essay revise

Rereading Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood: Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology

S o r a y a C o p l e y

Abstract

This article rereads early dystopian eco-narratives and explores the ways in which Margaret Atwood and Marge Piercy manipulate established generic conventions to make correlations between their fiction and the ‘real’ world. It explores the avenues of hope which both authors find necessary for the future by close textual analysis of the three novels under discussion. The article is significantly informed by eco-feminist theories, which centre on a basic belief that ecological crisis is the inevitable effect of a Eurocentric capitalist patriarchal culture. It explores the ways in which the symbolic equation of woman with nature is implemented by characters in the novels, and the consequences this has for other characters. The article explores the engagement of both authors with the eco-feminist idea of women’s unique agency in an era of ecological crisis.

Introduction

Both Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood issue profound warnings not only with regard to the catastrophic consequences of patriarchal capitalism on the planet, but also in their exploration of the role of the individual in bringing about political change. The following article rereads earlier novels by both authors and explores the contemporary global relevance of these texts with reference both to traditional Western ideologies and to early-twenty-first-century journalism which contextualizes some of the controversial issues dealt with by Atwood and Piercy, such as genetic engineering, new reproductive

Critical Survey Volume 25, Number 2, 2013: 40–56 doi: 10.3167/cs.2013.250204 ISSN 0011–1570 (Print), ISSN 1752–2293 (Online)

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 41

technologies, environmental degradation, agricultural processes, and gated communities. Both authors’ recognition of difference, complexity, hybridity, fluidity, and partial and situated knowledges is reflected, as Raffaella Baccolini points out, not only through the contents of their novels but also through the forms, which collapse boundaries between genres thus deconstructing ‘genre purity’.1 However, my main motivation is not primarily to explore the ways in which Atwood and Piercy manipulate and defy established generic conventions, but rather to make correlations between their fiction and the real world today, and to explore the avenues of hope which they illuminate for the future. Whilst I do not rely on any single theorist, the article is significantly informed by eco-feminist theories, which centre on a basic belief that ecological crisis is the inevitable effect of a Eurocentric capitalist patriarchal culture built, as Ariel Salleh says: ‘on the domination of nature and domination of Woman “as nature”. Or, to turn the subliminal Man/Woman=Nature equation around the other way, it is the inevitable effect of a culture constructed upon the domination of women, and domination of Nature “as feminine”’.2 I explore the ways in which the symbolic equation of woman with nature is implemented by characters in the novels of Atwood and Piercy, and the consequences this has for other characters. Also of interest to me is the engagement of both authors with the eco-feminist idea of ‘women’s unique agency in an era of ecological crisis’.3

Nature and Progress

The pollution of the environment and of the food chain by reckless humanity is not a new subject in dystopian writing. It has been a major preoccupation in a range of feminist dystopian texts for over forty years, and it continues today with renewed emphasis on post- apocalyptic and eco-critical dystopias. The major project of many eco-feminist writers is to interrogate society by analysing it from the perspective of utopians, who frequently refer to the anthropogenic era as the age of greed and waste. In Woman on the Edge of Time (1975), for example, Marge Piercy facilitates an interrogation of our destructive and damaging ways. What seems normal and acceptable to Connie is challenged by Luciente, when she asks in wonder, ‘it’s not true, is it, the horror stories in our histories? That your food was full of poisonous chemicals … that you ate food saturated with

42 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

preservatives?’4 Whilst many chemicals and preservatives are purposely used in food production today, the shocking truth of Luciente’s insight is also reflected at present in the situation of the Inuit people, whose diet of seal and fish has been polluted by industrial chemicals swept to the Arctic by ocean and air currents, subsequently emerging in high levels in Inuit breast milk and being blamed for deforming the sexual organs of female polar bears.5 Luciente goes on to emphasize the outrageous despoiling of the natural world in the twentieth century to Connie, who has seemingly never questioned her society’s methods of dealing with waste products, or considered them to be anything other than entirely normal, by crying out in exasperation and disbelief, ‘to burn your compost! To pour your shit into the waters others downstream must drink! That fish must live in! Into rivers whose estuaries and marshes are links in the whole offshore food chain!’ (WET, 55).

