Ph.D. Octopus

In the best and most typical of grad student fashions, Mircea wrote a blog post rather than his response paper, and sent it our way. This post first appeared at Mircea’s blog, Just Speculations, and challenges us to actually take a plunge into the abyss of Glenn Beck’s political thought. Is it fair to say that only a grad student on the brink of qualifying exams would dare such a thing? But this is historical scholarship applied to contemporary issues at its best — Read On.  -Luce

by Mircea

One of the things I have been trying to say for a while is that, with the 2012 election coming up, we (academics, concerned “progressives,” what have you) need to pay more serious and sustained attention to the political thought of the U.S. Right. In other words, to move beyond mere outrage at the latest crazy thing Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin say and take their ideologies and convictions at face value, explaining as much as possible where they come from and what they might mean.

If only because, for my impending qualifying exams in the History PhD. programme, I’ve been reading a bit about the British Empire, it provides as good of a place to start as any. I want to argue that certain long-standing assumptions and ways of thinking about the world (particularly the Middle East and Africa) that formed the repertoire of British imperialists in the dying days of the Empire provide a useful framework for understanding what drives contemporary U.S. conservatives in their understanding of Obama and the role of the American Empire in today’s world.

Responses to Glenn Beck’s spectacular rant on the Egyptian Revolution have ranged from sheer incredulity to anger and derision. At the risk of simplifying an enormously convoluted and paranoid argument, Beck thinks that the uprisings across the Middle East represent an alliance of Communists and Islamic fundamentalists that seeks to simultaneously institute a Caliphate and destroy Western Europe. Student protesters in London, quiescent (for now!) British and French Muslims, and the youth in Tahrir Square are all facets of the same anti-Israel, anti-American and anti-capitalist project. The obvious response is to localise every such movement and disaggregate the fear of Marxism/socialism from Islamic fundamentalism; is not Tunisia different from Egypt different from Iran etc.? Do not atheist Marxists hate Islamic fundamentalism? And so on. But this misses the real appeal of the paranoid or conspiracy bent of mind, and underestimates its historical coherence and staying power.

In her book Spies in Arabia, about British covert intelligence and air control in the Middle East from World War I through to the 1930s, Priya Satia argued that British official thinking was in the persistent grip of this very mentality. Faced with a series of nationalist uprisings after the War and with uncertain political developments in the old Russian and Turkish empire, the British intelligence community was searching for “a single secret center directing global unrest” despite the resolutely and evidently “local” character of the various movements. Everywhere they looked, the British saw “a web of secret societies dubbed the ‘Asiatic Islamic federation’ which had been converted to Bolshevism.” These worked to undermine the nation-state under Western backing of the mandates: “‘Islamic consciousness’ shared with the ‘European Labour Movement’ a highly dangerous international dimension.” (pp. 203-211)

It is easy to see how, regardless of the particular institutional and context-specific dimensions of the British intelligence problem in the Middle East at this time, the desire to apprehend the Middle East as a land of conspiracy and intrigue has been passed on to those strands of conservative thought in America that still holds vested interests in an established Middle Eastern order (today, anchored by Israel and client regimes like Mubarak’s Egypt and the Saudis rather than the Hashemite monarchies) that works for the benefit of the “paramount power.” Beck’s rhetoric is a mere reflection, and a faithful one at that, of the anxieties that inevitably come with imperial trusteeship. The political task facing us today, just as it was for critics of Empire in Britain’s parliamentary democracy, is to expose and attack these interests as they stand. Ridicule only gets us so far.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Luce

I’ve been afraid to post recently because almost anything I might write would probably come in the form of an anticipated general exam question (a month and a half away!) which would only serve to bore you and send me into a panic attack (also because I fear anything I write wouldn’t make half-sense, since my mind in the apt words of a friend looks like borscht soup at the moment). However I’ve been reading Habermas’”Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” an essay that appeared in German in 1968 in his Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics. The essay is dedicated to Herbert Marcuse (on his 70th! birthday — I’d forgotten how old he was 1968!)

It contains a passage that rings true today:

Activ[ist] students, who relatively frequently are in the social sciences and humanities, tend to be immune to technocratic consciousness because, although for varying motives, their primary experiences in their own intellectual work in neither case accord with the basic technocratic assumptions.

The technocratic consciousness being one that sees society as something to be controlled and improved by solving a series of technical problems, rather than as a normative order whose meaning and values are debatable. So basically technocratic consciousness doesn’t ask “ought” questions; it asks how we can fulfill what we want under the current system but doesn’t ask how we might potentially want to live our lives.

On reading the above quote my mind immediately went to various friends in humanities and socialsciences who support the NYU union and who have noted a disparity between support for the union in the humanities versus in the more ambivalent sciences. To a certain extent I’d chalked this up to scientists having a sweeter funding deal.

