Professional Middle-Class Cyborgs

Denaturalising sex to obscure class

I’m currently still working on the same section of my manuscript as earlier, a chapter on the shift from naturalistic definitions of sex and gender to the current model of ‘declarative’ gender.

This has involved yet again re-reading A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway (oof), but I finally noticed this bit again:

Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women’s dominations of each other. For me—and for many who share a similar historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies—the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion.

As you maybe know, both Haraway and Butler were the early architects for a de-naturalised concept of sex and gender. What is easily missed, however, is what they are reacting to and why they feel these older concepts need to be abolished.

Read that last line again, the one I bolded and italicized. It’s easy to imagine that Haraway here is performing the kind of confessional privilege check we now see relentlessly in woke discourse, but it was written decades before this even became a thing.

What both Haraway and Butler are reacting to and opposing are contemporaneous feminist current in which they don’t feel they have a place. Those currents (radical feminism, Marxist feminism, and especially ecofeminism) all argue for an increasingly naturalised concept of women upon with international solidarity can be built.

The problem for Haraway and Butler both is that their “professional middle-class” status separates them from the overwhelmingly majority of women around the world. In fact, they have much more in common with the male bosses of South-East Asian women slaving away in textile factories than they do with those women. Rather than hiring out their immigrant bodies as domestic workers, they’re of the class of people who hire them (and fire them when they don’t clean fast enough).

Gender and sex needed to be redefined as a site of political solidarity not because there was no such thing as “woman,” but rather that the “middle-class professional” status of women like Haraway and Butler (and later also Crenshaw) put them more in alignment with the exploiter class rather than the exploited.

This is the same thing we see in the matter of woke race politics. Neither Kimberly Crenshaw, nor Ibrahim X. Kendi, nor Ijeoma Oluo, nor any of the other PMC theorists of race have any class similarities to the black people being gunned down by police or living in urban squalor. On the contrary, their values are more in line with the capitalist order which engineers those awful material conditions.

Put more simply, many of the woke identity formations are ways to minimize class difference in order to accommodate well-off ‘radicals’ who need to obscure their much greater wealth and material conditions from those they are trying to influence.

Haraway’s “Cyborg” feminism and Butler’s “gender as performance” are both brilliant ways to obscure class. Both frameworks dissolve the materially-based categories into esoteric ideals which anyone can then later apply to themselves. All you need to do is feel oppressed, and feel that your oppression is just as valid as a practically enslaved woman in Asia or a single mother selling her body for rent money, and it’s suddenly so.

Those other feminist currents insisted that the core site of women’s oppression was women’s labor and women’s bodies, rather than just a vague sense of social inequality and male privilege. Denaturalising the concept of women makes it impossible to build solidarity along these lines, which is how we get ridiculous drivel like what Sophie Lewis (another “white, professional middle class, female, radical” and slobbering acolyte of Haraway) produced.

Unfortunately, the situation we find ourselves in now is that there are very few feminists—or really anyone else—arguing we consider again the material reality of sex as a site of exploitation. Silvia Federici (against whom Lewis seems to have a peculiar animosity) still does, of course.

Otherwise, we have to look to more conservative feminist voices to lead the way towards this. Here’s one, from self-identified “reactionary feminist” Mary Harrington’s recent review of Lewis’s of Full Surrogacy Now:

Lewis is a skilled, mercurial, and often witty prose stylist. Taken on its own terms, Full Surrogacy Now is an elegant and well-written text. And if you believe there’s no such thing as human nature, its vision for family life is a logical extension of egalitarian ideals into new territory. 

The principal obstacle to her utopia is the danger that human nature might not be a self-serving invention of white cisheteropatriarchy after all, but an irreducible fact of our existence. And if, in fact, human nature does exist, Lewis’s book is to be condemned for the idealistic coloration it affords what would then be a vision straight out of a horror movie: the technologically-enabled push to demolish all bonds of given, unconditional love—even of a mother for her baby. 

Doing so in the name of freedom and desire, with no regard for what that baby might need, would be to frame a dog-eat-dog world of selfishness, force, loneliness, and caprice as one of infinite richness, possibility, and satisfaction. As with the free-market optimists of the 1980s and 1990s, this vision ignores the role played by norms, constraints, and givens in shielding the weakest among us from predation by the strong. Its utopian sleight of hand is thus profoundly neoliberal in spirit.

Harrington is correct. The further divorced an identity framework becomes from the Real of the material conditions of the people that identity is meant to describe, the more absurd—and more irrelevant—the resulting politics become.