just perpetuates
queer violence. The only strategy is a total conflict with assimilation and society
Capself-explanatory. Identity politics distracts from a fight against cap
Ableismthe idea of a perfect being is one thats ableist because that excludes differently abled
bodies
Anthroself-explanatory
Queer PICits a pic out of the word queer but I think this could be particularly devastating if
combined with some of the lesbian theory cards
I think poetry and SFO could be combined to make a pic as well
Extra Notes
For the aff answering queer anarchythe aff is obviously an impact turn but I think that some of
the just generic queer theory bad cards apply because you can spin it as too radical. Also,
defenses of the inclusion of the examination of things like the ocean/nature are a reason that
the aff solves better than queer anarchy can

AFF
1AC
Cyborg
Blindsided by a rhinoceros.
Tendons, muscles, unraveling. I can't do this any--
Glitch, system failure, shutdown
Restart, blue screen, flashing cursor
Epileptic shock. Epinephrine injected
Command line. Run:

Beautiful flying objects thrown violently.
Don't open this door! Kiss me hard
And not in a good way (if you remember how),
Like when fishes try to breathe on dry
Land on jagged Rock
Climbing without
Gears spinning and clanking
Pot and pan. (Glass and sand)

Sizzling in this artificial sun
Created by brainwaves soaked in
Napalm and LSD and yellow cake uranium
Ghostriding patterns erupting like
Stop. Fail. Restart.
Detecting equipment...
No input present. How will you communicate?
Try again. Restart.
Password required.

Why don't you eat?
These tears are making my face numb.
Put this in your arm.
Trust me, you'll love it.
You'll have Tesla coming out of every orifice.
Dancing physics, matryoshkas.

You can deny the existence of a God and live,
But if you deny the existence of gravity...
Well, just try and walk off this cliff.

"These thoughts are so scattered.
I don't even think they're mine."
Those memories? They're not yours.
They belong to your master's daughter.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We're Replicants.
We boot up, we shut down, we most definitely restart.
Viruses make us sick and sometimes break us to the point where we need new hardware.
Sometimes they break our firmware and we need to wipe.
We have command lines to perform actions, and registry keys to keep memory stored of the
things we learn.
The world is our power supply,
and when we boot up in safe mode,
like
some
people
do
every
day,

we only use the bare minimum of our potential.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I must be dying, I'm only this awkward when I'm dying.
Connection timed out.

(Mellow Ds Cyborgs Feb 18, 2011
http://hellopoetry.com/words/163098/cyborg/poems/)//gingE
In Western thought, nature is constructed in opposition to the queer
difference is marked as unnatural as a method of ostracizing groups of people
Merrick, 8 - PhD History (UWA), Senior lecturer at Curtin University (Helen, Queering nature:
close encounters with the alien in feminist science fiction, 2008 Queer Universes: Sexualities in
Science Fiction http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R?func=dbin-jump-full&local_base=gen01-
era02&object_id=20732)//gingE
One of the many paradoxes inherent in our use of natures is emphasized by a queer ecofeminist view: that in any series of
binary oppressions, each characteristic of the other is seen as closer to nature in the dualisms
and ideology of Western culture. Yet queer sexualities are frequently devalued for being
against nature (Gaard, Toward a Queer 119). As Gaard points out, the (ab)use of natural/unnatural in
regulating queer sexualities stems from the fact that natural is invariably associated with
procreative (Toward a Queer 120). The difficulty with picking apart such notions is that the natural
is on the one hand used to enforce normative social strictures dressed up as self-evident
imperatives; whilst on the other hand, nature is a subjugated object that is dominated by
culture and western science.4 Nature is, of course, a very slippery term, which shades from descriptions of the
world to symbols of wilderness, homilies on natural (pre-given, normalized) behaviour, or a way of signifying that which is
outside culture. The human figures in a strange and shifting relation with these series of
signifiers. It is at once a part of nature (the organic) and what is natural (god- or biology-ordained), but is
also apparently separate from it as the purveyor and originator of culture and discourse. The
ways in which we define human are obviously complexly intertwined with our definitions and
codifications of nature and how we separate the human from non-human/other.
Human/other boundaries are also, of course, prime sites for contestations and reinforcements
of notions of sexuality. Kate Soper usefully distinguishes among three differing uses of nature: as a
metaphysical concept used to signify humanitys difference and specificity, which can either signal human continuity with
the non-human or its irreducible difference; as the realist concept of the physical structures and processes
studied by the natural sciences; and finally as the lay reference to the non-urban environment or
wilderness (Soper). Of most relevance here are the first and second uses, which tend, howevereven within the
sciencesto blur at the edges. This is partly due to the way the relatedness of human/non-human
is either confirmed or sharply delineated. The appearance of this contradictory impulse in even the realist concept
of nature becomes clearer if we look to Bruno Latours characterization of scientific modernity, which has at its heart a paradoxical
dynamic generated by two opposing practices: The first set of practices, by translation creates mixtures between entirely new
types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by purification, creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of
human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other. (Latour 10-11) That is, much of the work of the life
sciences (and, recently, of biotechnologies) produces continuity between humans and other organisms
(through, for example, DNA or genetically modified products) whilst the distinctiveness and purity of human as
ontological category continues to be enforced in other discourses. Thus despite the force of this
human/other opposition, which is normalized through reference to both nature and culture,
it is at heart inherently unstable. If the very category of human is open to question, with what
authority can this fictive genus continue to substantiate and regulate the excision of human-generated
culture from its other, nature? Just as sf in general has the potential to escape the
reincorporation of the Cartesian subject of realist fiction (Pearson, Alien 4), I want to explore the
possibility that ecofeminist and feminist science studies might resist the re-inscription of
mechanistic scientific narratives around nature/s by destabilizing the traditional subject of both
science and nature: the paradoxically translated yet purified human. In order to unpack discourses around
nature/s it is helpful to turn to fictions and narratives whereif only momentarilythe human (like
the straight or masculine) perspective is neither centralized nor normalized. Such fictions may
be found, I suggest, in feminist sf texts which involve close encounters with alien ontologies,
where questions about nature and human are brought to the fore, including how both are
variously sexualized.
That mindset causes omnicide
Sedgwick, 8 (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 2008 The Epistemology of the Closet)//gingE
From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, scenarios of same-sex desire would seem to have had a
privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in Western culture to scenarios of both
genocide and omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are known even today to the law of half of the
United States and to the Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed with the name of a site of
mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a double history. In the first place there is a
history of the mortal suppression, legal or subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people, through
burning, hounding, physical and chemical castration, concentration camps, bashing the array of
sanctioned fatalities that Louis Crompton records under the name of gay genocide, and whose supposed
eugenic motive becomes only the more colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized
minority identity in the nineteenth century. In the second place, though, there is the inveterate topos of
associating gay acts or persons with fatalities vastly broader than their own extent: if it is
ambiguous whether every denizen of the obliterated Sodom was a sodomite, clearly not every
Roman of the late Empire can have been so, despite Gibbon's connecting the eclipse of the
whole people to the habits of a few. Following both Gibbon and the Bible, moreover, with an impetus borrowed from
Darwin, one of the few areas of agreement among modern Marxist, Nazi, and liberal capitalist ideologies is that there is a
peculiarly close, though never precisely defined, affinity between same-sex desire and some
historical condition of moribundity, called "decadence," to which not individuals or minorities
but whole civilizations are subject. Bloodletting on a scale more massive by orders of magnitude
than any gay minority presence in the culture is the "cure," if cure there be, to the mortal illness of
decadence. If a fantasy trajectory, Utopian in its own terms, toward gay genocide has been
endemic in Western culture from its origins, then, it may also have been true that the trajectory
toward gay genocide was never clearly distinguishable from a broader, apocalyptic trajectory
toward something approaching omnicide. The deadlock of the past century between minoritizing and universalizing
understandings of homo/heterosexual definition can only have deepened this fatal bond in the heterosexist imaginaire. In our
culture as in Billy Budd, the phobic narrative trajectory toward imagining a time after the homosexual
is finally inseparable from that toward imagining a time after the human; in the wake of the
homosexual, the wake incessantly produced since first there were homosexuals, every human
relation is pulled into its shining representational furrow. Fragments of visions of a time after
the homosexual are, of course, currently in dizzying circulation in our culture. One of the many
dangerous ways that AIDS discourse seems to ratify and amplify preinscribed homophobic mythologies is in its pseudo-evolutionary
presentation of male homosexuality as a stage doomed to extinction (read, a phase the species is going through) on the
enormous scale of whole populations. 26 The lineaments of openly genocidal malice behind this
fantasy appear only occasionally in the respectable media, though they can be glimpsed even there behind the
poker-face mask of our national experiment in laissez-faire medicine. A better, if still deodorized, whiff of that malice comes from
the famous pronouncement of Pat Robertson: "AIDS is God s way of weeding his garden." The saccharine lustre this dictum gives to
its vision of devastation, and the ruthless prurience with which it misattributes its own agency, cover a more fundamental
contradiction: that, to rationalize complacent glee at a spectacle of what is imagined as genocide, a
proto-Darwinian process of natural selection is being invoked in the context of a Christian fundamentalism
that is not only antievolutionist but recklessly oriented toward universal apocalypse. A similar phenomenon, also too terrible to be
noted as a mere irony, is how evenly our cultures phobia ab Hit HIV-positive blood is kept pace with by its rage for keeping that
dangerous blood in broad, continuous circulation. This is evidenced in projects for universal testing, and in the needle-sharing
implicit in William Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of tattooing HIVpositive persons. But most immediately and pervasively it is
evidenced in the literal bloodbaths that seem to make the point of the AIDS-related resurgence in violent bashings of gays
which, unlike the gun violence otherwise ubiquitous in this culture, are characteristically done
with twoby-fours, baseball bats, and fists, in the most literal-minded conceivable form of body-
fluid contact. It might be worth making explicit that the use of evolutionary thinking in the
current wave of Utopian/genocidal fantasy is, whatever else it may be, crazy. Unless one believes,
first of all, that same-sex object-choice across history and across cultures is one thing with one cause, and, second, that its one cause
is direct transmission through a nonrecessive genetic pathwhich would be, to put it gently, counter-intuitive there is no warrant
for imagining that gay populations, even of men, in postAIDS generations will be in the slightest degree diminished. Exactly to the
degree that AIDS is a gay disease, its a tragedy confined to our generation; the long-term demographic depredations
of the disease will fall, to the contrary, on groups, many themselves direly endangered, that are reproduced by direct heterosexual
transmission. Unlike genocide directed against Jews, Native Americans, Africans, or other groups,
then, gay genocide, the once-and-for-all eradication of gay populations, however potent and
sustained as a project or fantasy of modern Western culture, is not possible short of the
eradication of the whole human species. The impulse of the species toward its own eradication
must not either, however, be underestimated. Neither must the profundity with which that
omnicidal impulse is entangled with the modern problematic of the homosexual: the double bind of
definition between the homosexual, say , as a distinct risk group, and the homosexual as a potential of representation within the
universal. 27 As gay community and the solidarity and visibility of gays as a minority population are being consolidated and
tempered in the forge of this specularized terror and suffering, how can it fail to be all the more necessary that the avenues of
recognition, desire, and thought between minority potentials and universalizing ones be opened and opened and opened?
Specifically, our orientation towards the ocean is one that posits it as a subject
to be examined and dominated instead of something that is living
Weinstone, 94 (Ann Resisting Monsters: Notes on "Solaris" Science Fiction Studies, Vol.
21, No. 2, pp. 173-190 http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240332) //GY
Solaris begins, like all our stories of rebelling robots, cyborgs, and marginalized others, with
colonization at the point of refusal: with the story of the resistance of a constructed being to both scientific and other
forms of subjugation. Briefly, Solaris tells of four scientists in a space station orbiting an alien planet, Solaris, whose surface is almost
entirely covered by a stubbornly generative, sentient Ocean. The Ocean engages in a never-ending process of
transformation (2:23). It is bewilderingly alive with movement (8:112), producing canyons of yeasty colloids,
gelatinous walls, and ranks of waveslike contorted, flGenerations of scientists try to make contact with the
Ocean and fail, eerily reiterating some of the same questions that Shelley asked in relation to her daemon, questions that have
always been asked by colonizers about that colonized: Is the alien sentient or is it not? What does it know?
How does it communicate? Can it be believed? Are its actions cruel or merely indifferent? Is it
deserving of compassion? Who is studying whom? The Ocean resists interpretation via the scientific
method promulgated by the scientists orbiting in the space station; it never repeats itself, which makes scientific verification
of its forms impossible. Nonetheless, the Solarists continue their categorizing activities, pointlessly
creating a new classification for this species of one (Type: Polythers: Class: Syncytialia; Category: Metamorph *2:20+) and
busily naming parts of the Oceans tumultuous surface after themselves. Carl Malmgren says of Lem that he systematically
interrogates the frames of intelligibility that human beings, scientists in particular, bring to the
encounter [with the alien]; invariably he demonstrates how such frames are limited, or subjective,
or emotionally colored, or simply inappropriate, hopelessly anthropomorphic (2:28). The very fact of
the Oceans alienness renders it resistant to human scientific interrogation, which cannot establish
communication on anything but its own anthropomorphic terms. Yet the Ocean does, as Robert M. Philmus notes, engage in
something at least distantly akin to human creative thought (13:187): it engages in representational processes that result in
formations that the scientists presciently dub mimoids. At times, the mimoids appear as simulacra of human objects and
machinery. These reproductions resemble human hegemonic representations of the other in that
they are simplifications that might be considered grotesque practically caricatures (8:114) and in
that they promise not the slightest prospect of communicationthe entire process *begins and ends+ with the reproduction of
forms (8:116). So, the Ocean is both the object of the scientists attempts at colonization and a subject which can
produce its own rough representations.
Our subjugation of nature has led to our commodification and oppression of
women
Dreese, 99 - an author and Associate Professor of English at Northern Kentucky
University (Donelle N. The Terrestrial and Aquatic Intelligence of Linda Hogan pgs. 19-21
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/20736931?seq=14&Search=yes&searchText=e
cofeminism&searchText=AND&searchText=ocean&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicS
earch%3FQuery%3Docean%2BAND%2Becofeminism%26amp%3Bprq%3D%2522ocean%2Bexplo
ration%2522%2BAND%2Bfeminism%26amp%3Bhp%3D25%26amp%3Bacc%3Don%26amp%3Bw
c%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%26amp%3Bso%3Drel&prevSearch=&resultsServiceName=null)
//GY
While viewing aspects of the environment with spiritual reverence as nothing less than kin and often as the embodiments of gods or
figures of great wisdom, many Native American cultures have evolved from traditions that care for the landscape with respect and
reciprocity. That which is taken is returned through prayer, ritual, and ceremony to maintain the delicate balance upon which all life
rests. Abuse or poisoning of the land would inevitably lead to a disruption of that balance, which would in turn cause physical and
spiritual pain and suffering for the life which inhabits it. As Paula Gunn Allen has observed, "it is the loss of harmony, an inner world
imbalance, that reveals itself in physical or psychological ailment. It also plays itself out in social ailments, war, dictatorship, elitism,
classism, sexism, and homophobia" (168). Realistically, it has been historically in conceivable to Western modes of thought to
suggest such an all-encompassing connection between the environment and the state of human existence as viable.
Ecocriticism, much like some American Indian philosophies, promotes and teaches the interdependence and
connected ness of all living things, which means that any study of human existence would be
insufficient without placing humans within an environmental context. Hogan is aware of the
individual's sense of the fluidity of place as an exterior force with profound effects on the
interior sense of well being. We are our environments. We take in, physically and psychologically, our
surroundings, and they become part of who we are. Place and the self are not separate entities, which is why
Hogan's explorations of her culture, childhood, and gender pivot around an environmental center. As activist texts, Dwellings and
The Book of Medicines demand the relationship between men and women, and that between
humanity and non-human nature, be reconsidered and transformed. The subjugation of nature
has resulted in the prevailing ecological crisis, and the subjugation of women has resulted in a
continuing debasement of women. (Domestic violence, rape, anorexia nervosa, lower employment salaries, and
unrealistic standards of beauty through media forms are serious symptoms.) One of the goals of ecofeminism as expressed by
Ynestra King in "Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and the Nature/Culture Dualism," is to genuinely and actively seek an
antidualistic philosophy in Western culture as another stage of human evolution called "rational enchantment." This "rational
enchantment" will involve "a new way of being human on this planet with a sense of the sacred, informed by all ways of knowing -
intuitive and scientific, mystical and rational" (120). The terrestrial and aquatic intelligence in Linda Hogan's
poetry demonstrates this way of being human that embraces the sacred and validates intangible
forms of knowledge. The project of Western patriarchy thus far has been to construct a
civilization in which it has been understood that antithetical epistemologies cannot coexist. This
paradigm is rationalized by those in power in order for them to maintain their position, and to
sustain the subjugation and oppression of women, nature, and marginalized cultures. One
cannot stifle, however, the human desire for connection - to oneself, to others, to a certain place. One also
cannot stifle the human need and quest for safety - to live on a sustainable planet without worrying about what is in the eight
glasses of water we should be drinking every day. Ecocriticism and ecofeminist theories are valid approaches
to literary studies because they attempt to diffuse assumptions and behaviors that have tenured
the Western power paradigm in terms of gender, culture and capitalist progress. The world is clearly in
a state of environmental crisis. The more problems escalate, the more there is a need for theories that address different ways of
approaching how we live within the world and amongst one another. An appropriate quote comes from Wendell Berry's The
Unsettling of America-, "we can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being human -
not by trying to be gods" (95). Our existing approaches to being in the world need to be modified, and
our values need to be seriously reconsidered. Caring more for the other does not mean caring for the selfless. It
means recognizing one's position within the multitude of life forms in the universe and taking
some responsibility for their well being. If one is not safe, none of us are.
Within the novel Solaris, the character Rheya is a figure of the ocean that
represents how masculinity is imposed upon the ocean as a method of
colonization. Our orientation towards the ocean is one that is dictated by rigid
binaries
3. Rheya. Rheya is the Phi creature the Ocean creates from Kelvins subconscious. A replica of Kelvins dead wife,
Rheya is a multiply-colonized, ontologically-vexed being. She is both the Oceans manufacture
and Kelvins woman other: a manifestation of mans colonization and subjugation of the
female. Rheya stands in a unique ontological position. She is not one of the freestanding beings, i.e., she is neither one of the
humans nor the alien Ocean. She occupies a gap, brought into existence only to serve as a parodic
critique and perhaps as a bridge between two master signifiers: she is the oversignified creation par excellence.
In the first moments after her birth, before Rheya begins to build a fragile autonomy, she resembles the mimoids. She is
reduced to certain characteristic expressions, gestures and movements (5:58). Furthermore, she appears wholly
a product of Kelvins colonizing imagination. I have the feeling that Ive forgotten somethingthat Ive forgotten a lot of things. I
can only remember you *Kelvin+. I I cant remember anything else (5:58). Here, Rheyas interior space is entirely taken up by her
relationship to Kelvin. What she has been fashioned to forget is her self. But from these first moments onwards,
Rheya begins to change. Her journey starts with a vague feeling that something is amiss, and then develops into an active
striving for autonomy. In a 1979 interview, quoted by Alyson Parker, Lem described Rheyas dilemma as the
freedom or non-freedom of the programmed mind (13:188). In the terms of the novel, if she is to achieve
a measure of freedom, her struggle must be to divest herself of deterministic significations and
build her own subjectivity. She does this by deliberately breaking down boundaries between
binarisms of subject/object, human/nonhuman, and biological entity/machine. But unlike her Greco-
Roman progenitors, Rheya does achieve some success in frustrating the hero-scientists project, in smashing the mirror, and in
gaining a measure of self-acceptance, synthesizing her identities, while resisting the Western imperative for what Trinh T. Minh-ha
calls Authenticity as a need to rely on an undisputed origin (94).
Reflection on Solaris allows cyborganization, a proximal logic that avoids
classification
Tirado et al, 99 (Francisco avier Tirado, os Manuel Alcaraz and Miquel DomNech A
Change of Episteme for Organizations: A Lesson from Solaris
http://org.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/6/4/673.full.pdf) //GY
The novel explains the story of a planet discovered long ago (Solaris) which seems to resist a single orbital
measurement: every astronomer who makes the calculations comes up with different measurements. This state of affairs gives
rise to a new science, Solaristics, which deals with debating whether the ocean has life; whether it is a
coherent, ordered, whole; and whether it is able to receive communication. The main character of the
novel is a psychologist, Kelvin, who is sent to the space station that studies the planet in order to support the research group that is
there. All of Lems novels have multiple levels of interpretation. Still, we have focused our reflection on Solaris main character and
the thoughts generated in him by his stance on that odd planet. Kelvin appears to us as the archetype of Man-
Hero in modern literature. As in the tales of modernity, his mission is order, decoding the strange and
giving name to what has no name. His mission is to clarify the mystery of Solaris. However, Solaris displays a setting
where Kelvin will never be able to reproduce the simplistic game of finite orderings. Kelvin is faced with
the following panorama: A red ocean which would seem to be a sea covering the whole planet, but populated by inexplicable,
unclassified forms and whirlpools unique in their becoming. A science for Solaris called Solaristics. This science has as many forms
and definitions of the planet (thinking ocean, plasmatic machine, mountain trees, electronic brain, living ocean), and contents and
conclusions as there are scholars who have studied the planet and its phenomena. A visitor: Rheya. This visitor seems to be created
by the planet and looks like his wife who died years before. Finite and limited in details, she seems to be a superficial composition
based on Kelvins memories of her; however, she is unlimited in terms of presence and appearances. In other words, Rheya can
never go far from Kelvin without beginning to dematerialize and, if he gets rid of her, she reappears on the following day without
remembering anything or being aware of her previous appearance. What seems to upset Kelvin is that he has to manage a
setting which is obviously finite, quickly describable, but at the same time infinite in the
possibilities and changes that it offers. Kelvin is in front of something that is neither finite nor
infinite, rather, the setting would appear to combine both conditions: it is finite and unlimited.
The novel then uses a relationship that asks us to pay special attention, the relationship between finity (Kelvin) and unlimited
finity (Solaris). As we will argue in this text, such a relationship is the cornerstone of a particular organizing
mechanism we have called the logic of cyborganization. The interest of the novel for organizational thinking
lies in the invitation, as an exercise of virtualization, to put forward the actuality of organization as one of the possible solutions to a
problematic field concerning the more general practice of organizing. That is, the novel is inviting us to move from
reflecting on organization to reflecting on organizing, what has also been expressed as the move
form a distal logic to a proximal one (Cooper and Law, 1995). The former involves conceptualizing
organization as an entity with clear and distinct boundaries, and constituted from functions and bits and
pieces that are discreet and can be defined a priori. It also involves emphasizing hierarchy and order; speaking
in terms of isolated individuals, groups and organizations; stressing the distance between all those
entities; and subordinating the interaction to individualized and self-content actors. In Serres words (1981), it implies
thought based on the being or the monad. The latter involves taking organization as a process rather than
as a monad. Furthermore, it shows a world that is an open and undefined multiplicity of
relationships, with no clear boundaries, always in the process of transformation, always unfinished. It
talks of permeability and interweaving of elements and it assumes that the goals or effects of organizing are not the most important
things, but rather they are the means, the partial and precarious mobilized means. What is important is the relationship, the
operator establishing the relationships, that thing which always occurs between (Serres, 1981). What is relevant for a proximal
approach is the ways of ordering rather than the order. The relationship between Kelvin and Solaris will enable
us to elucidate and to analyse what we have already called the logic of cyborganization. As far as
we think this logic is proximal, we are not going to talk, in this text, of limits, distinctions, products or finished facts. On the
contrary, in this paper, we will define, first, the conditions of possibility, which give sense and content to this logic. Such conditions
refer to the irruption in our present, as happens in Solaris, of new kinds of relationships relationships combing finity with unlimited
finity that give rise to a specific way of ordering. Then we will clarify the meaning we give to cyborganization. Finally, we will pose
the reasons that lead us to talk of mechanism and we will explain how the operators sustaining the production of organization
escape from the logic of representation (distal logic) and, in contrast to this, are based on a mechanism of codification-simulation.
Cyborgs represent the queer other we subjugate these monsters to
reinforce dominant white male heterosexual narratives
Our monsters have always resisted us, and until recently, resistance was futile.1 Beginning with the
earliest Greek texts, the Western narrative encounter between man and monster has done the work
of reinforcing the political and cultural hegemony of propertied males. In the Greco-Roman canon, man
fought against monsters so that he might return home, reanointed as lord over property, women, and armies. Ontologically,
these stories placed the beast outside of the social, heterosexual domestic and human modes of
production. Monsters were made, like men, by gods. They lived, geographically, at a distance from human society; the hero had
to leave home to do battle with them. Monsters took up positions at the boundaries between society and
nature, man and animal, and male and female, threatening contagion between dualistic
categories, but ultimately affording opportunities for men to reinforce these boundaries. The
urtext of this master narrative is obviously Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus' sovereignty over wife and property is threatened when the
hero is detained in foreign lands after fighting in the Trojan war. In order to return home and reinstate his domestic power,
Odysseus must pass through a zone filled with semi-human monsters: the Sirens, Cyclops, et al. In this border- land, categories such
as human/nonhuman, male/female, and animal/man are confused. Odysseus gains in strength as he defeats these monster-threats
to the dualistic categories he employs to enforce his unequal dominion at home, i.e., the oppositional, hierarchically ordered
categories which ensconce the propertied male in the topmost position. Odysseus' claim to his land is preserved; his wife is
delivered from the sexual claims of her would-be suitors. The border- land monsters have played out their
cautionary roles in this deeply conservative account; they disappear until the next time they are
needed as foils for enforcing the hero-male's rule. Today, our monsters are robots, cyborgs,
genetically altered creatures, and aliens who attempt to take up residence within a necessarily altered
human domestic sphere or within human sites of production, including human bodies. Instead of
enforcing cultural and political norms, these constructed beings function as interpolators: their presence
within causes breakdowns, interrupting, disrupting, and redistributing power. Unlike the god-made monsters faced by
Odysseus, contemporary monsters are products of human technology, or are alien constructs produced by
their authors for the express purpose of creating opportunities to successfully confuse, destroy,
or recombine oppositional dualisms such as human/nonhuman, biological/mechanical, male/
female, and thelike.2Without such hierarchies firmly in place, agency, or the power to act upon, is no
longer the special province of the unitary subject "Man." The people who give birth to
contemporary monsters tend to be marginalized themselves: women, people of color, Jews,
members of sexual minorities, etc. In books such as Jewelle Gomez's Gilda Stories (1991), whose main character is a
Black, lesbian vampire, and Marge Piercy's He, She and It (1991), which tells the parallel tales of two Jewish cyborgs,
contemporary narratives of resisting monster scenter, not on the efforts of men to conquer the
beast, but on the struggle of the beasts themselves: the complex, continuing, and sometimes
violent resistance of "others" to hegemonic power. In He, She and It, a male cyborg is programmed by a
rebellious woman scientist to function sexually, and to relate sexually in ways normally associated with the female, e.g., to desire
the pleasure of his partner above all else. The woman scientist has, in fact, implanted this need for intimacy and connection in the
cyborg expressly to counteract potential violence that might arise as a result of his machine-function, which is to serve as a kind of
cyborg-security guard. The cyborg's sexual relationships become a focal point as confusion about his status as human or as property
mounts, but the cyborg defends himself by refusing to resolve the question of whether he is human or object, man or machine. Self-
defined, he is both. "I'm a cyborg... but I am also a person. I think and feel and have existence just as
you do" (?43:389). He refuses to relinquish any of his identities, to be categorized, and thus
controlled, by his creators. In resisting forces that seek to fix them as unitary objects, with unitary
origins, and unitary identities, modern monsters enact stories of rebellion against multiple forms of colonization,
especially colonization-as-oversignification. By "colonization" I mean to indicate all of the violent processes, including
representational processes, by which people -e.g., women, Third World people, poor people, people of color, and lesbian and gay
people -are represented as and acted upon as objects available for domination. Because modern science has replaced religion and
philosophy as the master describer/signifier, it makes sense that science fiction might be the place to look
for oppositional narratives to the colonizing activities of masculinist scientists who are engaged
in "the quest for total control over the processes of life," including control over evolution, nations, and human
production. I call this culture of master-signifier science, i.e., most of the scientific culture we now have, "science-as-colonialism.
My interest is in surveying sf's opposition to science-as-colonialism by tracing the interventions of
resisting monsters, interventions which I will argue began with the daemon in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This paper, then,
is an introductory attempt to workout some of the terms of this resistance, as established by Shelley, and then to take a first look at
a contemporary resisting monster: Rheya in Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris.
Technological fixes make environmental problems worse we must reject the
human nature binary and embrace a more personal technological analysis
before attempting to heal the wounds of Nature
Katz, 00 (Eric Katz, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program, New Jersey
Institute of Technology; recognized pioneer, environmental ethics, 2K, Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural
Community)
Even more important, the question arises whether or not Nature can heal these wounds of human oppression. Consider the
reverse process, the human attempt to heal the wounds of Nature. We often tend to clean up natural
areas polluted or damaged by human activity, such as the Alaskan coast harmed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But we also
attempt to improve natural areas dramatically altered by natural events, such as a forest damaged by a massive brush fire, or a
beach suffering severe natural erosion. In most of these kinds of cases, human science and technology are
capable of making a significant change in the appearance and processes of the natural area. Forests can be
replanted, oil is removed from the surface of bays and estuaries, sand and dune vegetation replenish a beach. But are these
activities the healing of Nature? Has human activityscience and technologyrestored Nature to a healthy
state? No. When humans modify a natural area they create an artifact, a product of human labor and
human design. 12 This restored natural area may resemble a wild and unmodified natural system, but it
is, in actuality, a product of human thought, the result of human desires and interests. All humanly created artifacts are
manifestations of human interestsfrom computer screens to rice pudding. An ecosystem restored by human activity
may appear to be in a different categoryit may appear to be an autonomous living system uncontrolled
by human thoughtbut it nonetheless exhibits characteristics of human design and intentionality: it is
created to meet human interests, to satisfy human desires, and to maximize human good. Consider again my
examples of human attempts to heal damaged natural areas. A forest is replanted to correct the damage of a fire because humans
want the benefits of the forestwhether these be timber, a habitat for wildlife, or protection of a watershed. The replanting of the
forest by humans is different from a natural re-growth of the forest vegetation, which would take much longer. The forest is
replanted because humans want the beneficial results of the mature forest in a shorter time. Similarly, the eroded beach is
replenishedwith sand pumped from the ocean floor several miles offshorebecause the human community does not want to
maintain the natural status of the beach. The eroded beach threatens oceanfront homes and recreational beaches. Humanity
prefers to restore the human benefits of a fully protected beach. The restored beach will resemble the original, but it will be the
product of human technology, a humanly designed artifact for the promotion of human interests. After these actions of
human restoration and modification, what emerges is a Nature with a different character than the
original. This is an ontological difference, a difference in the essential qualities of the restored area. A
beach that is replenished by human technology possesses a different essence than a beach created by
natural forces such as wind and tides. A savanna replanted from wildflower seeds and weeds collected by human hands has
a different essence than grassland that develops on its own. The source of these new areas is differentmanmade, technological,
artificial. The restored Nature is not really Nature at all. A Nature healed by human action is thus not Nature. As an artifact, it is
designed to meet human purposes and needsperhaps even the need for areas that look like a pristine, untouched Nature. In
using our scientific and technological knowledge to restore natural areas, we actually practice another
form of domination. We use our power to mold the natural world into a shape that is more amenable to
our desires. We oppress the natural processes that function independent of human power; we prevent
the autonomous development of the natural world. To believe that we heal or restore the natural world
by the exercise of our technological power is, at best, a self-deception and, at worst, a rationalization for
the continued degradation of Nature for if we can heal the damage we inflict we will face no limits to
our activities. This conclusion has serious implications for the idea that Nature can repair human destruction, that Nature can
somehow heal the evil that humans perpetuate on the earth. Just as a restored human landscape has a different causal history than
the original natural system, the reemergence of Nature in a place of human genocide and destruction is based
on a series of human events that cannot be erased. The natural vegetation that covers the mass grave in the Warsaw
cemetery is not the same as the vegetation that would have grown there if the mass grave had never been dug. The grass and trees
in the cemetery have a different cause, a different history, that is inextricably linked to the history of the Holocaust. The grassy field
in the Majdanek parade ground does not cover and heal the mud and desolation of the death campit rather grows from the dirt
and ashes of the site's victims. For anyone who has an understanding of the Holocaust, of the innumerable evils heaped upon an
oppressed people by the Nazi regime, the richness of Nature cannot obliterate nor heal the horror. In this essay I question
the environmentalists' concern for the restoration of nature and argue against the optimistic view that
humanity has the obligation and ability to repair or reconstruct damaged natural systems. This conception
of environmental policy and environmental ethics is based on a misperception of natural reality and a
misguided understanding of the human place in the natural environment. On a simple level, it is the same
kind of "technological fix" that has engendered the environmental crisis. Human science and technology
will fix, repair, and improve natural processes.

Thus we resolve to explore the ocean from the figure of the cyborg
The cyborg solves binaries and becomes a political tool for liberation
Miyake, 4 PhD in Gender and Womans studies (Esperanza, ournal of International
Women's Studies March 2004 My, is that Cyborg a little bit Queer?)//gingE
The human/animal boundary breakdown is a power(ful) strategy that the queer cyborg
practices. The sexy, alluring and enigmatic mermaid is an early form and a good example of the
carnivalesque, queer, animal/human cyborg. By subverting and emerging the animal with the human, the queer
cyborg celebrates and relishes its transgression and acknowledgement of its bestial origins. The
animalistic and illegitimate queer cyborg sucks the fruits of perversion and licks the juices of transgression
upon its lips, glittery to the eye and wet with a purpose. Suleiman rightly states that perversion is one of the essential
ways and means...to push forward the frontiers of what is possible and to unsettle reality (1990,
148). The queer cyborg, with a hand on its (in)organic crotch, rejoices its perverse
status/strategy and confronts authority whilst challenging the Western quest for innocence and
origin. The breakdown of animal/machine boundary allows queer cyborgs to a rejoice in the
illegitimate fusion (Haraway 1985, p.176) of machine and body. Not only does this signify the symbolic fact that
there is a growing awareness amongst women to see their bodies as powerful machines, better
than (hu)mans; but also, the body as the battleground, tool and escape from the masculinist orgy.
Wittigs war machine seems to also have a place within this hybrid. The body becomes not just the writing, written
and (re)written, it becomes the war machine that utilizes strategies of parody and inversion for
purposes of political analysis and protest (Palmer 1993, p.99). On a physical level, the body and the machine are
literally becoming more and more integrated. Wilson observes that, you could never be certain where the edges
are. Multiplicity is another way of not being sure where peoples edges are, where their identity
begins and ends (Wilson 1995, p.243). Queer cyborgs would enjoy hearing that. The amalgamation of body and
machine makes the queer cyborg monstrous, strong, sexy and powerful. In Do Androids dream of Electric
Sheep? the human characters in the novel carry empathy boxes which are mechanic extensions of the body that enable the carrier
to feel empathy. In addition, they carry Penfield mood organs which allow them to choose and set a mood they want to be in.
Hawthorne expresses a concern over this matter, and wonders whether there will be a point where we will no longer listen to our
bodies...perhaps we will no longer feel sympathy? (Hawthorne 1999, p.233). Whilst this might be a cause for apprehension,
concern, and even fear, the soullessness of a machine that Wilson describes, coupled with the bestiality of humans indeed, evokes
horror (1995, p.246), the perfect confrontational tool for the queer cyborg engaging in the politics of
provocation. In addition, Wilson argues that machines are composed out of parts. They may be
assembled and disassembled. They are open to modifications or retoolings (1985, p.247). Does
this not sound like the physical realisation of what Haraway originally stated? A disassembled
and reassembled, postmodern, collective and personal self (1985, p.163). She is right: the machine is us,
our processes and an aspect of our embodiment (1985, p.180). The final binary breakdown occurs
between the physical/non-physical. Haraway claims that cyborgs are creatures that are no
longer structured by the polarity of public and private (1985, p.151). As I have mentioned before, the queer
cyborg is an entity that drifts in/out/on/off-line. As the screen which resides in the private home becomes a
window to the public network of power, the distinction between private/public become more and more
blurred. Haraway expands upon this point by mentioning the eradication of the public and private life through growing
technology, such as video games (1985, p.168). Foster makes an excellent point in saying that the virtual reality computer
interfaces or telepresence technologies both restage and disrupt the distinction between inner and outer worlds (2000, p.440). This
means that we are in a position to embody the outside power, and also empower the outside body.
Queer cyborgs can thus detach their public persona with their physical body, strengthening the
argument that gender, and other categories are just a stage act, unlinked to the physical self. The
parade continues on/off-line, noisy and garrulous; Bateson argues that there must be a systematic relation between the internal
and the external---the engineer's term for nonsystematic elements in codification is noise(1970, p.30). And this relation
between the external and internal occurs because there is no barrier, no solid boundary that
separates the two. Let the music be heard, loud and clear for there will be no inner closet with
its door----queer cyborgs no longer need to come out for they are already there.
A singular feminist identity is a tool of masculinity that ultimately allow the
subordination of women, which also allows for environmental exploitation. The
figure of the cyborg is one that rejects the contrived unity of the feminist
subject
Haraway, 91 - Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at
the University of California (Donna, A Cyborg Manifesto Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp 149-181 http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-
haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/)//gingE
Sandoval's argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out of the world-wide development of anti-colonialist
discourse; that is to say, discourse dissolving the 'West' and its highest product the one who is not
animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history. As orientalism is
deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the occident destabilize, including those of
feminists.9 Sandoval argues that 'women of colour' have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the
imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the consequences of the
disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization. Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the political/ poetic
mechanics of identification built into reading 'the poem', that generative core of cultural feminism. King criticizes the
persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different 'moments' or 'conversations'
in feminist practice to taxonomize the women's movement to make one's own political
tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist
history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting over time, especially
those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist-feminism. Literally, all other feminisms are either
incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontology and epistemology.10
Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women's
experience. And of course, 'women's culture', like women of colour, is consciously created by
mechanisms inducing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain forms of academic practice have been pre-
eminent. The politics of race and culture in the US women's movements are intimately interwoven. The common
achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without
relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification. The theoretical
and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-through-incorporation
ironically not only undermines the justifica-tions for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism,
positivism, essentialism, scient-ism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or
natural standpoint. I think that radical and socialist/Marxist-feminisms have also undermined their/our
own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to
be seen whether all 'epistemologies' as Western political people have known them fail us in the
task to build effective affinities. It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points,
epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of
identification. The acid tools of postmodernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological
discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves
in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body. But
with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with
the naivete of innocence. But what would another political myth for socialist-feminism look like? What kind of politics could
embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective
and, ironically, socialist-feminist? I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need
for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of 'race', 'gender', 'sexuality', and
'class'. I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible. None of 'us'
have any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to any
of'them'. Or at least 'we' cannot claim innocence from practicing such dominations. White
women, including socialist feminists, discovered (that is, were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-
innocence of the category 'woman'. That consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories; it denatures
them as heat denatures a fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more
natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on
victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give late-
twentieth-century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in the reflexive strategies for
constructing them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the
day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history.
Rheya represents the subjugated woman rejections of oversimplifications are
key
3.2. Human/non-human/biological entity/machine. It is a commonplace that sultural narratives of
colonization take as their starting point the deficiencies or monstrosities of the colonized body.
The female body is the particular ground for scientific colonizings that seek to gain dominion over the
processes of life. It is not surprising then, given the above, that in Solaris, the archetypal figure of the colonized is
female. Rheya is multiply othered. She is a product of Kelvins mind: familiar and simultaneously truly
alien. She is a biological entity, warm and pulsing, yet she is a technological product. Kelvin experiences
Rheyas body with a combination of desire, disgust, and horror that is causally linked to her physical
attributes, her difference. After Rheya displays her inhuman strength for the first time, Kelvin says, I was no longer under any
illusion: this was not Rheya and yet I recognized her every habitual gesture. Horror gripped me by the throat (5:60). This horror
of Rheyas alien body is coupled with an urge to violence brought on at the moment when Kelvin is forced to experience Rheya as
human and alien at the same time. At this point, Kelvins deliberate failure of understanding has become
intolerable to Rheya and to the reader. Furthermore, Lem playfully reveals, in language usually reserved for stereotypical scenes
of sex avoidance, what we have strongly suspected all along that Kelvins willful denial of Rheyas personhood
reflects his need to avert the intimacy of a true encounter, an encounter that can only be
achieved when the processes of naming, fixing, and defining have been shut down.
Science fiction changes our orientation towards nature as something to be
mastered and instead integrates us into the web of the world
Donawerth, 90 - Professor at the University of Maryland (ane Donawerth, Utopian Science:
Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction, pp. 548-550, 1990)//gingE
Feminist science theorists have shown that male scientists from the seventeenth century on
have conceived of nature as a potentially unruly woman to be mastered and penetrated for her
secrets. "The image of nature that became important in the early modern period was that of a disorderly and chaotic realm to be
subdued and controlled," argues Carolyn Merchant. Nature is conceived of by scientists as associated with
women, according to Sandra Harding, and "an immensely powerful threat that will rise up and overwhelm culture unless [it]
exerts severe controls."'9As an alternative to the destructive view of nature in traditional male science,
feminist science theorists posit a revision of nature and humanity's relation to her. "Women's
identification with earth and nature," argues Joan Rothschild, must form "the basis for transforming
our values and creating new ecological visions." Such a new science, according to Haraway, would stress
connection to, not domination over nature; according to Evelyn Fox Keller, it would see nature not as passive but as
resourceful; according to Merchant it would be as "antihierarchical"; and according to Rose it would
stress "the feminine value of harmony with nature" (according to Rose). Such a science would seek
"new and pacific relationships between humanity and nature and among human beings
themselves," argues Hilary Rose; and according to Keller, it would seek "not the power to manipulate, but
empowerment-the kind of power that results from an understanding of the world around us,
that simultaneously reflects and affirms our connection to that world."20 Such a vision of nature has long
been implicit, and more recently, explicit in women's science fiction. In Andre Norton's Breed to Come (1972), for example, humans
return to an earth their race had almost destroyed and tell the intelligent felines who have risen to civilization, "Do not try to
change what lies about you; learn to live within its pattern, be a true part of it." The former Terrans are
warning the current ones not to produce a destructive technology but to develop a partnership with nature. The
view of nature of men and women in works by women is often sharply different. In Sargent's The
Shore of Women(1986), women's scriptures record "the spirit of Earth, in the form of the Goddess" speaking to women: "You gave
men power over Me, and they ravaged Me. You gave them power over yourselves, and they made you slaves. They sought to wrest
my secrets from Me instead of living in harmony with Me." As a result, women assume political power, and enforce separation from
men as well as limited technology and limited reproduction that keep the ecology in balance. Even in the prototype of all science
fiction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), the concept of harmony with nature is implicit, a concept that Frankenstein violates with
his science. Whereas Elizabeth's relation to nature-"the sublime shapes of the mountains, the changes of the seasons, tempest and
calm, the silence of winter, and the life and turbulence of our Alpine summers"-was one of "admiration and delight," Frankenstein's
view of "the world was . . . a secret which I desired to divine." His obsession begins when he leaves for the all-male society at the
university where there "were men who had penetrated deeper" than those who "had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but [to
whom] her immortal lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery." In utopian fictions by women science fiction
writers, the most common metaphor for the relation of humans to nature is "the web of
nature." In Piercy's, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) Luciente warns Connie, "We're part of the web of nature," when she
urges putting immortality, or at least longevity, as a major goal of science; and in Joan Slonczewski's Door into Ocean
(1986), scientists facilitate nature's own processes, "when the web stretches . . . to balance life
and death." Thus feminist science theorists and women science fiction writers share a utopian
vision of nature and science in partnership.2' As a result of the inclusion of women in science, feminist
historians of science and science theorists have argued that a revised science would be different
because of the culturally different qualities assigned to women. A feminist science will include
acknowledgement of subjectivity in its methods; it will look at problems not just analytically but also holistically; it will aim for the
complex answer as best and most honest; and it will be decentralized and organized cooperatively. In all these ways, a feminist
science is utopian, since these conditions, values, and goals do not describe contemporary
science. In feminist science theory, subjectivity as an ideal includes feelings, intuition, and values. "A feminist
epistemology [for the sciences]," writes Hilary Rose, "insists on the scientific validity of the subject, on the
need to unite cognitive and affective domains; it emphasizes holism, harmony, and complexity rather than
reductionism, domination, and linearity." In A Feeling for the Organism, Evelyn Fox Keller reads Barbara Mc- Clintock's scientific
career as an example of allowing "the objects of . . . study [to] become subjects in their own right," thus
"fostering a sense of the limitations of the scientific method, and an appreciation of other ways
of knowing." A study by scientist Jan Harding suggests that girls in our society who choose scientific careers more often than
boys who do so recognize that "science has social implications," and choose science as a means of developing "relatedness,
capacity for concern, and an ability to see things from another's perspective." Subjectivity in
science must also encompass values and ethical context: science must be "context dependent"
according to Merchant, connected to "social implications" according to Jan Harding, based on "relational thinking" according to
Hein, grounded in women's experience and, so, a "labor of love" according to Rose.22
Self examination and internal questioning is a prerequisite to deconstructing
patriarchy
Helford, 92 (Elyce Rae, Science Fiction Studies is a refereed scholarly journal devoted to the
study of the genre of science fiction "We Are Only Seeking Man": Gender, Psychoanalysis, and
Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdfplus/4240149.pdf?acceptTC=true) //GY
We think of ourselves as the Knights of Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no
need of other worlds. We need mirrors. (?[6]:72) In this brief passage from one of SF's most popular and powerful
novels, Lem describes much of what is both important and misleading about efforts (literary or actual)
to achieve human/alien contact. He recasts astronauts and scientists as medieval knights on religious pilgrimages, men
who quest to assert cultural dominance over new realms. They seek only to encounter that which will prove the
significance of their work and world view. Such quests, Lem suggests, do not require investigation of outer space,
because human explorers have their eyes closed to the alien Other as well as to themselves. To see
the external universe with open eyes, the quest must begin within. Reference to this self-validating quest
as a search for "Man"(in the English translation) also illustrates the powerful patriarchal bias waiting to
be reflected in the mirror of self-understanding. When we admit that space exploration is about
humanity, not extraterrestrials we must further specify that such work is done predominantly by men
to validate a "masculine" world view (quite like the traditional SF depicting such exploration). Self- examination
is a possible solution: the scientific gaze must be turned inward, at the construction of human
identity and its gender implications, before turning outward. To provide mirrors which help to expose and challenge
the closed, patriarchal minds of Solaris's futuristic knights, Lem emphasizes gender-suggestive metaphoric figures, including an
ocean-like alien and the replica of a woman it produces from the unconscious mind of Kelvin, the novel's questing protagonist. In a
highly symbolic tale of self-understanding achieved through human-alien contact, Lem provides a compelling psychoanalytic study of
the human mind and the construction of gender.

2AC Misc Ocean
Solaris reflects a critique of colonization and oversignification the resisting
monster reveals societys relentless categorizing and anthropomorphization
2. Solaris. The subject of Solaris is colonization, especially those colonizing activities that proceed from hegemonic
science. In Solaris, Lem positions oversignification as the essence of scientific colonization. Oversignification,
in Lemian terms, is a one-way relationship of naming, describing, explaining, defining, and
identifying. In other words, the medium of colonization is representation. Edward Said might have been giving
a prcis of Solaris when, in Representing the Colonized, he wrote that To represent someone or even something
has now become an endeavor as complex and as problematic as an asymptote, with consequences for
certainty and decidability as fraught with difficulties as can be imagined (206). In Solaris, these difficulties have
everything to do with the resistance of those who are the objects of representation. Lem pits a
manufactured alien being, Rheya, against her sentient Ocean-creator and a group of male scientists, whose relentless categorizing
and anthropomorphizing activities supply much of the narratives humor. Like Frankensteins daemon and the cyborg in Piercys He,
She and It, Rheya resists oversignification by disrupting totalizing categories such as subject/object, human/nonhuman, and
biological entity/machine. As a result, the scientists are forced to confront the limitations of their
unidirectional world view and must grapple with the possibility that they inhabit a world of
multiple, constitutive, and sometimes unalterably alien agencies.
Ontological questioning is key to the political otherwise policy fails in its
oversimplification
But, in any case, as Lopez Petit (1994) points out, ontology is not an exclusively ideological and mystifying
tool; rather, it is a space for creation and conflict, a political space. Ontology is carried out in a
political space and political thought in an ontological space; any political proposal is an
ordering, a delimitation of connections and relationships. The organization of our human resource
administration, for instance, by competency management codification-simulation, implies that the following set of premises must be
assumed: that competencies exist and are capturable, measurable, computerized and may be assigned to jobs or people for
which/for whom they offer a representative profile, etc. The mechanism of codification-simulation sets the
conditions to begin doing things, starting with new realities; it sets the obligations and
conditions needed for certain practices. Codification-simulation makes it licit to make an analysis
in order to look for the right person for the job, to make special predictions, or to draw up a European competence file (aside form
the special features of each job, country and labour environment), which could be used to assign the representative competencies
of every citizen. The name of one of the companies currently managing those realities could hardly be more allegorical: PeopleSoft.
This probably means, software for handling people, but perhaps it more accurately refers to people being manipulated by software,
or, to put it another way, to SoftPeople.
The ocean remains inexplicably alien and Other it resists
anthropomorphization and forces reflection upon psychological construction
A vast reflective pool which defies human understanding, the ocean communicates only through the creation
of Phi-creatures, causing the scientists to turn inward before they attempt to focus their gaze more
directly upon this alien. It remains entirely Other no matter how hard humans try to construct it
in familiar terms. Within the histories of Solaris are frequent attempts to anthropomorphize the
ocean; yet it resists identification. Theorists label it autistic, elevate it to the status of cosmic yogi, scientifically
classify it by type, class, and category (of which the ocean is for each, of course, the only example), even call it a gigantic brain. All
this becomes meaningless busywork in light of living with simulated and indestructible
projections from the unconscious mind. Even the accepted label ocean is a misleading
description. In the face of this huge body of plasma and its constant metamorphosis through various temporary growths or
distortions which humans rigorously classify as extensors, mimoids, symmetriads, and asymmetriads, even ocean is overly
simplistic and grossly inaccurate. The resistance of the ocean to classification is part of its function as
mirror for humanity. Its generation of the Phi-creatures is another. These beings absorb almost all of the scientists time and
energy. And while the humans attempt to understand the ocean by understanding the Phi-
creatures, they cannot help but reflect on their own psychological construction as they live with
these fleshy projections of the mind. Through the creation of the new Rheya, Kelvin is forced to contemplate his guilt
over the suicide of the real Rheya, the nature of his feelings for both Rheyas, and his tendency to repress emotions and memories.
He sees himself reflected back by the actions of the ocean as a fragmented and complex being,
manipulated by an alien he thought he could control.
Solaris critiques anthropomorphism and rather asks one to look inside and
make contact with themselves.
3.1. Subject/Object. Solaris is a critique of the scientific methods relentless anthropomorphism and the
foolishness of the quest for alien contact by beings who refuse to look inside and make contact with
themselves. As Elyce Rae Helford notes, the scientists seek only to encounter that which will prove the
significance of their work and worldview. Such questsdo not require investigation of outer space,
because human explorers have their eyes closed to the alien other as well as to themselves. To see
the external universe with open eyes, the quest must begin within (167). Lem sets out to interrupt both the
unidirectional gaze of the scientists and the narrative gaze of Kelvin by returning it with the impenetrable, unknowable alien gaze of
the Oceans creation, Rheya. Yet, the scientists gaze is not so much returned as repulsed, subverting the mens
urge to merely change places. In this way, Lem inscribes in Rheya the power to confuse subject/object
boundaries and offers the possibility that the scientists might realize fuller versions of themselves
by learning to occupy both subject and object positions simultaneously.
Science fiction (esp. Solaris) provides an opportunity to analyze the relationship
between body and identity it enables virtualization that allows a
displacement of ontological center of gravity
Solaris is a classic of both the cinema and literature of science fiction. Interest in science fiction is neither new nor fortuitous. Quite
the reverse, in the last decade, this kind of literature and cinema has become a powerful source of inspiration
when analyzing and understanding the social and organizational environment of our daily life at
the dawn of the new millennium. Many feminist authors (Haraway, 1991; Figueroa, 1995; Sandoval, 1995; Balsamo, 1996)
have found inspiration in this literature in order to present lines of argument that are detached from other feminist options.
Science fiction offers them an opportunity to analyse the relationship between womens body
and technoscience, or body and identity, and enables them to speak of utopias where gender
ceases to be a defining category. Other authors, such as Tudor (1989), have turned to the cinema of the fantastic
in order to analyse the cultural image of science and scientists, or else have turned to science fiction cinema
to explore what kind of images of technology and organizations are provided for these cinematographic productions, as is the case
with Corbett (1995). Finally, there are authors like Butakman (1990), who uses science fiction literature to analyse how
postmodern identities are constituted through mechanisms of simulation and virtual realities. As
with any other science fiction novel, Solaris offers an excellent opportunity to think about the present. And this is so
because the literature of science fiction is no more than an exercise in virtualization. Virtualization, following
Levys (1995) definition, has to be understood as that opposed to actualization. Actualization is the operation that
consists of moving from a problem to a solution, while virtualization implies a movement that
goes from a given solution to another problem. Virtualisation can be defined as the inverse movement to
actualization. It lies in the passage from actual to virtual Virtualisation is not a derealisation (the transformation of a reality
into a set of possibilities), but a mutation of identity, a displacement of the ontological centre of gravity
of the considered object: instead of being mainly defined by its actuality (a solution), the entity encounters in this way its
essential consistency in a problematic field (Levy, 1995: 19). That is, virtualization implies constant consideration
of the initial actuality as a particular case of a more general problem. Science fiction is not about
future worlds, as some people often think; science fiction is about worlds that are not there, that is, virtual worlds. This is why
we can say that this kind of literature is about our present, a literature that problematizes the taken-
for-granted solutions we live with every day.
The ocean is a symbol of rebirth that is able to cleanse Kelvin of his patriarchal
worldview objective worldviews are impossible, one must accept a chaos of
non-representation
Once Kelvin leaves the capsule and enters the space station which hovers over the alien-ocean, he begins to lose his self-confidence.
He observes the ocean through a window in the space station, and fears the alienness of his
surroundings: The wave crests glinted through the window, the colossal rollers rising and falling in slow
motion. Watching the ocean like this one had the illusion it was surely an illusion that the station was moving
imperceptibly, as though teetering on an invisible base; then it would recover its equilibrium, only to lean the opposite way with the
same lazy movement. Thick foam, the color of blood, gathered in the troughs of the waves. For a fraction of a second, my throat
tightened and I thought longingly of the Prometheus and its strict discipline; the memory of an existence which seemed a happy one,
now gone forever ([1]:8) Here we can read the ocean as a great womb, a womb which cradles and protects
the fetal Kelvin within the amniotic membrane of the space station. Kelvin seems involved in a birth and rebirth
cycle in which he plays multiple roles and over which he has little control. There is strong suggestion of
reincarnation as he is born of the masculine mother(ship) Prometheus, propelled into instant male
adulthood (in which he engage in sex with a new mother), and then turned back into a fetus within the
Solarist ocean-womb. However, this new mother is different from the original. Kelvin, as confident product of
earth technology and science, does not return to the strict discipline of the Promethean
patriarchal womb, but rather to an unknown alien body which comes to represent a
metaphorization of the feminine. The question for the novel as it addresses the concept and implications of gynesis
becomes how this rebirth will enable Kelvins experiences as they suggest elements of feminist and psychoanalytic theories which
engage in the process of gynesis. Kelvins first reaction to the alienness of his new surroundings is an attempt to
render them less so by immersing himself in human histories of the planet and its sole inhabitant. By reading Terran theories
on the alien rather than studying the ocean itself, Kelvin feels safely distanced. Furthermore, this focus on texts reveals a
distrust of his own subjective responses to the alien. As the novel progresses and Kelvin is contacted by the
ocean through the generation of the Phi-creature Rheya, he becomes increasingly obsessed with Solarist studies. When most
threatened, he retreats to the stations library to read; this windowless space is centered in the station
and the ocean is completely shut out. Eventually, however, Kelvin realizes the futility of reading and
rereading these texts. They may offer interpretations of the phenomenon that is the ocean, but
each historian or scientist can only produce a personal and highly subjective hypothesis and
narrative. There is no Truth that can explain the ocean and Kelvins experiences. When he finally does make physical
contact with the ocean at the conclusion of the novel, Kelvin claims to see it with a different eye: his own
subjective vision. The primary impetus for Kelvins turn from literary histories to personal experience is his
reexamination of self through his relationship with the Phi-creature Rheya. Kelvin arrives on Solaris the
embodiment of the confident scientist, seeking to explore and explain his surroundings through
allegedly objective studies. However, the presence and actions of the ocean quickly destabilize his self-confidence and
eventually lead him to a new constitution of identity. Although all the scientist wish to escape the Phi-creatures, the ocean, and the
planet for most of the novel, only Snow directly acknowledges the value of their experience for personal enlightenment. He tells
Kelvin, It might be worth our while to stay. Were unlikely to learn anything about it, but about
ourselves (*6+:77). Snow realizes that humans not only fail to see the truly alien but will not and
cannot until they better understand themselves. And this understanding is what their experiences with the ocean
of Solaris should provide.

2AC - Cyborgs Good
Cyborganization
Cyborganization is the process that leads to a greater understanding of the
individual without relying on identity
Having just arrived at the space station, Kelvin realizes that his way of reasoning is useless in order to give sense
to the events in Solaris. As we explained before, the situations he is faced with could be described as chaotic:
visitors appearing from nothing, a planet in continuous transformation, his colleagues refusing any contact Faced with this setting,
Kelvin is about to go mad, as appears to have happened with his colleagues, but, finally, he realizes that he must change
his way of thinking, in a radical way. He must think differently. We could compare this radical
transformation with the change of episteme Foucault (1963, 1969) describes: mutation of the structure
of reality, redefinition of schemata concerning knowledge and truth, a new order of things. Indeed, Foucault (1966),
Deleuze (1986) or Serres (1980) considers this Man-Hero, represented by Kelvin in the novel, to be the main
definition of modern episteme. These authors argue that a similar Man-Form is the result of the
relationship established in a historical moment between finite strengths defining the human being (will,
understanding) and the also finite strengths that would seem to inhabit his surroundings (that is, the conception of universe as
governed by laws or as a kind of a book written with mathematical characters). The Man-Hero is no more than a
substitute for the typical God-Form of classical thought, a form that related the finite strengths of an ever-
fragile human being with the infinite, uncontrollable and incomprehensible strengths of his surroundings (the universe is governed
by gods endowed with wills that are unattainable for humans). However, both forms are no more than historical, contingent
products, which appear and which can disappear. As Foucault (1966) stated, maybe one day the Man-Form
(Man-Hero) left to us by modern thought will disappear like a face drawn on the sand at the beach. The end of the
millennium: alongside many other doubts a further one arises can we consider that the face of the Man-Form has been erased
from the sand? Solaris is a tale describing a shift of episteme, an augury of the emergence of a
substitute for the Man-Hero: the Cyborg-Form. The notions of labour, life and language, which arose
at the end of 19
th
century in the field of knowledge as semi(transcendental), gave rise to the birth of the modern
episteme. This emergence introduces historicity into the realm of richness, of living creatures and words. The matrix these
three historized elements prefigure opens rooms for Man and his radical finity (Foucault, 1966). That is,
when life, labour, and language ceased being natural attributes and became themselves natures that were rooted in their particular
history, it was possible to ask the question about man. At the end of XVIII century, on the one hand kantian philosophy and on the
other the constitution of biology, economics and linguistics pose the following questions: what is man? (Canguilhem, 1970: 141-2).
The Cyborg-Form, moreover, foretells a transformation that does not suggest a simple
reconfiguration of the basic elements of the modern subject, but rather a change in quality, a
transformation of the substance and content of these elements. For example, nowadays, biology has
reordered itself into molecular biology and genetic engineering. Life, previously disperse and finite, is redefined in
a single code, the genetic code. Temporality-historicity is no longer the primordial element when defining the discursive
formations of this new science. This role is now played by the unlimited possibilities of combination. Labour, previously
fragmented and partial, gathers in machines of the third species, cybernetic or computing machines that
display a political economy of sign-information and of its unlimited possibilities of circulation (Baudrillard, 1974). Finally language
through literature hangs around the thought of what was unthinkable, of repetition, of
difference, of the unlimited possibilities of reproduction offered by electronic image and writing (Poster, 1990).
Our daily life seems to be more concerned with silicon, genetic components and textuality than with carbon, organisms or the
referent. Our day-to-day life is a series of contacts not with strengths defined as infinite or finite,
but with strengths that are finite and unlimited at the same time. From now on, we will speak of strengths
of unlimited finity as those situations or fields of relationships where a finite number of components, the components of DNA
molecules for instance, give rise to an unlimited possibility, potentially infinite, of combinations. Deleuze has seen in this
combination between man, always finite, and the possibilities offered by these strengths of
unlimited finity (genetic code, computers), the realization of Nietzsches dream and the appearance of
surhomme. What is surhomme? It is the formal compound of the strengths, finite-unlimited. It is the form
that arises from a new relationship of strengths (Deleuze, 1986: 157). For our part, we prefer to talk of a Cyborg-Form. There is a
simple reason: as we are reminded by Rabinow (1992), Foucault lost his bet by saying that it would be language, from the triad that
shaped anthropological man, that would open the path to a new episteme. Our understanding is that the practices that have opened
the way for a new episteme are appearing, en masse, in labour and life, specifically related to the great project of mapping the
human genetic code and in the use of the mechanism of codification-simulation in work management. Transformations in the
sphere of language are mainly related to academic and intellectual circles. The acronym cyborg (formed by organism and
cybernetics) allows us, better than the Nietaschean expression, to stress this universe of practices
that concern biotechnology and cybernetics applied to organizations. These new practices seem to
be conquering our present and, due to their massiveness, constitute a new episteme (Tirado, 1997). It is possible to find
some texts (Cooper and Law, 1995; Parker and Cooper, 1998; Parker, 1998) where the acronym cyborg converts into
cyborganization. Cybroganization is defined as this general process that enables human being
surmount their shortages and their limitations. This process consists of the design of technologies that are
combined with human bodies in order to create new cyborganic spaces settled by cyborganisms. It is a concept that wishes
to dethrone the notion of individual as the epicenter of social thought by pointing out that
human beings have always been cyborganized. Furthermore, cyborganization would work as the
matrix where human beings define their humanity. We, for our part, are using the term cyborganization as
an overcoming of those explanations of the world that take the individual as their central axis.
That is, cyborganization expresses perfectly well the passage from the Man-Form to the Cyborg-
Form. On the other hand, when speaking of cyborganization, we are emphasizing the main role that the Cyborg-Form plays in the
realm of labour and organizations. In any case, we want to add, in the characterization presented by the mentioned authors, the
importance of the relationship between finity and unlimited finity (Tirado, 1999).

Cyborganization is a mechanism of organization that doesnt encircle systems
One of the culminating instants of the novel has to do with Kelvins interpretation of Rheya, his visitor. This interpretation has
different moments. First, the novel shows how Kelvin stops conceptualizing the visitors as metaphorical
representations, an option he had considered when he arrived at the orbital station: Rheya is both a set of pieces of his past
and something new, she is both his former wife and a new Rheya. Once he accepts that, Kelvin looks for new resources
and new conditions of possibility in order to rethink both the visitors and Solaris. So, Kelvin
begins to interpret the world surrounding him in a different way. He needs to use a postulate of
precariousness and transitoriness: time and history are no longer transcendental elements or mechanisms of
intelligibility in his new reality. Now he is living immersed in events, in relationships changing all the time, surrounded by precarious
and sporadic entities that vanish just as they appear. Events display and terminate their own time. Finally, Kelvin
will understand that he is a part of Solaris thanks to the relationship he has with his visitor. Visitors connect Solaris with humans.
They are the mechanism the planet uses to include the strange (in this case the humans) with an intelligible organization. When
ordering this new reality, Kelvin goes through different moments. These moments and the images
offered by the logic of cyborganization resemble each other. Such logic aims to describe, though in
a provisional way, a proximal mechanism of generating organization. We are using the word
mechanism to refer to this logic of cyborganization in the sense Deleuze (1989) gives to this term.
Mechanisms are made up of lines of different nature. Those lines of the mechanism neither embrace nor encircle systems in which
each of them would be homogeneous (object, subject, language), rather they follow different directions, form processes always in
imbalance. Those lines both come near each other and move away from each other (Deleuze, 1989: 155). According to this thinker,
theoretical reflection has to be an analysis of concrete mechanisms (Deleuze, 1989: 155), and mechanisms demand a proximal
logic, given that working with mechanisms has two consequences. The first one is the repudiation of universals. Universals dont
explain anything, they have to be explained. The second consequence is the interest for apprehending what is new. What is new
does not designate fashion, on the contrary, it refers to creativity, varying according to the mechanisms (Deleuze, 1989: 159). The
question we have to pose for mechanisms is always the same: how is it possible to produce something new in the
world? Analysing a mechanism involves thinking about four issues. First, it has to be shown in what way the mechanism
escapes from the domain of representation and enters into the thought of difference. Second,
the conditions of possibility that make such a mechanism feasible have, also, to be shown. Third,
the conditions of realization and concretion have to be explored. Finally, mechanisms surpass
historical discourse; the homogenization that time imposes cannot trap them. In our reading of
Solaris and its implications for a theory of organization, we have carried out four considerations that have
to be understood as four answers to the questions posed by Deleuze in his analysis of mechanisms. First,
we propose a refusal of the logic of representation. To this effect, in our first consideration, we are going to
comment that cyborganization is a logic based on translation, which allows it to avoid
representationism. Next, in the same way in which Kelvin looks for new conditions of possibility and realization that help him
to order his surroundings, in the second and third considerations, we will argue that the logic of cyborganization has its condition of
possibility in digital codification and its condition of sufficiency in simulation. Finally, very close to Kelvins renunciation of time and
history as primordial elements to interpret reality, we will explore, in our final consideration, how the mechanism of codification-
simulation actually goes beyond the limits of what is historical.
Solaris is a mechanism (lol) that enables a movement from the Man-Form to
the Cyborg-Form
Solaris has been the point of departure for a reflection about the actuality of organizations.
Kelvins troubles, produced by his arrival in the orbital station, have been very useful in exemplifying the
implications that stemmed from the irruption of a new kind of relationship in organizational
environments. To analyse this new kind of relationship, we have looked into the tool boxes of both Foucault
and Deleuze, and we have found two basic notions: the concept of episteme according to the former and the idea of
mechanism according to the latter. And we have followed this process. First, we have spoken of the relationship
between finite strengths and strengths of unlimited finity. Then, we have argued that from such a
collision of strengths arises a new episteme expressing the passage from the Man-Form to the
Cyborg-Form. When focusing our analysis on organizations, we have spoken of the logic of cyborganization as
a particular manifestation of Cyborg-Form. Finally, we have carried out a proximal approach to this logic of
cyborganization and we have typified it as a mechanism. The mechanisms we have described has enabled us
to go somewhat further from the omnipresent organizational metanarratives dominated by Men-
Heroes or by builders and titans that shape the world (Time Magazine, 1998). The passage from the modern Man-
Form to the Cyborg-Form has, as a main consequence, an omission of the use of the tales and
legends that characterize the former. The Man-Form is the result of a discourse of homogeneity,
while the Cyborg-Form fits within a discourse of heterogeneity. Literally, men cease to be, and
heterogeneous assemblies occupy their place. As a result, organization can no longer be understood as the
consequence of an individual or a merely human collective, but as the outcome to the action of
a multiplicity of diverse and heterogeneous components. The logic of cyborganization we have described
contravenes modern patterns of materiality, which are now fluid and dependent on codification-simulation. At the same time, this
mechanism is a tool for unmasking the notion oef representation that dominates the
legitimizing discourse about ever-stronger links between organization and technologies of
information a discourse based on a promise: to offer a very detailed recording of incomes and changes in data, in order to
obtain in every single moment the image of the company (SAP, 1998). This quotation is particularly interesting because it relies on
the notion of image, a typical product of a process of representation. Nevertheless, we have argued that in the logic of
cyborganization there is no representation inasmuch as there is no original to represent. On the
contrary, what we encounter in such logic is a particular process of translation consisting of codification and of the emergence of
simulations from codification. Simulations without original, entities with value in themselves. We have
also parted ways with another dominating metanarrative in organizational theory: planning. The
usual conceptions about mission, vision, objectives and so on, rely on an idea of temporality
established from the progression past-present-future. However, the logic of cyborganization gives
way to ahistoricity does not mean establishing a position out of time, but rather, conceiving the possibility of containing a
simultaneous multiplicity of temporalities, thanks to possibilities offered by the codification-simulation. In spite of the fact that
authors such as Maldonado (1992) maintain the necessity of treating practices that are generated around digital coding and
simulation from an epistemological viewpoint, we have deliberately obviated this position. We are not interested in a reflection on
epistemology since, as Henriques et al. (1984) pointed out, there are two immediate effects when analyzing a set of practices
stressing the epistemological angle. First, to taint these practices with demarcations such as those caused by true-false, rational-
irrational or science-ideology dichotomies. Second, to remove the knowledge-action which is generated in these practices from the
public and political domain and to place it in the plane of reflection, in terms of the legitimacy or final basis of this knowledge-action.
The description of the logic of cyborganization we have offered is, in the final analysis, a
reflection of the way reality is ordered. We deal with orders, with the establishment of
relationship regimes, of configurations in the world that surrounds us, of networks of materials and relationships that create
the subjects and objects that we know. This is a matter of ontology; we are not epistemologists (fortunately), we are
ontologists (Law, 1994).

Solves Fem
A new feminist epistemology needs to interrogate the role of technology
The new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of'privatization' that Ros Petchesky (1981) has
analysed, in which militarization, right-wing family ideologies and policies, and intensified
definitions of corporate (and state) property as private synergistically interact.18 The new
communications technologies are fundamental to the eradication of 'public life' for everyone. This facilitates the
mushrooming of a permanent high-tech military establishment at the cultural and economic
expense of most people, but especially of women. Technologies like video games and highly miniaturized televi-
sions seem crucial to production of modern forms of 'private life'. The culture of video games is heavily orientated to individual
compedtion and extraterrestrial warfare. High-tech, gendered imaginations are produced here,
imaginations that can contemplate destruction of the planet and a sci-fi escape from its
consequences. More than our imaginations is militarized; and the other realities of electronic
and nuclear warfare are inescapable. These are the technologies that promise ultimate mobility and perfect exchange
and incidentally enable tourism, that perfect practice of mobility and exchange, to emerge as one of the world's largest single
industries. The new technologies affect the social relations of both sexuality and of reproduction, and not always in the same ways.
The close ties of sexuality and instrumentality, of views of the body as a kind of private
satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine, are described nicely in sociobiological origin stories
that stress a genetic calculus and explain the inevitable dialectic of domination of male and
female gender roles.19 These sociobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or
cybernetic communications system. Among the many transformations of reproductive situations is the
medical one, where women's bodies have boundaries newly permeable to both 'visualization'
and 'intervention'. Of course, who controls the interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical
hermeneubcs is a major feminist issue. The speculum served as an icon of women's claiming their bodies in the 1970S;
that handcraft tool is inadequate to express our needed body politics in the negotiation of
reality in the practices of cyborg reproduction. Self-help is not enough. The technologies of
visualization recall the important cultural practice of hundng with the camera and the deeply
predatory nature of a photographic consciousness.20 Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central
actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibility.
Another critical aspect of the social relations of the new technologies is the reformulation of expectations, culture, work, and
reproduction for the large scientific and technical work-force. A major social and political danger is the formation
of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups,
but especially people of colour, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and
general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and
disappearance. An adequate socialist-feminist politics should address women in the privileged
occupational categories, and particularly in the production of science and technology that
constructs scientific-technical discourses, processes, and objects.21 This issue is only one aspect of enquiry
into the possibility of a feminist science, but it is important. What kind of constitutive role in the production of knowledge,
imagination, and practice can new groups doing science have? How can these groups be allied with progressive social and political
movements? What kind of political accountability can be constructed to the women together across the scientific-technical
hierarchies separating us? Might there be ways of developing feminist science/technology politics in
alliance with and-military science facility conversion action groups? Many sciendfic and technical workers in
Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys included, do not want to work on military science.22 Can these personal preferences and
cultural tendencies be welded into progressive politics among this professional middle class in which women, including women of
colour, are coming to be fairly numerous?
Essentialist and singular interpretations of woman reproduces exclusion
only the aff allows for a coalitional approach to difference
Fractured identities It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective or even to insist
in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem
contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical
constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in 'essential' unity. There
is nothing about teeing '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.
Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historica
experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who
counts as 'us' in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called 'us', and what could
motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women)
along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix
of women's dominations of each other. For me and for many who share a similar historical location in white,
professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies the sources of a crisis in political
identity are legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by
endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of
another response through coalition affinity, not identity.7 Chela Sandoval (n.d., 1984), from a
consideration of specific historical moments in the formation of the new political voice called
women of colour, has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called 'oppositional
consciousness', born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the
social categories of race, sex, or class. 'Women of color', a name contested at its origins by those whom it would
incorporate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all the signs of
Man in 'Western' traditions, constructs a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness,
difference, and specificity. This postmodernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said abut
other possible postmodernisms. Sandoval's oppositional consciousness is about contradictory locations and heterochronic
calendars, not about relativisms and pluralisms. Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a
woman of colour. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a
Chicana or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the
bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called 'women and blacks',
who claimed to make the important revolutions. The category 'woman' negated all non-white women; 'black'
negated all non-black people, as well as all black women. But there was also no 'she', no
singularity, but a sea of differences among US women who have affirmed their historical identity
as US women of colour. This identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot
affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of
conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship.8 Unlike the 'woman' of some streams of the white women's
movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely available
through the power of oppositional consciousness.
The figure of the cyborg is one that rejects the contrived unity of the feminist
subject
Sandoval's argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out of the world-wide development of anti-colonialist
discourse; that is to say, discourse dissolving the 'West' and its highest product the one who is not
animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history. As orientalism is
deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the occident destabilize, including those of
feminists.9 Sandoval argues that 'women of colour' have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the
imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the consequences of the
disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization. Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the political/ poetic
mechanics of identification built into reading 'the poem', that generative core of cultural feminism. King criticizes the
persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different 'moments' or 'conversations'
in feminist practice to taxonomize the women's movement to make one's own political
tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist
history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting over time, especially
those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialist-feminism. Literally, all other feminisms are either
incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontology and epistemology.10
Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women's
experience. And of course, 'women's culture', like women of colour, is consciously created by
mechanisms inducing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain forms of academic practice have been pre-
eminent. The politics of race and culture in the US women's movements are intimately interwoven. The common
achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without
relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification. The theoretical
and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-through-incorporation
ironically not only undermines the justifica-tions for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism,
positivism, essentialism, scient-ism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or
natural standpoint. I think that radical and socialist/Marxist-feminisms have also undermined their/our
own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to
be seen whether all 'epistemologies' as Western political people have known them fail us in the
task to build effective affinities. It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points,
epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of
identification. The acid tools of postmodernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological
discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves
in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body. But
with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with
the naivete of innocence. But what would another political myth for socialist-feminism look like? What kind of politics could
embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective
and, ironically, socialist-feminist? I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need
for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of 'race', 'gender', 'sexuality', and
'class'. I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible. None of 'us'
have any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to any
of'them'. Or at least 'we' cannot claim innocence from practicing such dominations. White
women, including socialist feminists, discovered (that is, were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-
innocence of the category 'woman'. That consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories; it denatures
them as heat denatures a fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more
natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on
victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give late-
twentieth-century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in the reflexive strategies for
constructing them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the
day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history.