Students occupy Hamilton Hall at Columbia in 1968

I guess I was struck by the uncanniness of what Habermas said about 1968. Obviously I shouldn’t be so surprised– I myself have criticized the problem with universities’ increasing focus on the sciences and problem-solving, rather than on critical thinking, and have suggested some practical implications of this.

So here are the questions up for debate: is this a transhistorical phenomena? Did it begin with 1968 or with Weber’s disenchantment? Are we today just experiencing  a quantitative increase of a problem that began with ‘modernity’ itself? How connected are today’s student struggles to those of 1968?

[I ask the latter with genuine curiosity. I went to Columbia as an undergraduate and was always mildly annoyed by students who invoked the "1968" tradition--mostly because those students weren't occupying buildings so I thought it a weak appropriation of the 1968 legacy-- but perhaps I shouldn't have so quickly dismissed the comparison.]

by Luce

I went to jury duty last week at the sleepy Middlesex County Courthouse in Somerville, MA and ended up sitting on what appeared to be an open-and-shut civil trial with relatively low stakes. I was there at 8 and out by 3, and within those 7 hours something I’d always abstractly known was brought home experientially: that the legal cards are really stacked up against certain segments of society.

It is not a profound thing for an historian to say that her legal system is flawed. And yet, as someone who has invested her life in “knowing more,” it was jarring to be asked to make a decision directly impacting two people’s financial situations on evidence that would  hardly support half an undergraduate term paper. As historians we are taught to keep digging through the archives, to distrust every seemingly obvious discourse, to employ a hermeneutics of suspicion, to doubt the possibility of ever discovering a “truth,” to consider the entire intellectual, social, cultural, political context of one’s narrative. For historians everything is a relative “lie,” since every claim depends on the claimant’s positionality.

In order to determine whether a woman should be awarded damages from an apartment manager she had accused of negligence due to a loose railing that ostensibly caused her to fall and break her collar bone, a jury of 6 (plus 1 alternate) listened to 2.5 hours of testimony by 3 witnesses–one the manager, one the woman, and one the woman’s friend. The questioning was constrained by legalese, yes and no answers to cross-examination, constant interruptions by the judge asking the lawyers to rephrase their questions or rephrasing their questions for them to make them understandable to the witnesses. Photos were shown of the staircase, though they had been taken at some vague time after the incident and so provided no real evidence of the situation of the staircase at the time of the incident. But significantly this point was hardly emphasized, and my fellow jurors kept referring to the photos as if they represented the exact same situation the woman herself had encountered.

Here’s the thing. At the end of the day this was basically a “he said, she said” case. She said that she had gone to the owner’s apartment building at 2am to bum a cigarette from a friend, had walked up two flights of stairs hanging onto the railing, fell back when the railing loosened and broke, lay on the floor for five minutes calling for help and then walked home, called a personal injury lawyer first thing in the morning, but waited 9 days to go to the hospital after the pain failed to subside. He said that everything she said was a lie, that the railing was in good condition, and that he was an excellent apartment manager.

I relied on the questioning of two smarmy lawyers who used their time both to ask leading questions and to engage in character assassinations. To the woman from the defense lawyer: “Isn’t it true that there’s a picture of you drinking a bottle of alcohol outside that building?… You don’t work during the day, correct? You just lie around all day?… You are on the following medications…” To the manager from the plaintiff lawyer: “You’re not from this country, are you? Lebanese?”

In order to decide a case that in the end turned on the plaintiff’s inconsistencies and the defendant’s more polished responses, the judge told us that we would need to judge the credibility of the witnesses in order to judge their evidence. Easy enough, right? Just decide if we believed them based on whether, to us, they were believable.

And yet how was I to judge what was credible for a woman on the margins of society? “The moment she said she was going out to bum a cig at 2am I knew this thing was bogus,” a fellow juror said. But why? The definition of negligence runs along the lines of a resident or guest experiencing injury due to lack of upkeep by the owner. A woman going out to score coke at 2am could still be the victim of a faulty railing, right?

This is when the sociology of the trial became both interesting and determinative. My fellow jurors were mostly middle-class native-born Bostonians — mothers, a school cafeteria worker, a musician/tech guy. There was one biology PhD, who convinced me even further of the need for analytical thinking developed through the humanities. I of course was the effete humanities academic. And as such I was the self-designated devil’s advocate; to my fellow jurors, the naif and fool. Because despite inconsistencies in the woman’s story, despite her decision to call a personal injury lawyer before visiting the hospital, and despite, or in fact because — a stance that makes my a priori assumptions just as problematic as my fellow jurors’ — this was a woman who was not in great physical or mental shape, who had a 9th grade education and apparently no job, who according to her own testimony lay around all day and then stayed up all night watching TV, I wasn’t so sure that her testimony was discreditable.

