Angelus Morningstar discusses how technological change is reconfiguring society to permit queerness, and how queerness might help us better understand these changes.
Transhumanism is a postmodern project. Its aims and aspirations are still developing, but can be broadly understood as an intellectual and cultural movement dedicated to exploring, and frequently embracing, the way that technology is changing humanity. Just as science-fiction frequently uses the advent of technology to question the human condition, transhumanism takes these contemplations seriously as more and more from science-fiction literature becomes reality.
This week’s article follows last week’s somewhat, where I responded to the ‘born this way’ argument. I intend to unpack the relationship between queerness and technology, namely that certain technologies allow society to reconfigure in such a way so as to permit queerness, and queerness in turn gives us insights into how we are already on the road to Transhumanism.
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In order to unpack his article completely, I’ll need to do some groundwork on the social constructions of technology. That is, I talk about technology in a particular way, from the perspective of what it means for our society and the way that technology shapes and interacts with society. One of the affectations of modernity is the fact that technology is increasingly alienating us from nature (or from an ideal of nature, which I’ll get to in a moment). It is this view of technology that makes me capitalise the word: to separate Technology as phenomenon as it interacts with society, rather than to describe an assemblage of objects and devices that humanity creates. By this, I allude to the way modern societies have collectively invested some kind of agency into a shared notion of Technology and what it does for our society. That this ideal is deeply implicated, and even integrated, into almost every aspect of Western society.
Thinking of Technology in this way becomes even more imperative as we enter the digital age, where our social realities simultaneously exist in both physical and digital mediums. Khanna talks about this in terms of human-technology coevolution, describing a society where technology is just as significant in the production of social arrangements as human experiences are. This is why the term “technology with a big T” is sometimes used, to acknowledge that technology is not neutral in terms of its interaction with and throughout our society, but as it becomes more pervasive it begins to define how we see and understand it. Technology is composed of a number of artifacts, objects and instruments that humanity has created towards a particular purpose, but whose very nature we have imposed a particular meaning upon. As a type of technology becomes ubiquitous its meaning is subsequently replicated throughout our society until it becomes invisible. We cease to make a conscientious connection between the two and start to unconsciously associate them. In certain extreme cases, the value we attribute to an artifact can excite and even elicit strong emotions from us, to the point where the artifact is fetishised. We need look no further than the Apple Cult for a recognisable example.
As Technology comes to represent the aggregate aspirations of human innovation, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of the ideal it has come to represent. Technology becomes embedded into nearly every aspect of our environment (social and physical), even serving as an intermediary for our socialisation. In fact Google Glass provides a rather explicit example of this, in that Google Glass is affixed directly onto our subjective point of view. The Technology is mounted upon our gaze and this tends to render the influence of the device invisible.That is to say, that there is already a native social context for person-to-person observation, and we actually have an implicit expectation to be the subject of another person’s attention. To piggy-back a sensory device upon a socially acceptable form of scrutiny obscures the intrusive and disruptive nature of that device.
Technology is already allowing people to select the sex of their children, and screen for children with disability. It may not be long before we have capacity to understand the significance what aspects of genetics contribute to a person’s gender and sexuality, and from that point on parents may begin to screen on that basis.
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This experience of Technology tends to have an affect on our shared human experience, and the possibilities of Technology tend to underwrite our vision of the future, (a shared “manifest destiny” if you will), which it regards as implicit from the humanity’s capacity for innovation. This vision of humanity (a techno-humanist convergence) defines a social reality that is both humanocentric and technocentric. This tends to position Technology in line with human progress, and against a commonly held view of Nature. While there is an underlying commentary here regarding views on environmentalism, they are not the focus of this article; rather the point that I would make is that these changes are challenging historic views about the human condition, and what can be regarded as natural of humanity (also see the Naturalistic Fallacy). It is also important to engage with these questions from a sociological position, to query the meaning of potential growing inequality due to unequal access to human enhancement technologies; Hughes has argued we have an obligation to articulate and implement public policies in such a way as to attenuate this growing divide.
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This is where this discussion now turns to the intertwining of queerness and Technology. Much of the history of queerness has challenged medicalised notions of sex, sexuality, and gender, and shifting them towards a framework of actualisation (as I outlined in my article last week). Queerness has, in part, been defined by a struggle to write features of identity over one’s own body, and utilising a variety of technologies to help change, control, and remodel our physical morphology to suit our personal needs and tastes. In many ways, this struggle is directed towards the way we understand the practice of medicine, and various technologies within its purview. It challenges medical practice normalising bodies towards liberating those bodies instead. In queering up our bodies, we are undermining the co-option of our bodies being purposed towards an ideal form of fitness, which eliminates dissent, divergence, and difference.
