Beyond The Humanist Imagination

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Beyond the Humanist Imagination
Article in NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research · December 2011

DOI: 10.1080/08038740.2011.625042
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Cecilia Åsberg , Redi Koobak & Ericka Johnson
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Department of Thematic Studies – Technology and Social Change,
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NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research,
Vol. 19, No. 4, 218–230, December 2011
POSITION PAPER
Downloaded by [Linkopings universitetsbibliotek] at 10:35 01 March 2012
CECILIA ÅSBERG*, REDI KOOBAK* & ERICKA JOHNSON**

*Department of Thematic Studies – Gender Studies, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden;
**Department of Thematic Studies – Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, Linköping,
Sweden
Visceralities
Something is stirring. Calls for attention are heard from within. Visceral movements
resonate from within the belly of the beast of academia. They beckon us from inside
the humanities and the natural sciences in an age when transgenic biotechnology and
patented genes, wildlife conservation, and in-vitro meat, in-vivo foetal imaging, and
embryo selection, epigenetics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, artificial insemina-
tion, and consumer custom-made pharmacology are the orders of the day. Stirrings
are felt more widely as well, from the world within and around us.
The realities of contemporary life, in the most mundane and everyday-ish sense,
keep us constantly on alert and beg us to pay attention to what we are doing in new
ways. This might happen as we take out the garbage. Waste has increasingly stirred
our awareness about the environment, as plastic bottles, disposable coffee cups, old
computers, plastic bags, and metal scraps litter both private and public spaces. It
finds no rest in landfills or in waterways. It haunts us in outer space as the junk-yard
belt of discharged satellites and rocket parts that orbit the Earth. It surfaces in the
ocean as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a marine sludge of plastic debris that kills
all kinds of flying and swimming animals, and outnumbers plankton and marine life
as it keeps expanding. This particular patch of plastic sea soup was recently estimated
to be twice the size of France, but it is probably not the only one. Not visible through
modern imaging technology, such as satellite surveillance, and gathering where major
currents converge, they are thus places often avoided by ships and are very hard to
detect unless one actually goes there.
But there is also more afoot in a different register. There are more things going
on that divert our attention to non-human agency and the forces of nature and the
fact that we are part of a world larger than any human society. Examples abound.
Correspondence Address: Cecilia Åsberg, PhD, Department of Thematic Studies – Gender Studies,
Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden. Email: cecilia.asberg@liu.se
0803-8740 Print/1502-394X Online/2011/040218–230 q 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2011.625042
Beyond the Humanist Imagination 219
For instance, the hurricane Gudrun ruined the estates, forests, and lives of farmers in
Småland, Sweden in 2005. The volcano Eyafjallajökul forced air traffic across
Northern Europe come to a grinding halt in 2010, and the surge of the Mississippi
River in 2011 created an historic flood. Climates have been changing under the surface
for quite some time. For instance, the Baltic Sea harbours many of the consequences
of recent modern life. It contains other agents beside the feral plastics that time cannot
make disappear, only transform into phthalates (a common plastic softener) and
other polymeric clusters that in effect can mimic and alter bodily hormone systems.
Pharmaceuticals, too, like birth control pills, take on sinister shapes as they pass
through the body and get flushed down the drain. Fish respond to such hormone
treatment with partial sex reassignment, and at the other end of the food chain we
stand gulping. There is a trans-corporeal (Alaimo 2008) sexual politics of transmission
across species and environments in this ecosystem that makes the sex – gender
distinction implode on itself. It is one that feminist scholars have yet to explore.
What concerns us in this think piece, however, are not the apocalyptic dimensions
of waste or weather (as explored in Hollywood movies) but the way feminist scholars
have returned to thinking with the powers of material natures and against
reductionist analysis in complicated times.
The wild and the wasted, the wily and the worldly beg for response and responsibility.
