In Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs you present monsters
as the abject: they fascinate and repel simultaneously. How do you envision
that a possible appropriation of a negative subjectivity - a 'monstrous'
subjectivity - can be productive for the feminist project?
RB: Of course the idea of claiming identities that we have been taught
to despise is an old one in feminism. In fact the idea of claiming an identity
in feminism is already an heroic gesture, considering how negative the
connotations are. Since the 70's the new wave [of feminism] has been claiming
all sorts of identities. The idea to repossess them, and redefine them
is the creative mimetic strategy that Irigaray -among others - theorises.
In a sense Judith Butler, with her parodies, is also in that same tradition.
You possess, you reoccupy, you revisit locations which they have coined
negatively. By repeating the gesture you epurate them of their charge,
and try to do something positive with them. So as a strategy it is nothing
new. What is new with the monster, is the way it intersects with issues
of science and technology. That is relatively new in feminism, although
in the early phases there were major feminist texts on science; I am thinking
of Shulamit Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex. But that's still pretty
much an isolated episode. In fact, the bulk of feminism is social science,
rather than 'real' science, and it's technophobic, rather than technophilic.
So it is only recently that we really try to look at what science had made
of us, and what possibilties are within that for creating reappraisal and
critical repossession. The monster has emerged in that context for me.
It has the positivity in two ways: first of all monsters are very ancient
categories. The book I am trying to finish now shows quite clearly the
ways the monstrous and the feminine intersect. It goes as far back as you
can think. You may know the work of Barbara Creed on the monstrous feminine,
and how that plays out in cinema. But if you go back in history, you will
see that the monster and the women are connected through several things:
the fact that the woman can be the mother of monsters, she can produce
them. Or, that there is something intrinsically monstrous about the feminine.
The definition of monsters is historically variable. How the monstrous
was defined in antiquity, the baroque era, the so-called scientific era,
and in the post-industrious era differ tremendously. I am trying to find
different forms of interconnection between this. The monsters have become
incredibly popular since the nuclear era, in the post-nuclear imaginary.
There is a kind of glorification of the age of freaks; there is an aesthetic
of the ugly that has been triumphant since the 60's. You can look at rock
'n roll culture, record covers, comic strips and ninja turtles…there is
alsthat post-nuclear imaginary which is in love with mutants. The monster
as mutant then becomes another sort of metaphor for some type of deviant
femininity. In that sense it is very rich. But all I want to say, is that
this is the last historical variation on a very old theme, that I find
particularly productive in trying to map out the intersections between
female subjectivity, and how scientific discourse connoted femininity negatively
by making it monstrous.
You express a concern that the etchnologies of bio-medical science,
esp. reproductive technologies, "freeze out time". How does this "temporal
dislocation" concretely manifest itself, and what dangers does it entail?
In what way?
RB: I do think that it is a misnomer to call a lot of what is going
on 'cyberspace'. It's a bit of a pity that they have metaphorised this
event spatially. I think that time is much more central to the great transformations
that we are going through. Whether it is time in the pursuit of eternal
youth, or time as the suspension, the eternal flexibility...working days
that go on forever: 3 shifts of 6 hours each, so that the factories can
work day and night, which is a feature of post-Taylorist economies. Or
whether it is time in the sense that we don't have any of it, or have too
much of it because technology expands so many of our faculties and capacities.
I see the temporal dimension as much more crucial to the whole exercise
of 'being' in post-modernity, and all that. In bio-technologies the suspension
of time dimension is absolutely blatant. Now all technologies 'freeze out'
time. The recording of this interview, for example, is a frozen slab of
oral history.
But what's so dangerous about this all, especially for women?
RB: I am in a very ambivalent position. What's so dangerous is not
so much the dislocation of time, because that happens all over the place.