No she didn’t act as I would have. Yet from the beginning she inhabited a body vastly different from my own: older, heavier, much more unwieldly. A fall for her would likely have been an almost-tumble for me. If I were a woman without a paycheck or health insurance, maybe I would have first called a personal injury lawyer to discuss whether I could get the landlord to cover any potential bills. Perhaps I would have had a friend who’d had a similar experience, or maybe I would have watched so much TV with its ubiquitous ads for personal injury lawyers that that just seemed the natural first call. Maybe I would have waited 9 days to go to the hospital, because it’s easier to make a call than board a bus, because my body already hurt and I was used to everyday discomforts, because I was lazy, yet in the end still had a broken collar bone. Yet her story was inconsistent even on which part of the railing had fallen off and at which step she had fallen. But if it were 2am and I was on a number of medications, including a possible sedative (information that was never extracted though a sleeping pill was listed amongst her prescribed medications) and had had a bad fall, would I necessarily remember? Would I then remember to remember to get my story straight?

Trials encourage a lack of imagination and in their emphasis on judging what is “credible” to you, rather than, perhaps, what is “conceivable,” they encourage judgments often rooted in subjective socioeconomic positions. I was struck by the class politics involved in the jury’s deliberations–something I don’t often focus on very much in my own historical writing.

“This is a huge waste of our time. She’s a bum,” said one of the middle class working women as if that point were decisive. I felt the need to suggest that even bums have legal rights.

“It’s all a scam–they’re a bunch of scammers trying to take a hard-working man. Look at her, can’t even make $75 rent on section 8 housing some days, all her money going to cigarettes when she has asthma” said another about the woman’s friend. I countered that even those whose life decisions we don’t agree with might conceivably be telling the truth about a negligently managed stairwell. Yet all my fellow jurors’ minds were made up before they entered the deliberation room. And to be honest, so was mine.

Perhaps I’ve felt the need to write this blog post to make up for the fact that in the end I voted with the other jurors in a unanimous judgment finding the apartment manager not negligent. Despite my feeling that we couldn’t possibly really know what had happened, that the woman might at base have been telling the truth despite her inconsistencies, and that the entire process actively discouraged empathy and imagination, there was simultaneously no way to find the manager negligent. He could just as easily have been telling the truth as she, and favor fell on the side of inertia.

On the other hand, the jury didn’t need my vote — they only needed 5 of the 6 — and so I could have registered a symbolic vote against a system in which a person who existed outside the dominant behavioral norm was never going to receive a fair trial within the legal norm. Yet despite my counters and protestations during jury deliberations, I didn’t. I’m still not sure why.

I’m very pleased to introduce a guest post from Mircea, a history grad studying South Asia, first published at his blog, Just Speculations. I’m particularly glad that he’s coined the phrase “subaltern of my dreams.” I can only hope this will be the title of his first book. – Luce

by Mircea

Over on facebook, Leil Zahra-Mortada has collected an album of photographs of women protesting in Cairo over the past weeks. Here are a few particularly striking ones:

by Luce

This blog has already broached the question of what causal role we ascribe to technology in historical events, particularly in recent revolutions and uprisings in Tunisia and now Egypt. Malcolm Gladwell recently asked whether the Egyptians need twitter to revolt (answer: No), reasserting his conviction from last fall that

‘high risk’ social activism requires deep roots and strong ties… surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.

I’m not sure if I’d go that far. But what has felicitously fallen into my lap during my qualifying exams prep? An entire book devoted to the question of Control and Freedom Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. While not explicitly focused on political uprisings, her opening paragraph goes:

We have lived, and still live in, exciting times, from the fall of the Berlin wall to the heady days of the dot-com era, from the events of September 11, 2001, to the ongoing turmoil in geopolitical relations. all these events have been linked to freedom: the triumph of the Free World, the free market, and the free circulation of information; threats to freedom from abroad, and the U.S. mission to spread democracy and freedom. All these events have also been linked to technology and networks: Eastern Europe’s collapse has been attributed to computer technology and broadcast/satellite television; terrorist networks turn everyday technologies like airplanes and cell phone into weapons; the U.S. military’s and intelligence agencies’ control and communications networks are without rival, if not without fault. But what does it mean to attribute such causality to technology and link freedom to what are essentially control technologies?

In my best grad student fashion, I’m going to pull two conclusions already from this paragraph: first that the idea of technology as politically transformative is an old story, a fact that itself makes the relationship between technology and political freedom quite interesting; and second that what may be uninteresting in all the recent analyses of the significance of the tweet is the superficiality of the analysis. “Did twitter cause the revolution?” is a silly question and provokes a yawn-fest of a debate. “What does it mean to attribute such causality to technology and link freedom to what are essentially control technologies?” That’s something to think about.