For Piercy’s utopians, progress cannot be equated with a global capitalist system in which millions starve through the inefficient use of land and the poor distribution of food and resources. Barbarossa explains to Connie, ‘coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, they all took land needed to feed local people … Imagine the plantation system, people starving while big fincas owned by foreigners grew for wealthy countries as cash crops a liquid without food value’ (195). Such unjust, inefficient and destructive use of land is endemic throughout the world today and is perhaps epitomized by the dual degradation by monopolizing palm oil companies of both the Indonesian rainforest which, according to Friends of the Earth, contains ‘10% of all of the world’s flowering plant species, 17% of all birds, 12% of all mammals and 16% of all reptiles and amphibians’ and which is being progressively destroyed, and of the plantation workers who carry out exhausting work often for a sickening wage of £1 a day.6 Interestingly, when this article was written, Atwood had just published Oryx and Crake (2003), the first novel of her acclaimed trilogy. Similarly, in the 1970s, when Piercy was writing, there were the beginnings of a global awareness of the destruction of nature and the setting up of such movements as Greenpeace, Save the Whale, the WWF and many more. For utopians, the notion of progress involves striving to bring about a time in which the environmental ravages, human exploitation, and unjust suffering brought about by patriarchal capitalism has been transcended, a time when ‘the oceans will be balanced, the rivers flow clean, the wetlands and the forests flourish. There’ll be no more

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 43

enemies. No Them and Us’ (WET, 328). In Luciente’s time, one of the most fundamental commitments made in order to try to establish greater equality and a more harmonious world is revealed in the decision ‘to feed everyone well’. This involves cultivating regional self-sufficiency and seriously limiting the amount of meat consumed, since ‘mammal meat is inefficient use of grains’ (100).

The contemporary urgency of this point for the world must not be underestimated. As George Monbiot pointed out in 2004, ‘if in the next 30 years there is a global food crisis, it will be because the arable land that should be producing food for humans is instead producing feed for animals’.7 Those animals provide meat, milk, and eggs which are sold to the world’s richer consumers, failing to benefit poorer people. In Piercy’s future Mattapoisett, by using resources efficiently and without greed, the people are not only nourished fairly but also reconnected to the land. As Jackrabbit explains, ‘place matters to us … We’re strongly rooted’ (WET, 124). To Connie, the utopians’ simple rural lifestyle at first appears to be profoundly regressive, and she laments, ‘back on the same old dungheap with ten chickens and a goat. That’s where my grandparents scratched out a dirt-poor life. It depresses me’ (70). The people of Mattapoisett, however, do not eschew the use of technology altogether, but rather advocate an appropriate balance between the use of technology and a simple respect for life in all its forms. According to Luciente: ‘There was much good in the life the ancestors led here on the continent before the white man came conquering. There was much brought that was useful. It has taken a long time to put the old good with the new good into a greater good’ (70–71).

The shared attitude of the utopians towards the environment is characterized by an acute awareness of the limitations of natural resources and a sincere commitment to acting responsibly in the light of this awareness. Luciente explains, ‘we have to account. There’s only one pool of air to breathe’ (278). Recycling is fundamental in Mattapoisett: ‘We compost everything compostible. We reuse everything else’ (55). Renewable, non-polluting energy sources are utilized through the villagers’ energy technology in the form of wood, wind power, water power, tidal power, solar power, and methane gas from human waste and compost. Advanced knowledge in the field of genetics is applied sensibly in order, for example, to breed out the irritant in mosquitoes whilst still respecting them as an important part of the food chain (97), and to create vegetables resistant to pests (53)

44 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

and drought (210), whilst still protecting and maintaining the genetic diversity of the ecosystem. The utopians thus avoid imposing homogeneity upon their crops, choosing instead to honour and preserve the inherent diversity of the natural world, which so many farmers have unfortunately failed to do since the Second World War, resulting in a situation whereby, as Janine Benyus points out, ‘in places like India, where there were once thirty thousand land-tailored varieties of rice, their replacement by one super variety swept away botanical knowledge and centuries of breeding in one fell swoop’.8