There's nothing we can do to stop that. What is dangerous in the particular
theme of reproduction, is that this new reification of reproduction through
bio-technologies happened at the same historical time, in fact simultaneously
with the feminist movement's attempt to have women redefine our relationship
to reproduction…and to win very very basic reproductive rights, whether
it is contraception, abortion…let alone euthanasia, or choosing the sex
of the child: things we are, I think, completely entitled to considering
the scientific means that we have to our disposal. But in a sense birth-technologies
come in as a tornado in the middle of this enormous revolution. And they
are so extreme that they make all discussion impossible. If you look at
the bio-ethics committees and their composition, for instance, then you
see the representatives of the major monotheistic religions plus a couple
of professional philosophers. You get a good example of this is the film
Contact. The people who have to select the representatives of mankind
to go in outer space, are a very good parody on your classical bio-ethics
committee. And if you consider the decisions they make, then they are busy
bringing back Arestotelian paradigms of national order, which bring us
back before the feminist revolution even started. It is that sort of preemptive
strike on the part of legislators, who cut down the liberational potentials
of bio-technologies. And confronted with this most feminists, being fundamentally
techno-phobic, just give up on the whole thing. They are taking it away
from us befor we even had a chance to define it! And it would have probably
taken a whole generation more for the whole issue of reproduction to settle.
Now the older generation fought for the basis, the younger generation has
to reasses, a generation futher we could have come to some sort of middleground
of a de-naturalised social constructivist approach to reproduction. That
didn't happen, these things come in triggering a paranoia of a brave new
world. And in the warp of that paranoia, we stand to lose very basic traditional
contraceptive rights, that we fought very hard to gain. So the danger is
not intrinsic to the technology, but is in the social use that is being
made of them. When I look at the time scale of emancipation, I think what
a pity that it has been short-circuited, that it is a preemptive strike.
They moved faster than we did…perhaps that is in the nature of technology
to do that, but the social use to which they are put is simply objectionable.
The female (reproductive) body is read as a monstrous text because
of its mutability: it bleeds, lactates, dilates during pregnancy. But what
about the demonisation of the sterile female body? The body in menopause?
How is this particular body marked and pathologised by our culture? How
does that feed into the ideology of women as uteruses, and the development
of fertility technologies?
RB: Sterile bodies are very complex. If you look at sterile bodies
in the context of aging, then in a sense it's easier, because the aging
body is absolutely abject in a culture obsessed with youth. So the menopause
as the end of reproduction is almost a category apart. But if we can stay
for a minute with the idea of sterile bodies..that's a really contested
zone! On the one hand sterility, male and female, is an enormous issue
in the advanced countries. It is one of the excuses, one of the pretexts
that justify the existence of bio-technologies. There is statistical evidence
that sterility is an issue, and that our society wants babies, and they
want them white and healthy and many. That would become a prime target
for something that needs to be corrected. At the same time, culture flirts
entirely with bodies, that I would call sterile in the sense of machine
celebataire, bodies that are not functional, that are deeply malfunctioning.
I am thinking of two paradigms of what I would call the celebate of the
sterile body: the anorexic and the drug addict. If you look at the representations
of these bodies in fashion, for example, then this culture is really completely
schizoid!! Kate Moss and those Calvin Kline ads...all these heroin ads,
as they call them, these bodies that are leaking…the junkie body leaks
all over the place from the wrong fluids…the anorexic body stops menstruating…these
are socially desirable bodies, because they fit in with the social imperative
of slimness and elegance, and some sort of consumptiveness, which gives
it the Nosferatu-look. These bodies would be sterile to all ends and purposes,
and they are rather under-aged bodies. They pretend to be the youth category.
