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 THE THURSDAY CLUB
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Date: Thursday 26th March 2009
Location: Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, London UK
          http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/
Time: 6pm - 8pm

Free, all welcome.

BIO FEMINISM: MOVE OVER DARWIN
Rachel Armstrong
Respondent: Joanna Zylinska

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.

http://thethursdayclub.net/

Programmed and Organised by the Goldsmiths Digital Studios.
Supported by the Goldsmiths Graduate School and the Department of
Computing.