I’ll get back to you when I’ve read the book’s other 300 pages. Is it too much to hope that might happen in a few hours or so?

by Luce

In January 2009 the media midwifed a new hybrid species and dubbed it Octomom. Octomom was 33-year-old Nadya Suleman, a California woman who had an unknown number of eggs implanted using IVF and gave birth to octuplets on January 26, 2009, bringing her total brood to 14. Since then Octomom has never quite left us. Just last week she appeared on Oprah to talk financial difficulties.

Once it became known that Suleman’s octuplets, only the second set to be born alive in the United Sates, were no miracle but the result of an assisted reproductive technology [ART], that all her other children had also been born through IVF, and that Suleman herself was single and unemployed, a media storm blitzed its way through the nation. The public spiritedly lambasted Suleman as a selfish woman who had irresponsibly used ARTs to bring 14 children into a world in which she and 11.6 million other Americans were unemployed.

Yet just a decade earlier in December 1998 Nkem Chukwu became the first American woman to successfully give birth to octuplets. Chukwu also used IVF to achieve this feat, but the American public did not gnash its teeth at the announcement. Chukwu was portrayed as a tired woman in a wheelchair next to her husband, a woman who discussed how her faith in God had brought her through a hard pregnancy, and who explained that she had refused a selective reduction operation during her pregnancy because she “could not find such words in [her] Bible.” No one pointed out that neither could she have found “IVF” there. Chukwu sacralized the births: “I wanted to have as many babies as God would give me,” and in turn the media portrayed the pregnancy as miracle rather than monstrosity.

In contrast no mention was initially made of Suleman’s refusal to undergo the same selective reduction procedure. A bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania called the scandal an “ethical failure” and there were invocations only of Suleman’s obsessions, not God’s gifts. Of course Suleman embodied one of the media’s favorite objects of fascination and reproach: young, female, desirous, and with a body that performed feats unknown to natural woman. Like other media favorites, Suleman even got her own hybridized nickname, Octomom, but unlike Brangelina, the hybridity was maternal rather than romantic, interspecies rather than intra-; Octomom was part-mom, part-(marine)-beast, and implicitly part-machine.

Though at first the nickname Octomom seems to reduce Suleman to the sum of her eight kids, the focus on Suleman’s desire or “obsession” instead reduced her eight newborns to herself. The scorn heaped on Suleman’s actions carried the implication that the children should never have been born in the first place, a curious stance for a society obsessed with abortion, celebrity children, and big families like the conservative Christian Duggars and John & Kate Plus 8. But Suleman made no attempt to explain her extraordinary pregnancy outside her own personal desires, and she lacked the trappings—husband, comfortable income, religious belief—that might have normalized it socially.

As a result, Octomom became a symbol of selfish enhancement, artificial excess, and irresponsible motherhood, and a reproductive technology that has been used to conceive over 250,000 pregnancies in the United States since the early 1980s suddenly became the focus of intense public discussion, giving bioethicists a platform to point out that while IVF is widely regulated throughout Europe, the US federal government only demands that ART clinics track their success rates.

Was the reaction to Octomom merely symptomatic of society’s anxiety about the impact of new technologies on society, or was something deeper at work concerning our contemporary understanding of maternal agency? I think Carl Elliott’s Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream [2003] is an interesting place to start thinking about the relationship between society, agency, treatment, and enhancement. Elliott theorizes that Americans’ obsession with identity and authenticity helps explain why Americans appear uneasy with enhancement technologies yet seek them in droves:

We need to understand the complex relationship between self-fulfillment and authenticity, and the paradoxical way in which a person can see an enhancement technology as a way to achieve a more authentic self, even as the technology dramatically alters his or her identity.

This authenticity often depends on the assertion of deficiency. By turning a characteristic into a deficit, such as the lack of social ease in those prescribed Paxil, an enhancement becomes a treatment.

Of course this construction of deficient or disabling conditions is an ever-evolving social process with consequences for a person’s understanding of his or her authentic self. Today social phobia is the third most common mental disorder in the US, but 15 years ago it was a rare problem. Diseases are not just culturally symptomatic, they are causal and therein lies the risk. Ian Hacking’s looping effect suggests that the identification of a disease creates the conditions for the manifestation of that disease in others. For instance the emergence of the idea of gender identity disorder gave people a means to conceptualize and reinterpret their experiences around a single idea, in this case a disorder with a surgical solution.

Elliott calls this semantic contagion, and while it is a more complex idea than the gloss I give it here, its relation to the idea of copycatting may help explain the suspicion and fear with which certain diseases or disabilities are approached.

In general, Elliott is sympathetic to those who make use of the possibilities of biomedicine like pharmaceuticals or sex-reassignment surgery to achieve self-fulfillment because he sees bodies, technology, and identity as co-constructive entities. He is even sympathetic to voluntary amputees, who want to cut off their limbs as surgical treatment for what they claim is a psychological condition, asking which is worse: to amputate your leg or to live with an obsession that controls your life. Elliott provocatively suggests that voluntary amputation is fair game in a world where you can “pay a surgeon to suck fat from your thighs, lengthen your penis, augment your breasts, redesign your labia, implant silicone horns in your forehead or split your tongue like a lizard’s.” Thirty years after the first test-tube baby, is Octomom just what society should come to expect?

