How ‘cyborg feminism’ confuses technology with women’s progress
Madeline Fry Schultz
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We’re living in an age of what Mary Harrington calls “cyborg feminism.” This feminism, Harrington explains, “is a vision of what freedom is that’s inseparable from the technologies that make it possible.”
The author of the recently released book Feminism Against Progress, Harrington argues that by turning women into simulacrums of their real selves, today’s feminism isn’t really as empowering as it likes to think. I sat down with Harrington during her recent trip to Washington to discuss cyborg feminism, why first-wave feminism got memory-holed, and the relationship between transhumanism and the transgender movement.
Thanks to the advent of birth control, a “transhumanist technology” leading to the availability of abortion and even the popularity of the transgender movement, we’re told we no longer have to worry about the particulars of our bodies because we can transcend them, Harrington explained. This isn’t true, of course, but it is the prevailing cultural message that imbues everything from our media to our textbooks.
This all means that women’s personhood and participation in society are now predicated on the ability to alter the natural functioning of their own bodies, a message that, despite its hostility to women, has ironically been pushed by mainstream feminism.
“If you believe that your participation in society and your personhood as such are structurally predicated on your access to birth control and legal abortion, then you are in a sense inseparable from the machine,” she explained. “You don’t exist as a person except through your integration with these technologies.”
This perspective underlies the pro-abortion movement, which, according to this logic, makes abortion a necessary prerequisite for a woman’s full personhood. And yet, pro-life principles actually undergirded much of first-wave feminism, but that part of history has been erased by the “winners” of the feminist movement, the ones who valued “freedom” over “care.”
“First-wave feminism has been almost completely memory-holed because it’s problematic from the point of view of the feminism we now have,” Harrington said. (Not only is early feminists’ stance on abortion hopelessly archaic, but so is their support for the domestic sphere as a bulwark against the atomization of modernity.)
If cyborg feminism has won and it has freed women from their own bodies and their obligations to their children, why shouldn’t it also free them from their gender? For young people who’ve grown up with the internet, this logic is easy to follow. Yet Harrington, who describes herself as “extremely online,” isn’t anti-technology. Technology can be used for good, “provided we’re intentional about orienting it to how people are and not how we think people ought to be,” she said.
She gave the example of Keeper, a new dating service aimed at producing marriages that describes itself as “driven by AI and relationship science, guided by human care.” There are also a variety of natural family planning apps that serve as a digital alternative to hormonal birth control. And then there’s remote work, which can help families return to the preindustrial standard of the household as its own economy.
But most new technologies seem to want to transcend the natural desires and designs of our bodies. Harrington warns against this “disembodying effect of digital technologies,” which we see in the rise of the “transhumanist juggernaut.”
Despite pushing the transgender movement, this school of thought doesn’t actually care that much about transgender people, she argues. The celebration lasts only as long as a man is becoming a woman, or vice versa. But if that person chooses to detransition, the support evaporates.
“What that suggests to me,” she said, “is that really they’re the cute mascots for something which is much bigger than trans identity and is much more about delegitimizing the idea of human nature as such and opening it up to commerce.”
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Gender identity crises are good business. The “sex reassignment” industry is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And the only thing holding it back, as with the other excesses of modern feminism, is the anti-cyborgs.
“There’s still broad cultural support for the idea that there are some things which are sacred. You can’t touch them,” Harrington said. “That intuitive sense still exists for a great many people, and there’s no way you can deregulate human nature unless you can get rid of that first, or at least make it deplorable. The point where it becomes low status is the point where big biotech can really take off.”