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NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist andGender ResearchPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/swom20

Post-humanities is a Feminist IssueCecilia Åsberg Editor , Redi Koobak Guest Editor & Ericka JohnsonGuest EditorPublished online: 31 Oct 2011.

To cite this article: Cecilia Åsberg Editor , Redi Koobak Guest Editor & Ericka Johnson Guest Editor(2011) Post-humanities is a Feminist Issue, NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research,19:4, 213-216, DOI: 10.1080/08038740.2011.625369

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2011.625369

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EDITORIAL

Post-humanities is a Feminist Issue

It is a great pleasure to introduce this special issue of NORA, entitled Post-humanities—which we construe as the conceptual re-tooling and reinvigoration offeminist research within the humanities and social sciences. Such re-tooling is hereregarded as necessary so as to meet up with the accelerating changes withincontemporary life engendered by technoscience (new technologies for baby-making isbut one intimate example), our natural world (the climate for instance), and thediscrepancies that mount up when we keep Man as the given focal point of socio-cultural analysis.

As has often been commented upon in recent discussions about this predicament,the deterioration of the humanities is often linked to the growing cultural andfinancial importance of technoscience. With this issue, in which we engage in variousforms of post-humanist gender studies, we would like to make a strong case for anupdated alliance between feminist theory, humanities research, and technosciencestudies—an alliance that could re-calibrate the analytical tools for understanding theeveryday practices of the sciences and how they affect our sense of self, whileenhancing the relevance of the humanities as well as making the applicability offeminist theory more visible.

As something of a transdisciplinary area of its own, feminist technoscience studieshas emerged out of more than four decades of feminist materialist critiques ofbiological determinism and androcentric medical expertise. It is a heterogeneous fieldof research that takes its cues from the larger field of science and technology studies(as the study of the history and social construction of knowledge, technology, andmedical practice), from actor-network theory, but also from cultural studies andpost-colonial and feminist theory. Feminist technoscience studies zooms in on theways in which gender, as it intersects with other power differentials, gives shape toand challenges technology, the medical and natural sciences, and our veryunderstanding of nature, culture, and humanness. As humans, more obviously todaythan ever, are entangled in co-constitutive relations with technology and science, withother animals, and with the environment, it has become difficult to uphold notions ofthe human along the lines of androcentrism and anthropocentrism. This is the raisond’etre for research in the registers of both post-humanities and feminist technosciencestudies. In fact, feminist technoscience studies—such as the oeuvre of DonnaHaraway—pioneered much of the work that today may be called post-humanities (toemphasize the transitional dimensions of the disciplines connected to the human,cultural, and natural sciences) as well as that peculiar philosophical trend ofreturning to (process) ontological issues as these link up with epistemological andethical ones. Sometimes such trends are termed the material turn, or the post-human

0803-8740 Print/1502-394X Online/11/040213–216 q 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2011.625369

NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research,Vol. 19, No. 4, 213–216, December 2011

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turn, and they are emerging not only in gender studies but in many other areas ofresearch as well, such as media studies, environmental and policy research, culturalstudies, and science and technology studies.

In this special issue of NORA we take on what may thus be called the ontologicalturn in feminist theory, and the issues raised through concepts such as the post-human and various post-humanisms. This entails critical and creative reappraisalsof cultural research as well as social studies of science, technology, and medicine.Interdisciplinary approaches have fundamentally changed the humanities fromwithin. The object of study, the human, can no longer be taken for granted. Animalstudies, eco-criticism, feminist theory, post-colonial studies, and the recent boomwithin body studies engendered by the merging of queer theory and disability studies(crip theory) have challenged our foundational concepts, including that of gender.Such heterogeneous research also entails a range of exit points from which thequestion of what really counts as human within the Humanities today can be posedanew. Moreover, it involves a feminist challenge and a call for onto-epistemologicalinventiveness and novel conceptualizations able to map out the emergingentanglements of humans and non-humans, as only some of these entanglementsget to prosper while others are marginalized or even killed. Therefore, this specialissue particularly addresses the power-imbued relationships that transgress thebinaries of:

. nature and culture

. human and non-human (animal, machines, environment)

. sign and substance, the material and the meaningful

. natural science, humanities, technology, medicine and popular cultures

The aim of this special issue of NORA is to assess the state of the art in the field, todiscuss visions for its further development, and to create new synergies and dialoguesbetween the different branches of scholarship of feminist technoscience studies,sociology of medicine, human animal studies, materialist feminist theorizing, andcultural studies. These fields, as well as others, are here subsumed under the verysuccinct term “post-humanities”. Until now the area has, to a large extent, beendivided into subfields along many different lines in the Nordic communities andbeyond. This NORA special issue aspires to transgress such divisions.