In an America that takes its individual responsibility seriously and its babies very seriously, how a gestating mother behaves and what she ingests has become increasingly socially and medically monitored. Authors who have explored the construction of fetal alcohol syndrome or tracked the impact of obstetric tools like ultrasound have argued that this has resulted in the objectification and erasure of the mother, and her individual needs, as she comes to embody the potential life within her.

In The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery [1998] Monica Casper traces the implications of what in the 1990s was the relatively new medical field of fetal surgery. In fetal surgery a woman’s fetus is partially taken out of the uterus, operated on, and, if it survives, placed back into her womb for further gestation. In 1998, fewer than 100 fetuses, all of which would otherwise have died in the womb, had been operated on. Only 35% of the fetuses survived the surgery.

Though the numbers suggest that most women will miscarry or choose to abort a fetus that is likely to die in the womb, Casper sees fetal surgery as contributing to the materialization of the fetal patient at the expense of the mother. The mother and fetus are first separated as subjects, and then one is given preference over the other. Pathologization in this case doesn’t result in the reorientation of an identity but instead in the creation of one subject and the erasure of another.

Casper obviously sees her book as a warning signal to women; they should be aware that in being made invisible, their agency risks obliteration. In becoming patients, fetuses problematically become persons. Casper surely uncovers a discursive realm, with very material consequences, that represents a serious threat to maternal agency. But does she overstate the extent to which the creation of a fetal patient necessarily erases the pregnant woman, or the extent to which such erasure necessarily threatens the woman’s agency?

If we take Carl Elliott’s biomedical world as our own, then bodies are frequently objectified and technologized for one’s own interests. Does the materialization of another subject through this technologization necessarily threaten those interests? I am not doing Casper, who recognizes that both fetal and maternal interests could be valued in fetal surgery and argues that the field is a ripe area for a women’s health intervention, full justice. But I do want to challenge the idea that invisibility, in the face of social and bioethical surveillance, is necessarily a handicap to a pregnant woman’s agency. In a world where increased biomedical capabilities has engendered a field of bioethicists, of which a substrata warn the public to value mystery in the face of mastery, do efforts to regulate maternal behavior in fact intensify when a pregnant woman’s own subjective desires and agency become visible? In other words, are pregnant women in fact more free because the gestating woman is absent from the sonogram?

The case of Octomom would seem to confirm the idea that unmediated maternal agency provokes surveillance and can even reverse a typically pro-life discourse (though not necessarily its anti-choice iteration). Obviously the media’s issue with Octomom was partly the abnormality of giving birth to eight children at once, combined with the perceived social disadvantage of the children as members of a 14-child family led by an unemployed, unmarried mother. I want to argue, however, that the intense media circus surrounding Octomom suggests that we, benefactors of the biomedical era, owners of our own bodies, who need merely pop a pill each day to prevent pregnancy and who can pull out a fetus and put it back in, whose obsession with identity grants us leave to do most of what we want with our bodies, have centered many of our anxieties surrounding the blurry divide between perfection and freakishness, human mastery and mystery, on the bugaboo of maternal hubris.

Yet how to explain the fact that most women who undergo IVF are not seen as hubristic cyborgs? In Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies [2005] Charis Thompson details the small everyday negotiations that are made to normalize ARTs in fertility clinics. She argues that not just babies but parenthood is constructed in the reproductive clinic, and that we exist in a new biomedical era which requires us to reconceptualize objectification, agency, and naturalness. Rather than seeing a sharp division between personhood and non-personhood, for either the fetus or mother, Thompson sees many forms of fetal personhood that operate in direct relation to the mother’s own expressions of agency:

The clinics deal on a daily basis with human gametes and embryos, which function in this clinical setting as questionable persons, potential persons, or elements in the creation of persons. Embryos, for example, can go from being a potential person (when they are part of the treatment process), to being in suspended animation (when they are frozen), to not being a potential person (when it has been decided that they will be discarded or donated to research), and even back again to being a potential person (when a couple has a change of heart and frozen embryos are defrosted for their own use or for embryo donation.

As in Casper’s narrative, the pregnant woman still comes to embody the potential life attributed to the embryos, but Thompson asserts that this ontological change contains not just objectification but agency and subject-formation—a dense choreography on whose merits Thompson makes no explicit judgments, though she herself used IVF to give birth to her daughter. Just as Elliott’s voluntary amputees objectify their own bodies to achieve a more authentic conception of themselves, women using ARTs allow the medical objectification of their bodies in order to assume the identity of motherhood.

