DISEÑO Y MODELAMIENTO

unravel the webs that produce a scenario whereby politics is consistently excluded from the scientific arena. The stories do not have beginnings, nor do they have ends. They have 'continuations, interruptions and reformulations' (Haraway 1992b: 68). Her work appears to epitomise what the network approach aims to do. It is consistently powerful in its refusal to demarcate what is social and what is scientific, what is cultural and what is political. Her stories are 'so finely textured, with networks so highly articulated that any hope of maintaining a dichotomy between the substance and the context or between science and ideology

becomes forlorn' (Young 1992: 183). Context and substance become

interdigitated and inextricably interwoven. Her worlds are all mixed up and her stories spin out a tale that weaves a narrative without reducing it to its parts, but includes them nevertheless. Dense, to the point of struggle, or as Young (1992: 183) suggests, exhausting yet exhilarating, her work combines and convolutes, and yet illuminates in moments of breathtaking clarity the encompassing world that we inhabit, its contingency and its messiness.

Drawing on Latour, Haraway aims to grant historicity to all the actors, and not just the human ones. Acknowledging Bruno Latour's work Haraway explains her reasons for including nonhuman actors. She suggests that although only some actors are language-bearing they are not the only ones that have a kind of agency (and note that this does not imply intentionality), adding that maybe only the actors that are organized by language are subjects. Haraway (in interview with Penley and Ross 1990: 9) notes that the acceptance of heterogeneous entities as actors is a 'risky business':

'Folks get mad at me because you can't be pinned down, folks get mad at me for not finally saying what the bottom line is on these things: they say, well do you or don't you believe that nonhuman actors are in some sense social agents? One reply that makes sense to me is, the subjects are cyborg, nature is coyote, and the geography is elsewhere'.

Haraway continues to evade being pinned down through the deployment of metaphors such as the coyote or trickster. Her tactical evasion is a powerful reminder that we do not know what, for example, nature is. Nor do we have the language to define it. Instead, categories such as nature are used strategically, in different ways and in different places, to have different meanings and effects. One metaphor, in particular, that Haraway has become synonymous with is that of the cyborg. Cyborgs belong to Nature, to the collective and to discourse (Latour 1993a: 64) .

Haraway's metaphorical use of the cyborg fits well with my work on the body of the woman on the pill. The woman on the pill, combining the technical and the biological, can be understood to be a point at which sex and gender and the body can be re-theorised. It is a site where radical contingencies can come into play, reworking old consistencies and conventions.

The cyborg is a myth of political identity; 'a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction' (Haraway 1991: 149). It is oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence. Embodied within it are possibilities of constructing new, monstrous, oppositional identities. It is self-conscious about its construction and production and operates to generate and be explicit about its coalitions, rather than naturalizing them. The cyborg is about new connections, new alliances and the creation of new boundaries and borders. It is about mixing and stirring and requires an acknowledgement of 'the primacy of multiple membership in many worlds at once' (Leigh Star 1991: 30). It is the potential of this 'monstrous' impurity, the disruption of boundaries, that promises something new. It allows for the possibility of re-articulating the body of the woman on the pill. The recombination of technological and human actants provides escape opportunities for evading patriarchal, technocratic and racist explanations. The woman on the pill could be one of Haraway's wily knowledgeable coyotes, even a cyborg: disrupting our constructions of the natural, of the social and of the technical.

The woman on the pill could be a cyborg. Blurring corporeal boundaries with technology the woman on the pill offers opportunities for new alliances and displacements. Haraway's work is also about uncovering the narration of nature and science in such a way that mediation, history and construction are excluded (Haraway 1989: 146). Latour and Woolgar (1986: 176) insist that it is not 'just that facts are socially constructed', but that the 'processes of construction involve the use of certain devices whereby all traces of production are made extremely difficult to detect'. The body, and especially the female body, is also narrated in such a way that it appears unmediated by culture and politics. The appearance of the sexed body, or woman, as always already there is a constant theme that will be reiterated throughout later chapters.

The body is constructed as innocent, as pre-discursive, and as natural. By revealing the constructed nature of the woman on the pill, her body becomes a site

for the reworking of meanings. The exposure of the ways in which her race, sex, gender and sexuality have been produced as inherent and natural, as well as in ways that endorse heterosexuality, racism, colonialism and sexism, provides opportunities for figuration. Figuration, as Haraway (1992b: 86) suggests, ’is about resetting the stage for possible pasts and futures’.

