... Dr Panos Zavosvariously described as a 'fertility maverick', 'a maverick and ... more ... Dr Panos Zavosvariously described as a 'fertility maverick', 'a maverick and egotistical doctor' and, of course, 'Dr Frankenstein' (Huxford, 2000; Turney ... Alex Thomson, presenter of Channel 4 News, conducted a live interview with Zavos as part of the channel's coverage of the ...
This article introduces the concept of imaginactivism to investigate the ways in which interpreti... more This article introduces the concept of imaginactivism to investigate the ways in which interpretive and activist communities are formed, inspired and reinvigorated by fictional cultural production. Several instantiations of imaginactivism, including a film pitch, a collection of short stories, and a panel organized for the Tiptree Symposium are discussed.
Sarah Lefanu claims that feminist science fiction is ‘informed by the feminist, socialist and rad... more Sarah Lefanu claims that feminist science fiction is ‘informed by the feminist, socialist and radical politics that developed during the 1960s and 1970s’ (Lefanu, 1988, p. 3). There were women writing science fiction much earlier, but the body of work labelled feminist science fiction burgeoned hand-in-hand with second-wave feminism. Lefanu states that The stock conventions of science fiction … can be used metaphorically and metonymically as powerful ways of exploring the construction of “woman”’ (ibid., p. 5), and Wolmark concurs, noting that ‘significant convergence between feminism and science fiction since the 1970s … has resulted in the production of texts in which gender and identity are central, as is the depiction of new and different sets of social and sexual relations’ (Wolmark, 1993, p. 1).
What Comes After Entanglement? is marked on its back cover as a Cultural Studies/Feminist Science... more What Comes After Entanglement? is marked on its back cover as a Cultural Studies/Feminist Science Studies/Activism text. Working at similar intersections, and with similar questions about the relationship between theory and praxis, I was eager to read this book when it was announced. Its subtitle Activism, Anthropocentrism and an Ethics of Exclusion gestures both towards the terrain that it excavates and its recommendation of an orientation to adopt. It may also be read as a mapping of feminist science studies' travel across the humanities and social sciences 1 , Giraud's contribution to the project of intergenerational labour defined by Donna Haraway in 'Situated Knowledges'-I think my problem, and "our" problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own "semiotic technologies" for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a "real" world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness (1991, p. 187).
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
The UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 was revised in 2008 in response to legal ch... more The UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 was revised in 2008 in response to legal challenges, societal changes and clinical advances since 1990. A provision permitting the creation of animal–human hybrid embryos was the subject of an extremely effective public relations (PR) campaign by embryo scientists and other supporters of such experimentation. In response, science correspondents of the ‘serious’ or ‘quality’ press commented favourably on these PR activities; this validation supplemented key messages in their press releases. The approval conferred on attempts to shape public opinion was explicitly contrasted with the public consultation exercise conducted by the UK Department of Health in 2005. Press coverage of the campaign demonstrated asymmetrical framings of the representativeness of public opinion and scientists' accounts of their proposed research. Scientists' views were represented as objective and therefore a legitimate basis for policymaking, in contrast with subjective views of putatively uninformed or opposed publics. Such opponents were cast as a counterpublic. The public interest was limited to evaluating the science on its own terms, thus pre-empting consideration of the possibility that public interests and scientists' interests may not coincide.
This article uses the figure of the Spiral Dance to draw out biographical, theoretical, and polit... more This article uses the figure of the Spiral Dance to draw out biographical, theoretical, and political similarities and points of friction between Haraway and Starhawk. It suggests that Haraway's assertion that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess foreclosed possibilities in feminism that have taken decades to reconstruct.
