Thursday Club: Rachel Armstrong:Bio Feminism — Move Over Darwin with respondent, Joanna Zylinska :: March 26, 2009; 6 -8 pm :: Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, South East London.

A significant change is occurring in the biological sciences with implications for feminist identity politics. This illustrated presentation examines cutting edge developments from pioneering laboratories and invites the audience to engage with the notion that Bio Feminism is set to play a pioneering role in the science of the third millennium. Modern science rests upon philosophical pillars that originate from 19th Century principles of logical analysis, reductionism and machines, particularly with respect to the organism. Feminist writers such as Evelyn Fox Keller and Donna Haraway, both of whom were trained biologists, have raised objection to this hierarchical, traditional view of science and made provocations for change towards a more inclusive feminist model of science whose organizational agenda is ‘cyborg’.

At the start of the 21st Century there is a convergence between feminist and biological scientific agendas, which propose a more complex view of life and cell mechanisms than stated by traditional science and is the basis for a new reading of biological identity that Armstrong has called Bio Feminism. This engages with a mechanism for the evolution of Haraway’s cybernetic entities and also embodies the unique politics of the cyborg. Despite counter arguments that feminist agendas have no contribution to make to scientific practice, feminist scientific thinkers have proven to be prophetic. The emerging disciplines of synthetic biology, Alife and chembiogenesis are more in keeping in their methodologies and rhetoric with modern feminist principles than their 19th Century scientific counterparts and as such, mark the emergence of a mainstream branch of science that could be regarded as inherently sympathetic to the feminist critique. Bio Feminist science promotes the treacherous biology of the cyborg challenging notions of aliveness, performing every transgressive act possible within autopoietic systems at a molecular level and redefining our view of evolution.

RACHEL ARMSTRONG is a medical doctor, author and arts collaborator who has worked at the intersection of art, science, technology and human space habitation. She has appeared regularly in the media and at international conferences speculating on the future of humankind, non-Darwinian techniques of evolution and the challenges of the extra-terrestrial environment. Her work includes collaborations with the artists Stelarc, Helen Chadwick and Orlan in the field of radical body modification and anatomical design. Armstrong is an academic architect working at the intersection of biology and design of autopoietic materials that facilitate the construction of autonomous architecture. She is a member of AVATAR, the advanced virtual and technological architecture research group. Armstrong has also written a number of Science Fiction narratives. Her
current affiliations are with the Bartlett School of Architecture and SMARTlab Digital Media Institute UEL.

JOANNA ZYLINSKA is a Reader in New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths. She is the author of three books: Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009), The Ethics of Cultural Studies (Continuum, 2005) and On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester University Press, 2001). She is also the editor of The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, a collection of essays on the work of performance artists Stelarc and Orlan (Continuum, 2002) and co-editor of Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Most recently she has been combining her philosophical writings with photographic art practice.