[Sophia] Cloning and Feminism

[Master, Neel]

I realize that we've strayed a bit from the discussion on cloning, but I was
reading this morning and came upon a useful passage. It's from Shulasmith
Firestone's _The Dialectic of Sex_, which is an analysis of gender relations
in terms of the domination of one class (women) by another (men.)

She's arguing that the domination of women emerged from their enslavement to
their biology: they had no control over their menstruation, painful child
birthing, breastfeeding. Their biology demands that they bear these social
responsibilities, and this creates a situation in which they are
economically dependent on men for their survival (since someone has to make
the money, get the food, etc) while men have no such dependence on women.
The excerpt becomes relevant to cloning toward the end, where she discusses
the liberating potential of technologies that undermine the inequality
created by biological differences.

If you're interested, you can read the whole first chapter of the book at
marxists.org, in the philosophy archive (I believe there is a link to this
site on the sophia website.)

--
So that just as. to assure elimination of economic classes requires the
revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a -temporary
dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the
elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women)
and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to
women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure
of control of human fertility - the new population biology as well as all
the social institutions of child-bearing and child-rearing. And just as the
end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the
economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so
the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first
feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex
distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer
matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud's
'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supersede
hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for
the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial
reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently
of. either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child
on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened
dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining
inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for
culturally. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of
labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological
family would be broken. 
--