Este artigo introduz o conceito de 'imaginativismo' para conceitualizar as formas pelas q... more Este artigo introduz o conceito de 'imaginativismo' para conceitualizar as formas pelas quais comunidades interpretativas e ativistas sao formadas, inspiradas e/ou revigoradas pela producao cultural ficcional. Em seguida, sugere que o termo "feminismos de ficcao cientifica" e mais fecundo do que "ficcao cientifica feminista", devido a seu foco em um modo de producao do conhecimento que e ao mesmo tempo esperancoso, alegre e critico, e nao em genero (para)literario. Chama a atencao para a relacao genealogica entre as posicoes de sujeito do/a leitor/a e do/a escritor/a antes de discutir a inspiracao oferecida a uma constelacao de ativistas da justica social e ambiental por meio da producao cultural e do ativismo de tres mulheres que reconheco como feministas de ficcao cientifica: Starhawk; Walidah Imarisha e adrienne maree brown. Dois estudos de caso do imaginativismo sao discutidos brevemente; A adaptacao proposta por Starhawk et al. do romance The Fifth Sacred Thing , de Starhawk, e a antologia de Imarisha e brown, publicada por meio de financiamento coletivo, intitulada Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements . Ambas intervencoes sao contextualizadas dentro de uma rede de trabalho literario e ativista espacial e temporalmente estendida e, assim, atencao e dada para as qualidades iterativas e relacionais do imaginativismo. Concentro-me no extenso trabalho de organizacao, incluindo o uso do crowdfunding , no qual cada uma dessas mulheres se engaja para desenvolver e disseminar visoes coletivas de um mundo justo, assim como as habilidades e estrategias necessarias para materializar essa visao. Elas inscrevem leitores/as e escritores/as em suas visoes de futuros transformados, e fazem o trabalho de transformar futuros atraves da organizacao cotidiana e assente como lideres, participantes e aliadas no movimento social em multiplas escalas. Sua combinacao de atividades pragmaticas e praticas, para fazer com que as coisas se efetivem, com visoes de justica transformadora, bem como sua articulacao persuasiva da relevância dessa combinacao, sugere que os investimentos utopicos que muitos/as leitores/as sempre tiveram no potencial da ficcao cientifica para mudar a mundo sao bem fundamentados.
Joanna Zylinska's Bioethics in the age of new media is neither an applied ethics textbook for new... more Joanna Zylinska's Bioethics in the age of new media is neither an applied ethics textbook for new media practitioners nor a new media textbook for bioethicists. Its project is rather more ambitious, and its audience somewhat more diffuse than the title might lead casual browsers to imagine. In this book, Zylinska sets out to do nothing less than to develop a "different framework for thinking about ethics and life in the age of new technologies and new media." She expresses her intention to make a case for an ethics of life rooted in the philosophy of alterity, with life studied in both its molecular and social aspects, and attempts to outline what she calls a "nonsystemic bioethics of relations," to facilitate the exploration of kinship between humans and non-humans (such as animals and machines). She aligns her project with those of others working at the intersections of the media and the biosciences who seek to "dethrone human-centered moral philosophy from its position of an arbitrator over the value of life" (p. 29) and writes in dialogue with continental philosophy as well as with feminist social and cultural theory. The book will find a ready audience in those who are engaged in theorizing the "posthuman," and tracking its traces through contemporary culture, but may prove somewhat frustrating to those who seek a more pragmatic approach to what is to be done in the face of the convergence of new bio-and media technologies. The book is divided into two sections: 'Theorizing Bioethics' and 'Bioethics in Action.' In 'Theorizing Bioethics' Zylinska conducts a genealogy of contemporary bioethics and points to a path not taken which would have been less humancentered and more focused on the network of relations between the human, technology and the environment. She goes on to develop her own framework for bioethics which departs from Levinas's focus on the requirement to address and respond to the other in his/her infinite alterity, and extends this address to the non-human other absent from Levinas's philosophy. This requirement is inflected through Derrida's emphasis on the relational quality of this address and Stiegler's position that the human is "always already technological." One of her most striking claims is that as soon as she starts "asking questions about the general applicability and universal validity of this ethics" she is moving from ethics into politics. The final chapter in this section appropriately then explores 'Biopolitics Today'-"a political regime under which bodies and
Introduction 97 Utopian Pleasures of the Science Fiction Text 98 Theorising Passionate Investment... more Introduction 97 Utopian Pleasures of the Science Fiction Text 98 Theorising Passionate Investments 105 Orientation to the Other 107 Psychoanalysis And (Gendered) Subjectivity 110 Lack and Longing 111 Revaluing Mothers 113
In this article, a novel by the North American ecofeminist Starhawk is read for its theorisation ... more In this article, a novel by the North American ecofeminist Starhawk is read for its theorisation of the challenge of imagining futures which do not secure justice for some at the expense of others. The article puts this reading of The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) in dialogue with ...
QR of Birmingham and elaborating critiques of this dynamic field both from within; key interventi... more QR of Birmingham and elaborating critiques of this dynamic field both from within; key interventions by black and feminist scholars at CCCS are instanced; and from without, from disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. She also draws attention to significant ...
... Dr Panos Zavosvariously described as a 'fertility maverick', 'a maverick and ... more ... Dr Panos Zavosvariously described as a 'fertility maverick', 'a maverick and egotistical doctor' and, of course, 'Dr Frankenstein' (Huxford, 2000; Turney ... Alex Thomson, presenter of Channel 4 News, conducted a live interview with Zavos as part of the channel's coverage of the ...