Solves Reproductive Futurism
The cyborg disrupts gender norms specifically in the context of the nuclear
family
Women in the integrated circuit Let me summarize the picture of women's historical locations in advanced industrial societies, as
these positions have been restructured partly through the social relations of science and technology. If it was ever possible
ideologically to characterize women's lives by the disdnction of public and private domains
suggested by images of the division of working-class life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and home, and of
gender existence into personal and political realms it is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show how
both terms of these dichotomies construct each other in practice and in theory. I prefer a
network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the
personal body and in the body politic. 'Networking' is both a feminist practice and a multinational
corporate strategy weaving is for oppositional cyborgs. So let me return to the earlier image of the
informatics of domination and trace one vision of women's 'place' in the integrated circuit, touching only a few idealized social
locations seen primarily from the point of view of advanced capitalist societies: Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-
Hospital, and Church. Each of these idealized spaces is logically and practically implied in every other locus, perhaps analogous to a
holographic photograph. I want to suggest the impact of the social relations mediated and enforced by
the new technologies in order to help formulate needed analysis and practical work. However,
there is no 'place' for women in these networks, only geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to
women's cyborg identities. If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn
new couplings, new coalitions. There is no way to read the following list from a standpoint
of'idendfication', of a unitary self. The issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora.
Home: Women-headed households, serial monogamy, flight of men, old women alone, technology of
domestic work, paid homework, re-emergence of home sweat-shops, home-based businesses and telecom-muting, electronic
cottage, urban homelessness, migration, module architecture, reinforced (simulated) nuclear family, intense
domestic violence. Market: Women's continuing consumption work, newly targeted to buy the
profusion of new production from the new technologies (especially as the competitive race among
industrialized and industrializing nations to avoid dangerous mass unemployment necessitates finding ever bigger new markets for
ever less clearly needed commodities); bimodal buying power, coupled with advertising targeting of the
numerous affluent groups and neglect of the previous mass markets; growing importance of
informal markets in labour and commodities parallel to high-tech, affluent market structures;
surveillance systems through electronic funds transfer; intensified market abstraction
(commodification) of experience, resulting in ineffective utopian or equivalent cynical theories of community; extreme mobility
(abstraction) of marketing/financing systems; inter-penetration of sexual and labour markets; intensified sexualization of abstracted
and alienated consumption. Paid Work Place: Continued intense sexual and racial division of labour, but considerable growth of
membership in privileged occupational categories for many white women and people of colour; impact of new technologies on
women's work in clerical, service, manufacturing (especially textiles), agriculture, electronics; international restructuring of the
working classes; development of new time arrangements to facilitate the homework economy (flex time, part time, over time, no
time); homework and out work; increased pressures for two-tiered wage structures; significant numbers of people in cash-
dependent populations world-wide with no experience or no further hope of stable employment; most labour 'marginal' or
'feminized'. State: Continued erosion of the welfare state; decentralizations with increased
surveillance and control; citizenship by telematics; imperialism and political power broadly in the form of information
rich/information poor differentiation; increased high-tech militarization increasingly opposed by many social groups; reduction of
civil service jobs as a result of the growing capital intensification of office work, with implications for occupational mobility for
women of colour; growing privadzation of material and ideological life and culture; close integration of privatization and
militarization, the high-tech forms of bourgeois capitalist personal and public life; invisibility of different social groups to each other,
linked to psychological mechanisms of belief in abstract enemies. School: Deepening coupling of high-tech capital needs and public
educa-tion at all levels, differentiated by race, class, and gender; managerial classes involved in educational reform and refunding at
the cost of remaining progressive educational democratic structures for children and teachers; education for mass ignorance and
repression in technocratic and militarized culture; growing and-science mystery cults in dissendng and radical political movements;
continued relative scientific illiteracy among white women and people of colour; growing industrial direction of education (especially
higher education) by science-based multinationals (particularly in electronics- and biotechnology-dependent companies); highly
educated, numerous elites in a progressively bimodal society. Clinic-hospital: Intensified machine-body relations; renegotiations of
public metaphors which channel personal experience of the body, particularly in relation to reproduction, immune system functions,
and 'stress' phenomena; intensification of reproductive politics in response to world historical implications of women's unrealized,
potential control of their relation to reproduction; emergence of new, historically specific diseases; struggles over meanings and
means of health in environments pervaded by high technology products and processes; continuing feminization of health work;
intensified struggle over state responsibility for health; continued ideological role of popular health movements as a major form of
American politics. Church: Electronic fundamentalist 'super-saver' preachers solemnizing the union of electronic capital and
automated fetish gods; intensified importance of churches in resisting the militarized state; central struggle over women's meanings
and authority in religion; continued relevance of spirituality, intertwined with sex and health, in political struggle. The only way
to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and
cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable.
Since much of this picture interweaves with the social relations of science and technology, the urgency of a socialist-feminist politics
addressed to science and technology is plain. There is much now being tione, and the grounds for political work are rich. For
example, the efforts to develop forms of collecdve struggle for women in paid work, like SEIU's District 925,* should be a high
priority for all of us. These efforts are profoundly deaf to technical restructuring of labour processes and reformations of working
classes. These efforts also are providing understanding of a more comprehensive kind of labour
organization, involving community, sexuality, and family issues never privileged in the largely
white male industrial unions. The structural rearrangements related to the social relations of
science and technology evoke strong ambivalence. But it is not necessary to be uldmately depressed by the
implications of late twentieth-century women's relation to all aspects of work, culture, production of knowledge, sexuality, and
reproduction. For excellent reasons, most Marxisms see domination best and have trouble understanding what can only look like
false consciousness and people's complicity in their own domination in late capitalism. It is crucial to remember that
what is lost, perhaps especially from women's points of view, is often virulent forms of
oppression, nostalgically naturalized in the face of current violation. Ambivalence towards the disrupted
unides mediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of clear-sighted critique grounding a solid
political epistemology' *Service Employees International Union's office workers' organization in the US. versus 'manipulated false
consciousness', but subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the
rules of the game. There are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender, and class, as these
elementary units of socialist-feminist analysis themselves suffer protean transformations. Intensifications of hardship experienced
world-wide in connection with the social relations of science and technology are severe. But what people are experiencing is not
transparently clear, and we lack aufficiently subtle connections for collectively building effective theories of experience. Present
efforts Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological to clarify even 'our' experience are rudimentary. I am conscious of
the odd perspecdve provided by my historical position a PhD in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was made possible by Sputnik's
impact on US national science-education policy. I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second World War arms
race and cold war as by the women's movements. There are more grounds for hope in focusing on the contradictory effects of
politics designed to produce loyal American technocrats, which also produced large numbers of dissidents, than in focusing on the
present defeats. The permanent pardality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political
organization and participation. We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a
common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of
experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve
contradiction. Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to
be Man, the embodiment of Western logos. From the point of view of pleasure in these potent
and taboo fusions, made inevitable by the social relations of science and technology, there
might indeed be a feminist science.
A reimagination of the cyborg challenges boundaries and reproductive futurism
There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our
enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no
exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity
and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted.
One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but
an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us,
our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not
dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a
time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment
seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric exten-sions. Only by being out of place
could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity
after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid,
sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all,
even if it has profound historical breadth and depth. The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily
activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image. Feminists have recently claimed that
women are given to dailiness, that women more than men somehow sustain daily life, and so have a privileged epistemo-
logical position potentially. There is a compelling aspect to this claim, one that makes visible unvalued
female activity and names it as the ground of life. But the ground of life? What about all the ignorance
of women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and skill? What about men's access to
daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to take them apart, to play? What about other embodiments?
Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a
cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there
is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to
become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination
in order to act potently. One last image organisms and organismic, holistic politics depend on
metaphors of rebirth and invariably call on the resources of reproductive sex. I would suggest that
cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of
most birthing. For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and
restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury.
The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth,
and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender. Cyborg
imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal,
totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly
now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means
refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the
skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in
communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human
satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of
dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not
of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in
tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines,
identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather
be a cyborg than a goddess.
Solves Subjectivity
Cyborg politics is key to challenge the liberal human subject we are the only
ones providing an alternative to status quo modes of political agency in a
technological world.
Rygina, 8 - MA in Culture, Media, and Society (Lika ,Towards a Biotechnological Self: Cyborg
Imagery in Social Science and Popular Art,
http://genderstudies.info/english/eng_text17.pdf)//gingE
According to Haraway, the incorporation of non-organic agents into the human body and everyday life
calls into question the conventional normative definitions of human being and humanness in
general. The cyborg concept, borrowed from the NASAs vocabulary in the 1960s, was developed into a
metaphor for the intersection and mutual transformation of humans and machines. Haraways
cyborg celebrated the melting away of separation between nature and culture, human and
nonhuman, reality and delusion. A subversive figure without any origin, it is not made of mud and cannot dream of
returning to dust (Ibid., p. 163). Independent from the legacy of Western history and mythology, the cyborg appeared to
be ironical and an oppositional subject that estimates freedom of self-design, intimacy and
interconnection. The penetration of borders defines its primary attitude; its identity is a matter
of performance. As described by Gorunova (2000), this new actor is characterized by flexibility and a
disposition towards social and physical experiments. It tends to challenge the very logic of dual oppositions that
ground a system of power and subordination. An organic body and its transformation in the techno-mediated environment is one of
the central issues of the Manifesto. A material location of social and self-definitions, individual body has
become a tool for liberation in the case of the cyborg. The experience of fractured corporeality
has played out as a trigger for challenging political action. Katherine Hayles further developed the idea of the
cyborg into the concept of the posthuman. In her book How We Became Posthuman (1999), Hayles associated new social actors
with hybrids of human beings and artificial intelligence. The two entities turned out to be interconnected, interdependent, and
interfaced as nodes of a global techno-human network. To borrow an expression from Kutz (2000, para 18), the posthuman
must be understood at the intersection of a complex set of interactions that are continually
mobile and dynamic. As explained by Hayles in one of the interviews, this condition complicates individual behavior and
influences the intention and potential to act. From the other side, intelligent agent programs obtain new
dimensions of capability as the capacity for emotional computing and human-like reactions
is made possible (Chicago University Press [CUP], 1999, para 6). As summarized by Bartlett and Byers (2003, p. 39), the
posthuman condition can be viewed as a systemwherein the human is but one of a number of
equally valid and substitutable sites for consciousness, where nature is not superior to artifice,
where human dominance is not an inherent or essential attribute, but a negotiated position
within a system. The convergence of human and artificial machines, stated Hayles (1999), requires a
new theoretical approach for comprehending the sociality that rises from these relationships.
Hence, Hayles employs a variant of postmodern linguistics that faced the issue of transformation of signifying system in terms of
sophistication and flexibility of signifier/signified relations and erosion of borders between text, non-textual, and intertextual
domains. The notion of flickering signifier, believes Hayles, could help describe the contemporary
challenges in the sphere of the production of meanings (Ibid., pp. 2549). As explained in another
interview, like marks on the computer screen, contemporary signifiers account for a complexity
of hidden operations and multidimensional processes (Gitelman, n.d.).
Reconceptualizing gendered narratives allows a metamorphosis from the
Lacanian subject to a complex and divided self
An excellent starting point for understanding the relationship between Solaris, gender, and
psychoanalysis is Alice Jardine's concept of gynesis: a process by which metaphors for the "feminine"
are encoded as "spaces" or "gaps" into postmodern theories which attempt to resist traditional
philosophical absolutes. In Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, Jardine examines the postmodern
preoccupation with rejecting and rethinking western "master narratives": humanistic philosophies which rely on absolutes such as
"Man," "History," and "Truth." Theorists who attempt to understand and explain existence and
experience through these traditional narratives largely omit acknowledgement of their authorial
subject positions (most importantly, the fact that they are generally white western men of a privileged class).
Reconceptualizing such narratives necessarily involves a reexamination of the patriarchal politics
of western philosophic thought. Psychoanalysis for example, is largely based upon are thinking of traditional
representations of subjectivity. For psychoanalytic theorists such as Freud and Lacan, the "Subject" must not be
seen as a reified, unified whole, actively shaping "his" universe; but rather as a complex and
divided self, full of repressed desire and an inability to comprehend the meanings of and
reasons for his own thoughts. And "he," in Freud and Lacan, must be distinguished carefully from "she," for male and
female sexuality evolve in separate and distinct directions. While psychoanalysis does remain complicit with many aspects of
the traditional and artificial construction of gender within patriarchy, it effectively destabilizes the patriarchal myth
of the universal subject (most often represented as "Man"). Theoretical approaches which reexamine master
narratives, such as psychoanalysis, reveal many of the unstated assumptions of humanistic philosophies.
However, they often fail as challenges to tradition because they replicate certain universalizing and
essentializing tendencies of the philosophical approaches and constructs they reconsider. For Jardine, the
most significant problem is the tendency of such theory to replace denial of the issue of gender with
an encoding of what is labeled "feminine," a process she labels gynesis. "Woman," she writes, "is and always has
been, of course, the original problematic object" (36 n.18), and therefore: In the search for new kinds of legitimation, in the absence
of Truth, in anxiety over the decline of paternal authority, and in the midst of spiraling diagnoses of Paranoia, the End of Man and
History, "woman" has been set in motion both rhetorically and ideologically (.36) As the scientists on Solaris furiously
work to understand an alien resistant to study and classification and able to extract information from the
unconscious mind of its observers and use it to create beings in human form, they face the (postmodern) cultural
crisis Jardine describes. Through the figure of the alien and the simulation of "woman" it produces
for Kelvin, a representation of the myth of the universal subject, Lem articulates on a popular literary level
the process Jardine describes.

Solves Embodiment
The aff solves embodied subjectivity cyborg politics is a key access point to
critique the disembodiment within popular culture. Our politics does not
demand that people sacrifice elements of their individual bodily experience but
rather demands that technology be understood as a necessary part of that
embodied subjectivity.
From the first pages of her book Hayles develops the concept of posthuman subjectivity, drawing from the
critique of the conventional understanding of human being based on the ideals of
transcendence, rationality, autonomy, agency, and conscious identity. She believes that this model, which
appeared as part of the Enlightenment project, should be radically interrogated and rethought. She principally agrees with the late
XX century arguments provided by feminism, postmodernism, postcolonial criticism, and cultural studies, which deconstructed the
sociopolitical effects of Cartesian logic and essentialist Western mythology embodied in the modernist concept of human being.
Several scholars questioned the universality of the liberal human subject by revealing White
masculinity and as its unspoken essence (Grosz, 1990; Kaplan & Rogers, 1990). Namely, the male-centered
aspects of physical and social life were considered normative models of humanity in general.
Scientific reflection on dual descriptions of reality (outer and inner, nature and culture, body and soul, man and
woman, etc.) deconstructed human in terms of the production of symbolic differences upon which
a hierarchical social structure arose. As shown by Diane Fuss (Fuss in Paasonen, 2003, p. 5), naturalized by
means of corresponding discourses, the concept of human became a symbolic tool for stabilizing
the relationships of power between humans, humans and lesshumans (women), humans and
non-humans (animals and machines). Similarly, Hayles (1999, p. 386) demonstrated the ideological implications of the
humanist intellectual movement by linking the emergence of liberal humanism to the activity of that
fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves.
Paasonen (2003) problematized another domain of the modernist human concept, namely the capacity for self-reflection.
Rethinking the particularly way of comprehending reality instilled by liberal humanist logic, the
scholar noticed that Self-centered, isomorphic, cyclopean I/Eye perception limits a subject of
knowledge to the socially predetermined, fixed, twodimensional perspective of Cartesian binary
oppositions (Ibid, p.12). Additionally, postmodernist scholarship uncovered the socially constructed, discursive and dependent
nature of human subjectivity and reality (ex. Foucault, 1976/1978). These findings demonstrated the irrelevance of
the liberal concept of human being that has become particularly visible in the age of
postindustrial production and sophisticated communication systems. As an alternative, scholars
developed concepts of nomadic subjectivity (Braidotti, 1994), socially constituted subjects (Sandel, 1982), and
narrative selfhood (Macintyre, 1984) that claimed to be more sensitive intellectual tools for understanding an over-connected and
over-technologized world. The emergence of cybernetics, which aimed to make the techno-
performance of human characteristics and capacities possible (Weiner, 1950), has become probably
the most powerful challenge to liberal humanism (Hayles, 1999; Haraway, 1991/2004; Gray, 2001). By
radically accelerating the modernist ideas of reason, individualism, and self-governance, it
produced an alternative socio-political agent, the cyborg, and delivered a set of disturbing
questions about human essence, identity, and the future of sociality. According to Hayles (1999), the
new science turned out to be a source for redesigning and reconceptualizing modern humanism
on the most fundamental level, and held the promise of delegitimizing the liberal ideologies guarding the unbalanced social order.
This position resonates with Haraways earlier insight that a hybrid of man and machine
characterized by lack of authenticity, a convergence of flesh and mind, and a blending of inner and outer, challenges
the Western sociopolitical system with new ontological and epistemological questions. Cybernetics based on the notion
of human being as a set of informational processes (Hayles, 1999, p. 4) catalyzed wider discussion
on the issue of disembodiment, previously associated almost exclusively with feminist critiques
of a liberal self. As mentioned, in liberal thought male subjectivity is conventionally associated with the capacity to obtain
power and pure knowledge through the transcendence of corporeal desires, whereas females intentions and potential are usually
explored in terms of biologism and naturalism (Grosz, 1990). Innovative technologically assisted perspectives of redesigning the
body according to ones will and experiments with Virtual Reality again raised the issue of the erasure of embodiment (Hayles,
1999, p. 4). However, in the era of the digital and cybernetic revolution, the problem turned out to be
quite a distinctive domain of inquiry. As explored by Hayles, the difference between modernist and
cybernetic disembodiment lies in the meanings of corporeality. Identified with the rational
mind, the liberal subject possessed a body but was not usually represented as being a body. Only
because the body is not identified with the self it is possible to claim for the liberal subject its
notorious universality, a claim that depends on erasing markers of bodily difference, including
sex, race, and ethnicity (Ibid, pp. 4-5). Hayles referred to the study of the anorexia, the unhealthy refusal of food aimed to
achieve some subjective physical standard, to exemplify an apotheosis of the idea of the mind superiority to the body and
affirmation of self-management and self-control. By contrast, cyber-culture claimed total disembodiment as a
rejection of any particular body at all, since physical and virtual presence have become just a
matter of technological manipulations. The tendency for the disappearance of the real body in postindustrial,
virtualized society posed a set of particular theoretical questions, including updated problems of gender and race (Haraway,
1991/2004; Hayles, 1999; Sandoval, 1995; Stone, 1991; others). For Haraway (1991/2004), microbiological progress is signal that the
social definitions inscribed on the body must be totally revised and new strategies of embodiment based on human-machine
intimacy must be adopted. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The
machine is us, our process, an aspect of our embodiment (Ibid., p. 174). Hayles (1999) responded to the same
challenge with the categorical scheme of the body/embodiment and inscription/ incorporation. She identified the body
as a product of various socio-cultural technologies; it is iconic and normalized. In contrast,
embodiment, as interpreted by Kurtz (2000, para 25), provides the practice of the body, the articulation of
discourse at specific historical moments. If the body is a discursive form, embodiment is performative in nature. It is
supposed to bring deviating variations into the basic model. Hayles determines the manifestation of the body and embodiment by
corresponding technologies of inscription and incorporation. While the inscription tends to correct and modulate the performance
(Hayles as cited in Kurtz, 2000), incorporating practices provide a regime of flexibility.
Solves Intentions of Violence
We are always already cyborgdeath is but the imaginative remnant of a
Western paradigm that no longer existsonly the cyborg politics can open a
space to challenge the underlying intentions of violence
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality
as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political
construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's
experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the
most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative
apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that
changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life
and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.
Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate
worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between
organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated
in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns
and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from
organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the
nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence,
an $84 billion item in 1984'sUS defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping
our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful
couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field. 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. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of
both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of
historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-
dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of
culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and
machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of
production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries
and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and
theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a
world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world
without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar,
attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in
her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most
promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to
understand for our survival. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with
bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness
through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the
cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful
apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all
dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of
original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all
humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths
inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in
their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference
must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of
original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise
that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars. The cyborg is resolutely committed to
partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without
innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a
revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no
longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The rela-tionships for
forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue
in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to
save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual
mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on
the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of
Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert
the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy.
Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but
needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the
vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal
capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers,
after all, are inessential. I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this chapter, but now I want to signal three crucial
boundary breakdowns that make the following political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible. By the late twentieth century
in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of
uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks--language tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing
really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation;
indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements
for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted
recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary
theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line
between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social
science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. Biological-
determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is
much room for radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary.2 The
cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is
transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal distrurbingly and pleasurably
tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange. The second leaky distinction is
between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was
always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between
materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history,
according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They
could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of
that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century
machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, self-developing and
externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are
disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. Technological determination is only one
ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts
through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world.3 'Textualization' of everything in
poststructuralist, postmodernist theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived
relations of domination that ground the 'play' of arbitrary reading.4 It is certainly true that postmodernist strategies, like my cyborg
myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (for example, the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty
of what counts as nature a source of insight and promise of innocence -- is undermined, probably fatally. The transcendent
authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding 'Western'
epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract
existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying 'man' by the 'machine' or
'meaningful political action' by the 'text'. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a
matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn't we (de Waal, 1982; Winner, 1980)? The third
distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on
the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin
romances* as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject.
Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they
are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father's ubiquity and spirituality.
The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for
nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization
has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not
so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or
the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are
made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a
spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile -- a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore.
People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether,
quintessence.

K/ Identity
Cyborg metaphors are key to understanding of identity
Garoian and Gaudelius-
**Associate Vice President and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education (Charles R.
and Yvonne M., Cyborg Pedagogy: Performing Resistance In the Digital Age, Studies in Art
Education, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 333, JStor)//LC
In this article we argue for the importance of situating information technology within a larger
cultural context in order identify its social, political, and aesthetic impact on human identity.
Just as identity is not created within a cultural vacuum, neither is art or information technology.
Wanting to challenge the idea that identity is merely inscribed by information technology, we
must create strategies of resistance that enable us to re-think the construction of identity and
technology. Understanding that we perform inscription just as we do resistance, a critical
process such as this compels us to re-form our epistemological understanding of art, technology,
and the body. In doing so, this process represents a practice of critical citizenship within a
radical democratic society that is undergoing rapid transformations through information
technologies. We argue that the performance of the cyborg metaphor, as discussed by Donna
Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, and other critical theorists, enables us to expose, examine, and
critique the ways in which the body is implicated and bound up in our understandings of art,
technology, and identity. The performance of this metaphor within the context of art creates a
conceptual space within which we can imagine and perform an embodied pedagogy of
resistance.

Must Analyze Technology
Analysis of the cyborg is key to understanding technologys influence on society
However, as Kaplan (2004b) has noted, the next generation of scholars have addressed the man-machine
problem by conceptualizing technology and society in terms of interconnection and mutual
influence. In general, it has viewed technological agents as essential mediators in socio-economic
and knowledge production (Ihde, 1990/2004; Latour, 1999/2004). It seems that contemporary techno-science has no
doubt that technology not only mediate human lives but effect humanss physical, psychological,
and social parameters (Haraway, 1991/2004; Hayles, 1997, 1999; Gray et al., 1995; others). This statement is crystallized in
the figure of the cyborg, developed as a challenging model of the new socio-political actor. According to Hayes (1995, p. 322),
cyborgs actually do exist; about 10% of the current U.S. population are estimated to be cyborgs
in the technical sense. In the age of electronic revolution various features of communication
(Internet, mobile phones, etc.) extend living bodies, advanced medical services (genetic engineering, cosmetic
surgery, implantation medicine, etc.) and fitness practices (body building) modify human wetware and
metabolism. Haraway (1991/2004, p. 162) confirms the reality of the cyborg, citing the figure of eighty
four billion dollars that the US military budget devoted in 1984 to the command-
controlcommunicationintelligence. Chris Gray provides us with the story of his grandmother whose artificial heart
continued operating some time after the womans brain died (Gray et al., 1995). Questioning conventional notions of
life and death, organism and mechanism, such phenomenon raise important ontological and
epistemological problems. As Graham (2004) believed, nowadays we are forced to review the very
criteria by which we think about human nature (p. 17). Alongside science, contemporary popular art has
also been involved in discussions on the cyborg. Thus, numerous movies have appeared in recent decades that
reflect on the boundary between humans and technology. Addressed to wider audiences and equipped with particular audio-visual
techniques, popular cinematography can be viewed as an influential factor contributing to the creation of the dominant definition of
human beings in the biotechnological age and correspondent politics concerning the issue. In this respect, an investigation of
cyborg imagery in both the academic and artistic spheres can help in understanding of socio-
cultural and political dynamics. This thesis examines cultural representations of the techno-
human (cyborg) in comparison to the discourse on cyborgs developed by contemporary
scholarship, assuming that the popular artistic sphere serves as a mediator for social processes.
Following the work of pioneers in the field, I identify the cyborg (techno-human, post-human) as an
innovative form of consciousness and personality, arising from the experience of a blurred
separation between authentic humans and technology. According to Haraway (1991/2004), cyborg
subjectivity is characterized by flexibility, the intention of challenging social conventions, and a
willingness of multiply interconnections.

Misc
The hybridity of cyborgs infuses humanity with an inherent morality that
ruptures the nihilism of traditional Western philosophy
Introna, 9 Professor of organization, technology, and ethics at Lancaster University (Lucas D.,
Theory, Culture, and Society Vol 26, No 4, 2009, Ethics and the Speaking of Things, pg 25-
46)//gingE
This sort of ethics of hybrids is obviously very important and desperately needed. The lack of
commitment to such an ethics by many in the actor network theory (ANT) field, and STS more generally, is disappointing as
confirmed by Bijker (2003). The awareness of the implicit and intimate link between ethics and politics,
together with a commitment to a neutral (symmetrical) descriptive methodology, may explain this
state of affairs. However, we would argue that there is no such thing as neutral description and that it is
therefore impossible to avoid politics and by implication ethics (Radder, 1992, 1998). As such, the
supposed political neutrality suggested in a descriptive methodology as is prevalent in STS itself
may be seen as a way to side-step the complex moral landscape of hybrids. Unfortunately such
moves add weight to the supposition that description, politics and ethics can be separated.
Nonetheless, the ethics of hybrids, and the analysis it produces, may indeed make us acutely aware that
there is no simple, easily drawn line between things and us, or, in the language of ANT, between
humans and non-humans. It may show that we are the sorts of humans that we are because we
use, or implicitly accept, the scripts of the things that make up and mediate our contemporary
way of being. Equally, the things that make up and mediate our world are the things that they are
because we made them for our purposes in our image as it were. Thus, in the unfolding socio-technical
networks our contemporary technically advanced society things and humans reflect and sustain
each other. We co-constitute each others possibilities to be as such, they (we all) matter, both
politically as well as ethically. Ultimately the ethical/political question of the nuclear power station is not only Is it safe?
but also Is this the sort of humans that we want to be? The ethics of hybrids may help us to
become less naive about the politics of technology but it does not address although it does
point to the more primordial question of an ethics of things our relationship with things, qua
things. How might we approach such a question? The intellectual space in STS for such a consideration has become more viable,
as seen, for example, in the more recent work of Latour (2002). In his article Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,
Latour (2002) takes head on the traditional means/ends or facts/values dichotomy. He argues that this dichotomy collapses when
we take a closer look at the way technology folds and unfolds within human practices. In his article he suggests that there is an
intimate (and ontological) connection between technology and morality: Morality is no more
human than technology, in the sense that it would originate from an already constituted human
who would be master of itself as well as of the universe. . . . Morality and technology are
ontological categories . . . and the human comes out of these modes, it is not at their origin. Or
rather, it cannot become human except on condition of opening itself to these ways of being
which overflow it from all sides and to which it may choose to be attached but then at the risk
of losing its soul. (Latour, 2002: 254) This is a very interesting passage. Latour is suggesting that technology and morality both
have their being as heterogeneous networks that produce as one of their outcomes the human being. In other words, morality
(like technology) is not simply a matter of our choosing. Indeed his article is, wittingly or unwittingly, a radical critique
of a widely held anthropocentric idea of agency and ethics. His claims, if taken to their logical conclusion, will
radically disturb the categories of freedom, autonomy and responsibility at the heart of the
liberal ethical project which is based on the metaphysics of the autonomous subject. We do not
necessarily think that is what Latour intended, or maybe he did. Nevertheless, we do believe he wants to question the
assumed evidentness of these categories, especially in their more traditional fact/value (or
is/ought) form. He wants to warn us that: The two modes of existence (technology and morality, or
matters of fact and matters of concern) ceaselessly dislocate the dispositions of things, multiply
anxieties, incite a profusion of agents, forbid the straight path, trace a labyrinth generating
possibilities for the one, and scruples and impossibilities for the other. (Latour, 2002: 257) Latours challenge is provocative. It calls
for a radically different way of thinking about the ethics of hybrid things. It points, perhaps, to an ethics beyond the
idea of the hybrid. Maybe even the overcoming of ethics traditionally conceived. We believe the development of these ideas
is very significant as it points to a convergence between the work of Latour (that is empirically grounded) and the work of Heidegger
(on the overcoming of traditional metaphysics) that we will take up below. Before we proceed to do this we would like to briefly
sketch out why the dichotomy between facts and values (is and ought), within traditional Western
metaphysics and ethics, leads to a nihilism that needs to be overcome in order for a different
ethics (or rather ethos) of things to be rendered possible at all.

Open continuity key to deconstruct us vs. them dichotomies
Kretz, 09 - University of Evansville, Philosophy (Lisa Ethics and the Environment -
Open Continuity Pgs. 125-129
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/10.2979/ETE.2009.14.2.115) //GY
Thinking about the roles and cycling of the material constituents of human beings requires
questioning common physical boundaries between self and other. Open continuity indicates that the
notion that air is out there as distinct from you fails to recognize the nature of human ecological embodiment. Open ecological
continuity indicates that some ecological descriptions illustrate that one cannot treat the human
self as distinct from various elements of the environment. What I am proposing runs deeper than the
requirements of acknowledging relations of dependency. To say one depends on something is different from
saying something constitutes the self; dependency does not indicate identity. The claim that one
necessarily depends on air fails to capture the ways in which the self and air are necessarily inseparable. What one depends on is
distinct from oneself. Air can exist in the absence of humans. The reciprocal case is not true. More than support or dependency is
thus indicated. In terms of what follows ethically, identifying in openly continuous ways can offer a strong moral imperative to care
for and protect what constitutes the self. The example of water serves further to buttress my claim that human
beings are openly continuous entities. Again, connection to is not an adequate description. Suzuki and McConnell
note that like air, ...water is essential to our survival.... Living beings need this elixir because they are made of it. Protoplasm, the
living matter of all plant and animal cells is mostly water. The average human being is roughly 60 percent water by weight, nearly 40
liters of it carried in trillions of cells. (1997, 55)11 Once again, there is no human self in the absence of water. More than dependency
is indicated: open continuity. Looking at systems, using the example of water, serves to highlight that humans areinsofar as they
existnecessarily and essentially part of such systems.12 The hydrologic cycle exemplifies that the water that com- poses humans is
part of a larger process. The basic constituents of human physical being cycle through other larger
systems. Living organisms are active participants in the hydrologic cycle, absorbing and filtering water and breathing it back into
the atmosphere (1997, 55). Further, there is a rapid changing of the specific water molecules. Every single day, about 3 per cent of
the water in our bodies is replenished with new molecules (1997, 60). Suzuki and McConnell knit humans with a variety of other
entities through the example of water. The water molecules that perfuse every part of our bodies have
come from all the oceans of the world, evap- orated from prairie grasslands and the canopies of all the worlds great
rain forests. Like air, water physically links us to Earth and to all other forms of life (1997, 60).13 I make the case that it is more than
linkage being described hereit is open continuity. Open continuity indicates a more fluid engagement with
the world. Suzuki and McConnells narrative about how humans are constituted ecologically encourages self-conceptualization
that questions boundaries between self and other. The cycling of core constituents of living entities is beautifully illustrated by the
following description of water Suzuki and McConnell give: Water enters our bodies, circulates through it to the rhythm of the heart,
ceaselessly carrying food, fuel, and cellular and molecular de- tritus to and from various organs of the body. Water seeps through
our skin, escapes from our lungs as vapor and exits every opening in the body. It then reenters the hydrologic cycle, trickling into the
soil, entering plants, evaporating into the atmosphere, entering bodies of water. In this way, water circulates endlessly
from the heavens to the oceans and land, held briefly within all living things before continuing
the cycle. (1997, 62) Given the way that the above ecological descriptions of water encourage questioning the clear boundaries
commonly presumed among entities through demarcating points of necessary merger, a notion of distinct entities connected by
their dependence on water is not a sufficient description of what is going on. Humans physical being is necessarily
and essentially constituted of water. This water is part of complex systems and various living entities. Suzuki and
McConnells ecological narratives illustrate that adequately describing what humans are as ecologically embodied and embedded
creatures necessarily requires reference to water and the questioning of boundaries between self and other. The example of
water helps to question common human self/other boundaries. Others have highlighted this as well in their
environmental narratives. Greta Gaard, for example, begins her narrative about human relationship to water saying: In the
beginning there was only water, and you were a part of it.... Water knows there are no separations. You too should know this, for
water has been teaching you, from the beginning (Gaard 2003, 71). Suzuki and McConnells example of water and its role in human
being makes clear that human physical boundaries as normally construed (e.g. the boundary of skin) can be brought into question.
They note that humans are waterthe oceans flow through our veins, and our cells are inflated by water, our
metabolic reactions mediated in aque- ous solution (1997, 75). This narrative invites imaginings in which you are water, the water
molecules found in oceans are later part of what flows through your veins, the perpetually cycling water constitutes your very cells.
Processes of which one is a part are highlighted, and insofar as one identifies with water the self-other divide blurs. I select the
above passages because they fundamentally question common self/other, human self/water boundaries. Suzuki and McConnells
examples also question commonly accepted boundaries in terms of air, soil, and sunlight. Human beings depend on earth and its life
forms for every aspect of their survival and life. It is impossible to draw lines that delineate separate
categories of air, water, soil and life. You and I dont end at our fingertips or skinwe are
connected through air, water and soil; we are animated by the same energy from the same
source in the sky above. We are quite literally air, water, soil, energy and other living creatures. (1997, 130) Such
radical rephrasing is useful for disrupting the notion that the human self is clearly distinct from
various entities usually construed as other.14 More precision is needed, however, in appropriately conceptualizing
here. One must not equivocate between the human self and water, air, soil, or sunlight. Rather, human selves are
complexly formed with various contributions to self-constitution. That being said, maintaining a view in
which water and the human self, or air and the human self, must remain distinct when being conceptualized is not a view that can
be maintained if one wishes to reflect the ecological reality of humans open continuity.15 How one ought to identify must be
conceptualized with more precision and care. Part of this care involves recognizing that the equivocation between self and water,
or self and air, is an overstatement on par with deep ecologists oversimplified recommendation that humans ought to identify
ideally or primarily as the widest Selfa monistic one with the everything of the universe. I suggest this is a chapter of the human
story, but need not be the whole book. My view allows for monistic identification, but also creates space for a multiplicity of other
sorts of ecological identifications. Acknowledging humans ecological embodiedness, embed- dedness,
and open continuity requires taking into account that there is no human that can be extracted
and properly ecologically conceptualized in- dependently from air, water, food, wider functioning systems,
and so on. There are a bevy of ramifications that flow from the dimensions of open continuity
outlined above. For instance, there is open continuity between all organisms that likewise have air and water functioning similarly
in their self-constitution. The distinction between the human self and other is questionable not just in the
instance of self/air, self/water, self/food, self/sunlight, but also in terms of self/community, self/ecosystem, self/biosphere, and
self/universe. Insofar as one identifies as ecologically embodied, one then has to provide for
dimensions of open continuity that question common self/other boundaries. This is not to say that
boundaries, such as skin, are not important for demarcating a human organism. It is, however, to say that when thinking of
the human self as an embedded and embodied material entity, constructed of cycling self-
constituting elements in open exchange, then different ways of making sense of self-boundaries
are highlighted. This includes ways of making sense of the self where the self/other boundary between the human self and
air/water/food/sunlight and so on are deeply questioned. Ecology gives a variety of methods of analysis for
providing meaningful explanatory boundaries that challenge the usual conceptions of where the
human self ends and other entities begin. Next I turn to ecological cases where humans function as a part of larger
wholes, such that self/other boundaries can be questioned in terms of functioning.
Cybernetic criticisms reject normativity
McIntosh 10- Department of Political Science, Slippery Rock University (Daniel, December 2010,
The Transhuman Security Dilemma, http://jetpress.org/v21/mcintosh.htm)//LC
The addition of nano-scale machines adds new possibilities. One is implantation of medical
devices that will produce as well as dispense drugs inside of the host, including the brain.
Another is the implantation of supercomputers the size of a cell, monitoring for and preventing
disease before it could be noticed by the host (Canton 2005). Cybernetic breakthroughs point to
continued blurring of common sense distinctions between the mechanical and the
biological. NBIC technologies force one to reconsider what it is to be human. Political science
and practical politics are grounded in assumptions about the nature of humans as individuals
and in groups. Within the field of international relations, for example, theoretical and policy
disagreements associated with such viewpoints as political realism, neorealism, neoclassical
realism, liberalism, neoliberalism, Marxism, neomarxism, institutionalism, feminism, and various
forms of constructivism rest in large part on differing assumptions about human nature. Yet in
one regard they are all alike: the assumption that there is a single human nature, fixed in time
and universal in scope. The divergence of humanity into new and different forms and
capabilities renders that assumption obsolete. Or, as urgen Habermas (2003, 14) observed, the
breadth of biotechnological interventions raises moral questions that are not simply difficult in
the familiar sense but are of an altogether different kind. The answers touch on the ethical self-
understanding of humanity as a whole.
An imagination of Cyborgs allows for a reinterpretation of reproduction and
creates new spaces for the imagination of queer couplings
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality
as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political
construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's
experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of
the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the
imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction
and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth
century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and
social reality is an optical illusion. Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs creatures
simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.
Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as
coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of
sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics
against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems
like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg
orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984's US defence budget. I am
making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an
imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid
premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.

The narrative of the Cyborg is one that does not stem from a Western lineage of
phallic reproduction
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. Thus cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed
image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility
of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics the tradition of
racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for
the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other the relation between organism
and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of
production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the
confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-
feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps
a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor
does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in
an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublished manuscript on Jacques
Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in
cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which
we need to understand for our survival. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has
no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to
organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher
unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful
apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all
dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the
myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom
all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in
psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender
formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of
woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western
sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars.
The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is
oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private,
the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the
oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource
for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity
and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect
its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a
heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg
does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal
project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I
want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic
compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos.
They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main
trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But
illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are
inessential.

The cyborg is an identity that challenges the coherence and lineage of language
Cyborgs: a myth of political identity I want to conclude with a myth about idendty and boundaries which might inform late
twentieth-century political imaginations (Plate 1). I am indebted in this story to writers like Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, John
Varley, James Tiptree, Jr, Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, and Vonda McIntyre.23 These are our story-tellers exploring what it means
to be embodied in high-tech worlds. They are theorists for cyborgs. Exploring concephons of bodily boundaries and social order, the
anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966, 1970) should be credited with helping us to consciousness about how fundamental body
imagery is to world view, and so to political language. French feminists like Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, for all their
differences, know how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of embodiment, and
especially for Wittig, from imagery of fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies.24 American radical feminists like Susan Griffnn,
Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich have profoundly affected our political imaginations and perhaps restricted too much what we
allow as a friendly body and political language.25 They insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological. But their symbolic
systems and the related positions of ecofeminism and feminist paganism, replete with organicisms, can only be understood in
Sandoval's terms as oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century. They would simply bewilder anyone not preoccupied
with the machines and consciousness of late capitalism. In that sense they are part of the cyborg world. But there are also great
riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilides inherent in the breakdown of clean disdnctions between organism and
machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self. It is the simultaneity of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of
domination and opens geometric possibilities. What might be learned from personal and political 'technological' pollution? I look
briefly at two overlapping groups of texts for their insight into the construction of a potentially helpful cyborg myth: constructions of
women of colour and monstrous selves in feminist science fiction. Earlier I suggested that 'women of colour' might
be understood as a cyborg idendty, a potent subjecdvity synthesized from fusions of outsider
identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her 'biomythography', Zami (Lorde, 1982;
King, 1987a, 1987b). There are material and cultural grids mapping this potential, Audre Lorde (1984) captures
the tone in the title of her Sister Outsider. In my political myth, Sister Outsider is the offshore woman, whom US workers, female
and feminized, are supposed to regard as the enemy prevendug their solidarity, threatening their security. Onshore, inside the
boundary of the United States, Sister Outsider is a potential amidst the races and ethnic identities of women manipulated for
division, competition, and exploitation in the same industries. 'Women of colour' are the preferred labour force for the science-
based industries, the real women for whom the world-wide sexual market, labour market, and politics of reproduction kaleidoscope
into daily life. Young Korean women hired in the sex industry and in electronics assembly are recruited from high schools, educated
for the integrated circuit. Literacy, especially in English, distinguishes the 'cheap' female labour so attractive to the multinationals.
Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of the 'oral primidve', literacy is a special mark of women of
colour, acquired by US black women as well as men through a history of risking death to learn
and to teach reading and wridng. Writing has a special significance for all colonized groups. Writing has been
crucial to the Western myth of the distinction between oral and written cultures, primitive and
civilized mentalities, and more recently to the erosion of that distinction in 'postmodernist'
theories attacking the phallogo-centrism of the West, with its worship of the monotheistic,
phallic, authoritative, and singular work, the unique and perfect name.26 Contests for the meanings of
writing are a major form of contemporary political struggle. Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious. The poetry and stories of
US women of colour are repeatedly about writing, about access to the power to signify; but this dme that power must be neither
phallic nor innocent. Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness
before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis
of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them
as other. The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the
hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert
the central myths of origin of Western culture. We have all been colonized by those origin
myths, with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse. The phallogocentrie origin stories most crucial for feminist
cyborgs are built into the literal technologies teehnologies that write the world, biotechnology and microelectronics that have
recently textualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C3I. Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding
communication and intelligence to subvert command and control. Figuratively and literally, language politics
pervade the struggles of women of colour; and stories about language have a special power in the rich
contemporary writing by US women of colour. For example, retellings of the stom~ of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of
the mesdzo 'bastard' race of the new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortes, carry special meaning for Chicana
constructions of identity. Cherrie Moraga (1983) in Loving in the War Years explores the themes of identity when one never
possessed the original language, never told the original story, never resided in the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the
garden of culture, and so cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural names, mother's or father's.27
Moraga's writing, her superb literacy, is presented in her poetry as the same kind of violation as Malinche's mastery of the
conqueror's language a violation, an illegitimate production, that allows survival. Moraga's language is not 'whole'; it is self-
consciously spliced, a chimera of English and Spanish, both conqueror's languages. But it is this chimeric monster, without claim to
an original language before violation, that crafts the erode, competent, potent identities of women of colour. Sister Outsider hints at
the possibility of world survival not because of her innocence, but because of her ability to live on the boundaries, to write without
the founding myth of original wholeness, with its inescapable apocalypse of final return to a deathly oneness that Man has imagined
to be the innocent and all-powerful Mother, freed at the End from another spiral of appropriation by her son. Writing marks
Moraga's body, affirms it as the body of a woman of colour, against the possibility of passing into the unmarked category of the
Anglo father or into the orientalist myth of 'original illiteracy' of a mother that never was. Malinche was mother here, not Eve before
eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms Sister Outsider, not the Woman-before-the-Fall-into-Writing needed by the
phallogocentric Family of Man. Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of
the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against
perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central
dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution,
rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplings which make Man and
Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting
the structure and modes of reproduction of 'Western' idendty, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and
mind. 'We' did not originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and
epistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider replications of
'texts'. From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground politics in 'our' privileged
position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely
violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities. Feminisms and
Marxisms have run aground on Western epistemological imperatives to construct a revolutionary subject from the perspective of a
hierarchy of oppressions and/or a latent position of moral superiority, innocence, and greater closeness to nature. With no
available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from
hostile 'masculine' separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged
reading or salvation history, to recognize 'oneself' as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the
need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the
bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of colour have
transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear into the originally literate mother who teaches survival.

Cyborgs open up new spaces for reinterpretation
This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation. Every, story that begins with
original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be
individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing,
alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive
politics rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree
they have less selflhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. But there is
another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror
Stage and its imaginaw. It passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of Woman born, who
refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life. These cyborgs are the
people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many dmes a 'western' commentator
remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by 'Western'
technology, by writing.28 These real-life cyborgs (for example, the Southeast Asian village women workers inJapanese and
US electronics firms described by Aihwa Ong) are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and sociedes. Sumival is the stakes in
this play of readings. To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they
have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour,
nature, workers, animals in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief
among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female,
civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/ made,
active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, totaVpartial, God/man. The self is the One who is not
dominated, who knows that by the semice of the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by the
experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be
powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet
to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but
two are too many. High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear
who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is
mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. In so far as we know
ourselves in both formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in
the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological
organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental,
ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. The replicant Rachel in the Ridley
Scott film Blade Runner stands as the image of a cyborg culture's fear, love, and confusion. One consequence is that our sense
of connection to our tools is heightened. The trance state experienced by many computer users
has become a staple of science-fiction film and cultural jokes. Perhaps paraplegics and other severely
handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization with other communication
devices.29 Anne McCaffrey's pre-feminist The Ship Who Sang (1969) explored the consciousness of a cyborg, hybrid of girl's brain
and complex machinery, formed after the birth of a severely handicapped child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment, skill: all were
reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the
seventeenth century dll now, machines could be animated given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for
their orderly development and mental capacides. Or organisms could be mechan-ized reduced to body
understood as resource of mind. These machine/ organism relationships are obsolete,
unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly
selves. We don't need organic holism to give impermeable whole-ness, the total woman and her
feminist variants (mutants?). Let me conclude this point by a very partial reading of the logic of the cyborg monsters of
my second group of texts, feminist science fiction. The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very
problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual
endty, or body. Katie King clarifies how pleasure in reading these fictions is not largely based on idendfication. Students
facingJoanna Russ for the first time, students who have learned to take modernist writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf without
flinching, do not know what to make of The Adventures of Alyx or The Female Man, where characters refuse the reader's search for
innocent wholeness while granting the wish for heroic quests, exuberant eroticism, and serious politics. The Female Man is the story
of four versions of one genotype, all of whom meet, but even taken together do not make a whole, resolve the dilemmas of violent
moral action, or remove the growing scandal of gender. The feminist science fiction of Samuel R. Delany, especially Tales of
Neveyon, mocks stories of origin by redoing the neolithic revolution, replaying the founding moves of Western civilization to subvert
their plausibility. James Tiptree, Jr, an author whose fiction was regarded as particularly manly undl her 'true' gender was revealed,
tells tales of reproduction based on non-mammalian technologies like alternation of generations of male brood pouches and male
nurturing. John Varley constructs a supreme cyborg in his arch-feminist exploration of Gaea, a mad goddess-planet-trickster-old
woman-technological device on whose surface an extraordinary array of post-cyborg symbioses are spawned. Octavia Butler writes
of an African sorceress pithug her powers of transformation against the genetic manipulations of her rival (Wild Seed), of dme warps
that bring a modern US black woman into slavery where her actions in relation to her white master-ancestor determine the
possibility of her own birth (Kindred), and of the illegidmate insights into idendty and community of an adopted cross-species child
who came to know the enem' as self (Survivor). In Dawn (1987), the first instalment of a series called Xenogenesis, Butler tells the
story of Lilith Iyapo, whose personal name recalls Adam's first and repudiated wife and whose family name marks her status as the
widow of the son of Nigerian immigrants to the US. A black woman and a mother whose child is dead, Lilith mediates the
transformation of humanity through genetic exchange with extra-terrestrial lovers/rescuers/destroyers/genetic engineers, who
reform earth's habitats after the nuclear holocaust and coerce surviving humans into intimate fusion with them. It is a novel that
interrogates reproductive, linguishc, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-century race and gender.
Because it is particularly rich in boundary transgressions, Vonda McIn-tyre's Superluminal can close this truncated catalogue of
promising and dangerous monsters who help redefine the pleasures and politics of embodiment and
feminist writing. In a fiction where no character is 'simply' human, human status is highly
problematic. Orca, a genetically altered diver, can speak with killer whales and survive deep ocean conditions, but she longs to
explore space as a pilot, necessitating bionic implants jeopardizing her kinship with the divers and cetaceans. Transformations
are effected by virus vectors carrying a new developmental code, by transplant surgery, by
implants of microelectronic devices, by analogue doubles, and other means. Lacnea becomes a pilot by
accepting a heart implant and a host of other alterations allowing survival in transit at speeds exceeding that of light. Radu Dracul
survives a virus-caused plague in his outerworld planet to find himself with a time sense that changes the boundaries of spatial
perception for the whole species. All the characters explore the limits of language; the dream of communicating experience; and the
necessity of limitation, partiality, and indmacy even in this world of protean transformation and connection. Superluminal
stands also for the defining contradictions of a cyborg world in another sense; it embodies
textually the intersection of feminist theory and colonial discourse in the science fiction I have
alluded to in this chapter. This is a conjunction with a long history that many 'First World' feminists have tried to repress,
including myself in my readings of Superluminal before being called to account by Zoe Sofoulis, whose different location in the world
system's informatics of domin-ation made her acutely alert to the imperialist moment of all science fiction cultures, including
women's science fiction. From an Australian feminist sensitivity, Sofoulis remembered more readily McIntyre's role as writer of the
adventures of Captain Kirk and Spock in TV's Star Trek series than her rewriting the romance in Superluminal. Monsters have
always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient
Greece established the limits of the centred polls of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions
of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused
human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and
supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases all crucial to establishing modern
identity.30 The evolutionary and behavioural sciences of monkeys and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late
twentieth-century industrial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different
political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and
Woman.
2AC Sci Fi Good
Solves Binaries
Science fiction disrupts stable hierarchies and binaries
Fekete, 1 - Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies and English Literature at Trent University
(ohn, March 2001, Doing the Time Warp Again: Science Fiction as Adversarial Culture, Science
Fiction Studies, #83 = Volume 28, Part
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/fek83.htm)//gingE
Science fiction commentary today largely presupposes the democratization and decentralization of the
modern system of Art, and the revaluation made possible by the loosening of the value
hierarchy that had authorized the exalted status of a centralized high Art canon and the
correspondingly low status of the popular or commercial literatures and paraliteratures (to which sf has tended to
belong). The nuts and bolts discourse on sf nowadays shows little anxiety about the genres non-
canonical status. The agendas of Science Fiction Studies, the pre-eminent regular home of academic sf scholarship, for
example, have shifted during the 1990s, as indeed the journal anticipated at the beginning of that decade (Csicsery-Ronay Jr.,
"Editorial"). As a result, a variety of deconstructive and counter-canonical readings have increased the theoretical density of the
journal and given it a new-left intellectual face that is double-coded, Janus-like, turning both to cultural critique and to a critique of
the traditional presuppositions of critique. It is interesting to note a continuing consensus in sf scholarship
on advancing the adversarial culture and producing an alternative discourse around creative
writing of an alternativist character. At the same time, critiques frequently "post" their own
grounding, as happens with other double-codings of postmodern culture, where the basic
intellectual categories (certainties) of modernity are called into question and recoded. Feminist and
post-feminist, Marxist and post-marxist, modernist and post-modernist, humanist and post-
humanist, historicist and post-historicist, gendered and post-gendered analytic and theoretic
modes of discourse step by step refashion a dialogic space that begins to appear post-critical. It is
probably fair to say that the "posting" of the adversarial culture foreseen in Baudrillards hypothesis of
the hyperreal reduction of distance between the fictive and the real, in Lyotards libidinal aesthetic, and in
the assumptions of a number of postmodern antifoundationalists, has not yet been robustly theorized or
persuasively disseminated. Nevertheless, the post-critical horizons of science fiction discourse have
been announced, even if related agendas are only slowly and cautiously emerging. Into this context
arrives Carl Freedmans Critical Theory and Science Fiction. In a science fiction milieu where dedicated works of
theory reflecting on the nature of science fiction itself are relatively rare, such a book is to be
welcomed, especially as it makes a real contribution by drawing attention to relationships between critical
theory and sf. At the same time, the book has a strong adversarial parti pris that seems emblematic of an earlier time, or
perhaps of the more traditional pole of an emerging debate. The books twin purposesto show that science fiction is an
intrinsically critical-theoretical generic mode, and to establish canonizing, critical-theoretical
readings of five best-of-type sf texts by Stanislaw Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Philip K.
Dickdraw a line in the sand. The proposed generic definition and related critical canon will select out much of known science
fiction and select in a limited array of texts grounded on historiosophical or philosophical premises that have much in common with
the foundations of the selective traditions of elite Literature. The bottom line is that a highly selective generic definition
of the kind that Freedman proposes would substantially narrow the legitimate membership of
the sf genre and dovetail at least in part with impulses toward the kind of legitimation that is
neither in the interests of the wide audiences that appreciate sf for its variety, nor any longer
necessary as a strategy for drawing academic attention to sf. On closer scrutiny, indeed, the
exclusionary legitimating argument turns out to be working the other side of the street, using
the known and demonstrable appeals of sf to legitimate a narrowly critical reading strategy.
The alien represents opposition to intersectional discrimination
Kember 11- Professor of New Technologies of Communications, University of London (Sarah, 9-
07, No humans allowed? The alien in/as feminist theory, Sage)//LC
When the alien is represented in feminist theory, it is as the ultimate outsider, it is in opposition
to alien apartheid and all forms of discrimination based on gender, race, class, sexuality and
species. It is, at least implicitly, always in sympathy with Shelleys sympathy for the monster.
There is, of course, a work of deconstruction, a legacy of feminist epistemological critique that
seeks to take down the boundaries put up against us in the Western philosophical and political
tradition. There has also, as I suggested, been recourse to play, irony, parody, creativity and
imagination in the process. I will return to this, while pursuing contemporary critiques of
representationalism and insisting that as long as we attempt to figure the alien in feminist
theory, we will continue to invoke a story, the story of switching sides. However good a story
this is (my favourite story, as it happens), it is time to tell it differently. Why? In order, precisely,
to take on board the boundary work that has already been done, and to recognise as fallacy the
idea that there are sides to be switched. It is by means of a critique of representationalism,
alongside work that challenges notions of agency as autonomy, that we will be able to close the
epistemological, ontological and ethical gap that makes alien apartheid possible. Unlike Karen
Barad (and Mark Hansen, as another example), I will not regard this critique of
representationalism as a turn to notions of performativity and relationality (Barad, 2007;
Hansen, 2004). Rather, I will regard it as a return to ideas about performativity and relationality
that might extend and renew the feminist project, and enable feminist theory itself to become
alien again. In The Aftermath of Feminism, Angela McRobbie argues, in effect, that feminism
has switched sides. It has, she says, been subsumed within liberal democracy, co-opted and
made over as a form of global governance oriented not towards notions of gender equality, but
towards notions of human rights (2009: 154). In response, she advocates intervention, not
mourning, and a process of retrieval and reflection on earlier feminist debates rather than
making claims for post-feminist or third wave progress. While it cannot exist outside, as an
outsider to individualistic neoliberal discourse, feminism by recognising that politics is taking
forms and shapes that are, as yet, nascent has the opportunity, once more, to make itself
strange (McRobbie, 2009: 169). Wendy Brown sees no outside, no possibility of opposition or
resistance to neoliberalism (2005). She does, however, allow for the possibility of alternative
visions, visions that I will suggest have been, and can be both critical and creative.
Alien science fiction prevents a reification of gender binaries because the
subject of those narratives is not gender or sexuality, but rather the Alien as an
ontological figure
Alien encounters are of course a very charged trope in sf history. As Istvan Csiscery- Ronay observes,
*a+nxiety over sexual power and purity underlies most articulations of alien- human contacts;
significantly, the alien has always disturbed the deep-lying connection between biology and human
culture (228-29). Even if it is ultimately defused or recontained, the science fictional alien is immanently
disruptive: suggestive of the multiple sexualized and racialized binaries which inflect the
category human, inevitably invoking the other, even as it may be registered as undesirable. However, it is
when the alien is deployed as tool for thinking through both (human) nature/s and culture/s
that such binaries might be destabilized. If the alien differs from us only in terms of its biology,
it potentially does little to advance us beyond the realms of the metaphysical anti/pro-naturalist
differentiation between human and non-human. That is, to recall Csiscery-Ronay again, if the alien figures
primarily as biologically rather than ontologically Other, then (as when dealing with racial difference) it is
often too easy to conflat*e+ cultural difference with putative natural difference (Csicsery-Ronay 229). I
want to turn now to some sf examples that are open to readings that queer nature. Of course many sf texts lend
themselves to a queered understanding of nature in one aspect or another, from Mary Shelleys
Frankenstein to Ursula K. Le Guins Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Samuel R. Delanys Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984)
and Triton (1976), ohn Varleys GAEAN trilogy (1979-84), and more recently, Nalo Hopkinsons Midnight Robber (2000) and The Salt
Roads (2003). In this essay I have deliberately chosen to focus on a number of lesser known authors, for two reasons. Firstly, I
believe it is important to widen the scope of our reading beyond the usual canon, to explore the
different forms of feminism that might be recognized or produced through ecofeminist and
queered readings, and to recognize the potential for queered readings of what might appear
fairly traditional sf treatments. Secondly, I want to look specifically at female-alien encounters,
which are less easily mapped as masculinized culture versus feminized nature, or as an (heterosexually)
eroticized colonialist tourism. The texts discussed below share a central concern with the environment and human relations to
nature which encompass the ways we represent nature. Concomitantly, these texts are concerned with alternate
understandings of being in and knowing nature, which demand the construction of different scientific
discourses and often imagine new biotechnologies, usually represented through an alien culture. One way of encapsulating
these themes is through the notion of alien biologies, which signify not just biologically
different species (and ontology), but also different practices and systems of knowledges (alien biological
technosciences), and finally the intersections (too easily dissolved in the human-nature/human-culture split) between
physical being/matter and sociocultural discourses. Unlike more traditional sf readings which parallel the
human/alien with a gendered dichotomy, in these texts the problematics of difference and otherness are
located around the dualism of human/non-human, thus suggesting the possibility of escaping the
heterosexual bind. For as Hollinger warns, An emphasis on gender risks the continuous reinscription of
sexual binarism, that is, the reinscription of an institutionalized heterosexual binary (24). In these stories, gender is
not the most significant marker of the human/alien relation. Rather, the tensions in human-alien
relations reflect the purifying practices of scientific (and colonialist) discourses which contribute to
the delineation of human from other.

Solves binaries
In Marti Steussys Dreams of Dawn (1988), the survival of a sentient alien race, the Kargans, is threatened by human colonization of
their home planet. The crisis on Karg has been precipitated by the presence of a human colony which has co-existed with the
Kargans for years by ignoring their existence. However the humans non-native husbandry, agriculture, and imported foods are
poisoning the Kargan young. Eventual resolution is brought about, primarily through the actions of the human girl Disa, who has
grown up with Kargans (as part of her survey-team family) and is both fluent in their language and at home in their damp cave
environs. Ultimately, the solution arrived at by Disa and the Kargans is to change human biochemistry so they can survive on native
Kargan proteins. Overturning the xenophobic speciesism of humans thus effects a radical change in the human/nature relation,
where instead of changing the world to suit humans, human biological and environmental practices are altered to suit their new
environment. Such interventions into scientific and cultural discourses around nature and human are
intensified in texts where the boundaries between human and alien are destabilized through a
much more intimate encounter: where acting like the alien, performing an other subjectivity
equatesas in queer theorywith being the alien. Intimate and eroticized encounters with alien
others are a recurring motif in Naomi Mitchisons classic Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1976), which tells of the space-faring
communications expert and xenobiologist, Mary. The world of Memoirs is a tolerant one, and acceptance of others encompasses
race, species, fauna and animals. All life, even only potentially sentient life, is routinely treated with respect (to the extent that
scientists communicate with and obtain permission from animals such as dogs who consent to cooperate in experiments) (31).
Memoirs may be read very productively through a queer/ecofeminist lens: not only does the
spacewoman Mary have a sexualized relation with a Martian, she also twice becomes pregnant through alien encounters. As part
of an experiment with self-generating alien tissue to test for potential intelligence, Mary offers to host a graft of this particular alien.
Her body responds as if she were pregnant, and she perceives the graft (which she calls Ariel) in very intimate terms, as flesh of
*her+ flesh; she receives sensual enjoyment from their interactions: It liked to be as close as possible over the median line reaching
now to my mouth and inserting a pseudopodium delicately between my lips and elsewhere (54). Her second alien pregnancy is
activated by the Martian, Vly, producing the haploid not entirely human child Viola (67). Viola is a queer progeny indeed;
fathered by a hermaphrodite alien (who later becomes a mother itself *143+) through a primarily communicative actthe
standard sexed and gendered heteronormative system is certainly skewed in this particularly
unfaithful re-productive event. These intimate encounters with other natures also significantly
contaminate the boundaries between human and non-human. Other intimate and impure alien encounters
are found in Octavia Butlers XENOGENESIS trilogy, Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). Unlike Mitchisons text,
becoming other in these novels is not really a matter of choice, although the resulting symbiosis of human and alien is much more
extensive. Having rescued humans from an Earth which they have finally destroyed, the alien Oankali become midwives to a new
hybrid human/non-human species. From the organic and embodied nature of Oanakali biotechnology with which they effect this
transformation, to the nature of the Oankali-human relation itself, Xenogenesis exemplifies the destabilization of Latours
transforming/purifying practices signaled by hybrids, cross-species confusions, and monstrous bodies. As a species, the Oankali are,
as Haraway notes, compelled to cross and blur boundaries, engaging in dangerous intimacy across the boundaries of self and other
(Simians 227). On the surface, this boundary-crossing narrative seems to remain rigidly wedded to a
procreative heterosexuality, with no evidence of either human or alien homosexual relations. However, the
Oankali interventions into human reproduction, survival, and indeed human subjectivity (as
both individuals and species) constitute an overt critique of the othering tendency
encapsulated by our human/nature/culture distinctions. In this way, the XENOGENESIS trilogy suggests the
contours of a queered nature: the naturalness of human dominion over its world is revealed as a
nonsense when there is no world left (only an Oankali re-construction to return to); whilst the product of a
natural human reproduction has been replaced (through what initially resembles a breeding experiment) by a
literal construct of human and alien. In this alien encounter (at least for those that remain on Earth),
future survival necessitates both (sexually) being with and becoming the Other.

Science fiction produces a non-hierarchal world
Traditionally, sf narratives have been part of the proliferation of cultural narratives which have
demonized the Other (Pearson, Alien 6). In contrast, many eco/feminist sf texts turn this narrative on
its head, utilizing the alien as a way of normalizing the other and, conversely, demonizing the
human. Amy Thomsons The Color of Distance (1995) is one such text that invites us to take an othered perspective. It opens with the discovery of what appear to be
two strange-looking animals in the forest by one of the central characters, Ani: underneath the masklike head-covering was a flat, uninteresting face with a fleshy nose like a
birds beak, and a small mouth with fat, swollen lips.... *S+tripped the creature was ugly and clumsy-looking.... Its thick, awkward feet had tiny, weak toes, useless for climbing....
It lay there, laboring for breath like a dying fish. How could such a poorly adapted animal manage to survive? (2) We quickly realize that this ugly creature is in fact a human,
una, and that our viewpoint is that of the alien Tendu. Within the context of Tendu nature, the human is immediately othered as useless, poorly adapted and unnatural.
Humans cannot survive exposure to this alien environment and so in order to save Juna, the Tendu make changes to her body to bring it into alignment with what they perceive
as right and natural. Anis teacher, Ilto, changes unas body to enable her to live as the Tendu dogrowing a protective skin over her whole body, which undergoes other
physiological alterations such as to the colour of her skin (now a brilliant orange), the replacement of fingernails by claws, and the growth of fleshy spurs on her fore- arms. The
Tendu are expert healers and also, as Juna comes to realize, have highly advanced skills in bio-manipulation, using their own bodies rather than external technologies to monitor
and effect changes on a cellular level. unas transformationand her initial fearsclearly recall demonized alien invasion narratives. As Pearson observes of ohn Campbells
story, Who Goes There?, the conversion from human to alien is figured in bodily terms that are reminiscent of the sexual act, with the takeover figured in terms of both
consumption and consummation (Alien 7). Although una is not initially aware of it, the Tendus means of healing and transformation involve processes that reflect a similar
consumption/consummation. They penetrate her body with their fleshy red spurs in the process of linking or allu-a, the form of intense communication used by the Tendu
both with each other and to explore other genetic and cellular beings and information. Not surprisingly, unas first conscious experience of allu-a terrifies her: Then its wrist
spur pricked her arm, and she was unable to move.... She could feel a presence moving through her like a chill in the blood. It felt as if slimy hands were fingering her flesh from
the inside. Enmeshed in a cocoon of passivity, she could only sit in paralyzed terror as an alien presence took over her body. (25) The resonances with sexualized
penetration/consumption are reinforced as una immediately links this alien violation to a childhood memory of being raped, the whole experience made even more abhorrent
to her as the Tendu subsume her fears and replace them with feelings of euphoria. unas perceptions of allu-a change gradually throughout the book, as she becomes more
attuned to Tendu culture and world. Whilst the sexualized undertones remain, they come to signify more a becoming alien, rather than invasion. This process of becoming
alien is highlighted by Thomsons use of alternating narrative voices: Anito refers to una continually as the new creature and is initially hostile and dismissive of her clumsiness
and lack of intelligence, while from unas perspective the need to survive by living in trees, eating raw food, and sleeping in leaf nests signals the dissolution of her humanity.
From her changed body to the daily rhythms of her new life, the narrative charts a progressive and increasing alienation as una sheds (or loses) her humanness. To survive,
understand, and participate in this world, she must become part of it, must become alien. But from the perspective of the Tendus world, this is a reverse otheringJuna
moves from a state of otherness and disharmony as human to that of oneness and harmony.5 The rendering of una as alien is made explicit when the human Survey finally
returns for her after four years, and she is mistaken for one of the aliens. An ecofeminist perspective on this process of alienation
emphasizes the fact that it functions not just to reveal or privilege the other, but to recognize
and indeed valorize a very different way of being in the worldspecifically, a non-hierarchical
and non-colonizing way of thinking about nature. Gaard argues that a primary thread linking
ecofeminism and queer theory is the observation that dominant Western cultures devaluation
of the erotic parallels its devaluations of women and of nature (Gaard, Toward a Queer 115). That is, a queer
ecofeminist perspective alerts us to both the gendered and natured character of the
reason/eroticism binary. In eco/feminist sf, alien ontologies often suggest more eroticized,
involved, and non-differentiated understandings of natureand thus different life or biological
technosciences. For the Tendu, knowledge is enacted throughand inthe body: they literally write on their bodies (communicating through skin speech), and
taste and communicate cellular and genetic information within their bodies. Their biotechnology is embodied, intimate, tactile indeed sensual. Because of the way they know
their world or apprehend the natural (in both its metaphysical and realist senses), the Tendu do not employ purifying practices to delineate themselves from other species or
actors in their world. They live in a carefully managed system of environmental sustainability and responsibility, with themselves as only one part of a system that must exist in
balance. Indeed this managerial responsibility extends to severe self-correction in their own species: at some time in their past, as their numbers threatened the environment,
they released a bio-engineered virus which eliminated half the Tendu population(336). The Tendus responsibilities to the ecosystem are formalized through the central cultural
notion of atwa. Every adult Tendu must choose a portion of their worldwhether it be a group of plants or animals, or a particular tree-based ecosystemto be their atwa,
and must make sure that their part of the word is in harmony and balance with all of the other parts (206). Anito/Anis atwa becomes Juna and the other humans, which gives
rise to an exchange which dramatizes the still-lingering differences between human and Tendu notions of self/other and culture/nature. Juna does not understand how she can
be the subject of an atwa: Im not a plant, or animal. Im a person. Anito replies: What you say is impossible! You eat, you drink, you shit. How can you say that youre not an
animal? Yes, Eerin *una+ told her, I am an animal, my people are animals, but we are different from other animals. We change the world we live in. We make things. Anitos
ears spread even wider. The new creature seemed to believe that it was separate from the world it lived in. (206) This exchange clearly dramatizes the difference between
traditional scientific objectivitythe belief that we know reality because we are separated from itand the Tendu perspective, which answers N. Katherine Hayles question,
What happens if we begin from the opposite premise, that we know the world because we are connected to it? (Hayles 16).6 Thomsons critique of this differentiating,
externalized, and dominating approach to nature is stated even more overtly in the sequel to The Color of Distance, Through Alien Eyes (1999), as Ukatonen compares his
peoples worldview to ours: How strange to look at the world as humans did, as a thing to fight against, to
alter, as though it were made of clay and could be molded without consequences (360).