Donna Haraway is also exploring in inventive and challenging ways the use and coherency of dichotomous thought. She actively illuminates the flaws and incoherency implicit in much of our dualistic structures. Haraway’s writings on the re visioning and de(con)struction of nature allow for a multiplicity of readings. I quote below an extract from one of Haraway’s early (1979: 206) essays on this theme. A theme which she again develops a decade later, highlighting the historical and geographical specificity of the constructed natural body:

’part of remaking ourselves as socialist-feminist beings is remaking the sciences which construct the category ’’nature” and empower its definitions in technology. Science is about knowledge and power. In our time, natural science defines the human being’s place in nature and history and provides the instruments of domination of the body and the community. By constructing the category nature, natural science imposes limits on history and self-formation. So science is part of the struggle over the nature of our lives’.

The traffic between nature and culture needs to be deciphered so that nothing can be said to be wholly natural or wholly cultural. We need to be able to trace how things become mediated and thereby challenge and legitimise ideologies and values. The reconfiguring of ourselves is part of that project. The history of the body has exemplified how nature is employed to legitimate beliefs. Although we have no shortage of twentieth century examples, the muscled body (Schulze 1990), the transsexual body (Epstein 1990), the cosmeticized body (Spitzack 1991), the anorexic body (Bordo 1990), this exposé of the natural body is only reluctantly applied to our own bodies. Contemporary bodies remain surprisingly un-interrogated as legitimators in specific social contexts.

So far, I have been arguing that the woman on the pill is an artefact. 1 have focused on the production and reproduction of the technology that contracepts the woman and renders her temporarily infertile. The pill is understood to be an

outcome. The ’woman' is also an outcome. Drawing on theories of

the woman who went on the pill. By revealing the constructed nature of the woman on the pill, her body becomes a site for the possible reworking of gender performances and subjectivities. Indeed, it is precisely because the production of the sexed subject has been so rigidly constrained, that Butler (1993: 123) argues that gender (and other regulatory fictions) 'ought to be repeated in directions that reverse and displace their originating aims'. It is this process that I address in the following section. How could the woman on the pill be repeated in ways that disrupted the conventions and fictions that already designated her performance?

Perform ing Bodies

If we are no longer able to start with 'the body', adding colour to make white, or adding sexuality to make heterosexual, or adding the pill to make infertile then we need to begin again. We need new ways of thinking about nature and biology: ways of thinking that do not endorse immanence nor truth. Recent work on the constructions of gender, sex, race and sexuality provide opportunities for re­ laying our foundations of truth.

The pill contains a combination of synthetic hormones which modify the female reproductive system, inhibiting ovulation. The pill acts on a body that is sexed female. While it may sound banal, and even nonsensical, to suggest that the subject popping the pill is female, sex is, however, not simply something one has, or is. Despite appearances, sex is an affect, a means by which 'one becomes viable ... that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility' (Butler 1993: 2). Historians of the body, including Foucault, Gilman, Laqueur, Jordanova and Duden, have illustrated that the sexed body is as (un)natural as gender. There is no trans-historical female body of woman, rather sex is produced as the biological base on which gender is constructed. It is this appearance of sex as pre-discursive, prior to culture, that obscures and disavows the constraints that produce a domain of intelligible and unintelligible bodies.

The woman swallowing the oral contraceptive pill makes sense to us in the twentieth century. She has done since 1960. We accept her body in a way that we do not accept a woman taking steroids for muscle building, or a transsexual taking the pill. By using the example of the woman on the pill I want to try to show how bodies are made culturally intelligible. I want to illustrate how the body of the woman swallowing the pill may (or may not) conform to the cultural matrix of what Judith Butler (1990: 17) has called intelligible genders:

'"Intelligible" genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire'.

The sexes/genders/desires (and races) that make sense to us are not natural or inevitable. The heterosexual, fertile, woman on the pill, wanting to plan the size of her family, for example, makes sense. Her body is both legitimate and intelligible. Located in another position, such as the postmenopausal single woman, or even as a man, she is less 'intelligible'.

Rather than understanding sex as a biological bed-rock upon which the cultural layers of gender are built, gender is the means by which the sexed body is established as natural. I am taking gender to be 'the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being' (Butler 1990: 33). There is, then, no sexed female body awaiting enculturation, or engendering. Instead, gender is understood to be performative, constituting 'the very subject it is said to express' (Butler 1991: 24). If gender is thus no longer assumed to signify, or be restricted by, sex, then as Butler (1990: 6) suggests,

'man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and

woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one'.

If gender is performative, constituting identity, then it makes no sense to start with the subject behind the act, the woman prior to the swallowing of the pill. It makes no sense to start with the 'woman', since 'no subject is its own point of departure' (Butler 1992: 9), rather the subject is constituted by the positions that are already in existence through the performance of gender. There is no volitional subject before the act, but the woman on the pill is constituted by the taking of the pill. It is at this location, that the doing, the becoming, the repeated making of the woman on the pill offers a site of resistance. When Butler asks (1990: viii) what is the 'best way to trouble the gender categories that support gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality', she argues that the answer lies in 'doing things differently'. I am asking whether the woman on the pill can also be 'done differently'. If the woman on the pill confirmed and perpetuated the norms that produced her, is there an alternative way of constituting the subject of the woman taking the pill that disrupts or subverts the same regulatory fictions? It is these codes and regulatory fictions that constituted the subject of the woman on the pill that I address in the following chapters. These regulatory fictions include racism,

compulsory heterosexuality, family norms and are also extended to notions of class, health and fitness.