Any kind of closer inspection reveals an intense, yet largely unacknowledged,
oscillation across the borders of nature and culture that has been established by modern
convention (Latour 1993). Our analytical categories are deeply troubled (Riley 1988;
Butler 1990). Even the human body is not as human as it was thought to be. The
information from the human genome overlaps with most other animal genomes in
general, and, as bacteria outnumber by at least a thousand times the number of human
cells in the body (!), we incorporate more bacterial than human genes into that which we
consider our body. The theme of much science fiction and UFO enthusiasm, that we are
not alone, has proved to be true. In fact, we remain rather outnumbered by friendly
aliens. Recent theories of evolution and systems biology suggest such cohabitation as
the very precondition for human existence (Hood & Perlmutter 2004). Biology is a
funny thing. In many ways it supplements post-structuralist feminist efforts to
deconstruct the solid and autonomous human individual. Recent stirrings within
feminist theory also ask us to acknowledge these non-humans (see, for instance, the
special issue on the non-human in the journal Feminist Theory, edited by Myra J. Hird
and Celia Roberts). The non-human makes up a large part of our bodies, our selves, and
the world in which we coexist. We need to acknowledge their presence, not as something
new-found, but as the pre-existing, “always already” (see van der Tuin, this issue) of
forces outside our anthropocentric imaginary. But why leave the division of labour
intact, that which says scientists deal with nature and feminist scholars with culture and
society, when “human nature”, as suggested by anthropologist Anna Tsing, really must
be thought of as “an interspecies relationship” (Haraway 2008: 19)?
This is food for thought and can potentially cause some serious indigestion. The
already age-old feminist question of who gets to count as human within the annals of the
Humanities must be taken up anew, from different intersecting perspectives. Consider
the noisy notion of “animal”. If it is not that exotic other of “Man” it is often taken
to be,1 feminists may do well to heed the fraught relationships between human and
220 C. Åsberg et al.
non-human animals. Statements such as “Men are animals” can take on outrageous
proportions in one context2 and be regarded as a scientific truism in another.3
The animal question echoes widely. While no longer a Cassandra cry of teenage
animal rights activists and their imagery of tortured rabbits in the cosmetics industry
or the beagles used in laboratories worldwide, animal welfare has yet to become
a mature concern of the public sphere. Our attention span is still uneven and
paradoxical. Today news of Knut the polar bear can easily eclipse a famine in
Somalia, at the same time as millions of Northerners gamble their Saturdays away at
the race tracks without much concern for the horses.
In response to such concerns, a cacophony of both human and non-human voices,
feminist researchers have shown a renewed interest in the body and corporeal
processes, in performative realisms, in how materialities mingle with meaning, and
how the constituency of human as well as non-human populations can coexist in a
world that nowadays is defined just as much by finitude and vulnerability as by
endless possibility (Grosz 1994; Birke et al. 2004; Barad 2007; Haraway 2008;
Braidotti 2009; Alaimo 2010). As humans become more entangled in intricate
relationships with technology and science, with other animals and the environment,
notions of the human, along with various humanisms and anthropocentric
approaches, have become difficult to uphold. The pervasiveness of these
entanglements also fundamentally threatens the humanist logics of gender and
race, sexuality and species, and their related dichotomous understandings of selfhood
and otherness, internal and external, familiar and alien, natural and constructed.
This indeed entails a serious challenge to feminist thought and a call for onto-
epistemological inventiveness, for new conceptualizations that can map and direct
the entanglements of human and non-human agency as they emerge.
In the following, we aim to map out key features of such feminist research that, as of
recently, flourishes at the rim of the humanist imagination. We explore here the on-
going fundamental questioning of the humanist assumption that “the figure of Man (sic)
naturally stands at the centre of things” (Badmington 2004: 1345). Our cartography is
framed by our perspectives as cultural scholars critically anchored in feminist theory. It
is also limited by the time-lag that haunts any attempts at mapping a moving field. We
set out to create what can only be named as a partial cartography that we hope can assist
in tracing exciting areas of research and clarifying some common misunderstandings
about this emerging trend of feminist questioning. It is not the case that we presume we
can boldly go where no feminist scholars have gone before, to paraphrase a well known
mission statement from the world of science fiction.4 In fact, we would like to make a
strong case for how previous research—some of which has not had a strong position
within the Nordic context, quite the contrary—supports these new lines of questions
without having to make a spectacular entrance as the new approach par excellence.
Conversely, we will here open up a thousand trails to the post-humanist imaginary of
recent and previous research in, or in the direct vicinity of, existing feminist scholarship.