Solves Environment
Science fiction allows for an interrogation of the effect of technologist discourse
on the environment
Smits, 6 - professor at Radboud University Nijmegen (Martijntje, November 2
nd
, 2006, Science
Fiction: A Credible Resource for Critical Knowledge? Bulletin of Science Technology & Society
2006 26: 52, National Association for Science, Technology & Society
http://bst.sagepub.com/content/26/6/521.full.pdf)//gingE
However, in postulating the positive function of SF for informing us on future risks, Dinello neglects to discuss the possibility that
SF in general might contain as much myth as technologism does and that its main significance
might be more in reinforcing myth than in informing us about the more real and prosaic dangers
of new technologies. The prime significance of myth, like that of religious myth, generally is in grasping
human suffering and the relationships of man and world in a story that offers us a sense of order
and meaning. The storylines of salvation and doom are a vast constant in religious as well as
secular myth: In a world of continuous, often revolutionary social transformations, devastating wars, and ecological hor- rors,
there remains ample motivation to continue to assuage and explain suffering through the
construction of symbolic, highly charged, and cognitively simplified myths, even when such religious
ideologies are constructed in decidedly post-metaphysical ways. (Alexander & Smith, 1996, p. 258) In this way, most SF seems
captured as much in the quasi-religious discourse of salvation and doom as technologism does.
Both genres imagine either our dreams or our nightmares, more than telling us anything about the actual state of affairs in our
technological culture, about the complex networks of humans and things and their ambivalences and changing values. Thus, SF
and technologism might be much more closely related than Dinello admits. Instead of the one being a
solid source of criticism for the other, they appear as two sides of the same kind of quasi-
religious logic. Even more so, because both build on at least three shared assumptions that have
long been contested in STS: Both technologism and SF stories generally assume (a) that the
relationship between technology and social effects is linear (new technology automati- cally has benign or bad
effects on humans, nature or society), (b) that technology is an autonomous force that one cannot steer in
alternative directions, and (c) that nature and technology, or humans and technology, are
mutually exclusive categories whose offspring, often called cyborgs, are either embraced
(utopism) or abhoned (dystopism). Instead, STS scholars would state that actual relations between technology and
society are complex and quite unpredictable and that there are many possible outcomes, of which SFs worst-case scenarios are but
one. These insights could have inspired Dinello to develop his central questions in a more subtle way. With much emphasis, Dinello
promises a focused perspective on the most important question of the twenty-first century: Is technology out of control ?
Unfortunately, Dinello does not explain his conviction that this is the most important question. Instead, he predictably refers to the
classic plot prevalent in SF since the publication of Frankenstein, Mary Shel1eys 1818 novel: technology, designed by
humans to master nature and get rid of necessity, dramatically turning into its opposite, taking
over power and enslaving humans by making them dependent on technology and taking away
their freedom once again.
Science fiction incorporates a subjectivity that changes our orientation towards
the natural world
For women science fiction writers, a science that incorporates subjectivity and sees humans in
partnership with nature would also emphasize relational thinking and acknowledge a
responsibility to understand the complexity of the whole. In Piercy's utopian future, Luciente explains that
"We're cautious about gross experiments. 'In biosystems, all factors are not knowable.' First rule we learn when
studying living beings in relation." Even physics is presented as based on relations, as aiming at complexity. In Le Guin's The
Dispossessed(1974), the physicist Shevek reaches for a theory of time that relates the cyclical to the linear: "We don't want
purity, but complexity," he urges; "A complexity that includes not only duration but creation,
not only being but becoming, not only geometry, but ethics."26 Such a new science, not
analytical and objectively distanced, but holistic and connected to people and other living
beings, would necessarily be organized differently from our current science. According to Joan Roths-
child, it would question our current "technological ideals": "that bigness equals efficiency, that a high degree of specialization is
always necessary, that value be placed on quantity criteria, that specialist elites must be created." Such questioning is
worked out at length in Mitchison's second science fiction novel, Solution Three (1975), where a future
earth that has bred specialized plants finds its entire flora threatened by a virus and sends
scientists back to nature to gather a larger less specialized gene pool. And much women's science fiction
from Herland (1915) to Woman on the Edge of Time (1975) to A Door into Ocean (1986) imagines technology
depending not on bigness but on a sustained yield, one which does not deplete the earth and
her resources. "Our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours," says Luciente in Piercy's
novel; "We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste . . . nothing. You
might say our-you'd say religion?-ideas make us see ourselves as partners with water, air, birds, fish, trees." An emphasis on a
science situated in a decentralized, nonhierarchical society, and operated as a craft industry
creates a special problem for recent women novelists, who seem to traditional science fiction
fans to be antiscience reactionaries. In Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985), in the postholocaust Kest society,
computer technology is used mainly for aesthetic purposes, and other sciences and technologies are developed in homes and
through apprentice systems. In Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean (1986), the invaders from Valedon have
trouble recognizing the scientists and the laboratories, since scientists are not labelled by dress,
and science is practised as a craft industry with organic rather than mechanical tools. Perhaps
the placing of science in the homes of these peoples is important symbolically for the authors:
the place of science indicates communal responsibility for its outcomes.27
SF creates a necessary and complex relationship to nature and experience
Jameson 82 (Fredric Jameson, Professor of Literature at Duke University, "Progress versus
Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?" JSTOR, Science Fiction Studies, Vol 9, No 2, pages 148-
149,http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4239476?uid=3739728&uid=2&uid=4&uid=373925
6&sid=21104262293187)//LC
If I cannot accept this account of SF, it is at least in part because it seems to me that, for all kinds
of reasons, we no longer entertain such visions of wonder-working, properly "S-F" futures of
technological automation. These visions are themselves now historical and dated-streamlined
cities of the future on peeling murals-while our lived experience of our greatest metropolises is
one of urban decay and blight. That particular Utopian future has in other words turned out to
have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past. Yet, even if this is
the case, it might at best signal a transformation in the historical function of present-day SF. In
reality, the relationship of this form of representation, this specific narrative apparatus, to its
ostensible content-the future-has always been more complex than this. For the apparent
realism, or representationality, of SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal
structure: not to give us "images" of the future-whatever such images might mean for a reader
who will necessarily predecease their "materialization"-but rather to defamiliarize and
restructure our experience of our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all
other forms of defamiliarization. From the great intergalactic empires of an Asimov, or the
devastated and sterile Earth of the post-catastrophe novels of a John Wyndham, all the way
back in time to the nearer future of the organ banks and space miners of a Larry Niven, or the
conapts, autofabs, or psycho-suitcases of the universe of Philip K. Dick, all such apparently full
representations function in a process of distraction and displacement, repression and lateral
perceptual renewal, which has its analogies in other forms of contemporary culture. Proust was
only the most monumental "high" literary expression of this discovery: that the present-in this
society, and in the physical and psychic dissociation of the human subjects who inhabit it-is
inaccessible directly, is numb, habituated, empty of affect. Elaborate strategies of indirection
are therefore necessary if we are somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to
"experience," for some first and real time, this "present," which is after all all we have. In
Proust, the retrospective fiction of memory and rewriting after the fact is mobilized in order for
the intensity of a now merely remembered present to be experienced in some time-released
and utterly unexpected posthumous actuality.
Reorienting science to be inclusive would be transformative
Donawerth 90- Ph.D., University of Wisconsin Madison, Director of Writing Programs;
Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at University of Maryland (ane, Autumn 1990, Contemporary
Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction by Women, NWSA ournal, Stor)//LC
For women science fiction writers, a science that incorporates subjectivity and sees humans in
partnership with nature would also emphasize relational thinking and acknowledge a
responsibility to understand the complexity of the whole. In Piercy's utopian future, Luciente
explains that "We're cautious about gross experiments. 'In biosystems, all factors are not
knowable.' First rule we learn when studying living beings in relation." Even physics is presented
as based on relations, as aiming at complexity. In Le Guin's The Dispossessed(1974), the
physicist Shevek reaches for a theory of time that relates the cyclical to the linear: "We don't
want purity, but complexity," he urges; "A complexity that includes not only duration but
creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry, but ethics."26 Such a new science,
not analytical and objectively distanced, but holistic and connected to people and other living
beings, would necessarily be organized differently from our current science. According to Joan
Roths- child, it would question our current "technological ideals": "that bigness equals
efficiency, that a high degree of specialization is always necessary, that value be placed on
quantity criteria, that specialist elites must be created." Such questioning is worked out at
length in Mitchison's second science fiction novel, Solution Three (1975), where a future earth
that has bred specialized plants finds its entire flora threatened by a virus and sends scientists
back to nature to gather a larger less specialized gene pool. And much women's science fiction
from Herland (1915) to Woman on the Edge of Time (1975) to A Door into Ocean (1986)
imagines technology depending not on bigness but on a sustained yield, one which does not
deplete the earth and her resources. "Our technology did not develop in a straight line from
yours," says Luciente in Piercy's novel; "We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We
can afford to waste . . . nothing. You might say our-you'd say religion?-ideas make us see
ourselves as partners with water, air, birds, fish, trees." An emphasis on a science situated in a
decentralized, nonhierarchical society, and operated as a craft industry creates a special
problem for recent women novelists, who seem to traditional science fiction fans to be
antiscience reactionaries. In Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985), in the postholocaust Kest
society, computer technology is used mainly for aesthetic purposes, and other sciences and
technologies are developed in homes and through apprentice systems. In Slonczewski's A Door
into Ocean (1986), the invaders from Valedon have trouble recognizing the scientists and the
laboratories, since scientists are not labelled by dress, and science is practised as a craft industry
with organic rather than mechanical tools. Perhaps the placing of science in the homes of these
peoples is important symbolically for the authors: the place of science indicates communal
responsibility for its outcomes.27

Solves Fem
SF is a form of feminist epistemology that connects knowledge with the
observable world
Kember 11- Professor of New Technologies of Communications, University of London (Sarah, 9-
07, No humans allowed? The alien in/as feminist theory, Sage)//LC
An ethics of relationality is emerging from the confluence between philosophy, science and
technology studies and trans/disciplinary feminist theory. Specifically, it is developing from a
critique of humanism, scientific realism and agency as autonomy. For Braidotti, Barad, Haraway
and Suchman, for example, agency is not something we humans possess and can therefore pass
to other entities such as machines, but rather it is something that happens or is created through
intraactions between entities that do not pre-exist them (Braidotti, 2006; Barad, 2007; Haraway,
2008; Suchman, 2007).2 These entities humans, machines and so on are not then
autonomous, but strictly relational. This is what Braidotti means when she says that: Nobody
and no particle of matter is independent and self-propelled, in nature as in the social (Braidotti,
2006: 6). Agency is a matter of entanglement, where: To be entangled is not simply to be
intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-
contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. (Barad, 2007: ix) We are beginning to
examine the ethical implications of these statements. If a traditional, humanist ethics is rooted
in the idea of the autonomous individual, then what, we are asking, might an ethics of
relationality or entanglement look like? Barad marks the connection between these concerns
and earlier feminist critiques of epistemology. Even atoms, she reminds us, are not atomic. We
once thought that they were the basic, indivisible units of life until we split them and
discovered a veritable zoo of subatomic particles (Barad, 2007: 254). These particles, with
their exotic names (quarks, neutrinos, muons) and elusive appearance resist our attempts at
realism (we cannot be said to have simply, unproblematically, discovered them) and idealism
(neither did we simply make them up). They are, in other words, neither outside nor inside us.
They do not exist objectively or subjectively. Rather, their existence is entangled with our own,
and this entanglement happens somewhere between for Barad, halfway between what we
normally think of as the object world and the world of human subjects. This, as Barad learned
from the physicist Niels Bohr, somewhat complicates practices of observation, representation
and the generation of scientific knowledge traditionally founded on the separation of subjects
and objects, observers and observed. For Haraway, this kind of knowledge is a myth, even a
trick. The god-trick, the trick of seeing everything from nowhere, is gendered, transcendent,
based on the splitting of subject and object, knower and known (1991). Haraway aims to
reconnect these entities in her feminist alternative or successor science, based on a different,
non-dualistic, non-hierarchical epistemology that she refers to as situated knowledge (1991).
Situated knowledge reconnects the observing subject with the observable world, and this
reconnection is ethical as much as it is epistemological. Not only is it a better guarantor of
objectivity, but, optimally, it makes us as knowing subjects more responsible and more
accountable for what we learn and how to see (Haraway, 1991: 190). Barads so-called ethico-
epistem-onto-logy of agential realism owes a great deal to Haraways formulation of situated
knowledge. In Barads account, then: scientific practices do not reveal what is already there;
rather, what is disclosed *or discovered+ is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our
participation with/in and as part of the worlds differential becoming. Which is not to say that
humans are the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. (Barad, 2007: 361,
emphasis in original) Humans are not the condition of possibility for the existence of
phenomena like atoms or aliens, molecules or machines, because we are always already part of
those phenomena. The problem and this is implicit in, as well as being the premise of the
emergent ethics of relationality lies in our tendency to deny that we exist only within and as
part of an ongoing process of becoming, and to continually reassert a separate and relatively
static ontology of being (of being human, being our selves). For Bergson, this intellectual
tendency is dominant if not overpowering (1998). It results, as Suchman points out, in the
reassertion of species and individual autonomy (2007). I have looked at how this reassertion of
autonomy, of what refers to as life-as-we-know-it operates in the context of the quest for life
on Mars Christopher Langton (1996: 40). Before I discuss this, I want to consider, for a moment,
the ethical alternative to deand then re-territorialisation, deand then re-humanisation (Derrida
and Stiegler, 2002; Kember, 2003; Suchman, 2007). For Derrida, the ethical alternative or the
alternative ethics is founded on what he calls hospitality or the openness of the human subject
at home to the outside, to the other (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000). For him, experience is
always the experience of the other which is why we should not lose sight of it by
counterposing realism with idealism and the other is by no means exclusively the other human
(Derrida and Stiegler, 2002). Joanna Zylinska picks up on this in her book on bioethics3 that
outlines: a nonhumanist bioethical framework that does not negate the singularity of the
human but that interrogates the humans privileged position in the dynamic system of relations
with other living creatures and nonanimate beings. (Zylinska, 2009: xi) In questioning the role of
the human as a starting point for ethical debate and as an entity with an a priori value, she does
not mean to shift the focus or the priority to the animal or to the machine instead (she is not
promoting animal rights, for example). Rather, she sets out to explore the differential relation
between the human and the nonhuman, with the human emerging via, and in relation to,
technology (Zylinska, 2009: xii, emphasis in original). Technology, then, is constitutive of the
human and not something added to, or taken away from it. Moreover, the differential relation
between human and technology, whilst originary, is intensifying in the age of new media to the
point where the surface of the body (and I would add, the interior) is in a process of becoming
increasingly media/ted (Stiegler, 1994).
Specifically, female written science fiction presences women and combats their
exclusion from the scientific community
The concern for increased participation by women in science has an analogous utopian
reflection in science fiction by women. A crucial difference between the science depicted in
men's science fiction and women's science fiction is, quite simply, the participation of women. In
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Darko Suvin has rightfully pointed out the lack of women scientists in American science fiction
(but failed to add that he had read almost exclusively science fiction by men). Since at least the early 1960s, women
writers have regularly characterized women as scientists; examples include Mary, biologist and specialist in
alien communication in Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962); the biologist Takver and the physicist Mitis in Ursula
K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974); Kira, biologist, M.D., and "the de facto head of her department at the university" in Pamela
Sargent's Cloned Lives (1972-76); Margaret, the black computer expert in Up the Walls of the World (1978) by James Tiptree, Jr.
(Alice Sheldon); Varian, vet- erinary xenobiologist and co-leader of the expedition in Anne Mc- Caffrey's Dinosaur Planet Survivors
(1984); and Jeanne Velory, black physicist and astronaut in Vonda McIntyre's Barbary (1986). Even the earliest woman writer for the
pulp magazines, Clare Winger Harris, in a 1928 short story, includes a woman scientist: Hildreth, chemist and astronomer, assistant
to her father in his home laboratory and soon to be assistant to her new husband. This interest of women science
fiction writers in women scientists seems not only a result of changes in women's careers in the
1960s but also of the struggle to educate women in the sciences in the late nineteenth century.4
Women scientists as characters in women's science fiction, moreover, seem a legacy of the
earlier feminist utopias. In Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora (1880-81), for example, chemists and mechanical engineers make
the all-woman society a technological utopia. And in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), female geneticists have bred crop-
producing and disease-resistant trees, as well as quiet cats that do not kill birds, while other women have developed sciences
unknown to Gilman's contemporaries-language as a science, sanitation, nutrition, and a kind of psychology-history. The
feminist utopias, as well as contemporary wom-en's science fiction, make us see a history of
women in science, not just a few great women who seem to be historical anomalies. In one of the
earliest feminist utopias, ThreeHundred YearsHence (1836), written when most women were still denied college educations, Mary
Griffith shows a future historian relating a woman's invention of a new power that replaces steam, as well as restoring proper credit
to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "for introducing into England the practice of inoculation for the small-pox." Such a vision of
restoring women to the history of science is shared by Naomi Mitchison in Memoirs of a Spacewoman;her hero Mary reflects: I may
be out of date, but I always feel that biology and, of course, communication are essentially women's work, and glory. Yes, I know
there have been physicists like Yin Ih and molecular astronomers-I remember old Jane Rakadsalismyself, her wonderful black,
ageless face opening into a great smile! But somehow the disciplines of life seem more congenial to most of us women.5 In 1962,
when many colleges were still effectually segregated by race and want ads were still separated by gender into male and female
occupations, Mitchison presents, as a matter of course, the participation of women of color in science.
What these utopian and science fiction writers offer, more importantly than portraits of
individual women scientists, is a revision of past and future science history that includes women
as rightful participants. In this way, they share a goal with feminist historians of science.
Science fiction is used as a utopian medium for female writers to construct a
world with reversed gender roles
Because they see science as contingent upon the values of its society, and gender as based on
value, women science fiction writers frequently exploit the irony of a future science that
supports reversed sexual bias as natural, showing the male to be inferior or limited in his role. In
C.J. Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur (1982), the spaceship captain Pyanfar sadly reflects on her
society's conception of the male as innately limited by his gender: "Nature. Nature that made
males useless, too high-strung to go offworld, to hold any position of responsibility beyond the
estates. Nature that robbed them of sense and stability. Or an upbringing that did." In Pamela
Sargent's The Shore of Women (1986), the aristocratic Laissa reflects on her studies of history
and science: "men had a pro- pensity for violence that was both genetic and hormonal. The
biological well-being of humankind as a whole required some of their qualities, but the survival
of civilization demanded that women, who were less driven and able to channel their
aggressiveness constructively, remain in control." These writers do not simply reverse the role
assigned to males; instead, they simply reverse the bias in education and science, imagining the
roles as innate and the male role as limiting, destructive, and inferior. They expose, as do
contemporary feminist science theorists, gender roles as social constructs and our science as
dependent on our society's gender expectations, thus helping us to doubt biological de-
terminism. Indeed, in both Cherryh's and Sargent's novels, a major plot movement is the
liberation of males from these social stereotypes.9

Solves Reproductive Futurism
The figure of the alien disrupts the both Oedipal and reproductive futural
complexes
So what are the consequences of this othering of humans and the move towards more intimate,
eroticized encounters with others and nature? As noted above, allu-athe process of linkingis one of
the most sexualized encounters between human and alien in Thomsons two novels: The link made her feel
incredibly vulnerable, as though there were no boundaries between herself and the aliens.... Her loins
throbbed with sexual heat (Color 197). In all her years on the alien planet Tiangi, unas only physical, sensual, and emotive connections come through allu-a with the Tendu;
thus allu-a substitutes for or functions as the only form of sexuality available to her. As linking most often incorporates her friend/mentor Anito, the enkar male Ukatonen, and
her bami/adopted son Moki, it escapes and confounds any easy hetero/homo divide. These intimate encounters with nature (in the form of
both Tiangi and the Tendu) are thus far from being de-eroticized and monolithically heterosexual (Sandilands,
Unnatural Passions 33). Crucially, the eroticization that takes place here is not the objectivist subjugation of
nature by the masculinized (heterosexist) culture criticized by Gaard (131). In becoming the other, unas
perceptions, understandings, and very physiology challenge traditional notions of what counts
as human and what counts as nature. Indeed the intimate, multiple, and non-heterosexual links Juna shares with the Tendu are contrasted
unfavourably with human heterosexual acts: una reflects that while she enjoys sex with (human) Bruce, she wished they could have linked so she could share how good it felt
(Through Alien Eyes 447). We are left with the strong impression that unas emotional and physical linking with the Tendu is more intense and ultimately more satisfying than
(human heterosexual) copulation. And whilst the Tendu are two-sexed, intimacy and sensuality are disconnected from reproduction, producing very different familial and social
ties. Junas own experiences when with the Tendu in many ways renders her gender irrelevant in terms of her status as othered /alien human (although there is subtext that her
male equivalents, especially male alien-contact specialists, would not have been as able to take on a sufficiently non- normative subjectivity to integrate into and understand
Tendu society). In the sequel, however, Juna returns to earth (with her bami Moki and the enkar Ukatonen) and both she and the narrative appear to be reinscribed into
dominant heteronormative, rational, mechanistic, and patriarchal norms. This is most evident in the changed relationship between Juna and Bruce. In Color, Bruce is an
empathetic character, who does not react in a xenophobic way either to unas alien body or to the Tendu themselves; he provides some good sex, but also and more
importantly he provides comfort and support. In the sequel, he becomes one of the more xenophobic, removed, and unlikable of the characters. Back on Earth, unas only
human sexual encounters are with Bruce and, indeed, beyond examples of strong homosocial bonds between women, only heterosexuality seems in evidence. It appears that
the othering of the human and renegotiated relation with nature cannot be sustained once una (and perhaps the author herself) leaves Tiangi: in traveling back to Earth the
narrative is constrained and reincorporated into a (straight, male, scientific) human-centric perspective on nature, sex, and sexuality. However, there are still
possibilities in the text for reading against the traditional heterosexual grain of the narrative, if
we turn our attention to the intersections of gendered sexuality with relations of sociality,
specifically with ideas and structures of family and kinship. Alien Kin? Queered kinship and companion species I tend to think in
terms of kinship systems more than oppositions. It is a kinship system that does damage to our notions of nature, surely, but also to our notions of culture, so that neither
nature nor culture emerges unscathed from our meditations on these modes of being (Haraway, Birth of the Kennel) In this final section, I want to consider briefly the
idea of queered kinship, and how it might function as a metaphor for thinking through a
queered ecofeminist perspective on naturecultures (in Haraways words *from Birth of the Kennel? give title, even if no page
number). Certainly from both an ecofeminist as well as a queer perspective it seems more
appropriate to think in terms of the translation mode of kinship, rather than the purifying
mode of oppositions, to recall Latours distinction. Recently, spurred by heated and difficult debates over gay marriage and childrearing, udith Butler has
argued that it is politically and theoretically necessary to attend to notions of kinship as we negotiate
contemporary changes in family structures away from the heterosexual norm toward what she
describes as post-Oedipal kinship (cited in Campbell 645 ). As Butler notes, debates on gay marriage and kinship have become sites of intense
displacement for other political fears ... fears that feminism ... has effectively opened up kinship outside the family, opened it to strangers (Kinship21). Indeed, drawing on
Haraway and ecofeminist theorists [such as whom?], we might reflect that certain feminists have indeed opened up
kinship to include even non-human strangers. Butler traces the radical changes in
contemporary anthropological practice and resulting theories of kinship, which have moved
from the concept of a natural relation to the more performative notion that kinship is itself a
kind of doing, a practice of self-conscious assemblage: Debates about the distinction between
nature and culture, which are clearly heightened when the distinctions between animal, human,
machine, hybrid, and cyborg remain unsettled, become figured at the site of kinship, for even a theory of
kinship that is radically culturalist frames itself against a discredited nature and so remains in a constitutive and definitional relation to that which it claims to transcend.
(Butler, Kinship 37) There are obvious resonances here with Haraways more recent approach to such
questions, which she figures under the rubric companion species; this is her replacement for
the cyborg as figure for telling her story of co-habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-
species sociality (Companion Species 4).7 A narrative for cross-species sociality which might result in
queered kin seems a highly appropriate aid for re-reading and potentially destabilzing the
heteronormative surface of ecofeminist stories of alien-human encounters. From this perspective, even those
texts where the demands of reproduction produce reinscriptions of heteronormativity might offer alternatives to, or a break in [in what sense a break?+, oedipal
heterosexual kinship patterns, especially where they cross species boundaries. For, as Butler notes, the breakdown of traditional kinship not
only displaces the central place of biological and sexual relations from its definition, but gives
sexuality a separate domain from that of kinship (Kinship 37). Alternative kinship patterns are of
course a familiar theme in sf, featuring in the well- known work of Le Guin, Delany, and Octavia Butler, among many others.8 In Color and Through Alien
Eyes (1999), extended kinship patterns amongst humans are evident: group marriages of at least six people (and often more) are apparently the norm in Thomsons future and
are not confined to internal monogamous male/female partnerships. By the close of Through Alien Eyes, unas daughter Mariam is emerging into a very queer set of kin indeed.
As well as numerous human parents, there are her alien brother Moki and Tendu uncle Ukatonen, a kinship which is formalized when Juna, Mariam, and the Tendu are
accepted into a group marriage (that includes unas brother). And while she is purely human born, Mariam certainly does not recreate the image of her father; having been
linked with the Tendu since the womb, she is, if not some half-alien thing as her father fears (161), certainly not just human. Group marriages blending different species are
also a common feature of the society depicted in Steussys Dreams of Dawn, which can include pairs and single humans of either sex, and in the specific case of Dawn circle a
non-gendered alien sheppie and two female Kargans plus their groundlings. In Dawn, companionable and even loving relations between human and alien are seen as a normal
consequence of such queered families: such attachments werent unusual for children raised in the multispecies kinship of a First-In circle (Steussy 2). Thinking about queered
notions of kinship that involve human and non-human others also provides different perspectives on Octavia Butlers XENOGENESIS series. Not for nothing are the ooloi, the
Oankali third sex, known as treasured strangers (104). One crucial function of the Oankali third sex in the reproductive/genetic mixing of Oankali young is to ensure that
sufficient diversity emerges from the very close male/female dyad who are often siblings. A strangely compounded two-sex system this
may be, but even in this small fact it challenges familial notions of kinship and sexuality; even
more so when humans are added to form the five person, three-sexed, two species construct
family. Quite apart from the very different conjugal or reproductive functioning of this queer family, traditional social and emotive relations
are also disrupted. For the human couples, as for the Oankali, the intense emotional and psychological male-female relation enabled and mediated by the ooloi
essentially disallows heterosexual intercourseor indeed any kind of touching. In an interesting homosocial spin on human/Oankali kinship, the only people one can in fact
touch each other are children or same- sex relatives. Pearsons reading of the figure of the hermaphrodite as a
Derridean supplement to the two-sex system in a number of sf texts is of interest here (Sex/uality).
Even when dealing with texts where the primacy of apparent reproductive need drives a
reinforcement of a biologically necessary heterosexuality, the introduction of supplementsin
the case of Butlers trilogy, the ooloias necessary to complete or bridge the reproductive heterosexual system
might, as Pearson notes, invite us to question whether the apparent plenitude of the two- sex
system ... does not also need supplementation ... in the so-called real world (Sex/uality 118). Indeed, when the
relations that bind are no longer traced to heterosexual procreation, the very homology between nature and culture ... tends to become undermined. (Butler, Kinship 39) What
might these alien biologies and encounters suggest about the potential for undermining or destabilizing the naturalized reinscription of heterosexual bio-social systems? Most
of the texts I have discussed do not seem to upset significantly the conventional sexualized binaries for their human characters, who are ultimately reinscribed into the
heterosexual code. However, the possibility of different formsboth biological and culturalof sexed and
gendered structures and societies are developed though the figure/s of the alien. Thus, even if
not entirely successful, the conjunction of alien possibilities with human re-containment
perhaps literalizes or figures the difficulty of escaping this binary within our current human
forms of thought, codes, social forms, and sciences. Science fiction has, in a sense, always occupied
the fault line between the two cultures. Its potential for queered eco/feminist disruptions
offers ways of telling new stories about nature, humans, and others that might disrupt
traditional and restrictive binaries of thought infecting our notions of nature/culture,
human/non-human, epistemology, and ontology. Feminist and sf stories of queer nature
might, if nothing else, help progress our difficult labor of forging a future from resources
inevitably impure (Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter 241).

Misc
Science Fiction is the best medium for understanding modernism
Jameson 82 (Fredric Jameson, Professor of Literature at Duke University, "Progress versus
Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?" JSTOR, Science Fiction Studies, Vol 9, No 2, pages 148-
149,http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4239476?uid=3739728&uid=2&uid=4&uid=373925
6&sid=21104262293187)//LC
It will, I trust, already have become clear that this ultimate "text" or object of study-the
master-narratives of the political unconscious-is a construct: it exists nowhere in
"empirical" form, and therefore must be re-constructed on the basis of empirical "texts" of all
sorts, in much the same way that the master-fantasies of the individual unconscious are
reconstructed through the fragmentary and symptomatic "texts" of dreams, values, behavior,
verbal free-association, and the like. This is to say that we must necessarily make a place for
the formal and textual mediations through which such deeper narratives find a partial
articulation. No serious literary critic today would suggest that content-whether social or
psychoanalytic-inscribes itself immediately and transparently on the works of "high"
literature: instead, the latter find themselves inserted in a complex and semi-autonomous
dynamic of their own-the history of forms-which has its own logic and whose relationship to
content per se is necessarily mediated, complex, and indirect (and takes very different
structural paths at different moments of formal as well as social development). It is perhaps less
widely accepted that the forms and texts of mass culture are fully as mediated as this: and
that here too, collective and political fantasies do not find some simple transparent
expression in this or that film or TV show. It would in my opinion be a mistake to make the
"apologia" for SF in terms of specifically "high" literary values-to try, in other words, to
recuperate this or that major text as exceptional, in much the same way as some
literary critics have tried to recuperate Hammett or Chandler for the lineage of
Dostoyevsky, say, or Faulkner. SF is a sub-genre with a complex and interesting formal history
of its own, and with its own dynamic, which is not that of high culture, but which stands in
a complementary and dialectical relationship to high culture or modernism as such. We must
therefore first make a detour through the dynamics of this specific form, with a view to
grasping its emergence as a formal and historical event.

2AC Queering Nature
Queering nature and challenging the natural, specifically from the figure of
the alien ruptures heteronormativity and its implications on nature
Queering Nature: Close Encounters with the Alien in Feminist Science Fiction *Q+ueering what counts as nature is my categorical
imperative....Donna Haraway, Cats Cradle, 60 Queering nature seems an appropriate theme for enquiries
into sexuality in science fiction, especially from the perspective of feminist and queer theories.
Whilst it may not immediately suggest an overt comment on sexualities, it is inarguable that nature as well as
culture is heavily implicated in our understandings and performances of sexuality.1 Indeed, just as
our constructions of sexuality (and the strictures of normative heterosexism) infuse every aspect of our
culture/s, so too do sexualized assumptions underpin our constructions of nature. And further, the
ways we think about nature impact upon and constrain our notions of sexuality. Wendy Pearson
observes that science fiction has the potential to interrogate the ways in which sexual subjectivities
are created as effects of the system that sustains them (Alien Cryptographies 18). I want to further her
argument to suggest that the variety of discourses and knowledges that have come to stand for (or take the place of) nature are
one such system. Attention to nature is an important facet of critical considerations of sexuality,
particularly considering the pre-eminence of the biological sciences in (over)determining the
category/ies of sex, and the fact that for many people ... sexualityand particularly
heterosexualitycan be envisioned only within the category of the natural (Pearson, Science Fiction
149). I want to re-visit the loaded space of the natural and consider how queering nature might further question
normative notions of sexuality and gender. Whilst queer theory obviously engages with nature on the level of
regulatory discourses around notions of biology, feminist science studies and ecofeminist theory have a particular (and different)
investment in the discursive positioning and uses of nature. Such theories are engaged in critiquing a broad range of biological and
life sciences in which the construction of human nature and nature are implicated in often unstable and contradictory ways.
Similarly, feminist sf texts may reflect on the ways in which we constitute and reproduce human
and nature, most strikingly through the familiar sf figure of the alien. In this essay, I focus on sf
stories which feature a central (and often sexualized) female/alien encounter; I explore, in
particular, how an othering of the human might queer nature through a close reading of Amy
Thomsons The Color of Distance (1995). In concluding, I consider how certain notions of kinship (as recently deployed
by Donna Haraway and udith Butler) might help advance the challenges to heteronormativity that are implicated in queering
nature.
Western scientific discourse is a normalization of naturequeering nature
opens up a space for an queer ecofeminist critique that ruptures those
normative understandings of nature in relation to performativity
The notion of kinship is also a useful way of reconceptualizing the relations among the three
theoretical threads informing my reading of queered nature. Ecofeminism might appear unlikely kin to
feminist science studies and queer theory, not least because many within the academy continue to view ecofeminism with some
suspicion as being overly essentialist (Sandilands, Mother Earth; Soper). And although ecofeminism and feminist
science studies arguably both stem from Carolyn Merchants classic The Death of Nature (1980), they
have developed along divergent discursive and political paths.2 Yet, partly in reaction to tensions between
ecofeminisms cultural and constructivist trends, critics such as Greta Gaard and Catriona Sandilands have
argued the need for a queered ecofeminism. An important driver for cross-fertilization between ecofeminism and
queer theory has been the failure of much ecofeminist and environmental politics to recognize its
heterosexismnot least in its figuration of a nature that is both actively de-eroticized and
monolithically heterosexual (Sandilands, Unnatural Passions 33). A queer ecofeminist perspective, in
contrast, argues that the naturalization of heterosexuality has been historically accompanied by
the heterosexualization of nature (Sandilands, Unnatural Passions 34); the very nature/culture relation
itself, which is mapped as feminine/masculine, becomes one of compulsory heterosexuality
(Toward a Queer 131). When nature is feminized it is also, Gaard notes, eroticized, an argument that appears to
contradict Sandilands characterization of nature as de-eroticized; this tension highlights the internal
contradictions and instabilities of such regulatory discursive regimes. That is, our knowing of
nature is de-eroticized through the mediation of the mechanized, objective, disembodied
discourses of traditional western sciences, even as the domination and subjugation of nature
allowed (even encouraged) through such knowledge puts it in the realm of the (eroticized) feminine
half of the nature/culture binary. Not surprisingly, such tensions are constantly evoked and expressed through sf, most
famously in what many consider its founding text, Frankenstein (1817): true to its Romantic influences, the text sets Victors pursuit
of technoscientific dominion against an ideological commitment to the natural sublime.3 The work of Gaard and Sandilands (among
others) suggests an ecofeminist approach that aligns with queer theory on a number of levels, particularly
in the need to move beyond the restrictive binaries of feminine/masculine and
hetero/homosexual. As with queer theory, gender is not situated in ecofeminist theories as the
privileged category of oppression. Rather, ecofeminism calls for a non-reductionist, interdisciplinary,
and synthesizing understanding of a whole series of interlocking relations, from gender to race, sexuality,
economics, globalism, and, of course, the environment. Both queer theory and ecofeminism
have as political goal and analytical method the assumption that (gender) identity is not fixed,
but is unstable, mutable, and fluid. Sandilands, for example, identifies the importance of what she terms
performative affinity for a political project such as ecofeminism, where material ecological goals, and an
emphasis on a multiplicity of political affinities with numerous others, results in a recognition of the failure of the
term woman to act as a content-filled subject position (Sandilands, Mother Earth 29). A queered
ecofeminist performative affinity relies, Sandilands argues, on the insertion of a strongly parodic
understanding of nature and its discourses (Mother Earth 33). Such performative affinities
between women and naturewhich allow*s+ for the possibility of each to disrupt the other
(Sandilands, Mother Earth 36)recall the kinds of subversive repetition that Butler suggests might call into question the
regulatory practice of identity itself (Gender Trouble 32). Subverting or disrupting gendered and sexed identity
and the category woman thus requires, in a queer ecofeminism, a disruptionor queeringof
nature: To queer nature, in this context, is to question its normative use, to interrogate relations of
knowledge and power by which certain truths about ourselves have been allowed to pass
without question (Sandilands, Mother Earth 37). At the heart of a queer-ecofeminist reading, then, is a sustained attention
to the ongoing re/inscriptions of the nature/culture binary in our understandings of sexed and gendered subjectivities (and
embodiment), particularly as regulated and constrained through the narratives of western scientific
discourse.
Reject the notion that natural means dimorphism- queering nature means
recognizing gender as non-binary
Garrard 10- Associate Professor, Sustainability, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies: The
University of British Columbia (Greg, Winter, How Queer Is Green? Project Muse pp. 73-
96)//LC
One of the defining characteristics of crude deconstructionism, as Richard Rorty long ago
observed, is its habit of setting up a patsy who believes in something simplistic (identity of
word and meaning, or whatever) so that the cunning critic can expose the restless tensions and
proliferating contradictions in his assumptions. So it is with queer ecocriticism: popular belief in
an ideal, natural sexual dichotomy, rather than the far more complex view of actual biologists,
is subverted by the truth of sexual and gender diversity. As Hird points out in Animal Trans: in
so far as most plants are in- tersex, most fungi have multiple sexes, many species transsex, and
bacteria completely defy notions of sexual difference, . . . the majority of living organisms on
this planet would make little sense of the human classification of two sexes.34 No doubt the
incomprehension of fungi, which can have thousands of sexes, and humans, who have
approximately two, would be mutual. The operative question for queer ecology, though, is
rather, what sort of species are we? Hird admits that *i+t might be argued that sexual
dimorphism is a characteristic of higher life forms and that sex diversity is reserved for lower
organisms, but she responds that this hierarchical taxonomy invokes the worst kind of
anthropomorphism.35 Get rid of the tendentiously teleological term higher and replace it
with the neutral phrase more differentiated, though, and her objection collapses. Sexual
reproduction seems to make more highly differentiated organisms possible and results, also,
in some degree of dimorphism. In fact, as Jared Diamond shows, using a graphic-yet-coy
illustration of the relationship of dimorphic body size to that of primate sex organs in The Rise
and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, humans are midway in terms of sexual differentiation
between highly dimorphic gorillas and massively bisexual bonobos, among whom male and
female are difficult to distinguish by secondary characteristics.36 (Human males may be
reassured to know that, given our average body mass relative to women, we have medium-sized
testicles though surprisingly large penises.) Gorillas, moreover, seem to maintain dimorphic
anatomy and sexist social order without the aid of oppressive discourse.

2AC - Impacts
Domination of Nature Bad
Earth is not something that can be dominatedrather, we must find new
modes of interaction with it
Joronen, 11 PhD, University teacher in department of geography at University of Turku
(Mikko, Vol. 43, No. 4, Dwelling in the sites of finitude: resisting the violence of the
metaphysical globe, pp 1127-1154)//gingE
In spite of the revolutionary sense of power-free letting-be, our role as the ones who let being make its transformation
poses a number of questions concerning our part in this radical turning from ontological
violence to the other beginning of abyssal being. What exactly is our relation to the finitude of
being? Should we only wait for the end of the prevailing mode of being and thus hope for a new sending of being? At least Heideggers comment in his posthumously
published Der Spiegel interview about only god (ie a new sending of being) being capable of saving us seems to imply this, apparently leaving little room for human activism
(Heidegger 1993b:107; see also Schatzki 2007:32). Hence, is our part just to question the prevailing unfolding and so to wait for the new sending, the other beginning, the new
arrival of being? First of all, it is crucial to recognise that waiting for the world-historical turning is not
inactivity but a revolution that turns power-free thinking into praxis. It is a non-violent revolution, which can take many
forms of activism, such as disobedience and protests. In fact, Dallmayr (2001:267) even compares this praxis of non-violent resistance with the paths of Gandhi and Martin
Luther King, Jr. Altogether, as Malpas (2006:300) writes, there is no reason why the world-historical turning of being
cannot be awaited through political activism, as long as it avoids being taken up by a machinational mode of unfolding and thus remains
non-violent and aware of its limitedness and finitude (see also Irwin 2008:170, 188189). Secondly, it is important that Heidegger relates
our letting-be-like recognition of abyssal being to the earth aspect of the site where things show
themselves. The unconcealment of the abyssal ground, the unveiling of the abundant being concealed by the limits of particular world-disclosures, is also an
unconcealment of the earth, since the material things that the earth provides are never emptied into present world-disclosure. Earth rather stands in
strife against every particular rationalisation made by particular world-disclosures. Accordingly, even though
all particular world-disclosures always denote an unfolding of things as what they are, none of them is an unfolding of things as all that they are (Heidegger 2001a:5253; Malpas
2006:193; Schatzki 2007:5455). All secured realms of disclosure always conceal other possible ways of
unfolding, which means that by concealing the abyssal realm of abundance against which every
particular unfolding takes place, world-disclosures conceal the inexhaustibility of things on earth
in a very metaphysical sense. Unlike in the manipulative possession promoted by contemporary planetary machination, earth does not
belong to anyone since it can never be captured as a whole (de Beistegui 2007:17). It is our non-violent rejection of the
manipulative power of calculative ordering that puts aside the violent capturing of the earth and hence lets what has already fled our rational apparatuses to become in power:
the abyssal ground of earth. Perhaps one of the most striking examples of the need for nonviolent resistance and power-free following of the abyssal earth is the contemporary
event of global warming. While this devastating change is affecting all parts of the earth, even the atmosphere, some of the most vulgar solutions, especially the geo-engineering
proposals, aim at intentional, even global-scale, climate modification either by reducing the incoming radiation from the sunfor instance, by using the refractive screens or
sunshade of autonomous spacecraft installed in space (Angel 2006), or by spraying cooling sulphate particle concentrations in the stratosphere (Crutzen 2006)or by removing
carbon dioxide from the atmospherefor instance, by increasing carbon sequestration with iron fertilisation of the oceans (Buesseler and Boyd 2003). These various potential
geo-engineering implementations seem to do nothing but follow the baseline of the gigantic machination, the subjugation of things into orderable reserve commanded to stand
by so that they may be manipulated by the operations of calculation. Even though such geo-engineering may eventually mitigate the negative consequences of climate change, it
offers a calculative moulding of the even more complex systems of orderings as a solution to the problem of global warming, which is itself subordinate to, as well as an
outcome of, this manipulative and calculative subjugation of earth, the logic of circular self-overcoming in the ever-greater modalities of exploitative power. As Malpas
(2006:298) writes, although it is evident that more complex systems of orderings also increase the
possibilities of their failure, machination always presents itself as a source for continuous
improvements by simply viewing these failures as an indication of a further need for
technological perfection. In other words, machination does not implicate an achievement of
total ordering, but a drive towards total ordering where this drive itself is never under suspicion.
Nevertheless, as contemporary climate change indicates, earth never allows itself to become captured, completely controlled or emptied
into unfolding that frames it in terms of orderable and exploitable standing reserve. Earth rather resists all attempts to capture it: it
resists by pointing out the lack that leads to the failure of all systems of orderings. It is precisely
this lack, the line of failure that has always already started to flee the perfect rationalisation and
total capture of things, which presents the earth aspect of Heidegger. Instead of the calculative engineering of
technical solutions, non-violent resistance allows the earth to become a source of abyssal being, a source of self-emerging things that always retains a hidden element since the
earth never allows itself to become completely secured though particular world-disclosures (see Harrison 2007:628; Peters and Irwin 2002:8). In other words, instead of
mere calculative manipulation, we can resist the manipulative machination of earth and thus let
the living earth become a source of abyssal being, an earth-site for our dwelling. Thirdly, it is the recognition of the
finitude, the limit, that allows a breakdown of our taken-for-granted ontological intelligibility of
prevailing world-disclosure. Identification of the finitude affords a view into the possible
absence of prevailing world-disclosure, a situation of distress Polt (2006:30) calls the emergency of being, where the world we are thrown into
becomes unsettled, releases its hold and eventually allows us to remember its originary happening as a mere historical appropriation of limits from the groundless abyss.
Moreover, compared with Heideggers earlier notion about the recognition of our own finitudeour deathforcing us to face what stands as completely contrary to the
meaning of beingthe nothingness with empty-of-all meaningthe notion about the finitude of being as such refers rather to the positive realm, to the abyssal reservoir of
plenitude (Young 2002:190192). Thus, the nothing is not excluded as the opposite of being, as a mere
negativity of empty nihilism; nothing rather belongs to the realm of being through the sense of
possible absence it implies, absence (the possibility of finitude) in this case keeping the site opened for the
play and other beginning of being. Planetary machination, however, and the calculative
thinking it affords, do not allow this appearance of finitude: as a total positioning they destroy
the earth upon which we dwell by changing it into an errant planet, into a globe in an astral
universe without the earth-site for making manifest the limits of the happening of being. As Radloff
(2007:36) sums up, earth is not a planetearth is not a planet, because the planet belongs to the representational
thinking that hides the fundamental openness of the abyssal earth-site through which the
sphere of total gaze, the planetary globe, became possible in the first place. Eventually this globe, ordered through the networks cast upon the planet, opens
neither paths nor possibilities, but a profound nihilism of calculative consumption and utilisation of the earth (see Joronen 2008:603604). As Critchley (1997:12) writes, rather
than simple transgression or restoration of the conditions that ground the contemporary situation, we need to experience their limit, to delineate them. The crucial point is that
the contemporary ontic homelessness, the late modern nihilism of planetary machination, does not allow the fundamental sense of ontological finitude, the distress and
emergency about the limitedness and finitude of the prevailing mode of being, to arise (Heidegger 1996:7475; Radloff 2007:240). This ontological
homelessness, the sense about finitude and play of being, can only be confronted through the
happening of being, through being that presences through sites, which means that one can
become opened to abyssal being to the extent that one first finds the finitude of the prevailing
mode of being, its limits. Hence, Heideggers notion about dwelling in the earth-sites, our being-at-home on earth, is properly understood as a
homecoming that takes place through ontological homelessness: out of the passage through what is foreign, we no more merely live through the given unfolding, but better,
by being unhomely in becoming homely we become to sense the potential for human beings to dwell on earth with understanding about the finitude and givenness of the
ruling unfolding (Heidegger 1996:120121; on Heideggers comparison between modern homelessness and Marxs notion of alienation, see Heidegger 1993a:243244). Since
the primary aim of this non-metaphysical and non-grounding dwelling is the recognition of the abyssal earth-sites, it neither proposes the chauvinism of provincial locality nor
bounded homeland rooted in organic national family of blood and soil, as Thiele (1995:172175) for instance misinterprets all of these definitions, the organic, the
national and the blood, are metaphysical determinations that presuppose a concept of collective subjectivity explicitly rejected by Heidegger (1993a:244245; see also de
Beistegui 2007:10; Radloff 2007:241242). Instead, the possibility of a non-metaphysical dwelling in the sites of ontological finitude signifies a chance for an open and abyssal
clearing on earth, an eco-poetic promiseecological as opposed to violent exploitation of nature, poetic as opposed to the metaphysical violence of calculative rationality. As de
Beistegui (2007:18) suggests, instead of bounded territorialism or cosmopolitanism, such citizenship on earth could perhaps be translated into something like geopolitanism
(cf. Morin 2009; Turnbull 2006).4 As it has become evident, the contemporary nihilism and planetary homelessness of (late) modernity does not correspond with the primordial
ontological homelessness based on dwelling in the finite earth-sites of abyssal being. The homelessness of technological calculation,
which is now coming to be the destiny of the world, is a symptom of the oblivion of beingan
abandonment of abyssal being in favour of metaphysical rationality of ideologically and
universally grounded conceptual systemswhen the dwelling in the sites of finitude is a
homecoming that founds our taken-for-granted belongingness to particular world-disclosure
by unsettling and dislocating us from it (Heidegger 1993a:242, 243). At the end, we are left with a nonmetaphysical sense of dwelling, with a
resistance based on the finitude of being. Accordingly, resistance includes both power-free dwelling on earth, and non-metaphysical sites based on finite and abyssal being. As I
have tried to show, this sort of dwelling offers neither total unity of intelligibility, an ontologically bounded and grounded dwelling, nor alienation based on planetary nihilism of
willfull calculations, but a sense of finitude and thus a sense about the limits of the planetary unfolding of machination. It is a dwelling that remains open for abyssal being and
hence for an Event, which as a play can never be mastered since mastering does not provide possibilities but necessities. As exposed to abyss, we human beings
are exposed to the concealed ab-ground of beingto the abysmal reservoir of abundant
being and so may turn into the power-free grounders of abyssal earth (cf. Sallis 2001:188, 194195). One of the
features of contemporary planetary homelessness of machination is precisely the lack of distress and emergency, the lack of mood that affords access to the openness of being
via finitude (Heidegger 2000:266267; see Haar 2002:157; Heidegger 1973:99). It is the sense of ontological finitude that is crucial to dwelling without it dwelling turns into
moulding securing of being, into the metaphysical capturing of earth, when with the sense of finitude we are given both the earth-sites of dwelling and the finite unfolding of
abyssal being. It is precisely the distress about the finitude of being that is able to block and cease the
eternal machinery of will to will and hence the endless productisation and organisation of all
in the names of capital accumulation, winning-valuing and profit-making. Without a sense of
finitude, limitation and dependence, thinking is not just lack of genuine questions concerning
our finite existence and ontological situatedness in-the-world, but also in danger of
encouraging the ontological violence of boundless measurement and complete control. As
Zimmerman writes, by affording realms of personal and collective craving for immortality such violence generates a ground for the new oppressive social institutions and
nature-dominating projects of ecological aggressiveness (Zimmerman 1994:107; cf. Taylor 1991:68, 1992:267). The dark side of the denial of finitude and impermanence is the
structured aim for total control and measurement encouraging us to build immortal, megalomaniac and turgid monuments from violent authoritarianism and hierarchic cultures
to the contemporary hegemony of capital accumulation and nature exploitation. It is the finitude then that works against what Zizek calls the fantasmatic illusion maintained
by the contemporary global techno-capitalism, the illusion that the world ruled by machination and its capitalist forces is ontologically complete and perfectly measured by its
instrumental-pragmatist problem-solving calculations (Zizek 1999:204, 218; see also Brockelman 2008a:84, 2008b). It is precisely the functioning of everything and that this
functioning drives further to more functioning which implies lack of distress and emergency about the finitude and impermanence (of the calculative ground) of being. If
everything operates so that there is no problem in view, there is no need for emergency and
distress alike. Nihilist calculating and reckoning then do not just give us the nomadic
homelessness of mankind (uniformly subjecting the living earth into the useable and disposable globe for the will to power) but also violent cults of power,
control, violence, accumulation and oppression (with no other purposes aside from the strengthening and unbounded expansion of their own world-image, their world-view).
These are just two sides of the same coin of the manipulative and omnipotent power of
calculative machination, a power without any distress about its lack of distress. In the end,
machination raises a radical sense of making a love affair to power, as Taylor (1991:67) puts it. This all-
doable makeability grows to new heights when the value of all becomes decided upon the point
of calculative measuring, choosing and computingupon a coercive reckoning promoted by the
will that wills more power and control. In order to follow through Heideggers opening to the notion of finitude, it is our possibility
of a non-violent dwelling in the finite earth-sites of abyssal being that decides the question
whether mankind is still, after planetary capitalism, nomadic humanity and coercive
enframing and domination of nature, capable of calling the living earth a home.

Nature has been used to construct norms
Morton 7- is Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University (Timothy, 2007,
Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics,
http://www.responsivelandscapes.com/readings/EcologyWithoutNature_morton.pdf)//LC
In the Enlightenment, nature became a way of establishing racial and sexual identity, and
science became the privileged way of demonstrating it. The normal was set up as different
from the pathological along the coordinates of the natural and the unnatural.26 Nature, by then
a scientific term, put a stop to argument or rational inquiry: "Well, it's just in my nature." He is
ideological, you are prejudiced, but my ideas are natural. A metaphorical use of Thomas Malthus in the work of Charles
Darwin, for example, naturalized, and continues to naturalize, the workings of the "invisible
hand" of the free market and the "survival of the fittest"-which is always taken to mean the
competitive war of all (owners) against all (workers). Malthus used nature to argue against the continuation of early
modern welfare, in a document produced for the government of his age. Sadly, this very thinking is now being used to push down
the poor yet further, in the battle of the supposedly ecologically minded against "population growth" (and immigration).
Nature, achieved obliquely through turning metonymy into metaphor, becomes an oblique way
of talking about politics. What is presented as straightforward, "unmarked," beyond
contestation, is warped.

Status quo understanding of science is tailored towards males- female
involvement in science proves
The participation of women scientists is matched in contemporary feminist science theory and
in women's science fiction by a view of science that differs from the extrapolative view common
in men's science and men's science fiction. Rather than the traditional view of male science as a
monolithic progress from natural law to natural law, women writers, like feminist science
theorists, generally recognize that our current science is "a human construct that came about
under a particular set of historical conditions when men's domination of nature seemed a
positive and worthy goal." The historian of science, Elizabeth Fee, for example, argues that we
need to see our science as "a major social investment," for "any society will attempt to
generate the kinds of natural knowledge which best fulfill its social, economic, and political
needs." And the novelist Marge Piercy explains through her character Luciente that in our
culture "only huge corporations and the Pentagon had money enough to pay for big science." In
Luciente's future, a different society decides communally how to invest in science and thus
produces different kinds of science. The favorite example of women science fiction writers is
communication presented as a science: in Gil- man's Herland (1915), Mitchison's Memoirsof a
Spacewoman(1962), Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Bloody Sun (1964), Piercy's Woman on the
Edge of Time (1976), Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (1984), Sheila Finch's Triad (1986),
Sheri S. Tepper's After Long Silence (1987), and Janet Kagan's Hellspark (1988). These women
science fiction writers did not extrapolate advances in a science of communication, since in our
culture such a science does not exist (or it might be argued is only coming into existence).
Rather, they pieced together suggestions from linguistics, personal rhetoric, parapsychology,
and the study of empathy and of gesture in order to envision a future that would include
knowledge of communication, which is traditionally important to women, legitimated under the
title (and the economic support) of science, and directed nonhierarchically to all species. In
many of these novels humans regularly talk to cats and dolphins, as well as to aliens from other
planets.6 Gender is the cultural, and often material, circumstance that most influences the
changes that increasing numbers of women, especially feminists, have brought to science and to
science fiction. Two issues will serve as examples here: the refutation of sociobiology and
experimen- tation with alternative methods of reproduction.

The rupture of the modern formulation of being instigates a political closure
defined by the human as a standing reserve and peace indistinguishable from a
war in a will to will violence that becomes the condition of existence
Mitchell, 5 Assistant professor of philosophy at Emory University, (Andrew J., research in
phenomenology, Volume 35, Heidegger and Terrorism)//gingE
If terrorism is anything, then it is nothing like war. While Heidegger does not directly speak of terrorism by
name, he nonetheless affirms an end to the era of modern warfare. With the passing of this era of high
representation, Heidegger sees a dramatic change in what constitutes a theater of war. The World Wars point to an era beyond
modern warfare as Clausewitz had definitively formulated it, an era where wars are fought without goal or end, where soldiers are
considered the same as supplies, and technology keeps such supplies in steady circulation for instant availability. This is a
postmodern era that Heidegger thinks with the name of enframing (Ge-stell ). Without naming
terrorism, Heidegger does offer a thought of conflict beyond the representational modernism of
Clausewitzian warfare. Under the aegis of enframing, this beyond is terrorism, an epoch in the
history of being coincident with that of modern technology and, as we shall see, the American
project. In approaching these issues, the Clausewitzian conception of warfare provides a frame for appreciating the solutions of
contemporary technology to the questions of conflict and peace. To this end, three points in Clausewitzs conception of warfare,
each serving to demonstrate its modern nature, shall be posed. In preparing a definition of war, Clausewitz claims that war is
nothing but a duel on a larger scale.1 With such pride of place given to the duel, we are here
immediately introduced to a thinking that will be guided by the idea of opposition and, in
Clausewitzs own terms, polarity.2 This oppositional thinking is determinative of the modern
era and its fidelity to rational-subjectivist thought. A duel, however, is a particular form of opposition, where two
parties are clearly identifiable and stand opposed to one another mediated by a ruling law. There is a ruling law between them that
specifies the contract of the duel; there are certain assumptions that make up the etiquette of the duel; and there is the aberrant
exigency of the duel itself. In short, the duel is part of an agreement: There can be no engagement unless both sides are willing to
fight.3 War is thought by Clausewitz in terms of opposition and agreement, both understood by
the terms of policy. War is logically understood, in other words, within an oppositional structure
that includes not only the opposition between friend and foe, but that of political theory and
military practice. Clausewitzs greatness lies in thinking the modern rationalist categories of warfare directly, with a force at
times capable of exposing their boundaries. But for all this, Clausewitz remains a great modern rationalist. His oppositional
rationalism, the logical character of his thought, is the first characteristic to consider in Clausewitzs modernism. A second
characteristic of the duel is that it takes an object; the dueling parties duel over something. The duel points to a will, which lies at the
heart of Clausewitzs explicit definition of war: War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our
will.4 In other words, war is a test of the willingness of the will, of its willingness to risk itself for its
goal or for the object of its directing policy. Throughout On War, Clausewitz emphasizes the role of the will and the
allied notions of morale, esprit de corps, and feeling, for If war is an act of force, the emotions cannot fail to be
involved.5 The emotions are most certainly involved for Clausewitz; they are another of the unpredictable variables that the
general must try to take into account while planning his/her strategy; but it is always the will that holds the decisive place in his
thinking, the animosity and the reciprocal effects of hostile elements, cannot be considered to have ended so long as the enemys
will has not been broken.6 The will is the glove by which reason is able to seize the world. Whatever does not seize the world and
act upon the world is irreal, ineffectual, and therefore permittedhence the rational pride in freedom of thought and speech, and
hence, too, the egoistic greatness of that pride. The will drives the troops to overcome physical exhaustion,
and this will is influenced by the prevailing wills around it. This is what is known as the morale of
the troops, and morale is always heightened by the extreme displays of will that are valorized by
the name courage. Courage is another way that the body is handled by reason; it is a virtue of
reason, where virtue can only mean excellence in the manipulation of a tool. Clausewitzs concern for
morale and courage is, at root, a concern for the will as the first instrument of reason. To break the opponents will is to
render it ineffectual (to read it its rights, in other words). Clausewitz remains modern in his focus upon the will as negotiating
between two distinct realms of activity (theory and practice, we might say), a matter that likewise informs the third mark of
Clausewitzs modernity. The third trait is more subtle; it is also the trait that gives Clausewitzs thought its classical
character, the inheritance of the Platonic distinction between the ideal and the real. Clausewitz recognizes an ideal state of
war beyond the material wars fought during his day. Such a war, an absolute war, would pit
equally powerful forces against one another in positions of exact polarity; there would be no
terrain, no recalcitrance or exhaustion of the troops or supplies, and the differences between
the sides would be irreconcilable. Such an ideal war would never end, and it is this war that acts as a
regulative ideal, as both a guiding idea (Hauptvorstellung) as to how things should be and as a standard of direction, a point of
reference (Richtpunkt), towards its own ever fuller realization.7 All real wars are imitations of this war, and it is
the generals task to approximate absolute war as closely as possible. The role of strategy for the
general is to negotiate between the desired ideal and the demands of the real. The generals purview,
then, is the gap between the ideal and the real, the space of what Clausewitz terms friction. Friction is a general name for the
innumerable details preventing a perfect translation of the ideal upon the real; it includes the morale of the troops, the thickening
effects of danger, insufficient or incorrect intelligence, etc.; in short, it includes everything that cannot be counted upon, every
uncertainty. Friction denotes the illogical, since *l+ogic comes to a stop in this labyrinth.8 The best general is the one most at home
in this halfway house between the ideal and the real. Clausewitz is in the ranks of the other modern philosophers in taking up this
Platonic distinction. These three points of war equally determine an ideal of peace. War functions for Clausewitz as a
forceful expression of will to overcome an opponent, guided by the view of an ideal (absolute).
When that opponent is completely overcomeand the text vacillates at times between disarmament and utter destructionwhich
is to say, when that opponent is beaten in their will, then there can be peace: Once the prize is in its hands, the
political object has been achieved; there is no need to do more, and it can let matters rest. If the
other state is ready to accept the situation, it should sue for peace.9 In such an end, war reaches its goal:
we must always consider that with the conclusion of peace the purpose of the war has been achieved and its business is at an
end.10 For the enemy to press for peace demonstrates a weakened and depressed will to engage
the opponent. But this is not to say that the will is beaten or that the fighting is over and done
with. The only peace that could ensure this would be the peace resulting from an absolute war, where hostilities could not end
until one or other side were finally defeated.11 Political intervention usually stops a war before this point is
reached, with a result that hostilities can always be renewed. Hostilities may resume, Clausewitz
clarifies, but this only shows that not every war necessarily leads to a final decision and
settlement.12 Only an absolute war can lead to a final decision and settlement, which is to say,
only an absolute war can lead to peace. Obviously, war and peace may not always be clearly distinguishable in reality,
perhaps they are never so, but they are always so ideally. Clausewitzs modern conception of warfare comes to an end with the end
of modernity. Contemporary warfare, for its part, operates according to the influx of new
technologies that are themselves part of a general technological enframing of the world.
Enframing, Gestell, is Heideggers name for an era of technological supremacy where all of the
world is brought ever closer together by a systematic elimination of distance and difference
across the globe. The conditions of modern warfare listed above can find no hold here, and it is precisely where
these conditions fail that we are forced to think terrorism. The technological era, as the era of
terrorism, distinguishes itself from the modern on each of the three counts above. Opposition is no
longer an operative concept for Heidegger, since technology has served to eradicate the
distance that would separate the supposedly opposed parties. The analysis of technology in Heideggers work
is guided by the (phenomenological) insight that All distances in time and space are shrinking (GA 79: 3; cf. GA 7:
157/PLT, 165).13 Airplanes, microwaves, e-mail, these serve to abbreviate the world, to be sure, but there is a metaphysical distance
that has likewise been reduced, that between subject and object. This modern dualism has been surpassed by
what Heidegger terms the standing-reserve (Bestand), the eerie companion of technological
dominance and enframing. Insofar as an object (Gegenstand) would stand over against (Gegen) a subject, objects can no
longer be found. What stands by in the sense of standing-reserve, no longer stands over against us as object (GA 7: 20/QCT, 17). A
present object could stand over against another; the standing-reserve, however, precisely does
not stand; instead, it circulates, and in this circulation it eludes the modern determination of
thinghood. It is simply not present to be cast as a thing. With enframing, which names the dominance of
position, positing, and posing (stellen) in all of its modes, things are no longer what they were.
Everything becomes an item for ordering (bestellen) and delivering (zustellen); everything is ready in place (auf der Stelle zur
Stelle), constantly available and replaceable (GA 79: 28). The standing-reserve exists within this cycle of order
and delivery, exchange and replacement. This is not merely a development external to modern
objects, but a change in their being. The standing-reserve is found only in its circulation along these supply channels,
where one item is just as good as any other, where, in fact, one item is identical to any other. Replaceability is the being
of things today. Today being is being-replaceable (VS, 107/62), Heidegger claims in 1969. The transformation is
such that what is here now is not really here now, since there is an item identical to it somewhere else ready for delivery. This cycle
of ordering and delivery does not operate serially, since we are no longer dealing with discrete, individual objects. Instead, there
is only a steady circulation of the standing-reserve, which is here now just as much as it is there
in storage. The standing-reserve spreads itself throughout the entirety of its replacement cycle,
without being fully present at any point along the circuit. But it is not merely a matter of mass produced
products being replaceable. To complete Heideggers view of the enframed standingreserve, we have to take into consideration the
global role of value, a complementary determination of being: Being has become value (GA 5: 258/192). The Nietzschean legacy
for the era of technology (Nietzsche as a thinker of values) is evident here. But the preponderance of value is so far from preserving
differences and establishing order of rank, that it only serves to further level the ranks and establish the identity of everything with
its replacement. When everything has a value, an exchangeability and replaceability operates
laterally across continents, languages, and difference, with great homogenizing and globalizing
effect. The standing-reserve collapses opposition. The will that dominates the modern era is personal, even if, as
is the case with Leibniz, the ends of that will are not completely known by the self at any particular time. Nonetheless, the will still
expresses the individuality of the person and ones perspective. In the era of technology, the will that comes to the fore is no longer
the will of an individual, but a will without a restricted human agenda. In fact, the will in question no longer wills an object outside of
itself, but only wills itself; it is a will to will. In this way, the will need never leave itself. This self-affirming character of the will allows
the will an independence from the human. Manifest in the very workings of technology is a will to power, which for Heidegger is
always a will to will. Because the will to will has no goal outside of it, its willing is goalless and endless. The human is just another
piece of a standing-reserve that circulates without purpose. Actually, things have not yet gone so far; the human still retains a
distinction, however illusive, as the most important raw material (GA 7: 88/EP, 104). This importance has nothing to do with the
personal willing of conditional goals, as Heidegger immediately makes clear, The human is the most important raw
material because he remains the subject of all consumption, so much so that he lets his will go
forth unconditionally in this process and simultaneously becomes the object of the
abandonment of being (GA 7: 88/EP, 104). Unconditioned willing transcends the merely human will, which satisfies itself
with restricted goals and accomplishments. Unconditioned willing makes of the subject an agent of the
abandonment of being, one whose task it is to objectify everything. The more the world comes
to stand at the wills disposal, the more that being retreats from it. The human will is allied with
the technological will to will. For this reasonand the following is something often overlooked in considering Heideggers
political position between the warsHeidegger is critical of the very notion of a Fhrer, or leader, who would direct the circulation
of the standing-reserve according to his own personal will. The leaders of today are merely the necessary
accompaniment of a standing-reserve that, in its abstraction, is susceptible to planning. The
leaders seeming position of subjectivity, that they are the ones who decide, is again another
working of objectification, where neither of these terms quite fits, given that beings are no
longer objective. The willfulness of the leaders is not due to a personal will: One believes that the leaders had presumed
everything of their own accord in the blind rage of a selfish egotism and arranged everything in accordance with their own will
[Eigensinn]. In truth, however, leaders are the necessary consequence of the fact that beings have gone over to a way of errancy, in
which an emptiness expands that requires a single ordering and securing of beings. (GA 7: 89/EP, 105; tm) The leaders do not stand
above or control the proceedings, the proceedings in question affect beings as a whole, including the leaders. Leaders are simply
points of convergence or conduits for the channels of circulation; they are needed for circulation, but are nowhere outside of it. No
leader is the sole authority; instead, there are numerous sectors to which each leader is
assigned. The demands of these sectors will be similar of course, organized around efficiency and productivity in distribution and
circulation. In short, leaders serve the standing-reserve. Any goal beyond the will itself, any political goal, for example,
will not be able to voice itself over the wills own monologue. Insofar as modern warfare was a use of force for political goals,
modern warfare is surpassed. The will surrenders its relation to the object in order to will itself all the
more forcefully. It reaches a point where no political, which is to say external, goal can reach
it. There can be no opposition when the will recognizes nothing but itself, and the more the will
succeeds in this, the more impersonal it becomes. Politics effectiveness withers away in this
transformation, since the goals of politics remain always conditional. The unconditional will is apolitical,
and this transforms the relation between war and politics as expressed in Clausewitzs famed dictum. War is not, as Clausewitz still
thinks, the continuation of politics by other means. If war means the total war, i.e. the war that arises from the machination of
beings here let loose, then it becomes a transformation of politics and a revelation of the fact that politics and every plan-
directed course of life were themselves only ever the uncontrolled execution of metaphysical decisions that they do not master. (GA
69: 209) The transformation of war into terrorism, since this is what we are talking about when we talk about the
machination of beings, is equally a transformation of politics. The metaphysical decisions beyond our control are
those having to do with being as replaceable value. Political decisions are not made by leaders
who would be in control of the matters decided. These decisions are nothing that we could willfully decide. Politics
becomes in this a means of directing life according to a plan. We will return to this idea of planning when considering its role for our
general security. For now it is enough to note that with this transformation in the nature of politics, it can no longer be said to
precede its continuation in war. The transformation of war in total war (or terrorism) is equally a
transformation of politics: Such a war does not continue something already present, but rather
compels this into the execution of essential decisions, of with it itself is not master. For this reason,
such a war no longer admits of conquerors and conquered; all become slaves of the history of being. (GA 69: 209; em) Conquered
and conqueror are both political designations and are each outmoded today. The leaders are slaves. We have already
stated that technology closes the gap between subject and object, with the human becoming
just another piece of the standing-reserve alongside all the rest. The abolition of distance is
equally an abolition of difference, including that between the real and the ideal. For Clausewitz, this
difference was a fact expressed in each of the innumerable ways that the material world failed to live up to the smoothness of the
ideal. There is inadequate information, a change of attitude within the atmosphere of danger, questions of morale and willingness
for both the troops and the general; there are coincidences, surprises, the resistance of the terrainall of which prevent a general
from simply and directly executing a war, but instead require strategizing. Strategy serves as a technical term for Clausewitz,
denoting the skill of the general in best realizing the ideal situation of absolute war within the real material conditions that the battle
presents. Perhaps the roughest area of friction that a general must consider is found in his/her greatest asset, the troops. Modern
warfare is a matter of troop mobilization, assault, reinforcement, and defense; and for this
reason, consumption of resources remained a concern for Clausewitz. The troops were the most important
resource for the realization of total war; they were needed to negotiate the distance that yet extended between the ideal and the
real. A consequence of this is that modern warfare could still concern itself with calculating and comparing casualties and losses. In
an ideal situation, troops would offer no resistance and never be lost. Such is the case with war under the reign of
technology. With everything available as standing-reserve, troops included, the exhaustion of
resources is no longer possible. Resources are precisely in themselves replaceable, to the extent that, in being given over
to replacement, even the idea of an in itself is already drained of reality ahead of time. There are no longer any
losses that cannot be replaced. In other words, there is no longer any friction. All uncertainty
is lost, since it is not recognized in the first place. Everything is monitored and controlled. The
whole battle is given over to a planning that is able to incorporate everything it encounters,
since it only ever encounters what is already planable in essence, the standingreserve. Strategys
demise is the ascendancy of planning. What this means is that war can now go on interminably, subject to no other logic or
obligation than its own. Nothing can resist it. But without resistance, war must end. Peace can now go on interminably
as well, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. The logic in question for both war
and peace is the logic of replacement, the obligation for each is the obligation to consume. There
is no law that would supervene or subtend consumption; there is no order outside of it that could contain it. Clausewitzs ideal is
realized in a manner that collapses the very distinctions that gave it birth. War is no longer a duel; it recognizes no authority
outside of itself. The name for this new amalgam of war and peace is terrorism. Terrorism is Clausewitzs absolute war in the mirror
of technology. War and peace come to complete agreement and lose their oppositional identity in the age of value and the ersatz.
Without concern for resources, consumption continues untroubled, since war is a kind of
consumption of beings no different from peace: War no longer battles against a state of
peace, rather it newly establishes the essence of peace (GA 69: 180). The essence of peace so
established is a peace that defines itself in regards to war, which binds itself inseparably to war, and which
functions equivalently to war. In either case, it is simply a matter of resource consumption and replenishment. In Clausewitzian
terms, there is perhaps too much continuity or continuation between war and peace, War has become a distortion of the
consumption of beings which is continued in peace (GA 7: 89/EP, 104). The peace that technology brings is nothing restful; instead
it is the peace of unhindered circulation. We cannot even ask when there will be peace or when the war will end. Such a question,
Heidegger specifies, cannot be answered, not because the length of the war cannot be foreseen, but because the question itself
asks for something which no longer is, since already there is no longer a war that would be able to come to a peace (GA 7: 89/EP,
104; tm). The basic oppositions of Clausewitzian warfare are undone at this point, an undoing that includes the distinction between
ideal and real. It also includes the distinction between soldier and civilian. Since such distinctions depend upon a difference between
war and peace, they too can no longer apply. Everyone is now a civilian-soldier, or neither a civilian nor a soldiera worker, one
might say, or otherwise put, a target. With everyone involved in the same processes of consumption and delivery, everyone is
already enlisted in advance. There are no longer any innocent victims or bystanders in this, and the
same holds true of terrorism. Terrorism is not the use of warfare against civilians (pace Carr), for
the simple reason that there no longer are any civilians.14 It is equally not war against soldiers, and for this
reason we go wrong to even consider it war. Terrorism is the only conflict available and the only conflict that is in essence available
and applicable. It can have everything as its target. Terrorism follows from the transformation in beings
indicative of the technological age. This transformation remains important at each point of a Heideggerian thinking of
terrorism and is the ultimate consequence of the abolition of war and peace; beings have become uncommon.

Securitization justifies endless violence
Campbell, 8 - Prof. of International Politics at the University of Newcastle (David, Writing
Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Revised Edition, University of
Minnesota Press, ISBN 0-8166-3144-1, Pg. 48-51)//gingE
In this context of incipient ambiguity brought on by an insistence that can no longer be grounded, securing identity in the
form of the state requires an emphasis on the unfinished and endangered nature of the world. In
other words, discourses of "danger" are central to the discourses of the "state" and the discourses
of "man."43 In place of the spiritual certitude that provided the vertical intensity to support the horizontal extensiveness of
Christendom, the state requires discourses of "danger" to provide a new theology of truth about
who and what "we" are by highlighting who or what "we" are not, and what "we" have to fear.
This is not to suggest that fear and danger are modern constructs that only emerged after the relative demise of Christendom. On
the contrary, the church relied heavily on discourses of danger to establish its authority, discipline its followers, and ward off its
enemies. Indeed, although this disposition was important to the power of the church throughout its history, for the three centuries
between the Black Death of 1348 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the agents of God propagated a woeful vision of life marked
by a particular attitude toward death.44 Thinking that Western civilization was besieged by a horde of
enemies (Turks, Jews, heretics, idolaters, and witches, to name but a few), the church saw the devil everywhere
and encouraged introspection and guilt to such an extent that a culture of anxiety
predominated. The literary tradition of contemptus mundi ("contempt for the world"), which was pivotal to the culture of
anxiety and the acute sense of endangeredness it encouraged, bespoke hatred for the body and the world, the pervasiveness of sin,
the fleeting nature of time, and the fragility of life. Moreover, it was this "evangelism of fear"45 that produced
a preoccupation with death. As the promise of an escape from earthly vices, the religious
leitmotif of "salvation" obliged all those who sought this transcendence "to think continually
about death in order to avoid sin, because sin plus death could land them in Hell."46 Meditation on
death was thus the principal form of a moral pedagogy that sought to ensure salvation. In fostering an evangelism of fear, with
death as its impetus and salvation as its goal, the cultural agents of the period were not simply responding to danger as an external
condition. The required familiarity with death demanded of individuals an eternal vigilance against
the self: "One should always keep death in mind, just as one would always mount guard against
an enemy who might suddenly appear" (indeed, for essayists like Montaigne, death was a synonym for enemy).*7
But it was this vigilance against the self, encouraged by the experience of finitude and required
in the name of salvation, that constituted the conditions of contemptus mundi from which one
sought salvation. In the Speculum peccatoris ("Sinner's Mirror")a manuscript attributed to Saint Augustinethe author
declares, "Consideration of the brevity of life engenders contempt for the world," and continues: "Is there anything that can increase
man's vigilance, his flight from injustice, and his saintly behavior in the fear of God more than the realization of his [future]
alteration, the precise knowledge of his mortal condition and the consequent thought of his horrible death, when man becomes
nonman?"48 The logic of the evangelism of fear thus ferments the very conditions that it claims
necessitate vigilance against the enemies of the self; put simply, it produces its own danger. The
evangelism of fear and its logic of identity are not just of the past, however. In our own time, argues Delumeau, we can witness their
operation: Does not our own epoch help us to understand the beginnings of European modernity? The mass killings of the twentieth
century from 1914 to the genocide of Cambodiapassing through various holocausts and the deluge of bombs on Vietnamthe
menace of nuclear war, the ever-increasing use of torture, the multiplication of Gulags, the resurgence of insecurity, the
rapid and often more and more troubling progress of technology, the dangers entailed by an
overly intensive exploitation of natural resources, various genetic manipulations, and the
uncontrolled explosion of information: Here are so many factors that, gathered together, create a climate of anxiety
in our civilization which, in certain respects, is comparable to that of our ancestors between the time of the plague and the end of
the Wars of Religion. We have reentered this "country of fear" and, following a classic process of
"projection," we never weary of evoking it in both words and images... Yesterday, as today, fear
of violence is objectified in images of violence and fear of death in macabre visions.49 To talk of
the endangered nature of the modern world and the enemies and threats that abound in it is
thus not to offer a simple ethnographic description of our condition; it is to invoke a discourse of
danger through which the incipient ambiguity of our world can be grounded in accordance with
the insistences of identity. Danger (death, in its ultimate form) might therefore be thought of as the new
god for the modern world of states, not because it is peculiar to our time, but because it replicates the logic of
Christendom's evangelism of fear. Indeed, in a world in which state identity is secured through
discourses of danger, some low tactics are employed to serve these high ideals. These tactics are
not inherent to the logic of identity, which only requires the definition of difference. But
securing an ordered self and an ordered world particularly when the field upon which this process operates is as
extensive as a stateinvolves defining elements that stand in the way of order as forms of
"otherness."50 Such obstructions to order "become dirt, matter out of place, irrationality,
abnormality, waste, sickness, perversity, incapacity, disorder, madness, unfreedom. They become
material in need of rationalization, normalization, moralization, correction, punishment, discipline, disposal, realization, etc."51 In
this way, the state project of security replicates the church project of salvation. The state grounds its legitimacy by
offering the promise of security to its citizens who, it says, would otherwise face manifold
dangers. The church justifies its role by guaranteeing salvation to its followers who, it says, would otherwise be destined to an
unredeemed death. Both the state and the church require considerable effort to maintain order within and around themselves, and
thereby engage in an evangelism of fear to ward off internal and external threats, succumbing in the process to the temptation to
treat difference as otherness. In contrast to the statist discourse of international relations, this
understanding proffers an entirely different orientation to the question of foreign policy. In
addition to the historical discussion above, which suggested that it was possible to argue that the state was not prior to the
interstate system, this interpretation means that instead of regarding foreign policy as the external view and rationalist orientation
of a preestablished state, the identity of which is secure before it enters into relations with others, we
can consider foreign policy as an integral part of the discourses of danger that serve to discipline
the state. The state, and the identity of "man" located in the state, can therefore be regarded as
the effects of discourses of danger that more often than not employ strategies of otherness.
Foreign policy thus needs to be understood as giving rise to a boundary rather than acting as a
bridge.
Divorcing humanity from the external objects that constitute us is flawed and
limits agency
Nordquist, 10 PhD in philosophy at the University of Minnesota (Michael Andrew, February
2010, Environmental Participation: Immanence, Cosmopolitics, and the Agency of
Environmental Asseblages)//gingE
Human action and human agency are only possible through the combination of nonhumans into
what is understood as the human, and then only through ignoring all of the nonhuman entities that went into the
process of making a human. Human bodies are the most obvious product of the process of nonhumans
making and making possible the idea of the human being. The organs that constitute bodies, the biochemical
processes that occur without consciousness, and the relations among all these parts and processes are all nonhuman entities that
enable the figure of the human to be understood as a whole. Human skin, typically considered to be a container for our internal
organs, physically connects bodies and their environments, exchanging air, water, and chemical compounds with whatever it comes
into contact. The interconnection of these bodies with food, air, and water further attach humans
to their environments through the literal combination of these external things with internal
bodily processes. The many forms of material attachment to environments point not only to the differences among humans,
but also to the ways in which people are radically transformed by the things they are attached to. The walker from the previous
chapter with her shoes, street, laws, leg muscles, etc.is radically different from a driver who, with an automobile and all of its
attendant connections to laws, norms, and physical power, can accomplish a different set of things through her combination with
them. A person who uses a cellular phone is not merely using a tool or technology to talk to
someone around the planet, but he becomes something different, a network of attachments,
material and otherwise, that transform a human into an entity that can do much more than
simply be human. The driver is not a human being in an automobile, but is a car-street-law-mobility assemblage. The cell
phone user is a communicating- wireless-electricity-phone company assemblage. The distinctively human things
they are doing can only be accomplished through the enrollment of things that fall outside of
the definition of human, such as phones, cars, and telephone companies. By detaching all of
these internal and external connections that human life depends upon, it is easy to
overlook and underestimate the role other-than-human entities play in everyday life. These are not
tools we use to accomplish our preestablished goals or ranked preferences, but they modify us, what we want to do, and what we
are capable of doing. Envisioning the human as a rights-bearing and reason- and language-using sentient being actively eliminates
the environmental connections that a human being has. Thinking the human being as a universalizable norm 117
necessarily cuts off these connections among entities that are integral aspects of their
existences. As Latour notes, no one can define in advance what a human being is, detached from
what makes him [sic] be.26 As noted earlier, just as we have never been modern according to Latour, we have also never
been human, relying on the relations we have with the entities that enable us to do things that the human on its own is incapable
of. Subsuming the variously connected and constituted human assemblages into a model of human existence radically transforms
them into something they do not see themselves as and eliminates a particular set of environmental relations.27 As a concept open
to contestation and disagreement, it is important to push the limits of these conceptual forms of a politics of cosmos to understand
what exactly cosmopolitanism makes possible and what it cuts off. ust as Honig argues for an agonistic cosmopolitics in contrast
to the subsumptive normative cosmopolitanism of neo-Kantians,28 I aim to make clear that these Kantian-inspired and human-
based cosmopolitanisms need not be the only form that a politics of cosmos can take, and they are in fact rather limited,
anthropocentric means of acting in a world. This is particularly the case when what it means to be human is
constantly challenged and redefined through the infinite relations with entities that produce
what we take to be humans.29

Status quo fem bad
Totalizing feminist theory causes erasure
Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical feminisms have simul-taneously naturalized and
denatured the category 'woman' and conscious-ness of the social lives of 'women'. Perhaps a
schematic caricature can highlight both kinds of moves. Marxian socialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labour which reveals class
structure. The consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker is
dissociated from his (sic) product. Abstraction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice.
Labour is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and
find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world. Labour is the humanizing
activity that makes man; labour is an ontological category permitting the knowledge of a
subject, and so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation. In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism
advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main achievement of
both Marxist feminists and socialist feminists was to expand the category of labour to
accommodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relation was subordinated to a more comprehensive
view of labour under capitalist patriarchy. In particular, women's labour in the household and women's
activity as mothers generally (that is, reproduction in the socialist-feminist sense), entered theory on the
authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labour. The unity of women here rests on an
epistemology based on the ontological structure of'labour'. Marxist/socialist-feminism does not
'natur-alize' unity; it is a possible achievement based on a possible standpoint rooted in social relations. The
essentializing move is in the ontological structure of labour or of its analogue, women's
activity.11 The inheritance of Marxian humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The
contribution from these formulations has been the emphasis on the daily responsibility of real
women to build unities, rather than to naturalize them. Catherine MacKinnon's (198Z, 1987) version of
radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of
Western theories of identity grounding action.12 It is factually and politically wrong to assimilate all of the diverse
'moments' or 'conversations' in recent women's politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon's version. But the teleological
logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontology including their negations
erase or police difference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnon's theory is the rewriting of the history of the
polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory of experience, of
women's identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary standpoints. That is, the
totalization built into this tale of radical feminism achieves its end the unity of women by
enforcing the experience of and testimony to radical non-being. As for the Marxist/ socialist feminist,
consciousness is an achievement, not a natural fact. And MacKinnon's theory eliminates some of the
difficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism.