Fundamental to the utopians’ ability to implement humanitarian and environmentally-friendly agricultural policies is the anti- hierarchical character of their group relations, which emphasize debate, cooperation and consensus decision-making. All community members take turns running the government and, as Tom Moylan points out, ‘profit and power do not determine the use of the advanced knowledge of the culture’.9 On the contrary, questions regarding the direction of science are decided democratically at town meetings (WET, 277), in which everybody takes an interest. The major political issue left unresolved at the end of the novel is that referred to as the ‘Shaping Controversy’, a debate between different factions of the community regarding the appropriate application of genetic technology, in which Luciente spends many hours engaged, defending the position that breeding should not be for selected traits but rather should involve random genetic mixing, since no one ‘can know objectively how people should become’ (226). The social structure of Mattapoisett allows the voices of the people to be heard, ensuring that no new technological practices are insidiously introduced to serve the interests of any one particular group. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for contemporary Western ‘democratic’ countries, in which corporate interests rather than the public good too often motivate science. In this time of rapid technological advance, Bryan Appleyard worries that:

There is a danger that people will sleep through this moment, only to wake and find themselves in a brave new genetic world. They will sleep because they feel excluded from the realm of science. They feel they have nothing to say about what scientists do and how they change the world. Thus they will slip into that most risky of habits – leaving science to the scientists.10

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 45

Piercy emphasizes that such political apathy and failure to engage in the struggle against monopolizing corporate forces results in catastrophic outcomes, as illustrated by the technological dystopian future in which, as Moylan points out, ‘the forces of phallocratic capitalism have remained dominant and produced a hierarchical society that is overpopulated, polluted, sexist and racist’.11 Through this dystopian vision, Piercy warns that the ‘progress’ desired by Western phallocratic capitalist systems will continue to involve exploitation of the natural world, exacerbating pollution and corrupting the food chain; increasing surveillance and decreasing freedom of movement; a widening divide between rich and poor, and men and women, who are physically adapted to become sex objects; and the establishment of a terrifying distinction between cyborg and human. The progress which Piercy seeks is defined in contrast by the committed assumption of political responsibility by every person through the sobering experience of ecological crisis, which will enable us, like the utopians, to reaffirm ourselves as ‘partners with water, air, birds, fish, trees’ (WET, 125).

According to Sardar, the most immediate impetus of science fiction is ‘horror, fear, disquiet and disaffection at the power of the human intellect’.12 This certainly seems to be true of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), in which nature, all living creatures, and ultimately the human race itself, fall victim to the overreaching of unscrupulous manipulators of the biological sciences. One of the first striking images in the novel is of the animals destroyed on a bonfire, looking at the young Jimmy ‘reproachfully out of their burning eyes’.13 Jimmy’s father and his colleague suspect biological sabotage in the form of a deadly virus unleashed by a rival business in order to ensure the destruction of their animals and so dominate the market. The scene ends ominously, with Jimmy’s father insinuating that he will retaliate in kind. Thus we see that this is a world in which the deadly combination of capitalism and science is running rampant at the expense of innocent creatures – a world not dissimilar to our own, in which, as Peter Singer points out, ‘each year, US industrial laboratories slaughter an average of 63 million animals – primates, dogs, rabbits, pigs, frogs and birds’.14

The gross manipulation and destruction of animals and the ecosystem by humans is a major theme in Atwood’s novel. At OrganInc, pigs are used as vessels in which to grow human organs suitable for transplantation, swelling them up like balloons and thus

46 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

earning them the nickname ‘pigoons’. These animals are frightful and uncanny, and often, it is implied, with understated horror, end up ‘on the staff café menu’ (OC, 27), an image which magnifies and extrapolates from the shocking and potentially lethal corruption of the food chain occurring within current farming practices, and reminiscent of the BSE crisis in Britain which has now lasted more than 20 years.15 Whilst Jimmy casually watches ‘Felicia’s Frog Squash’ and other ‘animal snuff sites’ on the internet, reflecting that ‘one stomped frog, one cat being torn apart by hand, was much like another’, his father’s colleagues play at ‘create-an-animal’ in their laboratories (93–94). In a number of reckless experiments, toads are genetically spliced with chameleons, snakes are blended with rats, raccoons mixed with skunks rabbits are made luminous green with the iridocytes of jellyfish, the genetic traits of bobcats are tampered with, wolves are spliced with dogs, and chickens are horrifyingly manipulated genetically until they bear closer resemblance to octopi, growing ‘bulbs’ of meat and lacking eyes and a beak as apparently they don’t need those.16 It is perhaps significant that Atwood incorporates a reference to the human destruction of frogs since, according to E.O. Wilson, ‘among the most massive losses of recent decades has been the frog die-off’ due to changes in habitat and atmosphere as a result of human actions.17 The ‘progress’ which such scientific capabilities supposedly signify and engender is completely turned on its head in the novel, as the improvement of the human lot is entirely overlooked and many of the hybrid animals are let loose to disrupt the balance of the ecosystem and threaten other species. The green rabbits breed with the wild population and become a nuisance (OC, 110), the ‘wolvogs’ have no trouble reversing ‘fifty thousand years of man- canid interaction’, killing and eating all the domesticated dogs (125), the ‘bobkittens’ which are created to cull the green rabbits instead end up attacking dogs, babies, and joggers (192–93), and by the end of the novel the ‘pigoons’, some of which may have been implanted with human neocortical tissue, ominously roam free in a world from which the human race has all but obliterated itself, leaving behind a legacy of global warming in the form of scorching sunshine, humidity, thunderstorms, and a global ecosystem in crisis.