We map out some of the threads of thought that string together key themes of thisspecial issue in our introductory position paper, a think piece entitled “Beyond theHumanist Imagination”. In addition to re-thinking “the human” in terms of whatgets counted as natural or cultural, this paper is offered in order to frame, forexample, the theme of how recent changes within science, medicine, and technologyare negotiated in our wider social imaginary, how we re-imagine the “facts of life”,such as conception, pregnancy, and parenthood in an age when a range ofreproductive technologies is available—as demonstrated by the first article,“Reproductive Imaginations: Stories of Egg and Sperm”. Merete Lie, Malin NoemRavn and Kristin Spilker focus on how stories of human reproduction have changedin contemporary Norway, both in the medical literature and amongst individualwomen and men. They discuss who and what is ascribed agency in these reproductive

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narratives and explore the different ways in which egg and sperm cells emerge as

entities occupying centre stage in contemporary stories of conception.In the second article, “Passing for Human in Science Fiction: Comparing the TV

SeriesBattlestarGalactica andV”,Aino-KaisaKoistinen examines the role that gender,

sexuality, and race play in the process of passing for human in the original and the

remakes of the popular science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica and

V. Gendered, sexual, and racial passing are crucially connected to the cultural and

political dynamics current at the time of the series’ creation, thus also to how humanity

comes to be construed and negotiated. Koistinen argues that signs of humanness and

inhumanness stick and slide between humans and the infiltrating alien others of the two

television series in a way that is telling of emerging understandings of humanness in our

own time.The nature of human nature has been thoroughly challenged, not only by various

types of feminist socio-cultural research, but also by the biological sciences.

Anthropologist Anna Tsing, focusing on the interconnected species relations in the

mushroom forest, has described human nature as an interspecies relation, which

spurred Donna Haraway to theorize our lives as “companion species”. Tim Jordan

takes up this concept in his article “Troubling Companions: Companion Species and

the Politics of Inter-relations” by examining the question of whether technologies can

be regarded as species or not. This question is analysed through a comparison between

Haraway’s companion species of her agility dog and the technology of the surfboard

and its rider. It is suggested that Haraway’s use of the concept of “becoming-with” in

relation to her conception of companion species leads to a limited target of analysis,

namely critique of the naturalization of social relations.In this issue’s Taking Turns, we are handing the baton over to Stacy Alaimo,

Professor of English at the University of Texas, Arlington, and Honorary Guest

Professor of the Posthumanities Hub at the Gender Studies Unit, Linkoping

University, Sweden in 2011. Professor Alaimo has published widely within feminist

theory, ecological humanities, green cultural studies, feminist materialisms,

corporeal feminisms, and science studies. At present, her research focuses on

creatures of the sea in art and science, through which she explores the limits of animal

studies, science, aesthetics, and ethics. In her piece, Alaimo suggests that feminist

materialisms transgress the outline of the human, and she considers the lively forces

and agencies that inhabit the world, not least the oceans. Alaimo contends that post-

humanist new materialism as well as decades’ worth of feminist theory may assist in

tearing down the assumptions that confine ethical and political considerations to the

domain of the Human.In her position paper, Iris van der Tuin proposes a new materialist understanding

of the notion of “always already”, famously connected to Jacques Derrida, that takes

humanities and not the natural sciences as its starting-point. This is, however, an

understanding that is not read within a linguisticist frame. It assigns a form of

difference that is always already slightly shifting the signification it presupposed. By

invoking the onto-epistemology of Karen Barad and the reinventive theoretical work

on Derrida by Vicky Kirby, van der Tuin puts her argument to the test and carries us

into an ontology of an a-human humanities.

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This special issue ends with two book reviews on similar themes. First, SallaPeltonen reviews Susan Hekman’s book The Material of Knowledge: FeministDisclosures (2010), and, second, Pat Treusch makes a German book available to usthrough her review of Epistemologie und Differenz. Zur Reproduktion des Wissens inden Wissenschaften, edited by Bettina Bock von Wulfingen and Ute Frietsch (2010).

As always, we hope that this issue of NORA will be useful in your research,teaching, and feminist activism within or outside academia. Manuscripts on a widerange of topics keep pouring into our online Manuscript Central as we continue toencourage all kinds of submissions! In addition we have a new special issue lined up—see the call for submissions in this issue. We hope to inspire you as readers, but also asscholars and authors, to consider sending us your work. Lastly, we would like toextend our warm thanks to everyone who contributed with their work to makethis issue truly special. We hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyedmaking it!

Cecilia Asberg(Editor), Redi Koobak & Ericka Johnson (Guest Editors)

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