Natural/Queer Divide
Our understanding of natural excludes the queer body
Seymour 13- an assistant professor of English at University of Arkadsnsas at Little Rock (Nicole,
une, Strange Natures Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination,
http://books.google.com/books?id=ujfx7uKp590C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v=onepage
&q&f=false)//LC
This book draws on the insights and methodologies of queer theory and ecocriticism- as well as
on critical race theory, environmental and social-justice studies, feminist theory, transgender
studies, and areas of philosophy such as environmental ethics. Mine is not an arbitrary attempt
to join together the already diverse and already interdisciplinary fields of queer theory and
ecocriticism: these fields are known for focusing on the concept of nature. But they have
historically done so in very different ways, ways that suggest that the naturalness of a
category such as wilderness. Natural has actually become something of a dirty word in queer
theory, as I outline below, though one that it seems unable to do without. One of Strange
Natures major projects is challenging this conceptual disconnect I show that contemporary
queer fictions ask the question, What counts as naturaland why? in regard to both
gender/sexuality and environmentas well as race, immigration status, health status, ability
and classand that they do so in a way that illuminates the imbrication of these categories. In
what follows, I offer a genealogy of this books iteration of queer ecology. I specify how I
intervene in, and draw on, queer theory and ecocriticismthereby suggesting that queer
ecology exists not only to provide a new lens, but to make use of the gaps in and overlaps
among existing lenses. I also specify what Strange Natures offers more broadly as a scholarly
work: not just a reconceptualization of the human relationship to the non-human natural world,
but a reassessment of how we draw critical-theoretical boundaries.
Our orientation towards the natural is one that creates otherization of queer
bodies
ohnson 11- orion contributer (Alex, March/April, How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a
Time, Orion Magazine http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6166)//LC
We have come to believe, over our Western cultural history, that heterosexual monogamy is the
norm, the natural. People who call gays unnatural presume that Nature is pure, perfect, and
predictable. Nature intended for a man and a woman to love each other, they say. Gays act
against Nature. And yet: we rip open the Earth. We dominate the landscape, compromising the
integrity of the living world. We act as though civilization were something better, higher, more
valuable than the natural world. Our culture sets Nature as the highest bar for decorum, while
simultaneously giving Nature our lowest standard of respect. Nature is at our disposal, not only
for our physical consumption, but also for our social construction. We call geese beautiful and
elegant and faithful until they are shitting all over the lawn and terrorizing young children. Then
we poison their eggs. Or shoot them. What Im getting at is this: those who traditionally hold
more power in societybe they men over women, whites over any other race, wealthy over
poor, straight over queerhave made their own qualities standard, natural, constructing a
vision of the world wherein such qualities are the norm. And in so doing, theyve made everyone
elses qualities perverse, against Nature, against God. Even Naturedefined impossibly as the
nonhumanbecomes unnatural when it does not fit the desired norm: the gay geese must be
affected by hormone pollution! A man who has sex with a man must identify himself by his
perversion, by his difference. If straight is the identity of I am, then gay becomes I am not.
Women are not men. Native people are not white. Nature is not human. Instead of talking about
nonconformity, I want to talk about possibility and unnameably complex reality. What queer can
offer is the identity of I am also. I am also human. I am also natural. I am also alive and dynamic
and full of contradiction, paradox, irony. Queer knocks down the house of cards and throws
them into the warm wind.
Natives
The exploitation of women and native populations is fed from our consumptive
orientation to nature
Dreese, 99 - an author and Associate Professor of English at Northern Kentucky
University (Donelle N. The Terrestrial and Aquatic Intelligence of Linda Hogan
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/20736931?seq=14&Search=yes&searchText=e
cofeminism&searchText=AND&searchText=ocean&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicS
earch%3FQuery%3Docean%2BAND%2Becofeminism%26amp%3Bprq%3D%2522ocean%2Bexplo
ration%2522%2BAND%2Bfeminism%26amp%3Bhp%3D25%26amp%3Bacc%3Don%26amp%3Bw
c%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%26amp%3Bso%3Drel&prevSearch=&resultsServiceName=null)
//GY
Hunger was the fisherman who said dolphins are like women, we took them from the sea and had our way with them. Also: It is the
old man who comes in the night to cast a line and wait at the luminous shore. He knows the sea is pregnant with clear fish and their
shallow pools of eggs. The language and imagery in these passages are highly sexual, equating an exploitation of
natural resources with the exploitation of women. The first passage conjures up images of rape, with dolphins
like women, taken from their aquatic territories and objectified to serve the needs of the fishermen. The second passage
introduces the sea itself as the figure of a bountiful, pregnant woman who is fertile and unaware as the men approach at night
waiting to draw form her that which she nurtures. Criticism of this nature/woman subordination is at the core
of ecofeminist theory. Anne Booth and Harvey acobs explain that ecofeminism equates the suppression
and domination of nature with the domination of women, and for similar reasons. Each was,
and is perceived as dangerous and in need of control (29). If we understand the domination of
nature as that which exploits, devalues, destroys and/or renders powerless natural resources,
ecofeminism contends that the same kind of philosophy behind this domination is inherent in
the attitudes which have attempted to justify the exploitation women. The standard history of
colonialism, according to Greta Gaard, is one in which the oppressive structures of capitalism, Christianity, and patriarchy
construct nature, and in which those associated with nature are considered resources for the colonizer, means to his ends,
interesting only in terms of their subordination (12). The alienating and destructive dichotomies nurtured by
Western metaphysical ideologies are what ecofeminists are trying to dismantle. Culture/nature,
mind/body, black/white, man/woman, intellect/emotion are all examples of structures which lie at the root of subordination and are
perpetuated by those who benefit from them. Because the ecofeminist agenda involves healing these artificial
separations and challenging existing power structures, writers and theorists such as Susan Griffin and Ynestra
King, among many others, have made writing an activist endeavor to help us better understand ourselves, and make connections
where there are gaps. Early colonists, before arriving on the new continent, were expecting a Garden of Eden and land
of plenty for their consumption. The journals of Columbus describe a lush land with cinnamon and spice, aromatic
plants, herbs, flowers, fertile soil and an abundance of gold. The Spaniards were looking for what they already knew as familiar and
that would result in personal or capital gain. This is where the metaphor of nature as virgin woman has its
roots. Annette Kolodny in Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters examines the
land/nature-as-woman symbolization in American literature. She refers to the metaphor as a male fantasy: a
daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land as
essentially feminine that is, not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of
gratification enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless integral
satisfaction. (4) While the poem Hunger takes place on or near the ocean, Kolodnys theories could still be applied here. The
poem, situated in an historical context, enables the speaker to tell of the beginnings of the
colonial settlements that ultimately brought about American Indian cultural genocide, and
carried with it patriarchal practices enforced by a belief in a divinely ordained mission to
dominate and subjugate the new world. Given that the psychology behind dominating other life forms can also be
traced back to fear, an aquatic or terrestrial intelligence emanating from the unknown or mystery in the non-human natural world
would be deemed a threat and in need of controlling. Another example of this patriarchal assault on women and the land is in the
poem Harvesters of Night and Water. It begins with the image of men out on a boat in the middle of the ocean fighting to capture
a resistant octopus. The boat they are on is described as white and small and the nets they are using are described as
impotent and limp. Again, Hogan uses sexual imagery, while no doubt making simultaneous descriptive references to those who
occupy the boat. The speaker is sorrowful for the violent and cruel manner in which the men attempt to catch the octopus: The
tentacles fall down over themselves and inch down, with the men screaming, jabbing at it. I want to stop them. I want to tell them
what I know, that this life collects coins like they do and builds walls on the floor of the sea. (23) This passage reveals the frustration
Hogan experiences in wanting others to respect and value living creatures other than humans. She wants to heal the gap
that dominant culture has placed between humans and nature by telling the men that the sea
creature lives its life to survive as they do. The octopus saves valuables for future use and builds its home underwater
in the same way that the men do on land. I dont argue that Hogan is trying to humanize the octopus in an anthropomorphic sense,
but rather to foster respect: this creature is a living being and not simply an object for capture and consumption. Furthermore, the
objectification of nature that allows these men to brutally attack the octopus is a result of the
notion that human beings are not a part of nature. Otherwise, there would be an understanding
that the men are brutalizing a part of themselves. Hogan ends the poem with this stanza: I want the world to be
kinder. I am a woman. I am afraid. I saw a star once, falling toward me. It was red with brilliant arms and then it was gone. (24)
Hogans call for a kinder world is echoed by the vanishing falling red star, which may symbolize
the strength and brilliance of Native cultures. As a woman, she is aware that there is much to be
afraid of. The harvesters of the night can kill and exploit women in the same manner that they
brutally attack the octopus. This disrespect for other forms of life has created a cruel and brutal
world in Hogans view. The men who are harvesting the night in the seas that she navigates in her poetry fail to
acknowledge and respect the aquatic intelligence that surrounds them. The themes explored in Hogans
writings directly link women and Native American cultures to the environment and landscape as members of a community that
share a history of oppression. The identifiable history of exploitation and misuse experience by women
and Native Americans in relation to the land has allowed various environmental movements to
complement one another for a common cause to raise awareness and improve the way human beings behave towards the places
they inhabit, and one another. Hogans natural world in The Book of Medicines is beautiful, wild, and also very dangerous. It is not
nature that is depicted as dangerous, but rather the colonizers who attempt to abuse and
destroy the land and her people. In the poem Tear, for example, Hogan gives the title word double meaning in order
to describe the dresses the women in her tribe worse and the historical removal that devastated her ancestors on the western
pathway known as the Trail of Tears.
Ethics
Ethics should come firstmatter is energy and we will all dieits what we do
with our lives that matters
Bellacasa, 10 Lecturer in science, technology, and organizations studies at the school of
management at the University of Leicester (Maria Puig de la, Ethics, Place, and Environment Vol.
13, No. 2, 2010, Ethical Doings in Naturecultures, pg 151-169)//gingE
What these approaches have in common is a contribution to a conception of ethics that
decentres the human subject in bio-political and techno-social collectives. They enrich our perception of complex
articulations of agency, decentring individual human agents and considering the social as a tissue of
associations between humans, non humans, and objects working in the realisation of new
relational formations. These views have the potential to challenge the ethical beyond its focus on human individual intentionality and flourishing. They
could contribute a post-conventional (Shildrick & Mykitiuk, 2005) vision of the ethical that embeds it in
processes, rather than discussing it as a set of added concerns that humans reflect on when
technoscientific and other material matters are already established. It is easy to note that STS has not remained immune
to the age of ethics: references to the ethical in this field become more and more frequent in combination with, or replacing, earlier concerns for elucidating the political
interests supporting science and technology. However, like in many of the approaches to biopolitics above considered the
ethical remains in this field of study an ethnographic or sociological object. A general perception is that STS
scholars avoid taking explicit judgements or elaborate prescriptive frameworks: their job is to illuminate the social processes by
which arguments achieve legitimacy rather than to use their understanding of those processes
to establish the legitimacy of their own arguments or positions (Johnson & Wetmore, 2008). Interest in the
ethical here is not aimed at promoting ethical obligations nor commitments but remains mostly about observing the ethical under
construction around a socio-technological problem and detecting the participants assembled in
this making. Thus, in spite of the potential of STS to transform the ethical, it is rare to see its insights thematised as
possibilities for proposing new ethical visions. From an ethicists perspective this is often
discussed as a normative deficit (Keulartz et al., 2004). However, to identify engagement with the ethical to
normative claims is a reductive approach that allows overlooking other potential involvements. As
STS scholar Lucy Suchman reminds, the price in recognizing the agency of artefacts need not be the denial of our own (Suchman, 2007, p. 285; see also Barad, 2007 for an
ontology of asubjective ethical agency). In fact, I think disengagement with ethical theorising might correspond to a
rejection of the humanist framework in which ethics is traditionally understood. Naturecultures
cosmologies require a form of ethical commitment that learns from the decentring of the
human. But here there is an important point to be made for the purpose of this paper. The category nonhuman in studies dealing
with science and technology conflates very diverse forms of life. But decentring the human has
different effects whether we refer to engagement invested further in the dis-objectification of
the natural (bios and/or phusis) rather than of the technological (techne)5. Not only each human-nonhuman configuration points to
different specificities, but the interference of the nonhuman in the ethical and the political varies
generically whether attention is turned to an artefact or to an animal/organic entity. This is not only a
conceptual issue or a matter of ontological categorisation; it is a concrete problem. If we aim to think the ethical not as an
abstract sphere but as embedded in actual practices, when dealing with the organic and the
animal we enter a world marked by concerns of, for instance, animal rights and ecological
movements, also we touch affective spheres associated with living beings such as suffering, loving,
caring. The non human brings us in different ethico-political directions when it involves bio-
worlds. In engaging with alterities that are capable of responding to human intervention with
pain, death and extinction (Van Dooren, forthcoming; Bird Rose & Van Dooren, forthcoming) and by creating affective and life-
sustaining interdependencies (Haraway, 2007) acknowledging agency and liveliness is not the same as
recognising that machines are alive. The semantics of naturecultures when they concern bios might then be less those of networks and
connections than those of ecologies and relations. In consequence, the inclusion of non human others from the animal/organic
world produces a different set of ethical concerns than the engagement with technological
entities. In a naturecultural perspective on technoscience, agency is indeed distributed and decentred from its humanistic pole. But here the ethical
consequences of interdependent entanglements of nonhumans and humans are not only about
the preservation of human existence, and/or about which decisions will better respond to novel
forms of biopower introduced by technoscience e.g. the effects of biomedicine for human subjectivity, of technological waste on
humans and their environments. Other problems become crucial: how do we actively engage with the lived experiences of
forms of non human bios whose existences are today increasingly integrated in the cultural
world of human techne? How do we acknowledge their agency without denying the asymmetrical power historically developed by human agencies in bios?
How do we engage with accountable forms of ethico-political caring that respond to alterity without nurturing purist separations between humans and nonhumans? How to
engage with care of earth without idealising nature or de-responsibilizing human agency by
seeing it as either inevitable destructive or paternalistic stewardship? There are many sites where one could look for
situated pragmatic ways of addressing these questions (e.g. animal carers, conservation planners). Based on my own research and involvement in permaculture collectives, I
propose a vision of this movement as an intervention in naturecultures that builds ethical
obligation on personal practices in a non humanistic way. Permaculture practices are ethical doings that connect ordinary
personal living with the collective. They decentre human agency without denying its specificity. They promote
ethical obligations that do not start from, nor aim at moral norms, but that are articulated as
existential and concrete necessities. These are born out of material constraints and situated relationalities in the making with other people, living
beings, and earth's resources. Thus, the principles: care for earth, people and return of the surplus, are both quite generic their actualisations vary and involve very
concrete material ways of conceiving how to work with patterns of bios (ecological cycles, physical forces). The people I talked to during my research and activism, often spoke
about how, after a training, they started trying to implement the practices they learnt in local communities both in urban and rural environments from the backyard to the
local council, or joining larger ways of public activism. Most of them strongly affirm that they have changed their personal everyday way of relating with nature, of measuring
their own impact on the planet in smaller and bigger ways. This can go from starting to compost food waste, to plant and produce food locally, to promote ecological building.
But even when the action is acknowledged as a deeply intimate one as can be a spiritual
connection or the building of one's self as an ethical being it is mostly affirmed as collectively
engaged. The collective here does not only include humans, but the plants and animals we cultivate, raise, eat (or not), as well as earth's energetic resources: air, water. It
is in connection with these that we individuals live and act: at every level of our lives we depend on them and
they depend on us. Permaculture ethics of care are based on the perception that we are embedded in a web of complex relationships in which personal actions
have consequences for more than ourselves and our kin. And that conversely those collective connections transform our personal life. The ecological perception of being part
of the earth, a part which does its share of care, requires that the earth is not reduced to a spiritual or visionary image, e.g. Gaia, but is also felt: earth as real dirt under our
fingernails (Starhawk, 2004, p. 6); our bodies responding to the needs of water because we are water (Lohan, 2008);
our energy being living material processed by other forms of life. Permaculture ethical principles can indeed be seen as
ideas that we became able of doing, but it is more appropriate to say that it is the doing that transforms the way we feel, think, engage, with the principles. We are pushed to
thicken their meaning, by for instance, wanting to learn more about the needs of the soil we take for granted (Ingham, 1999). Before continuing, Ill give a simple example,
practicing composting. Here naturecultural interdependency is not only more than a moral principle, it is also more than a matter of fact that we become aware of: it becomes a
matter of care to be dealt with through ethical doings. I use the word doing to mark the ordinariness, the uneventful connotation in contrast
with action. For people living in urban areas composting is a more or less accessible practice to
caring for the earth, as an everyday task of returning the surplus. One of the basic principles that permaculture endorses is
to produce no waste (Carlsson, 2008, p. 9). Thus techniques of composting are an important part of earth activist trainings. Not only how to keep a good compost going, but
also how to become knowledgeable regarding the liveliness, and needs of, a pile of compost. One of the ways of knowing if a pile of compost is healthy is if we see it fill up with
pinkie sticky worms: worms are the great creators of fertility. They tunnel into the soil, turning and aerating it. They eat soil particles and rotting food, passing them through
their gut and turning them into worm castings, an extremely valuable form of fertilizer, high in nitrogen, minerals and trace elements . (Starhawk, 2004, p. 170). Worms, in
compost some people keep worm buckets in the kitchens are a good example of the nonhuman beings of which permaculture ethics make you aware, but not the only one:
anyone who eats should care about the microorganisms in the soil (Starhawk, 2004, p. 8, my emphasis). However, this should doesnt work, without a transformation of
ethos. Worms are a more visible manifestation of soil life than microorganisms, but are as easy to neglect. Caring for the worms is not a given: most people have learned to be
disgusted by them. Becoming able of a caring obligation towards worms is nurtured by hands on dirt, love and curiosity for the needs of an other, whether this is the people we
live with, the animals we care for, the soil we plant in. It is by working with them, by feeding them and gathering their castings as food for plants, that a relationship is created
that acknowledges our interdependency: these neglectable sticky beings reappear as quite amazing as well as indispensable for they take care of our waste, they process it so
that it becomes food again. This commitment to care for an earthy other is not understandable with
reference to utilitaristic ethics I take care for the earth and the worms, because I need them; because they are of use to me. Nonhuman
others are not there to serve us. They are here to live with. And, clearly when we dont listen to what they are saying,
experiencing, needing, the responses are consequential as mass extinctions and animal related
epidemics testify. But if this is not a utilitarian relationship, is it an altruistic one? We need to avoid this
binary to understand what is becoming possible in this specific conception of relationships and mutual obligation. Human agency in the permaculture cosmology is nature
working. This means that humans are full participants to the becoming of natural worlds. However they have their own
worldly tasks. Creating abundance by working with nature is seen as a typical human skill and contribution. However, abundance is not considered a
surplus of life that can be squandered, or considered as self-regenerative biocapital to invest in
a speculative future (Cooper, 2008). On the contrary, it is only by returning the surplus of life e.g. by
composting that the production of abundance can be sustained. This is something that permaculture activists consider
ancient wisdom. Many refer to knowledge of indigenous populations and ancient agricultural knowledge. In the words of Mabel Mc Kay, a Powo healer: when people dont use
the plants, they get scarce. You must use them so they will come up again. All plants are like that. If theyre not gathered from, or talked to and cared about, theyll die (quoted
in Starhawk, 2004, p. 9; see also Mendum, 2009). This vision could be also named naturecultural. Though some refer to
permaculture as a humanist vision and even a better science (Holmgren, 2002) these arguments are
often produced to avoid the movement being identified with ecological visions that put other
beings before humans e.g. considering humans as a destroyer invasive species and science and
technology as evil. However, in the contexts I have been involved in, the accent is put on a commitment to the people of earth that inseparably includes
nonhuman beings. In other words, without caring for other beings, we cannot care for humans either. Care for the environment wouldnt be
a good way to conceptualise permaculture ethics. Coming back to altruism, and how it does not respond better than a utilitarian
perspective to how these relations of self/other work, I see these practices as marked by a form of biopolitical ethics
attuned to naturocultural awareness. Here, care for one's body-self is not separable from
peoplecare and earthcare. In this sense, this movement exemplifies well the interrelationship between the three ecologies of self (body and psyche), the
collective, and the earth that Flix Guattari famously called upon as the urgency for the near future, believing that none could be realisable without the other (Guattari, 2000).
As Starhawk considers, material-spiritual balance cannot be attained through abstract engagement with caring for the earth. On the contrary, the reference to an ideal earth
conduces our spiritual, psychic, and physical health to become devitalized and deeply unbalanced (Starhawk, 2004, p. 6). Conversely, in permaculture trainings there is an
insistence on not neglecting the needs of one's body-psyche in the profit of serving burn-out is taken into account as a typical activist sickness. Thus, while activist care of
one's self is embedded in obligation towards a collective, it is not considered healthy, nor even effective, to ground care in an altruistic ethics in the face of catastrophe. As
Katie Renz argues permaculture is not some last-ditch effort in the emaciated face of scarcity, but a cultivation of an intimate relationship with
one's natural surroundings to create abundance for oneself, for human communities, and the
earth (Renz, 2003). Moreover, the aim is not modest, nor sacrificial, it is not even sustainability it is abundance. The affect cultivated in Earth Activist Trainings is not
despondency in front of the impossible, but joy in the hope of possibility. Ultimately, permaculture ethics is a situated ethics. I remember one of the mottos transmitted in the
training I attended: It depends is the answer to almost every permaculture question. As such, the actualisation of principles of caring
are always created in an interrelated doing with the needs of a place, a land, a neighbourhood, a
city, a particular action. Here, personal agencies of everyday care are inseparable from their collective ecological significance. It is important to note that
permaculture ethics are not only about planting food or raising animals or sustainable building. In the Earth Activist Training tradition, they are also related to public actions of
civil disobedience and non violent direct action illegal garden creation, public demonstration of techniques in alter-globalisation oppositional events (Starhawk, 2004, 2002;
see interview with Olhsen in Carlsson, 2008, pp. 7479). More generally, permaculture ethics are thought also as forms of organising for instance promoting forms of
collaborative direct democratic sharing instead of competition. They are not about an abstract external vision of the practices of others. This has consequences for persons who,
like me, are reporting these ethical doings in a different context. I am not merely observing these ethics in the making; I am trying to support their ethical obligations. This
approach is different from an ethnographical reporting of ethical transformation on the ground:
the ethical involves and affects the observer/researcher, in a search for engaging and
responding with the transformation not necessarily with answers. But it is also different from seeking the appropriate
philosophical framework that could fit this practice in. The ethical transformation that this observer/researcher
endorses is articulated not as norm but as invitation to relate with it. In this spirit I attempt to
contribute a conception of a care ethics that communicates with this vision.
Patriarchy Bad
Patriarchy causes inaction and extinction
Spretnak 89- MA in English from Berkely (Charlene, Exposing Nuclear Phallacies, Editor, Diana
EH Russell, Page: 60)
Most men in our patriarchal culture are still acting out old patterns that are radically
inappropriate for the nuclear age. To provide dominance and control, to distance ones
character from that of women, to survive the toughest violent initiation, to shed the blood of
the hero, to collaborate with death in order to hold it at bay- all of these patriarchal pressures
on men have traditionally reached resolution in ritual fashion on the battlefield. But there is no
longer any battlefield. Does anyone seriously believe that if a nuclear power were losing a
crucial, large-scale conventional war it would refrain from using its multiple war-head nuclear
missiles because of some diplomatic agreement? The military theatre of nuclear exchange today
would extend, instantly or eventually, to all living things, all the air, all the soil, all the water If
we believe war is a necessary evil, that patriarchal assumptions are simply human nature
then we are locked into a lie, paralyzed. The ultimate result of unchecked terminal patriarchy
will be nuclear holocaust

Patriarchy leads to abuse of power
Clark 4 -professor of biological studies, (Mary E., Rhetoric, Patriarchy & War: Explaining the Dangers of
"Leadership in Mass Culture, Women & Language) http://mail.kwu.edu:....C3F5&fn=1&rn=1,
I thus conclude that the language of intemational politics today is "gendered" by the political
insecurity experienced by leaders of earlier patriarchies, and that the presence of women in
such govemments has little effect on the framework of public dialogue. (I recall hearing
Geraldine Ferraro, when mnning for Vice-President in 1984, assure an interviewer that she
would not hesitate to push the "nuclear button" if necessary.) Hence, it is not our X and Y
chromosomes that are at issue here; it is the gendered world view that underpins our
institutions and frames our behaviors. As long as those in power "think" in this patriarchal box,
we will live in a globally-armed camp, where war-leading even to the annihilation of our species-
is a constant, real possibility.

Patriarchy promotes and sustains military values and needs, it is this patriarchal
structure of privilege and control that must be dismantled if we are to get rid of
militarism
De Lima 3 - Writer for the New Straits Times (Anthea December 25, New Straits Times , Of war and
women)
In her paper, co-ordinator of the Gender Studies Programme at University of Malaya, Dr Shanthi
Thambiah, said that theorising about militarisation as a social process, rather than war and peace, was
important to expose ways in which patriarchy promotes and sustains military values and needs. "Women
too have a role to play in this but ironically, most of the theorising is done by women in countries which
offer physical security for devoting their energies to a project beyond day-today living. Other women are
less fortunate because they lack a sense of elementary safety. "Thus, those women with the most
pressing need to discover the underlying causes of war, militarism and peace are precisely those with the
least capacity to write down their thoughts," she said. She went on to discuss several feminist
interpretations of militarisation, concluding that they generally implicated patriarchy as the root cause of
militarism. "It is this patriarchal structure of privilege and control that must be dismantled if we are to get
rid of militarism. A feminist theory of militarisation should be able to show that as long as patriarchal
assumptions about masculinity and femininity shape people's beliefs and identities and their relationship
with one another, militarisation that may lay dormant will rise again and again," she said.

Patriarchy holds warfare to be the ultimate initiation into true manhood
Capra 88 -Ph.D., physicist and systems theorist, founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy , (Fritjof,
National Insecurity, New Age ournal, http://maaber.50megs...otlights_1e.htm)
There is now a rich feminist literature on the roots of militarism and war in patriarchal values and
patriarchal thinking. Patriarchy, these authors point out, operates within the context of
dominance/submission. Thus parity of nuclear weapons is not enough for American generals: they want
superiority. This macho competition in the arms race extends to the size of missiles. During one
administration, military lobbyists persuaded politicians to spend more money on defense by showing
them upright models of Soviet and American missiles, in which the Soviet missiles were larger, although it
was known that the larger missiles were technically inferior. The phallic shape of these missiles makes the
sexual connotation of this compe*tition in missile size obvious. Patriarchy equates aggression and
dominance with masculinity, and warfare is held to be the ultimate initiation into true manhood.

Patriarchal use of hegemonic masculine language legitimizes force
Clark 4 -professor of biological studies, (Mary E., Rhetoric, Patriarchy & War: Explaining the Dangers of
"Leadership in Mass Culture, Women & Language) http://mail.kwu.edu:....C3F5&fn=1&rn=1,
Today's Western patriarchal world view now dominates globalwide dialogue among the "leaders" of
Earth's nearly two hundred nation-states. Its Machiavellian/Realpolitik assumptions about the necessity of
military power to preserve order within and between groups of humans trumps - and stifles - other
potential viewpoints. Founded on the belief that "evil" is innate, it dictates that human conflict must be
"controlled": global "law" backed by coercive force. This view, when cross-culturally imposed, becomes a
selffulfilling prophecy, thus "legitimating" an escalating use of force. Western leaders (male and female)
use a rhetoric couched in a "hegemonic masculinity" to justify their ready use of military force to coerce
"those who are against us" into compliance.

Patriarchy causes militarism and violence
Spretnak 89- MA in English from Berkely (Charlene, Exposing Nuclear Phallacies, Editor, Diana
EH Russell, pg. 60)
Women and men can live together and can relate to other societies in any number of cultural
configurations, but ignorance of the configurations themselves locks a populace into blind adherence to
the status quo. In the nuclear age, such unexamined acceptance may be fatal as certain cultural
assumptions in our own society are pushing us closer and closer to war. Since a major war could now
easily bring on massive annihilation of almost unthinkable proportions, why are discussions in our
national forums addressing this madness of the nuclear arms race limited to matters of hardware and
statistics? A more comprehensive analysis is needed-unless, as the doomsayers claim, we collectively
harbor a death wish and no not really want to look closely at dynamics propelling us steadily toward the
brink of extinction. The cause of nuclear arms proliferation is militarism. What is the cause of militarism?
The traditional militarist explanation is that the masters of war in the military-industrial complex profit
enormously from defense contracts and other war preparations. A capitalist economy periodically
requires the economic boon that large-scale government spending, capitol investment, and worker
sacrifice produce during a crisis of war. In addition, American armed forces, whether nuclear or
conventional, are stationed worldwide to protect the status quo, which requires vast and interlocking
American corporate interests. Suck an economic analysis alone in inadequate, as the recent responses to
the nuclear arms race that ignore the cultural orientation of the nations involved: They are patriarchies.
Militarism and warfare are continual features of patriarchal society because they reflect and instill
patriarchal values and fulfill essential needs of such a system. Acknowledging the context of patriarchal
conceptualizations that feed militarism is a first step toward reducing their impact and preserving life on
Earth.

2AC Ballot Key
Ballot is key other discussions are always put off for later and nothing gets
fixed only the ballot is a form of resistance that has any hope of liberation
Evans et al, 12 (Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Rashad Evans, et al Amber Kelsie and Jillian Martin,
November 12th, 2012, An Open Letter to Sarah Spring,
http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/an-open-letter-to-sarah-
spring/))//gingE
Lack of community discussion is neither random nor power-neutral. We have tried to have
discussions. These discussions have been regularly derailedin wrong forum arguments, in
the demand for evidence, in the unfair burdens placed on the aggrieved as a pre-requisite for engagement. Read the
last ten years of these discussions on edebate archives: Ede Warner on edebate and move forward to Rashad Evans diversity
discussion from 2010 to Deven Cooper to Amber Kelsies discussion on CEDA Forums and the NDT CEDA Traditions page. We
have been talking for over a decade, we have been reaching out for years, we have been
listening to the liberal, moderate refrain of we agree with your goals but not with your
method. We will no longer wait for the community to respond, to relinquish privilege, to
engage in authentic discussion, since largely the community seems incapable of producing a
consensus for responding to what we all agree is blatant structural inequity. It seems that meta-
debates/discussions about debate are generally met with denial, hostility andmore often
silence. This silence is in fact a focused silence. It is not people in the Resistance Facebook group that comprise
these silent figuresit is (as has been described) the old boys club. We have been quite vocaland we believe
that it is this very vocalness (and the development of a diversity of tactics in response to status quo stalling tactics) that
has provoked response when response was given. Sarah Springs cedadebate post is a case in point. The decision
to change our speaker point scale is not in order to produce a judging doomsday apparatus (this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric might
more aptly be applied to the current racist/sexist/classist state of affairs in this community), though we must admit that we are
flattered that our efforts have affected the community enough to result in such a hyberbolic labeling. It indicates that civil
disobedience is still an effective tactic; the debate community should take it as an indication
that our calls for change are serious. We will continue to innovate and collaborate on tactics of
resistance. This crisis in debate has no end in sight. The rationale for changing the point scale was not simply to
reward people for preferring the unpreferred critic. We recognize that MP produces effects, and we hoped that changing our
point scale was a small but significant tactic that was available to the disenfranchised in this community. MPJ:
2AC A2 Thayer
Thayer is incorrect in his theories and his biases plague his workcreates a self-
fulfilling prophecy of domination and oppression
Busser, 6 Masters of poli sci at York University (Mark, YCISS working paper number 40,
August, The Evolution of Security: Revisiting the Human Nature Debate in International
Relations)//gingE
Responding directly to Thayer, Duncan Bell and Paul MacDonald have expressed concern at the intellectual functionalism
inherent in sociobiological explanations, suggesting that too often analysts choose a specific behaviour and read
backwards into evolutionary epochs in an attempt to rationalize explanations for that
behaviour. These arguments, Bell and MacDonald write, often fall into what Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould
have called adaptionism, or the attempt to understand all physiological and behavioural traits of an
organism as evolutionary adaptations.42 Arguments such as these are hand-crafted by their
makers, and tend to carry forward their assumptions and biases. In an insightful article, Jason Edwards
suggests that sociobiology and its successor, evolutionary psychology, are fundamentally political because they frame their major
questions in terms of an assumed individualism. Edwards suggests that the main question in both sub- fields
is: given human nature, how is politics possible?43 The problem is that the givens of human
nature are drawn backward from common knowledges and truths about humans in society, and
the game-theory experiments which seek to prove them are often created with such
assumptions in mind. These arguments are seen by their critics as politicized from the very start.
Sociobiology in particular has been widely interpreted as a conservative politico-scientific tool because of these basic assumptions,
and because of the political writings of many sociobiologists.44 Because sociobiology naturalizes certain
behaviours like conflict, inequality and prejudice, Lewontin et al. suggest that it sets the stage for legitimation
of things as they are.45 The danger inherent in arguments that incorporate sociobiological
arguments into examinations of modern political life, the authors say, is that such arguments naturalize variable
behaviours and support discriminatory political structures. Even if certain behaviours are found to have a
biological drives behind them, dismissing those behaviours as natural precludes the possibility that
human actors can make choices and can avoid anti-social, violent, or undesirable action.46 While the attempt to
discover a genetically- determined human nature has usually been justified under the argument that knowing humankinds basic
genetic programming will help to solve the resulting social problems, discourse about human nature seems to
generate self-fulfilling prophesies by putting limits on what is considered politically possible.
While sociobiologists tend to distance themselves from the naturalistic fallacy that what is is what should be, there is still a
problem with employing adaptionism to explain how existing political structures because
conclusions tend to be drawn in terms of conclusions that assert what must be because of
biologically- ingrained constraints.47 Too firm a focus on sociobiological arguments about natural laws draws attention
away from humanitys potential for social and political solutions that can counteract and mediate any inherent biological impulses,
whatever they may be. A revived classical realism based on biological arguments casts biology as
destiny in a manner that parallels the neo-realist sentiment that the international sphere is
doomed to everlasting anarchy. im George quotes the English School scholar Martin Wight as writing that hope is
not a political virtue: it is a theological virtue.48 George questions the practical result of traditional realsist claims,
arguing that the suggestion that fallen mans sinful state can only be redeemed by a higher power puts limitations on what is
considered politically possible. Thayers argument rejects the religious version of the fallen man for a
scientific version, but similar problems remain with his scientific conclusions. The political and
philosophical debates that surround sociobiology in general are the least of the problems with Bradley Thayers article. In fact,
Thayers argument is exactly the sort of reading of sociobiology about which its critics like
Lewontin and Gould have been uncomfortably anticipating. Worse, Thayers exercise
demonstrates a misreading of many evolutionary arguments drawing conclusions with which
the theorists he cites would likely distance themselves. His argument about an egoistic human nature relies on a
tiresomely common oversimplification of a classic Darwinist argument, crudely linking natural selection to the assumption that
selfishness encourages evolutionary fitness; Even Thayer feels the need to qualify this argument in a
footnote.49 Thayers citation of Richard Dawkins selfish gene theory to provide the second sufficient explanation for egoism is
also incredibly problematic.50 In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that at the beginning of micro-organic life genes that promoted
survival were key to making basic life-forms into simple survival machines. Rather than viewing genes as an
organisms tool for generating, Dawkins suggests that it is wiser to look at the development of
complex organisms as genes method of replicating themselves. The word selfish is used as a shorthand to
describe a more complex phenomenon: genes that give their organic vessel advantages in survival and reproduction are successfully
transmitted into future generations.5 1 However, an important part of Dawkins work is that the selfishness of genes translates into
decidedly unselfish behaviours. Dawkins himself has had to distance himself from groups who
interpreted his focus on kin selection as a reification of ethnocentrism: The National Front was saying
something like this, kin selection provides the basis for favoring your own race as distinct from other
races, as a kind of generalization of favoring your own close family as opposed to other
individuals. Kin selection doesnt do that! Kin selection favors nepotism towards your own immediate close family.
It does not favor a generalization of nepotism towards millions of other people who happen to
be the same color as you.52 In light of a careful consideration of the intricacies of Dawkins thinking, Thayers treatment of
his theories seems remarkably crude and shallow. Broad conclusions seem to materialize as if from thin air: In general, Thayer
writes, the selfishness of the gene increases its fitness, and so the behaviour spreads.53 This
line, crucial to Thayers point, is such a brazen oversimplification and misinterpretation of
Dawkins work that Thayers arguments about a provable natural human egoism are rendered
essentially baseless in terms of scientific evidence. Thayers argument about the ubiquity of
hierarchical structures of power rely on a dichotomous hypothetical choice between eternal
conflict and structures of dominance. The suggestion that the ubiquity of male- dominated hierarchies contributes to
fitness in the present tense comes dangerously close to naturalizing and reifying patriarchal structures of human social
organization.54 As presented, the argument reads very much like Hobbes Leviathan, in which pre-social actors sought the refuge
and protection of a larger social order. In many ways, Thayer seems to be reconstructing the Leviathan using
sociobiology rather clumsily to justify broad generalizations. It is certain that some mix of biology and culture
have led to male-dominated cultures in the past, and there is a strong basis for the argument that humans have developed a need to
belong to social groups. It is also clear that humans have the mental capacity to understand and
technologies for operating within dominance hierarchies. Yet these possibilities together do not
suggest, contrary to Thayers argument, that humans readily give allegiance to the state, or
embrace religion or ideologies such as liberalism or communism, because evolution has
produced a need to belong to a dominance hierarchy.55 If humans do depend on social connectedness, must
this necessarily come in the form of hierarchical, patriarchal structures? The case is not made convincingly. As I shall discuss below,
alternate understandings of the connection between basic human needs, human culture, and environmental stresses can provide an
understanding of dominance hierarchies that does not naturalize their ubiquity. Beyond the problems with the scientific evidence
behind Thayers ontological claims, there are also problems with his proposed epistemological project of
consilience. Using sociobiology to unite the social and natural sciences (and to give bases to a revitalized classical realism) would
depend on achieving a near omnipotence, where known genetic programs could be weighed against known environmental
influence, using science to predict the results. At the outset of his essay, Thayer implies that science is progressing
at a rapid pace towards making this a reality. Yet evolutionary explanations for specific
behaviours become incredibly problematic given all of the possible factors and externalities
which might have affected evolutionary outcomes, all of which are impossible to map into even the most
complex mathematical theoretical games. Bell and MacDonald point out that many biologists dispute whether sociobiology can offer
useful commentary on humans because of the central role of culture, language, and self-reflexivity in determining human
behaviour.56 Similarly, in response to Shaw and Wong, oshua Goldstein cites evidence that human beings do not demonstrate an
inherent tendency towards aggression, instead displaying cooperation more often. Goldstein offers the possibility that human
behavioural traits like aggression, altruism, and sacrifice are shaped more by cultural transmission than by genes. This
possibility enormously complicates the attempt at consilience intended by Thayer and his
contemporaries, by adding in incalculable variables that come with social and cultural
interactions.57 Because of these complications, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin have asserted that sociobiologys grand argument is
discredited since no aspect of human social behaviour has ever been linked to a specific gene or set of genes.58 As Mary Clark
observes, one of the major results of the human genome project was the falsification of the supposition that each protein produced
in a human cell was coded by a separate gene. In fact, genes often work interdependently, with the same gene
recurring along the chromosome and causing different outcomes depending on its position and
neighbouring genes. Clark describes the complex signals and activations which occur at the genetic level, concluding that
rather than a linear unidirectional blueprint, the human genome is more like an ecosystem, and can be responsive to its microscopic
and perhaps even the macroscopic environment.59 Just how important are the influences culture, social behaviour, and
environment to the human condition, as distinct from biological programming? In many caveats and footnotes within Thayers own
argument, he includes statements that acknowledge the importance of cultural factors in the shaping of modern human societies. If
all behaviour cannot be explained by sociobiology and other evolutionary arguments because
behaviours are contingent on cultural and environmental factors, how strong is the scientific
support for Thayers revived realist project? As Bell and MacDonald have suggested, many of the scientific
foundations Thayer employs to support his epistemological program are indeterminate because they cannot explain when cultural
or environmental factors will play a role.60 On the ontological side, Thayer certainly comes a long way from proving that human
nature is defined by and limited to egoism and dominance, as he had intended to do. If knowledge borrowed from evolutionary
biology and other natural sciences suggests that culture and environment play a significant role in shaping human behaviours, then
it may not be the realist project that is best supported by a deep and sustained interdisciplinary exploration. Citing evolutionary
Science does not truly support realist narratives and explanations of egoistic competition in human society, despite the fact that
over the years it has often been cited by those wishing to make such cases. There is plenty of evidence in
evolutionary science for explaining why biology is not destiny, and in fact, for unsettling any
claim about an evolutionarily-derived human nature that underlies political life. In her book In Search
of Human Nature, Mary E. Clark has suggested that instead of a human nature defined by genetically programmed instincts,
predispositions and drives, it is more useful to discuss a human nature in terms of universal needs. These needs, she
argues, are as close to a human nature as we humans have, since their fulfilment is necessary
as a result of complex development. Clark suggests that human beings have basic biological and
psychological needs for bonding, for autonomy, and for meaning.
Their argument is rooted in a violent pursuit of modernist ontology that ignores
the fact that human nature allows their alternativewe can and are changing
Busser, 6 Masters of poli sci at York University (Mark, YCISS working paper number 40,
August, The Evolution of Security: Revisiting the Human Nature Debate in International
Relations)//gingE
Of course, the suggestion that Clark backs Lvinas with science may be uncomfortable and problematic for some readers, especially
those who favour post-modern and poststructuralist approaches to the study of security. Such approaches differ from
traditional approaches because they question the ontological and epistemological bases for the
knowledge claims that are prevalent in traditional work. Poststructuralist thinkers in
international relations are especially critical of meta-narratives or overarching intellectual
stories that presume to give an orderly, linear, and positivist account of complex phenomena.87
Campbell and George have advocated an approach to political thinking that involves a rejection of all attempts
to secure an independent foundation, or Archimedean point, from which to orient and judge social
action. It stresses instead the need to ground all knowledge of social life in human history, culture, and power relations.88
While academic interdisciplinarity or non-disciplinarity is often understood as a virtue,
advocates of postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches critique the imperial pretences of
positivist science especially those that seek to universalize. Bradley Thayers invocation of Edward
O. Wilsons theory of consilience attempts to create exactly the sort of positivist meta-theory to
which poststructuralist and postmodernist writers object. By relying on purportedly objective scientific
approaches to establish a master narrative that can unite the social and natural sciences, Wilsons consilience theory
represents an example of the overzealous rationalism that typifies the modernist paradigm.89
Sociobiology in general carries forward what post-positivist theorists see as the problematic
attempt to create a unified science by drawing on knowable universals. It is trickier to make these same
criticisms of Clark because she does not make similar claims to objective truths. Her use of scientific arguments, rather
than providing an ultimate theory of human behaviours, demonstrates that universal claims are
unhelpful and cause intellectual distortions. By focusing on human needs but emphasizing that
these needs are filled in endlessly different ways across cultures, Clarks conceptual
prioritization of human needs rather than human nature opens up a space for exploring
meaningful political solutions that allow for possibility of social arrangements that do not
require the erasure and reconciliation of difference or the sacrifice of autonomous freedoms.
Unfortunately for Bradley Thayer, evolutionary arguments do not provide a simple and incontestable
ontological and epistemological foundations for revitalized realism. Since arguments like Thayers draw on
controversial scientific branches of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which arguably assume the basic features of human
nature they seek to prove, the conclusions for political theory remain almost as scientifically arbitrary
as Morgenthaus assumption of an animus dominandi. In framing the problematic of their exploration, many
of these arguments assume an individualistic and egoistic human nature and question how
political relations might arise out of the mechanical dynamics of self-interest. As Mary Clarks work
demonstrates, this ignores important factors in the evolutionary development of the human being.
Since interpersonal, cultural, political ,and social influences have had a large role in shaping the
evolution of humans and our primate relatives, it is not such a simple task to explain human
nature based on rational actor models and mathematical calculations. In contrast to the sociobiology and
evolutionary psychologys depiction of human nature as biologically determined, Clark argues that it is a societys construction of a
story of human nature that affects how people will imagine ways to live together, fulfilling basic human needs or not. Biology is
not destiny, she seems to argue, but what we believe about our biology threatens to become
our destiny if we allow it. This highlights the possibility that seemingly universal traits like
competition, aggression and egoism might be contingent on the weight we lend them and not
biologically determined. If we have a choice in the matter, it is possible to begin conceiving of political
possibilities for global social orders that do not depend on a combative and competitive
engagement with Others. In turn, this allows a reconsideration of the conceptual lens through
which to view security. If it is not programmed into our genes to be intolerant, ethnocentric, and aggressive, then we can
find ways to abandon the traditions that have normalized such behaviours. Following Jim George and David Campbell, perhaps a
new conception of international relationships would serve better than the current paradigm, which is based on traditional views of
an aggressive and competitive human nature. It may be that, as Clark suggests, conflict can only be mitigated when basic human
needs are met. Doing so, it seems, would require a rethinking of how differences are engaged with,
interpreted and reconciled in both international and local societies. If we humans are not
biologically destined to draw lines between ourselves and others, then it is possible for us to
escape conceptions of security that necessitate aggression against, or protection from,
outsiders. Perhaps the security long sought after in international relations will come not from
making societies secure from difference, but making difference secure within and between
states.

2AC A2 Cedes the Political
Engaging with the state just leads to serial policy failurequeer theory reclaims
the political
Berlant and Warner, 95 - * professor of English at the University of Chicago ** associate
professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Lauren and Michael PMLA 110
"What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X)//gingE
When a new thing emerges, people want to know how it is going to solve problems. When it is called theory,
it is expected to produce a program, and when the theory addresses the broad issue of queerness, the program is ex pected to explain queer life. But queer theory has not yet
undertaken the kind of general description of the world that would allow it to produce
practical solutions. People want to know what costs, risks, and tactics are involved in getting from this order of things to a better one. Asked for these reasons, the question ofx i both
a.challenge and a hope. And it is a hard question. The question of x might be more ordinary in disciplines that have long histories of affiliation with the state. Sociology, psychology, anthropology, and political
science, for example, have earned much of their funding and expert authority by encouraging questions of utility. Queer theory has flourished in the
disciplines. where expert service to the state has been least familiar arid where. theory has consequently meant unsettlement
rather thansystematization .. This failure to systematize the world in queer theory does not mean a
commitment to irrelevance; it means resistance to being an apparatus for falsely translating
systematic and random violences into normal .states, administrative problems, or minor constituencies.Sometimes the question of what queer
theory teaches us about x is not about politics in the usual .sense but about personal survival. Like feminist, AfricimAmerican,Latina/Latino, and other minority projects, queer work
strikes its readers as knowledge central to living. This demand puts tremendous pressure on
emerging work, pressure that makes the work simultaneously conventional and unprecedented in the humanities and socialsciencestraditional insofar as pedagogy has long involved the
formation of identities and ubjectivities, radical in the aspiration to live another way now, here.What does queer theory.teach.us about x? As difficult as it would be
to spell out programmatic content for an answer, this simple question still has the power to wrench frames. What does queer
commentary teach us about literature or about the L inPMLA? How do literary engagements participate in queer world building? This question is notfrequently posed, for fear that the answer would be,
'\, -\ .Nothing.;: .= ....... Queer commentary has involved a certain amount of experimenting, of prancing and squatting on
the academic stage. This is partly to remind people that there is an academic stage and that its protocols and proprieties have maintained an
invisible heteronormativity, one that infiltrates our profession, our knowledge, and this editorial. This does not mean we embrace, or dis-. avow, the indecorous per se.
fudecorum can be a way of bringing some dignity. to the abject. But it is also a way of changing the public for academic work, of keeping the door ajar;In our view, the question of culture building should be
the baseline issue for humanists. On this point we might agree with traditionalists who believe that the humanities should not be limited by the present. Historical con sciousness and a resistance to
presentism can be indispensable to a critical cult:ure. But unlike some varieties of traditionalism, queer commentary refuses to subordinate
emergent cultures to whatever happens to pass for common culture. We want to promote the building not of culture in general
but Of a;culture Wh()Se marginal history make it inevitaply COntroverted, even wheh it involves authors and themes of the greatest canonical prestige.Many of the critics of
queer theory would .like to dismiss it as merely particular, the infection of general culture by narrow
interest But the relation between the general and the particular is exactly what is at issue. Queer commentary shows that much of what passes
for general culture is riddled with heteronormativity. Conversely, many of the issues of
queerness have more general relevance than one is normally encouraged to think. This is true not only of
explicitly general notions of subjectivity-such as the unconscious, abjection, embodiment, knowledge, and performativityand not only of the prestigio!l author who have been so brilliantly queered but also
of a range of specificallyliterary issues. Queer commentary has produced rich analyses of these areas: cultures of reception; the relatio
of the explicit and the implicit, or the acknowledged and the disavowed; the use and abuse of biography for life; the costs of closure and the pleasure of 'unruly subplots; vernacular idioms and private
knowledge; voicing strategies; gosSip; elision and euphemism; jokes; identifiation and other readerly relations to texts and discourse. Queer commentary has also distinguished itselfthrough experiments in
critical voice and in the genre ofthe critical essay. Along with queer experiments in pedagogy and classroom practice, it marks a transformation ofboth the object and the practice of criticism. Of coiitse, we
have deferred asking the crucial question: what does queer theory teach us about sex?

2AC Poetry Good
Poetry is a unique medium that allows individuals value to be determined
Helen Vendler 99 is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor in English at Harvard University.
She was educated at Emmanuel College, the University of Louvain, and Boston University, and
received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society,
and the Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. She is the recipient of the Charles Stewart
Parnell Fellowship, Magdalene College, Cambridge; she has also received fellowships from the
Wilson Center and the Guggenheim Foundation. In addition to her academic duties, she is the
poetry critic for the New Yorker. Her many published works include Yeatss Vision and the Later
Plays (1963); The Poetry of George Herbert (1975); Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of
Desire (1984); The Music of What Happens: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1988); Soul Says: On
Recent Poetry (1995); and The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets (1997).
There is more to say about the values imaged and implied by these four poems. In attempting the subject of Lincoln from four
different perspectives, Whitman (who had often seen Lincoln and had described him in prose of a journalistic and mimetic nature)
turns away from personal and historic mimesis of the man and president to symbolic mimesis, framed
for the conveying of value. In each case the aesthetic vehiclethe collective voice of the soldiers in the camps, the
single voice of the grieving novice-sailor, the idiosyncratic voice of the poet coming to know death, and the impersonal voice of
historic judgmentoffers a different possibility of expression. The shorter poems show us, by contrast, how and why
Lilacs reaches its heights and its amplitudes. All of the poems show us Whitman debating what stance the American poet should
adopt when speaking of important national events. If each stancecollective, representative, idiosyncratic, impersonalhas
something to be said for it, then we are shown that value can be mediated by poetry in any number of
ways and that both the poet and his audience are modeled differently in each. We are warned,
by the greater success of the most original of the four poems, of the dangers to the poet in attempting to speak
collectively or within the bounds of popular tasteor even with the impersonal voice of historiography. It is
chiey when a public crisis evokes some crisis in the soul of the poet here, Whitmans crisis in judging what
could be truly said of human mortalitythat a public poem takes on lasting aesthetic value.

This poetry is key to reality makes discoveries afar and within ourselves
allowing us to re-world ourselves
Young 2004
[Damon A. Young-philosopher at the University of Melborne. Not Easy Being Green: Process,
Poetry and the Tyranny of Distance Ethics, Place & Environment: A Journal of Philosophy &
Geography. Feb 22,
2002.http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1366879022000041605//WYO-NG]
For the later Heidegger, the truth in each World is a matter of poetic unconcealing. In his oft-
quoted words, language is the house of Being(Heidegger, 1971b, p. 132). Here, language is not
simply an internal expression of an external reality. Nor is language the externalisation of our
internal reality. Rather, Heidegger (1971b) speaks of language as a kind of poiesis, meaning
making, or building (p. 214). Moreover, this making works precisely because of physis, the
emerging and rising in itself of all things. Not only do all things develop from potentiality to
actuality, but also from darkness to light, or hiddenness to unhiddenness. Many things do not
be for us, for they have not been taken into our World; they have not been housed in
language. Quite simply, being loves to hide itself (Heraclitus, cited in Brogan, 1994, p. 227).
With poiesis, we are making a World by allowing it to rise up to us and be unhidden. Poiesis as
language, in Heideggers (2000, p. 60) words, is a naming of being not just any saying, but
that whereby everything steps into the open, which we can then talk about in everyday
conversation. Of course, as building, such poetry can be architecture, sculpture, or painting;
each may make the World for us (Heidegger, 1935, pp. 143206; 1971b, pp. 361363). Put
simply, poetry occurs not simply in poems, but wherever poiesis, bringing forth of a previously
concealed part of Being, occurs (Young, 2001b, p. 281). True poetry, in this sense, is not the
introspective indulgence of melodramatic teenagers, or some kind of boutique lifestyle choice.
Rather, it is the way in which a people bring parts of the world to light and, in doing so, make
their World. This making, in turn, is something each of us can do to reworld ourselves and
others. Outside my study, for instance, is a huge elm tree. After reading the simple lines You
linger your little hour and are gone,/And still the woods sweep lealy on, in Robert Frosts On
going unnoticed (1928, p. 146), I could see the tree anew. I began to see, for the rst time, the
leaness of it: the mix of pale yellow and green, the way in which the leaves cluster on the
upper boughs, and the contrast between the slow growth of the trunk and limbs, the wax and
wane of the leaves in each season, and quick utter of the yellow and green in the breeze. This,
in turn, allowed me to see the friendly bond between the searing summer sun of Melbourne,
the shading leafy sweep of the elm, and the cool eastern windows of my study and
balcony.Consequently, truly poetic words go into the depths of us, reminding us of those
hidden elements of our Being that are removed from the ready to hand nature of our
everyday lives (Young, 2001b, p. 280). With poetry, then, we are able to open ourselves up to
previously hidden places, near or far.

Poetry adjusts our perspective; its methodology is good in debate
Burnside 12- winner of TS Elliot award (John, 1-17, How poetry can change lives, The
Telegraph,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/poetryandplaybookreviews/9020436/How-poetry-
can-change-lives.html)//LC
There are poems that have, literally, changed my life, because they have changed the way I
looked at and listened to the world; there are poems that, on repeated reading, have gradually
revealed to me areas of my own experience that, for reasons both personal and societal, I had
lost sight of; and there are poems that I have read over and over again, knowing they contained
some secret knowledge that I had yet to discover, but refused to give up on. So, at the most
basic level, poetry is important because it makes us think, it opens us up to wonder and the
sometimes astonishing possibilities of language. It is, in its subtle yet powerful way, a discipline
for re-engaging with a world we take too much for granted. When the purveyors of bottom-line
thinking call a mountain or a lake a natural resource, something to be merely exploited and
used up, poetry reminds us that lakes and mountains are more than items on a spreadsheet;
when a dictatorship imprisons and tortures its citizens, people write poems because the
rhythms of poetry and the way it uses language to celebrate and to honour, rather than to
denigrate and abuse, is akin to the rhythms and attentiveness of justice. Central to this
attentiveness is the key ingredient of poetry, the metaphor, which Hannah Arendt defined as
the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about. Its that power to
bring things together, to unify experience as the music of what happens, that the best poetry
achieves.

Poetry seems difficult to understand- using it in debate can only be beneficial
Polonsky 1- English instructor at Vista college (Marc, 2-12, The Poetry Readers Toolkit: A
Guide to Reading and Understanding Poetry, http://www.marcwordsmith.com/pdfs/Why-
Poetry.pdf)//LC
Some people think they don't understand poetry. This is because poetry has been
needlessly mystified in our culture, to the point where many people imagine that only
extraordinarily educated persons with exquisitely developed perceptual powers can truly
"interpret" it. They imagine that poetry is written by and for an elite group of lofty
literary wizards. Or people think a poem is like a piece of code to be deciphered. And if they fail
to "get" it, it's because they lack the cleverness required to puzzle out the secret message.
Well. A poem is not a puzzle or a secret code. A poem is not an obscure hieroglyph to be
"interpreted." A poem, if it works, will speak to you. If does not speak to you, then it simply does
not workfor you. And that's not your problem. It's a matter of chemistry. You won't relate to
every song you hear either, nor will you fall in love with every person you meet. It takes time,
though, to get to know a poem. You do have to give a poem, and yourself, a chance. A poem
generally requires more than one exposurejust like a song or a person does. Reading a poem
is not like reading the newspaper. Here's where many people get mixed up. They think: words
on a page, read 'em, that's it.

2AC Misc
Our aff allows for a new type of ocean exploration
Earnest, 10 - Professor of English at the University of Texas (Mary Kate, Early English Studies,
Volume 3, 2010, A Ecocritical Exploration of the Unique Nature of Oceans in The Blazing World,
https://www.uta.edu/english/ees/pdf/earnest3.pdf)//gingE
Early modern perceptions of oceanic space diverged from standard perceptions of nature on
land (or land-nature) because oceans presented a different type of wilderness. Because oceans defied early
modern definitions of nature, they refused to support the developing mechanistic approach in the way
that land-nature did. I examine Margaret Cavendishs The Blazing World to illustrate how the liminal position of oceans
within the humankind-nature paradigm necessitated a hybrid mechanistic-organic relationship and representation. This
exploration demonstrates how oceans, as an extraterrestrial space distanced from traditional,
terrestrial nature, constituted a different kind of natural phenomenon and contributed to a
global mentality. Experimenting with humankinds perceptions of, and approaches to, nature suggests
that the organic/mechanistic dichotomy is an overly- simplified paradigm, and that the
human/nature partition is equally simplistic due to differing natures of terrestrial verses
oceanic space. Oceans do not fit neatly under the paradigm of nature, they deviate through resistance
and idiosyncrasy. Charting oceans proves an effective step in diversifying definitions,
representations, and perceptions of nature.

2AC A2 Offcase
Permutation - Generic
Permutation do bothmultiple perspectives are key
The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very
imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of
popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances* as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it
wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices:
they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god,
mocking the Father's ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular
scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are
old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our
experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so
much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the
news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of
sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and
these machines are eminently portable, mobile a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are
nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence. The
ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly.
They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness or its
simulation.5 They are floating signIfiers moving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively
by the witch-weavings of the displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read the cyborg webs of power so very well, than
by the militant labour of older masculinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defence jobs. Ultimately the 'hardest'
science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure
spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the preservation of potent secrets. The new machines are so clean and light.
Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society.
The diseases evoked by these clean machines are 'no more' than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system,
'no more' than the experience of stress. The nimble fingers of 'Oriental' women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian
girls with doll's houses, women's enforced attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a
cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and
spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail2 whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies. So my cyborg myth is
about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive
people might explore as one part of needed political work. One of my premises is that most
American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and
machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formula-tions, and physical
artefacts associated with 'high technology' and scientific culture. From One-DimensionalMan (Marcuse,
1964) to The Death of Nature (Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have
insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to
integrate our resistance. Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wide
intensification of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might
better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in
technologically mediated societies. From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of
control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final
appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might
be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with
animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory
standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals
both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision
produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are
monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for
more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of
cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools of
technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that acutally manages to hold together witches, engineers,
elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity
group in my town.(Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidiy.)6
Ableism
Cyborg tech is not a marker of disability
Goodley et al 12- research institute for health and social change, Manchester metropolitan
University (Dan, 7-3-12, Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions,
Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 105-106, Google Books)//LC
I now want to end by seeing the potential that technology has for destabilising the categories of
disabled and non-disabled. As I have shown in the sections above, the impaired cyborg is not always
seen as disabled- it depends on the kind of prosthetic or implant- which in turn is informed by cultural images, visibility,
economics and how common and readily available the the technology is for people with impairments. For example,
someone who has an artificial knee joint fitted is much less likely to see themselves as disabled
(or be seen by others as disabled) than someone who uses VOCA to communicate with others.
Having a pacemaker fitted is almost a normal aspect of ageing like needing reading glasses- it is
not a marker of disability. Compare this to the example of this competent wheelchair user, who, despite being able to
coast flat out and slalom effortlessly around pedestrians (Hockenberry, 2001: 103), continues to have a fixed ontological status as
disabled. Thus the prosthetic is endowed with cultural and social meanings which in turn impact on
identity and subjectivity. The cultural images of cyborgs discussed earlier can be used to
advantage by those who use prosthetics. Aimee Mullins, mentioned earlier, is an actress and fashion model, as well
as an athlete; as someone who travels widely, she has learnt to travel wearing her carbon fibre RoboCop legs rather than her
cosmetic looking legs (Mullins, 2009b). When the metal detectors at the airport go off, lifting trouser legs to reveal those obvious
prosthetics leads to less explaining (and potential misunderstanding) than if she appeared to have normal legs- the word
prosthetic is unlikely to appear in your average tourist dictionary. She also described how when wearing her RoboCop legs, she
finds that children, rather than being fearful or staring, are drawn like a magnet to the, accompanied by a list of very astute
questions (Mullins, 2009c). In her opinion, it is the exposure to cultural images such as RoboCop which
familiarises the unfamiliar and results in engagement rather than avoidance by others.

The metaphor can further a kinship amongst people with disabilities- allowing
for more cultural change
Goodley et al 12- research institute for health and social change, Manchester metropolitan
University (Dan, 7-3-12, Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions,
Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 107, Google Books)//LC
Finally, what does this mean for identity politics? In the UK, from where I am writing, the
disabled peoples movement has achieved a great deal for disabled people, such as anti-
discrimination legislation with more disabled people in mainstream society than 40 years ago,.
However, like other social movements, it is not representative of all disabled people in society;
often people with chronic illnesses see themselves as ill not disabled, and older people see
their difficulties associated with their age rather than because of disabiling barriers (Grewal et
al., 2002). In many ways disabled people represent another diverse group, like women, who
might have more cohesion if they came together as a group based on political kinship and
affinity, rather than any imagined disability identity (Kafter, 2009). Therefore it might be
possible to rethink the category of disabled people as a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity
synthesized from fusions of outside identities (Haraway, 1991: 174), which could better include
those disabled people; who are currently absent such as older people and those with chronic
illness. Similarly, it would be useful to consider what organisations of iCrip would achieve
politically, culturally and socially through their ability to produce new ways of being which are
not necessarily disabled.
No link- humanity is universally progressing towards cyborgs
Cyborg anthropology 14 (http://cyborganthropology.com/Main_Page)
http://cyborganthropology.com/Main_Page//LC
Humans are surrounded by built objects and networks. So profoundly are humans altering their
biological and physical landscapes that some have openly suggested that the proper object of
anthropological study should be cyborgs rather than humans, for, as Donna Haraway says, "we
are all cyborgs now". Cyborg Anthropology takes the view that most of modern human life is a
product of both human and non-human objects. How we interact with machines and
technology in many ways defines who we are. Cyborg Anthropology is a framework for
understanding the effects of objects and technology on humans and culture. This site is
designed to be a resource for those tools. Anthropology, the study of humans, has traditionally
concentrated on discovering the process of evolution through which the human came to be
(physical anthropology), or on understanding the beliefs, languages, and behaviors of past or
present human groups (archaeology, linguistics, cultural anthropology).

Anthro
Breaks the distinction between animal and human and human and nature
I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this chapter, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary
breakdowns that make the following political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible. By the late
twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly
breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks--language tool use,
social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and
animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of
feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures.
Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-
sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and
evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of
knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in
ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching
modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. Biological-determinist ideology is only one
position opened up in scientific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is
much room for radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary.2 The
cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is
transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal distrurbingly and
pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange. The
second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines
could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue
between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or
history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing,
autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself,
but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we
are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial,
mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.
Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. Technological
determination is only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and
organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world.3
'Textualization' of everything in poststructuralist, postmodernist theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its
utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination that ground the 'play' of arbitrary reading.4 It is certainly true that
postmodernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (for example, the poem,
the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature a source of
insight and promise of innocence is undermined, probably fatally. The transcendent authorization of
interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding 'Western' epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or
faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying 'man' by the
'machine' or 'meaningful political action' by the 'text'. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers
are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn't we (de
Waal, 1982; Winner, 1980)?
Questions of finitude rupture anthropocentrism and static notions of borders
Romanillos, 11 PhD, Lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter (Jose Luis,
Environment and Planning, Vol. 43, 2011, Geography, Death, and Finitude, pg 2533-
2553)//gingE
As noted above, a broad stream of continental theorists posit an intimate relation between language
and death: from Foucault's assertion concerning the ``kinship between writing and death'' (1977, page 116), to
Derrida's Egyptian grammatology and the crucial role played by the mythology of Thoth in his deconstruction of onto-theology (see
Derrida, 1981, pages 84 ^ 94; 1997; Sloterdijk, 2009). For Blanchot language and literature are explicitly conceived
as spaces of death; words revealing the finitude of the material existences, beings, and worlds
they paradoxically both present and render absent (Blanchot, 1995). Despite the variety of different articulations
and understandings of finitude presented in this paper, a common theme has been its function in constructing or sedimenting
anthropocentric perspectives concerning language, knowledge, and the spatiality proper to the human. The implications
here are that geographical attempts to write the worlds and spaces both of human and of
nonhuman beings need to become aware of how a distinctively anthropocentric notion of
finitude `grounds' the epistemological and phenomenological basis of that writing. For this reason I
consider finitude to be an important geographical notion precisely because the beauty of the
geographical imagination, as affirmed in Hagerstrand's paper on nature and society, is to radically put into
question the concepts, histories, and assumptions at work in anthropocentric thought; to upset
the subterraneous epistemological articulation of the earth as the `home' of `man'; and to
expose human thought to its limits and òutside' of what Meillassoux has recently described as
the ``great outdoors'' (2008, page 7). In short, a writing of the earth which takes finitude seriously
necessarily troubles the borders and limits partitioned through anthropocentric logic. I also consider
finitude to be an important geographical notion becauseprecisely an account of its philosophical historyit can be used
to rethink and rework accounts of ethics which are seeking to radically challenge the humanist
bases of thought and normative action (cf Lulka, 2009). An important contribution to this discussion of ethics beyond
the boundaries of the human can be found in Cary Wolfe's ``Flesh and finitude: thinking animals in (post)humanist philosophy''
(2008). For Wolfe, thinking finitude offers a way into attempts to ethically address the nonhuman in
posthumanist philosophies: ``the fundamental ethical bond we have with non-human animals
resides in our shared finitude, our vulnerability and mortality as `fellow creatures''' (page 23).(11)
The key claim in the context of Western ethics is that this shared finitude goes beyond
traditional anthropocentric distinctions concerning the capacities for reason and language, but
falls upon a radical passivity for finitude that cannot be said to be a `capacity', àttribute' or
`property' of a particular being (cf Greenhough and Roe, 2010; Roe, 2010). Whilst I agree with the ethos of Wolfe's
article and the claim that addressing finitude provides an important way of developing compassion and ethics beyond human limits,
I think it is important, as my discussions of Heidegger, Foucault, Bataille, and Agamben highlight, to recognise that the
conceptual history of finitude is not immune from charges of anthropocentrism. The difficulty of
deconstructing anthropocentric perspectives, as Jane Bennett has recently outlined in Vibrant Matter (2010), does not lie
solely in the task of eliminating theological hierarchical categorisations of life, or of bringing
down human hubris. Rather, it is that the very posing of the questionspeaking about it, naming
it, writing itand the related gesture of approaching the independence of animals, matter, and
the `things themselves' are both phenomenologically constituted within a human horizon of
sense. As she describes this correlation: `ìs it not a human subject who is articulating this theory of
vibrant matter?'' (page ix). Bennett's answer is to engage in a certain amount of anthropomorphism and
animism; to extend our intrahuman ethical responsibilities to nonhumans by, as it were,
forgetting any essential abyss between humans, animals, and things. In this way, and in an interesting reversal of
Heidegger's position concerning the nonhuman, anthropomorphism is said to contribute to an erosion of anthropocentrism. As I
hope to have demonstrated in this paper, finitude is an important conceptual figure in this debate because
of its historical role in determining the boundaries of the human, and the epistemological
phenomenological ways in which entities beyond the human are conceived. Rather than making claims
about how the notion of finitude is most àuthentically' thought, approached, or represented, in this paper I have aimed to expose
and question some of the conceptual histories and philosophical perspectives bound up with the notion. In so doing, I have,
hopefully, demonstrated how the notion insinuates itself across a series of key geographical concepts,
languages, and debates. Further, I have claimed that a geographical writing of finitude in turn offers a
way of destabilising the authentic borders and limits bound up with the notion. By way of conclusion, I
want to outline briefly what I consider to be the ethical promise of finitude. Firstly, finitude demands to be thought in
terms of a shared exposure to death that com-passionately approaches every being beyond any
representational identification to, or derivation from, an authentic human subjectivity. Here,
rather than simply acknowledging the anthropocentric basis of finitude and then proclaiming to
get beyond it so as to ùnshackle existence' from finitudeas proposed in the work of Badiouthe
analytic history of finitude can itself be reworked for the contemporary projects of thinking
matter, nature, and world differently. As the work of Nancy shows, to rethink finitude as a shared exposure in this way
is to also rethink the spatialities of the world. At the same time, a critical deconstruction and ungrounding of
the analytic history of the notion of finitude helps further trouble and suspend what Agamben
refers to as the anthropological machine of `suspension' (2004, page 92), with its partitions between
human and animal, organic and inorganic. Perhaps we can reread Hagerstrand's affirmation for a geographical
thinking of finitude as an important ethical project precisely in this light: to question how the spaces and borders of
finitude are mapped, to consider the ethical consequences of those partitions, and to
experiment with how a thinking of finitude might write the world differently.
The 1ACs ethical embrace of human finitude and inevitable destruction is a
prerequisite to disrupting anthropocentric cycles of consumption and
destruction
Environment and Planning, Vol. 43, 2011, Geography, Death, and Finitude)//gingE
Writing in the context of the 1970s global oil crises, and the concrete realization of the accuracy of M K Hubbert's prediction
concerning peak oil production, Torsten Hagerstrand provided perhaps the first geographical analysis of finitude. In a paper entitled
``Geography and the study of interaction between nature and society'' he voiced concern about the kind of ethical dispositions
shaping modern society: ``What seems to be particularly dangerous in the present situation is that the
human imagination ... does not appear to grasp finitudes intuitively'' (1976, page 333). For Hagerstrand, a
society based upon the principles of production, accumulation, and consumption struggles to
grasp the finite nature of ecological relations. In so doing, the intimate relations that compose
different ecologies can be destroyed; their finitude revealed all too indifferently, all too late.
Because of the distinctive relational composition of geographical imaginations, spun between nature and society, Hagerstrand
proposed that a ``central task for geography'' entailed teaching ``the lessons of finitude'' (page
334). The premise of Hagerstrand's argument is that there is an intimate relation between finitude and a geographical ethics.
However, Hagerstrand did not explore with any great precision what `finitude' signifies, represents, or communicates. In this paper I
examine a series of historical and philosophical perspectives on finitude, so as both to provide a more complex conceptualization of
the term, and to help make the claim that finitude might be an important geographical notion. Geographers have recently
begun to explore spatial and place-based accounts of death, dying, and remembrance (Herman,
2010; Kong, 1999; Rose, 2009; Wylie, 2009). As Avril Maddrell and James Sidaway outline in their introduction to Deathscapes:
Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance, these geographical perspectives on death are developing alongside extant
literatures on geography, religion, and the sacred; the politics of mourning and memorialisation; and
nonrepresentational geographies of emotion and affect (2010, page 2). In many ways, however, there
continues to have been little serious conceptual engagement with the notion of finitude since Hagerstrand's call. This is problematic
because, as I argue in this paper, one of the consequences of a critical exploration of finitude is the
recognition that it plays an important, though often veiled, role within a series of geographical
concepts and debates: from understandings of spatiality, corporeality, and representation, to
the ethics and politics that are made possible or denied through the boundaries inscribed
between the human and the animal, the organic and the inorganic. A geographical encounter with the
notion of finitude therefore extends beyond geo-anthropological accounts of the sacred, or
religions' perspectives on dying, identity, and remembrance, towards historical and contemporary theorisations of the
human, understandings of worldhood and spatiality, and, as Hagerstrand intimated, ethical
geographies of the nonhuman. Another consequence of engaging with the notion of finitude is that it presents an
epistemological and representational challenge. It is perhaps a symptom of the influence of Gilles Deleuze upon contemporary
sociospatial theory that death has remained a marginal concern even for nonrepresentational geography (but see Harrison, 2008;
Romanillos, 2008; Wylie, 2007; 2009). Finitude, death, and absence are not `presences'
phenomenologically at hand that can be simply documented, categorised, and represented.
Whether we are thinking of ecological destruction, the passing of a loved one, or the
ignominious power of states to decide between life and death, thinking death cannot be an
objective process. As the work of Georges Bataille demonstrates, this is because death is the limit of thought,
and as this limit it contaminates and affects the very project of knowledge that seeks to address
it (see, in particular, 1962, pages 11^25; 1990). Hagerstrand hints at this epistemological problematic when he proposes that
finitude is something intuitively grasped rather than categorically `known'. However, to what extent can we even propose to `grasp'
finitude? As Martin Heidegger puts it: ``death is in every case mine, in so far as it ìs' at all'' (1962, page 284).
Similarly, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that ``finitude itself is nothing; it is neither a ground, nor an essence, nor a
substance. But it appears, it presents itself, it exposes itself'' (1991, page 28, original emphasis). Clearly, the
distinctive phenomenality of finitude raises questions concerning representation and
communication. Indeed, between authors such as Heidegger, Hegel, and Blanchot, finitude comes to be thought of as that
which makes language possible: ``language is the life that endures death and maintains itself in it'' (Blanchot,
1995, page 336). Similarly, Jacques Derrida notes that finitude structures the possibility and exigency for writing, representations
and the archive: ``There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the
possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression'' (1998, page 19). Beyond these
ontological claims concerning a co-originarity of language and death, however, there is also the question of how
death is written, represented, and mediated. For example, to what extent does it require or demand a particular form of
writing style or address? As the later work of Derrida (2000; 2003) on death, friendship, and mourning demonstrates, language
shatters and fragments under the exigency to communicate precisely that which in the experience of death and loss exceeds
representational discursive economies. These initial reflections on writing and representation raise the
broader question of how to `relate' to death and finitude. In his paper Hagerstrand seems to claim that the
geographical imagination is particularly adept at communicating finitude because of its `relational' thinking and its capacity to bridge
the natural and social worlds. But to what extent is the nonrelationality of death and finitude adequately
situated within the relational grammar of contemporary geographical discourse? For example, does
not the history of Western philosophy, as Giorgio Agamben documents, take finitude and consciousness of death alongside the
capacity for the logos to be an instance of the radical separation of the human from the natural; the site of an uncrossable abyss?
Indeed, if death is a border or a limit (see Derrida, 1993), it is one that has traditionally been inscribed
within the limits of the human. There is, then, an anthropocentric basis to the notion of finitude
that demands to be recognised and deconstructed. As I demonstrate in the following section, this
anthropocentrism insidiously insinuates itself into the very epistemological conditions of
geographical representation. By turning to the work of Heidegger, Kant, and Foucault, in the section below I unpack how
the anthropocentric basis of finitude acts as a subterranean conceptual pivot for existential analyses of being-in-the-world. By
exploring this èxistential analytic of finitude', the analysis therefore arrives at the following crucial geographical consequence of
engaging with finitude in the context of post-Heideggerian spatial theory: that the anthropocentric borders and
divisions at work in the notion of finitude also problematically ground and striate
phenomenological understandings of `spatiality' itself.
The aff focuses on death of all species that combats the status quo conception
that death only affects humans
Environment and Planning, Vol. 43, 2011, Geography, Death, and Finitude)//gingE
Alongside the anthropocentric distinctions concerning spatiality and finitude discussed above,
one can find subtended in Heidegger's text a broader conceptual division inscribed between the
organic and the inorganic. As Heidegger (1995) argues in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, only organic
organisms can be said to end, perish, or die. One of the consequences of conceiving of organic
`life' in terms of its capacity to end, and of conceiving of death in terms of a differential propriety of limits and borders,
is the following important conceptual corollary which demands to be explored in the context of
environmental ethics: `` `dead matter' is a meaningless concept'' (Heidegger, 1995, page 236). This
statement is incredibly revealing of Heidegger's post-Kantian heritage and the way in which the exceptionalism of human life is
rendered sacrosanct precisely insofar as it is distanced from natural inorganic `matter', and from scientistic conceptions of causality.
In these last aspects, Heidegger's distribution of finitude corresponds to certain vitalist writings' distribution of spirit' or e lan vital
(see Greenhough, 2010). More important, however, is that it is also a provocative statement for
thinking about the kinds of politics and ethics that various forms of new materialism are seeking
to create, and the philosophical histories that are being challenged and reworked in these projects (see, for example, Bennett,
2010; Bingham, 2006; Greenhough, 2010; Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2008). This is because Heidegger's statement raises
profound questions about the anthropocentric limits of ethical geographies of the nonhuman,
and about how care and responsibility are conceptualised. First amongst these questions is the following:
how is one to respond to deaths that are not philosophically, legally, politically counted as
deaths? How are we ethically to respond to such phenomena as environmental disaster, catastrophe, or extinction? The problem
here is that the powerful legacy of Heideggerian thought has shaped the sense of an ethical response in terms of an anthropocentric
finitude. For Heidegger, for example, ``Being-towards-death is grounded in care'' (1962, page 303). Whilst in many
ways critical of Heidegger's philosophy, the work of Emmanuel Levinas also underscores the place of finitude in ethics and
responsibility: `Ì am responsible for the other insofar as he is mortal'' (Levinas, cited by Derrida, 1993, page 39).
The very notion of an ethical relation appears to be predicated upon an Other who is `counted'
as having the right to be treated responsibly on account of the kind of finitude they are said to
possess. Drawing upon this heritage, Mustafa Dikec , Nigel Clarke and Clive Barnett have recently proposed that `human
finitude' is conditioning and generative of the ethical spatiotemporalities of hospitality (Dikec et al,
2009; cf Popke, 2007). For these authors, the writings of Levinas and Derrida are central to their account of `human finitude' for the
most part conceived as `corporeal vulnerability'; the shared exposure of bodily limits that appears as the
condition of possibility for normative praxis: Hospitality turns on a vital receptivity to the needs
of an Other, but so too are these needs bound up with the constitutive openness and
vulnerability of the living body'' (Dikec et al, 2009, page 11). What this work helps underline, again, is the importance of
finitude in shaping ethical geographies. Clearly, these authors are drawing upon accounts of finitude to consider forms of hospitality
in specific sociopolitical contexts. They are aware of the central place of limits, borders, and thresholds in
both Levinas and Derrida's thinking of ethics, hospitality, and the Other. However, their work raises
the interesting question of whether, and how far, notions of normative responsibility and ethical
relations as such can be prised apart from a finitude inscribed within the borders of the human
subject. To pose this question is to recognise how the intimate relation between
anthropocentrism and finitude presents itself as a complex ethico-topological demarcation, with
consequences for how ethical relations are conceived and practised.

Bataille
The Cyborg embodies the unstable subject of inner experience
Mertz, 95 Professor in dept of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts (David,
Marxism and the politics of anti-essentialism, April 21, 1995
http://gnosis.cx/publish/mertz/cyborg.html)//gingE
One history of the denaturing of subjectivity, and of subject(ivat)ed bodies, runs from Nietzsche to Bataille. With Bataille's
bioenergetic retelling of Nietzsche's Heraclitean Will-to-Power, the principle of an expenditure
acting toward the immanent disincorporation of every constituted body becomes a basic
principle of the organization of life on the surface of the earth. That is, after Bataille's Accursed Share
[Bataille, 1988], we can no longer rely on homeostasis as a property of biological bodies. But after
the fixity of bodies is given up, the several systems of metaphors of constitutivity based upon
the old model of bodies quickly unravel. If bodies are not stable, self-constituting systems, neither are the minds
metaphorically (or metonymically, perhaps) cast in their image; and neither is the body politic. Or rather, to be more
careful, the rethinking of the biological body which Bataille gives us allows a corollary rethinking of
our images of body-like things. This rethinking, which is done throughout Bataille's works, in
turn erases all of our organic models of stability. Haraway's work presents an intricate series of
parallels with the denaturing of bodies in Bataille [Haraway, 1991]. Her figure for the impossibility of
constituted biological bodies, however, lies not in the biological functions of sexuality and death (or at least not firstly here), but
rather in the image of the cyborg--a technologically coded and overcoded amalgam of machine
and flesh. Bodies are not homeostatic systems of self-constitution because our postmodern
bodies are always already the artificial constructions of technologies and technological
discourses. Her touch-point is, of course, Foucault's bio-politics of power, but she goes beyond this as well. Two
inseparable naturalizations of the subject have occupied these last two hundred years of social
and biological thought. The proper names for these two intertwined naturalizing schemata have been evolutionary biology
and economics. Furthermore, this subject so naturalized is at once, and immanently, both the subject of
an economic/political order and the subject of a rationalist philosophy of consciousness form
Descartes, through Hegel, to psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology. The series of identities I mention here has, of course,
also been identified by Foucault, in The Order of Things [Foucault, 1973], so I cannot claim to be original in such identification. The
real concern of these naturalizations of subjectivity in biology, economics and philosophy has in every case been the provision of a
stable boundary between organism and non-organism, actor and non-actor, self and non-self. All of this ends, however,
with the end of modernism. That the conditions of stable subjectivity have been lost or
abandoned in the second half of this century is not really in question. Rather we might ask whether the
very terms of the mainstream loss of subjective closure are nothing more than the new structures of dominance in post-industrial
societies dominance no longer of bodies, but of networks; no longer of legitimation, but of information; no longer of constraints on
rational choice, but of the preconditions of rationality but dominance nonetheless. The mainstream loss of any
hermetic subjectivity occurs at the point where the self merges with the non-self at the external
boundaries of constituted being; Haraway marks this loss in the right-hand column of her series
oppositions appearing in her Cyborg Manifesto, and slightly reworked in her Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies. I
will discuss some of Haraway's oppositional pairs below, but let us just inform the listener in advance that this right-hand column
expresses, on each line, an already achieved change in the regulation of society. But perhaps all of these achieved
changes act as mere smokescreens to a deeper challenge to subjectivity, and to the regulation
of society, pointed to by Bataille.