Meeting materialities
A key figure in materialist feminist thought, Stacy Alaimo (also present in this issue
of NORA), has outlined what she terms the material turn in feminist theory,
environmental humanities, and science studies (Alaimo 2010). She claims that what
the recent decades of feminist focus on the discursive and the linguistic, “the primacy
of the cultural”, have excluded is the “stuff” of matter and materiality. In a similar
vein, Karen Barad presents a line of provocative post-humanist questions to social
constructionist feminist research:
What compels the belief that we have direct access to cultural representations
and their content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language
come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture
granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and
immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language

and culture? (Barad 2003: 801)
Granted, language entails a strong performative dimension, Barad argues with

Judith Butler, but why do feminists need to continue to uphold the modern divide
that derogates nature as a mere passive resource for humans and their cultural
activities? Matter, Barad concludes, is not devoid of agency. The transformative
power accredited to culture by feminist theory is founded on a dichotomous
understanding of nature and culture, the material and the discursive, she contends in
her influential article “Posthumanist performativity”. Importantly, Barad replaces
this with a material-discursive theory of agential realism. In doing this she builds on
concepts from Donna Haraway, like “naturecultures”, and onto-epistemological
insights about the co-constitution of observer, observation, and the observed that she
reads out of the work of physicist Niels Bohr.
As nature becomes reinvented as agential, the concept of culture too must change.
The call for reappraisal comes here primarily from studies of human and animal
relations. For long taken to be the exclusive domain of human beings and defined by
their allegedly superior communicative practices, the very concept of culture,
however, hinges largely on an understanding of language as a unique feature of
human existence. (Honestly, who here has not engaged in an interspecies
conversation, perhaps with her cat or dog, and experienced a response?) Post-
structuralist scholars even pinpoint language as the key to subjectivity and social
existence. Comparing overlaps and divergences between animal and disability studies,
Kari Weil forces us to rethink such assumptions. Discussing recent work within
animal studies that aims to demonstrate that specific animals do have language
capabilities similar to those of humans, she compares such work with other animal
studies and disability projects that instead are intent on studying other forms of
subjectivity that are not based on language. Conversely, such non-language-centred
studies are “concerned with ways of knowing that appear to work outside those
processes of logocentric, rational thinking that have defined what is proper to the
human, as opposed to the nonhuman animal” (Weil 2006: 87). Clearly, such concerns
are in direct affinity with much work within feminist theory, like the philosophical
oeuvre of Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz. They move us towards uncharted
domains for feminist research, towards a counter-linguistic turn to material cultures.
This adds but another inflection to the many twists and turns we mention and map out
here as presently haunting the outskirts of the humanist imaginary.
Ambivalence looms largely over what to term all these emerging turns or
intersecting movements as they stir and redirect our awareness. Whatever we call it, it
seems to entail (studies of) the living and the agential, (un)ethical companionships
and pluralistic coexistence as issues that cannot be contained within cultural,
discursive, or human-centred domains of analysis. Some of the concerns raised are
novel, and challenging as such; some are not so new. Still they evoke and provoke
feminist responses. Here, we may only be able to pull out a few entangled strands of
that yarn of ontological twists and analytical turns in the vicinity of feminist theory.
And one of the most unsettled questions of our field of research, the body and its
sensibilities, remains an old concern of materialist feminism as it ranges from
historical (dialectical) materialisms to new (non-dialectical) materialisms.

Materialist feminist work has also rekindled the question of materiality within
feminist ethics. Such ontological politics, invigorating human animal studies, eco-
criticism, and decades-worth of work to come to terms with the biological within
feminist science studies, is captured in the statement: “We are all matter, and we all
matter” (Birke et al. 2004: 178). A lot of such and similar contemporary materialist
theorizing is produced with special reference to the field of research, less established
in the Nordic countries, called feminist science studies, or feminist technoscience
studies. As an umbrella term it harbours the transdisciplinary study of the natural,
technological, and medical sciences as they inflect, and are inflected by, our
contemporary capitalist society and cultural imaginaries. Feminist technoscience
studies inhabit a long materialist tradition, especially regarding the materialities of
the body.
Old body troubles

Not exactly the new kids on the block, feminists have, for almost four decades,
critiqued the complicity of scientific and rationalist discourse in the production and
reiteration of “the body” as the effeminate half of different permutations of a
mind/body dualism. Moreover, they have called critical attention to the inscription of
the female body as a version of “nature”, an icon of irrationality and exotic sensuality
in particular need of (scientific) discipline (Schiebinger 1993; Davis 1997). The early
1970s saw the very invention of the widely acknowledged separation of sex and
gender by two sexologists, John Money and Anke Ehrhardt. Sex stood for the
biological determination of anatomies into either male or female bodies, while gender
initially was regarded as the individual’s sense of identity.