So there is a very perverse discourse at hand. One the one hand, there's
a panic that we have to make children white and healthy in the labs, because
the women are not reproducing them, and are on procreative strike. The
absolute commodification and sterilisation of youth under those images…and
I would have a lot of quarrels with the hype around things like Trainspotting
and the whole junk culture from that angle…we are playing with fire here..and
Deleuze would have very hard things to say against this junkie thing. But
then at the other extreme, when sterility comes in the sense of the end
of the reproductive cycle, you get a different type of abject body. Recently
an actress in Hollywood was talking about the fact that Marlon Brando was
getting 2 million to play for 5 minutes in the latest Keanu Reeves film
or so. I mean, he's old and fat and revolting, and he gets 2 million to
play for 5 minutes!! Can you think of any old and fat woman who would get
paid that amount of money for 5 minutes??!! The fat aging body in our culture,
and the way in which class and race intersect with that, is an area that
I would put in a different category. It is has less to do with the sterility/procreation
thing, but is some new monstrifcation. For me it is not demonisation, but
the creation of new monsters. Our culture IS aging; we are on zero growth…this
has enormous economic, as well as aesthetic consequences. I think that
we need to reappraise a lot more what we would do with that category of
the 'new' monsters. Of course you have to be socio-culturally specific,
coz in the States the fat body is racialised; it's usually the black single
mother with a fat decomposing body. So you have to map them out very carefully.
Although for me the real sterilisation is what is happening to a certain
image of youth culture, and a certain flirtation with anorexia and heroin…that
I find a real patriarchal plot!
In the Romantic period you would have these tubercular bodies, also
as markers of consumption (consumption was of course the colloquial term
for TBC, in the sense that the disease consumed the body). But somehow
that representation of 'the body wasted'was conceived as having this artistic
aura to it…do you see ananalogy with the present situation?
RB: It's possible. People talk about the gothic imaginary, you know,
the vampire, the consumptive female…but for me a closer analogy would be
the syphilitic body. There was an enormous mass epidemic that touched most
'good' men of most families, and consequently affected millions of women,
who contracted it from their lawfully wedded husbands. And it was also
a secret, and not talked about. It spread like rabies, and not only induced
sterility, but also madness. Nietzsche died of it. It's at the heart of
Dora's disease, if you read the Freud case. I think it would be interesting
to do a comparison of this geography of diseases; it's a bit what Elaine
Showalter does badly - in my opinion - in Sexual Anarchy. It doesn't
really work; she's attempting these connections. Now TBC…I think you're
right, but I would have to think a bit more about it.
When I was referring to sterile female bodies, I was thinking about
the demonisation of tribades, for instance. And the obsession in 19th
century art, which feeds in to 20th century filmic representations,
of representing the lesbian body as monstrous and vampiric.
RB: In my chapter on monsters in Nomadic Subjects, I talk about
the different historical periods wherein certain imaginaries come up. It
is in the racialised anthropology of the colonial era, that you get the
nationally African vampiric lesbian women. It's very distinctive. Ambroise
Paré has a footnote on dishevelled and lascivious African degenerates,
hermaphrodites that have sex with the same sex, and that is the 17th
century. It has been there as one of the figurations of male anxiety about
deviant sexuality. I always try to make a difference between the level
of the imaginary, and what science came up with. For a long time science
and the imaginary work hand in hand, but then they split. In fact this
occurs with the making of the early theories of evolution. Then you get
a long period that science tries to purify itself. Then the connection
monstrosity and femininity disappears, because it was purely imaginary.
Then it reappears after the nuclear disaster because of mutations, and
because of the procreation of new monsters…most of whom are still not quite
documented. I read in the papers yesterday, that they are raising 400 million
dollars to put a great big sarcophagus over Chernobyl, to make sure that
that doesn't leak. But in the meanwhile birds and species are changing
colour and shape, and the damage has been done. I think that it is with
the post-nuclear that there is a return of the connection monsters/feminine,
which we lost in the period of pure scientificity, which is those 80 years
when teratology [the science of monsters] is a real science. And before
that it is free for all. I mean, the monster is just a sign of pejoration,
and is interchangeable with the feminine. Although it is not only limited
to women, it covers certainly all other 'others', especially the colonial.