Thompson traces how the work done in reproductive clinics naturalizes kinship and procreative intent, smokescreening patients’ exceptional agency in selecting gametes with certain characteristics or constructing non-normative, and previously impossible, bio-social family structures. Significantly, of course, IVF actually has a high failure rate, and many women often require three or four rounds before an embryo implants, though this fact doesn’t necessarily obscure the appearance of extraordinary control, as the ambivalent reactions to the NY Times story of the Twiblings recently demonstrated.

Because of the costs involved, many of those who use ARTs embody a certain socially desirable profile: white, heterosexual, partnered, middle to upper class. Toward the end of the 1990s, however, there was a shift in focus from childrens’ to parents’ reproductive rights, corresponding to a legal trend protecting privacy in the bedroom. Infertility has become pathologized so that some states now mandate that insurance companies cover a certain number of treatment cycles. What were once called artificial reproductive technologies, denoting enhancement, are now called assisted reproductive technologies, denoting aid and treatment. Finally, the language of genes has helped reconstruct kinship ties whose traditional linearity can sometimes be disrupted by ARTs. A mother who uses a daughter’s egg to give birth to her daughter’s sister can focus on genetic kinship rather than processual kinship. An Italian-American woman can invoke the idea that genes code for race and ethnicity to seek gametes that appear to represent a specific group identity.

All these factors contribute to the strategic naturalization of ARTs. When the biological facts of parenthood are underdetermined—for instance when a woman gestates a different woman’s egg—legal, medical, and familial conventions step in to naturalize kinship. In turn, biological entities, like genetics, are used to substantiate the social. In this biomedical process neither the natural nor the social is essentialized—elements of each work together and contribute to a recognizable process of “family building.”

The irony then is that a woman can achieve a great deal of agency by putting herself at the mercy of medicine so long as the desire and control that technology grants her to achieve an exceptional, nontraditional pregnancy in form or substance, is mediated, normalized, and  made invisible. And when other forces fail to naturalize an IVF procedure, abortion politics and its close companion, contemporary American religion, have a significant role to play in shaping public perception, as demonstrated by the Nkem Chukwu narrative.

Octomom incurred scathing public scorn and initiated a debate on the regulation of a reproductive technology that has been around for nearly three decades because Suleman made visible—literally embodied—the potential abnormality of ARTs and did nothing to mediate this abnormality through socio-naturalization or by deploying a supernatural discourse of God and miracles. Instead, Suleman’s story was told through the language of human “obsession,” “desire,” and “fixation.” As a result tabloids painted her as selfish and irresponsible, a drain on society’s resources, and the pregnancy as regrettable, the work of human hubris and misappropriated technology.

Ten years ago when Nkem Chukwu had her eight children there was no media storm; in fact the Chukwu octuplets were largely forgotten until Octomom. Nearly two years later, Octomom is still with us. An image of her very pregnant stomach photographed eight days before giving birth saturates the internet—in this photo both Suleman’s stomach and her face, which looks directly into the camera with a half-smile, are distinct and memorable. In October 2010 news sources began to report on the California trial of Suleman’s doctor for negligence. Paparazzi follow Suleman around and blogs speculate about post-pregnancy plastic surgery, the great symbol of American artificiality.

Childbearing in the US is tightly bound to narratives of self-sacrifice—whether it’s the mother who gives up drinking during pregnancy, her career to stay home, or her body to fetal surgery. And while we have reached a point where we endorse a normalized agency and right to parent that supports such sacrifices and naturalizes ARTs as treatments rather than enhancements, maternal self-interest must be mediated and muted, better off obscured than exposed.

Suleman was unusual in her use of reproductive technology to achieve an extraordinary birth, but she was also unusual because she made no effort to portray her pregnancy as natural, therapeutic, miraculous, or self-sacrificial. As a result she became an object of fascination, a much-photographed freakish symbol of hubristic enhancement. Yet the sudden public attention on the question of legal regulation of IVF thirty years after its American birth suggests that Suleman and her pathologized self-interest were also seen as potentially contagious. The border between extraordinary reproductive enhancement and typical treatment was a little too blurry. A fence had to be built, and the media have always been excellent fence-builders. They drew up plans and the easiest way to build it was to turn a woman into a cyborg.

In honor of Paul the Psychic Octopus who correctly predicted the 2010 World Cup match winners (though note that he was NOT the octopus who predicted the 2008 UEFA European Football Championships), this memorial was unveiled at the Sea Life aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany yesterday.

Wrap those tentacles around a doctoral degree, and I’m sure any of the bloggers here at PhD Octopus would be glad to take it home with them.

by Luce

We’ve pretty much gotten past the point where cultural commentators decry the internet for dumbing down ideas and have entered an era of where we ask more complex questions about what sort of cultural, political, and social work the Internet, particularly its intellectual and literary production [blogs, onlines mags, newspapers] and social networking features, does. Note that the two actually overlap quite a bit: fodder for thought is exchanged via facebook walls (the undoubtedly apocryphal story of the founding of this blog claims such exchanges as inspiration) while blogs foment social connections (I can count a number of friendships that have directly or indirectly resulted from my writing here).