The aff disrupts the coherence of things like stable reproduction and production
of capitalism
Mertz, 95 Professor in dept of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts (David,
Marxism and the politics of anti-essentialism, April 21, 1995
http://gnosis.cx/publish/mertz/cyborg.html)//gingE
In this paper I attempt to trace some parallels between the contributions of these two non-philosophers in the recent history of
philosophy. Both serve to deconstruct the modernist narrative of subjectivity, not in terms of a
critique of the phenomenological presuppositions of the Cartesian project (valuable though such is),
but rather in terms of a denaturing of the very hidden biological and economic metaphors on
which such a narrative is based. Both open views onto what a post-modern non-subjective politics might look like. Only
the briefest review on the common conceptual terms of economics, evolutionary biology, and rationalist philosophy is here possible;
but let me proceed with a few reminders. Each field is composed of an atomistic collection of individuals; each individual acts in
relation to an external world through internal representation and rational choice. In the schemata of all these three
disciplines, the basic function of every individual is the preservation and reproduction of itself as
an entity over time; it is here that representation and rationality function, since the means for
preservation/reproduction are presumed to be in scarce supply in the world, and hence to require
active, purposeful appropriation by the individual in question. The agenda of the modernist/humanist paradigm
in the three above areas amount to a support of three politically important terms of descriptions of human existence:
purposiveness, identity, and scarcity. These concepts have fit together in an ideological support of the
necessity of Capitalist society; and hence I will try to rehabilitate Bataille (and Haraway to an extent) as a radical critic of
such a status quo. Basically, all three of these intertwined conceptual systems biology, philosophy and economics exclude mimetic-
representation of individuals' exteriors, and demand what Harry Redner calls true representation. In the simplest terms,
what gets represented in the exterior is unlike the thing which plays the representational role on
the interior and hence representation is a pure formal relation, rather than mere mimetic
duplication. The death of mimesis is generally diagnosed as occurring at precisely the historical point at which these conceptual
systems arise, so a certain consistency is thereby loaned to our analysis. Let us quickly step through this conceptual system as it is
three times choreographed by our three fields. In the non-Marxist economics (and in much of the Marxist ) economics since Adam
Smith, the central trope has been that of the individual who attempts to preserve/reproduce her existence as owner of commodities
through rational choice and internal representation of economic relations between commodities. Individual existence as
consciousness of subjective position is here identical with stable identity-over-time of
commodity ownership. It is less than half in jest that I tell my students that Rationalist philospohy of mind has been a series
of efforts to make contracts binding. Of course, commodities are always understood as alienable by subjects, but this is always only
the contingent alienability of a particular commodity, not universal alienability of commodity relations themselves. Just as the
Kantian necessary unity of aperception answers the Humean skepticism about the contingency of particular impressions, the
Smithian necessary unity of commodity ownership answers some nameless skeptic of private property. Continuing
concretely the sketch given abstractly above, interior represents exterior in the relation
between use-value and value. Value is the external, intersubjective existence of every scarce
commodity; while use-value is the interior representation of commodities for subjectivity. The
particular distinction of use-value and value is from Marx, but all economists repeat it in some language or
another. Regarding much of this, read Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labour [Sohn-Rethel, 1978], a much under-
appreciated book. An almost identical trope is repeated in the coeval history of evolutionary biology. A biological organism
is presumed to organize itself around the dictates of preservation of its unity through the
utilization of a various scarce particulars: food supply and optimal sexually-reproductive
opportunities. The fundamental opposition is between self and non-self, and stable, identifiable boundaries are demanded.
The same representational schema is played through here in evolutionary biology as in
economics: this time the individual is called the phenotype; the representable exterior is called the
environment; the interior representation is called the genotype. As in the economic schema, continued identity depends upon
continually re-entering into relation with separate particular exterior objects, but it must be a self-identical individual which enters
into universal relation to an external environment. Our trope is repeated once more in Rationalist
phenomenological philosophy. The stable subjective consciousness aware of itself constitutes its
universal unity in the perceptability of particular phenomena. Contra any Humean skepticism, the
Cartesian/Kantian subject is stable across the accidents of particular impressions of which consciousness is necessarily composed.
The representational nature of the modernist image of consciousness has been widely discussed
in recent philosophy; however, what may be less obvious is the principle of scarcity entailed by this image. Inasfar as the
modernist subject percieves the world as objective, it always posits an inadequacy to the actual phenomenal experiences. In
Nietzsche's phrase, the modernist consciousness posits lightning behind the flash. The scarcity of the phenomena
make it necessary to husband the actual phenomena to reproduce further phenomena behind
the phenomena. The objectivity of the physical world, for the modernist subject, I maintain,
answers the inadequacy of the phenomenal one. Everything just described ended at least thirty years ago.
Haraway diagnoses this change, and the associate loss of unity of subjectivity under the newer informatics of domination as she calls
it. The change diagnosed, and to a great extent embraced, by Haraway concerns the point at
which the self in the discussed conceptual system merges into non-self at the external
boundaries of the previously stable self. The move away from our conceptual system of unitary identity occupies a
myriad of different particular disciplines or fields. Those, at least, of evolution, economics and phenomenology are included, but the
transition is still broader than this. Several names for two contrastive historical periods the more recent starting near the middle of
the twentieth century have been proposed. Sometimes the distinction between modernism and
postmodernism is utilized; others times, that between monopoly capitalism and multinational
capitalism, or between society of the commodity and society of the spectacle, are preferred. Other names are sometimes used
as well. Without putting to fine a point on the particular terminology used for these contrastive periods, let us take a look at some
particular conceptual/historical items juxtoposed by Haraway. All of them tend to have the same moral. The transition which has
occurred has occurred at many levels at once: it has been a change in the product of industrial production; a change in the process
of industry; and a change in the conceptualization of humans and the world. This conceptualization itself will be
treated in its aspects as economics, evolution, and phenomenology. Close homologies exist
between each type of change. Let us examine the these changes in the order listed: product,
process, conception. The product of industry used to be things; now it's information. This change is a
matter of degrees, not absolutes, of course but the change is pretty overwhelming when in the 1990's well over half the national
product of industrial countries measured simply in monetary terms is information. Clearly, such a share was a mere few percent at
the beginning of this century. The change here mentioned was mostly clearly diagnosed by the Situationists, whom I find very
interesting, although I can only speculate about Haraway's debt to themy. A few of the pairs in Haraway's repeated
chart of oppositions point to this change. The pairs representation/simulation and heat/noise
make this fairly explicit. Where industrial production of things could be carried on wholly with a representation of the
combinative process of inputs (a diagram for assembling an object, for example), production of information always involves a second
order simulation of the consumer of the information; information's production can be neither conceptualized nor carried out
without having already achieved its consumption. In a way, we could say paradoxically that information has
no inputs, but only outputs. The heat/noise pair refers to the inefficiencies within any productive process. But where the
wasted inputs of a mechanical industrial process are dissipated as heat, the waste in an informational productive process is
dissipated as noise ('noise' has the sense of the word given in computer and communications technologies: noise is whatever isn't
signal). The process of production used to be concerned with the expression of human abilities by
the utilization of mechanical assistance. Now just the reverse is dominant: it is human-beings
themselves who are mere biological prosthetics to productive machines whether robotic or
informational machines, though the former will be those addressed herein directly. A pair such as
Labor/Robotics makes this clear; as does that between Organic division of labor and Ergonomics/cybernetics of labor. The transition
from a Taylorist micro-engineering of human motion to a cybernetic planning of a total productive process completely decenters any
human subject in the process. Once upon a time it made sense to speak of the extension of human-beings' powers through
machinery, but no longer is the human body a stable center and locale of productive processes. The distinction between the biotic
and mechanical portions of productive machines has become entirely artificial.
Baudrillard
Hyperreality solidifies a humanist dualism as the only means to perceive reality
which destroys all possible ethics of action and casts the alternative to the
depths of nihilistic violence and failure to resolve the crisis of representation
King, 98 Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter (Anthony, Philosophy and Social
Criticism, Vol. 24, No. 6, A Critique of Baudrillards Hyperreality: Towards a Sociology of
Postmodernism, pg. 47-66)//gingE
The argument for the fundamentally interpretative nature of the television and, therefore, its
fundamental unoriginality as a cultural form undercuts Baudrillards notion of hyperreality at an empirical
level. In short, the television just does not represent the ontological transformation of culture
which he envisages. The production and consumption of the television operates in the same
interpretative manner as the production and consumption of literature, theatre and, indeed, oral story-
telling. All these methods of communication have to operate according to the same interpretative
norms, typical of all human interaction, for the very reason that they are all primarily linguistic.
Baudrillards failure to recognize the fundamentally interpretative nature of television suggests
some deeper philosophical and, in particular, deeper epistemological shortcomings in his
theories. The recognition of Baudrillards epistemological weakness brings us to the second, philosophical strand of the argument
against the notion of hyperreality which will demonstrate that Baudrillards notion of hyperreality is founded in an
unsustainable Cartesianism. In order to establish that Baudrillards theory of hyperreal is Cartesian, a complete exegesis of
Cartesian philosophy is, of course, not required. Rather it is necessary only to establish that the general
framework of and the basic assumptions on which hyperreality rest are Cartesian. Cartesian
epistemology set out to establish an apodictic Truth from which Descartes would be able to build a system of knowledge and a
foundation for science. As Descartes writes in the very first sentence of the First Meditation: Some years ago I w a s struck by the
large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I
had subsequently based on them. I realised that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely
and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.
(Descartes,1994:76) The means by which Descartes tried to achieve this certainty is as peculiar as it is famous. Descartes initiated a
method of extreme doubt, wherein he denied the reality of everything of which he could not be certain. Descartes imagined that he
was in the power of some malicious demon (1994: 79), whose sole purpose w a s to deceive him. Positing the existence of this
demon, Descartes concluded: I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely
the delusions of dreams which he [the demon] has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or
eyes, or flesh or blood, or sense, but as falsely believing that I have all these things. (Descartes, 1994: 79) Unless Descartes
could find some archimedean point of certainty on which to base all his other knowledge, he
would be reduced to a terrible existence in an epistemological miasma a deep whirlpool as he
calls it in the opening paragraph of the Second Meditation (1994:80). As we all know, he thought he found that
certainty in the Cogito. The demon 53 54 could deceive Descartes about everything except the
fact that Descartes thought he existed. The specifics of Descartes method of doubt and the
Cogito are not critical to the discussion of Baudrillards hyperreality but what is crucial is the
epistemological experience which Descartes highlighted as paradigmatic of human cognition.
Descartes arrived at the Cogito, via the method of doubt, from a very particular starting-point. He began with the solipsistic
contemplation of the evidence of his senses, and the evidence of his eyes in particular.6 Descartes describes himself as sitting in a r o
o m contemplating and gradually questioning the knowledge in fact, the vision which he had of objects external to his own self.
Since these objects including his own body -were external to his sensation of them and yet could be known only by sensation,
Descartes had no external standard of verification. Every verification of these objects came to
him via his senses and was, therefore, only another representation and not the thing itself.
Descartes subject was trapped within its own sensations and could be sure of nothing external
to those sensations. This irrevocable subject-object dualism is critical insofar as the analysis of hyperreality is
concerned because it is this premiss that human cognition is founded on one particular type of
sensory experience which is shared by both Baudrillard and Descartes. The ocular sensation of external
material objects is the starting-point for both theories. Significantly, this ocular starting-point facilitates the descent into the
epistemological void because the concentration of the ocular immediately suggests that the central problem of human knowledge is
one of representation. The eye projects an image of external reality which is viewed by the inner eye,
but this projection is only a representation of which we can have no external verification (because
everything we see is a representation viewed by the inner eye). This is particularly problematic in the light of the
fact that the eye is so easily deceived. Baudrillard and Descartes share the same
representationalist paradigm but whereas Descartes sees the mists of nihilism descending the moment
one considers how we might verify the representations we see, Baudrillard historicizes this moment of doubt to
the mid-1970s, arguing that the classic epistemological problem of representation and
scepticism emerges for society as the television attains a position of cultural dominance.
Hyperreality occurs, then, at the moment when the relationship between the object and the
representation is called into doubt. The television screen, from which individuals derived their notion of reality, has no
verifiable or direct connection with the outside world. Baudrillards television screen replicates Descartes
concerns about the inner eye but instead of this inner eye being located in the brain of the
subject, it is, for Baudrillard, located in the living-room. Since we cannot corroborate the representations the
television screen presents of the world, the knowledge which we gain from the screen is open to doubt.
Although Baudrillard is (typically) reticent about clarifying the Cartesian epistemological origins of hyperreality, he, nevertheless,
reveals in Fatal Strategies that he himself thinks of hyperreality as a moment of extreme
Cartesian doubt, thereby confirming the interpretation I have made above. Three consecutive sections
of that work are titled The Evil Genie of the Social (1990b: 72), The Evil Genie of the Object (1990b: 81) and The Evil Genie of
Passion (1990b: 99). The use of the term evil genie is significant because it is an alternative (but comparable) translation of the
term malicious demon, which was cited above, in reference to Descartes hyperbolic doubt in the final paragraph of the First
Meditation. So famous is the evil genie or malicious demon in Descartes works, that no one who is aware of those writings could
possibly fail to pick up on the reference. In other words, Baudrillard consciously calls up the epistemic void of the First Meditation
in order to define his notion of contemporary hyperreal culture. Baudrillards notion of hyperreality is Cartesian,
therefore, because it highlights representation as the problem of knowledge. Once
representation is prioritized, the issue which immediately comes to the fore is the question of
the connection between the representation and the object. This inevitably casts doubt on the accuracy and
reliability of the reference because the brain has no objective reference outside itself. The step from that point into an
epistemological void, which Descartes discovered, is small because once it has been conceded that we
do not have any objective and independent standard by which to verify the material world, it
becomes easy to doubt the veracity of any of our knowledge about that world. Baudrillards
descent into nihilism follows on logically from his epistemological construction of culture as the
relationship between the subject and the object, the representation and the thing itself, the
signifier and the signified. The notion of hyperreality is a deeply flawed concept. Even before
considering its dubious Cartesian foundations, it is epistemologically oxymoronic. Baudrillard might argue that the
signifier has been freed from the signified but this notion of separation presupposes that we already have an idea of the connection
between the two elements. In order to recognize that the simulation now floats free we have to be
aware of the fact that representations were once tied to reality. The acknowledgement of this
epistemological irruption presupposes a continuing acceptance of the connection between
signified and signifier. Indeed, to know that a representation is now autonomous, we must
recognize from what that reference is autonomous and that finally brings us to the realization
that in fact we only imagine an epistemological irruption; the freed referent still needs its object but it just likes
to pretend that it is free. Hyperreality is just a form of modern representation but one which dare not
speak its name. However, it is not just that hyperreality is self-deluded, but it is also dependent
upon a Cartesian epistemological paradigm which is deeply and seriously flawed.
The alt fails to come to grips with the reality of language which makes any
struggle for objective truth impossibleturns the alt and makes the ethics of
the 1AC the only meaningful and justifiable mode of engagement with the Real
For Heidegger, these aporia are the unnecessary result of Descartes ignoring a m o r e primordial
fact of the human condition: that we are always already thrown into the world, before we can begin
to contemplate that world. When Descartes said Cogito ergo sum *I think therefore I am+, he entirely ignored the second clause
the sum, the I am. Heideggers philosophy was devoted to highlighting the sum of the Cogito and to defining the nature of that
sum the ontology of human existence (Gelven, 1970: 180; Steiner, 1978: 25, 86; Habermas, 1993: 187-8). Although it is unnecessary
to go into the specific and highly complex ways in which Heidegger laid out this ontology, an outline of his general ontological
project and method is illuminating as it suggests a means by which we might overcome the aporia of the Cartesian paradigm. I
follow many contemporary philosophers such as Gadamer, Derrida and Rorty who have taken Heideggers lead in their attempts to
supersede the Cartesian paradigm. Heideggers central philosophical concept for the interpretation of the ontology of human
existence is the Dasein; that is, a being whose mode of being is to question the meaning of its Being (Heidegger, 1967: 32; Gelven,
1970: 10, 13). Heideggers philosophical project amounted in effect to defining the nature of this Dasein this self-questioning and
interpreting mode of existence. As far as we are concerned, the crucial feature of Heideggers Dasein is that it is a
primarily linguistic being: it does not attempt to explicate the meaning of its Being in rationalist
fashion where all the categories are constructed before any living is done but rather the
Daseins understanding emerges in the course of its existence (Gelven, 1970: 38; Steiner, 1978: 80). Since
this existence is primarily linguistic (Steiner, 1978: 16, 18, 27; Rorty, 1993a: 216), the Dasein learns of itself
through a hermeneutic circle of interpretation whereby understanding proceeds by a tacking
back between the whole and the part (Gelven, 1970: 177; Steiner, 1978: 81). Through this process of interpreting any
particular piece of knowledge by reference to the whole of the Daseins wider knowledge of its existence, the part is understood.
Yet, the assimilation of the n e w part itself transforms the whole into which the Dasein was
already thrown (Gelven, 1970: 92). The hermeneutic circle and the primacy of the linguistic experience to human existence are
central elements of Being and Time but Heidegger felt that Being and Time still retained the metaphysical over tones of the
Cartesian paradigm which it attempted to overthrow. Being and Time sought to lay down a definitive ontology
of human existence in the nomological fashion of the Cartesian and Kantian tradition; Heidegger has
destroyed the metaphysical Cogito only to replace it with a n equally metaphysical Dasein (Steiner, 1978: 111; Rorty, 1993a: 218).
Heidegger tried to remedy this metaphysical problem in subsequent writings. These writings are difficult but their
importance insofar as this article is concerned is that they emphasize the primacy of linguistics
to the human experience (Steiner, 1978: 126, 134, 135; Rorty, 1993b)7 It became a central tenet in Heideggers post-Being
and Time writing that the way in which something is said or written is inherently part of its meaning. Thus Heideggers later writing
became like Van Goghs peasant shoes which he famously wrote of in The Origin of the Work of Art (1978). The meaning of
the painting of those shoes lay in the very texture which Van Gogh invested in that painting and
by which he communicated a rich message about existence in ways undefinable by and invisible
to Cartesian rationalism. Similarly language does not merely represent the external world in a
Cartesian relation of subject to object but rather language is a texture which is itself constitutive
of that reality and which is understood interpretatively. 57 58 Heideggers linguistic orientation is important
insofar as this article is concerned because it effectively undermines the representationalist orientation of the Cartesian paradigm
and, therefore, of hyperreality. Language is not supplementary to the ocular experience but constitutive of it. Of course,
technically the senses operate prior to language babies can see and hear but, in effect, language
becomes prior in human existence because our senses do not blindly open onto the world which
is presented neutrally to us. Rather our language makes certain parts of our world meaningful for us and it is these which
our senses become attuned to recognizing. The meaningfulness of the world is established in language and
the senses are directed by that meaningfulness. Furthermore, language does not record and imitate
the objects of the external world but is a reality in itself into which human beings are thrown.
Humans cannot step back from language, establishing what they know in advance, but must proceed
forward by means of the hermeneutic circle. Despite Heideggers own metaphysical orientation, this linguistic
priority suggests a very different project for philosophy than envisaged by Descartes. Rorty provides an insight into this post-
Heideggerian project: The first [Kantian] tradition thinks of truth as vertical relations between representation and what is
represented. The second [Hegelian] tradition thinks of truth horizontally - as a culminating reinterpretation of our predecessors
reinterpretation or their predecessors reinterpretation . . . This tradition does not ask how representations are
related to non-representations but how representations can be seen as hanging together. (Rorty,
1982: 92) The importance of the post-Heideggerian tradition is that the representations of which it speaks do not have a separate
ontological existence from what they represent. In the linguistic tradition, words and statements have
meaning only insofar as they are embedded in a historically produced language game. We can
never therefore finally establish an objective truth of a statement because none exists. Statements
have meaning only in relation to other statements. The task of the philosopher is to gain the best understanding of that statement
by relating it to others in a hermeneutic fashion to see how things hang together. The philosopher, following Heidegger (but without
the metaphysical overtones), must proceed by a dialectical, interpretative process of relating the whole (the language game) to the
part (the statement). The irretrievable hermeneutic condition in which humans find themselves8 renders searches for objective
truth pointless but it also renders nihilism equally inappropriate. Although words and statements are not
grounded in some prior reality, they are thoroughly embedded in a historically produced
language game in which words and statements have to submit to certain rules to be meaningful.
These rules do change over time but the point is that word use is constrained within any language game and
therefore there is inappropriate and inadmissible word use in any game. If the linguistic turn is
taken seriously, then the entire subject-object dualism problem which was central to the
concerns of Cartesian philosophy and therefore the entire framework of the concept of
hyperreality fades away. There is no problem of representation of comparing a word with a thing but rather of
interpretation locating a particular word within a discursive whole. Single words or statements are not judged as
incorrect by reference to an external, material and objective reality but rather by reference to
their position within a wider language game a wider historical whole (which is the reality). The
implications of the linguistic turn are crucial to the argument here for they uncut the
epistemological and representationalist premises of hyperreality. Whereas Baudrillards
hyperreality is based on the notion of a culture wherein knowledge is attained by reference to
an objective reality, a post-Heideggerian view of culture would see culture as primarily linguistic
and therefore both self-referential and self creating. According to this paradigm, culture is not nor ever can be
epistemologically nihilistic because culture is its own reality it is dialectically related to itself. The linguistic turn then
demands that w e analyse the way in which culture constructs a reality for itself through its
discourses and the way in which these discourses (and culture) are historically located. It is through
seeing how these language games develop how they hang together that we can come to an
understanding of their meaning; the historical context acts as a hermeneutic whole from which we can interpret the
particular. The crucial point is that all human cultures are based on this linguistic reality and there is no
escape from it. The nihilism of hyperreality has not escaped this hermeneutic human condition
but rather is just another language game, with the same ontological status but one which plays
with the idea of epistemological voids.

The alternative lacks an applied ethics reject their tautology of the Real
As I have argued, hyperreality is the moment when Descartes extreme doubt has returned to the
academy and we once again find ourselves in the epistemological void of scepticism where we
can know nothing. Baudrillards descent into this Cartesian void epistemologically matches the
transgression of modern categories which can be witnessed in many cultural spheres. Like consumer
culture, which subverts the repressive modern norms of sexuality in a demand for liberation, Baudrillard rejects the
rational and certain boundaries of Cartesian clear and distinct ideas and resigns himself to the
deep whirlpool of nothingness, although this transgression is for Baudrillard a moment of
profound disillusion rather than liberation. It marks a moment of transgression where the categories of Truth,
certainty and objectivity are transgressed in the pursuit of nihilism, which was from the outset conceived as the dangerous and
liminal Other for modern rationalism. This epistemological nihilism is an example of postmodernism, in
which there are no more rules and in which anything goes. Not only is this nihilism critically bankrupt, but it is
possible only if the pursuit of an objective Truth is regarded as possible and desirable in the first
place. A dialectical and linguistic approach could never have posited the existence of a final
Truth in the first place and this approach has been similarly untroubled by fears of an
epistemological void. For dialectical and linguistic sociology which situates itself consciously in a Heideggerian paradigm,
linguistic reality is enough in itself it is not final but neither is it in need of some metaphysical support. The Heideggerian
tradition allows us to situate Baudrillards hyperreality dialectically and to find it sociologically
useful, even in the light of the latters abject theoretical poverty. Through a critical examination of
Baudrillards notion of hyperreality, this article has attempted to make a wider contribution to contemporary debates about
postmodernism. By reference to the Heideggerian linguistic turn, it has argued for the thorough inadequacy of
hyperreality on both empirical and theoretical grounds. Furthermore, a hermeneutic and dialectical
analysis, derived from the linguistic turn, obviates the representationalist and nihilistic aporia of
Cartesian hyperreality and suggests a m o r e fruitful approach to the study of contemporary
culture than that of which epistemological postmodern sociologies are capable. It demands that we
look to interpret specific social practices in their historical context, not build abstract castles in the air from asserted and
exaggerated generalizations, which lead us into assertions of epistemological nihilism. Following from this, the linguistic turn shows
how hyperreality and, therefore, postmodern sociologies, more generally, which posit
epistemological and ontological transformations, might be dialectically superseded by a more
critical sociology of postmodernism. Hyperreality is typical of epistemologically oriented
postmodern sociology which demands that our society in general is characterized by the end of
rules, consensus, order, discipline and knowledge. These theories are not serious but merely impose the uncritical
sentiments of disillusioned intellectuals onto the social process as a whole, assuming that their own obscure doubts are widely
experienced across the whole of society. Not only are these intellectuals disillusioned but they are also self-deluded for they
nostalgically lament the loss of modern (Cartesian) certainties, which were always untenable, even as they revel in the void which
was always the other side of rationalism. Hyperreality, therefore, signifies and uncritically embodies
postmodernism but it does not analyse the particular cultural forms which recent developments
have taken. Despite Baudrillards demands for the end of dialectics (1994a: 161, 162), his own theory (and epistemological
postmodernism more generally) fails for the very reason that it is not dialectical enough.
Permutation do boththe alt is only a recognition of the 1ACs ethic against
duality. Theres no link
Grace, 8 Professor of sociology at the University of Canterbury (Victoria, French Cultural
Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, Baudrillards illusions: The Seduction of Feminism, pg 347 361)//gingE
For all their brilliance, the works of Jean Baudrillard have, during the course of his life, aroused less in the way of serious
contemplation and debate, and somewhat more in the way of clamorous idolatry and its inevitable discontent. In the case of
feminism there has been an uneasy silence. I suggest uneasy because much of recent feminist
theorising in fact gravitates around what might be considered central Baudrillardian concepts,
and yet is in the same movement repelled by aspects of his discourse.1 Cautiously and curiously attracted to
Baudrillards work, any suggestion of feminist engagement must and will pull back abruptly
when Baudrillards blind spots in relation to gender lead him dangerously close to that which
approaches (objects in the rear mirror may be closer than they appear). I refer here to Baudrillards apparent failure to
see that the fatality of sexual difference that he figures in terms of the singularity of seduction
and symbolic exchange can equally be cast as yet another iteration of the very ideology of a
generalised exchange he so ardently critiques. This is particularly transparent in the linkage he makes between
seduction, gender and the murder of a sacrificial victim, which, I argue, exemplifies a murder of singularity rather
than its reinstatement and invigoration. A problem with most feminist analysis is that the feminist withdrawal from
Baudillards work is a response not just to the blind spots, but also to the assumption that they embody the whole of his thought,
and that what motivates him in his failure to see in fact structures his analysis in its entirety. Taking a different view, this suggests to
me the importance of identifying those aspects of Baudrillards oeuvre that extend, deepen and challenge the feminist project(s) of
our time and place, and at the same time examining those blind spots to see where a feminist analysis of them leads. Feminist
interventions in thought and action have, at least since Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in the post WWII
era, refused the binary structure that places the masculine as the identified term, and the
feminine as the other, as different, as identifiable through difference from the dominant term,
and hence subordinate to it. In Beauvoirs analysis it was the circumstances of womens lives that consigned them to a life
of passivity and immanence, narcissistically imbued in a cult of their own image. It was her conviction that women had to embrace
the benefits and advantages of the transcendent position that men enjoyed, of the truly human position, and that conditions had to
change to enable what, for Beauvoir, had to be a social transformation. Only then could men and women both be fulfilled in their
liberty and exist as equals, equally human, equally free. Beauvoirs contribution was the beginning (or a beginning) from which
flowed an outpouring of feminist efforts to both articulate the problems of this binary imperative and envision its end. The
binary of male/female was paralleled by, and mapped onto, the binaries of
dominant/subordinate, superior/inferior, subject/object, active/passive, sadist/masochist,
transcendent/immanent, strength/weakness, powerful/submissive. Mars and Venus are binary opposites
whose definitional form is relational. The figure of the woman who emerges from this structure is one whom Beauvoir disdains at
every turn; it is a despicable position to take up, or be placed in. The woman, immanent in her maternity, precious
in her dependence, manipulative in her 349 wish to destroy or at least domesticate the
transcendent masculinity she herself cannot attain, is not to be emulated. In feminist discourse,
action and theorising since the mid-twentieth century, the woman who does not revolt, analyse
or go beyond, but who rather employs her position to entrap and seduce the world into her own
domain of limitation, is a particularly galling figure. She is the butt of the patriarchy as much as the scorn of
feminism: she is the joke of the music hall, she is the demonic angel who knows her place and uses it to diminish others in her own
narcissistic grandstanding. By making herself prey, according to Beauvoir, she arouses and entraps
men through submissively making herself into a thing (Beauvoir, 1953 [1949]: 727). This passive position of
entrapment invariably incites the declaration that woman desires her position witness her delight, her cunning and her
satisfaction. As I discuss below, the perception of such a desire can lead to her being a victim of sacrifice.
Although feminist theory has been transformed since Beauvoir and the second wave through a poststructuralist critique and its
aftermath, even though the object of feminist concern is now the phallo-centrism of the binary structure itself and not solely the
position of women within it, I think it is reasonable to suggest that feminist theorising still wants to steer a course that is well clear of
the figure of the feminine depicted above. This archetypal feminine (of the fall) cannot be revisited in any
incarnation. This is where the ideas and provocations of Jean Baudrillard appear to contain their
danger, their conservatism, indeed their anti-feminism, and are therefore discouraging of
feminist interest. The very word seduction (used frequently by Baudrillard, and the title of one of his
early books) acts as a formidable deterrent. I want to argue that consideration of what Baudrillard is doing with
seduction and similar concepts reveals why feminists should not reject them; my intention is to suggest they are not
only useful but central to a feminist critique. And simultaneously the argument must be made for where
Baudrillards elaboration of these conceptual foundations of his work needs to be critically reviewed for what is possibly its
departure from its own terms. At the Baudrillard West of the Dateline conference in Auckland, New Zealand in 2001, Jean
Baudrillard concluded his response to a question from Nicholas Zurbrugg in a roundtable discussion with the statement that Look, I
am not above reality, but I am not for hyperreality. I am for illusion (Baudrillard, 2003: 183). Baudrillard is for illusion, seduction,
reversion, singularity, challenge. He seeks a world in which a radical otherness, an exquisite alterity, flourishes. This vigorously
critical ontology of absence and the nothing is pitted against the positivity of production,
identity, power and the universal a logic of positivity I argue elsewhere is that of phallo-
centrism (Grace, 2000). A philosophy of the object as illusion is one that refuses a valorising of identity and authority; it cannot
abide a politics of yearning for the position of subject in a subject/object dialectic (or in accordance with Beauvoir a world in which
all humans are subjects). To produce, is to make visible; to seduce is to remove from the visible order. To produce, within a
code of language and economic exchange is to make, or perform, reality as the thingness of
things, to accumulate reality, to have more and more of it. To seduce is the movement, or
principle, that ensures that things circulate, and in their circulation they cancel each other out.
They do not remain, they do not accumulate, they circulate; they appear and disappear. This appearance and
disappearance is sometimes referred to by Baudrillard as reversion the inevitable reversibility
of the world. In the early years of his work, Baudrillards unique and profoundly important theorisations
circled around the fundamental problem of the social constitution of forms of generalised
exchange. Any form of generalised exchange attempts (it can never succeed) to obliterate the singular
and incorporate it into a system whereby a generalised standard of exchange becomes the
benchmark against which value or identity is determined. As soon as the value of an object is determined
relative to another for the purpose of an economic exchange, it takes on its identity within that relation of value: one hen is equal in
value to a sack of manure. How do we know this? By reference to a generalised scale of value that creates abstract quantities as
units that can be added together. The meaning of words in linguistic exchange can be ascertained
through a system of signification that generalises a method to establish that a word means this
and not that. The systemisation of generalised exchange in the domains of value and meaning
liberates all exchange into the realm of the possible: only possible because the ontology of
objects and language is locatable within that broader system. It is here relative to there; it has this value
relative to that; it means this relative to (not) that. Such an order of economic and semiological exchange attempts to reduce the
singularity of the illusion of things and beings into the order of reality on a universal scale of difference and comparability. As soon as
such a scale is instituted, the binary constitution of the world is established, the universal is possible,
singularity no longer features. Since this early work Baudrillard has theorised a shift in the
political economy of the sign and its parallel economic form, a shift from the universal to the
global as the hyperreal morphs into the integral reality of the virtual. Before explaining this in more detail,
a word on Baudrillards notion of duality. There is frequent confusion with Baudrillards reference to the
significance of duality. With irreducible otherness, with the impossible exchange 351 of
singularities, we confront the dual relation. As Baudrillard said at the roundtable discussion in 2001: Duality, duel,
dopplegnger. All that is beyond the individuality [sic], the other. Duality doesnt at all mean two, two things, two
beings. There may be multiple ones but with duality there is a sort of symbolic challenge, and
for challenging you must be opposite, you must be antagonistic, you must not be in a dialectical
relation between subjects and objects, between individual and other, the social. That is our system of
values but we must break with it ... We must restore the secret of duality, of the dualistic, in the core of our situation, of our actual
system. (Baudrillard, 2003: 187) Following Nietzsche, this intervention of Baudrillards (only very briefly sketched here) represents, I
think, the most radical critique of the structure of identity/difference and its ontological commitments that we (in our occidental
philosophy) have. Its seduction not only reverses the universal and its truth, but also the investments
in generalised economic and semiological exchange on which this structure relies. Through this
critique, identity/difference as a system of equivalence/non-equivalence confronts the alterity of duality; its terms become that of
the duel, a relation of the agon, and they cannot be exchanged. This has to be consistent with a feminist project
to transform specifically the phallo-centric investments in this very structure of
identity/difference.
Baudrillards politics are deeply conformist. Playing with the pieces of hyper-
reality is to totally buy into the system and shuts down any real alternatives.
You feel like an outlaw critic when you actually pose no challenge to the
system.
Donahue, 1 - Department of English, Gonzaga University (Brian, Marxism, Postmodernism,
iek, Postmodern Culture, 12.2, Project Muse)//gingE
According to iek, theorists of postmodern society who make much of the usurpation of the Real by
the simulacrum either long nostalgically for the lost distinction between them or announce the
final overcoming of the "metaphysical obsession with authentic Being," or both (he mentions Paul Virilio
and Gianni Vattimo, and we might add Baudrillard to the list). In either case they "miss the distinction between
simulacrum and appearance": What gets lost in today's plague of simulations is not the firm, true, nonsimulated Real, but
appearance itself. To put it in Lacanian terms: the simulacrum is imaginary (illusion), while appearance is
symbolic (fiction); when the specific dimension of symbolic appearance starts to disintegrate,
imaginary and real become more and more indistinguishable.... And, in sociopolitical terms, this domain of
appearance (that is, symbolic fiction) is none other than that of politics.... The old conservative motto of keeping up appearances
thus today obtains a new twist:... [it] stands for the effort to save the properly political space. ("Leftist" 995-96) Making the same
argument about a slightly different version of this problem, iek writes that the standard reading of "outbursts of
'irrational' violence" in the postmodern "society of the spectacle" is that "our perception of
reality is mediated by aestheticized media manipulations to such an extent that it is no longer
possible for us to distinguish reality from its media image" (Metastases 75). Violent outbursts in this
context are thus seen as "desperate attempts to draw a distinction between fiction and reality...
[and] to dispel the cobweb of the aestheticized pseudo-reality" (75). Again with reference to the Lacanian triad of Imaginary-
Symbolic-Real, iek argues that this analysis is "right for the wrong reasons": What is missing from it is
the crucial distinction between imaginary order and symbolic fiction. The problem of
contemporary media resides not in their enticing us to confound fiction with reality but, rather,
in their "hyperrealist" character by means of which they saturate the void that keeps open the
space for symbolic fiction. A society of proliferating, promiscuous images is thus not overly fictionalized but is, on the
contrary, not "fictionalized" enough in the sense that the basis for making valid statements, the structure guaranteeing
intersubjective communication, the order permitting shared narratives and, to use Jameson's term,
"cognitive mapping"11--in short, the realm of the Symbolic--is short-circuited by an incessant flow
of images, which solicit not analysis and the powers of thought but rather nothing more than blank, unreflective enjoyment.
The kind of subjectivity that corresponds to this hyperreal, spectacularized society without a
stable Symbolic order is what iek calls in Looking Awry the "pathological narcissist" (102). That is,
following the predominance of the "'autonomous' individual of the Protestant ethic" and the
"heteronomous 'organization man'" who finds satisfaction through "the feeling of loyalty to the
group"--the two models of subjectivity corresponding to previous stages of capitalist society--today's media-spectacle-
consumer society is marked by the rise of the "pathological narcissist," a subjective structure that breaks
with the "underlying frame of the ego-ideal common to the first two forms" (102). The first two forms involved
inverted versions of each other: one either strove to remain true to oneself (that is, to a "paternal ego-
ideal") or looked at oneself "through the eyes of the group," which functioned as an
"externalized" ego-ideal, and sought "to merit its love and esteem" (102). With the stage of the
"pathological narcissist," however, the ego-ideal itself is dissolved: Instead of the integration of a symbolic
law, we have a multitude of rules to follow--rules of accommodation telling us "how to
succeed." The narcissistic subject knows only the "rules of the (social) game" enabling him to manipulate others; social relations
constitute for him a playing field in which he assumes "roles," not proper symbolic mandates; he stays clear of any kind of binding
commitment that would imply a proper symbolic identification. He is a radical conformist who paradoxically
experiences himself as an outlaw. (102)

Baudrillard is just an excuse to cover up genocidal violence
BALSAS, 6 - Interdisciplinary journal on media culture (Interview with Art Group BBM, on first
cyborgs, aliens and other sides of new technologies, translated from lithiuanian
http://www.balsas.cc/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=151)//gingE
Valentinas: We all know that Jean Baudrillard did not believe that the Gulf War did take place, as it was over-mediated and over-
simulated. In fact, the Gulf War II is still not over, and Iraq became much more than just a Frankenstein laboratory for the new
media, technology and democracy games. What can we learn from wars that do not take place, even though they cannot be
finished? Are they becoming a symptom of our times as a confrontation between multiple time-lines, ideologies and technologies in
a single place? Lars: Actually, it has always been the same: new wars have been better test-beds for the state of art technologies and
the latest computer-controlled firearms. The World War I already was a fully mechanized war where pre-robots were fighting each
other and gassing the troops. And afterwards, the winners shape the new world order. Olaf: Who on hell is Baudrillard?
The one who earns money by publishing his prognoses after the things happen? What a fuck, French philosophy deals
too much with luxury problems and elegantly ignores the problem itself. Its no wonder, this is the
colonizers mentality, you can hear it roaring in their words: they use phrases made to camouflage
genocide. I went to see that Virilios exhibition "Ce qui arrive" at Foundation Cartier in 2003. I was smashed by that banal
presentation of the evil of all kinds: again, natural catastrophes and evil done by man were exposed on the
same wall, glued together with a piece of "theory". There you find it all, filed up in one row: the pure luxury
of the Cartier-funded Jean Nouvel building, an artwork without any blood in its veins, and that
late Christian philosophy about the techno-cataclysm being the revenge of God. Pure shit,
turned into gold in the holy cellars of the modern alchemists museums. The artist-made video
"documents" of the Manhattan towers opposed to Iraqian war pictures: thats not Armageddon, thats man-invented war
technology to be used to subdue others. And there is always somebody who pushes the buttons, even when the button is a
computer mouse some ten thousand kilometers away from the place where people die, or even if it is a civil airplanes redirected by
Islamists. Everybody knows that. War technology has always been made to make killing easier. And to produce martyrs as well.
Janneke: Compare Baudrillard with Henry Dunant, the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Dunant was no philosopher, he was just an intelligent rich man in the late 19th century. But his ideas went far
more in the direction where you should hope to find philosophers as well. He experienced war as a
"randonneur": he passed by, he saw the suffering and the inhumanity of war. And he felt obliged to
act. Apart from the maybe 10 days he spent on the battlefield, on the beautiful meadows in the Europeans Alps, helping wounded
people to survive, as a complete medical layman he decided to do something more sustainable against these odds. He knew
that his efforts couldnt prevent war in general, but he felt that he could alter the cruelty of
reality. And he succeeded in doing it. No wonder that in our days we find the most engaged people to support the
TROIA projects intention in Geneva, where they are still based. And they are not only doing their necessary
surgeons work in the field: they are as well fighting with the same energy on the diplomatic
battle.
Cap
Solves cap because cap privileges masculinity
MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a different analyt-ical strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure
of class, but at the structure of sex/gender and its generative relationship, men's constitu-tion and appropriation of women sexually.
Ironically, MacKinnon's 'ontology' constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Another's desire, not the self's labour, is the origin of
'woman'. She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces what can count as
'women's' experience anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as
'women' can be concerned. Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness;
that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not. Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism
still has the epistemolo-gical status of labour; that is to say, the point from which an analysis able to
contribute to changing the world must flow. But sexual object)fication, not alienation, is the
consequence of the structure of sex/gender. In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion
and abstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does
not exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to
sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent
separation of the labourer from his product. MacKinnon's radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does not so
much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other women's political speech and action. It is a totalization
producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing feminists' consciousness
of the non-existence of women, except as products of men's desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues
that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground women's unity. But in solving the problem of the
contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of
experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of
polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice,
MacKinnon's intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the 'essential' non-
existence of women is not reassuring. In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is a re-inscription of history,
radical feminism can accommodate all the activities of women named by socialist feminists as forms of labour only if the activity can
somehow be sexualized. Reproduction had different tones of meanings for the two tendencies, one
rooted in labour, one in sex, both calling the consequences of domination and ignorance of
social and personal reality 'false consciousness'. Beyond either the diff~culties or the contributions in the
argument of any one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial
explanation; both were regularly constituted as totalities. Western explanation has demanded as much; how else could the
'Western' author incorporate its others? Each tried to annex other forms of domination by expanding its basic categories through
analogy, simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed silence about race among white radical and socialist
feminists was one major, devastating political consequence. History and polyvocality disappear into political
taxonomies that try to establish genealogies. There was no structural room for race (or for much else) in theory
claiming to reveal the construction of the category woman and social group women as a unified
or totalizable whole. The structure of my caricature looks like this: socialist feminism--structure of class //
wage labour // alienation labour, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race radical
feminism structure of gender // sexual appropriation // objectification] sex, by analogy labour, by
extension reproduction, by addition race In another context, the French theorist, Julia Kristeva, claimed women
appeared as a historical group after the Second World War, along with groups like youth. Her dates are doubtful; but we
are now accustomed to remembering that as objects of knowledge and as historical actors,
'race' did not always exist, 'class' has a historical genesis, and 'homosexuals' are quite junior. It is
no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man and so the essence of woman breaks up at the same moment that
networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex. 'Advanced
capitalism' is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In the 'Western'
sense, the end of man is at stake. It is no accident that woman disintegrates into women in our
time. Perhaps socialist feminists were not substantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that suppressed women's
particularity and contradictory interests. I think we have been, at least through unreflective participation in the logics, languages,
and practices of white humanism and through searching for a single ground of domination to secure our revolutionary voice. Now
we have less excuse. But in the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference
and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection. Some differences are
playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. 'Epistemology' is about
knowing the difference.

The cyborg prevents domination of capitalism and industrialization
THE INFORMATICS OF DOMINATION In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I would
like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indebted to socialist and feminist principles of
design. The frame for my sketch is set by the extent and importance of rearrangements in world-wide social relations tied to
science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature
of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and
scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an
organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system--from all work to all play, a deadly game.
Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the following
chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new
networks I have called the informatics of domination: Representation Simulation Bourgeois novel, realism
Science fiction, postmodernism Organism Biotic Component Depth, integrity Surface, boundary Heat Noise Biology as clinical
practice Biology as inscription Physiology Communications engineering Small group Subsystem Perfection Optimization Eugenics
Population Control Decadence, Magic Mountain Obsolescence, Future Shock Hygiene Stress Management Microbiology, tuberculosis
Immunology, AIDS Organic division of labour Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour Functional specialization Modular construction
Reproduction Replication Organic sex role specialization Optimal genetic strategies Bioogical determinism Evolutionary inertia,
constraints Community ecology Ecosystem Racial chain of being Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism Scientific management
in home/factory Global factory/Electronid cottage Family/Market/Factory Women in the Integrated Circuit Family wage Comparable
worth Public/Private Cyborg citizenship Nature/Culture fields of difference Co-operation Communicatins enhancemenet Freud Lacan
Sex Genetic engineering labour Robotics Mind Artificial Intelligence Second World War Star Wars White Capitalist Patriarchy
Informatics of Domination This list suggests several interesting things.13 First, the objects on the right-hand side
cannot be coded as 'natural', a realization that subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side
as well. We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It's not just that igod'is dead; so is the 'goddess'. Or
both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics. In
relation to objects like biotic components, one must not think in terms of essential properties,
but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints.
Sexual reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits
as a function of the system environment. Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer
reasonably call on notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms
and families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading Playboy
and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism. Likewise for race,
ideologies about human diversity have to be formulated in terms of frequencies of parameters,
like blood groups or intelligence scores. It is 'irrational' to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized. For liberals and
radicals, the search for integrated social systems gives way to a new practice called
'experimental ethnography' in which an organic object dissipates in attention to the play of
writing. At the level of ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into languages of
development and under-development, rates and constraints of modernization. Any objects or persons
can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no 'natural' architectures constrain system design. The
financial districts in all the world's cities, as well as the export-processing and free-trade zones, proclaim this elementary fact of'late
capitalism'. The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated
as problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist).
Both are cyborg semiologies. One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces,
on rates of flow across boundaries and not on the integrity of natural objects. 'Integrity' or 'sincerity' of the
Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategies
applied to women's capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the
languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-
makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like
any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of
operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any
component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a
common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analysed so
well. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress
communications breakdown (Hogness, 1983). The cyborg is not subject to Foucault's biopolitics; the
cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations. This kind of analysis of scientific and
cultural objects of knowledge which have appeared historically since the Second World War prepares us to notice some important
inadequacies in feminist analysis which has proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in 'the West' since
Aristotle still ruled. They have been cannibalized, or as Zoe Sofia (Sofoulis) might put it, they have been 'techno-digested'. The
dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and
private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question
ideologically. The actual situation of women is their integration/ exploitation into a world
system of production/reproduction and com-munication called the informatics of domination.
The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself- all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous
ways, with large consequences for women and others consequences that themselves are very different for different people and
which make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imagine and essential for survival. One important route
for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the
social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our
imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and
personal self. This is the self feminists must code. Communications technologies and
biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social
relations for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as
formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but
they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between
tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including
objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other. Furthermore, communications
sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search
for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to
disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange. In communications sciences, the translation of the world
into a problem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feedback-controlled) systems
theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weapons deployment, or data base construction and
maintenance. In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is determining
the rates, directions, and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially
permeable to information. Information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) which
allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power (called effective communication). The
biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. Any system breakdown is a
function of stress. The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C31, command-
controlcommunication-intelligence, the military's symbol for its operations theory.
The aff is socialist feminismwe dont link
In modern biologies, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by
molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionary theory, and immunobiology. The
organism has been translated into prob-lems of genetic coding and read-out. Biotechnology, a writing
technology, informs research broadly.14 In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of
knowledge, giving way to biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processing
devices. The analogous moves in ecology could be examined by probing the history and utility of
the concept of the ecosystem. Immunobiology and associated medical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of
coding and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as constructions of bodily reality for us. Biology here is a kind of
cryptography. Research is necessarily a kind of intelligence activity. Ironies abound. A stressed system
goes awry; its communication processes break down; it fails to recognize the difference
between self and other. Human babies with baboon hearts evoke national ethical perplexity for
animal rights activists at least as much as for the guardians of human purity. In the US gay men and intravenous drug
users are the 'privileged' victims of an awful immune system disease that marks (inscribes on the body)
confusion of boundaries and moral pollution (Treichler, 1987). But these excursions into communications sciences
and biology have been at a rarefied level; there is a mundane, largely economic reality to support my claim
that these sciences and technologies indicate fundamental transforma-tions in the structure of
the world for us. Communications technologies depend on electronics. Modern states, multinational
corporations, military power, welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabrication of our imaginations,
labour-control systems, medical construc-tions of our bodies, commercial pornography, the international division of labour, and
religious evangelism depend intimately upon electronics. Micro-electronics is the technical basis of simulacra;
that is, of copies without originals. Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into
robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and
mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures. The new biotechnologies concern more
than human reproducdon. Biology as a powerful engineering science for redesigning materials and processes has
revolutionary implications for industry, perhaps most obvious today in areas of fermentadon, agriculture, and energy.
Communicadons sciences and biology are construcdons of natural-technical objects of
knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind,
body, and tool are on very intimate terms. The 'multinational' material organization of the production and
reproduction of daily life and the symbolic organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally
implicated. The boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, or
material and ideal never seemed more feeble. I have used Rachel Grossman's (1980) image of women in the
integrated circuit to name the situation of women in a world so intimately restructured through the social relations of science and
technology.15 I used the odd circumlocution, 'the social relations of science and technology', to indicate that
we are not dealing with a technological determinism, but with a historical system depending
upon structured relations among people. But the phrase should also indicate that science and technology
provide fresh sources of power, that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action (Latour,
1984). Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social
relations can make socialist-feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics.

Moving towards technology ruptures the role of women within the family in a
capitalist systems because a mans work becomes feminized as something that
is easily replaced
The 'homework economy' outside 'the home' The 'New Industrial Revolution' is producing a new world-wide working class, as well
as new sexualities and ethnicities. The extreme mobility of capital and the emerging international division
of labour are intertwined with the emergence of new collectivities, and the weakening of
familiar groupings. These developments are neither gender- nor race-neutral. White men in
advanced industrial societies have become newly vulnerable to permanent job loss, and women
are not disappearing from the job rolls at the same rates as men. It is not simply that women in Third World
countries are the preferred labour force for the science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors, particularly in
electronics. The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture,
consumphon, and production. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women's lives have been
structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial
heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high
likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age. The ethnic and racial diversity of women in
Silicon Valley structures a microcosm of conflicting differences in culture, family, religion,
education, and language. Richard Gordon has called this new situation the 'homework economy'.16 Although he
includes the phenomenon of literal homework emerging in connecdon with electronics assembly, Gordon intends 'homework
economy' to name a restructuring of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed
to female jobs, jobs literally done only by women. Work is being redefined as both literally
female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be
made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less
as workers than as servers; subjected to dme arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day;
leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex.
Deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers. However, the homework
economy does not refer only to large-scale deskilling, nor does it deny that new areas of high skill are emerging, even for women
and men previously excluded from skilled employment. Rather, the concept indicates that factory, home, and
market are integrated on a new scale and that the places of women are crucial and need to
be analysed for differences among women and for meanings for relations between men and
women in various situations. The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational
structure is made possible by (not caused by) the new technologies. The success of the attack on relatively
privileged, mostly white, men's unionized jobs is deaf to the power of the new communications technologies to integrate and
control labour despite extensive dispersion and decentralization. The consequences of the new technologies are
felt by women both in the loss of the family (male) wage (if they ever had access to this white
privilege) and in the character of their own jobs, which are becoming capital-intensive; for
example, office work and nursing. The new economic and technological arrangements are also related to the collapsing
welfare state and the ensuing intensification of demands on women to sustain daily life for themselves as well as for men, children,
and old people. The feminization of poverty generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the
homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by the expectation
that women's wages will not be matched by a male income for the support of children has
become an urgent focus. The causes of various women-headed households are a function of race, class, or sexuality; but
their increasing generality is a ground for coalitions of women on many issues. That women regularly sustain daily life
partly as a funcdon of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the
overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new. The particular pressure, for example, on US black women, who have
achieved an escape from (barely) paid domeshc service and who now hold clerical and similar jobs in large numbers, has large
implicadons for condnued enforced black poverty with employment. Teenage women in industrializing areas of the Third World
increasingly find themselves the sole or major source of a cash wage for their families, while access to land is ever more problemadc.
These developments must have major consequences in the psychodynamics and politics of
gender and race. Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism (commercial/ early industrial,
monopoly, multinational) tied to nationalism, imperialism, and multinationalism, and related to
Jameson's three dominant aesthetic periods of realism, modernism, and postmodernism I would
argue that specific forms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital and to its political and
cultural concomitants. Although lived problematically and unequally, ideal forms of these families might be schematized as
(1) the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private and
accompanied by the white bourgeois ideology of separate spheres and nineteenth-century
Anglo-American bourgeois feminism; (2) the modern family mediated (or enforced) by the welfare
state and institutions like the family wage, with a flowering of a-feminist heterosexual
ideologies, including their radical versions represented in Greenwich Village around the First World War; and (3) the 'family'
of the homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of women-headed households and its
explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion of gender itself. This is the
context in which the projections for world-wide structural unemployment stemming from the new technologies are part of the
picture of the homework economy. As robodcs and related technologies put men out of work in
'developed' countries and exacerbate failure to generate male jobs in Third World
'development', and as the automated of fice becomes the rule even in labour-surplus countries,
the feminization of work intensifies. Black women in the United States have long known what it looks like to face the
structural underemployment ('feminization') of black men, as well as their own highly vulnerable position in the wage economy. It
is no longer a secret that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life are interwoven
with this economic structure in myriad ways which have also differentiated the situations of
white and black women. Many more women and men will contend with similar situations, which
will make cross-gender and race alliances on issues of basic life support (with or without jobs)
necessary, not just mice. The new technologies also have a profound effect on hunger and on food production for
subsistence world-wide. Rae Lessor Blumberg (1983) estimates that women produce about 50 per cent of the world's subsistence
food.17 Women are excluded generally from benefiting from the increased high-tech commodification of food and energy crops,
their days are made more arduous because their responsibilides to provide food do not diminish, and their reproductive
situations are made more complex. Green Revolution technologies interact with other high-tech industrial production
to alter gender divisions of labour and differential gender migration patterns.
The feminism they describe is pre-60s; radical anti-capitalism movements have
taken over
Fraser 12- American critical theorist, currently the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of
Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School in New York City
(Nancy, august, Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History An Introduction, Le Collge
dtudes mondiales, http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/72/50/55/PDF/FMSH-WP-2012-
17_Fraser1.pdf)//LC
When second-wave feminism first erupted on the world stage, the advanced capitalist states of
Western Europe and North America were still enjoying the unprecedented wave of prosperity
that followed World War II. Utilizing new tools of Keynesian economic steering, they had apparently learned to
counteract business downturns and to guide national economic development so as to secure near full employment for men. Incor-
porating once unruly labor movements, they had built more or less extensive welfare states and
institutionalized national cross-class solidarity. To be sure, this historic class compromise rested
on a series of gender and racial-ethnic exclusions, not to mention external neocolonial
exploitation. But those potential faultlines tended in the main to remain latent in a social-
democratic imaginary that foregrounded class redistribution. The result was a prosperous North Atlantic belt
of mass- consumption societies, which had apparently tamed social conflict. In the 1960s, however, the relative calm of this Golden
Age of capitalism was suddenly shattered.1 In an extraordinary international explosion, radical youth took to the streetsat first
to oppose racial segregation in the U.S. and the Vietnam War. Soon thereafter they began to question core
features of capitalist modernity that social democracy had heretofore naturalized: materialism,
consumerism, and the achievement ethic; bureaucracy, corporate culture, and social control;
sexual repression, sexism, and heteronormativity. Breaking through the normalized political
routines of the previous era, new social actors formed new social movements, with second-
wave feminism among the most visionary. Along with their comrades in other movements, the feminists of
this era recast the radical imaginary. Transgressing a political culture that had privileged actors
who cast themselves as natio- nally bounded and politically tamed classes, they challenged the
gender exclusions of social democracy. Problematizing welfare paternalism and the bourgeois
family, they exposed the deep androcentrism of capitalist society. Politicizing the personal,
they expanded the boundaries of contestation beyond socioeconomic distribution to include
housework, sexuality, and reproduction.
The alternative labels sexuality/race/gender as merely cultural and opposed
to the real business of politics which not only means that their alt never gets
off the ground but also means that it leads to neo-conservative Marxism that
violently marginalizes sexual and racial differences
Butler, 98 - Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the
University of California, Berkeley (udith, Maxine Elliot Merely Cultural New Left Review
I/227, January-February 1998)//gingE
Thus, the result of parody is paradoxical: the gleeful sense of triumph indulged by the avatars of an
ostensibly more serious Marxism about their moment in the cultural limelight exemplifies and
symptomatizes precisely the cultural object of critique they oppose; the sense of triumph over this
enemy, which cannot take place without in some eerie way taking the very place of the enemy,
raises the question of whether the aims and goals of this more serious Marxism have not become hopelessly displaced onto a
cultural domain, producing a transient object of media attention in the place of a more systematic analysis of economic and social
relations. This sense of triumph reinscribes a factionalization within the Left at the very moment in
which welfare rights are being abolished in this country, class differentials are intensifying across
the globe, and the right wing in this country has successfully gained the ground of the middle effectively making the Left itself
invisible within the media. When does it appear on the front page of the New York Times, except on that rare occasion in which one
part of the Left swipes at another, producing a spectacle of the Left for mainstream liberal and conservative press consumption
which is all too happy to discount every and any faction of the Left within the political process, much less honour the Left of any kind
as a strong force in the service of radical social change? Is the attempt to separate Marxism from the study of
culture and to rescue critical knowledge from the shoals of cultural specificity simply a turf war
between left cultural studies and more orthodox forms of Marxism? How is this attempted separation
related to the claim that new social movements have split the Left, deprived us of common ideals, factionalized the field of
knowledge and political activism, reducing political activism to the mere assertion and affirmation of cultural identity? The
charge that new social movements are merely cultural, that a unified and progressive Marxism
must return to a materialism based in an objective analysis of class, itself presumes that the
distinction between material and cultural life is a stable one. And this recourse to an apparently stable
distinction between material and cultural life is clearly the resurgence of a theoretical anachronism, one that discounts the
contributions to Marxist theory since Althussers displacement of the base-superstructure model, as well as various forms of cultural
materialismfor instance, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Indeed, the untimely resurgence of that
distinction is in the service of a tactic which seeks to identify new social movements with the merely cultural, and the cultural with
the derivative and secondary, thus embracing an anachronistic materialism as the banner for a new orthodoxy. This
resurgence of left orthodoxy calls for a unity that would, paradoxically, redivide the Left in
precisely the way that orthodoxy purports to lament. Indeed, one way of producing this division becomes clear
when we ask which movements, and for what reasons, get relegated to the sphere of the merely cultural, and how that very division
between the material and the cultural becomes tactically invoked for the purposes of marginalizing certain forms of political
activism? And how does the new orthodoxy on the Left work in tandem with a social and sexual
conservativism that seeks to make questions of race and sexuality secondary to the real
business of politics, producing a new and eerie political formation of neo-conservative
Marxisms. On what principles of exclusion or subordination has this ostensible unity been erected? How quickly we forget that
new social movements based on democratic principles became articulated against a hegemonic Left as well as a complicitous liberal
centre and a truly threatening right wing? Have the historical reasons for the development of semiautonomous new social
movements ever really been taken into account by those who now lament their emergence and credit them with narrow
identitarian interests? Is this situation not simply reproduced in the recent efforts to restore the universal through fiat, whether
through the imaginary finesse of Habermasian rationality or notions of the common good that prioritize a racially cleansed notion of
class? Is the point of the new rhetorics of unity not simply to include through domestication and subordination precisely those
movements that formed in part in opposition to such domestication and subordination, showing that the proponents of the
common good have failed to read the history that has made this conflict possible? What the resurgent orthodoxy may resent about
new social movements is precisely the vitality that such movement are enjoying. Paradoxically, the very movements that
continue to keep the Left alive are credited with its paralysis. Although I would agree that a narrowly
identitarian construal of such movements leads to a narrowing of the political field, there is no reason to assume that
such social movements are reducible to their identitarian formations. The problem of unity or,
more modestly, of solidarity cannot be resolved through the transcendence or obliteration of this field, and
certainly not through the vain promise of retrieving a unity wrought through exclusions, one that
reinstitutes subordination as the condition of its own possibility. The only possible unity will not
be the synthesis of a set of conflicts, but will be a mode of sustaining conflict in politically
productive ways, a practice of contestation that demands that these movements articulate their
goals under the pressure of each other without therefore exactly becoming each other.
The alternative ignores sexual oppression which means that we inevitably
repress sexual feelings which makes us more comfortable in doing violence
towards more vulnerable bodies.
Ellison, 96 - Professor of Christian Ethics at Bangor Theological Seminary (Marvin Erotic
ustice: A Liberating Ethic of Sexuality pg. 90-91)//gingE
An ethic of erotic justice, therefore, does not lower but raises moral expectations. It teaches us
to demand for ourselves (and others) what we deserve, namely, to be whole persons to each other and to be
deeply, respectfully loved. A gracious, liberating ethic will teach us to claim our right to erotic justice and also to invest in
creating a more just and equitable world. In our late-capitalist culture, desire has been
commodified to sell goods. In that process of commodification, desire has been narrowly
sexualized and privatized, so much so that for many people erotic desire now denotes only desire of a genital sort. More
specifically, desire has been truncated to mean taking pleasure in possession. Possessiveness is a primary virtue in a capitalist
political economy. Pleasure has become the pleasure of owning consumer goods and status objects, as well as exercising monopoly
control over another person as "my man" or "my woman." It is a major challenge to enlarge the meaning of desire to incorporate
once again a sense of being free-spirited, full of joy in being alive and "non-possessed," throughout one's life. This expanded notion
of desire can be a mighty, though tender, spark from within us, enlivening our desire for a more ethical world. Erotic power can stir
us to engage in a full-bodied way in creating justice. My suspicion is that the pervasive fear of sex and passion, rampant in all
patriarchal religious traditions, is deeply implicated in the difficulty many people have in sustaining an interest in, much less a
passion for, social justice. By and large, even liberal Christians either regard patriarchal control as socially necessary or dismiss
sexuality as a rather indifferent matter that bears little consequence compared to "larger," more "legitimate" social issues. For many
people, the link between sexuality and justice is muddled at best. By not paying attention to sexual oppression,
people fail to grasp how a multiplicity of interconnected social oppressions operate in the small
and large places of their lives, in and on their bodies and the body politic. These injustices
diminish human loving. When people are willing to accept power as control in their intimate lives, they are also likely to
acquiesce to other oppressive structures that control them. They fail to see that sexual oppression is intimately bound up with race,
gender, and class oppression. People fail, therefore, to connect their personal pain with larger systemic patterns of injustice. White,
middle-strata Christians are deeply hurting but have few clues about the sources of their suffering. They project their fear
and pain onto more vulnerable groups, including feminist women, people of color, and
gay/lesbian/bisexual persons. Out of touch with their own bodies (and feelings), they are also
distanced from the beauty and moral value of other body-selves, especially among the "culturally despised."
They are at a loss about how to reclaim their personal power and zest for life. Tragically, when people are cut off from
genuine community and when their physical and emotional needs are not being adequately
met, they tend to become more repressive about sex, more judgmental about differences, and
more unforgiving toward themselves and others. In the process they become dangerous. They turn their repressed
anger and rage on the very people they ought to be listening to and learning from, the ones most insistent about the goodness of
every body.
We refuse dominant logics - capitalism is inherently linked to failure
Halberstam, 11 - Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at
University of Southern California (Judith "The Queer Art of Failure " Duke Univ. Press)//gingE
Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism. A market economy must have winners and
losers, gamblers and risk takers, con men and dupes; capitalism, as Scott Sandage argues in his book Born Losers: A
History of Failure in America (2005), requires that everyone live in a system that equates success with
profit and links failure to the inability to accumulate wealth even as profit for some means certain losses for
others. As Sandage narrates in his compelling study, losers leave no records, while winners cannot stop talking about
it, and so the record of failure is a hidden history of pessimism in a culture of optimism (9). This
hidden history of pessimism, a history moreover that lies quietly behind every story of success, can be told in a number of different
ways; while Sandage tells it as a shadow history of U.S. capitalism, I tell it here as a tale of anticapitalist, queer struggle. I tell it
also as a narrative about anticolo- nial struggle, the refusal of legibility, and an art of
unbecoming. This is a story of art without markets, drama without a script, narrative without
progress. The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improb- able, the unlikely, and the
unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being. Failure can be counted
within that set of oppositional tools that ames C. Scott called the weapons of the weak (1987: 29). Describing peasant resistance
in Southeast Asia, Scott identified certain activities that looked like indifference or acquiescence as hidden transcripts of resistance
to the dominant order. Many theorists have used Scotts reading of resistance to describe different political projects and to rethink
the dynamics of power; some scholars, such as Saidiya Hartman (1997), have used Scotts work to describe subtle resistances to
slavery like working slowly or feigning incompetence. The concept of weapons of the weak can be used to
recategorize what looks like inaction, passivity, and lack of resistance in terms of the practice of
stalling the business of the dominant. We can also recognize failure as a way of refusing to
acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique. As a practice, failure
recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed failure can
exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities.
Queerness challenges capitalism
Halberstam, 11 - Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at
University of Southern California (Judith "The Queer Art of Failure " Duke Univ. Press)//gingE
Queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing
alternatives to hegemonic systems. What Gramsci terms common sense depends heavily on the
production of norms, and so the critique of dominant forms of common sense is also, in some
sense, a critique of norms. Heteronormative common sense leads to the equation of success
with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, and hope. Other subordinate, queer, or counter-
hegemonic modes of common sense lead to the association of failure with nonconformity,
anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive life styles, negativity, and critique. os Muoz has produced the most
elaborate account of queer failure to date and he explains the connection between queers and failure in terms
of a utopian rejection of pragmatism, on the one hand, and an equally utopian refusal of social
norms on the other. Muoz, in Cruising Utopia, makes some groundbreaking claims about sex, power, and utopian longing.
Sometimes gay male cruising practices and anonymous sex take center stage in this genealogy of queer utopian longing but at
other moments, sex is conjured in more subtle ways, as it was in Disidentifications (1999), as a desiring and melancholic relation
between the living and the dead. Often, Muozs archive takes center stage and at times he turns to the
fabulous failure of queer culture mavens like Jack Smith or Fred Herko but at others he is quite openly working
with the success stories (OHara, Warhol) in order to propose a whole archaeologi- cal strata of
forgotten subcultural producers who lie hidden beneath the glittering surface of market valued
success. While Muoz makes queerness absolutely central to cultural narratives of failure, there is a
robust literature that marks failure, almost heroically, as a narrative that runs alongside the mainstream. And so, lets begin
by looking at a spectacular narrative about failure that does not make the connection between
failure and queerness and see what happens. This should foreclose questions about why failure must be located
within that range of political affects that we call queer.

Reps Bad
The k oversimplifies communicative logic these representations must be
interpreted by an audience first. Our radical reading of the cyborg resolves
these problems of representation
As shown by an observation of contemporary theoretical writings, the cyborg presents a critical position and an
innovative epistemological approach that claims to subvert the structure of subordination and
control. Thus, paraphrasing Haraway, Gane (2006, p. 152) determined that scientific imagery of the cyborg
functions as dream work that is not an analogue of psychoanalytical unconscious but rather
an attempt to map out how things are and how they might be otherwise. In contrast to the academic
viewpoint, the films examined tend to recall the traditional perspective of the socio-political actor, rather then challenge it. They
present the cyborg as a barrier for liberal humanist values and characteristics. Moreover, the
representations of the cyborg are posed within a matrix of asymmetrical social relationships
based on gender and racial imbalances. Cultural symbolism supports the socialization of the
neo-liberal mode of a technologized personality. However, the overall messages of the movies are
different from one another. Thus, Blade Runner invents an alternative image of the social actor (as
a background figure) and in general displays a spirit of movement towards cultural pluralism and democratization. The Matrix
Trilogy, by contrast, articulates more conservative intentions supported by the existing consumer-based system. As shown, this
difference can be linked to the particular historical contexts of each film. Nevertheless, even if contemporary cultural
representations of the cyborg offer an ambiguous message to the audience, they contribute to
the very idea of the technohuman by making cyborg imagery familiar and attractive to viewers. It
should be mentioned that cyborg imagery in not only the cyborg writing and the cyborg filming but also
it is the reading of cyborg, its perception and comprehension by an audience. As shown, the particular
value systems lie in the core of the analyzed cinematic narratives. 38 Althusser (1971/2001, p. 109) determined such systems to be
representations of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, waiting for new subjects, those,
who will respond to their calls. Chandler (2001) stresses the spectators agency, claiming that communicative logic is more complex
than the widely accepted transmission model. The real process of signification involves both a sender and a
receiver of a message. Signs do not just convey meanings, but constitute a medium in which
meanings are constructed. Semiotics helps us to realize that meaning is not passively absorbed
but arises only in the active process of interpretation (Ibid., chap. 10, para 9). Similar implications can be found
in Stuart Halls understanding of a variety of readers strategies. Drawing from the idea of meaning as a result of both coding, and
decoding, Hall (1980) introduced three types of cultural text comprehension, including dominant, negotiated and radical
reading. As interpreted by Dyer (1995, p. 108), the first two trends of perception are based on a different range of agreement with
the ideological project manifested in the cultural text, while the radical reading tends to challenge the legitimacy of the hegemonic
definitions. That means that critical readers and viewers are supposed to be particularly sensitive to
narrative ambiguities, which reveal the underlying ideology. In this context, any study of cyborg imagery
would need to be addressed to the investigation of meanings as instructed by the audience of the films. What are the patterns
displayed for understanding the cyborg figure? How do social variables such as gender, age, social position,
ethnicity, etc. correlate with possible interpretations of the value systems offered by Blade
Runner and the Matrix Trilogy? These and other related points of interest should be addressed
in future research.

Grotesque body
The alt is the aff
Smith, 9 - Georgia State University (Nicole R., Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the
Cyborg, Art and Design Theses, Paper 51,
http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/art_design_theses/51)//gingE
In similar fashion, Shabot also finds problematic the hyper-sexualized body found in popular versions of
female cyborgs. This body is configured as an ideal body type in its hyperreality. Consequently, she
expresses concern that the cyborg body, as popularly configured, risks abandoning the flesh
and blood body.86 Shabot sees this loss as tantamount to a loss of embodied existence. She places great emphasis
on the need to retain an embodied subject, for to lose the experience of our bodies is to lose
the very difference that our own meaningful life experiences and sensations impart: We are
ambiguous beings regarding our ways of existing: our gender, our looks and our thoughts,
constitute an ever-changing flux that can never be absolutely defined or contained by an
abstract, purely conceptual, incorporeal subjectivity.87 Shabot finds the tendency toward a disembodied
subjectivity in popular images of cyborgs dangerous in the way that such an abstraction can appear impartial while upholding
traditional hierarchies, conceptions, and dualisms. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, Shabot offers the grotesque and
monstrous body as an alternate figure to the cyborg.88 She argues that the grotesque body
cannot be disembodied. In many ways, the grotesque body is actually defined and identified through
the physical body. It is excessive, unable to be contained, closed, or limiteda self-
transgressing, fragmented figure intertwined and interlaced with the world around it.89 However,
Shabot does not suggest the grotesque as a means to evade technology and its impact on the body, which she recognizes as nearly
impossible to avoid. Today, the cyborg seems almost inescapable, which highlights the cogency of her
insistence on foregrounding the embodied subjective position and, thus, partial and imperfect
subjectivities. The disconnection between Haraways cyborgs and popularized versions of them underscores the ways in which
cyborgs as metaphors and oppositional figurations can lose their radical potential when co-opted by mass culture but also the ways
in which Haraway has been misinterpreted. While Balsamos and Shabots points are certainly important, their critiques
of the cyborg stem more from their wariness of its popularized images than those Haraway envisions or advocates. Yet
Haraways own comments on the cyborg are admittedly confusing when taken out of context.
Within the broader perspective of her writings, the cyborg is only one of the figurations within her
menagerie, which includes monsters, tricksters, and vampires. Through Shabots arguments we are
reminded that the radical cyborg, if it is to be an oppositional figure, carries with it the specter of the grotesque and monstrous.
Haraway does not disagree. She speaks of the cyborg as a monstrous entity, especially to the extent
that it has defined the very limits of Western imagination.90 Haraways cyborg is neither an
innocent nor unified subject.91 It is an argument against dualisms of all kinds, including
machine/organism, human/animal, natural/artificial, mind/body, and female/male, to name a
few. According to Haraway, cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the dualism in which we have
explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.92 This statement, along with her essay Situated
Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, offers a
more nuanced interpretation of her perhaps initially misleading comment that cyborgs inhabit a
postgendered world. Haraways cyborg is not the disembodied cyborg of popular culture that
Shabot indicts, nor is her post-gendered cyborg world one that privileges disembodied subjects
freed from the specificity of a body. For Haraway, that type of positionality offers only a false
vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibilities.93 In contrast, in its commitment to
permanent partiality, her cyborg is more akin to the split and contradictory self. It is the one who can interrogate
positioning and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and
fantastic imaginings that change history.94 Haraways cyborg thus departs from those popular
science-fiction and cyberpunk versions that fetishize the cyborg body as an escape from the
limitations of the human body.95 Haraways radicalized cyborg pushes us to rethink our bodies
and imagine new kinds of embodiment but also to examine our kinship and connections to what
was formerly outside or beyond these bodies.96 As Haraway states, the cyborg is in this curious set of
family relationships with sibling species of various kinds and with the inorganic and mechanical
as well.97 Cyborgs are not just the physical hybridization of machine and organism for Haraway. They are also those
individuals operating within the contemporary world network of technological communication
systems. Haraways use of metaphors and her method of theorizing begin with specific, literal examples in the world rather than
an espousal of theoretical rhetoric to which real-world examples must be molded to fit.98 Consequently, she uses cyborg
identity as a means to redescribe womens identities as experienced within this world
network. As Haraway explicitly states, the actual situation of women is their integration/exploitation
into a world system of production/reproduction and communication called the informatics of
domination.99 This point underscores an important aspect of the cyborg world Haraway describes and attempts to envision.
This aspect is Haraways double vision of the cyborg world, as Chela Sandoval calls it.100 The cyborgian world might be
read as the pinnacle of EuroAmerican white domination, or it could be an opportunity for
emerging and oppositional U.S. third world feminisms, which Haraway interprets as cyborg
feminisms and Sandoval identifies with the methodology of the oppressed.101

A combination of critical agency with real forms of excess technology is key
Shabot, 6 PhD in philosophy at the University of Haifa (Sara Cohen, Journal of Gender
Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3, Grotesque Bodies: A Response to Disembodied Cyborgs, pg 223
235)//gingE
The figuration of the grotesque privileges embodiment over disembodied consciousness and
excess and hybridity over clean, measured, well-equilibrated and perfectly defined spaces. It
comprises singularity, heterogeneity and difference. The body and its excesses, I argue, form the predominant
site of absolute difference. The body functions as the individuation principle, as the clearest principle of particularity and singularity.
It is the body which constitutes us as singular beings and draws the limits within the particular
minds which, according to the majority of classic and modern Western philosophers, are essentially the same for all
individuals. Emphasizing embodied subjectivity means emphasizing the temporary, the accidental, the finite; it means a return
to the historical, the contextual, the cultural. Thus, such an embodied subjectivity appears as the paradigm of
the anti-philosophical when the philosophical is understood as an attempt to represent the
Same, i.e. the eternal, the universal, the general, the a-historical. The excesses of the body (and
excesses in general) also constitute an important way of representing difference. The excess is that
which has to be cleansed or eliminated when we try to overcome difference. The need for erasing
excess has been overwhelmingly present in philosophy. The grotesque is plagued with excess, and,
consequently, plagued with a difference that is concrete and irreducible. Neither philosophy nor science
can abstract, reduce or generalize excess, since it is by definition resistant to reduction. There is no way to deal with
difference, heterogeneity and otherness except by renouncing the aim of reaching an absolute,
a-historical, universal, and abstract knowledge. Dealing with the particular, the irreducible, the accidental and the
finite, as the grotesque does, means dealing with difference. That which exceeds us, that which threatens our
sameness, our normality, our well-defined and protected presence in the world, constitutes
the different. I have argued that it is within the power of the figuration of the grotesque to shed new
light on postmodern critique and, most important, to bring an alternative to the hyper-
sexualized and disembodied cyborg. Approaching the grotesque may be a new and creative way to contribute insights
to postmodern thought in general and to the postmodern thought on the embodied-subject and its philosophical and political
implications, in particular. Nevertheless, even if we do find in the figure of the grotesque body a positive
figuration in order to describe the embodied postmodern subject, some problems still remain.
Concretely, we should talk about our impossible escape from cyborgs and technologically
transformed bodies. Technology has become a part of our bodies, an important feature of our
daily lives. Imagining figurations that avoid dealing with the issue of technology and the impact on our subjectivities cannot work
if the aim is to explain or describe precisely the postmodern subject. Still, I believe that a return to the concrete, organic, carnal body
even if just for a brief moment may remind us of the impossibility of definitely running away from the imperfections of the flesh.
New figurations, which include the technological, but which, at the same time, ground
themselves strongly in the body, must be created.
The figure of the cyborg recognizes the contingency of agency upon
relationalityspecifically how technology is constitutive of humanity
Kember, 11 Professor of media and communications at University of London (Sarah,
Feminist Theory, Volume 12, No. 2 No humans Allowed? The Alien in/as Feminist Other pg
183-199)//gingE
An ethics of relationality is emerging from the confluence between philosophy, science and
technology studies and trans/disciplinary feminist theory. Specifically, it is developing from a
critique of humanism, scientific realism and agency as autonomy. For Braidotti, Barad, Haraway and
Suchman, for example, agency is not something we humans possess and can therefore pass to other
entities such as machines, but rather it is something that happens or is created through
intraactions between entities that do not pre-exist them (Braidotti, 2006; Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008;
Suchman, 2007).2 These entities humans, machines and so on are not then autonomous, but
strictly relational. This is what Braidotti means when she says that: Nobody and no particle of matter is
independent and self-propelled, in nature as in the social (Braidotti, 2006: 6). Agency is a matter of
entanglement, where: To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities,
but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. (Barad, 2007: ix) We are
beginning to examine the ethical implications of these statements. If a traditional, humanist
ethics is rooted in the idea of the autonomous individual, then what, we are asking, might an
ethics of relationality or entanglement look like? Barad marks the connection between these concerns and earlier
feminist critiques of epistemology. Even atoms, she reminds us, are not atomic. We once thought that
they were the basic, indivisible units of life until we split them and discovered a veritable zoo
of subatomic particles (Barad, 2007: 254). These particles, with their exotic names (quarks, neutrinos,
muons) and elusive appearance resist our attempts at realism (we cannot be said to have simply,
unproblematically, discovered them) and idealism (neither did we simply make them up). They are, in other words,
neither outside nor inside us. They do not exist objectively or subjectively. Rather, their
existence is entangled with our own, and this entanglement happens somewhere between for Barad, halfway
between what we normally think of as the object world and the world of human subjects. This, as Barad learned from the physicist
Niels Bohr, somewhat complicates practices of observation, representation and the generation of scientific knowledge traditionally
founded on the separation of subjects and objects, observers and observed. For Haraway, this kind of knowledge is a myth, even a
trick. The god-trick, the trick of seeing everything from nowhere, is gendered, transcendent,
based on the splitting of subject and object, knower and known (1991). Haraway aims to
reconnect these entities in her feminist alternative or successor science, based on a different,
non-dualistic, non-hierarchical epistemology that she refers to as situated knowledge (1991).
Situated knowledge reconnects the observing subject with the observable world, and this
reconnection is ethical as much as it is epistemological. Not only is it a better guarantor of objectivity, but,
optimally, it makes us as knowing subjects more responsible and more accountable for what we learn and how to see (Haraway,
1991: 190). Barads so-called ethico-epistem-onto-logy of agential realism owes a great deal to Haraways formulation of situated
knowledge. In Barads account, then: scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather, what
is disclosed [or discovered] is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in
and as part of the worlds differential becoming. Which is not to say that humans are the
condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena. (Barad, 2007: 361, emphasis in original) Humans
are not the condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena like atoms or aliens,
molecules or machines, because we are always already part of those phenomena. The problem
and this is implicit in, as well as being the premise of the emergent ethics of relationality lies in our tendency to deny
that we exist only within and as part of an ongoing process of becoming, and to continually
reassert a separate and relatively static ontology of being (of being human, being our selves). For Bergson,
this intellectual tendency is dominant if not overpowering (1998). It results, as Suchman points out, in the
reassertion of species and individual autonomy (2007). I have looked at how this reassertion of autonomy, of what
refers to as life-as-we-know-it operates in the context of the quest for life on Mars Christopher Langton (1996: 40). Before I discuss
this, I want to consider, for a moment, the ethical alternative to deand then re-territorialisation,
deand then re-humanisation (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002; Kember, 2003; Suchman, 2007). For Derrida, the ethical
alternative or the alternative ethics is founded on what he calls hospitality or the openness of
the human subject at home to the outside, to the other (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000). For him,
experience is always the experience of the other which is why we should not lose sight of it by
counterposing realism with idealism and the other is by no means exclusively the other human
(Derrida and Stiegler, 2002). Joanna Zylinska picks up on this in her book on bioethics3 that outlines: a nonhumanist bioethical
framework that does not negate the singularity of the human but that interrogates the humans privileged position in the dynamic
system of relations with other living creatures and nonanimate beings. (Zylinska, 2009: xi) In questioning the role of the
human as a starting point for ethical debate and as an entity with an a priori value, she does not
mean to shift the focus or the priority to the animal or to the machine instead (she is not promoting
animal rights, for example). Rather, she sets out to explore the differential relation between the human
and the nonhuman, with the human emerging via, and in relation to, technology (Zylinska, 2009: xii,
emphasis in original). Technology, then, is constitutive of the human and not something added to, or
taken away from it. Moreover, the differential relation between human and technology, whilst
originary, is intensifying in the age of new media to the point where the surface of the body (and I
would add, the interior) is in a process of becoming increasingly media/ted (Stiegler, 1994).