For Linnaeus African man is a monster, not of the human species…that's
his classification system, and it is done without batting an eyelid. I
think you have to distinguish the metaphorical level from the material
foundation of the scientific discourse about science, because that's one
that in the long run is more dangerous, because the imaginary goes on.
We continue representing female cyborgs, riot grrls as witches, as dangerous.
What science has come up with, and the way in which the reproduction of
deviance has been absolutely repossessed by the techno-doctors, that's
a different line, much more sober, much quiter and much more difficult
to track. But in the long run the triumphant one. There people are not
very metaphorically minded; they just need to reproduce white babies for
the white species, period! And they are going to do it whether the women
cooperate or not. And then you get to Gena Corea and the mother-machine
argument, which is a bit techno-phobic, but there's a lot to it, in the
extent to which the desire to reproduce the white baby at an age of demographic
crisis, really propells an industry. I mean, they are really scared that
we are growing old!
I want to touch again on the concept of time. What is your view on
cyborgian figures, such as transsexuals/genderists who disavow, if not
rewrite, their story of biological origin? Do think that their self-acclaimed
cyborg subjectivities - as subjects in transit, never reaching telos, for
once you reach that stage wherein you 'pass' as a woman or man, you have
lost the transitory quality - might offer us useful strategies of resistance?
RB: In all the work I have done on nomadism, I have always been a bit
more conservative on this point of sexual identity. I have a very ambivalent
relation to it. On the one hand, if we agree that identities of all kinds,
including the nomadic interstetials in-between are inter-active; they require
other people; they are retro-spective - you reconstruct them a posteriori,
but you don't know a priori where you are going - and they are floating
or drifting. But they require you being embedded in a set of interactions.
They are NOT about willful solipsistic self-naming. If we agree with that,
then I can say OK…any experimentations with degrees of chopping up, breaking
down, revisiting, cannibalising, metabolising, different degrees of inter-sexuality
is fine…so long as it doesn't become this solipsistic self-naming exercise
that would fit in the nihilism of contemporary culture. The entire youth
of the Western world would be then on drugs, or video-drugs and call themselves
cyborgs, and drop out of the production system, quite simply because there's
no job for everybody…we need a total number of people to be unemployable,
and to stay on welfare, and that's fine if it is a whole section of our
youth. I am very very worried about the nihilistic potential of that part.
If it is a creative, productive, collectively embedded set of experimentations,
that wilfully target full termination, fixed identities based on the phallus
etc..then go all the way! But so much of what I read about this flirtation,
you know Arthur Kroker and this 'degenerative tumescent', or whatever he
calls it..floating identities..well, that scares me a lot. Because I know
from practice, and my years in feminism, that change is a difficult precarious
thing, that identities are fragile. Some of my generation are drugged out,
boned out, in jail, they committed suicide, cancer took them at the age
of 35. I saw a whole generation just go into rot, because we wanted change
so quickly, and we couldn't wait. Now before we rush ahead towards quick
changes, I just want to take the time to say: changes are painful, difficult,
fragile things. And there is where Deleuze has got a very strong ethical
message: you've got to have systems that are sustainable. You have whatever
changes you make,it must to be able to put up with it. It must be able
to live a satisfactory life out of it. Happiness is a fundamental political
ideal, and one that we need to bring back. Happiness in the sense of well-being,
of being able to sustain the changes that are coming upon us, and not being
destroyed by them. So that would be my warning,and this is why in Nomadic
Subjects at the level of identity - which I call my level 3 of sexual
difference - I preserve it and say: let each person choose the speed with
which they are capable of entering the pursuits of vertigo and transformation.
People have different speeds. We come after Nietzsche,we come after Deleuze,
people are made of different intensities. Not everybody can enter the great
mixmaster, and come out nomadic. A lot of people just need anchoring points.
And we have to give them opportunity to pitch the itensity of the changes
at different levels.