At around the same time, Anglophone feminists also argued that sex was to be
regarded as separate from gender, while gender to them designated a bifurcated and
hierarchical societal regime that, on a structural scale, assigned femininity to the
detriment of women. In the Swedish context, where “kön” signified both sex and
gender (minus the sexuality dimension), this translated later into the introduction of
a novel concept, “genus” (Hirdman 1988), and a corollary of responses (Kulick &
Bjerén 1987; Jónasdóttir 1998; Widerberg 1998; Åsberg 1998; Hemmings 2006;
Peltonen 2009; Johnson & Berner 2010; Lykke 2010). Gender became the instrument
with which to detail how societal structures and historical context designated two sets
of gender regimes. These gender regimes, as famously argued by Gayle Rubin in
1975, produced the bulk of differences between men and women. While the Swedish
notion of “genus” supplanted the heterosexual norm, Rubin forcefully argued against
regarding homosexuality and heterosexuality as stable, given and natural referents
for identity (Rubin 1975). Such questioning of the biological basis for sexual identity
was later to be foundational for feminist theorizing, in Sweden and elsewhere,
through the work of Judith Butler (1990), and the influential queer feminist work that
followed (Rosenberg 2002).
In many ways similar to the term gender, “genus” opened up previously uncharted
channels of Swedish feminist thought, for instance the interdisciplinary move from
women’s studies to gender studies, or the cross-over of queer feminist theory (Butler
1993, 1994), and later also for anti-racist approaches such as those of intersectionality
(Crenshaw 1989; de los Reyes & Mulinari 2005; Lykke 2010). In an anti-essentialist
mode, feminist theorizing flourished in the spirit of working “against proper objects”
(Butler 1994), also in regard to fields of study (Lykke 2010). However, the biological
has continued to trouble feminist thought.
In particular it troubled the subfield often referred to as feminist science studies.
This, since the study of science, medicine, and engineering as social practices in
historical or cultural context entailed hard work as science is located in the border
zone of overlapping physical, social, and conceptual worlds. Challenged with
demanding forms of interdisciplinarity, feminist science studies scrutinized biological
claims in particular, as these find their way into politics and society as place-holders
that legitimize and naturalize gendered power relations.
To sum up five key “body troubles”, such feminist concerns ranged from critiquing
(1) biological determinism, encapsulated by the notion that “we are our genes” or
“anatomy is destiny” (as Freud infamously claimed with regard to the female
psyche); to problematizing (2) scientism as the epistemic authority granted to the
natural sciences in society and the general gendering of expertise (a form of
normative and “abstract masculinity”). Furthermore, feminist science scholars
interrogated the modern dynamics of (3) disembodiment, the idea that knowledge and
perceptions of the world can come from nowhere, from a neutral no-body. This is
also an onto-epistemological move that Donna Haraway, herself a pioneering
scholar of feminist science studies, has famously dubbed the “God trick” (Haraway
1991). It relates to the problem feminists have identified as the (4) objectification of
bodies, which entails the problematic idea that nature and bodies are passive
resources for culture and mind. Such feminist criticisms have also redirected their
attention from earlier criticisms of biological determinism into readings of (5)
biological fetishism (Haraway 1997; Franklin et al. 2000). As a term, fetishism
describes the attribution of excessive value to a singular, ultra-naturalized entity,
such as the gene, the uterus, the brain, or the neuron. The entity is consequently
celebrated as a disembodied and self-referential thing-in-itself (cf. Haraway 1997:
134, 142), which feminists find highly problematic in their insistence on context and
specificity.
The possibilities entailed in understanding the social construction of gender were
instrumental for these critiques. Feminists assigned biological (especially reproduc-
tive) differences to the word sex, and gender became the term for all other differences
(Fausto-Sterling 2000). This has been a convincing epistemological project, based on
the social constructionist assumptions that the sexed/gendered body is primarily

constituted by the social. Examining the discursive has indeed been immensely
productive for feminist research. It opened up new possibilities for understanding
gender, sexuality, and the body, without becoming trapped in genital, reproduc-
tionist, or essentialist categorizations. In a way, this led gender studies in general to
“abandon” the physical materiality of the processual body (Birke 1999; Barad 2007;
Alaimo & Heckman 2008). Feminist science studies, however, with its unusual
numbers of interdisciplinary women trained in the natural sciences or in public health
policy (for instance, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective 2005), did not
exactly leave the physical body as an object of study to be handled solely by general
medical and biological research.