Atwood’s engagement with biopolitics is juxtaposed with global politics. Jimmy and Crake sometimes watch dirtysockpuppets.com, a current affairs show about world political leaders. According to Crake, however: ‘With digital genalteration you couldn’t tell whether

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 47

any of these generals and whatnot existed any more, and if they did, whether they’d actually said what you’d heard. Anyway, they were toppled and replaced with such rapidity that it hardly mattered’ (94). Atwood portrays the virtual collapse of global politics, whereby a public dedication to the common good and a system of stable, representative government has been displaced by rampant consumerism, as evidenced by the commoditization of nature and the natural world, and encapsulated in the novel by the vacuous reduction of language to slogans for advertising purposes. This is underpinned by the cult of the body, seemingly severed from ‘its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul’, and pursuing its own cultural forms: ‘executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance’ (97–98). Oryx and Crake emphasizes the way in which social and political progress in terms of the shared improvement of the human lot is being increasingly suppressed by the pursuit of private interests. This is a pressing contemporary concern since, as Helena Paul and others point out:

Governments with the largest number of corporations – in the US, Europe and Japan – have become increasingly complicit in corporate interests. Politicians and corporate executives regularly swap places in a flurry of revolving doors, especially in the US. All of this is facilitating the entry of private corporations into areas of public interest which were formerly the preserve of local communities or governments.18

Alongside the human race, the natural world falls victim to the thirst for profit endemic amongst politicians who are supposed to represent the interests of the common people. This is illustrated by the suppression of a secret Pentagon report regarding climate change for four months by the Bush administration, reported publicly in February 2004. According to Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency, ‘this administration is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil companies’.19 Western governments and the powerful corporations which dominate global relations have become, as suggested by Atwood through her depiction of corporations such as HelthWyzer, with their starvation-causing Happicuppa coffee bean, the epitome not of progress but rather of self-seeking, irresponsible destruction.

The secret report suppressed by the White House predicts that, by 2020, ‘nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world’.20 Piercy’s vision of the future in

48 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

He, She and It (1991) is not dissimilar to this, as she presents a world recovering from nuclear warfare that had ‘burned Jerusalem off the map’, rendering much of the Middle East ‘a pestilent radioactive desert’.21 We learn that, ‘Shira had been born since the Famine, after the rising oceans had drowned much of the rice and breadbaskets of the world, after the rising temperatures had shifted the ocean and air currents, leaving former farmlands scrubland or desert, after the end of abundant oil had finished agribusiness on land’ (HSI, 37). In the wake of such horrific nuclear destruction, human suffering, and ecological crisis, the human race is finally finding ways to progress towards more humanitarian and environmentally friendly practices. The experience of ecological devastation instils the characters with a profound love and respect for the natural world, and indeed the narrator tells us that ‘no one before the twenty-first century had ever loved flowers and fruiting trees and little birds and the simple beauty of green leaves as did those who lived after the Famine, for whom they were precious and rare and always endangered’ (37). As in Oryx and Crake, mainstream national politics have become practically obsolete, but in He, She and It the authority previously wielded by government has been displaced more promisingly onto ‘the remains of the old UN, the eco-police’ who, following the death of the two billion in the Great Famine and the plagues, ‘had authority over earth, water, air outside domes and wraps’ (33). This reawakened sense of responsibility and stewardship towards the land is accompanied by a commitment to eradicating world hunger, albeit by means of the unappetizing vat food, made of algae and yeasts (41). Although two ‘multis’22 dominate the production and distribution of ‘vat food’, they at least manage to keep people ‘alive and nourished’ which, after the Famine, ‘seemed a great accomplishment’ (306). The responsible global approach to the natural world is informed by an acute awareness of the dependency of the human race upon the environment for its sustenance and survival, and a nostalgic desire to regenerate and revive the natural world, returning it to its original, unpolluted state. As Shira asserts to Yod, ‘the sky is not blue because of the greenhouse effect. We hope someday the sky will be blue again’ (89).