Weiner’s recent post on Facebook and Tunisia and the discussion that ensued is an example of how we’ve begun to conceive of the Internet as at least Janus-faced. The attempt to historicize the internet by claiming forebears, such as Robert Darnton’s 18th century French scandal sheets, what he calls “pre-modern blogs,” signals that historians are ready to look at the internet as a text, a point of power exchange, a site of identity construction, and so on.

It’s been interesting reading through some historical literature on recent technologies and social movements to see how historians have conceptualized a technology that is still very much in the making. Then again, so is the book. The question is not when should you write a history of something that appears “new,” but how you can write it so that its newness doesn’t drive your narrative. One way to remain cautious yet still attentive to the significance of the technology might be to think of it in terms of Foucauldian beginnings, which imply historical difference, rather than of origins, which presume causation.

A failed attempt to think about the historical significance of new communications technologies, like the cell phone or the internet, in a nuanced way is found in the otherwise good book by Mikael Hard and Andrew Jamison Hubris and Hybrids: A Cultural History of Technology and Science [2005]. I won’t even get into the problem of the authors’ underlying premise that modern technology has engendered cyborg hybridity [it might be interesting to think about why we think about it like that, but not to actually appropriate the concept as your own analytical tool. After all, wasn't the first time a human picked up a hammer an instance of techno-human hybridity?]

The following description of cell phones from Hubris and Hybridity rehearses simplistic themes of technological alienation and superficiality completely detached from concurrent phenomena:

The irony seems to be that as we communicate more with more people, the content of this communication becomes ever more superficial. Cell phones definitely allow greater flexibility and the appropriation of new spaces, but do they really guarantee closer contacts and more intimate relations?

These seem silly questions, and my use of Skype this summer to stay connected with family and friends is an easy anecdotal counter.Which perhaps points to a another thing to be aware of when writing histories of things that your readers will consider contemporary to them: everyone has a countering anecdote.

The other, and for me more interesting, example of a historian looking at the effect of the internet was in Ilse Lenz’s Die Neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland [The New Women's Movement in Germany] where she briefly discusses how the internet in the late 1990s helped to demonstrate the constructiveness of gender, as men and women were able to moonlight as various, multiple sexual and gender identities online in ways they were typically unable to in their public lives.

If we follow Judith Butler and see gender as a performance, an identity that is constituted through repetitive stylized acts, a repetition that both fortifies and undercuts identity as small but potentially significant changes are introduced in the performance, then what has the internet contributed to our conceptualization of gender identities? Some might say that the internet’s wide distribution of hard core porn has re-awoken a primal violent male sexuality [I'll get to that in a different post]. Carl Elliott’s Better than Well describes how the internet allows marginalized queer (in a broad sense) identities to form biosocial communities, thus strengthening such identities against a normalizing world.

I think though that Lenz is describing something different. Elliott’s queer communities conceive of themselves as embodying stabilized, if socially unacceptable, identities. The internet is a tool that allows these identities to be more easily expressed and supported, though it may also help construct such identities as individuals reinterpret their experiences into ossified identities as a result of the “semantic contagion” facilitated by the internet. Still there is no theorizing on how the internet contributes to the subtle shifting of such identities.

So what role does the internet play in the performance of gender? Does an individual’s gender identity change as a result of one’s internet performance in line with Butler’s miniscule but potentially consequential shifts? And is it only those who take on extravagantly different online identities that contribute to these shifts, or do we all?

Let’s take me for an example. Though only briefly. Both because I haven’t actually  self-analyzed my gendered blogging experience too much and because I lack a certain desire to publicly plumb my gender identity online — undoubtedly this has something to do with the way I was socialized as a heterosexual female within the cultural milieu in which I was raised. I give you all leave to totally over-analyze the ambivalence, skittishness, and swift ducking behind theory all contained in this last paragraph at will.

When I began to blog over at my old, short-lived personal blog this summer, Something Pending, I made a deliberate effort that lasted perhaps a week, to obscure my gender. Though perhaps I was wrong, I thought the pseudonym Luce could go either way on the binary: perhaps it was short for Lucy (it’s not), perhaps it referred to Henry Luce, the American publisher (it didn’t). My blog design was chosen for its grayness, its ugliness, and what I thought was a sort of gender-neutral tech-iness. I described myself as doing “Criss-crossed thinking on reproduction, technology, and the law. With some historian speak. And maybe a few stray thoughts about my research and travels…” Was “reproduction” a dead give-away? Maybe, depending on my readers’ biases. But as someone who is quite aware of her audience, the lack of obvious gender added another layer of anonymity. I’ve wondered whether it was this gender neutrality or the general anonymity that allowed me to take on what felt like an atypically aggressive tone early on. Of course, that tone has now just become part of my identity as a blogger.