Already in the 1980s, Haraway proposed the cyborg concept, signalling the
hybridity of social technology and embodiment, nature and culture, sex and gender,
and that our world must be understood as simultaneously material and performative,
collective and semiotic composites. Hence, her methodology of a “material-
semiotics” (Haraway 1997) remains of key interest to the project of new materialisms.
Despite or perhaps partly due to the widespread popularity of the hybridity of the
cyborg, Haraway contends that “boundary crossing in itself is not very interesting for
feminist, multicultural, antiracist technoscience projects” (Haraway 1997: 62). What
matters is how “the world takes shape in specific ways and cannot take shape just in
any way”, as she concludes (Haraway 1997: 143). This is in line with the feminist
ethics of another pioneer of feminist science studies, Susan Leigh Star, who suggests
“it is both more analytically interesting and more politically just to begin with the
question, cui bono? than to begin with a celebration of the fact of human/non-human
mingling” (Bowker & Star 2000: 43).
The most obvious problem in contemporary feminist research is that the presently
dominant discursive and social constructionist approaches do not succeed in
transgressing the nature/culture, nature/nurture, reality/discourse, body/mind, and
sex/gender dichotomies (Harding 1987; Haraway 1991; Wilson 2004; Grosz 2010).
Failing to transgress these binaries means that mainstream feminist research does not
consider the agency of the material world, of which we are made (embodiments,
environmental reactions, and unforeseen events), in the production of humanist and
social science knowledge about gender. Implicit in this problem (the troubles are
inherent to the sex/gender distinction) is a lack of an adequate language with which to
research and communicate such worldly processes. Bodies are always already in
themselves multiple, as shown by Annemarie Mol, consisting of the previously
mentioned multitude of bacteria, proteins, viruses, and other micro “bodies”, and
shaped by various ethico-epistemological regimes (Mol 2002). We need new words
and concepts which are underpinned by different ontological, epistemological, and
ethical presuppositions, and which might enable us to communicate clearly the fact
that “culture can shape bones” and that “bone-structure can shape cultures” (Fausto-
Sterling 2000). Anthropologist of science Marilyn Strathern has articulated a central
conviction that we share, “that it matters what ideas one uses to think other ideas
(with)” (Strathern 1992: 10). We need conceptual innovations to grapple with the
processes of worlds-in-the-making because it does matter what kinds of concepts or
substances receive our attention in such a cosmopolitical turmoil as that of our times.
Neither “kön” nor “genus” can (post-Butler) any longer be defined as the only
“proper” object of feminist research in this regard. There is still a range of unresolved
issues concerning such bifurcating yet socially constructionist work against biological
reductionism and essentialism. Crudely put, can we get the feminist job done by
focusing solely on societal power relations, the formative powers of discourse? What
happens to non-conformist embodiment beyond sex/gender and to the vastness of
events stirring beyond words and cultures, beyond our humanist imaginary?
The aim of emerging feminist post-humanist, material feminist, and feminist
technoscience studies research and theorizing has been to move beyond the discourse/
reality, nature/culture, and sex/gender dichotomies and try to construct a new
paradigm for feminism that integrates the discursive and the material (Heckman
2008: 86). One of the conceptual innovations motivated by such debates in cultural
theory more widely is the notion of post-humanities.
Post-humanities as feminist practices

Feminist scholars of science studies and cultural studies have deployed the notion of
the post-human to avoid fixating on the categories of nature and culture and to
enable analysis of how they are entangled, productive to, and produced by material-
discursive relations among both human and non-human agents. For Karen Barad,
“posthumanism marks a refusal to take the distinction between ‘human’ and
‘nonhuman’ for granted, and to found analysis on this presumably fixed and inherent
set of categories” (Barad 2007: 32). From early work on the cyborg (Haraway 1985,
1991) to agential realism (Barad 2003, 2007), the post-human has proven to be
productive for an ontological politics of feminist theory. Post-humanities, a slightly
different term again, can be used to indicate such research, which recognizes that
non-humans matter, also in cultural scholarship, as suggested by cultural and animal
scholar Cary Wolfe. The prefix post here does not signal any kind of end, but rather
the inclusion of the humanities and a gesture of moving further, beyond the comfort
zones of human-centred research at large. As such, post-humanities may well
translate into several bodies of thought and across disciplines while benefiting from
the analytical approaches developed within the human sciences.