Whilst a certain level of global awareness of the need to try to restore and protect the natural world has been attained in He, She and It, progress in overcoming humanitarian and environmental problems also has a local flavour. In Tikva, access to knowledge is considered to be an important key to the liberation of the human race into a more

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 49

egalitarian and harmonious way of life, and so each child is equipped to access the internet (55). In Nili’s native and ravaged Israel, however, the women have so far chosen not to access the internet, but clone and engineer genes, undergoing additional alteration after birth in order to tolerate high levels of radiation, and bypassing the need for men in reproduction, thus overcoming the widespread infertility caused by radiation and toxic pollutants. Nili asserts, ‘we have created ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land’ (198). In another different setting, people such as Lazarus in the Glop devise their own strategies to try to overcome the monopolies on food distribution upon which they are so dependent, finally beginning to establish their own means of food production and distribution. I tend to agree then with Anna Martinson that:

Piercy’s He, She and It is an example of the localization of standpoint. The solutions developed in Tikva differ from the solutions developed in the Black Zone or the Glop. None of the approaches are necessarily better than the others, and each developed in trajectories necessitated by the specific requirements of each situation. Each approach has something to learn from and teach the others (as Nili travels with Riva to the Glop, and later Malkah travels with Nili to the Black Zone).23

Piercy thus does not present a simplified or romanticized view of progress and does not privilege any single set of ideals, reflecting instead the complexities and difficulties of life as it is really lived by different people in different places with different perspectives.

Nature: From Human to Posthuman

In He, She and It, Piercy utilizes the figures of the cyborg Yod and his seventeenth-century ancestor Joseph, the golem, in order to explore the postmodern theme of the construction of human identity. However, it is the presence and embodiment of the cyborg that most denaturalizes the human, raising questions about gender, reproduction, the body, cultural identity, and kinship, blurring the distinction between human and machine. Critics such as Keith Ansell Pearson and Silvio Gaggi argue that, since humans have always used tools to supplement and extend themselves both physically and mentally, the human is, as Christine Wertheim asserts, ‘something absolutely distinct from the natural because it is essentially artificial, even if this artificiality plays

50 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

itself out around and through a biological core’.24 In the words of Gaggi, ‘it is not just a matter of using tools to extend our “selves”. It is a matter of becoming “one” with our tools’.25 This ‘one’, however, consists of parts that can be deconstructed and reconstructed, swapped and changed, thus undermining the notion of a fixed, coherent, and unitary human subject or an immutable and definitive ‘human nature’. This is illustrated when Shira tells Yod: ‘We’re all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a computer. I read time by a corneal implant. Malkah has a subcutaneous unit that monitors and corrects blood pressure, and half her teeth are regrown. Her eyes have been rebuilt twice. Avram has an artificial heart and Gadi a kidney’ (HSI, 150). Whilst the human race has not yet reached the level of technological advancement depicted by Piercy, human bodies today do incorporate machinery in such forms as pacemakers, dialysis machines, and contact lenses, and the juxtaposition of human and cyborg in the novel allows us to recognize, as Deery points out, ‘that the human and the machine are contiguous, not opposing terms. It is all a matter of degree’.26

Whilst being human can be likened to existing in a permanently contingent state of machine-like artificiality, Piercy also emphasizes qualities in her cyborg which are perhaps more traditionally associated with the human. However, although Yod is in many ways distinct from human beings – for example, in his inability to grow physically, in his complete lack of need for sleep, and in his inability to apprehend beauty or appreciate music – he does possess numerous human qualities, many of which operate independently of his primary function as protector of the town. He can disobey, deceive, and lie, and is capable of love and friendship, enjoying sex and desiring to be loved and respected by others. He declares, ‘I’m a cyborg […] but I’m also a person. I think and feel and have existence just as you do’ (HSI, 375). Yod’s human qualities explicitly invite comparison with those of the other male characters, particularly with the scientists Avram and Shira’s ex-husband Josh, who are shown to be lacking in love and emotion. We learn of Shira that ‘she enjoyed better rapport with a machine than she had with Josh. In fact she had always found computers easier to communicate with than Josh’ (103). Malkah also compares Yod with human men, reflecting, ‘men so often try to be inhumanly powerful, efficient, unfeeling, to perform like a machine, it is ironic to watch a machine striving to be male’ (340–41). Piercy thus problematizes white male identity, which has for so long operated

