The Cyborg
a manuscript excerpt
I’m in the final stages of my second round of edits for my manuscript, now tentatively titled ‘Here Be Monsters.’ The publishers have slated it for publication in September, 2023.
While much of the original material continues on into this iteration of the manuscript, I’ve chosen to re-narrate much of the ideological and historical shifts that resulted in what is often called “Woke” politics now through the figures of monsters.
Our word “monster” comes from a Latin word that meant “to show.” The appearance of monsters was a divine omen or warning, a sign from elsewhere of some shift in society.
This is a short excerpt from one of the new chapters in the manuscript in which I discuss the first of these monsters, the Cyborg.
Ideological shifts do not merely happen in a vacuum, and they are rarely if ever born only in academic, political, or scientific discourse. Larger events occurring in society itself often initiate these changes.
It’s well known, for example, that the transformation of industrial societies during the second World War changed the composition of the labor force. While millions of men were pulled into the war efforts as soldiers, millions of women filled the industrial and agricultural positions those men no longer filled. Women worked as machinists, miners, assembly-line workers, and in many other “traditionally-male” roles.
Often this is seen as a moment of liberation and progress for women and women’s political rights, since prior to this period women in those societies were generally often not employed in such jobs. However, because many of those women lost those jobs after the war, or married and became housewives, it would seem this moment of liberation was only quite temporary. Also, the following decade, the 50’s, saw a resurgence of strict gender roles for women especially through the figure of the dutiful suburban housewife, eager to please her work-traumatized husband in every way possible.
In the meantime, technological changes promised to alter domestic work itself. The mass production and consumer availability of household domestic appliances such as washing machines, tumble dryers, and dish washing machines appeared to make life easier for women, but they did not actually change the societal role of housewives as the people doing that work. Instead, advertising during that period often showed women happy and relieved to have more time to take care of their husbands, rather than being able to pursue their own goals.
One bit of technology did radically alter the situation of women, however: the birth control pill. Invented in the 50’s and approved for prescription sale by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1960, the pill offered to women a technological escape from the inevitability of pregnancy and a degree of control over the decision to raise a child or not.
The introduction of the birth control pill heavily shaped feminist thought in the 1960’s,1 and is sometimes seen as the true starting point of second-wave feminism. Feminists began to think about pregnancy and motherhood not as natural fates of women, but just one potential role that they could have. It also meant that pregnancy was less of a risk in sexual relations with men, thus freeing women to explore their sexual desires with fewer economic consequences.
In 1973, the Federal decriminalization of abortion through the Supreme Court ruling of Roe vs. Wade furthered this apparent trajectory towards liberation in the United States. Not only could women choose to avoid conception, they could also choose to terminate a pregnancy after conception.
Both widespread availability of the birth control pill and then the decriminalization of abortion seemed to give women full control over their reproduction, and yet feminists noticed that society wasn’t becoming more equal. Men still dominated their professional lives and the instruments of political governance, and men continued to physically dominate women. Rape and other sexual assaults continued as they had before: all that had really changed was a woman’s options after such assaults.
The point here is that the technological changes which influenced and shaped feminist thought never quite delivered the liberation which they promised. Though machines appeared in almost every home to make work easier for women, those machines never changed the fact that it was women who must do that work. Though women could now mostly control whether or not their bodies would carry a child after sexual relations with a man, their bodies were still subordinate to the bodies of men.
This meant that second-wave feminists started looking elsewhere for the roots of the problem. One influential current which arose in response to these observations was called radical feminism. Radical feminism saw inequality between men and women as a “transhistorical phenomenon” arising out of the system they identified as patriarchy. Men had always arranged societies in such a way that women would be subjugated, inferior, and barred from political and economic access. Thus, the only way for women to achieve liberation and have an equal status with men was a radical re-ordering of society on all levels.
When we now hear people speaking of “dismantling” or “smashing” the patriarchy, this is why. The influence of radical feminism on the rest of feminism was substantial, and even though radical feminism has now become synonymous with criticism of transgenderism (as in “Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists”), all contemporary feminist thought—as well as queer, anti-racist, and other radical movements—were shaped by radical feminism’s framework.