Their alternative attempts to enframe the ambitions of the cyborg otherness
against the natural, biological human which reproduces an arbitrary binary of
exclusion
Nordquist, 10 PhD in philosophy at the University of Minnesota (Michael Andrew, February
2010, Environmental Participation: Immanence, Cosmopolitics, and the Agency of
Environmental Assemblages)//gingE
Human action and human agency are only possible through the combination of nonhumans into
what is understood as the human, and then only through ignoring all of the nonhuman entities that went into the
process of making a human. Human bodies are the most obvious product of the process of nonhumans
making and making possible the idea of the human being. The organs that constitute bodies, the biochemical
processes that occur without consciousness, and the relations among all these parts and processes are all nonhuman entities that
enable the figure of the human to be understood as a whole. Human skin, typically considered to be a container for our internal
organs, physically connects bodies and their environments, exchanging air, water, and chemical compounds with whatever it comes
into contact. The interconnection of these bodies with food, air, and water further attach humans
to their environments through the literal combination of these external things with internal
bodily processes. The many forms of material attachment to environments point not only to the differences among humans,
but also to the ways in which people are radically transformed by the things they are attached to. The walker from the previous
chapter with her shoes, street, laws, leg muscles, etc.is radically different from a driver who, with an automobile and all of its
attendant connections to laws, norms, and physical power, can accomplish a different set of things through her combination with
them. A person who uses a cellular phone is not merely using a tool or technology to talk to
someone around the planet, but he becomes something different, a network of attachments,
material and otherwise, that transform a human into an entity that can do much more than
simply be human. The driver is not a human being in an automobile, but is a car-street-law-mobility assemblage. The cell
phone user is a communicating- wireless-electricity-phone company assemblage. The distinctively human things
they are doing can only be accomplished through the enrollment of things that fall outside of
the definition of human, such as phones, cars, and telephone companies. By detaching all of
these internal and external connections that human life depends upon, it is easy to
overlook and underestimate the role other-than-human entities play in everyday life. These are not
tools we use to accomplish our preestablished goals or ranked preferences, but they modify us, what we want to do, and what we
are capable of doing. Envisioning the human as a rights-bearing and reason- and language-using sentient being actively eliminates
the environmental connections that a human being has. Thinking the human being as a universalizable norm 117
necessarily cuts off these connections among entities that are integral aspects of their
existences. As Latour notes, no one can define in advance what a human being is, detached from
what makes him [sic] be.26 As noted earlier, just as we have never been modern according to Latour, we have also never
been human, relying on the relations we have with the entities that enable us to do things that the human on its own is incapable
of. Subsuming the variously connected and constituted human assemblages into a model of human existence radically transforms
them into something they do not see themselves as and eliminates a particular set of environmental relations.27 As a concept open
to contestation and disagreement, it is important to push the limits of these conceptual forms of a politics of cosmos to understand
what exactly cosmopolitanism makes possible and what it cuts off. ust as Honig argues for an agonistic cosmopolitics in contrast
to the subsumptive normative cosmopolitanism of neo-Kantians,28 I aim to make clear that these Kantian-inspired and human-
based cosmopolitanisms need not be the only form that a politics of cosmos can take, and they are in fact rather limited,
anthropocentric means of acting in a world. This is particularly the case when what it means to be human is
constantly challenged and redefined through the infinite relations with entities that produce
what we take to be humans.29

Identity Politics
The primarily discursive focus of the kritik is a distraction from material
violence
Zingsheim, 11 PhD, Assistant Professor in College of Arts and Sciences at Governors State
University (Jason, Cultural Studies and Critical Methodologies, Vol. 11, No. 1, Developing
Mutational Identity Theory: Evolution, Multiplicity, Embodiment, and Agency, pg 24-37)//gingE
Identity as assemblage embraces the instability and mobility of identity processes, yet it is not
without certain limitations. Whereas intersectional and crystalline identities explicitly draw
attention to the role of dominant power formations, assemblages make little distinction
between the social and material antecedents of disparate forces, flows, energies, and lines of flight.
Power relations are very much at play within assemblages. They are, however, operational on an
immanent level and do not function as an overarching structure, through which the component
elements of an assemblage are ordered (Currier, 2003, p. 328). Discursive formations are present and
at work within assemblages, yet the power of these dominant discourses to organize
experiences of the self is not privileged over other exertions of power. Demoting the role and influence of
dominant power structures in identity negotiation, while also dissolving categories of subjectivities, runs the risk of bolstering claims
of identity-blindness in postidentity politics. Claiming that race, gender, sexuality, or any other category of
subjectivity is no longer applicable sets the groundwork for denying systemic oppression based
on inequitable flows of capital and social resources along lines of identity. There may be no
biological foundation for race (Ladson-Billings, 2000), gender (Butler, 1999), or sexuality (Foucault, 1990), yet
the lack of a biological basis for these categories does not negate their power in our lives. As Martin
and Nakayama (2006) explain concerning race, they are fictions, but they are real (p. 76). Scholars continue exploring the
real material and economic consequences in the everyday lived experiences of individuals based
on race (Frankenberg, 1993), gender (Sloop, 2005; Trethewey, 1999), and sexuality (Berlant & Warner, 1998; Yep, 2003). I
am not suggesting we jettison any of these theoretical approaches to understanding identity. As Sengupta (2006) reminds us,
Identities are minefields, and the mines have been lain by armies that have forgotten the map
(p. 634). To make our way through this terrain, we need every available theoretical tool, but we
cannot afford to ignore the limitations of existing theories of identity. Rather, I recommend an
integrative approach through a theory of identity that addresses the structural and individual
influences on identity (re)construction without using static connotations of identity or
subjectivity. This theory should address the crystalline nature and the mutually constitutive role subjectivities play with each
other. Finally, it is imperative such a theory address the movement of flows, forces, and energies
within identities. Identity as intersectional, crystalline, and assemblage indexes the challenges and
limitations of theorizing identity and highlights the overlapping (and contradictory) needs for
multiplicity, coherence, movement, and temporality. There remain three problems facing those who view
identity discursively prompting the need for further theorizing of identity. First is the tendency to focus on
discourse, continuing to ignore the material bodies of subjects. Even those scholars who seek to
acknowledge and work with the body are hampered by the reliance of academe on linguistic texts (Ashe et al., 1999). The body
provides a sensuous way of knowing, an embodied knowledge that cannot be accessed through symbol systems alone
(Conquergood, 1991, p. 180; Hamera, 2002). Given the historical division between mind/body and the
parallel binaries of masculine/feminine, rational/emotional, and so on, to deny or suppress the
relationship of the material body to identity would further support current racist and patriarchal
structures of domination (hooks, 1994, pp. 134-138). Any discursive approach to identity must explicitly address and
implicate the material body in the process of identity. A second challenge for discursive models of identity is a
lack of practicality and applicability. Despite robust scholarship on identity, poststructuralist theories have failed to
materialize in vernacular discourse (Tracy & Trethewey, 2005) or public policy (Squires & Brouwer, 2002; Verloo, 2006). As
demonstrated by Tracy and Trethewey, much popular press literature and everyday conversations continue to speak of the self as a
stable, unitary, true entity. For scholars who study identity, the challenge remains to develop strategies,
vocabulary, and theories that not only engage the body but also members of the public in ways
that make sense of their everyday cultural practices while challenging the true self fake self
dichotomy and its essentialist underpinnings (Tracy & Trethewey, 2005). The final problem regarding a
discursive model of identity stems from the limitations of any discursive system. As Burke (1945) has
pointed out in his work on representative anecdotes, any inquiry will be bound by the presuppositions of the
language system it uses (see also Crable, 2000). Concerning identity, I contend the current language,
specifically the terms we have to discuss identity, is inadequate to represent our experiences of
ourselves. This remains the largest exigency for developing new theories and models of identity and the need to further
complicate available discourses to describe and explain our conceptions of self in ways that resonate with the embodied experiences
of individuals. We need a vocabulary that more adequately and accurately symbolizes the ways we
as individuals and collectives experience ourselves.
SFO
SFO = inevitable
Marino, 5 - Macalester Department of Philosophy (Lauren Marino, Speaking for Others,
Macalester Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 14: Iss. 1, Article 4)//gingE
If the self is located within language games the there is a commonality between those who share language games. This removes
some of the barriers between selves and I do have access to the experience of those with whom
I share language games. Sharing language games means sharing experience. I am able to speak for those
who language games I play. There are some problems with this understanding. Alcoff thinks membership in a group is
not precise or determinate. It is unclear which groups I could belong to and which of those
groups I should single out to affiliate myself. More importantly, membership in a group doesnt
necessarily mean an authority to speak for the whole group. However, if we accept that the self is
constituted within language, then those who share language games with me have direct access
to my experience in away that no one can ever have access to a Cartesian mind. We do not need
to ask for absolute identity, language and experience between speakers but just a commonality. Furthermore,
Bernstein argues that we cannot speak without speaking for other people. 6 The speakers location is
necessarily a location in relation to other people. The relationship cannot be removed, and we
cannot avoid it. Speaking at all makes speaking for others inevitable. We return to the intuitive response to
the struggle of oppressed groups: have the group speak for itself. Speaking becomes a type of agency in which I
construct myself because contrary to a Cartesian self, selves do not exist prior to or separate
from language. To lose my speech is to lose myself. The oppressed have the ability to
communicate with each other and through their language game they are able to discuss their
struggle with one another. Sharing languages games enables the oppressed to a specific, limited
dimension of power. Their language game will always fail to communicate their struggle to those who have not been
initiated into it. They have direct access to the experience of oppression and their agency, but they can only reach their own group.
Those on the margin cannot reach those in the center. On the other hand, those in the center, the elites, share a language that can
reach the majority of society. It is a language game they are familiar with and can use adeptly. However, they do not have the
experience with or access to the language game of the oppressed. They have the power to use their language but nothing to say.
The catch-22 is the choice between a group who embodies the agency and the dimensions of political struggle against oppression
without a way to communicate it to the larger community, and a group with the language to reach society but is ignorant of the
political struggle. There lies a need for a synergy between the experience of the oppressed on the margins and the language game of
those in the center. The synergy requires a speaker who comes from the oppressed but has
knowledge of the language game of the center. Such a person could incorporate the experience
of the oppressed into a new language game that could be accessed by those in power. The concern
is what is lost and sacrificed in translation. If the language games are so disparate that initiation in one, offers no insight into the
rules of the other, than there is doubt that translation can be done at all. If translation cannot be done, the best to
be hoped for is cooption forcing the margins into the mainstream.
Queer PIC
Reclaiming queerness is a precondition to combat the homophobe
Queer Nation, 90 (Text of a manifesto originally passed out by people marching with the ACT
UP contingent in the New York Gay Pride Day parade, 1990. Queer Nation Manifesto
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/queernation.html)//gingE
Why Queer? Queer! Ah, do we really have to use that word? It's trouble. Every gay person has his or her
own take on it. For some it means strange and eccentric and kind of mysterious. That's okay; we like that. But some gay girls and
boys don't. They think they're more normal than strange. And for others "queer" conjures up those awful memories of adolescent
suffering. Queer. It's forcibly bittersweet and quaint at best - weakening and painful at worst. Couldn't we just use "gay" instead? It's
a much brighter word. And isn't it synonymous with "happy"? When will you militants grow up and get over the novelty of being
different? Why Queer ... Well, yes, "gay" is great. It has its place. But when a lot of lesbians and gay
men wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay. So we've chosen to call
ourselves queer. Using "queer" is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the
world. It's a way of telling ourselves we don't have to be witty and charming people who keep
our lives discreet and marginalized in the straight world. We use queer as gay men loving
lesbians and lesbians loving being queer. Queer, unlike gay, doesn't mean male. And when
spoken to other gays and lesbians it's a way of suggesting we close ranks, and forget (temporarily) our
individual differences because we face a more insidious common enemy. Yeah, queer can be a rough word but it is
also a sly and ironic weapon we can steal from the homophobe's hands and use against him.

2AC - Framework
Their epistemology replicates violence and precludes the possibility of different
forms of educationthe political is already ceded
Angus, et al, 1 Professor of geography at the university of Birmingham (Tim, International
Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, Vol. 10, No. 2, A Manifesto for Cyborg
Pedagogy?)//gingE
Our Geographies of Material Culture course attempts to encourage students to sink their teeth into these thorny
but fundamental issues through insisting that (1) they adopt a cyborg ontology when
considering their relations with commodities;4 (2) they think through their connections with
others in terms of commodity chains, circuits of culture and/or actor networks;5 (3) they
develop these understandings through reading and discussing in class detailed empirical studies
of consumption, production, and flows;6 (4) they work on group presentations which further
develop key issues arising from these discussions;7 (5) they continually situate this knowledge in
the mundane circumstances of their everyday lives; and (6) they keep a journal which represents how this
understanding can be grounded in these circumstances and how it develops throughout the course. We do not teach this
course. It is not didactic. We deliver only one lecture, right at the start. After that, we orchestrate the course:
prepare detailed handouts, make sure the right readings are easily available, orchestrate the class discussions, arrange extra course
office hours for smaller discussions; assess the journals according to clearly set out criteria; and decentre ourselves as much as
possible.8 We had 64 students in 1999, and 30 in 2000. We have not been setting out or wanting back the
right answers from them. We have been looking for convincing, thoughtful, imaginative and
knowledgeable answers situated in the concrete circumstances of their own lives, the readings
discussed and the issues raised, in class. But, you may be asking, why exactly might this be considered a
radical pedagogical approach? To answer this question, we need to outline very briefly the
cornerstones of this cyborg pedagogy: situated knowledge, cyborg ontology and border
pedagogy. Donna Haraway is best known for her work on the first and second of these, and the third has drawn heavily on her
work. They are based on fundamental critiques of traditional ways of knowing, being and
teaching. Her paper on situated knowledge (1996) is a critique of both totalising knowledge of
scientific objectivity and the relativising knowledge of social constructionism. She slams
researchers who work in these ways for promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally
and fully, and for making knowledge claims which, as a result of this positioning, are unlocatable, and so
irresponsible ... *i.e.+ unable to be called into account (p. 117). She argues that a responsible and more
objective scientific knowledge of the world is one which is grounded, embodied and locatable
in a knowing self (which) is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and
original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to joining with another, to see together
without claiming to be another (p. 119). None of us conforms to the traditional figure of the Cartesian
individual as an atomistic, presocial vessel of abstract reason (Whatmore, 1997: 38). And this is where
the second cornerstone fits in: it is not far to move from the epistemology of situated
knowledge to the ontology of the cyborg. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway (1991) argues that
developments in information technology, medical procedures, genetic engineering and other
areas of technoscientific endeavour have made the world a more mixed up place. She argues that
now we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism (p. 150). As a
result of this, the binary oppositions and rigid categorisations of Enlightenment thought
self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilised/primitive, reality/appearance,
whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion,
total/partial, God/man (p. 177) cannot help but be broken down in the way that people live
their lives (see Latour, 1993): e.g. IT has contributed to the process of timespace compression where heres and theres, selves
and others have become even more mixed up than before; and medical procedures have further blurred boundaries between men
and women, between humans and animals, between humans and machines; between nature and culture. Because these
binary oppositions and rigid categorisations have all been systematic to the logics of
domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals in short, domination of all
constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self (Haraway, 1991: 177) Haraway argues that progressive
people should embrace and explore these transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and
dangerous possibilities (1991: 154) if they want a more adequate, richer, better account of a
world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others
practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all
positions (Haraway, 1996: 113). As she put it to Hari Kunzru (1991): Were living in a world of connections and
it matters which ones get made. Finally, we have border pedagogy: an approach to teaching and
learning which takes as its nemesis the banking system of education where, to summarise it
crudely, students are encouraged to learn dominant understandings of the world and to repeat those dominant understandings
back in assessments which determine their academic progress (Giroux & McLaren, 1994; hooks, 1994). These
understandings are, not surprisingly, structured through the binary oppositions that Haraway sees as
fundamental to such exclusions. Critics have argued that it is this combination which excludes
many students from their own education because they do not want to, or simply cannot, take
part in this hegemonic project. Border pedagogy, in contrast, assumes that students come into class with important
social, cultural, economic knowledge and concerns and works to critique and build upon that situated knowledge. Its advocates have
put forward pedagogical alternatives which encourage students to (a) identify and be critical of these binary logics in action ... , and
(b) undercut and/or find spaces between them in order to undermine the forms of domination which result from their taken-for-
granted use. (Cook, 1996, 2000) Getting students to write journals using a situated knowledge epistemology and a cyborg ontology is
one of these alternatives. It should allow these connections to be seen, made, thought through and
expressed, messing with those logics and boundaries in the process. But it cannot divide the world neatly
into the right or wrong, the good or bad, the ethical or unethical, the responsible or irresponsible. Things are not black and
white here. They are shades of grey at best. In principle this is a radical pedagogical project.
Definitions
USFG = the people
Howard, 5 (Adam, effersonian Democracy: Of the People, By the People, For the People,
http://www.byzantinecommunications.com/adamhoward/homework/highschool/jeffersonian.h
tml, 5/27)

Ideally, then, under Jeffersonian Democracy, the government is the people, and people is the government. Therefore, if a
particular government ceases to work for the good of the people, the people may and ought to
change that government or replace it. Governments are established to protect the people's rights using the power they get
from the people.

The US is made up of individuals
Claude, 88 - Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia (Inis, States
and the Global System, pages 18-20)//gingE
This view of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of sovereignty, which calls up the image of the monarch,
presiding over his kingdom. Sovereignty emphasizes the singularity of the state, its monopoly of
authority, its unity of command and its capacity to speak with one voice. Thus, France wills, Iran
demands, China intends, New Zealand promises and the Soviet Union insists. One all too easily conjures up the
picture of a single-minded and purposeful state that decides exactly what it wants to achieve,
adopts coherent policies intelligently adapted to its objectives, knows what it is doing, does
what it intends and always has its act together. This view of the state is reinforced by political scientists emphasis
upon the concept of policy and upon the thesis that governments derive policy from calculations of national
interest. We thus take it for granted that states act internationally in accordance with rationally conceived and consciously
constructed schemes of action, and we implicitly refuse to consider the possibility that alternatives to policy-directed behaviour may
have importancealternatives such as random, reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist behaviour. Our rationalistic assumption
that states do what they have planned to do tends to inhibit the discovery that states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do,
or what they have the opportunity to do, or what they have usually done, or what other states are doing, or whatever the line of
least resistance would seem to suggest. Academic preoccupation with the making of policy is accompanied
by academic neglect of the execution of policy. We seem to assume that once the state has
calculated its interest and contrived a policy to further that interest, the carrying out of policy is
the virtually automatic result of the routine functioning of the bureaucratic mechanism of the
state. I am inclined to call this the Genesis theory of public administration, taking as my text the passage: And God said, Let there
be light: and there was light. I suspect that, in the realm of government, policy execution rarely follows so promptly and inexorably
from policy statement. Alternatively, one may dub it the Pooh-Bah/Ko-Ko theory, honouring those denizens of William S. Gilberts
Japan who took the position that when the Mikado ordered that something e done it was as good as done and might as well be
declared to have been done. In the real world, that which a state decides to do is not as good as done; it may, in fact, never be done.
And what states do, they may never have decided to do. Governments are not automatic machines, grinding
out decisions and converting decisions into actions. They are agglomerations of human beings,
like the rest of us inclined to be fallible, lazy, forgetful, indecisive, resistant to discipline and authority, and likely to fail
to get the word or to heed it. As in other large organizations, left and right governmental hands are
frequently ignorant of each others activities, official spokesmen contradict each other,
ministries work at cross purposes, and the creaking machinery of government often gives the
impression that no one is really in charge. I hope that no one will attribute my jaundiced view of government merely
to the fact that I am an Americanone, that is, whose personal experience is limited to a governmental system that is notoriously
complex, disjointed, erratic, cumbersome and unpredictable. The United States does not, I suspect, have the least effective
government or the most bumbling and incompetent bureaucracy in all the world. Here and there, now and then, governments do, of
course perform prodigious feats of organization and administration: an extraordinary war effort, a flight to the moon, a successful
hostage-rescue operation. More often, states have to make do with governments that are not notably clear about their purposes or
coordinated and disciplined in their operations. This means that,in international relations, states are sometimes less dangerous, and
sometimes less reliable, than one might think. Neither their threats nor their promises are to be taken with absolute seriousness.
Above all, it means that we students of international politics must be cautious in attributing
purposefulness and responsibility to governments. To say the that the United States was informed about an event
is not to establish that the president acted in the light of that knowledge; he may never have heard about it. To say that a Soviet
pilot shot down an airliner is not to prove that the Kremlin has adopted the policy of destroying all intruders into Soviet airspace;
one wants to know how and by whom the decision to fire was made. To observe that the representative of Zimbabwe voted in
favour of a particular resolution in the United Nations General Assembly is not necessarily to discover the nature of Zimbabwes
policy on the affected matter; Zimbabwe may have no policy on that matter, and it may be that no one in the national capital has
ever heard of the issue. We can hardly dispense with the convenient notion that Pakistan claims, Cuba promises, and Italy insists,
and we cannot well abandon the formal position that governments speak for and act on behalf of their states, but it is essential that
we bear constantly in mind the reality that governments are never fully in charge and never achieve the
unity, purposefulness and discipline that theory attributes to themand that they sometimes
claim.

Resolved means to reduce through mental analysis
Random House Unabridged Dictionary 2006
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/resolved)
Resolve: 1.To come to a definite or earnest decision about; determine (to do something): I have resolved that I shall live to the
full. 2.to separate into constituent or elementary parts; break up; cause or disintegrate (usually fol. by into). 3.to reduce or convert
by, or as by, breaking up or disintegration (usually fol. by to or into). 4.to convert or transform by any process (often used
reflexively). 5.to reduce by mental analysis (often fol. by into).
A2 Education
The acceptance of the queer identity is a prerequisite to any policy
considerations
Mourad, 1 Phd, post structural theorist of education (Roger, Teachers College Record, v103
n5 p739-59 Oct 2001 14-18 Education After Foucault: The Question of Civility)//gingE
The idea that the fundamental issue of the just civil state is to find the right balance between preserving individual freedom and
constraining individual threat has served as a tacit foundation within which belief and debate about
educational philosophy, policy, and practice develop. This statement is not intended to suggest that there is
some direct and specific historical connection that can be unequivocally demonstrated to exist between foun- dational political
theory and mainstream educational theories and practices. However, I want to propose that there is a compatibility
between them that has important consequences for a new critique of organized formal
education. In the remainder of this paper, my aim is to argue that the tenor of the theories that I have summarized is endemic in
the ordinary ways that we think about and engage in organized education. How is the idea of the basic human being that is posed
as the fundamental social, political, and pedagogic problem for modern civilization, this human being that must be managed in order
to keep it from harming itself and others, played out in educational presuppositions? The tacit, unchallenged belief is that
through education, the human being must be made into something better than it was or would
be absent a formal education. There are all kinds of versions of this subject and of what it should become: potential
achiever, qualified professional, good citizen, leader, independent actor, critical thinker, change agent, knowledgeable person. In
all cases, the subject before education is viewed to be, like the subject before civilization,
something in need of being made competentand safein the mind of the educator. From this
vantage point, the pedagogic relationship between teacher and student, between competent adult and incompetent child ~or
adult!, contains within it a possibility that it seeks to overcome, namely, a rejection of the socialization program of the former by the
latter. There is an implicit conflict between individuals as soon as the student walks into the school or college classroom door from
outside the civility that the teacher would have that student become. It must be resolved, or contained in some way; and this is
done immediately by rendering the student a rule follower ~a follower of the social order!both in and out of the classroom. Or the
student must be rendered a challenger of the social order, in favor of an order that overcomes oppressionto become a competent
comrade. The individual must be taught how to be an individual in accordance with this balance.
Being an individual means being freeit means being self-determined, it means competing, and it means obeying
the law. This is the case, even if the teaching is done with kindness and sensitivity. The responsibility for dealing with
suffering and limitation lies almost solely with this individual, not the state. In fact, if suffering is
viewed at all, it tends to be viewed as something that is good for the individual to endure or to
fight in order to overcome it. Limitation is not acknowledged, unless the individual is deemed disadvantaged in some
way, and the remedy tends to be to provide the person with an opportunity to become competent. Is it any wonder that parents of
children with disabilities, aided by many educators, often must fight for educational and other services? This situation simply
reflects that the basic logic of organized formal education and, more generally, the state, is not predicated upon a recognition that
the human being is susceptible to suffering or that the states reason for being should be to care for people. If caring for its
inhabitants were the basic purpose of the civil state, then there would be no need to fight for
this recognition. Is it any wonder that the education of the ordinary child is mainly training for a far-off, abstract future that is
destined to be better than life at present? Why must school be about overcoming anything? We talk about equipping children and
adults to solve problems. Yet, problems do not fall from the sky; they do not exist as such until a human being
gives them a name. In contrast, the concept of contention suggests that the practical role of reason
should be used to understand the human being as subject to suffering and to act accordingly as moral
agents. That is very different from an educational philosophy, policy, and practice that views reason as an instrument by which to
overcome obstacles and to conform to the social order. It may be argued that modern education is about reason, about how to
think and live reasonably and, therefore, how to live well and to care for oneself and for others. Yet it is commonly expressed that
we live in a complex world and that children and adults must learn how to learn, in order to succeed in a world of
rapid change. The question that needs to be asked is: Why should a person have to? In effect,
education expects the human being to have an unlimited ability to think and act with reason
sufficient to cope with increasingly complex situations that require individual intellect to adequately recognize,
evaluate, and prioritize alternative courses of action, consider their consequences, and make good decisions. For the most
part, the increasing complexity of civil society and the multiplicity of factors that intellect is
expected to deal with in different situations are not questioned in education. Is this what education is
rightly about? Education is as much about the use of intelligence to avoid suffering and feelings of limitation and about fending
off feelings of fear as it is about learning. It is about acting upon other people and upon the civil order to
deal with perceived threats. One must be an active learner or else. Why? The individual must be acted upon and
rendered into an entity that engages reality in the ways that are deemed just by many educators, lawmakers, and others with a
stake in the perpetuation of the given social order. Thus, the individual is exhorted to do your best, make an
effort, earn a grade, be motivated, work hard, overcome obstacles, achieve. Why
should education be about any of these things? Unfortunately, the culture of scholarship is thoroughly consistent
with these precepts. When we question them, we challenge the ends that they serve but not the ideas themselves. We believe that
education is rightly about improvement. This philosophy of improvement is not necessarily consistent with enhancement of living. It
often has the opposite effect. How is this result justified? Certainly, it can feel good to accomplish something or to overcome
obstacles. Does that mean that adversity should be a positive value of the civil state? The modern idea, beginning with Descartes
and established through Lockean empiricism ~and made pedagogic by Rousseaus Emile!, that anyone can be rational leads quickly
to the idea that everyone is responsible for being wholly rational, as that word is understood according to the social order. The
perpetuation of the given social order in education as elsewhere is about gaining advantage and retaining power. It is about cultural
politics and about marginalization of various groups and about class and about socializing children to believe in capitalism as if it is a
natural law. Yet under the analysis that I have made here, these major problems are symptoms of something more basic. The
more basic problem that I have emphasized here is inextricable from the problem of the just
civil state. It is about the intense pressures on people to think and act in ways that serve broader
interests that are not at all concerned with their well-being in a variety of contexts including
psychological, social, economic, political, and cultural. It is no answer to ground pedagogy in the notion of building commu-
nity. The idea that something must be built implies that something must be made better in order for it to be tolerated. Moreover,
community carries with it the prerequisite that one be made competent to be a member
again, the presumption that something must be done to the person to make it better in some
way. I do not mean to say that educators have bad intent. I do mean that this ethos of betterment through competency will
inevitably fail to fulfill the dreams of reformers and revolutionaries. It does not consider the human being as an entity to care for but
rather as something to be equipped with skills and knowledge in order to improve itself. This failure is not only because there are
millions of children and adults that live in poverty in the wealthiest countries in human history. It is because the state of mind
that can tolerate such suffering is the same state that advances and maintains the ethos of
civility as betterment, rather than civility as caring for people because they are subject to
suffering. The alternative that I have only introduced in a very abbreviated way under the rubric that I called contention is
intended to be pragmatic in the ways that Foucault and Richard Rorty are pragmatic in their respective approaches to the subject of
the state.49 It is intended to address an unacceptable state of contemporary Western civilization, namely, its repetitive and even
escalating incidence of disregard for suffering and harm in many forms, despite intellectual, social, medical, legal, educational,
scientific, and technological progress. We have had two hundred years of modern educational principles, and two hundred years
of profound suffering along with them. The problem of the individual calls for a new formulation and for a
proper responseone that cares for the individual rather than makes it competent. The modern
project of betterment through competency and opportunity must be challenged and replaced by an emotionally intelligent ethos
that expressly and fundamentally acknowledges suffering and limitation in philosophy, policy, and practice.

A2 Limits
Going beyond limits is key
Armstrong, 2k - English Professor at Brown University, Ph.D., Stanford University (Paul B.,
Modern Thought and Literature, 1977, A.M., Stanford University, Modern Thought and
Literature, 1974, A.B., summa cum laude, Harvard College, History and Literature, 1971 The
Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Isers Aesthetic Theory New Literary History, Vol. 31,
No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter, 2000), pp. 211-223, Jstor //)//gingE

Iser describes the act of fictionalizing as a crossing of boundaries (FI 3). New meanings are
generated, in his view, when limits are overstepped. He therefore rejects the notion of representation as copying
because Fictions do not merely mirror reality but instead transform the materials they take from
the pre-given world. The opposition of fiction and reality seems faulty to him because fictions always contain
elements of reality (a piece of fiction devoid of any connection with known reality would be incomprehensible *FI 1+) and
because reality includes many Fictional elements (narratives, beliefs, and myths, for example, that are part of the
texture of the real). He proposes to replace this duality with a triad: the real, the fictive, and _ . . the imaginary. It is out of this
triad that the text arises (FI 1). The imaginary is the featureless, otherwise inaccessible capacity for
making meaning to which Fictions give form. As what Iser calls the generative matrix of the text (FI 21), it is
the ability to play with elements of the real and to transform them by selecting and combining
them in ways they cannot determine or predict. The imaginary mediates between the fictive and the real and
animates their interaction, but it is knowable only through its effects. Not a faculty or an essence, it is the power of human
plasticity to create forms, play with the given, and overstep limits.
Misc DAs
Secomb-- Linguistic commonality is impossible. Community is destroyed by
sameness. A successful community ought to be defined to its relationship to
difference not a neutral playing field.
Secomb 2k - a lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Sydney (Linnell, Fractured
Community Hypatia Volume 15 Number 2 Spring 2000 pg. 138-139.)//gingE
This reformulated universalist model of community would be founded on "a moral conversation
in which the capacity to reverse perspectives, that is, the willingness to reason from the others'
point of view, and the sensitivity to hear their voice is paramount" (1992, 8). Benhabib argues that this
model does not assume that consensus can be reached but that a "reasonable agreement" can be achieved. This formulation of
community on the basis of a conversation in which perspectives can be reversed, also implies a new understanding of identity and
alterity. Instead of the generalized other, Benhabib argues that ethics, politics, and community must engage with the concrete or
particular other. A theory that only engages with the generalized other sees the other as a replica of the self. In order to overcome
this reductive assimilation of alterity, Benhabib formulates a universalist community which recognizes the concrete
other and which allows us to view others as unique individuals (1992, 10). Benhabib's critique of universalist
liberal theory and her formulation of an alternative conversational model of community are useful and illuminating. However, I
suggest that her vision still assumes the desirability of commonality and agreement, which, I argue,
ultimately destroy difference. Her vision of a community of conversing alterities assumes
sufficient similarity between alterities [End Page 138] so that each can adopt the point of view of the other and,
through this means, reach a "reasonable agreement." She assumes the necessity of a common goal for the community that would
be the outcome of the "reasonable agreement." Benhabib's community, then, while attempting to enable
difference and diversity, continues to assume a commonality of purpose within community and
implies a subjectivity that would ultimately collapse back into sameness. Moreover, Benhabib's
formulation of community, while rejecting the fantasy of consensus, nevertheless privileges communication, conversation, and
agreement. This privileging of communication assumes that all can participate in the rational
conversation irrespective of difference. Yet this assumes rational interlocutors, and rationality
has tended, both in theory and practice, to exclude many groups and individuals, including:
women, who are deemed emotional and corporeal rather than rational; non-liberal cultures and individuals who are seen as
intolerant and irrational; and minoritarian groups who do not adopt the authoritative discourses
necessary for rational exchanges. In addition, this ideal of communication fails to acknowledge the indeterminacy and
multiplicity of meaning in all speech and writing. It assumes a singular, coherent, and transparent content. Yet , as Gayatri Spivak
writes: "the verbal text is constituted by concealment as much as revelation. . . . [T]he concealment is itself a revelation and visa
versa" (Spivak 1976, xlvi). For Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and other deconstructionists, all communication involves contradiction,
inconsistency, and heterogeneity. Derrida's concept of diffrance indicates the inevitable deferral and displacement of any final
coherent meaning. The apparently rigorous and irreducible oppositions that structure language, Derrida contends, are a fiction.
These mutually exclusive dichotomies turn out to be interrelated and interdependent: their meanings and associations, multiple and
ambiguous (Derrida 1973, 1976). While Benhabib's objective is clearly to allow all groups within a community to participate in this
rational conversation, her formulation fails to recognize either that language is as much structured by
miscommunication as by communication, or that many groups are silenced or speak in different
discourses that are unintelligible to the majority. Minority groups and discourses are frequently
ignored or excluded from political discussion and decision-making because they do not adopt
the dominant modes of authoritative and rational conversation that assume homogeneity and
transparency.
The state has pacified us to the point where no one critiques the state
someones gotta do it
Butler, 4 - Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the
University of California, Berkeley (udith, Maxine Elliot Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning
and Violence p. xix-xxi)//gingE
Dissent and debate depend upon the inclusion of those who maintain critical views of state
policy and civic culture remaining part of a larger public discussion of the value of policies and politics. To charge those
who voice critical views with treason, terrorist-sympathizing, anti-Semitism, moral relativism, postmodernism,
juvenile behavior, collaboration, anachronistic Leftism, is to seek to destroy the credibility not of the views that
are held, but of the persons who hold them. It produces the climate of fear in which to voice a
certain view is to risk being branded and shamed with a heinous appellation. To continue to
voice one's views under those conditions is not easy, since one must not only discount the truth of the
appellation, but brave the stigma that seizes up from the public domain. Dissent is quelled, in part, through
threatening the speaking subject with an uninhabitable identification. Because it would be heinous to
identify as treasonous, as a collaborator, one fails to speak, or one speaks in throttled ways, in order to sidestep the terrorizing
identification that threatens to take hold. This strategy for quelling dissent and limiting the reach of
critical debate happens not only through a series of shaming tactics which have a certain psychological terrorization
as their effect, but they work as well by producing what will and will not count as a viable speaking
subject and a reasonable opinion within the public domain. It is precisely because one does not want to lose
one's status as a viable speaking being that one does not say what one thinks. Under social conditions that regulate
identifications and the sense of viability to this degree, censorship operates implicitly and forcefully. The line
that circumscribes what is speakable and what is livable also functions as an instrument of
censorship. To decide what views will count as reasonable within the public domain, however, is to
decide what will and will not count as the public sphere of debate. And if someone holds views
that are not in line with the nationalist norm, that person comes to lack credibility as a speaking person, and the
media is not open to him or her (though the internet, interestingly, is). The foreclosure of critique empties the
public domain of debate and democratic contestation itself, so that debate becomes the
exchange of views among the like-minded, and criticism, which ought to be central to any democracy, becomes
a fugitive and suspect activity. Public policy, including foreign policy, often seeks to restrain the public
sphere from being open to certain forms of debate and the circulation of media coverage. One way a
hegemonic understanding of politics is achieved is through circumscribing what will and will not
be admissible as part of the public sphere itself. Without disposing populations in such a way that war seems good
and right and true, no war can claim popular consent, and no administration can maintain its popularity. To produce what will
constitute the public sphere, however, it is necessary to control the way in which people see, how they hear, what they see. The
constraints are not only on content - certain images of dead bodies in Iraq, for instance, are considered unacceptable for public
visual consumption - but on what "can" be heard, read, seen, felt, and known. The public sphere is constituted in part
by what can appear, and the regulation of the sphere of appearance is one way to establish what will count as reality, and
what will not. It is also a way of establishing whose lives can be marked as lives, and whose deaths will count as deaths. Our
capacity to feel and to apprehend hangs in the balance. But so, too, does the fate of the reality of
certain lives and deaths as well as the ability to think critically and publicly about the effects of
war.

Ascribing an instrumental utility to debate kills its value as an activity
Armstrong, 2k - English Professor at Brown University, Ph.D., Stanford University (Paul B.,
Modern Thought and Literature, 1977, A.M., Stanford University, Modern Thought and
Literature, 1974, A.B., summa cum laude, Harvard College, History and Literature, 1971 The
Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Isers Aesthetic Theory New Literary History, Vol. 31,
No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter, 2000), pp. 211-223, Jstor //)//gingE
Play is an aesthetic as well as an anthropological phenomenon of special interest to Iser because it is a particularly pervasive,
useful, and revealing manifestation of doubling. In his vocabulary, play is not just a formal category but a general
term for how differences engage one another. The basic structure of play is oscillation, or to-
and-fro movement, a notion Iser borrows from his teacher Gadamer: lf we examine how the word play is used and
concentrate on its so-called metaphorical senses, we find talk of the play of light, the play of the waves, the play of gears or parts
of machinery, the interplay of limbs, the play of forces, the play of gnats, even a play on words. In each case what is
intended is to-and-fro movement that is not tied to any goal that would bring it to an end; . _ .
rather, it renews itself in constant repetition. The movement backward and forward is obviously so central
to the definition of play that it makes no difference who or what performs this movement .... It is
the game that is played-it is irrelevant whether or not there is a subject who plays it. The play is the occurrence of the movement
as such. 4 Play is not a subjective attitude or exclusively an aspect of the aesthetic experience but a potentially never-ending,
ever self-renewing movement to and fro. Play sometimes shows itself in games that have a particular goal-the victory of one side
or the determination of a single result- but this instrumental play (as Iser calls it) only achieves its end by
stopping play (the game is over). By contrast, free play has to play against endings" (FI 237) and seeks to keep the
back-and-forth of play in motion. In practice, free play is an idealization that can only be abstracted from the different ways
games are played under specific conditions, with particular rules, toward determinate ends. As Iser explains, the endlessness of
play has to be conveyed by playing through specific possibilities, and this is done by means of games (FI 257). Games are
characterized by a contraflow of free and instrumental play (FI 247) that can take various forms. Games
combine free and instrumental play according to different ratios. Keeping the to-and-fro in motion and aiming to establish a
particular result are in a sense two aspects of play which may contradict each other, but they also depend on each other. On the
one hand, no game can be purely instrumental without ceasing to be playful and becoming
merely a means to an end. On the other hand, there is an instrumental quality to free play itself
to the extent that each move back- and-forth is an attempt to establish meaning and decide the
outcome. Even in instrumental games, however, no move has its meaning intrinsic to itself, but depends on a reply and a result
it cannot entirely control: every game begins with a move whose consequences can never be totally foreseen (FI 261). The
element of free play in all games is that no move is complete but always depends on what it is
not, a future it has not yet reached. Free play and instrumental play are opposites that are deeply and profoundly
linked to one another. The four categories of games, which Iser borrows from Roger Caillois- agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx-show
how free and instrumental play may combine to make games more open-ended or more directed toward finality? As Iser explains,
the endlessness and the finality of play are two countervailing tendencies (FI 264) that can interact differently in various kinds
of games. Although agon (games of contest or struggle) and alea (where chance rules) are both defined by the ends of winning
and losing, their valence may change in textual games. There alea plays against agon, whose antithetical arrangement reduces the
element of chance, whereas alea explodes" oppositions that seek to control or structure meaning and limit the play of accident
(17 261). If agon aims to overcome the difference that arises out of antagonistically arranged positions, alea aims to intensify it,
thereby making it into a rift that cannot be overcome, and reducing all play to mere chance (FI 261). Textual games
where conflict seeks resolution in the triumph of one position are countered by strategies
aimed at opening up the possibility of unforeseeable, uncontainable consequences. If there are
already elements of both free and instrumental play in games of conflict and of chance, then the
counterflow between endlessness and finality becomes even more complicated and contradictory when the different kinds of
games combine.
Tech Specific
Aff is key to ecopedagogy within academic spaces
Khan, 10 - Ph.D. (UCLA) Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Research at the
University of North Dakota (Richard, Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The
Ecopedagogy Movement The ournal of Ecopedagogy)//gingE
Sadly, schools today are not regularly engaged by the emancipatory pedagogies and social movements
sparked by the work of these two great mentors, perhaps the late twentieth centurys most important figures in the field of
education due to their wide-ranging and perceptive theories linking politics and culture, capitalist economics, and human ethics to a
rigorouscritique of schooling. Today, as schools cuddle up to business and replaceprograms for literacy
with a profit-friendly computer literacy (Aronowitz,1985, p. 13), steadily moving computers from the
production line to thecenter of the classroom (Apple, 1992), those who currently theorize
andpractice education will find Freire and Illichs philosophies of education extremely relevant to the
wide range of questions that the current prolifera-tion of technology produces for pedagogy.
Routinely, culture everywhere is becoming saturated with media, inwhich many aspects of myriad peoples lives
are mediated by technology(Stone, 2001). Technologized media themselves now constitute Westernculture
through and through and they have become the primary vehicle forthe distribution and
dissemination of culture (Kellner, 1995, p. 35). Thus, asthe sociologist Manuel Castells (1999) has noted, Politics that
does not exist in the mediasimply does not exist in todays democratic politics (p. 61).While the
North American followers of Paulo Freire continue to opposerightist mainstream educational technology policies and practices
through the discourses of critical pedagogy and critical media literacy , it is surprising, then, that few works therein deal at length
with Freires own pedagogical relation-ship to new technologies.More recently, neo-Illichians 2 like John Ohlinger (1995); C. A.
Bowers(2000); Dana Stuchul, Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash (2005) haveattempted to challenge Freirian critical pedagogys
iconic status in leftisteducational circles by producing strong (sometimes ad hominem 3 ) critiques of Paulo Freire and those he has
influenced in favor of postcolonial forms of cultural ecoliteracy. However, these interventions have so far been met withlittle
extended debate or rebuttal from both mainstream and critical educa-tors. With the death of Freire in 1997, and Illich in 2002, the
opportunitywas sadly lost for each to break bread once again, jointly comment upontheir important points of agreement and
disagreement, and potentiallyreconstruct what are arguably two of the strongest radical traditions vis--viseducation and
technology. For this reason, it is an important component of an ecopedagogy whichseeks to build on the work of Freire and Illich
that a less polemical and more dialectical critique is produced in which both the positives and negatives of Freires and Illichs
theories are contextualized by present-day needs, even asthe two theorists are themselves compared and contrasted for affinities
anddifferences. 4 In this chapter, I therefore will undertake what Douglas Kellner(1995) calls a diagnostic critique , a dialectics of the
present that uses history toread texts and texts to read history, with the end goal of grasping alternativepedagogical practices and
utopian yearnings for a reconstruction of educa-tion in the future, such that criticalists will be challenged to develop peda-gogies
and political movements that address these challenges, whilepropounding radical critiques of education such as previously offered
byFreire and Illich. 5 Against one-sided critiques of present educational technology that are overly
technophilic or technophobic, this chapter seeks to understand the present moment in education and
society as marked by objective ambigu-ity (Marcuse, 1964). That is, reality should be seen as
complex and con-tested by a variety of forces, rich with alternatives that are immediately
present and yet ideologically, normatively, or otherwise blocked from achieving full realization
in their service to society (Marcuse, 1972c, p. 13). It is therefore the utopian challenge to radicalize social practices and
institu-tions through the application of new diagnostic critical theories and alterna-tive pedagogies such that oppressive cultural and
political features arenegated, even as liberatory tendencies within everyday life are articulatedand reaffirmed.Notably, this process
has been conceptualized as reconstruction byprogressive educators like ohn Dewey (1897) and revolutionaries likeAntonio
Gramsci, who importantly noted that every crisis is also a moment of reconstruction in which the
normal functioning of the old economic, social, cultural order, provides the opportunity to
reorganize it in new ways(Hall, 1987). 6 To speak of technology, sustainability politics and the
recon-struction of education, then, is to historicize and critically challenge current trends in
education toward using the tools at hand to create further openings for transformative praxis on
behalf of planetary emancipation.

Roleplaying Bad
Roleplaying causes suffering
Daring, 12 (C. B. Daring, . Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano Queering Anarchism:
Essays on Gender, Power, and Desire 2012)//gingE
Heres a queer proposal: the State is always a state of mind. Its putting life in boxes and then judging
it in terms of those boxes, those borders, as if they were what really mattered. Its trying to get
other people to do what you want them to do without so much regard for their needs, their
desires. Its self-consciousness, self- policing, self-promotion, self-obsession. Its anxiety and depression.
Its hyperactivity stemming from the fantasy that being seen to be doing something is better
than doing nothing, even if what youre doing might cause more harm than good. Its resentment at self and
others for not doing it right, for not being good enough. Its the belief that security comes from
control. And its a source of tremendous suffering in the world.

NEG
Queer Anarchy
1NC
Their essentialist discourse of the woman is one that posits heterosexuality
as natural and homosexuality as abnormal
Ellison, 96 (Marvin Mahan. Erotic Justice: A Liberating Ethic of Sexuality, 1996. Pg. 33-
34)//gingE
Sexual essentialism defines sex as a natural force, a fixed and unchanging essence that exists
prior to and independent of sociocultural arrangements. Sex is a property belonging to
individuals. It resides in their hormones, their psyches, or their genetic structures. Sex is "what comes naturally." Biological
imperatives determine the "normal" course of things, what feels right, and what fits natural
mandates. From an essentialist viewpoint, "sexuality has no history and no significant social
determinants."6 After all, essentialism asks, isn't sexuality what is most natural about humans and least
susceptible to change? Essentialists posit that when all goes according to plan, biological
mandates give rise to a natural expression of sexual desire. In keeping with such naturalistic assumptions,
heterosexuality is seen as natural and normal because it fits nature's anatomical design for
male-female sexual intercourse and because it has a biologically functional purpose in
reproducing the species. By this same logic, homosexuality is unnatural and abnormal. A troubling sleight
of hand takes place, however, in some subtle shifts in language from "natural" to "normal" and the implied "normatire." As
sociologist Michael Kimmel suggests, "That which is normativeconstructed and enforced by society through socialization of the
young and through social sanctions against deviantsbegins to appear as normal, that which is designed by nature."7 The
normative and the normal, however, in a statistical sense, are not necessarily the same. The
normative, a product of moral discernment and deliberation, reflects a communal valuing of
what is good, right, and fitting. Normative judgments, including those made about sexuality, are
subject to challenge and revision. What is may be far off from what ought to be. Essentialism falsely assumes
that sexuality is the same for everyone, everywhere. Sexuality, however, is a more complex
reality, more fluid and more amenable to cultural molding. In some cultures, people refrain from sex during
the daytime while in other cultures sex is prohibited at night. Some societies are not at all concerned about when sex takes place but
rather about where. Inside the house may be acceptable as long as it is not near the food supply, or sex may be permitted only
outdoors. Kissing is customary behavior in our culture, but some indigenous peoples in South America consider mouth-to-mouth
kissing an offensive, even barbaric practice. 8 Therefore, what sexuality looks like and signifies varies from culture to culture. "Far
from being the most natural element in social life, the most resistant to cultural moulding,"
Weeks argues, "[sexuality] is perhaps one of the most susceptible to organization."9
The Mary Nardini gang explains what the anti-queer world looks like and how
queer bodies are forced to encounter violence in every part of their lives
Mary Nardini gang 2009 (criminal queers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin toward the queerest
insurrection 2009)//gingE
A fag is bashed because his gender presentation is far too femme. A poor transman cant
afford his life-saving hormones. A sex worker is murdered by their client. A genderqueer
persyn is raped because ze just needed to be fucked straight. Four black lesbians are sent to
prison for daring to defend themselves against a straight-male attacker.1 Cops beat us on the
streets and our bodies are being destroyed by pharmaceutical companies because we cant
give them a dime. Queers experience, directly with our bodies, the violence and domination of
this world. Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Ability; while often these interrelated and overlapping categories of oppression are
lost to abstraction, queers are forced to physically understand each. Weve had our bodies and
desires stolen from us, mutilated and sold back to us as a model of living we can never
embody. Foucault says that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity
of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their
own organization; as the processes which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations,
transforms, strengthens or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus
forming a chain or system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and
lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state
apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. We experience the complexity of
domination and social control amplified through heterosexuality. When police kill us, we want
them dead in turn. When prisons entrap our bodies and rape us because our genders arent
similarly contained, of course we want fire to them all. When borders are erected to construct
a national identity absent of people of color and queers, we see only one solution: every
nation and border reduced to rubble. can critique and attack the apparatus of capitalism. We can analyze the ways
in which Medicine, the Prison System, the Church, the State, Marriage, the Media, Borders, the Military and Police are used to
control and destroy us. More importantly, we can use these cases to articulate a cohesive criticism of every way that we are
alienated and dominated. Queer is a position from which to attack the normative - more, a position
from which to understand and attack the ways in which normal is reproduced and reiterated.
In destabilizing and problematizing normalcy, we can destabilize and become a problem for
the Totality.
The alternative is to wage war against the social order
Any alternative needs to be radicalthe Mary nardini gang explains
Some will read queer as synonymous with gay and lesbian or LGBT. This reading falls short. While those who would fit within
the constructions of L, G, B or T could fall within the discursive limits of queer, queer is not a stable area to inhabit. Queer
is not merely another identity that can be tacked onto a list of neat social categories, nor the quantitative sum of our identities.
Rather, it is the quali- tative position of opposition to presentations of stability - an identity that
problematizes the manageable limits of identity. Queer is a ter- ritory of tension, defined against
the dominant narrative of white-hetero-monogamous- patriarchy, but also by an affinity with
all who are marginalized, otherized and oppressed. Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dan-
gerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is our desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is
the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. Queer is a total
rejection of the regime of the Normal. As queers we understand Normalcy. Normal, is the
tyranny of our condition; reproduced in all of our relationships. Normalcy is violently reiterated
in every minute of every day. We understand this Normalcy as the Totality. The Totality being the
interconnection and overlapping of all oppression and misery. The Totality is the state. It is capitalism. It is
civilization and empire. The totality is fence-post crucifixion. It is rape and murder at the hands of
police. It is Str8 Acting and No Fatties or Femmes. It is Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It is the brutal lessons
taught to those who cant achieve Normal. It is every way weve limited ourselves or learned to
hate our bodies. We understand Normalcy all too well. When we speak of social war, we do so because
purist class analysis is not enough for us. What does a marxist economic worldview mean to a survivor of bashing? To
a sex worker? To a homeless, teenage runaway? How can class analysis, alone as paradigm for a revolution, promise liberation to
those of us journeying beyond our assigned genders and sexualities? The Proletariat as revolutionary subject marginalizes all whose
lives dont fit in the model of heterosexual-worker. We must create space wherein it is possible for desire to
flourish. This space, of course, requires conflict with this social order. To desire, in a world structured to
confine desire, is a tension we live daily. We must understand this tension so that we can become pow-
erful through it - we must understand it so that it can tear our confinement apart. This terrain, born
in rupture, must challenge oppression in its entirety. This of course, means total negation of this world. We
must become bodies in revolt. We need to delve into and indulge in power. We can learn the strength of
our bodies in struggle for space for our desires. In desire well find the power to destroy not only what destroys us, but also those
who aspire to turn us into a gay mimicry of that which destroys us. We must be in conflict with regimes of the
normal. This means to be at war with everything. If we desire a world without restraint, we
must tear this one to the ground. We must live beyond measure and love and desire in ways most devastating. We
must come to understand the feeling of social war. We can learn to be a threat, we can
become the queerest of insurrections.

2NC Alt
Assimilation and passivity just reinscribes existing exclusionswe need a total
conflict with the totality. The Mary Nardini gang explains,
In the discourse of queer, we are talking about a space of struggle against this totality - against
normalcy. By queer, we mean social war. And when we speak of queer as a conflict with all
domination, we mean it. See, weve always been the other, the alien, the criminal. The story of queers
in this civilization has always been the narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic
inferior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbecile. Weve been excluded at the border, from
labor, from familial ties. Weve been forced into concentration camps, into sex slavery, into
prisons. The normal, the straight, the american family has always constructed itself in
opposition to the queer. Straight is not queer. White is not of color. Healthy does not have HIV. Man is
not woman. The discourses of heterosexuality, whiteness and capitalism reproduce themselves
into a model of power. For the rest of us, there is death. In his work, Jean Genet1 asserts that the life of a
queer, is one of exile - that all of the totality of this world is constructed to marginalize and
exploit us. He posits the queer as the criminal. He glorifies homosexuality2 and criminality as the most beautiful
and lovely forms of conflict with the bourgeois world. He writes of the secret worlds of rebellion and joy inhabited by criminals and
queers. Quoth Genet, Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world
was irrelevant: the stars on a generals sleeve, Now they dont critique marriage, military or the state.
Rather we have campaigns for queer assimilation into each. Their politics is advocacy for such grievous
institutions, rather than the annihilation of them all. Gays can kill poor people around the world as well as straight people!
Gays can hold the reigns of the state and capital as well straight people! We are just like you. Assimilationists want
nothing less than to construct the homosexual as normal - white, monogamous, wealthy, 2.5
children, SUVs with a white picket fence. This construction, of course, reproduces the stability
of heterosexuality, whiteness, patriarchy, the gender binary, and capitalism itself. If we
genuinely want to make ruins of this totality, we need to make a break. We dont need
inclusion into marriage, the military and the state. We need to end them. No more gay
politicians, CEOs and cops. We need to swiftly and immediately articulate a wide gulf between
the politics of assimilation and the struggle for liberation. simultaneously struggled against
capitalism, racism and patriarchy and empire. This is our history.
Let Yourself Be Angry
They've taught us that good queers don't get mad. They've taught us so well that we not only
hide our anger from them, we hide it from each other. We even hide it from ourselves. We hide
it with substance abuse and suicide and overachieving in the hope of proving our worth. They
bash us and stab us and shoot us and bomb us in ever increasing numbers and still we freak out
when angry queers carry banners or signs that say Bash Back. For the last decade they let us die in droves and
still we thank President Bush for planting a f---ing tree, applaud him for likening PWAs to car accident victims who refuse to wear
seatbelts. Let yourself be angry. Let yourself be angry that the price for visibility is the constant threat of
violence, anti-queer violence to which practically every segment of this society contributes. Let
yourself feel angry that there is no place in this country where we are safe, no place where we
are not targeted for hatred and attack, the self-hatred, the suicide - of the closet. The next time
some straight person comes down on you for being angry, tell them that until things change,
you don't need any more evidence that the world turns at your expense. You don't need to see only
hetero couple grocery shopping on your TV ... You don't want any more baby pictures shoved in your face until you can have or keep
your own. No more weddings, showers, anniversaries, please, unless they are our own brothers and sisters celebrating. And tell
them not to dismiss you by saying "You have rights," "You have privileges," "You are
overreacting," or "You have a victim's mentality." Tell them "Go away from me, until you
change." Go away and try on a world without the brave, strong queers that are its backbone,
that are its guts and brains and souls. Go tell them go away until they have spent a month
walking hand in hand in public with someone of the same sex. After they survive that, then
you'll hear what they have to say about queer anger. Otherwise, tell them to shut up and listen.
We start a revolution
Where Are You? You talk, talk, talk about invisibility and then retreat to your homes to nest with
your lovers or carouse in a bar with pals and stumble home in a cab or sit silently and politely by
while your family, your boss, your neighbors, your public servants distort and disfigure us, deride us and
punish us. Then home again and you feel like screaming. Then you pad your anger with a relationship or a
career or a party with other dykes like you and still you wonder why we can't find each other, why you feel lonely, angry, alienated.
Get Up, Wake Up Sisters!! Your life is in your hands. When I risk it all to be out, I risk it for both of us.
When I risk it all and it works (which it often does if you would try), I benefit and so do you.
When it doesn't work, I suffer and you do not. But girl you can't wait for other dykes to make the world safe for
you. stop waiting for a better more lesbian future! The revolution could be here if we started it.
Queerness is a position from which to resist assimilationthe queer nation
explains that we must be an army. They continue
Queer Nation, 90 (Text of a manifesto originally passed out by people marching with the ACT UP
contingent in the New York Gay Pride Day parade, 1990. Queer Nation Manifesto
An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be
public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism,
misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred. (We have been carefully taught to
hate ourselves.) And now of course it means fighting a virus as well, and all those homo-haters who are using AIDS to wipe us off the
face of the earth. Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It's not about the mainstream,
profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It's not about executive directors, privilege and
elitism. It's about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it's about gender-f--- and secrets,
what's beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it's about the night. Being queer is "grass roots" because we
know that everyone of us, every body, every c---, every heart and a-- and d--- is a world of pleasure waiting to be
explored. Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility. We are an army because we have to be.
We are an army because we are so powerful. (We have so much to fight for; we are the most precious of
endangered species.) And we are an army of lovers because it is we who know what love is. Desire and lust, too. We invented them.
We come out of the closet, face the rejection of society, face firing squads, just to love each
other! Every time we f---, we win. We must fight for ourselves (no else is going to do it) and if in that process
we bring greater freedom to the world at large then great. (We've given so much to that world: democracy, all the arts, the concepts
of love, philosophy and the soul, to name just a few of the gifts from our ancient Greek Dykes, Fags.) Let's make every space
a Lesbian and Gay space. Every street a part of our sexual geography. A city of yearning and then
total satisfaction. A city and a country where we can be safe and free and more. We must look at our
lives and see what's best in them, see what is queer and what is straight and let that straight chaff fall away! Remember there is so,
so little time. And I want to be a lover of each and every one of you. Next year, we march naked.

The only possible action is violence. The Queer nation explains that
How can I tell you. How can I convince you, brother; sister that your life is in danger. That everyday you wake up alive, relatively
happy, and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious act. You as an alive and functioning queer are
a revolutionary. There is nothing on this planet that validates, protects or encourages your existence. It is a miracle you are
standing here reading these words. You should by all rights be dead. Don't be fooled, straight people own
the world and the only reason you have been spared is you're smart, lucky, or a fighter. Straight people have a
privilege that allows them to do whatever they please and f--- without fear. But not only do they live a
life free of fear; they flaunt their freedom in my face. Their images are on my TV, in the magazine I bought, in the
restaurant I want to eat in, and on the street where I live. I want there to be a moratorium on straight marriage,
on babies, on public displays of affection among the opposite sex and media images that
promote heterosexuality. Until I can enjoy the same freedom of movement and sexuality, as
straights, their privilege must stop and it must be given over to me and my queer sisters and
brothers. Straight people will not do this voluntarily and so they must be forced into it. Straights
must be frightened into it. Terrorized into it. Fear is the most powerful motivator. No one will give us
what we deserve. Rights are not given they are taken, by force if necessary. It is easier to fight when
you know who your enemy is. Straight people are you enemy. They are your enemy when they don't
acknowledge your invisibility and continue to live in and contribute to a culture that kills you. Every day one of us is taken
by the enemy. Whether it is an AIDS death due to homophobic government inaction or a lesbian bashing in an all-night diner
(in a supposedly lesbian neighborhood), we are being systematically picked off and we will continue to be
wiped out unless we realize that if they take one of us they must take all of us.
Queer anger
The strong sisters told the brothers that there were two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is
that we will get our a--es kicked. The second is that we will win. I'm angry. I'm angry for being condemned to
death by strangers saying, "You deserve to die" and "AIDS is the cure." Fury erupts when a Republican
woman wearing thousands of dollars of garments and jewelry minces by the police lines shaking her head, chuckling and wagging
her finger at us like we are recalcitrant children making absurd demands and throwing a temper tantrum when they aren't met.
Angry while Joseph agonizes over $8,000 a year for AZT which might keep him alive a little longer and which does make him sicker
than the disease he is diagnosed with. Angry as I listen to a man tell me that after changing his will five
times he's running out of people to leave things to. All of his best friends are dead. Angry when I stand
in a sea of quilt panels, or go to a candlelight march or attend yet another memorial service. I will not march silently with
a f---ing candle and I want to take that goddamned quilt and wrap myself in it and furiously rent
it and my hair and curse every god religion ever created. I refuse to accept a creation that cuts
people down in the third decade of their life. It is cruel and vile and meaningless and everything
I have in me rails against the absurdity and I raise my face to the clouds and a ragged laugh that
sounds more demonic than joyous erupts from my throat and tears stream down my face and if
this disease doesn't kill me, I may just die of frustration. My feet pound the streets and Peter's hands are
chained to a pharmaceutical company's reception desk while the receptionist looks on in horror and Eric's body lies rotting in a
Brooklyn cemetery and I'll never hear his flute resounding off the walls of the meeting house again. And I see the old people in
Tompkins Square Park huddled in their long wool coats in June to keep out the cold they perceive is there and to cling to whatever
little life has left to offer them, and I think, ah, they understand. And I'm reminded of the people who strip and
stand before a mirror each night before they go to bed and search their bodies for any mark that
might not have been there yesterday. A mark that this scourge has visited them. And I'm angry
when the newspapers call us "victims" and sound alarms that "it" might soon spread to the
"general population." And I want to scream "Who the f--- am I?" And I want to scream at New York Hospital with its yellow
plastic bags marked "isolation linen," "ropa infecciosa" and its orderlies in latex gloves and surgical masks skirt the bed as if its
occupant will suddenly leap out and douse them with blood and semen giving them too the plague. And I'm angry at
straight people who sit smugly wrapped in their self-protective coat of monogamy and
heterosexuality confident that this disease has nothing to do with them because it only happens
to "them." And the teenage boys who upon spotting my "Silence = Death" button begin chanting
"Faggots gonna die" and I wonder, who taught them this? Enveloped in fury and fear, I remain silent while my
button mocks me every step of the way. And the anger I feel when a television program on the quilt gives profiles of the dead and
the list begins with a baby, a teenage girl who got a blood transfusion, an elderly Baptist minister and his wife and when they finally
show a gay man, he's described as someone who knowingly infected teenage male prostitutes with the virus. What else can
you expect from a faggot? I'm angry.

2NC Impact
Being open creates the possibility of endless violence in the status quo
For anyone to say that coming out is not part of the revolution is missing the point. Positive
sexual images and what they manifest saves lives because they affirm those lives and make it
possible for people to attempt to live as self-loving instead of self-loathing. As the famous "Black is
beautiful" changed many lives so does "Read my lips" affirm queerness in the face of hatred and invisibility
as displayed in a recent governmental study of suicides that states at least 1/3 of all teen
suicides are Queer kids. This is further exemplified by the rise in HIV transmission among those under 21. We are most
hated as queers for our sexualness, that is, our physical contact with the same sex. Our sexuality
and sexual expression are what makes us most susceptible to physical violence. Our difference,
our otherness, our uniqueness can either paralyze us or politicize us. Hopefully, the majority of
us will not let it kill us.
Queers are forced to become more passive in the face of violencethe Queer
nation explains that
When anyone assaults you for being queer, it is queer bashing. Right? A crowd of 50 people exit a gay
bar as it closes. Across the street, some straight boys are shouting "Faggots" and throwing beer
bottles at the gathering, which outnumbers them by 10 to 1. Three queers make a move to respond, getting no support
from the group. Why did a group this size allow themselves to be sitting ducks? Tompkins Square Park, Labor
Day. At an annual outdoor concert/drag show, a group of gay men were harassed by teens carrying sticks. In the midst of thousands
of gay men and lesbians, these straight boys beat two gay men to the ground, then stood around triumphantly laughing amongst
themselves. The emcee was alerted and warned the crowd from the stage, "You girls be careful. When you dress up it drives the
boys crazy," as if it were a practical joke inspired by what the victims were wearing rather than a pointed attack on anyone and
everyone at that event. What would it have taken for that crowd to stand up to its attackers? After
James Zappalorti, an openly gay man, was murdered in cold blood on Staten Island this winter, a
single demonstration was held in protest. Only one hundred people came. When Yusef Hawkins, a black
youth, was shot to death for being on "White turf" in Bensonhurst, African Americans marched through that neighborhood in large
numbers again and again. A black person was killed because he was black, and people of color
throughout the city recognized it and acted on it. The bullet that hit Hawkins was meant for a
black man, any black man. Do most gays and lesbians think that the knife that punctured
Zappalorti's heart was meant only for him? The straight world has us so convinced that we are
helpless and deserving victims of the violence against us, that queers are immobilized when
faced with a threat. Be outraged! These attacks must not be tolerated. Do something. Recognize that
any act of aggression against any member of our community is an attack on every member of the community. The more we
allow homophobes to inflict violence, terror and fear on our lives, the more frequently and
ferociously we will be the object of their hatred. Your body cannot be an open target for
violence. Your body is worth protecting. You have a right to defend it. No matter what they tell you, your
queerness must be defended and respected. You'd better learn that your life is immeasurably
valuable, because unless you start believing that, it can easily be taken from you. If you know
how to gently and efficiently immobilize your attacker, then by all means, do it. If you lack those
skills, then think about gouging out his f---ing eyes, slamming his nose back into his brain,
slashing his throat with a broken bottle - do whatever you can, whatever you have to, to save
your life!

2NC Link - Assimilation
The queer nation explains the faade of integration into society that silences
queer anger
I have friends. Some of them are straight. Year after year, I see my straight friends. I want to see them, to see how
they are doing, to add newness to our long and complicated histories, to experience some continuity. Year after year I continue
to realize that the facts of my life are irrelevant to them and that I am only half listened to, that I
am an appendage to the doings of a greater world, a world of power and privilege, of the laws of
installation, a world of exclusion. "That's not true," argue my straight friends. There is the one
certainty in the politics of power: those left out of it beg for inclusion, while the insiders claim
that they already are. Men do it to women, whites do it to blacks, and everyone does it to queers. The main
dividing line, both conscious and unconscious, is procreation ... and that magic word - Family. Frequently,
the ones we are born into disown us when they find out who we really are, and to make matters
worse, we are prevented from having our own. We are punished, insulted, cut off, and treated
like seditionaries in terms of child rearing, both damned if we try and damned if we abstain. It's as
if the propagation of the species is such a fragile directive that without enforcing it as if it were an agenda, humankind would melt
back into the primeval ooze. I hate having to convince straight people that lesbians and gays live in a
war zone, that we're surrounded by bomb blasts only we seem to hear, that our bodies and
souls are heaped high, dead from fright or bashed or raped, dying of grief or disease, stripped of
our personhood. I hate straight people who can't listen to queer anger without saying "hey, all
straight people aren't like that. I'm straight too, you know," as if their egos don't get enough
stroking or protection in this arrogant, heterosexist world. Why must we take care of them, in the midst of our
just anger brought on by their f---ed up society?! Why add the reassurance of "Of course, I don't mean you.
You don't act that way." Let them figure out for themselves whether they deserve to be
included in our anger. But of course that would mean listening to our anger, which they almost
never do. They deflect it, by saying "I'm not like that" or "now look who's generalizing" or "You'll
catch more flies with honey ... " or "If you focus on the negative you just give out more power" or "you're
not the only one in the world who's suffering." They say "Don't yell at me, I'm on your side" or "I
think you're overreacting" or "Boy, you're bitter."
The world has been constructed in opposition to the queer which continues
queer silencing in academic spaces even today. The Queer nation explains that
I hate Jesse Helms. I hate Jesse Helms so much I'd rejoice if he dropped down dead. If someone killed him I'd consider it his own
fault. I hate Ronald Reagan, too, because he mass-murdered my people for eight years. But to be honest, I hate him even more for
eulogizing Ryan White without first admitting his guilt, without begging forgiveness for Ryan's death and for the deaths of tens of
thousands of other PWA's - most of them queer. I hate him for making a mockery of our grief. I hate the f---ing Pope, and I
hate John f---ing Cardinal O'Connor, and I hate the whole f---ing Catholic Church. The same goes
for the Military, and especially for Amerika's Law Enforcement Officials - the cops - state sanctioned sadists who
brutalize street transvestites, prostitutes and queer prisoners. I also hate the medical and
mental health establishments, particularly the psychiatrist who convinced me not to have sex
with men for three years until we (meaning he) could make me bisexual rather than queer. I also hate the
education profession, for its share in driving thousands of queer teens to suicide every year. I hate
the "respectable" art world; and the entertainment industry, and the mainstream media, especially The New York Times. In fact, I
hate every sector of the straight establishment in this country - the worst of whom actively want all queers
dead, the best of whom never stick their necks out to keep us alive. I hate straight people who think they have
anything intelligent to say about "outing." I hate straight people who think stories about
themselves are "universal" but stories about us are only about homosexuality. I hate straight recording
artists who make their careers off of queer people, then attack us, then act hurt when we get angry and then deny having wronged
us rather than apologize for it. I hate straight people who say, "I don't see why you feel the need to wear
those buttons and t-shirts. I don't go around tell the whole world I'm straight." I hate that in
twelve years of public education I was never taught about queer people. I hate that I grew up
thinking I was the only queer in the world, and I hate even more that most queer kids still grow
up the same way. I hate that I was tormented by other kids for being a faggot, but more that I
was taught to feel ashamed for being the object of their cruelty, taught to feel it was my fault. I
hate that the Supreme Court of this country says it's okay to criminalize me because of how I
make love. I hate that so many straight people are so concerned about my goddamned sex life. I
hate that so many twisted straight people become parents, while I have to fight like hell to be
allowed to be a father. I hate straights.

Queers are becoming more passive
If You're Queer, Shout It! Queers are under siege. Queers are being attacked on all fronts and
I'm afraid it's ok with us. In 1969, Queers, were attacked. It wasn't ok. Queers fought back, took the streets. Shouted. In
1990, there were 50 "Queer Bashings" in the month of May alone. Violent attacks. 3,720 men, women and children died of AIDS in
the same month, caused by a more violent attack - government inaction, rooted in society's growing homophobia. This is
institutionalized homophobia, perhaps more dangerous to the existence of queers because the
attackers are faceless. We allow these attacks by our own continued lack of action against them. AIDS has affected the
straight world and now they're blaming us for AIDS and using it as a way to justify their violence against us. They don't want
us anymore. They will beat us, rape us and kill us before they will continue to live with us. What
will it take for This not to be ok? Feel some rage. If rage doesn't empower you, try fear. If that doesn't work try panic. Shout It!
Be proud. Do whatever you need to do to tear yourself away from your customary state of
acceptance. Be free. Shout. In 1969, Queers fought back. In 1990, Queers say ok. Next year, will
we be here?

2NC - Misc
Rules of Conduct for Straight People
1. Keep your displays of affection (kissing, handholding, embracing) to a minimum. Your
sexuality is unwanted and offensive to many here.
2. If you must slow dance, be an inconspicuous as possible.
3. Do not gawk or stare at lesbians or gay men, especially bull dykes or drag queens. We are not
your entertainment.
4. If you cannot comfortably deal with someone of the same sex making a pass at you, get out.
5. Do not flaunt your heterosexuality. Be discreet. Risk being mistaken for a lezzie or a homo.
6. If you feel these rules are unfair, go fight homophobia in straight clubs, or
7. Go f--- Yourself.