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 51

as the norm and standard of human nature, against which all others are judged and measured. As Deery points out: ‘Women and people of color have had to consider their status as other and their identity as marked, vulnerable to definition and redefinition. But the postmodern white male identity is no longer unmarked, neutral, or obvious, in part, Piercy indicates, because of the presence and possibility of nonhuman or posthuman entities’.27

Piercy complicates the boundary between human and machine, as Yod is not born of woman but is rather ‘a fusion of machine and lab- created biological components’ (HSI, 70). The majority of humans in the novel are not born of woman, as infertility is a widespread problem due to environmental pollution, creating great dependence on reproductive technologies and engendering the view that conceiving and carrying a baby ‘the ancient way’ is ‘a bit gross’ (192). According to Shira, who herself discovers she was created using sperm from a man who died eighteen years before her birth, acknowledging that ‘half the kids in this town are born from petri dishes or test tubes. At Y-S they used to say every baby has three parents nowadays – the mother, the father, and the doctor who does all the chemistry’ (191– 92). The fact that Yod is not born of a woman therefore does not necessarily disqualify him from human status, and nor does his inability to reproduce, since this is also a trait which he shares with many humans. Further confusing the distinction between human and cyborg, Yod is able to form a family with Shira and Ari, proving himself to be a far more attentive and loving parent than Avram, Riva or Josh (349). It is in the collapsing of such seemingly monolithic categories as ‘human’ and ‘machine’ then that Haraway perceives the dissolution of patriarchal, logocentric systems of power which, as critics such as Hélène Cixous have demonstrated, have traditionally subjected all thought to a system of dual, hierarchical oppositions, creating a ‘masculine edifice which passed itself off as eternal- natural’.28 In evading the neat labelling and categorization which phallocentric society seeks to impose upon all living creatures, the figure of the cyborg possesses, as Haraway asserts, ‘great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self’. It is the liberating potential to confuse the oppressive boundaries erected by patriarchal systems of thought ‘that cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities’.29

52 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

One of the oppositions – perhaps the most fundamental opposition – which Piercy examines is that established in patriarchal society between men and women. As the title suggests, in He, She and It Piercy interrogates and problematizes conventional gender demarcations, primarily through the figure of Yod, whose male body has undergone adaptation by Malkah to incorporate some feminine wiring. Malkah discusses with Shira her contribution to Yod’s development, explaining: ‘Avram made him male – entirely so. Avram thought that was the ideal: pure reason, pure logic, pure violence. The world has barely survived the males we have running around. I gave him a gentler side, starting with emphasizing his love for knowledge and extending it to emotional and personal knowledge, a need for connection’ (HSI, 142). Whilst Piercy’s polarization of masculine reason as opposed to feminine emotion borders precariously on essentialism, she does seem to argue, through the representation of Yod, for the benefits of a blend of different gender characteristics, which in his case allow him to be both a chivalrous protector and a sensitive lover. He craves touching and intimacy and desires total telepathy, which Shira identifies as a fantasy of women. He is also a considerate and attentive lover, prioritising female desire. Ultimately, however, Yod’s behaviour evades and confuses gender classification, and Shira reflects, ‘sometimes Yod’s behavior was what she thought of as feminine; sometimes it seemed neutral, mechanical, purely logical; sometimes he did things that struck her as indistinguishable from how every other male she had been with would have acted’ (321). Moreover, the problematization of gendered behaviour which Yod embodies also reveals itself in Shira’s contemplation of her own gendered behaviour, thrown into sharp relief by the presence of Yod. She realizes that ‘so often she found that with Yod, when she moved into her usual behavior with men, she was playing by herself. Whole sets of male–female behavior simply did not apply’ (245). Piercy thus seems to take a somewhat ambivalent approach to the issue of gender, seeming on the one hand to argue that men and women possess distinct masculine and feminine traits, implying that human nature is inherently gendered, and on the other hand that interaction between the sexes consists largely of gendered performance, bearing little relation to the true people hiding behind the façade. However, the notion of a ‘true’ person is itself problematized in the novel, revealing as it does through the correlation of human and cyborg the instability, contingency, and flux which characterizes human nature.

