the rest of the natural world, has what she calls ‘a trickster quality that resists categories and projects of all kinds’ (1997: 128). Nature is viewed as an agent, actively contributing to the indivisible nature/culture with which we are faced. ‘We must find another relationship to nature besides reification, possession, appropriation and nostalgia’ (Haraway 2008: 158). This other relation is to view nature as ‘a partner in the potent conversation’ (ibid.) in which we attempt to constitute it. What is so notable about Haraway’s work is the careful respect shown to the concreteness of bodily existence and to the biological narratives, alongside narratives of historical and cultural kinds.
The nature/cultures with which Haraway concerns herself resist disentanglement into biological grounding and derived formations. Rather, they work in an interdependent way. Reflecting in a lecture on the ‘enzymes of the electro transport system … biological catalysts in energy-producing cells’, she concludes: ‘Machine, organism and human embodiment all were articulated – brought into particular co-constitutive relations – in complex ways which [were] … historically specific’ (2008: 162–3). The agency of the human, manifest in the articulation, narrative and visualizing of the process, required the agency (as Haraway calls it, in a use of the term ‘agency’ without a suggestion of intention) of the organism, and that of the machine, in ‘past and present … socio-technical histories’ (ibid.: 163). This is to recognize that our account of what we take to be nature emerges from a complex interaction of scientific investigations, cultural metaphors and the networks of technology which condition theory. Haraway’s attention to the availability of technology as influencing our theorizing is of particular interest when we are thinking about sexed differences. For it is in part the development of surgical technologies, enabling bodily changes, that facilitated, for example, the sexed categories of trans man or trans woman. Donna Haraway’s writings are centrally important in establishing not only the way culture mediates our understanding of nature but also the impossibility of maintaining any dualism of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. The two are irrevocably intertwined. It therefore seems mistaken to treat biology as if it had disentangled the natural and the cultural and presented us with nature disentangled. Biology itself is just one form of the entanglement.
In refusing biological determinism in relation to the formation of sexed identities, then, we do not have to deny that our biological bodies have a role to play. Certain very general facts of nature can give a kind of intelligibility to our having the concepts that we do, without determining them. The historical and current need9 for both sperm and egg for human and much animal reproduction, and their origin in bodily organs typically found in bodies with distinct visible morphologies, is suggestive of how we might have fixed on a binary sexed classificatory practice. This is the framework to which Alcoff is drawing our attention. But further research and diverse cultural practices have shown these biological features to be less than determining. The complexity of the entanglements between biology, cultural practices, and technological developments, which Haraway highlights, has allowed for changes in the way in which reproduction is possible – via IVF, for example, and sperm donation – and, thereby, to diversity in the familial and kinship structures within which children are raised. Historical, cultural and socio-economic factors have always resulted in very diverse sets of relations within which children are raised, but recent developments have the consequence that these structures do not require one parent sexed male and one parent sexed female. And with these changes the conditions prompting a sexual binary may themselves be undermined.
The entanglements to which Haraway draws our attention, and which we are highlighting within the context of a project addressing sexed difference, are not simply entanglements of matter and meaning. The biological body is placed in entanglements with the bodies of other humans in varieties of kinship and other social relations. And we are in relation to animals, with the matter of the planet as a whole and all its inhabitants, which Haraway (2016) also calls kinship relations. We are entangled in economic systems, as well as within systems of meanings and the workings of the imaginary. Some of these we will address in the rest of this book.
Notes
1 See the discussion in Gatens (1996). One of the important influences on first making the distinction was the work of Robert Stoller (1968), who paid attention to both transvestite and transsexual people. For Stoller, ‘a person’s gender identity is primarily a result of … [social] influences. These … can completely override the biological fact of a person’s sex and result in, for example, the situation of the transsexual [person]’ (Gatens 1996: 6). Nonetheless, it is not clear that the distinction is adequate to capture the very diverse experiences of trans people, a point we will return to later in this book. 2 The scientific scepticism of ‘binary’ sex – that is, the idea that there are men and women and that they can be clearly distinguished – started even earlier. In 1968 the Journal of the American Medical Association carried an article by the biologist Keith L. Moore listing nine different components of someone’s sexual identity: external genital appearance, internal reproductive organs, structure of the gonads, endocrinologic sex, genetic sex, nuclear sex, chromosomal sex, psychological sex and social sex. See also Heggie (2015). 3 Intersex Society of North America: www.isna.org/node/523. 4 There is clearly a question as to why this is, and some argue that, though women do not perform to such high levels as men, this is because of a history of exclusion and that, theoretically at least, as women and men’s achievements begin to converge, they could in time equal out. 5 The reporting of this matter has been marred by an ugly sexism and racism. Castor is claimed to look masculine, on a standard of looks which privileges a certain kind of white femininity and echoes what Lugones (2010) calls the colonial logic of gender and race. Similar problems have beset the reporting of the achievements of other black female athletes, such as the tennis player Serena Williams and gymnast Gabby Douglas. 6 These writings have been called ‘new materialism’ to distinguish them from both reductive materialism, which sees scientific facts as determining culture, and Marxist historical materialism, which will be the focus of chapter 3. 7 There is some slippage in these discussions between biology conceived as biological facts and biology as a science. We take it that the concern is that our accounts of everyday sexed difference reflect the facts of biology, whatever these may be, and that an engagement with biology as a science is required to provide the best articulation of those facts. 8 Grosz quotes approvingly from Darwin: ‘We have thus far been baffled in all our attempts to account for the differences between the races of man; but there remains one important agency, namely Sexual Selection. … It can further be shewn that the differences between the races of man, as in colour … &c., … might have been expected [from] … sexual selection’ (Grosz 2008: 35). 9 This need is, of course, currently being undermined with the development of cloning.
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