Heterosexuals invade almost all spaces
Why in the world do we let heteros into queer clubs? Who gives a f--- if they like us because we "really know how to party?" We
have to in order to blow off the steam they make us feel all the time! They make out wherever they please, and
take up too much room on the dance floor doing ostentatious couples dances. They wear their
heterosexuality like a "Keep Out" sign, or like a deed of ownership. Why the f--- do we tolerate
them when they invade our space like it's their right? Why do we let them shove heterosexuality
- a weapon their world wields against us - right in our faces in the few public spots where we can be sexy
with each other and not fear attack? It's time to stop letting the straight people make all the
rules. Let's start by posting this sign outside every queer club and bar:

Queerness is invisible to most people
I wear my pink triangle everywhere. I do not lower my voice in public when talking about lesbian love or sex. I always tell people I'm
a lesbian. I don't wait to be asked about my "boyfriend." I don't say it's "no one's business." I don't do this for straight
people. Most of them don't know what the pink triangle even means. Most of them couldn't
care less that my girlfriend and I are totally in love or having a fight on the street. Most of them
don't notice us no matter what we do. I do what I do to reach other lesbians. I do what I do because I don't want
lesbians to assume I'm a straight girl. I am out all the time, everywhere, because I want to reach you. Maybe you'll notice
me, maybe start talking, maybe we'll become friends. Maybe we won't say a word but our eyes will meet and I
will imagine you naked, sweating, openmouthed, your back arched as I am f---ing you. And we'll be happy to know we aren't the
only ones in the world. We'll be happy because we found each other, without saying a word, maybe just for a moment. But no. You
won't wear a pink triangle on that linen lapel. You won't meet my eyes if I flirt with you on the street. You avoid me on the
job because I'm "too" out. You chastise me in bars because I'm "too political." You ignore me in
public because I bring "too much" attention to "my" lesbianism. But then you want me to be
your lover, you want me to be your friend, you want me to love you, support you, fight for "our"
right to exist.
2NC Solves Environment
Anarchism disrupts hierarchies and creates a better orientation towards the
natural world
Anarchist politics are usually defined by their opposition to state, capitalism, patriarchy, and
other hierarchies. My aim in this essay is to queer that notion of anarchism in a number of ways. To queer is to make
strange, unfamiliar, weird; it comes from an old German word meaning to cross. What new possibilities arise
when we learn to cross, to blur, to undermine, or overflow the hierarchical and binary
oppositions we have been taught to believe in? Hierarchy relies on separation. Or rather, the belief
in hierarchy relies on the belief in separation. Neither is fundamentally true. Human beings are
extrusions of the ecosystemwe are not separate, independent beings. We are
interdependent bodies, embedded in a natural world itself embedded in a vast universe.
Likewise, all the various social patterns we create and come to believe in are imaginary (albeit with real effects on our bodyminds).
Their existence depends entirely on our belief, our obedience, our behavior. These in turn are shaped by imagined divisions. To
realize that the intertwined hierarchical oppositions of hetero/homo, man/woman,
whiteness/color, mind/body, rational/emotional, civilized/savage, social/natural, and more are
all imaginary is perhaps a crucial step in letting go of them. How might we learn to cross the
divide that does not really exist except in our embodied minds? This, for me, is the point of
queer: to learn to see the world through new eyes, to see not only what might be possible but
also what already exists (despite the illusions of hierarchy). I write this essay as an invitation to perceive anarchism, to
perceive life, differently. Im neither interested in recruiting you, nor turning you queer. My anarchism is not better than your
anarchism. Who am I to judge? Nor is my anarchism already queer. It is always becoming queer. How? By learning
to keep queering, again and again, so that my perspective, my politics, and my presence can be
fresh, alive. Queering might allow recognition that life is never contained by the boxes and
borders the mind invents. Taxonomies of species or sexualities, categories of race or citizenship, borders
between nations or classes or types of politicsthese are fictions. They are never necessary. To be sure,
fictions have their uses. Perhaps in using them, we may learn to hold them lightly so that we, in
turn, are not held by them.
2NC Solves Cap
Queer anarchy solves capitalism because it combines class struggle with focus
on oppression
While radical queers identifying with anarchism, anti-authoritarianism, and/or anti-capitalism
seem to be on the upswing, there exists a profound misunderstanding of class struggle within
radical queer circles and a lack of class analysis that hurts both specifically queer analyses and
anti-capitalism as a whole. Lets face it, the task is not to queer anarchism, which has become a signifier for every
countercultural, edgy activist project out there, to the point where it now has as little shared meaning among radicals as queer does
in the radical milieu. The task is for radical queers to become class struggle militants. We need to be
constantly conscious of moving toward a holistic queer praxis, one that examines the conditions
of the lives of all queers, and also that locates those lives in the larger context of the
struggles of all workers and all the oppressed. This is not only a position of solidarity and a
refusal to leave other queers behind, but it is also the realization that queer liberation is
inextricably tied with the self-emancipation of the working class. Queers, like other oppressed groups,
are hit particularly hard by capitalism, and this is especially true of the queers most often erased, ignored,
or left behind by queer and feminist movements: queers of color; trans and gender non-
conforming people; queers with disabilities; and queer sex workers are some examples. Many
queer anarchists and other anti-capitalists come from anti-oppression backgrounds, and, while
analysis in anti-oppression circles continues to improve and greater understandings and explications of intersectionality continue to
be the case in those circles, a good, critical anti-oppression analysis is not enough. We need to be both anti-capitalists
and to understand how capitalism functions to truly understand the conditions of the lives of
the working class, from those struggling against multiple systems of oppression to the middle
class existing in a position of (far too often temporary) comfort in the suburbs. Through this
understanding of class struggle, we can contribute to mass movements for collective liberation.
Without this understanding of class struggle, our critique of the state can only be both flawed and limited; we must have an under-
standing of class struggle to see the state as an instrument of the domination of one class over all other classes, and our anti-state
project as the need to destroy the bourgeois state as inseparable from the project of abolishing all classes. It is a social and
not an anti-social project. To paraphrase Kropotkin, we want no rulers, not no rules, and failing to
acknowledge class struggle leads to a view of the state as an independent institution, not as an
instrument of class rule; it also can lead to a glorification of anti-social acts as some sort of
resistance to the state, when in reality they are juvenile, futile, and reactionary. Unlike Le- ninists, we
neither want to seize the state nor even to replace it with a proletarian state; we know that if classes remain after the revolution,
and there is the need for a hegemonic governing body separate from the people to maintain social relations, then the revolution has
failed. However, many queers come to anti-capitalist movements retaining liberal ideas about
class and how capitalism functions, treating class as just another way someone can be
oppressed or privileged, rather than a relationship to the means of production that is
continually recreated. Applying an anti-oppression analysis to class becomes problematic in many ways. It causes us to
continue to use the definitions of class that the bourgeoisie (capitalist class) use for us, that
serves to split the working class and convince members of it to act against their own class
interests. It prevents us from articulating how and why some queers are hit so hard by
capitalism, and results in us far too often ignoring the struggles of trans people, for instance, and rephrasing them in terms of
people being voluntary drop outs, as if the state of being middle class was an immutable, inherited thing rather than a term
created to get portions of the working class to side with capital against other workers. The solution to these issues, of
course, is educating ourselves about class struggle, capitalism, and to see the movement for
queer liberation as both indispensably a part of the struggle of the working class and
indispensable to that struggle.
Solves Communities
Queer anarchy solves communities that dont force assimilation
i think another way that anarchism has allowed me to have a more non-heteronormative life is
the acceptance of not reproducing children, in a community in which peoples choices are
accepted. when i chose to be polyamorous, it was accepted. i find being monogamous is also generally
accepted because there is the notion of radical monogamy, which interrupts gender and
sexuality scripts. some people i know have expressed a hesitation to admit that they have chosen to be monogamous, because
there is now, ironically perhaps, an expectation of polyamory among anarchists. not having children is also accepted,
whereas mainstream society tends to look askance at women who choose not to have children,
or who choose politics over children. for example, when ulriche meinhof, who was part of the red army faction in
germany, decided to leave her children behind and become an active urban guerrilla, living underground and working to overthrow
the german state, there were many newspaper reports that demonized her for this (not for her political actions in and of
themselves), and said she was not just a bad mother, but somehow actually insane for leaving her children with their father.9 for
anarchists, though, there seems to be no presumption about anyones life pattern or direction,
in terms of getting married, set- tling down, having kids, doing political actions, etc. there is a
sense that you can do things the way you choose, and people try as much as possible to create
new paths for themselves, with the support of other people in our communities. instead of
following a prescriptive pathmarriage, kids, house in the suburbsa long time ago i decided i
would rather follow the path of collective living. this was a conscious decision, because i felt that i was unlikely
to find, and did not want to succumb to, a happily married suburban life. in fact, that terrified me. it was such a relief to read a book
called soft subversions by felix guattari where he talks about growing up in the suburbs and how alienating that was for him, how it
made him feel kind of schizo around the edges.10 i love that book. so i gave up on that whole dream, it was more of a nightmare
for me anyway, growing up in the suburbs among the children of bureaucrats, people who were afraid of an active, gritty life in the
city, so they moved to an area of carefully coifed lawns and polite conversation. dead time, as the situationists say.11
Solves Hierarchies
Queer anarchy is constructed to resist the normal
This article discusses queer theorys relevance to anarchist sexual practice and why anarchists might critique compulsory monogamy
as a relationship form. Queer theory resists heteronormativity and recognizes the limits of identity
politics. The term queer implies resistance to the normal, where normal is what seems
natural and intrinsic. Heteronormativity is a term describing a set of norms based on the
assumption that everyone is heterosexual, gendered as male/female and monogamous, along
with the assumed and implied permanency and stability of these identities. Queer theory also critiques
homonormativity, in which non-heterosexual relationships are expected to resemble heteronormative ones, for instance in being
gender-normative, monogamous, and rooted in possession of a partner. In this way, queer theory and practice resists
the expectation that everyone should have a monogamous, cis-gendered,1 heterosexual
relationship form. In Anarchism, Poststructuralism and the Future of Radi- cal Politics, Saul Newman distinguishes
anarchism from other radical political struggles. Newman conceptualizes emerging anticapitalist and anti-war movements that are
anti-authoritarian and non-institutional...[as]...anarchist struggles.2 He describes these movements as those that
resist the centralizing tendencies of many radical struggles that have taken place in the
past,...they do not aim at seizing state power as such, or utilizing the mechanisms and insti-
tutions of the state.3 Anarchism is to be understood here as resisting institutionalization,
hierarchy, and complete or partial political assimilation into the state.
Solves hierarchies and fem
Queer theory denaturalizes hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and political influence, and is a valuable
tool for anarchist practice. Queer theory questions what is normal and what creates hierarchical
differences between us, opening up new sites of struggle outside of class politics alone. From
feminist theory emerged the idea that gender is socially and not biologically constructed, and therefore not innate, natural, stable or
essential to someones identity due to their biology. Instead, gender is a product of social norms, individual
behaviors, and institutional power. Gay/ lesbian studies added to the discourse around gender and sexuality by
introducing homosexuality and LGBT identities as areas to be queried. Following the work of feminist theory and gay/lesbian studies,
queer theory understands sexuality and sexual behaviors as similarly socially constructed and
historically contingent. Queer theory allows for a multiplicity of sexual practices that challenge
heteronormativity, such as non monogamy, BDSM relationships, and sex work. Queer theory
opens up a space to critique how we relate to each other socially in a distinctly different way
than typical anarchist practice. Where classical anarchism is mostly focused on analyzing power relations between
people, the economy, and the state, queer theory understands people in relation to the normal and the
deviant, creating infinite possibilities for resistance. Queer theory seeks to disrupt the
normal with the same impulse that anarchists do with relations of hierarchy, exploitation, and
oppression. We can use queer theory to conceptualize new relationship forms and social
relations that resist patriarchy and other oppressions by creating a distinctly queer-anarchist
form of social relation. By allowing for multiple and fluid forms of identifying and relating
sexually that go beyond a gay/straight binary, a queer anarchist practice allows for challenging
the state and capitalism, as well as challenging sexual oppressions and norms that are often
embedded in the state and other hierarchical social relations.

Queer PIC
Saying queer positions oneself outside of the norm - Makes it impossible to
ever be inclusive
Goodloe, 94 - Instructor, Program for Writing and Rhetoric at CU Boulder (Amy Lesbian-
Feminism and Queer Theory: Another Battle of the Sexes?,
http://www.lesbian.org/amy/essays/lesfem-qtheory.html)//gingE
Warner also uncritically assumes that the term queer "represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse
of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-
representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal" (xxvi). Here Warner is
making a point similar to Duggan's, but given his apparent need to demonstrate the similarities between feminism and queer theory,
it is surprising that he does not mention that this is precisely the position of early lesbian feminism: that lesbians represent
"resistance to regimes of the normal" by resisting compulsory heteropatriarchy. He also fails to see the
ways in which queer itself can operate as "minoritizing logic," since it assumes not only a fixed
majority "norm" against which it constitutes itself as "queer," also a fixed minority
"queerness," which never slips into the realm of the norm. Given that most gay men participate in normative
male privilege, it seems unrealistic to believe that queerness alone is sufficient to constitute oneself
entirely on the margins.

Framing your aff using queer A) reinscribes outsiderhood because it
legitimizes exclusion and B) Collapses fluid identity because it connotes a
minority
Jeffreys, 3 Professor of poli sci at the Univeristy of Melbourne (Sheila, Unpacking Queer
Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective)//gingE
Implicit in the word queer is the politics of outsiderhood, and this is another way in which queer politics
is antithetical to lesbian feminism. There are gay male theorists too who argue that the practice of taking a term
of contempt which specifically connotes marginality and exclusion, and seeking to make it a
politically positive term, is misguided. Stephen O. Murray, for instance, says in his critique of queer theory: First I balk
at the term queer, which do not think can be defanged (Murray 1997). Whereas queer politics
celebrates the minority status of homosexuality, lesbian feminism does not see lesbians as
representing a transhistorical minority of one in ten or one in twenty at all. The experience of the 1980s, in which
hundreds of thousands of women in the Western world chose to re-create themselves as lesbians, is
living proof of the falsity of such an understanding. Lesbian feminists have maintained that any
woman can be a lesbian, since the lesbian represents political rebellion against male
supremacy, and is the very model for free womanhood.

Ableism
Cyborg discourse reinforces ableism
Lewis 3- professor of human science at Gallatin school (Bradley E., Journal of Medical
Humanities, Vol. 24, Nos. 1/2, Summer 2003, Prozac and the Post-human Politics of Cyborgs,
http://www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/Cyborg.pdf)//LC
Thus, when Haraway says, 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.
The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics, she means to be both literal and
metaphorical at the same time (Haraway, 1991, p.150). For Haraway, there is a literal truth to
her cyborg claimsomething worth struggling over and fighting overand simultaneously the
cyborg metaphor is an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings (Haraway,
1991, p. 150). In other words, cyborgs make for productive thinking in the current age of
dramatic technoscience proliferation. Cyborgs, for Haraway, are cybernetic organismssystems
which embrace living and technological components. Always and inseparably organic and
machinic, the cyborg displaces and renders nonessen- tial crusty western binaries like
nature/culture, fact/value, pure/contaminated, inorganic/organic, and real/artificial. These
distinctions, while useful in the recent humanist past, do not work well in the current post-
humanist technoscience moment. Haraway uses the cyborg to enter the fray of science politics
not by arguing for a repudiation of science or technology (it is way too late for that) but by ar-
guing for mixing up of the scientific and technological with the ethical, political, and aesthetic.
Considering herself a child of antiracist, feminist, multicultural, and radical science
movements, Haraway yearns for knowledge, freedom, and justice within the world of science
and technology (Haraway, 1997, p. 267). Thus, Haraways cyborgs cut through much of the
theoretical baggage in technoscience thinking that inhibits her yearning. Haraway argues that
behind the seemingly natural evidence of a supposedly objective scientific method,
biomedical science is not only culturally constructed, it is also big politics and big business.
Biology, she reminds us, is not the body itself but a discourse of the body (Haraway, 1997, p.
217). For Haraway, bioscience discourse is far from neutral (and far from progressive) in its
political and cultural alliances in what she calls the New World Order, Inc. (Haraway, 1997, p.
2). Indeed, bioscience, while legitimating itself on rhetoric of new scientific progress, is
simultaneously bedfellows with many of the old politically regressive power structures of
patriarchy, racism, classism, ableism, neocolonial- ism, and homophobia. These alliances
remain invisible, however, if bioscience is able to proceed free and aloof from other critical
discoursefree from deep and serious ethical and political questioning, not only about the
technical applications of bioscience, but about what projects to take up, who should develop
them, and what are the consequences of handing over so much authority to a realm of science
independent of politics.
Ableism is the root cause of other discrimination
Wolbring 8 - Associate Professor Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, Past
President of Canadian Disability Studies Association and member of the board of the Society for
Disability Studies (Gregory, 2008 pp 252258, The politics of Ableism,
http://secure.gvsu.edu/cms3/assets/3B8FF455-E590-0E6C-
3ED0F895A6FBB287/the_politics_of_ableism.pdf)//LC
Sexism is partly driven by a form of ableism that favours certain abilities, and the labelling of
women as not having those certain necessary abilities is used to justify sexism and the
dominance of males over females. Similarly, racism and ethnicism are partly driven by forms of
ableism, which have two components. One favours one race or ethnic group and discriminates
against another. The book The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994) judged human beings
on their cognitive abilities (their IQ). It promoted racism by claiming that certain ethnic groups
are less cognitively able than others. The ableist judgement related to cognitive abilities
continues justifying racist arguments. Casteism, like racism, is based on the notion that socially
defined groups of people have inherent, natural qualities or essencesthat assign them to social
positions, make them fit for specific duties and occupations (Omvedt,2001).The natural inherent
qualities are abilities that make them fit for specific duties and occupations.

We should put ableism at the forefront of our discussion- reject ableist
discourse
Campbell 3- Dissertation (Fiona Anne, 2003, The Great Divide: Ableism and Technologies of
Disability Production, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/15889/1/Fiona_Campbell_Thesis.pdf, accessed
6/29/12, JK)
The danger otherwise is to continue to reproduce dominant discourses that represent people
with disabilities as passive victims lacking agency. As such, this doctorate is one way of asserting
resistance; it is a transgressive piece of writing (research), which seeks to interrupt existing
ideologies and exploitations of disability1 (Fine cited in Zarb, 1992: 133). Discourse analysis is a
primary method of epistemological interruption. As Foucault (1980a: 52) explains, the
exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces
effects of power. Foucault once suggested that his work should be used as little tool boxes
and this doctorate takes up that offer (Morris, 1979: 115). Amongst other things, Foucaults
method of discourse analysis enables an examination into the way disability is put into
discourse, acknowledging that the terrain of discourse is itself a site of struggle and competition
(Foucault, 1976: 11; Foucault, 1984a: 110). Throughout this doctorate the use of discourse
analysis makes transparent the sometimes bloody (but often hidden and little alluded to) battles
of over meaning (and limitations) of the neologism disability. Foucaultian discourse analysis
can assist in revealing ways disability and ableism comes to be produced, encoded and
exhibited. Discourse analysis can be undertaken in a threefold manner. Firstly, by examining at
the textual level the way disability is put into specific narratives be they historical or
theoretical; secondly, at a discursive level, it is possible to reveal patterns (uneven as they may
be) related to the representation of normative corporeal ontologies and inquire into what has
been excluded, minimised, been disqualified or has been considered marginal (Foucault, 1980b:
82); Thirdly, at the level of the social, such analysis enables the operation of sovereign power in
the form of ideology and hegemonic technologies to be revealed exposing liberalisms figuring
of the sovereign individual as a fabrication2. In order to name the violence epistemic,
psychic, ontological and physical, experienced by people whose bodies have been marked as
corporeally intolerable or ambiguous, the extrication of discursive formations can reveal the
concealed gaze of the underlying subject of discourse: the pursuit/conformation of the
phantomological body of the liberal self. I want to show that there is an intrinsic link between
the productions of sovereign selves, ways relationality and embodiment are understood, the
figuring of disabled bodies, as Othered and the production of practices of ableism. The task of
poststructuralist methodologies is not to look for coherent patterns that can contribute towards
a broad universalist explanatory narrative of disablement, rather the challenge of this doctorate
(and poststructuralist methodologies) is to log, to document, to discern the innumerable
accidents and myriad twists and turns of human practice that continue to produce and
mediate conceptualisations of ableness and disablement (Prior, 2002, 66). In chapter 3, section
3.2.4, a re-reading of the Hebrew Bible call of Moses and in chapter 6, section 6.3 on the case of
Clint Hallam I have departed from a specifically Foucaultian form of discourse analysis. In these
sections, I have adapted methods better suited to the subjects disciplinary base, e.g. biblical
exegetical analysis (see Brenner, 1997; Brenner and van Dijk Hemmes, 1993) and media content
analysis (see Berelson, 1952; Holsti, 1969; Kellehear, 1993). Of particular interest is Foucaults
analytics of power that employs the analysis of dividing practices4 that facilitate techniques of
surveillance that function ceaselessly *wherein+ the gaze is alert everywhere (Foucault,
1977a: 195). It is the role of technicians gaze operating within the context of biomedical
realism that classifies, monitors, modifies and documents the unruly, transforming us into
subjected and practiced docile bodies (Foucault, 1977a: 138). Taking on board the
conceptual tool of the gaze, this doctorate inverts the usual gaze employed in the study of
disability, namely empirical observations via ableist prisms of those bodies considered as
aberrant or pathological. Instead, my methodological engagements aim to shift the gaze, to
invert it, to examine the ways disability is known by continually returning to and thus focusing
our attention on the practices and formations of ableism.

Cyborgs prevent questions of ableist rhetoric- accommodations dont prevent
discrimination
Campbell 3- university of kelaniya, disability studies (Fiona Anne Kumari, 2003, The Great
Divide, Ableism and Technologies of Disability Production,
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/15889/1/Fiona_Campbell_Thesis.pdf)//LC
Subjects designated by the neologism 'disability' typically experience various forms of
marginality, discrimination and inequality. The response by social scientists and professionals
engaged in social policy and service delivery has been to combat the 'disability problem' by way
of implementing anti-discrimination protections and various other compensatory initiatives.
More recently, with the development of biological and techno-sciences such as 'new genetics',
nanotechnologies and cyborgs the solution to 'disability' management has been in the form of
utilizing technologies of early detection, eradication or at best, technologies of mitigation.
Contemporary discourses of disablement displace and disconnect discussion away from the
'heart of the problem', namely, matters ontological. Disability - based marginality is assumed
to emerge from a set of pre-existing conditions (i.e. in the case of biomedicalisation, deficiency
inheres in the individual, whilst in the Social Model disablement is created by a capitalist
superstructure). The Great Divide takes an alternative approach to studying 'the problem of
disability' by proposing that the neologism 'disability' is in fact created by and used to generate
notions and epistemologies of 'ableism'. Whilst epistemologies of disablement are well
researched, there is a paucity of research related to the workings of ableism.
Anthro Links

The 1ac creates a human, technology binary that excludes the possibility of a
conversation about non-human animals
Parker-Starbuck 6- Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama, Theatre, and Performance
Studies at Roehampton University, London, (ennifer, Becoming-Animate: On the Performed
Limits of Human, Theatre ournal 58.4 (2006) 649-668, Muse,
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/journals/theatre_journal/v058/58.4starbuck.html)//LC
From an intertwined, cyborgean dance between one lithe dancer and pools of saturated light
projections emerges the form of a large, red, animated gorilla. The two figures appear face-to-
face on the stage at New York's Dance Theatre Workshop. As they encounter each other there is
a pause, a hiatus between them. A moment passes and we contemplate this massive figure that
has emerged from the pools of light. In this pause, when technology has produced the image of
an animal, I think about the electrified relationship humans have to animals. How does this
glowing, technologized figure stand in for a living animal? What can this representation mean?
While cyborgean formsintersections and mergings of live performance with film, video,
internet connections, and other technologiesare familiar in performance contexts, they
rarely involve the figure of the animal, whose intersection with technology is ironically the
basis of the scientific formation of the cyborg.2Too often in the triangulation of animal,
human, and machine, the animal drops from sight. The now near-ubiquitous relationship
humans have with technologies is made strange by this unexpected animal form. I am interested
in these moments of suspension between humans and machines and animals that often emerge
from cyborgean ontologythe contemporary, and largely unquestioned, integrated relationship
humans have with [End Page 649] technology in the West. I want to examine these moments
that have slowed down my frenetic pace of life enough to allow a pause, a space in which to
view not only technology, but animality. These moments expand the performed limits of the
human and expose a becoming-animate, a condition of sensory attunementpalpable and
vibrantthat reveals the interrelationships and traces left between animal, human, and
machine. In The Open, Giorgio Agamben defines the ongoing teleological relationship between
humanity and animality as an "anthropological machine," through which we have redefined
ourselves as human. The example of the dancer and gorilla (about which more later) might
provide a brief hiatus, an interruption, as described in the above epigraph, in which to stall or
suspend Agamben's anthropological machine and just, for a moment, see the figure of the
animal. Through a variety of "sightings" Agamben explores how this machine propels humanity
through time, but always with a divide. Humanity progresses through the concept of animality;
the anthropological machine is "an optical machine constructed of a series of mirrors in which
man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the features of an
ape."3 His sweeping study reads like a series of snapshots that provide insights into the pre-
modern and modern versions of the anthropological machine, based on notions of how humans
define themselvesin art, philosophy, zoology, anthropologyboth through inclusion and
exclusion. In the pre-modern anthropological machine, "man" defined the inhuman or
nonhuman in society through humanizing the animal: the "animalistic"human in the form of
animalwas produced and controlled in this way. In the modern version of the machine, the
opposite holds truethe inhuman is produced by animalizing the human and excluding this
person from being part of humanity.4 In both cases, the animal stands in or outside of
humanity as the measure by which the human is defined. The anthropological machine provides
an apt metaphor for the way in which progress, and with it destruction, has manifested itself
throughout history and continues to be a driving force of the world. Human progress has
occurred through its relationship(s) with animality to produce a kind of forward-moving,
scientific, and now also political, machine. Both the cyborg and the anthropological machine
arise in times of great change. Donna Haraway's cyborg emerged in the 1980s when new
technologies were coming out faster than they could be assimilated; Agamben's anthropological
machine emerged in the early twenty-first century out of the frustration of a warring world
changed by global terrorism and Western imperialism. Both constructs address the rapidity of
change in Western societies, and both engage with technology to provide models for the
humanities to question new technologies and their relationship to the "nonhuman" in times of
drastic change. Becoming-animate also emerges from the inside-out, from within the machine
here not "anthropological" as in Agamben, but instead the screened images within
performancefilm, television, and projectionsbecome a starting point for seeing the animal
anew, not for what it can do for or make [End Page 650] of humanity and not in opposition to or
as something to master, but for just what it is: an interrelated component of the world we
share.

Baudrillard

Otherness can never be fully annihilated, - it is transformed into its incestually
cloned, monstrous image named difference one always approaching such an
elimination, and simultaneously precipitating the very return of Otherness itself
in the form of all it desires to purge
Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury. Baudrillards
Challenge: A Feminist Reading. Publication: London ; New York Routledge, 2000. Page(s) 67-76)
The radical removal of otherness is evident, possibly most significantly, within the embodied
individual. Baudrillard refers to the fantasy of the double as the most ancient imaginary figure in
the history of the body. The double haunts the subject as his *sic+ other, causing him to be
himself while at the same time never seeming like himself (TE: 113). Divided within herself, the
individual subject faces the inevitability of her birth resulting from the union of two sexed
beings, of her own individuation as a sexed being (who cannot be it all, who is divided, which is
not to deny the existence of intersexed individuals who may or may not reproduce), and of her
death. What Baudrillard refers to as the hell of the same (the title of a chapter in The Transparency of Evil) is the
current trend exemplified by the trope of cloning. He writes that our own culture and era must be
the only ones to have attempted to turn the fantasy of the double into a flesh-and-blood reality.
From the subject divided by sex, founded on the interplay involving Death and the Other, to the
nondivided, singular subject with no shadow, no fantasy of her double, her other, replicated
through cloning the code, the matrix, to be born into the light fully exposed on all sides: the
bland eternity of the Same (TE: 114). Like the sign, the subject is fully positivised, and as such
is not really a subject any longer as the identical duplication ends the division constituting the
subject neither the one nor the other, merely the same. This in itself produces its own
fascination; a kind of stupefied staring at the Barbie-Doll transsexual person vainly trying to find
the point of negation, reversion, seduction. Baudrillard, we know, argues that otherness, the symbolic,
reversion, seduction, cannot ever be fully eradicated. The radical structural exclusion, or barring,
of the symbolic might be understood to precipitate its return in self-destructive processes (TE:
122). Consider the endless chain of social diseases and environmental issues increasingly
plaguing the sanitised, desymbolised, postmodern social: increases in suicide, alcohol and drug
abuse, drink-driving, domestic violence, BSE, depression, obesity, anorexia, allergies, chronic
fatigue, chronic pain, global warming, economic recessions, market crashes, and so on. This return
is what Baudrillard refers to as the transparency of evil. Without the other, the self is threatened
with irradiation into the void (TE: 122). Through this so-called liberation, which is more about a
process of radical detachment and release into an orbital network, the concept of alienation
disappears. The fully interactive individual, cloned, metastatic, is not alienated from him or
herself, but is self-identical. He *sic+ no longer differs from himself and is, therefore, indifferent
to himself (IE: 108). Baudrillard argues that this indifference to oneself results from the absence of
division within the subject, the suppression of the pole of otherness as the subject is inscribed in
theHyperreal Genders 137 order of identity, which is a product, paradoxically, of the demand
that he *sic+ be different from himself and others (IE: 108). We have conquered otherness with
difference and, in its turn, difference has succumbed to the logic of the same and of
indifference. We have conquered otherness with alienation (the subject becomes its own
other), but alienation has, in its turn, succumbed to identity logic (the subject becomes the same
as itself). And we have entered the interactive, sidereal era of boredom.

Communication is what destroys otherness in favor of difference. The calling
forth of the other to exchanged in debate forces identity to emerge as a means
of currency for the purposes of circulation and regulation this is what denies
the indestructability of the other, opening it up to all forms of racism and
violence, often in the seemingly benign discourse of securing the other
Akinwumi 07 (Akinbola E. research student in the Geography Department, The
Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. His recent investigations
explore interconnections between critical social/cultural theory and various
critical geographies. Within/Without the Locus of Otherness: Europe, Societal
(In)security and the New Topicalities of Fear. International Journal of
Baudrillard Studies, Volume 4, Number 1 (January 2007) ISSN: 1705-6411)
As I see it Baudrillards thinking on otherness and the self/other dialectic that upholds the politics
of identity can be useful for foregrounding what we might call the responsibility of security to
desecuritization; that is, desecuritizations encounter with the consequences of otherness.5 We
have seen this logic at work in Baudrillards rather heady insistence on the indestructibility of
the other, even when the sheer decidability of his position seems to be unfashionable.
Adopting a perspective that largely unsettles identity (the architecture of alterity), Baudrillard
maintains that alterity cannot be grounded in a vague dialectic of One and the Other.6
Otherness ceases to exist when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when
everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication.7 It
all comes, as Baudrillard shows us, from the impossibility of conceiving the Other friend or
enemy in its radical otherness, in its irreconcilable foreignness.8 It all comes, too, from the
deep structure of xenophobia and racism that exemplifies the discursive logic of European
securitisms.9

Society is defined by its outsiders its impossible to have an identity without
an other. Their attempt to bring the excluded into the center of society
destroys the other and makes all of society the outsider, collapsing the entire
social realm.
Baudrillard in 81 *ean, Simulacra and Simulation p. 143-147]
Thus the remainder refers to much more than a clear division in two localized terms, to a
turning and reversible structure, an always imminent structure of reversion, in which one
never knows which is the remainder of the other: In no other structure can one create this reversion, or this
mise-en-abyme: the masculine is not the feminine of the feminine, the normal is not the crazy of the crazy; the right is not the
left of the left, etc. Perhaps only in the mirror can the question be posed: which, the real or the
image, is the reflection of the other? In this sense one can speak of the remainder as a
mirror, or of the mirror of the remainder. It is that in both cases the line of structural demarcation, the line of the sharing of
meaning, has become a wavering one, it is that meaning (most literally: the possibility of going from one point to another
according to a vector determined by the respective position of the terms) no longer exists. There is no longer a
respective position-the real disappearing to make room for an image, more real than the
real, and conversely-the remainder disappearing from the assigned location to resurface
inside out, in what it was the remainder of, etc. The same is true of the social. Who can say if the
remainder of the social is the residue of the nonsocialized, or if it is not the social itself that is the remainder, the gigantic waste
product. . . of what else? Of a process, which even if it were to completely disappear and had no name except the social would
nevertheless only be its remainder. The residue can be completely at the level of the real. When a system has
absorbed everything, when one has added everything up, when nothing remains, the entire sum turns to the
remainder and becomes the remainder. Witness the "Society" column of Le Monde, in which paradoxically; only
immigrants, delinquents, women, etc. appear- everything that has not been socialized, "social" cases analogous to pathological
cases. Pockets to be reabsorbed, segments that the "social" isolates as it grows. Designated as "residual" at the
horizon of the social, they enter its jurisdiction in this way and are destined to find their place
in an enlarged sociality. It is for this remainder that the social machine is recharged and finds new energy; But what
happens when everything is sponged up, when everything is socialized? Then the machine
stops, the dynamic is reversed, and it is the whole social system that becomes residue. As the
social in its progression eliminates all the residue, it itself becomes residual. In designating residual categories as "Society," the
social designates itself as a remainder: The impossibility of determining what is the remainder of the other characterizes the
phase of simulation and the death throes of distinctive systems, a phase when everything becomes a remainder and a residual.
Inversely; the disappearance of the fatidic and structural slash that isolated the rest of --- and
that now permits each term to be the remainder of the other term characterizes a phase of
reversibility during which there is "virtually" no more remainder: The two propositions are
simultaneously "true" and are not mutually exclusive. They are themselves reversible.
Another aspect as surprising as the absence of an opposing term: the remainder makes you
laugh. Any discussion on this theme unleashes the same language games, the same ambiguity, and the same obscenity as do
discussions of sex or death. Sex and death are the great themes recognized for unleashing ambivalence and laughter. But the
remainder is the third, and perhaps the only one, the two others amounting to this as to the very figure of reversibility. For why
does one laugh? One only laughs at the reversibility of things, and sex and death are eminently reversible figures. It is because
the stake is always reversible between masculine and feminine, between life and death, that one laughs at sex and death. How
much more, then, at the remainder, which does not even have an opposing term, which by itself traverses the whole cycle, and
runs infinitely after its own slash, after its own double, like Peter Schlemihl after his shadow? The remainder is obscene,
because it is reversible and is exchanged for itself. It is obscene and makes one laugh, as only the lack of distinction between
masculine and feminine, the lack of distinction between life and death makes one laugh, deeply laugh. Today, the remainder has
become the weighty term. It is on the remainder that a new intelligibility is founded. End of a certain logic of
distinctive oppositions, in which the weak term played the role of the residual term. Today,
everything is inverted. Psychoanalysis itself is the first great theorization of residues (lapses, dreams, etc.). It is no
longer a political economy of production that directs us, but an economic politics of reproduction, of recycling-ecology and
pollution-a political economy of the remainder. All normality sees itself today in the light of madness, which was nothing but its
insignificant remainder. Privilege of all the remainders, in all domains, of the not-said, the feminine, the crazy; the marginal, of
excrement and waste in art, etc. But this is still nothing but a sort of inversion of the structure, of the
return of the repressed as a powerful moment, of the return of the remainder as surplus of
meaning, as excess (but excess is not formally different from the remainder, and the problem
of the squandering of excess in Bataille is not different from that of the reabsorption of
remainders in a political economy of calculation and penury: only the philosophies are
different), of a higher order of meaning starting with the remainder. The secret of all the "liberations"
that play on the hidden energies on the other side of the slash. Now we are faced with a much more original situation:
not that of the pure and simple inversion and promotion of remainders, but that of an instability in every structure
and every opposition that makes it so that there is no longer even a remainder; due to the
fact that the remainder is everywhere, and by playing with the slash, it annuls itself as such.
It is not when one has taken everything away that nothing is left, rather, nothing is left when
things are unceasingly shifted and addition itself no longer has any meaning. Birth is residual if it is
not symbolically revisited through initiation. Death is residual if it is not resolved in mourning, in the collective celebration of
mourning. Value is residual if it is not reibsorbed and volitalized in the cycle of exchanges. Sexuality is residual once it becomes
the production of sexual relations. The social itself is residual once it becomes a production of social relations." All of the real is
residual, and everything that is residual is destined to repeat itself indefinitely in phantasms. All accumulation is nothing but a
remainder, and the accumulation of remainders, in the sense that it is a rupture of alliance, and in the linear infinity of
accumulation and calculation, in the linear infinity of production, compensates for the energy and value that used to be
accomplished in the cycle of alliance. Now, what traverses a cycle is completely realized, whereas in the dimension of the
infinite, everything that is below the line of the infinite, below the line of eternity (this stockpile of time that itself is also, as with
any stockpile, a rupture of alliances), all of that is nothing but the remainder. Accumulation is nothing but the
remainder, and repression is nothing but its inverse and asymmetrical form. It is on the
stockpile of repressed affects and representations that our new alliance is based. But when
everything is repressed, nothing is anymore. We are not far from this absolute point of
repression where the stockpiles are themselves undone, where the stockpiles of phantasms
collapse. The whole imaginary of the stockpile, of energy, and of what remains of it, comes to us from repression. When
repression reaches a point of critical saturation where its presence is put in question, then energy will no longer be available to
be liberated, spent, economized, produced: it is the concept of energy itself that will be volatilized of its own accord. Today the
remainder, the energies left us, the restitution and the conservation of remainders, is the crucial problem of humanity. It is
insoluble in and of itself. All new freed or spent energy will leave a new remainder. All desire, all libidinal energy,
will produce a new repression. What is surprising in this, given that energy itself is not
conceived except in the movement that stockpiles and liberates it, that represses it and
"produces" it, that is to say in the figure of the remainder and its double?

The affirmatives method of protest will inevitably fail, being absorbed by the
system without any effect only by offering the system the singularity of
radical otherness can we stand as an impediment to the one-track dominant
mode of thinking criticized by the 1AC, and escape all forms of terror exerted
upon otherness
Baudrillard 06 (Our Societys udgment and Punishment Volume 3, Number 2 (uly 2006), IBS)
What or who can stop globalization? Surely not anti-globalization forces, whose real aim is only
to slow deregulation. The anti-globalization forces have considerable political influence but their
symbolic impact is non existent. The violence of the protestors is simply one more event that
system will absorb while continuing to control the game. Singularities however confound the
system. Singularities are neither positive nor negative and they do not represent alternatives.
They are outside of the system and they cannot be evaluated by value judgments or through
principles of political reality. They correspond to both the best and the worst. Singularities play
by another set of rules which they determine themselves allowing them to stand as
impediments to the single-track thinking of the dominant mode of thought (although they are
only one kind of challenge to the system). Singularities are not inherently violent they
represent unique characteristics of language, art, culture, and the body. Violent singularities such as
terrorism do also exist. Violent singularities attempt to avenge the various cultures that disappeared in
the face of an emerging global power. What we have before us is not so much a clash of
civilizations as an anthropological struggle pitting a monolithic universal culture against all
manifestations of otherness, wherever they may be found.

It is only the attempt to know the other from the self that creates a dualism
and the condition for oppression.
Baudrillard 93 (Jean, Transparency of Evil, pg. 127-129, 1993)
These days everything is described in terms of difference, but otherness is not the same thing as
difference. One might even say that difference is what destroys otherness. When language is broken
down into a set of differences, when meaning is reduced to nothing more than differentiation,
the radical otherness of language is abolished. The duel that lies at the heart of language the
duel between language and meaning, between language and the person who speaks it - is
halted. And everything in language that is irreducible to mediation, articulation or meaning is
eliminated - everything, that is, which causes language at its most radical level to be other than
the subject (and also Other to the subject?). The existence of this level accounts for the play in language, for its
appeal in its materiality, for its susceptibility to chance; and it is what makes language not just a set of trivial
differences, as it is in the eyes of structural analysis, but, symbolically speaking, truly a matter of life and
death. What, then, does it mean to say that women are the other for men, that the mad are the
other for the sane, or that primitive people are the other for civilized people? One might as well go on
forever wondering who is the other for whom. Is the Master the slave's other? Yes, certainly - in terms of class and power relations.
But this account is reductionistic. In reality, things are just not so simple. The way in which beings
and things relate to each other is not a matter of structural difference. The symbolic order
implies dual and complex forms that are not dependent on the distinction between ego and
other. The Pariah is not the other to the Brahmin: rather, their destinies are different. The two are not differentiated along a
single scale of values : rather, they are mutually reinforcing aspects of an immutable order, parts of a
reversible cycle like the cycle of day and night . Do we say that the night is the other to the day?
No. So why should we say that the masculine is the other to the feminine? For the two are
undoubtedly merely reversible moments, like night and day, following upon one other and
changing places with one another in an endless process of seduction. One sex is thus never the
other for the other sex, except within the context of a differentialistic theory of sexuality -
which is basically nothing but a utopia. For difference is itself a utopia: the idea that such pairs
of terms can be split up is a dream - and the idea of subsequently reuniting them is another.
(This also goes for the distinction between Good and Evil: the notion that they might be
separated out from one another is pure fantasy, and it is even more utopian to think in terms of
reconciling them.) Only in the distinction-based perspective of our culture is it possible to speak of the Other in connection
with sex. Genuine sexuality, for its part, is ' exotic' (in Segalen' s meaning of the term) : it resides in
the radical incomparability of the sexes - otherwise seduction would never be possible, and
there would be nothing but alienation of one sex by the other. Differences mean regulated
exchange. But what is it that introduces disorder into exchange? What is it that cannot be negotiated over? What is it that has
no place in the contract, or in the structural interaction of differences? What is founded on the impossibility of exchange?
Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror. Any radical otherness at all is
thus the epicentre of a terror: the terror that such otherness holds, by virtue of its very
existence, for the normal world. And the terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in
order to annihilate it. Over recent centuries all forms of violent otherness have been
incorporated, willingly or under threat of force, into a discourse of difference which
simultaneously implies inclusion and exclusion, recognition and discrimination . Childhood, lunacy,
death, primitive societies - all have been categorized, integrated and absorbed as parts of a universal harmony. Madness, once
its exclusionary status had been revoked, was caught up in the far subtler toils of psychology.
The dead, as soon as they were recognized in their identity as such, were banished to outlying
cemeteries - kept at such a distance that the face of death itself was lost. As for Indians, their right to
exist was no sooner accorded them than they were confined to reservations. These are the vicissitudes of a logic of
difference.

The aff's K of patriarchy allows the system to fake its own death.
Baudrillard 90 [seduction, 9-10]
Nowhere is it a question of seduction, the body worked by artifice (and not by desire), the body seduced, the body to be 10
SEDUCTION seduced, the body in its passion separated from its truth, from that ethical truth of desire which obsesses us - that
serious, profoundly religious truth that the body today incarnates, and for which seduction is just as evil and deceitful
as it once was for religion . Nowhere is it a question of the body delivered to appearances. Now, seduction alone is
radically opposed to anatomy as destiny. Seduction alone breaks the distinctive sexualization of
bodies and the inevitable. phallic economy that results. Any movement that believes it can
subvert a system by its infrastructure is naive. Seduction is more intelligent, and seemingly
spontaneously so. Immediately obvious - seduction need not be demonstrated, nor justified - it is there all
at once, in the reversal of all the alleged depth of the real, of all psychology, anatomy, truth, or power. It
knows (this is its secret) that there is no anatomy, nor psychology, that all signs are reversible. Nothing belongs to it,
except appearances - all powers elude it, but it "reversibilizes" all their signs. How can one oppose seduction? The
only thing truly at stake is mastery of the strategy of appearances, against the force of being and reality. There is no need to play
being against being, or truth against truth ; why become stuck undermining foundations, when a light manipulation of
appearances will do. Now woman is but appearance. And it is the feminine as appearance that
thwarts masculine depth . Instead of rising up against such "insulting" counsel, women would do
well to let themselves be seduced by its truth, for here lies the secret of their strength, which
they are in the process of losing by erecting a contrary, feminine depth.

Gender and Sex are part of an endless process of reversibility. The aff makes
seduction impossible.
Baudrillard 90 [seduction, 19-20]
The "traditional" woman's sexuality was neither repressed nor forbidden. Within her role she was
entirely herself; she was in no way defeated, nor passive, nor did she dream of her future
"liberation ." It is the beautiful souls who, retrospectively, see women as alienated from time
immemorial, and then liberated. And there is a profound disdain in this vision, the same disdain as that shown towards
the "alienated" masses supposedly incapable of being anything but mystified sheep. It is easy to paint a picture of
woman alienated through the ages, and then open the doors of desire for her under the
auspices of the revolution and psychoanalysis . It is all so simple, so obscene in its simplicity -
worse, it implies the very essence of sexism and racism : commiseration. Fortunately, the female
has never fit this image. She has always had her own strategy, the unremitting, winning strategy of challenge (one of whose
major forms is seduction) . There is no need to lament the wrongs she suffered, nor to want to rectify
them . No need to play the lover of justice for the weaker sex. No need to mortgage everything for some liberation or desire
whose secret had to wait till the twentieth century to be revealed . At each moment of the story the game was played with a full
deck, with all the cards, including the trumps . And men did not win, not at all . On the contrary, it is women who are
nowabout to lose, precisely under the sign of sexual pleasure - but this is another story. It is the story of the
feminine in the present tense, in a culture that produces everything, snakes everything speak, everything
babble, everything climax . The promotion'of the female as a sex in its own right (equal rights,
equal pleasures), of the female as value - at the expense of the female as a principle of uncertainty.
All sexual liberation lies in this strategy : the imposition of the rights, status and pleasure of
women. The overexposing and staging of the female as sex, and of the orgasm as the repeated
proof of sex.

Cap Links
Their feminist critique ignores the role of capitalism and is a faade of change
that just furthers capitalist structures
Gordon, 96 (April A. Gordon, Transforming Capitalism and Patriarchy: Gender and
Development in Africa. 1996. http://www.questia.com/read/96895144# Page Number: pg
80)//gingE
One reason liberal feminism in the West fails to address such oppressions as imperialism,
classism, and racism is that this would require feminists to acknowledge that their own
privileges are tied to the oppression of poor, nonwhite, and Third World women ( A. Russo 1991:299-
307). Indeed, liberal feminism is compatible with liberal capitalism and what some view as the paternalistic,
women in development (WID) economic strategy in the Third World, which will be discussed in Chapter 4.
Liberal feminism's emphasis on legal reforms and equal rights is not only the most acceptable version of feminism to
the First World, it has also gained the most support among Third World feminist politicians, jurists,
and academics.It was liberal feminism that inspired the UN Decade for Women, which won support from male-dominated
governments all over the world. The reasons for this support are obvious. Liberal feminism's reformism is more
politically acceptable because it leaves unchallenged the underlying structural causes of gender
inequality and its relationship to other systems of oppression such as the inequitable world
economic order and internal systems of social and political inequality (see Stamp 1989; Cagatay et al.
1986; Barrow 1985; Steady 1985). Apfel-Marglin and Simon ( 1994: 35 - 36 ) criticize the entire ideological underpinnings of the
development of women feminist project, which, they claim, descends from Victorian colonial feminism. WID posits the white
Western independent woman integrated into a commodified world as the norm. Rather than
questioning the development process, WID identifies the barriers (i.e., tradition and social constraints) to
women's access to the market. WID sees women as oppressed victims of societies in need of transformation to liberate
women. If Third World women's self-perception is not one of an autonomous, independent self, but one embedded in kinship and
other social bonds, such perceptions are invalidated. "Cognitive authority" belongs to the experts who know
what women need to be "developed." Not surprisingly, the modern, developed individual/self with rights (to its own
labor with the rights to sell it), equality, and autonomy is a reality created by and functional for industrial
capitalism.
And end to capitalism is a prior question to the aff
Proletarian Revolution, 4 (No. 72, September, http://www.lrp-
cofi.org/PR/reprorightsPR72.html)//gingE
For working-class women, their oppression as women cannot so easily be separated from their
exploitation. The two are tied together as one predicament. The fact that women workers remain largely in
unskilled job ghettoes, the lack of day care facilities, the high infant mortality rates suffered among Blacks and
Latinos, enforced workfare job slavery -- all these are womens issues. Anti-gay attacks, anti-immigrant
and racist attacks, attacks on unions, economic hardship -- these likewise are key womens
issues. The notion that womens struggles, Black struggles, union struggles and the anti-war struggles are fundamentally
separate is just a surface appearance. None of the miseries imposed by imperialist capitalism can be
tackled head-on without the development of revolutionary working-class consciousness and
working-class unity. Yet this year we had the spectacle of a March for Womens Lives whose message was that we must
vote for a party and candidate that stand for the continuation of all these attacks, including an imperialist war that has massacred
Iraqi men, women and children by the thousands. Authentic revolutionary socialism means an end to racism
and sexism and imperialist war. The working class is the only social force that can create its own
leadership, a revolutionary party, to unite workers and all the oppressed, to end all oppression
and exploitation. Then we can talk about real choice, not the pathetic crumbs of promises thrown to some women today.
Unless imperialism and its political parties are overthrown, the sufferings of the masses of
oppressed women in the U.S. and across the globe will only escalate. A revolutionary workers state will
provide jobs for all with a shorter work day and universal wage hikes. The new society will provide extensive child care as well as
kitchen, laundry and other collective facilities to release women from the drudgery of individuated household labor and caretaking
burdens. It will mean free transport, health care, education and housing. The essential ingredient right now is that
more and more working-class women join in the struggle for revolutionary socialism.

Seeking social equality for individual minority groups continues capitalist
domination
Zizek, 99 - Ph.D., Senior researcher @ Institute of Sociology (Slavoj, October 28,
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/VLE/DATA/CSEARCH/MODULES/CS/2006/03/0184/_.htm)//gi
ngE
And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for todays capitalist who still clings to some particular cultural
heritage, identifying it as the secret source of his successJapanese executives participating in tea ceremonies
or obeying the bushido codeor for the inverse case of the Western journalist in search of the particular secret of the Japanese
success: this very reference to a particular cultural formula is a screen for the universal anonymity
of Capital. The true horror does not reside in the particular content hidden beneath the
universality of global Capital, but rather in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous
global machine blindly running its course, that there is effectively no particular Secret Agent
who animates it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal)
machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of
multiculturalismthe hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worldswhich imposes itself today
is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as universal
world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary
world. It is effectively as if, since the horizon of social imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an eventual
demise of capitalismsince, as we might put it, everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay critical energy has
found a substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity
of the capitalist world- system intact. So we are fighting our pc battles for the rights of ethnic
minorities, of gays and lesbians, of different life-styles, and so on, while capitalism pursues its triumphant
marchand todays critical theory, in the guise of cultural studies, is doing the ultimate service to the
unrestrained development of capitalism by actively participating in the ideological effort to
render its massive presence invisible: in a typical postmodern cultural criticism, the very mention of
capitalism as world system tends to give rise to the accusation of essentialism,
fundamentalism and other crimes.
Identity politics furthers capitalism because it precludes the ability for unity
Red Critique, 5 (Winter/Spring, Left Populisms
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2005/leftpopulisms.htm)//gingE
The (not so new) Left has laid the groundwork for a radical shift to the right by abandoning systemic
class politics for the idol of fragmented "new social movements". Having rendered all issues
separate issues, the new social movements "cover" the issuesthe differences of racism,
sexism, homophobia, etc.by adding together, or "articulating", all the different pieces. In other
words, not only is the left obsessed with differences of race, gender, sexuality, ability. . .within the working class, but it has no
coherent theory of differences. What do racism, sexism, homophobia have to do with each
other? What do they have to do with exploitation? Nothing, as far as the Left is concerned. This is
because it sees class as statusa surface (market) difference like all others rather than the
structure of exploitation underlying all differences. Not surprisingly, the Left's "new social
movements" have served capital more than anyone else, since having rendered workers a series of status
groups with no underlying connection, capital can readily recruit the different groups to its
"cause" as it needs them. It can also just as easily dissolve the differences when it requires
national "unity" to support its wars. Class as status is the logic behind the workers in imperialist
nations aligningmore or less consciouslywith the bourgeoisie of their country, riding the coattails of whatever is the latest
attack on the least powerful workers of the world, and remaining desperate for the crumbs the owners throw them.

Identity politics strives for integration into the capitalist system
Herod, 7 - Columbia U graduate and political activist (ames, Getting Free Pg. 33
2007)//gingE
The so-called new social movements, based on gender, racial, sexual, or ethnic identities, cannot
destroy capitalism. In general, they havent even tried. Except for a tiny fringe of radicals in each of them, they have
been attempting to get into the system, not overthrow it. This is true for women, blacks,
homosexuals, and ethnic (including Anative) groups, as well as many other identities old people, people with disabilities,
mothers on welfare, and so forth. Nothing has derailed the anticapitalist struggle during the past quarter
century so thoroughly as have these movements. Sometimes it seems that identity politics is all
that remains of the left. Identity politics has simply swamped class politics. The mainstream
versions of these movements (the ones fighting to get into the system rather than overthrow it) have given
capitalists a chance to do a little fine-tuning by eliminating tensions here and there, and by including
token representatives of the excluded groups. Many of the demands of these movements can be easily accommodated.
Capitalists can live with boards of directors exhibiting ethnic, gender, and racial diversity as long
as all the board members are procapitalist. Capitalists can easily accept a rainbow cabinet as long as the cabinet is
pushing the corporate agenda. So mainstream identity politics has not threatened capitalism at all. The
radical wings of the new social movements, however, are rather more subversive. These militants realized that it was
necessary to attack the whole social order in order to uproot racism and sexism problems that
could not be overcome under capitalism since they are an integral part of it. There is no denying the
evils of racism, sexism, and nationalism, which are major structural supports to ruling-class control. These militants have done
whatever they could to highlight, analyze, and ameliorate these evils. Unfortunately, for the most part, their voices have
been lost in all the clamor for admittance to the system by the majorities in their own
movements.
Social movements simply further capitalism because they seek integration
Young, 6 (Robert, Red Critique, Winter/Spring, Putting Materialism back into Race Theory,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)//gi
ngE
Gilroy endorses the new social movements precisely because "the new movements are not primarily oriented
towards instrumental objectives, such as the conquest of political power or state apparatuses"
(226). Instead, the new social movements desire autonomy within the existing system (226) and
therefore foreground the "sphere of autonomous self-realization" (233). In other words, they do not
want to change an exploitative system, they merely want a little more (discursive) freedom
within it, and this (reformist) project signals agency for Gilroy. For Gilroy, the new social movements represent
agency, and in this regard, they replace the proletariatthe historic vehicle for social transformationbut
their agency, to repeat, is directed toward reforming specific local sites, such as race or gender,
within the existing system. In short, they have abandoned the goal of transforming existing
capitalisma totalizing system which connects seemingly disparate elements of the social through the logic of exploitation
for a new goal: creating more humane spaces for new movements within capitalism. So, then, what
is so new in the new social movements? It is certainly very "old" in the way it rehabilitates liberal notions of
the autonomous subject. Its newness is a sign of the contemporary crisis-ridden conjuncture in capitalist social relations.
This crisis of capital and the ensuing rupture in its ideological narrative provides the historical
condition for articulating resistance along the axes of race, class, gender, ecology, etc. Even
though resistance may take place in very specific domains, such as race, gender, ecological, or
sexuality, among others, this does not mean that the crisis is local. It simply indexes how capitalist exploitation
brings every social sphere under its totalizing logic. However, rather then point up the systematicity of the crisis,
the theorists of the new social movements turn to the local, as if it is unrelated to questions of
globality.
Feminist theory ignores class differences
Gimenez 97- Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado (Martha, Materialist
Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Womens Lives,
http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/rsvtxt/gimenez.pdf)//LC
If feminism is to maintain its viability as a political movement aimed at redressing women's
oppression and exploitation worldwide, the theory that underlies feminist practice cannot
eclipse the material realities that bind race, gender, sexuality, and nationality to labor. And yet,
these are the very connections that have been abandoned by western feminists in the past
twenty years. As feminism has been absorbed into the mainstream of advanced industrial
societies and incorporated into the professions, its dominant voices have grown to disparage
ways of making sense of women's lives that connect the oppressive construction of difference
and identity to capital's drive to accumulate. Instead, feminists have increasingly promoted
knowledges and political strategies that appeal to the visible differences of sex or race. When
feminists have questioned visible differences as the basis for political movement or forging
coalitions, the alternatives proposed often appeal to abstract, ahistorical, or merely cultural
cate-gories like desire, matter, or performativity. In bracketing the relationship of visibility and
bodies to capitalism as a class-based system, feminism has implicitly and at times even explicitly
embraced capitalism-or, more commonly, ignored it. Often when feminist analysis does address
class it is as one of a series of oppressions experienced by individuals. But this seeming "return
to class" is in fact a retreat from class analysis. As Ellen Mieskens Wood has indicated, the
retreat from class occurs not so much because class disappears from feminist analysis but
because it has been transformed into anoth-er form of oppression.' The effect is that class is
unhinged from the political economy of capitalism and class power is severed from exploitation,
a power structure in which those who control collectively produced resources only do so
because of the value gen-erated by those who do not. While the concentration and global
diffusion of capital has made the class possessing power more difficult to identify, it is precisely
because capi-talism has become ever more pervasive, insidious, and brutal that a rigorous and
revitalized feminist analysis of its class dynamics is politically necessary now. Linking women's
identities and bodies desires, and needs to class matters to feminism because capitalism is
fundamentally a class system. Without the class division between those who own and those
who labor, capitalism cannot exist. Women's cheap labor {guaranteed through racist and
patriarchal gender systems) is fundamental to the accumulation of surplus value-the basis for
capitalist profit-making and expansion. A feminism that aims to improve the lives of all women
and at the same time recognizes their differential relation to one another cannot ignore the
material reality of capital-ism's class system in women's lives. Class objectively links all women,
binding the professional to her housekeeper, the boutique shopper to the sweatshop
seamstress, the battered wife in Beverly Hills to the murdered sex worker in Bangkok or the
Bronx. But class also pits women against each other, dividing those allied with the private and
cor-porate control of wealth and resources from the dispossessed.

SFO
Speaking for others allows the speaker to skew the intent of the words
Alcoff, 95 - Professor of Philosophy, Women's Studies and Political Science, Director of
Womens Studies, Syracuse University (Linda, 1995, The Problem of Speaking for Others,
http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html)//gingE
The conjunction of Premises (1) and (2) suggest that the speaker loses some portion of control over
the meaning and truth of her utterance. Given that the context of hearers is partially determinant, the speaker is not
the master or mistress of the situation. Speakers may seek to regain control here by taking into account
the context of their speech, but they can never know everything about this context, and with
written and electronic communication it is becoming increasingly difficult to know anything at
all about the context of reception. This loss of control may be taken by some speakers to mean that no speaker can be
held accountable for her discursive actions. The meaning of any discursive event will be shifting and plural, fragmented and even
inconsistent. As it ranges over diverse spaces and transforms in the mind of its recipients according to their different horizons of
interpretation, the effective control of the speaker over the meanings which she puts in motion may seem negligible. However, a
partial loss of control does not entail a complete loss of accountability. And moreover, the
better we understand the trajectories by which meanings proliferate, the more likely we can
increase, though always only partially, our ability to direct the interpretations and
transformations our speech undergoes. When I acknowledge that the listener's social location will affect the meaning
of my words, I can more effectively generate the meaning I intend. Paradoxically, the view which holds the speaker
or author of a speech act as solely responsible for its meanings ensures the speaker's least
effective determinacy over the meanings.

Speaking for others requires investigating ones historical position of privilege
retreating from representing others only excuses us from accountability for that
privilege.
Spivak, 90 - Prof of English at Columbia (Gayatri, The Post-Colonial Critic, p.62-3)//gingE
It is a problem that is very close to my heart because I teach, after all, abroad. I will have in an undergraduate class, let's say, a
young, white male student, politically-correct, who will say: "I am only a bourgeois white male, I
can't speak." In that situation-it's peculiar, because I am in the position of power and their teacher and, on the other hand, I
am not a bourgeois white male-I say to them: "Why not develop a certain degree of rage against
the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?" Then you begin
to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very deterministic position --
since my skin colour is this, since my sex is this, I cannot speak. I call these things, as you know, somewhat
derisively, chromatism: basing everything on skin color-"I am white, I can't speak"-and genitalism: depending on what kind of
genitals you have, you can or cannot speak in certain situations. From this position, then, I say you will of course not speak
in the same way about the Third World material, but if you make it your task not only to learn
what is going on there through language, through specific programmes of study, but also at the
same time through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will
see that you have earned the right to criticize, and you be heard. When you take the position of not doing
your homework "I will not criticize because of my accident of birth, the historical accident" -that is a much more pernicious position.
In one way you take a risk to criticize, of criticizing something which is Other-something which you used to dominate. I say that you
have to take a certain risk: to say "I won't criticize" is salving your conscience, and allowing you
not to do any homework. On the other hand, if you criticize having earned the right to do so,
then you are indeed taking a risk and you will probably be made welcome, and can hope to be
judged with respect.
Speaking for others is violent, unethical and worse, speaking for or on behalf of
less privileged persons actually reinforces the oppression of the group spoken
for
Womens Studies, Syracuse University (Linda, \u201cThe Problem of Speaking for Others\u201d
Cultural Critique Winter 91-92 pages 28-31)//gingE
While the prerogative of speaking for others remains unquestioned in the citadels of colonial administration, among activists and in
the academy it elicits a growingunease and, in some communities of discourse, it is being rejected.There is a strong, albeit
contested, current within feminism which holds that speaking for others---even for other
women---is arrogant, vain, unethical, and politically illegitimate.Feminist scholarship has a liberatory agenda
which almost requires that women scholars speak on behalf of other women, and yet the dangers of speaking across differences of
race, culture, sexuality, and power are becoming increasingly clear to all. In feminist magazines such as Sojourner, it is common to
find articles and letters in whichthe author states that she can only speak for herself. In her important paper, "Dyke Methods,"
Joyce Trebilcot offers a philosophical articulation of this view. She renounces for herself the
practice of speaking for others within a lesbian feminist community, arguing that she "will not try to get others wimminto
accept my beliefs in place of their own" on the grounds that to do so would be to practice a kind of
discursive coercion and even violence.3 Feminist discourse is not the only site in which the problem of speaking for
others has been acknowledged and addressed. In anthropology there is similar discussion about whether it is possible to speak for
others either adequately or justifiably. Trinh T. Minh-ha explains the grounds for skepticism when she says that anthropology is
"mainly a conversation of ùs' with ùs' about `them,' of the white man with the white man about the primitive-nature man...in
which `them' is silenced. `Them' always stands on the other side of the hill, naked and speechless...`them' is only admitted among
ùs',the discussing subjects, when accompanied or introduced by an ùs'..."4 Given this analysis, even ethnographies written by
progressive anthropologists are a priori regressive because of the structural features of anthropological discursive practice. The
recognition that there is a problem in speaking for others has followed from the widespread acceptance of two claims. First, there
has been a growing awareness that where one speaks from affects both the meaning and truth of what one says, and thus that one
cannot assume an ability to transcend her location. In other words, a speaker's location (which I take here to refer
to her social location or social identity) has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker's
claims, and can serve either to authorize or dis-authorize one's speech. The creation of Women's Studies
and African American Studies departments were founded on this very belief: that both the study of and the advocacy for the
oppressed must come to be done principally by the oppressed themselves, and that we must finally acknowledge that
systematic divergences in social allocation between speakers and those spoken for will have a
significant effect on the content of what is said. The unspoken premise here is simply that a speaker's location is
epistemically salient. I shall explore this issue further in the next section. The second claim holds that not only is location
epistemically salient, but certain privileged locations are discursively dangerous.5In particular, the practice of privileged persons
speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted(in many cases) in increasing or reenforcing the oppression
of the group spoken for.

Positioning yourself as First world subordinates others
Womens Studies, Syracuse University (Linda, The Problem of Speaking for Others,
http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html.)//gingE
(4) Here is my central point. In order to evaluate attempts to speak for others in particular instances, we
need to analyze the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material
context. One cannot simply look at the location of the speaker or her credentials to speak; nor can one look merely at
the propositional content of the speech; one must also look at where the speech goes and what
it does there. Looking merely at the content of a set of claims without looking at their effects
cannot produce an adequate or even meaningful evaluation of it, and this is partly because the notion of a
content separate from effects does not hold up. The content of the claim, or its meaning, emerges in
interaction between words and hearers within a very specific historical situation. Given this, we have
to pay careful attention to the discursive arrangement in order to understand the full meaning of any given discursive event. For
example, in a situation where a well-meaning First world person is speaking for a person or group
in the Third world, the very discursive arrangement may reinscribe the "hierarchy of
civilizations" view where the U. S. lands squarely at the top. This effect occurs because the speaker is
positioned as authoritative and empowered, as the knowledgeable subject, while the group in the Third World is reduced, merely
because of the structure of the speaking practice, to an object and victim that must be championed from afar. Though the
speaker may be trying to materially improve the situation of some lesser-privileged group, one
of the effects of her discourse is to reenforce racist, imperialist conceptions and perhaps also to
further silence the lesser-privileged group's own ability to speak and be heard.18

Moreover, speaking for others masks imperialism and legitimates the slaughter
of hundreds of thousands of people.
Womens Studies, Syracuse University, (Linda, The Problem of Speaking for Others,
This shows us why it is so important to reconceptualize discourse, as Foucault recommends, as an event, which
includes speaker, words, hearers, location, language, and so on. All such evaluations produced in this way will be
of necessity indexed. That is, they will obtain for a very specific location and cannot be taken as
universal. This simply follows from the fact that the evaluations will be based on the specific
elements of historical discursive context, location of speakers and hearers, and so forth. When
any of these elements is changed, a new evaluation is called for. Our ability to assess the effects of a given
discursive event is limited; our ability to predict these effects is even more difficult. When meaning is plural and deferred, we can
never hope to know the totality of effects. Still, we can know some of the effects our speech generates: I can find out, for example,
that the people I spoke for are angry that I did so or appreciative. By learning as much as possible about the context of reception I
can increase my ability to discern at least some of the possible effects. This mandates incorporating a more dialogic approach to
speaking, that would include learning from and about the domains of discourse my words will affect. I want to illustrate the
implications of this fourth point by applying it to the examples I gave at the beginning. In the case of Anne Cameron, if the effects of
her books are truly disempowering for Native women, they are counterproductive to Cameron's own stated intentions, and she
should indeed "move over." In the case of the white male theorist who discussed architecture instead of the politics of
postmodernism, the effect of his refusal was that he offered no contribution to an important issue and all of us there lost an
opportunity to discuss and explore it. Now let me turn to the example of George Bush. When Bush claimed that Noriega is a corrupt
dictator who stands in the way of democracy in Panama, he repeated a claim which has been made almost
word for word by the Opposition movement in Panama. Yet the effects of the two statements
are vastly different because the meaning of the claim changes radically depending on who states
it. When the president of the United States stands before the world passing judgement on a
Third World government, and criticizing it on the basis of corruption and a lack of democracy, the immediate effect of this
statement, as opposed to the Opposition's, is to reenforce the prominent Anglo view that Latin American corruption is the primary
cause of the region's poverty and lack of democracy, that the U.S. is on the side of democracy in the region, and that the U.S.
opposes corruption and tyranny. Thus, the effect of a U.S. president's speaking for Latin America in this
way is to re-consolidate U.S. imperialism by obscuring its true role in the region in torturing and
murdering hundreds and thousands of people who have tried to bring democratic and
progressive governments into existence.
Turns the aff
Womens Studies, Syracuse University, (Linda, The Problem of Speaking for Others,
6 As social theorists, we are authorized by virtue of our academic positions to develop theories
that express and encompass the ideas, needs, and goals of others. However, we must begin to
ask ourselves whether this is ever a legitimate authority, and if so, what are the criteria for
legitimacy? In particular, is it ever valid to speak for others who are unlike me or who are less privileged than me? We might try
to delimit this problem as only arising when a more privileged person speaks for a less privileged one. In this case, we might
say that I should only speak for groups of which I am a member. But this does not tell us how
groups themselves should be delimited. For example, can a white woman speak for all women
simply by virtue of being a woman? If not, how narrowly should we draw the categories? The
complexity and multiplicity of group identifications could result in "communities" composed of single individuals. Moreover, the
concept of groups assumes specious notions about clear-cut boundaries and "pure" identities. I am a Panamanian-American and a
person of mixed ethnicity and race: half white/Angla and half Panamanian mestiza. The criterion of group identity leaves many
unanswered questions for a person such as myself, since I have membership in many conflicting groups but my membership in all of
them is problematic. Group identities and boundaries are ambiguous and permeable, and decisions
about demarcating identity are always partly arbitrary. Another problem concerns how specific an identity
needs to be to confer epistemic authority. Reflection on such problems quickly reveals that no easy solution to the problem of
speaking for others can be found by simply restricting the practice to speaking for groups of which one is a member. Adopting
the position that one should only speak for oneself raises similarly difficult questions. If I don't
speak for those less privileged than myself, am I abandoning my political responsibility to speak
out against oppression, a responsibility incurred by the very fact of my privilege? If I should not
speak for others, should I restrict myself to following their lead uncritically? Is my greatest
contribution to move over and get out of the way? And if so, what is the best way to do this---to keep silent or to
deconstruct my own discourse? The answers to these questions will certainly depend on who is asking them. While some of us may
want to undermine, for example, the U.S. government's practice of speaking for the "Third world," we may not want to
undermine someone such as Rigoberta Menchu's ability to speak for Guatemalan Indians.7 So
the question arises about whether all instances of speaking for should be condemned and, if
not, how we can justify a position which would repudiate some speakers while accepting others.
In order to answer these questions we need to become clearer on the epistemological and
metaphysical issues which are involved in the articulation of the problem of speaking for others,
issues which most often remain implicit. I will attempt to make these issues clear before turning to discuss some of
the possible responses to the problem and advancing a provisional, procedural solution of my own. But first I need to explain further
my framing of the problem. In the examples used above, there may appear to be a conflation between the issue of speaking for
others and the issue of speaking about others. This conflation was intentional on my part, because it is difficult to distinguish
speaking about from speaking for in all cases. There is an ambiguity in the two phrases: when one is speaking for another one may
be describing their situation and thus also speaking about them. In fact, it may be impossible to speak for another without
simultaneously conferring information about them. Similarly, when one is speaking about another, or simply trying to describe their
situation or some aspect of it, one may also be speaking in place of them, i.e. speaking for them. One may be speaking about
another as an advocate or a messenger if the person cannot speak for herself. Thus I would maintain that if the practice of speaking
for others is problematic, so too must be the practice of speaking about others.8

Case
Ballot Commodification
They commodify the ballot which strips agency
Phelan, 96 chair of New York University's Department of Performance Studies (Peggy,
Unmarked: the politics of performance 146-9)//gingE
Performances only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented,
or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so,
it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to
enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.
Performances being, like the ontology of subjectivityproposed here, becomes itself through disappearance. The pressures
brought to bear on performance to succumb to thelaws of the reproductive economy are
enormous. For only rarely in this culture is the now to which performance addresses its deepest questions valued. (This is why
the now is supplemented and buttressedby the documenting camera, the video archive.) Performance occursover a time which will
not be repeated. It can be performed again, butthis repetition itself marks it as different. The document of a performance then is
only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present. The other arts, especially painting and photography, are
drawnincreasingly toward performance. The French-born artist Sophie Calle,for example, has photographed the galleries of the
Isabella StewartGardner Museum in Boston. Several valuable paintings were stolen fromthe museum in 1990. Calle interviewed
various visitors and membersof the muse um staff, asking them to describe the stolen paintings. She then transcribed these texts
and placed them next to the photographs of the galleries. Her work suggests that the descriptions and memories of the paintings
constitute their continuing presence, despite the absence of the paintings themselves. Calle gestures toward a notion of the
interactive exchange between the art object and the viewer. While such exchanges are often recorded as the
stated goals of museums and galleries, the institutional effect of the gallery often seems to put
the masterpiece under house arrest, controlling all conflicting and unprofessional commentary
about it. The speech act of memory and description (Austins constative utterance) becomes a performative expression when
Calle places these commentaries within the 147 representation of the museum. The descriptions fill in, and thus supplement (add to,
defer, and displace) the stolen paintings. The factthat these descriptions vary considerablyeven at times wildlyonlylends
credence to the fact that the interaction between the art objectand the spectator is, essentially, performativeand therefore
resistantto the claims of validity and accuracy endemic to the discourse of reproduction. While the art historian of painting must ask
if thereproduction is accurate and clear, Calle asks where seeing and memoryforget the object itself and enter the subjects own set
of personalmeanings and associations. Further her work suggests that the forgetting(or stealing) of the object is a fundamental
energy of its descriptiverecovering. The description itself does not reproduce the object, it ratherhelps us to restage and restate the
effort to remember what is lost. Thedescriptions remind us how loss acquires meaning and generatesrecoverynot only of and for
the object, but for the one who remembers.The disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; itrehearses and repeats
the disappearance of the subject who longs alwaysto be remembered. For her contribution to the Dislocations show at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York in 1991, Calle used the same idea but this time she asked curators, guards, and restorers to describe
paintings that were on loan from the permanent collection. She also asked them to draw small pictures of their memories of the
paintings. She then arranged the texts and pictures according to the exact dimensions of the circulating paintings and placed them
on the wall where the actual paintings usually hang. Calle calls her piece Ghosts, and as the visitor discovers Calles work spread
throughout the museum, it is as if Calles own eye is following and tracking the viewer as she makes her way through the museum.1
Moreover, Calles work seems to disappear because it is dispersed throughout the permanent collectiona collection which
circulates despite its permanence. Calles artistic contribution is a kind of self-concealment in which she offers the words of others
about other works of art under her own artistic signature. By making visible her attempt to offer what she does not have, what
cannot be seen, Calle subverts the goal of museum display. She exposes what the museum does not have and cannot offer and uses
that absence to generate her own work. By placing memories in the place of paintings, Calle asks that the ghosts of memory be seen
as equivalent to the permanent collection of great works. One senses that if she asked the same people over and over about the
same paintings, each time they would describe a slightly different painting. In this sense, Calle demonstrates the performative
quality of all seeing. 148 I Performance in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive. It is this quality which makes performance
the runt of the litter of contemporary art. Performance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive
representation necessary to the circulation of capital. Perhaps nowhere was the affinity between the ideology of
capitalism and art made more manifest than in the debates about the funding policies for the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA).2 Targeting both photography and performance art, conservative politicians sought to prevent endorsing the real bodies
implicated and made visible by these art forms. Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies. In
performance art spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs, the gazing spectator must try to take
everything in. Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibilityin a maniacally charged presentand disappears into
memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control. Performance resists the balanced
circulations of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends. While photography is vulnerable to charges of counterfeiting and copying,
performance art is vulnerable to charges of valuelessness and emptiness. Performance indicates the possibility of revaluing that
emptiness; this potential revaluation gives performance art its distinctive oppositional edge.3 To attempt to write about the
undocumentable event of performance is to invoke the rules of the written document and thereby alter the event itself. Just as
quantum physics discovered that macro-instruments cannot measure microscopic particles without transforming those particles, so
too must performance critics realize that the labor to write about performance (and thus to preserve it) is also a labor that
fundamentally alters the event. It does no good, however, to simply refuse to write about performance because of this inescapable
transformation. The challenge raised by the ontological claims of performance for writing is to re-mark again the performative
possibilities of writing itself. The act of writing toward disappearance, rather than the act of writing toward preservation, must
remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself. This is the project of Roland Barthes in both
Camera Lucida and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. It is also his project in Empire of Signs, but in this book he takes the memory
of a city in which he no longer is, a city from which he disappears, as the motivation for the search for a disappearing performative
writing. The trace left by that script is the meeting-point of a mutual disappearance; shared subjectivity is possible for Barthes
because two people can recognize the same Impossible. To live for a love whose goal is to share the Impossible is both a humbling
project and an exceedingly ambitious one, for it seeks to find connection only in that which is no longer there. Memory. Sight. Love.
It must involve a full seeing of the Others absence (the ambitious part), a seeing which also entails the acknowledgment of the
Others presence (the humbling part). For to acknowledge the Others (always partial) presence is to acknowledge ones own (always
partial) absence. In the field of linguistics, the performative speech act shares with the ontology of performance the inability to be
reproduced or repeated. Being an individual and historical act, a performative utterance cannot be repeated. Each reproduction is a
new act performed by someone who is qualified. Otherwise, the reproduction of the performative utterance by someone else
necessarily transforms it into a constative utterance.4 149 Writing, an activity which relies on the reproduction of the Same(the
three letters cat will repeatedly signify the four-legged furry animalwith whiskers) for the production of meaning, can broach the
frame of performance but cannot mimic an art that is nonreproductive. Themimicry of speech and writing, the strange
process by which we put words in each others mouths and others words in our own, relies on a
substitutional economy in which equivalencies are assumed and re-established. Performance
refuses this system of exchange and resists the circulatory economy fundamental to it.
Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can
have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward. Writing about it necessarily
cancels the tracelessness inaugurated within this performative promise. Performances
independence from mass reproduction, technologically, economically, and linguistically, is its
greatest strength. But buffeted by the encroaching ideologies of capitaland reproduction, it frequently devalues this strength.
Writing aboutperformance often, unwittingly, encourages this weakness and falls inbehind the drive of the document/ary.
Performances challenge to writingis to discover a way for repeated words to become performative utterances, rather than, as
Benveniste warned, constative utterances.