For this reason, I often regard the contraceptive pill as one of the first modern queer technologies. It helped precipitate the sexual revolutions, and allowed women to reclaim their bodies away from a social construction that regarded the utility of their bodies as geared towards reproductivity. Technologies that grant conscious control over reproductive capacity (either promoting or suppressing it) are a subset of technologies that remove the constraints of biological determinism (reproductive technologies also includes in vitro fertilisation, embryo screening, and genetic diagnostics). They challenge traditional notions of sex, gender, and sexuality; they reconfigure them from away from subservience to reproduction, to serving a broader range of agendas, including identity, pleasure, and power.
Bodily autonomy is a keystone to queerness, which includes piercings, tattoos, and other body-modifications. Pitts, in her work In the Flesh, explores the connections between body modification and contemporary struggles over sex and gender, and widespread attitudes about identity, consumption, and the body. Likewise body-modification has also been employed as a form of women’s empowerment in an act of reclaiming bodies from social ownership. For the queer community, there are a range of factors around bodily autonomy and body modification, and amongst the most symbolic and transhuman among them is the use of medical technologies (hormone replacement therapy, sex affirmation surgeries, et al.) to reconfigure the primary and secondary sexual characteristics of the body in order to inscribe their own ideal of body.
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With this in mind, the convergence of queerness and Transhumanism becomes much more apparent. Indeed, the synthesis of many of these ideas informs the postgender movement and the Cyborg Manifesto. Technology is disrupting historic notions of gender, as people are empowered to select lifestyles that reject traditional gender roles, to empower personal morphologies and physicalities, and to generally strive towards a society where gender is broken down from the deeply hierarchical and stratified regime that exists now. For some, the end goal is not just the elimination of gendered privilege but the elimination of gendered distinctions itself by moving towards a genderless society. This is not to say that all physical characteristics of sex would be eliminated but that this project would dismantle gender’s reproductive and economic functions in the way that we currently can conceive.*
Queerness has, in part, been defined by a struggle to write features of identity over one’s own body, and utilising a variety of technologies to help change, control, and remodel our physical morphology to suit our personal needs and tastes.
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It is upon this juncture, upon the intersection of technology and our views of embodiment, where we can learn much from the social model of disability. This view of disability stands in direct contrast towards the dominant medical view of disability that seeks to normalise disabled bodies with therapy. This view suggests that disability is a product of society not accommodating their unique differences, rather than requiring bodies to be fitted into normal morphologies. This is part of an underlying social narrative that positions bodies in terms of their economic capacity (for women, there is an emphasis on their reproductive capacity before their economic capacity). A stark challenge upon this matter emerges from the Deaf community, who have sought to prevent their children from being “fixed” with hearing, so that they could remain part of their own Deaf culture. This area is rife with ethical discussions, which I won’t unpack here, but it nevertheless stands as an excellent challenge to the prevailing valuing of certain ideals of fitness of the body.
This will become increasingly important as the Technology intervenes and disrupts the stable social configurations, and we are required to confront socio-economic forces that seek to normalise bodies. Technology is already allowing people to select the sex of their children, and screen for children with disability. It may not be long before we have capacity to understand the significance what aspects of genetics contribute to a person’s gender and sexuality, and from that point on parents may begin to screen on that basis; this follows on directly from last week’s argument against born this way arguments, because it is not challenging the social norms that influence those preferences.
Image–Flickr/Keoni Cabral
Why is your name Angelus Morningstar? I doubt this is not your real name. Your name to me is a direct references to satanism and the occult. Not a good name for a person that advocates trans humanism.
While many ideas you express in this article are becoming more of a reality every day and I believe there is many good that can come from these advances; many of these technology such as choosing the sex of a child and screening for genetic problems will only favor the rich and those with access to these knowledge and Technology.
Really? You’re complaining about my name because you have chosen to fixate on one out of five or six mythologies that are relevant to the name, three of which are Christian and have variously referred to either Jesus or Mary? Don’t bother me.
As for your concern about the possibility of furthering privileged divides, I believe that warrants close scrutiny for those reasons. However, the emphasis should be on the socio-economic arrangements that enable access, not the technologies themselves.