... Dr Panos Zavosvariously described as a 'fertility maverick', 'a maverick and ... more ... Dr Panos Zavosvariously described as a 'fertility maverick', 'a maverick and egotistical doctor' and, of course, 'Dr Frankenstein' (Huxford, 2000; Turney ... Alex Thomson, presenter of Channel 4 News, conducted a live interview with Zavos as part of the channel's coverage of the ...
This article introduces the concept of imaginactivism to investigate the ways in which interpreti... more This article introduces the concept of imaginactivism to investigate the ways in which interpretive and activist communities are formed, inspired and reinvigorated by fictional cultural production. Several instantiations of imaginactivism, including a film pitch, a collection of short stories, and a panel organized for the Tiptree Symposium are discussed.
Sarah Lefanu claims that feminist science fiction is ‘informed by the feminist, socialist and rad... more Sarah Lefanu claims that feminist science fiction is ‘informed by the feminist, socialist and radical politics that developed during the 1960s and 1970s’ (Lefanu, 1988, p. 3). There were women writing science fiction much earlier, but the body of work labelled feminist science fiction burgeoned hand-in-hand with second-wave feminism. Lefanu states that The stock conventions of science fiction … can be used metaphorically and metonymically as powerful ways of exploring the construction of “woman”’ (ibid., p. 5), and Wolmark concurs, noting that ‘significant convergence between feminism and science fiction since the 1970s … has resulted in the production of texts in which gender and identity are central, as is the depiction of new and different sets of social and sexual relations’ (Wolmark, 1993, p. 1).
What Comes After Entanglement? is marked on its back cover as a Cultural Studies/Feminist Science... more What Comes After Entanglement? is marked on its back cover as a Cultural Studies/Feminist Science Studies/Activism text. Working at similar intersections, and with similar questions about the relationship between theory and praxis, I was eager to read this book when it was announced. Its subtitle Activism, Anthropocentrism and an Ethics of Exclusion gestures both towards the terrain that it excavates and its recommendation of an orientation to adopt. It may also be read as a mapping of feminist science studies' travel across the humanities and social sciences 1 , Giraud's contribution to the project of intergenerational labour defined by Donna Haraway in 'Situated Knowledges'-I think my problem, and "our" problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own "semiotic technologies" for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a "real" world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness (1991, p. 187).
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
The UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 was revised in 2008 in response to legal ch... more The UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 was revised in 2008 in response to legal challenges, societal changes and clinical advances since 1990. A provision permitting the creation of animal–human hybrid embryos was the subject of an extremely effective public relations (PR) campaign by embryo scientists and other supporters of such experimentation. In response, science correspondents of the ‘serious’ or ‘quality’ press commented favourably on these PR activities; this validation supplemented key messages in their press releases. The approval conferred on attempts to shape public opinion was explicitly contrasted with the public consultation exercise conducted by the UK Department of Health in 2005. Press coverage of the campaign demonstrated asymmetrical framings of the representativeness of public opinion and scientists' accounts of their proposed research. Scientists' views were represented as objective and therefore a legitimate basis for policymaking, in contrast with subjective views of putatively uninformed or opposed publics. Such opponents were cast as a counterpublic. The public interest was limited to evaluating the science on its own terms, thus pre-empting consideration of the possibility that public interests and scientists' interests may not coincide.
This article uses the figure of the Spiral Dance to draw out biographical, theoretical, and polit... more This article uses the figure of the Spiral Dance to draw out biographical, theoretical, and political similarities and points of friction between Haraway and Starhawk. It suggests that Haraway's assertion that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess foreclosed possibilities in feminism that have taken decades to reconstruct.
