Biology, Contingency and the Problem of Racism in Feminist Discourse

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s a strong opposition and anxiety towards biological and naturalizing knowledges was the norm in feminist discourse. In the past decades the certainties of that 'anti-biologism' have been challenged, in part because of a new recognition of the role of contingency in both biological determination and biological science. What seems to have survived the shift is a set of normative assumptions concerning the role of determinacy and contingency (or being-born and becoming) in the political implications of ontological claims: an assumed political valorization of contingency. This article challenges those assumptions. It draws attention to the embrace of contingency and processuality on the part of supremacist biopolitical discourse, and suggests the need to think again about the politics of contingency and becoming (in constructivist as well as biologistic discourses). Focusing on the issue of racism and supremacist-specification, the article takes a genealogical look at 'second-wave' feminist anti-biologism. Monique Wittig's materialist feminist attack on naturalizing ideology and 'the myth of woman' provides the (ideal-typical) historical example. The article draws attention to curious absences in Wittig's (and Rosalind Rosenberg's) anti-biologistic statements concerning early 20th-century biologistic feminism: the absence of a critique of eugenics, racism and supremacism. Arguably the condemnation of biology as a conservative 'ideology of the status quo' created masks for biopolitical ontology, obscuring the progressive, dynamic, processual character of biologism and of modern racism. While dislodging some powers of biologistic discourse, feminist anti-biologism might also have played a part in facilitating the revitalization of biopolitical racism within the constructivist culturalist rubric. The aim of the article is not to critique 'second-wave' feminism from the perspective of contemporary scholarship, but to help generate new ways of thinking and feeling about the role of ontology, contingency and temporality in the present politics of classification.

Restructuring legal geography

“…While contingency and determination have come to be terms through which scholars signal and debate their understandings of the social world (see, for example, Blencowe, 2011; Marks, 2009), the terms are not always conceived of as a pair, and for reasons that will help us to explain two related terms: structure and agency. ‘Contingency’ does not in fact mean that something is uncaused; it means that that something is uncaused by some other particular thing (or, for some, that it is neither necessary nor impossible with respect to that other thing).…”

(Re)Reading Monique Wittig: Domination, Utopia, and Polysemy

“…References are made to the war that has yet to take place narratively (but already occurred chronologically) and descriptions are given of “the modification of naïve conceptions the guérillères have such as they were just after the war” (42), which is to say, the narrative start of the text but its chronological end. The narrative action of the novel also performs this cyclicality, as Blencowe argues (Blencowe 2011, 17). Battles within the text are not cast as “wins” or “losses” but are rather viewed as transformative for their participants; thus, though the novel narratively ends with “peace,” such stability is not conclusive.…”

“Mix or Match?”: Transnational Fertility Industry and White Desirability

“…For Tober, this form of eugenics is individual, innocuous and starkly different from the racebased eugenics of the past. Other scholars of "liberal eugenics," imagined as a new era of biopolitics led by individual consumer choice, have been as optimistic about this difference between state-sponsored eugenics of the past, and the private choices around technological enhancements prevalent today (Agar 2004;Blencowe 2011;Rose 2007). The fertility industry, especially its transnational avatar, leads us to question this assumed binary.…”