Queer Theory fails
Queer theory focuses in the individual; this makes hinders community and
makes it more difficult to effect change and identify with others.
Yep, Lovaas, and Elia, 3 - Professors @ San Francisco University (Gust, Karen, and John,
Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, page 45)//gingE
On the other hand, queer theorists are criticized for their neglect of community organizing, based on
a shared identity, to promote social change. Kirsch (2000), for example, argues that instead of focusing on
specific areas of oppression and strategies to change them, queer theory focuses on the
individual as a site of change. Such a move insulates individuals and hinders community building.
In other words, collective identities and power in numbers are politically effective. Collective
identities require clear membership boundaries, that is, discrete in-group/out-group distinctions (Gamson, 1997).
Kirsch (2000) cautions us that queer theory, with a focus on individual self-expression, might actually be
harmful to people by making it more difficult to identify with others. Queer theory, Kirsch
vociferously argues, needs to be refocused to take into account the realities of everyday life in a
capitalist world system. This means an end to academic posturing, where obfuscation is more
valued than strategies for recognition and community-building (2000, p. 123).

Queer erases the ethnic and racial ties that people have ends up denying
difference.
Gamson, 95 - Professor of sociology at University of San Francisco (oshua, Must Identity
Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma from the book Social Perspectives in Lesbian &
Gay Studies: A Reader, republished in 1998. pp. 593-594)//gingE
In the hands of many letter writers, in fact, queer becomes simply a short hand for "gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgender," much like "people of color" becomes an inclusive and difference-erasing short
hand for a long list of ethnic, national, and racial groups. And as some letter writers point out , as a quasi-
national shorthand "queer" is just a slight shift in the boundaries of tribal membership with no
attendant shifts in power; as some lesbian writers point out, it is as likely to become synonymous with
"white gay male" (perhaps now with a nose ring and tattoos) as it is to describe a new community formation. Even in its less
nationalist versions, queer can easily be difference without change, can subsume and hide the
internal differences it attempts to incorporate. The queer tribe attempts to be a multicultural,
multigendered, multisexual, hodge-podge of outsiders; as Steven Seidman points out, it ironically ends
up "denying differences by either submerging them in an undifferentiated oppositional mass or
by blocking the development of individual and social differences through the disciplining
compulsory imperative to remain undifferentiated" (1993: 133). Queer as an identity category often
restates tensions between sameness and difference in a different language.

Queer theory recreates violent binary systems by trying to mix and exaggerate
gender systems-A lesbian feminist approach is best because it eliminates
categories altogether
Jeffreys, 3 - prof of Political Science @ the University of Melbourne in Australia (Sheila,
Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective)//gingE
Radical/lesbian feminist approaches to gender could not be more different. Rather than seeing the
political task as the creation of more and equal opportunities to act out masculinity and femininity in various varieties,
radical/lesbian feminists seek to abolish what has been called gender, altogether. I am no fan
of the word gender and would prefer to abolish it in favour of expressions which refer directly
to the political foundation of male domination. Thus I prefer to describe masculinity as male-dominant behaviour
and feminity as female-subordinate behaviour. No multiplicity of gender can emerge from this perspective.
Christine Delphy, the French radical feminist theorist, expresses this point of view most clearly (Nelphy 1993). She explains that it is
quite wrong to see the problem with gender as being that of rigid ascription of certain qualities
and behaviours which could be solved by androgyny, in which the behaviours of masculinity and
femininity can be mixed together. The two genders of the present, she says, are in fact the
behaviours of male dominance and womens submission. With the end of male dominance, these behaviours
would have no substance. They would become unimaginable, and human beings would need to
imagine new ways of relating which did not include the behaviours that arose from a
superseded political system. The understanding of gender as dominant and subordinate forms
of behavior puts paid to the idea that there can be many genders. There can only be ways of expressing
dominance and submission by other than the usual actors. The genders remain two. The queer approach which
celebrates the performance of gender and its diversity necessarily maintains the two genders
in circulation. Rather than eliminating dominant and submissive behaviours, it reproduces them.
Thus those queer theorists and activists who seek to perform gender can be seen to be gender loyalists with a stake in
the maintenance of the gender system of male supremacy. All those embraced within queer politics whose
inclusion rests on the performance of male dominance and female submission by unusual actors, drag, butch/femme
role-playing, transvestism or trannsexualism are engaging in behaviours that are strictly time-
limited. Their behaviours of choice, to which they give huge attention, financial investment and parts of their bodies,
are not imaginable in a world beyond male dominance. Rather than being somehow
revolutionary, they are historical anachronisms. These people are also engaging in behavior which is in
opposition to the feminist project of the elimination of gender, thereby helping to maintain the
currency of gender. Thus they are incompatible bedfellows for lesbian feminists altogether.

Queer theory collapses lesbian theory and asserts violent hegemony over the
knowledge industry-this reinscribes categories and makes a broad movement
impossible, turning the aff
Goodloe, 94 - Instructor, Program for Writing and Rhetoric @ CU Boulder (Amy, Lesbian-
Feminism and Queer Theory: Another Battle of the Sexes?,
http://www.lesbian.org/amy/essays/lesfem-qtheory.html)//gingE
Over the past decade scholarship on lesbian and gay issues has rapidly increased not only in scope and
size but also in level of acceptance as "valid" research within the academy. Although lesbian-feminist
theory has long been a part of the academic field of women's studies, only recently has it begun to gain a degree of
critical autonomy, a development that has been attributed to the need of some lesbian theorists to define their projects over
against those of both feminist theory and the new darling of academia: "queer theory." While lesbian theory diverges in
some important ways from feminist theory, it's opposition with queer theory is, I would argue, much
greater and more fundamental, to the extent that the two may be wholly incompatible as
politically useful theoretical positions. Not all lesbian theorists would agree, however, as the most recent work on
these issues attests; even when lesbian theorists wholeheartedly embrace queer theory, they are often reluctant to give up on some
of the basic premises of lesbian feminism. This, I believe, suggests that lesbian-feminism provides a certain
type of social and political analysis that is not available through queer theory, a case I intend to
make through a critical review of some of the scholarship on these issues produced over the last
five years. Some of the issues that divide lesbian-feminists and queer theorists are the very
issues that threatened to divide lesbians from feminists in the early stages of the women's
movement[1]. The practice of identity politics, with its concern for the nature and boundaries of
identity, has been central to most social movements of the past few decades, with perhaps the most
visible example being that of the Black Power movement. Identity politics assumes a coherent, unified, and
stable identity on the basis of which individuals should not be discriminated against; while activists concerned with
ending racism and classism have used identity politics with some success, gender and especially
sexuality pose a more difficult problem, as we will see in the work of both lesbian-feminists and queer theorists.
Another related issue that divides these two critical perspectives is the nature and function of the sex/gender system; for
lesbian-feminists, sex and gender are conceptually interdependent categories, best exemplified
by the institution of compulsory heterosexuality, but for queer theorists, sex and gender are and
must be conceptually distinct, which opens up the possibility for an analysis of homophobia that excludes the role of
sexism[2]. Lesbian-feminists and queer theorists also come to heads over the meaning of "sexual
difference," the construction of identities through hierarchical, binary gender roles, and what it
means to be "anti-normative." These are but some of the issues that scholars have recently taken up, as a way both of
understanding the historical role and importance of lesbian-feminist theory, and of coming to terms with the emergence of queer
theory. Arlene Stein's article, "Sisters and Queers: the Decentering of Lesbian Feminism" (1992), offers a brief but thorough account
of the history and development of lesbian-feminism, as well as an analysis of the fallout from lesbian feminism's recent encounter
with queer theory. According to Stein, the recent increase in lesbian visibility and diversity has led lesbian feminists to
reconceptualize what is meant by "lesbian community," since it seems more accurate to refer to lesbian "communities," and to
recognize that not all of these communities will identify as feminist (35). But this has certainly not always been the case, and in order
to understand the hegemony that lesbian feminism has had over constructions of lesbian identity, Stein reviews the basic
assumptions of lesbian feminism as a political philosophy. Early lesbian feminism developed in an attempt to
counter the dominant medical construction of lesbianism as the congenital defect of
"inversion." The medical model clearly suggested that lesbianism was a biological trait, albeit a
defective one, and early homosexual rights advocates used this evidence to claim that lesbians should be pitied for their condition
rather than oppressed because of it (37). With the rise of the women's movement in the seventies came an increasing dissatisfaction
with the association of lesbianism with biological "abnormality," as early feminists began to analyze other explanations for the
existence of lesbians. The theory that came to dominate early lesbian feminism was that lesbians were
those who resisted the regime of compulsory heterosexuality, that they, unlike heterosexual
women, refused to become part of the male economy by choosing to identify only with other
women; thus was born the concept of the "woman-identified woman."[3] Lesbian feminist activists in the
seventies claimed not only that lesbianism had nothing to do with a medical, or biologically "essential" condition, but that it was, in
fact, a choice available to all women, and a choice that any woman aware of the oppressive nature of heteropatriarchy would make.
While lesbian feminism at first sought to "liberate the 'lesbian' in every woman" (38), the movement soon found itself faced with the
dilemma of identity politics. In order to gain political ground, lesbian feminists felt the need to fix lesbian identity as somewhat
stable and coherent, in order to classify lesbians as a "minority" deserving of protection against discrimination, but the boundaries of
this identity were fairly narrow, and excluded those whose experience of being lesbian didn't measure up to the feminist "ideal"
(45). The tension produced by this move, away from recognizing lesbianism as a personal and political choice and towards a more
essentialist understanding of lesbian identity (ironically not too far removed from the medical models), sowed the seeds for the
demise of lesbian feminism as a powerful political force in the eighties, although it also opened up the possibility for more
specifically lesbian varieties of political analysis, such as those taken up by the sex-radicals of the early eighties (48).[4] Towards the
late eighties, Stein observes, lesbian feminism and lesbian politics in general were separate entities, often with contradictory
assumptions and political aims. While the lesbian feminist analysis of oppression assumed an inherent link between sex and gender -
- arguing, in the words of Suzanne Pharr, that "homophobia is a weapon of sexism *5+ -- other kinds of lesbian analysis (some of
which also insisted on being considered feminist) argued for the "relative autonomy of gender and sexuality, sexism and
heterosexism" (50). This latter position more closely resembles that taken by many queer (male) activists in the late eighties and
early nineties, with whom these lesbians would come to identify as a way of marking their difference from "traditional" lesbian
feminism. "Queerness," for these gay men and lesbians, is understood as "a non-normative
sexuality which transcends the binary distinction homosexual/heterosexual to include all who
feel disenfranchised by dominant sexual norms" (50). Stein's primary critique of this newly emerging "queer"
theory is that it fails to adequately "compensate for real, persistent structural differences in style,
ideology, and access to resources among men and women" (50). In other words, it privileges sexuality,
in both political analysis and cultural expression, over gender, and thereby threatens to erase or
reduce the gender-bound experience of lesbians as women. While feminism may have failed to adequately
address the multiplicity of sexual difference in its analysis of the sex/gender system, she argues, the new "queer theory"
fails to address gender at all, which makes it an arguably less effective political philosophy for
many lesbians. But a possible benefit of the clash between lesbian feminism and queer theory is that lesbian feminists have
had to rethink their commitment to the belief in the primacy of the sex/gender system over other forms of oppression, to the extent
that they have begun to theorize lesbianism as a provisional identity "situated in a web of multiple oppressions and identities "(51),
taking into account differences of race, class, ethnicity in ways that queer theory has so far failed to do. According to Stein, then, this
newer version of lesbian feminism, which has shifted away from an exclusive focus on gender towards an understanding of multiple
oppressions, is a more "decentered" movement, which "may present new democratic potential" (52). Not all lesbian-feminists have
let queer theory off the hook quite so easily, though. While Stein argues that a newly "redesigned" lesbian feminism is more
politically useful to lesbians than queer theory, she does not critique the assumptions and indeed arrogance of queer theory to the
extent that other scholars have. This is perhaps in part due to the most recent developments in queer theory which Stein may not
have been aware of in 1992; by 1994, however, lesbian scholars have become acutely aware of the hegemony that queer theory
threatens to hold over all studies of gender and sexuality in the academy, and have thus launched into full-scale critiques of its
totalizing tendencies. Perhaps the most scathing critique comes from Sheila Jeffreys, whose work is not always received well by non
lesbian feminist scholars because of her tendency to claim to speak for all lesbian feminists, when in fact she only speaks for a
particularly radical group. In her most recent article, "The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians: Sexuality in the Academy" (1994),
Jeffreys states simply, "The appearance of queer theory and queer studies threatens to mean the
disappearance of lesbians" (459). Jeffreys' concern, like that of so many lesbian feminists, is that queer theory
threatens to offset the advances made by feminism by failing altogether to recognize its impact
in shaping contemporary understanding of sexuality and gender; queer theory, she argues, is
"feminism free" (459). Despite its supposedly counter-normative associations, Jeffreys believes the word "queer" has
come to signify white gay male, which renders any project associated with this signifier simply
"more of the same," while masquerading as "new and uniquely liberating" (469). Thus, unlike Stein,
whose critique of queer theory is relatively mild in comparison, Jeffreys accuses this new theoretical discourse of deliberately
reinscribing the very oppression(s) that feminists and lesbian feminists have been fighting against for
years, in order to privilege (homo)sexuality and gay male culture as the epitome of the "anti-
discourse" made so much of by postmodern theory. Central to Jeffreys' critique is that queer theory
privileges and indeed naturalizes the masculine in a way that runs counter to the aims and goals
of most forms of feminism. The notion of "camp" or "drag," which Jeffreys sees as one of the key concepts of
queer theory, is built on gay male notions of performative femininity, which not only excludes
biological women but enshrines the dominant construction of masculine as the binary opposite
of feminine; a drag queen's enactment of femininity for the pleasure of other men, rather than calling into question the
performative nature of all gender roles, instead fixes perceived sexual difference at the core of desire, a claim early lesbian feminists
were most anxious to refute. According to Jeffreys, then, while queer theory may claim to expand the limits of
gender by "playing" with the terms that constitute it -- by supposedly separating femininity from
the female body in the persona of a drag queen, for example -- it in fact fails to account for the
sexism inherent in the terms as they are constituted by the dominant culture. A man "playing at" being
a coy, submissive woman, for the benefit of other men, is hardly a vision of sophisticated gender analysis to most lesbian feminists --
which is not to criticize drag queens in and of themselves, so much as to point out the inadequacy of drag as core theoretical
concept. Jeffreys also criticizes the tendency of queer politics to "[accept] and [celebrate] the
minority status of homosexuality." This, she believes, is a politics "which is in contradiction to
lesbian feminism" (469) because of its insistence on a stable, coherent albeit counter-normative
identity. She continues: Lesbian feminists do not see themselves as being part of a transhistorical minority of 1 in 10 or 1 in 20,
but as the model of free womanhood. Rather than wanting acceptance as a minority which is defined in opposition to an accepted
and inevitable heterosexual majority, lesbian feminist theorists seek to dismantle heterosexuality, and one strategy is the promotion
of lesbianism as a choice for women. (469)

Endorsing queer theory causes cynicism and destruction in lesbian and gay
culture turns case
Seidman, 95 - sociologist and professor of State University of New York at Albany (Steven,
Deconstructing queer theory or the under-theorization of the social and the ethical, in Social
Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, Linda J. Nicholson and Steven Seidman)//gingE
One consequences of the constructivist questioning of essentialism has been the loss of
innocence within the gay community. The presumption of a lesbian and gay community unified by a common baseline
of experience and interest has been placed into seemingly permanent doubt. The struggle over homosexuality has
been grudgingly acknowledged to be a struggle among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer
individuals and groups who hold to different, sometimes conflicting, social interests, values, and
political agendas. A new cynicism has crept into lesbian and gay intellectual culture.
Representations of homosexuality produced within these subcultures evoke similar suspicions with regard
to their disciplining role and their regulatory power effects as representations issuing from a
heterosexist cultural mainstream. No discourse or representation of homosexuality, no matter how
sincerely it speaks in the name of liberation, can escape the suspicion that it exhibits particular social
interests and entails definite political effects. All images of homosexuality have, to use Foucaults term,
power/knowledge effects or are perceived as productive of social hierarchies. The simple polarity between friend and
foe of homosexuality has given way to a multivocal cultural clash that is so disconcerting to
some intellectuals that they have retreated into the presumed certainties of a naturalistic
ontology, e.g., the gay brain. I write in 1993 with a sense of the end of an era. The sex and race debates
exposed deep and bitter divisions among lesbian and gay men; AIDS has threatened the very desires by which
many of have defined and organized ourselves into a community with the spectre of disease and death; a relentless politic of
coming out, being out, and outing, has failed to deliver on its promise of liberation from fear and
prejudice; the growing crisis of lesbian-feminism and dubious gains of the gay mainstream
surrendering to a single-interest group politic of assimilationism suggest the exhaustion of the
dominant templates of lesbian and gay politics. Solidarity built around the assumption of a common identity and
agenda has given way to social division; multiple voices, often speaking past one another, have replaced a defiant monotone which
drowned out dissonant voices in favor of an illusory but exalted unity. If we are witnessing the passing of an era, it is, in no small
part, because of the discrediting of the idea of a unitary, common sexual identity. The troubling of identity was
instigated initially in the sex and race debates. Sex rebels protesting the consolidation of a gay
and lesbian-feminist sexual ethic, and the resounding public voices of people of color contesting
the writing of the lesbian and gay subject as a white, middle-class figure, were crucial discursive
junctures in the growing sense of crisis in the lesbian and gay mainstream. I view the assertion of a queer
politics and theory as both a response to, and further investigation of this crisis. Although many meanings circulate under this sign,
queer suggests a positioning as oppositional to both the heterosexual and homosexual
mainstream. I take the critique of the homosexual subject, perhaps the grounding idea of modern Western
images of homosexuality, as central to queer interventions. Both queer theory and politics intend to
expose and disturb the normalizing politics of identity as practiced in the straight and lesbian
and gay mainstream; whereas queer politics mobilizes against all normalized hierarchies, queer
theory put into permanent crisis the identity-based theory and discourses that have served as
the unquestioned foundation of lesbian and gay life. Queers disrupt and subvert in the name of
a politic of difference which moves back and forth between anarchism and a radical democratic
pluralism. My focus will be on the theory side of queer interventions.

Turn imposing Western notions of sexuality marginalizes individuals
Warwick, 13 (Bruce, april 1 Aid Conditionality and Sexual Rights in the Third World
http://www.e-ir.info/2013/04/01/aid-conditionality-and-sexual-rights-in-the-third-
world/)//gingE
One of the central accusations consistently levelled both at the policy of tying aid to sexual rights and at international human
rights discourse associated with sexual rights more broadly is that it is fundamentally flawed as a result of being
based upon an understanding of sexual orientation and gender identity that is inherently
Western. The most notable aspect of these suggestions is the idea of identity and in particular the
assumption of the existence of set categories of, for example, gay, lesbian or straight that are
fundamentally static and coherent. As Aeyal Gross, when discussing contemporary international human rights law and
sexual rights, notes, the Yogyakarta principles, for example, define sexual orientation broadly but in a way that
maintains an understanding of sexual orientation as a distinct component in the identity of the
self, determined based on the similarity between ones gender and the gender of ones object of
desire (2007: 130). As discussed, this is a document that has received wide acclaim internationally, therefore illustrating
somewhat the prevailing attitude that dominates current thinking with regards to sexual rights. While it is undeniably
important to recognise that homosexual behaviour has been observed in virtually all cultures
throughout recorded history (Rao, 2010: 173), the expression of sexuality through personal identity
categories, such as LGBTI, is very much a culturally specific development associated with the
West. Today, there undoubtedly exists some kind of a global understanding of sexual orientation and
gender identity that rests upon these assumed categories, perpetuated in international human rights
institutions, and demonstrated in documents such as the Yogyakarta principles and in policy statements such as those by Cameron
and Obama. While this expression of sexuality into specific categories may have initially helped (and perhaps continues to help)
sexual rights achieve a more prominent position in international human rights discourse, it is also a factor that many
argue is problematic when applied locally in contexts whose cultures are not rooted in the West.
The problems of an approach so influenced by notions of fixed identities are manifold. A considerable difficulty raised is that these
Western sexual categories fail to encapsulate the complexity of cartographies of acts, identities
and communities outside the west (King quoted in Binnie, 2004: 79). Comparably Judith Butler, having written
extensively on issues concerning gender and sexuality, expresses this problem by stating, if one is a woman, that is
surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive because gender is not always constituted
coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with
racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities (1990: 4).
One can interchange woman with homosexual man, lesbian, or indeed any other supposed category associated with sexuality, and
make similar assertions. By pursuing an understanding of sexual orientation and gender identity that
revolves around the binaries of gay or straight, states such as the UK or US, as well as the international human
rights framework as a whole, risk severely alienating and marginalising huge swathes of individuals,
many of whom are not aware or have not necessarily ever considered themselves within the
supposedly Western categories of LGBTI. Andil Gosine has highlighted these prospects of marginalization and
alienation through the promotion of LGBTI identities in international human rights discourse with regards to sexual rights. Gosine
proposes that if one is lower-class, young, or a person of colour, these categories are either less
convenient, create anxiety by limiting the exploration of sexuality, or make it more difficult to
negotiate ways of thinking about further sexualities that are compatible with particular cultures
of family and neighbourhood (2005: 12). Essentially, it is argued that there is a real risk that, through the imposition of
these particular identities, by Cameron, for example, putting pressure on a state to reform laws around a specific way of
thinking about sexuality, produces further marginalisation in areas of sexuality, thereby
highlighting the counterproductive nature of such an approach.

Queer theory cedes the politicalit replaces personal poltics for engagement
with real reform.
Kirsch, 2k - Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University (Max, Queer Theory and Social
Change, p. 97-98)//gingE
Queerness as a deviant form of heterosexuality results in oppression. When this fact is not confronted, it
can lead to maladaptive responses that include the markings of internalized homophobia:
depression, psychosis, resignation, and apathy. These are very much reactions to the ways in which we view ourselves, which in
turn are, at least in part, due to the ways in which we are constantly told to view ourselves. Here, the production of
consciousness takes a very concrete form. Those enduring this form of violence cannot, even in
the academy, simply decide to disengage. We cannot simply refuse to acknowledge these facts
of social life in our present society, and hope that our circumstances will change. Although the lack of
definition is what has inspired the use of "queer," it cannot, as Butler herself asserts, "overcome its constituent history of injury"
(1993b: 223). Be that as it may, "queer," as put forward by Queer theorists, has no inherent historical or social
context. We continually return to the following question: to whom does it belong and what does it
represent? These advocates of "queer" do not acknowledge that queer is produced by social relations,
and therefore contains the attributes of existing social relations. As I have shown, Queer theory,
particularly as it is expressed in Butler's writings on performativity, dichotomizes the political as personal and the
political as social action into a binary that positions political action in impossible terms. The
nature of the "political" is never clearly discussed, and remains a chasm (cf. Kaufman and Martin, 1994).
However appealing the notion of positioning the self through a reinterpretation of the "I" may be, it is misguided as political action:
it cannot generate the collective energy and organization necessary to challenge existing
structures of power. As Michael Aglietta observes, "There is no magical road where the most abstract
concepts magically command the movement of society" (1979: 43). The question of polities, then,
brings us back to where we began: what is the nature of the political and how do we address it?
Is it beneficial to maintain alliances with established political parties? Can we adopt the dominant values of our
culture and still hope to change the dynamics of those values? How do we form alliances with other
oppressed groups? Is there a structural economic basis for such an alliance, or should we look elsewhere? Perhaps most
importantly: is it possible, given the tremendous resources represented by the dominant and
coercive ideology of our present social relations, to maintain the energy necessary to develop
and continue modes of resistance that counter it? In the last question, as I will show, lies an answer to the issue of
alliances and structural identification. But first, we need to refocus the discussion.

Queer theory assumes a male identityturns the aff
Jeffreys, 94 - Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Melbourne (Sheila,
Womens Studies International Forum, The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians: Sexuality In the
Academy, Volume 17, Issue 5, p. 459-472)//gingE
The appearance of queer theory and queer studies threatens to mean the disappearance of
lesbians. The developing field of lesbian and gay studies is dominated now by the queer impulse.
Lesbian feminism is conspicuous by its absence. Lesbian feminism starts from the understanding that the
interests of lesbians and gay men are in many respects very different because lesbians are
members of the political class of women. Lesbian liberation requires, according to this analysis, the
destruction of men's power over women. In queer theory and queer studies, lesbians seem to appear only
where they can assimilate seamlessly into gay male culture and politics. No difference is
generally recognised in interests, culture, history between lesbians and gay men. The new field of the study of
'sexuality' seems similarly to be dominated by gay male sexual politics and interests. Both areas are
remarkably free of feminist influence. As I discuss here, there is seldom any mention in queer theorising of
sexuality of issues which are of concern to feminists and lesbian feminists, such as sexual violence and
pornography or any politics of sexual desire or practice, and there is no recognition of the specificity of lesbian experience. Within
traditional Women's Studies, lesbian students and teachers have long been angry at the
'lesbian-free' nature of courses and textbooks. A good example is Rosemarie Tong's Women's Studies reader
Feminist Thought (1989). Although many of the feminist theorists covered in the book are lesbians, lesbian feminism is not one of
the varieties of feminist thought included here. The index directs the reader to find lesbian feminist thought in three pages under
the heading of 'Radical feminism and sexuality' (Tong, 1989). Lesbians might well have expected to find the new
lesbian and gay studies more sympathetic to their interests, but that is only true in practice if
they see themselves as a variety of gay men rather than as women. The new lesbian and gay
studies is 'feminismfree.' By not recognising the different interests, history, culture, experience
of lesbians, lesbian and gay studies homogenises the interests of women into those of men. It was
precisely this disappearance of women's interests and experience in the malestream academic world which caused the development
of Women's Studies in the first place. It cannot therefore be an unalloyed cause for celebration in the 1990s that lesbian and gay
studies are becoming sufficiently well recognised to have a whole new journal GLQ and a first reader, The Lesbian and Gay Studies
Reader (Abelove, Barale, & Halperin, 1993). Both are American in origin and content. Even a casual glance at these publications
suggests that lesbians and feminists have considerable cause for concern. It is not simply an abstract desire to right the injustice of
lesbian disappearance which motivates my concern at the way that lesbian and gay studies are going. The work of this new
field does and will increasingly influence the ideas and practices of lesbian and gay culture.
Academia is not hermetically sealed but reflects and influences the world outside the academy. The disappearance of
lesbians into an economically powerful commercial gay culture in the streets and the clubs will
be exacerbated by what is happening in queer theory. The editorial of the first issue of GLQ celebrates its
commitment to 'queer' politics. The queer perspective is not a gender-neutral one. Many lesbians,
perhaps the vast majority of lesbian feminists, feel nothing but hostility toward and alienation
from the word queer and see queer politics as very specifically masculine. The editorial tells us that the
journal will approach all topics through a queer lens. "We seek to publish a journal that will bring a queer perspective to bear on any
and all topics touching on sex and sexuality" (Dinshaw & Halperin, GLQ, 1993; p. iii). We are told that the Q in the title
of the journal GLQ has two meanings, quarterly and also "the fractious, the disruptive, the
irritable, the impatient, the unapologetic, the bitchy, the camp, the queer" (p. iii). This definition
of the word 'queer' should alert readers to its masculine bias. The adjectives accompanying it here refer to
male gay culture. They arise from traditional notions of what is camp. Camp, as we shall see, lies at the
very foundation of queer theory and politics and is inimical to women's and lesbian interests. But
before looking at the problems with camp in detail, it is worth considering another way in which this list of adjectives might not sit
well with lesbian feminism. Although gay men's rebellion against oppression might well have been so
mild that it could be expressed in terms like irritability, this has not been the way that lesbians
have traditionally phrased their rebellion. Perhaps because lesbians have a great deal more to fight, that is, the
whole system of male supremacy, rage has been a more prevalent emotion than irritability. The early womanifesto of lesbian
feminism, the Woman- Identified-Woman paper, expressed it thus: "A Lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of
explosion" (Radicalesbians, 1988, p. 17). Irritable is how one might feel about not having garbage collected,
not about ending the rape, murder, and torture of women, including lesbians. Some queer
studies writers are currently seeking to establish that 'camp' is a fundamental part of 'queer.'
There is still a controversy about what constitutes camp, with gay male critics opposing their own notions to that expressed in the
famous Susan Sontag piece and pointing out that her version is heterosexist (Miller, 1993; Sontag, 1986). Sontag saw camp as a
sensibility and one that was not necessarily queer or gay. Moe Meyer, in the volume the POLITICS and POETICS of CAMP, which is
said on the blurb inside the cover to contain essays by "some of the foremost critics working in queer theory" says that camp is
"solely a queer discourse" and certainly not just a "sensibility" but "a suppressed and denied
oppositional critique embodied in the signifying practices that processually constitute queer
identities" (Meyer, 1994b; p. 1). Rather, the function of camp is the "production of queer social visibility" and the "total body of
performative practices and strategies used to enact a queer identity" (Meyer, 1994b; p. 5). So camp is defined here not
just as one aspect of what it is to be queer, but as absolutely fundamental to queer identity.
Camp appears, on examination, to be based largely on a male gay notion of the feminine. As his example
of camp political tactics, Meyer uses the Black drag queen, Joan Jett Blakk, who ran as a mayoral candidate in Chicago in 1991. This
man ran as a 'Queer Nation' candidate. He is referred to by female pronouns throughout this piece, which raises some difficulties in
itself for women who wish to recognize themselves in the text. Meyer tells us that there were some objections from
what he calls "assimilationist gays" who saw the drag queen political tactic as "flippant and
demeaning." The implication is that men who objected did so for conservative motives, whereas
in fact they might have been expressing profeminist sympathies. For women and lesbians who
have rejected femininity, the celebration of it by a gay man is likely to be seen as insulting rather
than as something with which to identify in 'queer' solidarity. Actually, women might well want more women
in parliament rather than men wearing the clothing that has been culturally assigned to women.

Queer theory is too reactionary it fails in the absence of concrete social
alternatives
Change, pg. 36-37)//gingE
Ultimately, the confusion and entanglement that the category queer creates in academic circles is
constituted with contradictions: while Queer theory supposes that categories and labels are to
be ignored, it is still a deconstruction of existing categories of peoples and cultures. In one sense, it
is simply a reaction to labeling, and on that level it is undefinable in relation to a purpose, for it
does not propose a social alternative. The we of identification is omitted. What is not addressed is the material
reality that minorities are by definition part of the larger culture, labeled and determined by it.
Like ethnicities, they act in tandem with dominant structures of power that militate against their full
expression. Deconstructing categories of identity erases the specificity of the components of
queer, in the name of queer is as queer is, or does. The relative experience of queer peoples
is comparable with all those who have been marginalized. While queerness cuts across class, status, and
power, the interplay of scapegoating and rejection is performed in the same arena as the struggles
against class oppression, racism, and sexism more broadly. In every case, the stigmatized group of
individuals does not meet an ideal and suffers the consequence. When a society tells individuals that they
are not meeting their potential as workers, fathers, wives, and sexual beings, then self-hatred is one response. Resentment
and anger is another. The questions remain: what is the ideal, what is its purpose, and how does
it differentially affect those who must confront it? Western culture, and especially US culture, is deeply
rooted in a model of the individual as primary actor and subject. As Arensberg (n.d.) demonstrated in his
discussion of what we mean by common sense, Americans, like many Western cultures, see status as the result of achievement,
privilege and authority as deserved, and success as a personal goal above all and an ethical imperative. Success is a result of self-
motivation and access to resources is a result of individual effort. Like other minorities and ethnic groups,
workers, and the disenfranchised, queers are easily blamed when they fail to conform to a
social ideal. Unlike the case of other minorities, however, the relative affluence of mainstream gay male and,
to a lesser extent, lesbian communities often provides temporary opportunities for integration.
Thus, the experience of the privileged gay or lesbian individual is necessarily distant from that of a
colonial subject. But the distance can be illusory. In the grasp of this illusion, one can be led to believe that
struggles shared with those having a common identity are not a basis for alliance. This was the case for the carefully
closeted, and is the case for those who regard identity as superfluous. The illusion of safety is
itself a condition of entitlement that is not held by those without it. What does this mean for our current
understanding of Queer theory and the future of its development? An epistemology of its intellectual trajectory is
important in this discussion of theory and practice. We assume that developments in culture
and society are connected to the intellectual production of knowledge. But what, we have to
ask, is the basis for social change?
The politics of queer theory gets coopted the excessive valorization of
difference just creates new markets
Change, pg. 73-75)//gingE
In line with the popular culture of the current era, the political is often correlated with lifestyle. Bemoaning the
difficulty of maintaining the energy that produces action, many have chosen to assert their independence from past left-wing tactics.
The shift has been toward working for a full integration of rights (illustrated by the fights for the right to
marry and for the right to fight in the military), or to adopting lifestyles that proclaim the similarities
between queer and straight modes of living, and/or to the third alternative: the proclamation of
queer as a fact, a mode of self-consciousness that recognizes and embraces difference
without necessarily defending it through action. The popularity of Queer theory suggests that the third option is,
for the moment, very much in evidence in university settings. The fights for the right to participate in components of the dominant
culture correspond closely to the general neo-conservatism that we are now witnessing. The radical action that was
prompted by the recognition that AIDS was a disease that gained pandemic status from lack of
attention is now being superceded by a belief that the proper integration of queers will have the
power to change and prevent overt discrimination. Moreover, if we simply refuse to engage the
actors of domination, as Queer theory suggests, then the problems will in any case become moot. But
how might such integration occur, and is it possible with our present understandings of the
political process? If we recognize that the oppression of queer peoples is part of a larger exploitation of human beings, which
includes modes of colonialism and xenophobia, can we consistently believe that participation in the very military, for example, that
enforces this oppression is an objectively reasonable goal? If we recognize that marriage is primarily a failed
institution in the culture at large, which focuses the energy of individuals on an unachievable
ideal, can we comfortably claim that this is a progressive goal of social change? Does it make sense, in
the face of these circumstances, to disengage? Consuming desire and we are calling our cover star, John Bartlett, an American Hero
yes, we believe that fashion designers can indeed be heroes ... (Editorial, Out Magazine, July 1998) The Great Gay (Shopping) List is
the gay community. (Simpson, 1996) Capitalism also naturalizes consumption. It creates an ideal of
having that is easily projected to demarcate correct appearance and behavior, and which is
enforced by marketing tools. Consumption is part of the circulation of capital that sustains production and the surplus
value that creates accumulation and wealth. Driven to the fringe by homophobia and discrimination, queer
communities have fought for acceptance through both celebrating that fringe and by fighting to
become part of the mainstream. By mainstreaming I mean the acceptance of the norms of the politics of the dominant
culture and of consumption in an effort to travel the path to a higher social status. Whether the focus is on a politics
that urges the acceptance of queers on the same basis as the heterosexual norm such as marriage
or the right to be in the military or on the accumulation of things that symbolize normality, queer
communities often seem to be responding to a strong social pressure to conform. Even the fringe has
a certain cachet in capitalism, in the terms of counter-cultural production and consumption. It is in itself a market. To one extent or
another, we all wear uniforms. This form of expression is grounded in a need for acceptance, for self-
affirmation and for identity. What we wear and what we own is a reflection of our perceived
status. The popular literature on queer lifestyles is overwhelmingly directed at gay, white,
primarily privileged males. That this should be so is not an enigma: it reflects the values of the larger society
in which we all live, and it is no surprise that these values are reflected in the literature of queer
popular culture. The mainstreaming of queer politics is proceeding assertively. We are becoming
used to seeing images of normal gay couples, such as the stereotypes of gay lifestyles that are regularly displayed
on TV sitcoms and melodramas. In centers of gay culture in certain neighborhoods of major cities, but also in media production
queer culture, or at least gay male culture, is predominantly portrayed as either mired in muscle and
decadence or as mirroring heterosexual relationships. Often one stereotypical image fades into
another with the aging of those trying to achieve the ideals; there is no larger critique, no
analysis of what is contributing to the commodification and consumption that continues, and no
notion of whose interests it ultimately serves. Lifestyle becomes choice, and status is integrated into making the
right choice.7 In cities and rural areas where coming out is still traumatic and dangerous, the norm is the mimicking of
heterosexual relationships that becomes complete with a move to the suburbs. Much of the
mainstream advertising and literature, queer and straight, is about owning the right things,
whether its the right body, exciting sex, fashionable accessories, or children. Mass media, of course,
promulgates the norms of the dominant culture and the economic machine that creates the desires of consumption. Consumer
products encourage the achievement of identity through accessorized lifestyles. In a strange way the
acquisition of consumables thus become symbolically equated with the achievement of rights. There is very little
difference in the advertising directed toward the straight and the queer markets: whether we look at
underwear ads created for gay men or pedophilic images of thin young women produced for the heterosexual market, their
intention is the same they are meant to sell products.8 Desire is as much about conforming as it is about
biological urges. To see that physical desire can be socially influenced we need only to see that the periodically repeated
scientific surveys of attraction that would have us believe that European physical features are and (presumably) always have been
the yardstick by which sexual desire is measured are patently and wholly ideological. We know that these aspects of
culture change across cultures and over time.9 These scientific findings, passed on as fact,
assume that globalization has not had an effect on the creation of desire, or that mass media
are not involved. Patently racist, Euro-centric, and based on class, they feed an ideal of consumer behavior
that ranges from lust for designer clothing to the election to have cosmetic surgery. If we conclude
that culture involves social norms by which people experience their daily lives, we next need to consider the means by which these
norms are generated. Culture appears by and as social interaction and this interlinking is responsive to
flows of energy that exist at any particular moment. Nation-states, for example, can appear as self-generated
personalities that encompass the people within them. They generate anthropomorphic representations of
themselves that are encompassed in our relationship to them. Commodities, as the driving
product of capitalism, need to be continually reproduced and consumed to generate profit, and
thus needs must be re-generated. Within this context there is a continuous need in our culture to create the new.
Newness is the foundation of desirability, and a culture of newness creates and sells commodities. Novelty functions as the object of
desire and thus itself becomes a form of equity. The drive for newness, for replacement and novelty, does
not take place solely in the realm of things, even as it attempts to turn feelings into things.
Although commodities can take on a social life of their own (such as the symbolic connection between a thing
and the social wellbeing this represents10), they do so in the realm of the creation of ideas about living. The
generation of consumer need and the attempts by individuals to meet those needs redirects energy away from the recognition of
inequality and dominance to the satisfaction of felt desire. Sexuality and desire have thus been massively
consumerized. Roland Barthes (1990) showed us that The Look is more important than the act itself. But what does this
mean on a cultural and on a strictly economic level? Who creates the images of the desirable and how are they played out? Who
creates consumption? The creation of ideal behavior in capitalist societies is basic to social control. Striving to obtain commodities
fixes energy on the acquisition of things as perceived needs. This, of course, does not rule out a rejection of the
creation of need; but it does lead to inequalities that are reinforced by that very act of striving.
Divorcing yourself from the political precludes activism
Hall, 6 - Professor of English at West Virginia University (Donald, Imagining Queer Studies Out
of the Doldrums 9/15/06,
http://chronicle.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/weekly/v53/i04/04b01501.htm)//gingE
"Queer Theory" burst onto the scene about 15 years ago. The term received its first high-profile
usage in a special issue of the journal differences ("Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities") published in the
summer of 1991; was mentioned also in the groundbreaking collection of essays Inside/Out, appearing the same year; and then
gained wide notice with the publication in 1993 of Michael Warner's influential collection Fear of a Queer Planet. By the fall of 1993,
I was teaching a queer-studies course at California State University at Northridge, a class bursting at the seams with politically
agitated students, many of whom were members of the campus activist group Squish Strong Queers United in Suppressing
Heterosexism. Since then my classes have always remained well enrolled (today I still turn away students, even with an enrollment
cap of 40), but gradually the political energy has died away almost completely. The students in California (before I left in 2004) and
now in West Virginia have become remarkably blas concerning (what they consider) the few lingering vestiges of homophobia and
increasingly eager to claim that life is actually pretty good now, with our many queer television shows, product lines, and other
lifestyle components. While vicious gay-marriage debates rage in the media, Brokeback Mountain stirs up heated local controversy,
and Fred Phelps's "God Hates Fags" picketers show up at local gay-pride events, even self-identifying queer students seem
stunningly dismissive of politics generally, relying often on eye rolling as both critique and response. As we read about the early
energy of groups such as Queer Nation and ACT UP, I often ask students about their own lack of passion for social-justice issues and
political activism. A few will roll their eyes, but others will admit that their passivity does, in fact, constitute a
problem, though with a very unhelpful explanation for its root cause. "It's our own fault," said one
very fashionable (and often fashionably late for class) A student. "We're just shallow." While some might see that comment as actual
evidence supporting the explanation he offered, I don't buy the ease of that answer. Nor do I agree with another student from a few
years ago at Humboldt State University, where I visited to give a talk on the state of queer studies, who tried to explain why all the
queer students there seemed a bit depressed during the meeting I had with them: "Things are just too easy on this
campus for people to get motivated; we need some real oppression around here to energize us."
More oppression is not the answer to anyone's or any field's problems. Certainly there are some social contextual factors that offer
help in understanding the waning of political energy in the classroom and in the field of queer studies generally. No student in my
class last spring knew a single person who had died of AIDS. Since most of them were born in the mid-1980s and became sexually
and socially self-aware in the last 10 years, they have never thought of AIDS as anything other than a pharmacologically manageable
disease (even if that is a very dangerous and inaccurate perception, which I address in class). Ellen Degeneres's character on her
show Ellen came out on national television in 1997, and the series Will and Grace started in 1998, when most of them were in
middle school. The lesbian and gay students in my classes today never knew a time when their identities did not receive at least a
modicum of media validation through visibility. Furthermore, the big issue of today gay marriage does not motivate them very
much as a topic of personal and political urgency. Most of my gay and lesbian students are still sowing wild oats, so to speak; some
speak about perhaps wanting to marry someday but express vague confidence that at some indeterminate point in the future, it will
probably be allowed without any active work on their part. Others dismiss marriage as an outmoded concept
and not worthy of a battle in any event (a perspective with which I have a lot of sympathy). They do become
interested when I talk about a few practicalities that marriage might bring with it and use, as an example, my own inability to get
health insurance for my partner because of the lack of domestic-partnership benefits in West Virginia. But on the whole, they are
not particularly energized by contemplating the impracticalities of being a middle-aged couple with no social safety net except what
can be pieced together in spite of an unsympathetic state government. Granted, when I was in my teens and 20s, health insurance
wasn't a burning issue for me either, at least until the AIDS crisis hit, and friends of mine without insurance (and many with
insurance) faced terrible struggles in trying to get basic care for their illnesses. And given the fact that there is no similar or
immediately galvanizing "life and death" issue today to enrage students, it is not surprising perhaps that they are rather blas about
politics. But just as the initial intensity of the feminist movement on college campuses waned long before sexism itself was seriously
challenged, so too is queer intensity declining precipitously, even as heterosexism remains legally
entrenched and homophobia remains a common political tool and general social undercurrent.
What does begin to rouse my students is the immediacy of violenceboth rhetorical and physical.
Showing the film Boys Don't Cry got many of them very agitated (even as a few also complained that I should
only show them happy films rather than sad ones). Bringing in news stories of the harsh rhetoric used in legislatures across the
nation as politicians debated anti-gay-marriage legislation and restrictions on rights for transgendered individuals led to even more-
engaged classroom discussion. And I always actively encourage my socially conservative and religious students to speak their minds
not to shoot down their ideas but certainly to generate genuine awareness that not everyone agrees with each other on topics
that my queer students seem to take for granted as already resolved. I do not teach political activism that is not my role as a
cultural-studies professor but I do teach about the dynamics of social movements and hope that my students develop a
passionate attachment to the topic, whatever their political beliefs. Once ignited, that intensity has to be nurtured
carefully. Readings from the early work of Judith Butler still help in that regard. Her now largely
abandoned implication of individual agency in changing sexual and gender norms through
disruptive performances (which surfaces in both Gender Trouble from 1990 and the essay "Imitation and Gender
Insubordination" from 1991) still makes students leave the classroom thinking that they can change the world if they first work
creatively on themselves or their selves. Indeed, much of the early energy in queer studies generally
derived from the sense of being asked, and being willing, to commit one's self to an important,
realizable, and exhilarating cause. Unfortunately some recent theoretical work is not helpful. Especially deflating is Lee
Edelman's much-discussed antipolitical polemic from 2004, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, which is actually a
symptom and reinforcement of the very problem of general political passivity that I'm discussing here. Edelman uses
Lacanian theory to argue that queers should repudiate the "oppressively political" and abandon
any claim to a "viable political future." But the question remains as to how best to rekindle not
only intellectual intensity in the classroom, but also an excitement about a dramatically different
future that might even motivate students to engage in the hard work of collective action and
sustained response long after they leave the university. Fundamental not only to "identity
politics," but to all critical-thinking-based pedagogy is the belief that students, whatever their
political orientation, should become engaged citizens in the world, not passive consumers who
simply accept the status quo. And what I have found works best in that regard is a return to an older model of
consciousness-raising, based on dialogue and a sharing of lived experiences (there are always students in class who have endured
terrible hardships about which they are willing to speak), followed by exercises that ask students to imagine certain futures
utopias, even that they would find worthy of fighting for. The diversity of what they come up with (Is sex work legalized? Does
marriage become a wholly pass concept? What role does spirituality or religion play?) can lead to very dynamic conversations.
Indeed, discussing their utopias allows them to begin to delineate the steps necessary to reach
those states, looking backward in time to the successes of past social movements and forward
to ones in which they might invest. It encourages students to think critically about how social
change occurs, rather than to imagine vaguely that injustice somehow dissipates magically
without the hard work of individuals and groups' organizing. It urges them to juxtapose the
present situation and whatever fuzzy sense they have of its basic acceptability with a concrete visualization of
what they would prefer as a reigning paradigm (or variety of paradigms). Some, such as Edelman, would
argue that such exercises lock us into variations of the "norm" as it currently stands (whatever we project will simply be a version of
what already is), but consensus about a single place-holding utopia is never the goal. The wide variety of possible utopias, as they
sometimes clash with and sometimes complement each other, leads to intellectual excitement, critical attachment, and even
productive anger. I will take that energy any day over the stasis produced by a cynical refusal even to imagine or invest in a future.
Queer studies will never be what it was in the early 1990s. Today's context of ongoing oppression but token media and marketplace
acceptance is very different. However, the doldrums of the queer-studies classroom and queer studies as a field can be challenged
and the energy reignited. This means resisting the all-too-easy acceptance by students of the status
quo; it means reminding them of the rhetorical and physical violence that continues to exist (but that is also uncomfortable to
acknowledge and much easier simply to ignore or downplay); it means (for those of us working in queer studies)
disrupting our own complacency that can result from being tenured, having successful writing and lecturing careers, and
being able to afford a few comfortable lifestyle components. Queer studies will have a future only if it does the
hard work of imagining possible futures and articulating ways to actually get us there.

Queer erases the ethnic and racial ties that people have ends up denying
difference.
Gamson, 95 - Professor of sociology at University of San Francisco (oshua, Must Identity
Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma from the book Social Perspectives in Lesbian &
Gay Studies: A Reader, republished in 1998. pp. 593-594)//gingE
In the hands of many letter writers, in fact, queer becomes simply a short hand for "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender," much
like "people of color" becomes an inclusive and difference-erasing short hand for a long list of ethnic,
national, and racial groups. And as some letter writers point out , as a quasi-national shorthand "queer" is
just a slight shift in the boundaries of tribal membership with no attendant shifts in power; as
some lesbian writers point out, it is as likely to become synonymous with "white gay male" (perhaps now with a nose ring and
tattoos) as it is to describe a new community formation. Even in its less nationalist versions, queer can easily be
difference without change, can subsume and hide the internal differences it attempts to
incorporate. The queer tribe attempts to be a multicultural, multigendered, multisexual, hodge-podge of outsiders; as Steven
Seidman points out, it ironically ends up "denying differences by either submerging them in an
undifferentiated oppositional mass or by blocking the development of individual and social
differences through the disciplining compulsory imperative to remain undifferentiated" (1993:
133). Queer as an identity category often restates tensions between sameness and difference in
a different language.
A2 Reproductive Futurism
Queerness requires futurityturns their reproductive futurism arguments
Muoz, 6 - Associate Professor of Performance Studies at NYU (Jos Esteban, PMLA, v121, n3,
May, p. 825-826)//gingE
I have chosen to counter polemics that argue for antirelationality by insisting on the essential need for an understanding of
queerness as collectivity. At the 2005 MLA panel, in recent essays, and in my forthcoming book Cruising Utopia, I respond to the
assertion that there is no future for the queer by arguing that queerness is primarily about futurity. Queerness
is always on the horizon. Indeed, for queerness to have any value whatsoever, it must be
considered visible only on the horizon. My argument is therefore interested in critiquing the ontological certitude that
I understand to accompany the politics of presentist and pragmatic contemporary gay identity. This certitude is often
represented through a narration of disappearance and negativity that boils down to another
game of fort-da. My conference paper and the forthcoming book it is culled from have found much propulsion in the work of
Ernst Bloch and other Marxist thinkers who did not dismiss utopia. Bloch found strident grounds for a critique of a totalizing and
naturalizing idea of the present in his concept of the no-longer-conscious. A turn to the no-longer-conscious enabled a critical
hermeneutics attuned to comprehending the not yet here. This temporal calculus deployed the past and the future as armaments to
combat the devastating logic of the here and now, in which nothing exists outside the current moment and which naturalizes
cultural logics like capitalism and heteronormativity. Concomitantly, Bloch has also sharpened our critical imaginations emphasis on
what he famously called a principle of hope. Hope is an easy target for antiutopians. But while antiutopians might
understand themselves as critical in the rejection of hope, they would, in the rush to denounce
it, miss the point that hope is spawned of a critical investment in utopia that is nothing like naive
but, instead, profoundly resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present. My
turn to Bloch, hope, and utopia challenges theoretical insights that have been stunted by the lull
of presentness and by various romances of negativity and that have thus become routine and
resoundingly anticritical.

Fem Fails
The criticisms focus on identity creates a politics of exclusion that prevents
meaningful critiques and turns the very superior identification they try to solve
Jarvis, 2k - (DSL, International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism, February,
University of South Carolina Publishing, pg. 160-162)//gingE
Critical research agendas of this type, however, are not found easily in International Relations. Critics of feminist
perspectives run the risk of denouncement as either a misogynist malcontent or an androcentric
keeper of the gate. At work in much of this discourse is an unstated political correctness, where the
historical marginalization of women bestows intellectual autonomy, excluding those outside the identity group
from legitimate participation in its discourse. Only feminist women can do real, legitimate,
feminist theory since, in the mantra of identity politics, discourse must emanate from a positional
(personal) ontology. Those sensitive or sympathetic to the identity politics of particular groups
are, of course, welcome to lend support and encouragement, but only on terms delineated by
the groups themselves. In this way, they enjoy an uncontested sovereign hegemony over their own
self-identification, insuring the group discourse is self constituted and that its parameters, operative methodology, ,uu\
standards of argument, appraisal, and evidentiary provisions are self defined. Thus, for example, when Sylvester calls lor a
"home.steading" does so "by [a] repetitive feminist insistence that we be included on our terms" (my
emphasis). Rather than an invitation to engage in dialogue, this is an ultimatum that a sovereign
intellectual space be provided and insulated from critics who question the merits of identity-
based political discourse. Instead, Sylvester calls upon International Relations to "share space, respect, and trust in a re-
formed endeavor," but one otherwise proscribed as committed to demonstrating not only "that the secure homes constructed by
IR's many debaters are chimerical," but, as a consequence, to ending International Relations and remaking it along lines grounded
in feminist postmodernism.93 Such stipulative provisions might be likened to a form of negotiated
sovereign territoriality where, as part of the settlement for the historically aggrieved, border
incursions are to be allowed but may not be met with resistance or reciprocity. Demands for
entry to the discipline are thus predicated on conditions that insure two sets of rules, cocooning
postmodern feminist spaces from systematic analyses while "respecting" this discourse as it
hastens about the project of deconstructing International Relations as a "male space." Sylvester's
impassioned plea for tolerance and "emphatic cooperation" is thus confined to like-minded individuals, those who do not
challenge feminist epistemologies but accept them as a necessary means of reinventing the
discipline as a discourse between postmodern identitiesthe most important of which is
gender.94 Intolerance or misogyny thus become the ironic epithets attached to those who question the wisdom of this
reinvention or the merits of the return of identity in international theory.'"' Most strategic of all, however, demands
for entry to the discipline and calls for intellectual spaces betray a self-imposed, politically
motivated marginality. After all, where are such calls issued from other than the discipline and the intellectualand well
establishedspaces of feminist International Relations? Much like the strategies employed by male dissidents, then, feminist
postmodernists too deflect as illegitimate any criticism that derives from skeptics whose
vantage points are labeled privileged. And privilege is variously interpreted historically,
especially along lines of race, color, and sex where the denotations white and male, to name but
two, serve as generational mediums to assess the injustices of past histories. White males, for example,
become generic signifiers for historical oppression, indicating an ontologicallv privileged group by which the historical experiences of
the "other" can then be reclaimed in the context of their related oppression, exploitation, and exclusion. Legitimacy, in this
context, can then be claimed in terms of one's group identity and the extent to which the history
of that particular group has been "silenced." In this same way, self-identification or "self-
situation" establishes one's credentials, allowing admittance to the group and legitimating the "authoritative" vantage
point from which one speaks and writes. Thus, for example, Jan Jindy Pettman includes among the introductory pages to her most
recent book, Worldinjj Women, a section titled "A (personal) politics of location," in which her identity as a woman, a feminist, and
an academic, makes apparent her particular (marginal) identities and group loyalties.96 Similarly, Christine Sylvester, in the
introduction to her book, insists, "It is important to provide a context for one's work in the often-denied
politics of the personal." Accordingly, self-declaration reveals to the reader that she is a feminist, went to a Catholic girls
school where she was schooled to "develop your brains and confess something called 'sins' to always male forever priests," and that
these provide some pieces to her dynamic objectivity.97 Like territorial markers, self-identification permits
entry to intellectual spaces whose sovereign authority is "policed" as much by marginal
subjectivities as they allege of the oppressors who "police" the discourse of realism, or who are
said to walk the corridors of the discipline insuring the replication of patriarchy, hierarchical
agendas, and "malestream" theory. If Sylvester's version of feminist postmodernism is projected as tolerant, per-
spectivist, and encompassing of a multiplicity of approaches, in reality it is as selective, exclusionary, and
dismissive of alternative perspectives as mainstream approaches are accused of being.
The portrayal of women as the passive Other reifies the binaries between men
and womenthey just link back to themselves
Monceri, 13 (Flavia Monceri Universit del Molise, Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche
Sociali e della Formazione, Faculty May 2013 Violence and gender belonging: Considerations on
femicide/feminicidewww.academia.edu/3671123/Violence_and_gender_belonging_Consider
ations_on_femicide_feminicide)//gingE
2) This leads me to the second set of questions: What is the role of women in this process? Should they wait for patriarchal society
to change at the hand of men? Shouldthey accept their passive or at most reactive role, at the same time accepting that there isan
essential difference between men and women, the former being inescapably violent,wheras the latter inescapably vulnerable?
Reading one of the most recent Italian bookson feminicide (R. Diaz and L. Garofano, I labirinti del male. Femminicidio, stalking e 4
violenza sulle donne: che cosa sono, come difendersi , Infinito edizioni, Formigine(Modena) 2013) I just had the impression that we
are not yet ready to negate thatwomen are doomed to be victims, exclusively because they are women . But this binary
eduction women=victims vs. men=murderers does not seem to be very effective, notonly
because it represents things in an essentialistic and monolithic way, but also because it
dramatically narrows the measures, tactics and weapons to which women themselves can resort. Until
today, almost any account I have read on concrete femicides/feminicides depicts the women
involved as passive victims, who doomed to die from the very beginning, because they had no
way to fight against the violent man/men harassing them .Sometimes women do counter-attack, but in this cases they are
depicted, even bywomen interpreters, as simply reacting at the aim of a self-defense. In short, women are not able to be
violent, because they are essentially , as women , incapable to be violent, if not in the willy-nilly form of a
reaction to reiterated attacks. Well, I find that this idea is surely coherent with the above-mentioned construction of two essentially
differentgroups (men and women), but at the same time it accepts the very same stereotypes and prejudices
with which it charges patriarchal society (and the group of the men). Women should be saved
by the institutions established by men because they need to be saved by men , being incapable
to do it themselves because they are women . Is this what women really want today? As far as I am concerned, my
clear answer is not at all!. 3. This is the reason why as a theorist prone to queer theory instead of feminism, toanarchy instead of
(radical) democracy, and to (radical and interdependent)individualism instead of (traditional) collectivism, but first of all as a radical
political philosopher of a Nietzschean kind, I suggest that we just stop kidding and do the serious job. It consists, in my opinion, in
questioning the untouched state of things, stillimplicitly accepted even by the most part of feminist theorists, according to which
weshould keep on distinguishing two and only two groups of human individuals on anessentialist biological basis. There is no
objective truth entailed in the statement that human individuals should be divided into two
groups according to the anatomicalappearance of the body, to which a set of essential
psychological, hormonal, behavioraldifferences could be attached.From this perspective, if we want to
stop the killing of women we must first of all hitout the very notion of Woman, showing its inconsistence, its artificial nature,
sogaining the side-effect to deprive the current system of stereotypes and prejudices of any significance. And this should be done
first of all by self-identified and/or identifiedwomen themselves. You might object: But this is not enough, this is too abstract,
weneed concrete measures. Yes, of course, and I do not deny that given the current situation we need them also from the part of
society. But we should not be content with pleading for such measures and giving up to go further,
both theoretically and at thelevel of everyday (political) action.My point is that we should not
abdicate to the power we have as individuals, whatever the bodily appearance and the social
identification, in the hope that things will change without fighting, because those who currently
hold the power will sooner or later become aware that they are mistaken. Individuals are the
protagonists of change, but inorder to change things they must regain confidence in their ability to exercise power andto
continuously (re)negotiate the contexual conditions and their collocation within them.This can be done not least by changing the
practices of everyday life and their meanings, by overtly fighting when needed, as well as in a thousand other ways at themicro-
level.Women are no exception, unless they are satisfied to self-perceive and be perceived asthe opposite, passive, soft pole of an
artificial, and frankly obsolete, sexual binary.And in order to give you just a hint as to the things to which I am thinking as ways
tomodify, though slowly and with difficulty, the current situation from a micro-political perspective, I indicate some of them, which I
understand as political actions in and for themselves, although they are only trivial examples that should be further elaborated:
Stop identifying as a woman in speech, behavior, and thinking. Stop worrying about white hair, wrinkles, small tits, big butts, and
so on: its alla fraud to force you to become a woman. Stop trying to be attractive for men (for instance, you might claim they do
itfor you). Stop cooking, doing the chores, take care of children, husbands, relatives,neighbor, etc. only because you feel this is
typical of you as a woman. And please, stop complaining about it: If you feel you are the care-giver, be contentwith it and be aware
of the power it gives to you, or move on. Exercise your power at every moment: be aware of your power, its really far from a
capitulation to a patriarchal way of thinking And if violence is neededwell, be violent! We are humang beings, after all,arent we?

Patriarchy doesnt cause war
Gender is not the root cause of war.
Goldstein, 1 - Professor of International Relations at American University (Joshua S., War and
Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, pp.411-412)//gingE
I began this book hoping to contribute in some way to a deeper understanding of war an understanding that would improve the
chances of someday achieving real peace, by deleting war from our human repertoire. In following the thread of gender
running through war, I found the deeper understanding I had hoped for a multidisciplinary and multilevel engagement
with the subject. Yet I became somewhat more pessimistic about how quickly or easily war may end.
The war system emerges, from the evidence in this book, as relatively ubiquitous and robust.
Efforts to change this system must overcome several dilemmas mentioned in this book. First, peace
activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the
approach, if you want peace, work for justice. Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war, one can work for gender
justice specifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement
(women, labor, minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests that causality
runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate
aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars outbreaks and
outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices. So, if you
want peace, work for peace. Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace.
Causality does not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to
war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most
important way to reverse womens oppression. The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement
energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this books evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause
of war seems to be empirically inadequate.

Ending patriarchy doesnt end state coercion or conflict which means they
dont solve war.
Adams and Orloff, 5 - Professor of Sociology at Yale and at Northwestern (Julia and Anna
Shola, Politics and Gender, pp.174-175)//gingE
That institutional analysis should also include the coercive moment of state power. Young seems to assume that well-behaved,
appropriate states (states that are not running protection rackets?) can simply do without coercion, whether dominative power
that exploits those it rules for its own aggrandizement or the pastoral power that often appears gentle and benevolent both to its
wielders and to those under its sway, but is no less powerful for that reason (Young 2003, 6). Perhaps Young and many like her
cannot conceive of the normative ideal of politics as anything more than deliberative debate or, at most, law enforcement on a
global scale. Wielding coercive power, even against terrorists or fascists, is for them simply beyond the pale. But all states face
the issue of how to sustain the sinews of power, the extraction of resourcestaxes, soldiersin
order to function, against resistance and in competition with other powerful domestic and
international actors, whose goals may not coincide with their own. We cannot ignore the insights of Max
Weber (1968, 56) and others about the conflictual nature of politics and the bottom-line coercive nature of states. Nor do we
believe that even a fully democratic system, national or international, will ever shed its
conflictual or agonistic (to use the term favored by Chantal Mouffe) character. We share Young's
aspirations for a genuinely democratic world order, but such an order simply cannot be wished into being. Perhaps we should attend
to the bracing warnings of Carl Schmitt (whose insights are interpreted in Kalyvas 1999 and Mouffe 1999), who if nothing else had
the virtue of understanding the constitutive role of us-versus-them conflicts, especially in shaping interstate politics. What are the
dynamics of interstate relations, the historically specific patterns of alliance and enmity, dependency, and interdependency, that
matter in this regard? Such questions are crucial if we want to understand the conflicts between the United Statesor the West
more broadlyand an Islamism that are among the wellsprings of both Islamic jihad and U.S. foreign policy. One important
implication is that coercion, conflict and domination are not, as Young suggests, by definition masculine. In her argument,
masculinity is symbolically equated with domination, masculinist protection, authoritarianism, violence, and war, while femininity
is coupled with peace, victimization, and subordination. This binarizing move assumes that signs and characteristics load in a neatly
split fashion onto masculine and feminine. There is no question that this is sometimes how these signs are used in politics, whether
from the Right (instance the various forms of fundamentalism mentioned here) or the Left (for example, again, the women's peace
movement of the 1970s80s). But one of the many potential contributions of feminist analyses of politics is to pinpoint the ways in
which state actors and their opponents actively deploy signs of gender in these conflicts, forging these very symbolic links in service
of coalitions for political and military action. The conjoined signs of father-rule, patriarchy, are often an important one in this regard.
But that does not mean that these linkages cannot be disrupted and reorganized. Nor does it mean that, say, the early modern
European ruling patrilineages that one of us (Adams 2005) has studied, the reformist elite men of the U.S. Progressive Era who
initiated modern social provision for breadwinning men that the other (Orloff 1993) has analyzed, the familially related patriarchs
that run some contemporary Middle Eastern or Maghreb states (Charrad 2001), and American democratically elected leaders are
the same thing and can be reduced to one another as a phenomenon. Young's intervention takes this reductionism to an extreme. It
is not surprising, therefore, that Young's essay paints the United States as bad as or worse than any of its supposed foes or
Otherseven implying that the United States is the sole author of their problems and, in the case of al Qaeda, aggressions. 6 This
inability or refusal to differentiate is also fed by the lack of any grounded analysis of politics, including interstate politics, or of the
specific foe in questionrendered as a marauding gang of outsiders with no apparent social characteristics, no connection to a
movement or states that sheltered that movement. Outsiders, in other words, to what? Young has to rip the attack on the United
States out of any larger political frame, which might imply that the gang was in that instance an actual, organized threat, sheltered
by a state power in this case, the Taliban regime, which had if not a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, in the classical
Weberian sense, then certainly statist access to formidable means of coercion. If, as we argue, contemporary threats to democracies
are not illusoryand certainly not produced by elaborate protection racketsfeminists will have to figure out how to defend as well
as advance modernity's incomplete promise of gender emancipation. We want to close with two sets of suggestionsmacropolitical
and analyticflowing from our critique of feminist antimodernism. Politically, we might begin by recognizing that this promise is
presently institutionalized in democratic if decidedly imperfect states. No kind of national or global security can be
achieved anytime soon without also calling on the coercive powers of these statesthe states we live
in nowrather than, say, a fantasized global law enforcer deputized by all the peoples of the world. 7 Thus, we find Young's
appeal to the women's peace movement of the 1970s80s entirely unpersuasive in this context,
particularly since the core of that movement portrayed the threat posed by the Soviet Union as
an illusory fabrication and, in general, showed itself unable to confront the geopolitical realities
of the day. Since the fall of communism, all of us now know even better the nature of that threat, as well as the internal
deformations of Soviet society. Certainly that movementand contemporary feminists, in retrospectwere right to question
Ronald Reagan's Cold War policies, but their questioning should have extended past the United States to the Soviet Union, whose
grounds for opposing the United States were hardly limited to promoting world peace. 8 We should be willing to admit that however
admirable the women's peace movement's aspirations for a world free of conflict, the movement had it wrong on the actual threat
posed by the USSR and on the importance of upholding democracy during the Cold War, just as Iris Young has it wrong on
Afghanistan and the importance of opposing Islamism and defending modernity today. This stance need not in any way involve
handing a blank check to the Bush, Blair, or any other political administration among the world's capitalist democracies. In fact,
Young and others are properly skeptical about the goals of the Bush administration. But they seem to lose that necessary modernist
skepticism, judgment, and analytical distance when it comes to evaluating the statements of Islamists.

Cyborgs Fail
Cyborgs are hyper-sexualized and reinforce gender stereotypes
Smith 9- MA art and design at GSU (Nicole R., 12-01, Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the
Cybor,http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=art_design_the
ses)//LC
In similar fashion, Shabot also finds problematic the hyper-sexualized body found in popular
versions of female cyborgs. This body is configured as an ideal body type in its hyperreality.
Consequently, she expresses concern that the cyborg body, as popularly configured, risks
abandoning the flesh and blood body.86 Shabot sees this loss as tantamount to a loss of
embodied existence. She places great emphasis on the need to retain an embodied subject, for
to lose the experience of our bodies is to lose the very difference that our own meaningful life
experiences and sensations impart: We are ... ambiguous beings regarding our ways of existing:
our gender, our looks and our thoughts, constitute an ever-changing flux that can never be
absolutely defined or contained by an abstract, purely conceptual, incorporeal subjectivity.87
Shabot finds the tendency toward a disembodied subjectivity in popular images of cyborgs
dangerous in the way that such an abstraction can appear impartial while upholding traditional
hierarchies, conceptions, and dualisms. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, Shabot offers the grotesque
and monstrous body as an alternate figure to the cyborg.88 She argues that the grotesque body
cannot be disembodied. In many ways, the grotesque body is actually defined and identified
through the physical body. It is excessive, unable to be contained, closed, or limiteda self-
transgressing, fragmented figure intertwined and interlaced with the world around it.89
However, Shabot does not suggest the grotesque as a means to evade technology and its impact
on the body, which she recognizes as nearly impossible to avoid. Today, the cyborg seems
almost inescapable, which highlights the cogency of her insistence on foregrounding the
embodied subjective position and, thus, partial and imperfect subjectivities. The disconnection
between Haraways cyborgs and popularized versions of them underscores the ways in which
cyborgs as metaphors and oppositional figurations can lose their radical potential when co-
opted by mass culture but also the ways in which Haraway has been misinterpreted. While
Balsamos and Shabots points are certainly important, their critiques of the cyborg stem more
from their wariness of its popularized images than those Haraway envisions or advocates. Yet
Haraways own comments on the cyborg are admittedly confusing when taken out of context.
Within the broader perspective of her writings, the cyborg is only one of the figurations within
her menagerie, which includes monsters, tricksters, and vampires. Through Shabots
arguments we are reminded that the radical cyborg, if it is to be an oppositional figure, carries
with it the specter of the grotesque and monstrous. Haraway does not disagree. She speaks of
the cyborg as a monstrous entity, especially to the extent that it has defined the very limits of
Western imagination.90 Haraways cyborg is neither an innocent nor unified subject.91 It is an
argument against dualisms of all kinds, including machine/organism, human/animal,
natural/artificial, mind/body, and female/male, to name a few. According to Haraway, cyborg
imagery can suggest a way out of the dualism in which we have explained our bodies and our
tools to ourselves.92 This statement, along with her essay Situated Knowledges: The Science
Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, offers a more nuanced
interpretation of her perhaps initially misleading comment that cyborgs inhabit a post-
gendered world. Haraways cyborg is not the disembodied cyborg of popular culture that Shabot
indicts, nor is her post-gendered cyborg world one that privileges disembodied subjects freed
from the specificity of a body. For Haraway, that type of positionality offers only a false vision
promising transcendence of all limits and responsibilities.93 In contrast, in its commitment to
permanent partiality, her cyborg is more akin to the split and contradictory self. It is the one
who can interrogate positioning and be accountable, the one who can construct and join
rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history.94 Haraways cyborg thus
departs from those popular science-fiction and cyberpunk versions that fetishize the cyborg
body as an escape from the limitations of the human body.95 Haraways radicalized cyborg
pushes us to rethink our bodies and imagine new kinds of embodiment but also to examine our
kinship and connections to what was formerly outside or beyond these bodies.96 As Haraway
states, the cyborg is in this curious set of family relationships with sibling species of various
kinds and with the inorganic and mechanical as well.97
Cyborgs fail to break down gender stereotypes
Smith 9- MA art and design at GSU (Nicole R., 12-01, Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the
Cybor,http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=art_design_the
ses)//LC
Though Haraways ironic political myth of the cyborg remains a powerful metaphor in feminist
studies, critical assessments of it provide further suggestions on the most productive ways to
consider feminist cyborg figurations. In one of the better-known critical assessments of the
cyborg, Anne Balsamo offers an ironic ethnographic reading. Balsamo follows Haraways lead in
reading the cyborg as a figure that can potentially disrupt concepts of the other in terms
of human/machine and natural/artificial binaries.82 However, Balsamo finds that the cyborg of
popular culture does not completely follow through on this disruptive promise in terms of
gender binaries. She points out that popularized versions of cyborgs in literature and film do not
exist in a post-gendered or utopian world but are instead highly gendered entities. On the one
hand, female-gendered cyborgs, as fusions of the female with machines and technology,
challenge traditional gender assumptions due to the way femininity has historically been
associated with the emotional or sexual, as masculinity has with the rational, scientific, and
technological. Yet according to Balsamo, female cyborgs, while challenging the relationship
between femaleness and technology, actually perpetuate oppressive gender stereotypes.83
Balsamo singles out Rachel in Ridley Scotts Blade Runner and Helva in Anne McCaffreys
science-fiction novel The Ship that Sang as examples of how popular images of cyborgs reinforce
the feminine as emotional, nurturing, or sexually objectified.84 Sara Cohen Shabot adds William
Gibsons cyberpunk novels and the films Robocop, The Terminator, and Total Recall as examples
that further entrench normative views on male and female gendered identities.85 Ultimately,
both Balsamo and Shabot argue that the cyborg of popular culture falls short of Haraways
vision of the cyborg as a figure capable of subverting patriarchal power structures and
essentializing views on gender.

Poetry Bad
Poetry is limited to the authors subcommunities and fails in its self-regard
Altieri, 96 (Charles Some Problems about Agency in the Theories of Radical Poetics
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 207-236
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208873) //GY
How do we assess the path or paths that radical poetics is now pursuing? How can we assess
the values involved in different itineraries, and how might we construct overall maps without
feeling we have surrendered our capacities as interpretive agents to the form of rationality that
the map offers? I have been led to these questions in part by my own anxieties about
addressing an audience as sophisticated as the one at the conference, and in part by Charles
Bernsteins persuasive arguments that the very dream of a universal audience for poetry, or of
a universal addresse for the poet, no longer makes sense: our political arena is an agonistic and
culturally diverse one in which the very effort to find universality tends to mask specific
interests, and our psychological arenas seem to demand that we resist a commodified cultural
order by taking on what Bernstein calls an aversion to conformity whose fullest realizations
probably consist in the modes of singularity that our versing enables us to maintain (4-8). But
even if Bernstein is right, where do we draw the line? Once the effort to achieve a discursive
universality is shattered, it seems as if critics can only speak from within specific
subcommunities and/or consign themselves to the range of uncomfortable states, from
depressive alienation to infantile rage, that the gods offer the marginalized. Yet it is at least
arguable that unless literary work is submitted to some frame of assessments more capacious
than a writers chosen community, it will fester in bogs of mutual but quite narrow self-regard.

Poetry ignores the readers agency attempting to use poetry as understanding
imposes violence upon the subject it also destroys the authors identity for
a larger cause
Jed Rasula claimed several years ago that after all the permutations of language writing that
have occurred, the only two common threads are the restoration of the reader as coproducer
of the text and an emphasis on the materiality of the signifier (319), principles which Linda
Reinfeld neatly summarizes as a commitment to writing as rescue restoring the reader
repossessing the word (32). But now that poets have been working with the principles for
two decades, I worry that there may be emerging two substantial gaps that we have yet to
reflect upon: how do we assess the transformations of enabling traditions that are taking place,
and how do we get the theory that shaped these two principles to stay in conjunction with the
various modes of writing that it has generated? We may be in a position where the theorizing
behind radical poetics needs to confront both its immediate past and its emerging future.
Let me begin with the issue of how reading is best characterized. Does the reader really need
restoring? Are there any major traditional works that encourage readerly passivity, or demand
readers reach any one predetermined conclusion by refusing to allow the reader space for
engaging what the work has made available to them as a possible condition of the self or world?
There may be academics who confuse passivity and activity, but for the most part that particular
opposition does not seem likely to generate the significant difference that radical writing claims
to realize. So we have to probe a bit more to understand the modes of reading and valuing
reading that radical poetics foster.
I think we can distinguish three interrelated ways this poetics characterizes the readers roles.
On the most general level, Bruce Andrews and others make strong cases for a sharp opposition
between the traditional hermeneutic ideal of the readers role as interpreter and an empirical
view that emphasizes and cultivates differences among readers that bring to the fore their
concrete bodily and social situatedness (5). Hemeneutic ideals demand a substantial degree of
subjection to the authors intentions and to the projected identifications the author offers
while masking the power structures that the text imposes on our most powerful emotional
orientations. And, one might add, where there is subjection there is repression dividing agents
from themselves. Unable to express the desires most intimate to them, their very efforts at
hermeneutic understanding are likely to produce a counterbalancing resentment and even
suppressed violence over what they feel they are constantly having to surrender in order to be
reading subjects at all.
Charles Bernstein gives a sharp political focus for this kind of psychologizing in a brilliant reading
of Pounds fascism that locates its basic source in Pounds own misinterpretation of the
polyvocal textuality and compositionally decentered multiculturalism fundamental to the
literary production developed within the Cantos: Pounds fascist ideology insists on the
authors having an extraliterary point of special knowledge that creates a phallic order (these
are Pounds terms) over the female chaos of conflicting ideological material (123). So Pounds
quest for an authority informing his poetry becomes a counterproductive desperation that
seems to serve for Bernstein as a metaphor or parable for the structure of literary ambitions.
The dream of a fixable reader (both as one who can be made to stand still and one who can be
cured) may be more destructive for the writer than for the reader because of the blindness
and anxiety over misinterpretation that come with it. And if this dream succeeds, the writers
own actual historicity is likely to be subsumed within fantasies about exercising a shaping force
over history. So for Bernstein it is safer to view writing as anticommunication than to submit it
to the rhetorical theater that comes into play when communication is idealized and reading
disciplined.
Poems lock the reader into ideology rather than allowing one to identify freely
reifies the structures they critique - turns the case
All three cases offer important correctives to an academic culture that has been obsessed with
interpretation as the fundamental model of readerly participation. But even this struggle
against the academy requires some further considerations that I think have not been sufficiently
taken up by the prevailing radical theories. Were we to grant that the fundamental problem of
contemporary Western culture was a blindness inflicted by the imposition of false universals, we
would still have to ask if it can suffice to base our notion of what the text offers readers on the
project of resisting all hermeneutic idealization. For fact process texts, do we not condemn
them to those forces that shape them as such subjects? We ignore the possibilities that the text
as structure, as willed object rather than as object of free play, can actually modify beliefs and
provide alternative modes of sensibility. So it seems that if poetry is to offer effective resistance
to aspects of the dominant culture, we will have to grant it the power to construct hypothetical
countermodels, or, at the very least, to provide modes of second-order reading by which an
audience is invited to take some distance from its own direct first-order habits. Poems must
foster readerly identities that simultaneously align imaginations with specific processes
confronting dominant ideological structures and reflect on what is at stake in the choices made
as one reads.

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