Este artigo introduz o conceito de 'imaginativismo' para conceitualizar as formas pelas q... more Este artigo introduz o conceito de 'imaginativismo' para conceitualizar as formas pelas quais comunidades interpretativas e ativistas sao formadas, inspiradas e/ou revigoradas pela producao cultural ficcional. Em seguida, sugere que o termo "feminismos de ficcao cientifica" e mais fecundo do que "ficcao cientifica feminista", devido a seu foco em um modo de producao do conhecimento que e ao mesmo tempo esperancoso, alegre e critico, e nao em genero (para)literario. Chama a atencao para a relacao genealogica entre as posicoes de sujeito do/a leitor/a e do/a escritor/a antes de discutir a inspiracao oferecida a uma constelacao de ativistas da justica social e ambiental por meio da producao cultural e do ativismo de tres mulheres que reconheco como feministas de ficcao cientifica: Starhawk; Walidah Imarisha e adrienne maree brown. Dois estudos de caso do imaginativismo sao discutidos brevemente; A adaptacao proposta por Starhawk et al. do romance The Fifth Sacred Thing , de Starhawk, e a antologia de Imarisha e brown, publicada por meio de financiamento coletivo, intitulada Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements . Ambas intervencoes sao contextualizadas dentro de uma rede de trabalho literario e ativista espacial e temporalmente estendida e, assim, atencao e dada para as qualidades iterativas e relacionais do imaginativismo. Concentro-me no extenso trabalho de organizacao, incluindo o uso do crowdfunding , no qual cada uma dessas mulheres se engaja para desenvolver e disseminar visoes coletivas de um mundo justo, assim como as habilidades e estrategias necessarias para materializar essa visao. Elas inscrevem leitores/as e escritores/as em suas visoes de futuros transformados, e fazem o trabalho de transformar futuros atraves da organizacao cotidiana e assente como lideres, participantes e aliadas no movimento social em multiplas escalas. Sua combinacao de atividades pragmaticas e praticas, para fazer com que as coisas se efetivem, com visoes de justica transformadora, bem como sua articulacao persuasiva da relevância dessa combinacao, sugere que os investimentos utopicos que muitos/as leitores/as sempre tiveram no potencial da ficcao cientifica para mudar a mundo sao bem fundamentados.
Joanna Zylinska's Bioethics in the age of new media is neither an applied ethics textbook for new... more Joanna Zylinska's Bioethics in the age of new media is neither an applied ethics textbook for new media practitioners nor a new media textbook for bioethicists. Its project is rather more ambitious, and its audience somewhat more diffuse than the title might lead casual browsers to imagine. In this book, Zylinska sets out to do nothing less than to develop a "different framework for thinking about ethics and life in the age of new technologies and new media." She expresses her intention to make a case for an ethics of life rooted in the philosophy of alterity, with life studied in both its molecular and social aspects, and attempts to outline what she calls a "nonsystemic bioethics of relations," to facilitate the exploration of kinship between humans and non-humans (such as animals and machines). She aligns her project with those of others working at the intersections of the media and the biosciences who seek to "dethrone human-centered moral philosophy from its position of an arbitrator over the value of life" (p. 29) and writes in dialogue with continental philosophy as well as with feminist social and cultural theory. The book will find a ready audience in those who are engaged in theorizing the "posthuman," and tracking its traces through contemporary culture, but may prove somewhat frustrating to those who seek a more pragmatic approach to what is to be done in the face of the convergence of new bio-and media technologies. The book is divided into two sections: 'Theorizing Bioethics' and 'Bioethics in Action.' In 'Theorizing Bioethics' Zylinska conducts a genealogy of contemporary bioethics and points to a path not taken which would have been less humancentered and more focused on the network of relations between the human, technology and the environment. She goes on to develop her own framework for bioethics which departs from Levinas's focus on the requirement to address and respond to the other in his/her infinite alterity, and extends this address to the non-human other absent from Levinas's philosophy. This requirement is inflected through Derrida's emphasis on the relational quality of this address and Stiegler's position that the human is "always already technological." One of her most striking claims is that as soon as she starts "asking questions about the general applicability and universal validity of this ethics" she is moving from ethics into politics. The final chapter in this section appropriately then explores 'Biopolitics Today'-"a political regime under which bodies and
Introduction 97 Utopian Pleasures of the Science Fiction Text 98 Theorising Passionate Investment... more Introduction 97 Utopian Pleasures of the Science Fiction Text 98 Theorising Passionate Investments 105 Orientation to the Other 107 Psychoanalysis And (Gendered) Subjectivity 110 Lack and Longing 111 Revaluing Mothers 113
In this article, a novel by the North American ecofeminist Starhawk is read for its theorisation ... more In this article, a novel by the North American ecofeminist Starhawk is read for its theorisation of the challenge of imagining futures which do not secure justice for some at the expense of others. The article puts this reading of The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) in dialogue with ...
QR of Birmingham and elaborating critiques of this dynamic field both from within; key interventi... more QR of Birmingham and elaborating critiques of this dynamic field both from within; key interventions by black and feminist scholars at CCCS are instanced; and from without, from disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. She also draws attention to significant ...
... Dr Panos Zavosvariously described as a 'fertility maverick', 'a maverick and ... more ... Dr Panos Zavosvariously described as a 'fertility maverick', 'a maverick and egotistical doctor' and, of course, 'Dr Frankenstein' (Huxford, 2000; Turney ... Alex Thomson, presenter of Channel 4 News, conducted a live interview with Zavos as part of the channel's coverage of the ...
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