If the woman on the pill confirmed and perpetuated the norms that produced her, is there an alternative way of constituting the subject of the woman taking the pill that disrupts or subverts the same regulatory fictions? I needed to understand how the woman on the pill had achieved stability and coherence; and how she had achieved 'intelligibility' before I could begin to rethink her.

The woman on the pill thus becomes a site of contestation. Her body is not stable, and as I show in the following chapters, nor is her sex, or her race fixed or given. The woman on the pill is 'doing' her gender in a specific way. She does it repeatedly, (and never completely), and in interaction with others. She does it in a way that produces an illusion; an illusion of essence. Gender is the 'mundane drama specifically corporeal, constrained by possibilities cultural' (Butler 1989: 261) that produces the illusion that we simply are our genders, that they are an expression of our identity. What Butler (1990: 141) argues, however, is that gender is performative, constituting the identity that it is said to express or reveal. Consequently, the exposure of 'a constructed identity, a perform ative accomplishment' such as the woman on the pill, reveals the 'performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality'. In this way, the woman on the pill becomes a possible site for 'gender transformation'.

To understand gender as a performance, and identity as performative, is not, however, to presume that gender is, or can be, chosen. There is no 'sexed body' that 'decides' what gender it is to be. Gender is not a style, or a game that can be played. Gender is not voluntary, rather 'performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms' (Butler in Kotz 1992: 84). It is this forced reiteration of norms, the repetition of 'regulatory fictions' that constitutes the subject (Butler 1993: 95).

Butler has attempted to find a new way of talking about 'the subject'. A subject that is not always, already positioned within phallocratie, heterosexist and patriarchal discourse. She suggests that the current 'feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation' (Butler 1990: 2). In an analogous way, the sexed body that is trying to create new radical, discontinuous ways of thinking about sex and gender requires a new vocabulary, a new way of understanding sexed bodies.

stage Nerves; problems of performance

If there is no solid corporeal base on which gender, sexuality, and race can be built, but only compulsory practices that themselves produce the embodiment of these norms, then where does it leave us? Does it leave us stranded as the category 'woman' loses its coherency? Does the exposure of its complicity in the legitisation of racism and homophobia make it redundant? Are we left wondering how to think and organise?

Di Stefano (1991: 87) questions the extent to which 'gender', as a 'central category of feminist analyses, [has] functioned as a partner of white privilege and as a beneficiary/proponent of the heterosexual contract'. She asks what is its future as a category of analysis if gender is no longer adequate. Once gender has been rejected, surely, Di Stefano argues, so too must race, class and other general categories be abandoned. But, what Butler and other theorists of performativity are offering are ways of reconfiguring the active female subject, and this includes the woman on the pill. Sex, according to Butler, becomes not something one has, or is, but that which qualifies a body, and renders it intelligible. The task is therefore to find ways of producing sex (and bodies, genders and races) differently.

Despite the radical possibilities of this project of performativity, other axes of power do not appear to be adequately or equally acknowledged. Butler has argued that it is not possible to 'be' a human body that is not always already sexed (hence the difficulties and confusion resulting with the birth of an intersexed infant (see Kessler 1990), and whilst it may be possible to render a body 'culturally intelligible' without knowing its class or ability, can we make sense of a body that does not have a 'race'? Although Butler (1993: 17) wants to include 'other regimes of regulatory production [that] contour the materiality of bodies', she appears to continue to privilege gender.

1 argue that the fictions that produce the effects of race and other social norms are as equally compulsory and violent as gender, and yet persist in being relegated to a subsidiary role. Several theorists have suggested that this lies in performativity theories' emphasis on the visual. Peggy Phelan (1992: 98) has drawn on the work of the artist Adrian Piper and the film Paris is Burning to illustrate the 'failure of the visible to represent race'. Grigsby (1992: 90) also uses the work of Adrian Piper. Piper is black, but can 'pass' as white. Her confrontational work 'undoes complacent assumptions regarding the categories of race and racial

identity at the same time that she further entrenches them' by exposing and marking the invisible. lin this case it is 'whiteness' that is rendered visible. Race, alongside gender, can be disrupted and subverted: race is not merely something that we have, or are. Its fictions have a history and a geography. The exposure of the constructed nature of racial types, ethnicities and colour offers opportunities for rendering new bodies intelligible and embodying a new kind of materiality.