So here are some questions: was I erasing myself or was I passing? In being ‘gender neutral’ was I by default perceived, or did I perceive myself as, masculine? That is, on the internet: if not feminine, then masculine?

Secondly, does the internet mean the death of the subject, and relatedly, the author? Given the cloak of anonymity, do we take the opportunity to masquerade through a number of guises, or do we assume a stabilized one? Do we even construct an even more strongly subjective identity than we do in other spheres of life because we have more control over whom we interact with, more time to consider our written responses, more agency in determining which topics we will and will not engage with?

Robert Darnton made a passing “death of the author” argument about contemporary blogs at a talk I went to recently. But I’m unconvinced that this is the case. Blogs are most often about pseudonymity rather than anonymity after all. And those pseudonyms develop their own voices, often tied to their “real” world identity. My gender neutrality didn’t last that long because I really wanted to talk about abortion and reproduction from an obviously gendered (female) perspective. Maybe I could have challenged notions of femininity and masculinity if I had engaged passionately with these topics while “passing” as male. But at the end of the day, I’ve never been a very good actor.

by Luce

Just wanted to point out a fantastic, extremely thorough post from Jonathan Jarrett at Cliopatria on details of new governmental higher ed policies and resulting protests in the UK, where the government has decided to cut its subsidy of teaching by 80% overall and 100% in the Humanities:

This will, ineluctably, mean the raising of tuition fees on new students, a massive consequent rise in the cost of higher education and its consequent restriction to those who can pay to a much greater extent than at present….If you believe in meritocracy, equal access, a level playing field and so on, there is no way not to be angry about this. If you believe that higher education contributes something to a person, and that academic research and teaching are worth something, this is an attack on that belief, a belief which is clearly not shared by a powerful part of the current government.

Jarrett documents protests in Cambridge and Oxford which I think he rightly sees as sign that the UK government has radicalized a student body that had been very sleepy before. Sustained occupations and protests went on for a week at Cambridge a month or so ago.

You should also for sure read an essay in the London Review of Books by Stefan Collini on the Lord Browne report, which has been a key instigator in the dramatic shift the UK has taken in its funding scheme for univerisites, but most significantly in its approach to the underlying value of education itself:

Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as the provision of a public good, articulated through educational judgment and largely financed by public funds (in recent years supplemented by a relatively small fee element). Instead, we should think of it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e. universities).

While I am all for student voice in university government and teaching, a thing that the UK has done much better than its American counterparts with a tradition of student unions, the idea that higher education should pander to the financially-driven demands of its undergraduate population is  ludicrous. Academic critique and original analysis for one depend on an educational system that protects diversity of argument [manifested within a variety of disciplines and offerings] against a contemporary discourse that can tend toward the totalizing. And secondly, if you shape your curriculum according to the perceived desires of your students you reify them into their current incarnations — you take away the opportunity for them to grow. Without that opportunity I’d likely be sitting on the 20th floor of a corporate law office across from Rockefeller Center right now.

Not to get dramatic (though the situation seems bizarre enough), but I’m going to go ahead and quote some Dialectic of Enlightenment on this one:

Subjectivity has given way to the logic of the allegedly indifferent rules of the game, in order to dictate all the more unrestrainedly. Positivism, which finally did not spare thought itself, the chimera in a cerebral form, has removed the very last insulating instance between individual behavior and the social norm. The technical process into which the subject has objectified itself after being removed from the consciousness, is free of the ambiguity of mythic thought as of all meaning altogether, because reason itself has become the mere instrument of the all-inclusive economic apparatus.

[Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (Verso, 1979 ed.), p. 30; orig published 1944 as Dialektik der Aufklärung]

Update: Thanks to Greg for pointing out Simon Head’s great essay in the New York Review of Books, which [rightly] argues that the “alliance between the public and private sector has become a threat to academic freedom in the UK, and a warning to the American academy about how its own freedoms can be threatened”

Texas A&M University of College Station, Texas, provides an extreme example of a teaching factory in the making. For the academic year 2008–2009 each faculty member at Texas A&M was given a “profit and loss account” by the university administration, where the “loss” of the faculty member’s salary was or was not offset by teaching revenues brought in by the faculty member in the form of “semester credit hours.” Professors were in the red when their salary “loss” exceeded their teaching revenues. A professor’s research and publication record, and the value of research grants he or she might have received, did not figure in the profit and loss calculations. So Professor Chester Dunning, a tenured historian of Russia with a distinguished research and publication record, was nonetheless judged to be a $26,863 “lossmaker” for the university because his total salary plus benefits of $112,138 well exceeded the $85,275 he attracted in semester credit hours.