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 53

Jennifer Gonzalez asserts, in her historical study of visual representations of cyborg bodies, that her motivation was to explore the relationship between representations of cyborgs and representations of race and racial mixtures, having observed the prevalence of the term ‘miscegenation’ in discussions of the concept of cyborgs. The hybrid character of the cyborg, who dissolves the boundary between human and machine, seems to confront humans with its ‘otherness’, invoking fear associated with the loss of racial purity. However, as Gonzalez points out, what makes the term ‘hybrid’ controversial is that:

it appears to assume by definition the existence of a non-hybrid state – a pure state, a pure species, a pure race – with which it is contrasted. It is this notion of purity that must, in fact, be problematized. For if any progress is to be made in a politics of human or cyborg existence, heterogeneity must be taken as a given.30

The figure of the cyborg thus demands that humans confront the ‘otherness’ within ourselves, breaking open the rigid and constricting categories into which we have been forced by a phallocentric system, and which work to keep us in fear of all those who are different, fuelling the capitalist system, as Wertheim points out, by maintaining individuals as ‘passive, discrete and possessive’ through ‘the repression of this relational and equivocal otherness’.31 The figure of the cyborg has the revolutionary potential, as Haraway argues, to provide ‘a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia’.32

Conclusion

Atwood and Piercy strive to emphasize that ‘political confrontation is not merely a choice but a human responsibility’.33 The future we want to see must be fought for and brought into being through both individual and collective political action, the penalty for political passivity being dystopia, which reiterates those familiar fears of the erosion of personal freedoms, the continued despoiling of the environment and destruction of animal and plant species, the imposition of rigid and divisive codes of behaviour, and an intensified divide between rich and poor. Whilst neither Atwood nor Piercy suggest simply that women are the sole agents of positive political

54 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

change in society, as illustrated in the important role of Lazarus in ameliorating conditions in the Glop in He, She and It, they both suggest that women, precisely due to their status as women, can be significant agents of subversion. Women, having been historically oppressed by men and contained within the domestic sphere, cut off from channels of power and alienated from one another, surely have less investment in the status quo; they are more motivated to overthrow existing power structures and try to replace them with more egalitarian and democratic structures. However, whilst some women may indeed be able to lead the way in the emancipation of the world from patriarchal capitalism, a continued focus upon a sexual divide seems somehow to re-entrench essentialist notions regarding men and women, assuming false commonalities between people of the same sex, and signalling collectivities which do not, in fact, exist. The most important aspect of Atwood’s and Piercy’s speculative fiction is surely that change is possible; more than that, that change is inevitable, and it is up to us as individuals to determine whether that change is for good or for ill. It is time to act wisely, they warn, before it is too late, for our planet and for our freedom.

Notes

1. Raffaella Baccolini, ‘Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler’, in Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, ed. Marleen Barr (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 18.

2. Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (London: Zed Books, 1997), 12–13. Salleh notes that ‘the word “nature” is a mystifying construction in capitalist patriarchal discourse, just as “man” and “woman” are’. She goes on to say that, in her book, ‘static ideological terms like “Woman”, “Humanity”, “the State”, “Nature” are occasionally capitalized to convey the false concreteness that must be resisted in making change’ (14).

3. Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics, 3. 4. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (London: The Women’s Press, 2000),

54. Hereafter cited as WET, with page numbers provided in parentheses in the main body of the article.

5. ‘We’re being poisoned from afar’, declared Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which represents 155,000 Inuit, in May 2004 – see Alister Doyle, ‘‘Dirty Dozen’ Toxins are Banned by UN Pact’, Guardian, 17 May 2004.

6. Daniel Elkan, ‘What’s Your Bank up to in the Rainforest?’ Guardian, 29 May 2004. 7. George Monbiot, ‘Starved of the Truth’, Guardian, 9 March 2004. Monbiot is a

regular columnist in the Guardian and writes on environmental matters.

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 55

8. Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: Morrow, 1997), 17.

9. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible (New York: Methuen, 1986), 130. 10. Bryan Appleyard, Brave New Worlds: Genetics and the Human Experience

(London: HarperCollins, 2000), 3. 11. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, 136. 12. Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Introduction’, in Aliens R Us: The Other in Science Fiction

Cinema, eds Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 3. 13. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago, 2004), 20. Hereafter cited as

OC, with page numbers provided in parentheses in the main body of the article. 14. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (London: Cape, 1975), 32, cited in Salleh,

Ecofeminism as Politics, 56. 15. Eric Schlosser writes: ‘About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were

routinely fed livestock wastes – the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle – until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters’. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal is Doing to the World (London: Penguin, 2002), 202

16. See OC, 57–58, 109–10, 192–93, 241, 238. 17. E.O. Wilson, The Future of Life (London: Little Brown, 2002), 54. 18. Helena Paul, Ricarda Steinbrecher, Lucy Michaels, and Devlin Kuvek, Hungry

Corporations: Transnational Biotech Companies Colonise the Food Chain (London: Zed Books, 2003), 227.

19. Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, ‘Now the Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us’, Observer, 22 February 2004.

20. Ibid. 21. Marge Piercy, He, She and It (New York: Fawcett Books, 1991), 3, 11. Hereafter

referred to as HSI, with page numbers provided in parentheses in the main body of the article. 22. In the post-apocalyptic world of He, She and It, humanity is starkly divided between

tightly controlled corporate enclaves run by a handful of multis – huge, wealthy multi- national enterprises with their own social hierarchy, and the Glop outside these enclaves, where people live with poverty, violence and disease in an environmentally ravaged landscape. An exception are the ‘free towns’ such as Tikva, that are able to sell their technologies to the multis while remaining autonomous.

23. Anna M. Martinson, ‘Ecofeminist Perspectives on Technology in the Science Fiction of Marge Piercy’, Extrapolation 44, 1 (2003): 50–68 .

24. Christine Wertheim, ‘Star Trek: First Contact: The Hybrid, the Whore and the Machine’, in Sardar and Cubitt, eds, Aliens R Us, 91, original emphasis.

25. Silvio Gaggi, ‘The Cyborg and the Net: Figures of the Technological Subject’, Bucknell Review 46, 2 (2003), 125.

26. June Deery, ‘Science for Feminists: Margaret Atwood’s Body of Knowledge’, in Future Females, The Next Generation, 92.

27. Ibid., 92. 28. Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David

Lodge with Nigel Wood (Harlow: Pearson, 2nd edn, 2000), 266. 29. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New

York: Routledge, 1991), 174.

56 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

30. Jennifer Gonzalez, ‘Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes From Current Research’, in Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kath Woodward and Fiona Hovenden (eds.), The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (London and New York: Routledge in association with The Open University, 2000), 67.

31. Wertheim, ‘Star Trek: First Contact’, 91. 32. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 181. 33. Barbara Hill Rigney, Margaret Atwood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 120.

Notes on Contributors

Jim Clarke is a doctoral candidate in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, where he is completing his PhD on the aesthetics of English polymath Anthony Burgess as a scholar of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. He has an additional research interest in the intersection of SF and religion, and is currently working on a book on SF and Catholicism. A former national newspaper journalist, he also conducts research on the culture and history of tabloids.

Soraya Copley is an independent scholar and lives in Newcastle, UK. She studied at the University of Newcastle, where much of her postgraduate research focused on women’s writing, in particular women’s science fiction. She wrote her postgraduate thesis on women’s science fiction, focusing on the work of Margaret Atwood and Marge Piercy.

Rowland Hughes is Principal Lecturer in English Literature and American Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, Native American literature, and literature and the environment. He has published work on American literature, British and American cinema, and literary theory.

Sidneyeve Matrix is Queen’s National Scholar and Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Film at Queen’s University, Canada, where she teaches courses on mass communication and digital technology trends. Her research on science fiction and cyberpunk film and media was published as Cyberpop: Digital Lifestyles and Commodity Culture (by Routledge, 2006). She has also published research on media convergence, geosocial technologies, and social media communication and marketing.

Hannah Stark is Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania, where she works on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, feminist theory, contemporary literature, and representations of the non-human.

Critical Survey Volume 25, Number 2, 2013: 112–113 doi: 10.3167/cs.2013.250210 ISSN 0011–1570 (Print), ISSN 1752–2293 (Online)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.