Since the inception of feminist technoscience studies, the field of feminist
materialist thinking has both exploded and imploded on itself as previous theoretical
insights, especially from feminist science studies, are re-evaluated and re-read
through queer phenomenologies, new materialism, and older ones, such as cultural
materialism (Ahmed 2008; Stacey 2011). Such developments might as well translate
into a form of post-humanities of the feminist kind.
As pointed out by Stacy Alaimo, the on-going reinvention of materiality is by no
means work exclusive to feminist scholarship, although feminist scholars feature
prominently in these debates (Alaimo 2010). Transgender theorists and disability
scholars have, like feminist body studies or health scholars, tried to incorporate the
body as agential materiality, and scholars working within science and technology
studies (STS) are reiterating the multiplicity of bodies and other materialities as
they are known and performed in, for instance, medical practice (Johnson & Berner
2010).
More specifically, this turn of feminist research (variously entitled the material
turn, the post-humanist turn, or the ontological turn) entails a turn from
anthropocentrism to non-human natures, sometimes to “the posthuman” and
“posthumanities” (Wolfe 2003), always from social constructionism to material-
semiotics, from disciplinary wars to post-disciplinary alliances of an unexpected kind.
These attempts to challenge humanist frameworks have variously been dubbed
cyborg studies (Lykke 2002; Åsberg 2009a), (social) assemblages of (media)
materialities (Lury 1998), material feminism (Alaimo & Hekman 2008), or feminist
materialism (Braidotti 1994), ecofeminism as a critical form of post-humanism
(Twine 2010), “posthumanities” (Wolfe 2007; Haraway 2008), or “trans-corporeal
feminism” (Alaimo 2008), and that ontological politics called actor-network theory
that does away with the modern (Latour 1993; Mol 2002). Enriched with such
reinventive natures, social and cultural theory meets up with agential materialities in a
varied set of registers that trail paths beyond the constructionist feminist frameworks
of analysis.
Reinventive natures
The term post-human has come to designate a very loosely related set of recent
attempts to reconceptualize the relationship between the rapidly changing field of
technology and the conditions of human embodiment. Interpretations vary
(Halberstam & Livingston 1995; Hayles 1999; Fukuyama 2002; Pepperell 2003;
Wolfe 2003). On the one hand, conservative opponents like Francis Fukuyama
(2002), in his dystopian vision of Our Posthuman Future, sees the post-human as a
metaphor figure for science out of control, as a bioengineered assault on our
fundamentally pure, sacrosanct human nature and our essential dignity. To
Fukuyama, humanity now needs to be preserved and protected from technological
interference. On the other hand, Donna Haraway’s notions of the cyborg and
“companion species” gesture towards something completely different. They signal the
need to acknowledge that we have never been particularly human in the first place.
As developed in When Species Meet, the concept of “companion species” anchors a
form of reluctant post-humanist approach to non-human –human relations that aims
not to discard anything related to humans, but to think people, and to practise the
humanities, differently. It is not so much about the death of Man (and individuality),
as emphasized by previous traditions of anti-humanist critiques ranging from Michel
Foucault to Louis Althusser. In fact, with this concept Haraway makes an argument
for interspecies survival. As such, this concept must be read in the light of three
decades of technoscience studies and ecofeminist struggles to come to terms with the
body, with biology, and with life-changing materialities from a less universalist and
more modest standpoint. Companion species are about interdependence and co-
constitution but also about power relations, about who gets to live and who gets to
die in the companion species constellations. Haraway writes: “Under the material-
semiotic sign of companion species, I am interested in the ontics and antics of
significant otherness, in the on-going making of partners through the making itself, in
the making of bodies lived in the game. Partners do not pre-exist their relating; the
partners are precisely what come out of inter- and intra-relating of fleshy, significant,
material-semiotic being” (Haraway 2008: 165). With this concept, Haraway suggests
that we pay attention to accountable relationality.
Companion species also avoid a recursive gesture of fetishizing “the post-human”.
Nowadays, this latter concept has travelled way beyond disciplinary confinements
and even taken on a popular life of its own (much like the cyborg did) that
uncritically celebrates Enlightenment ideals of anthropocentric humanism and can
just as well translate into a form of super-humanism (i.e. trans-humanism). Such
post-feminist and post-biological understandings of the post-human fail to consider
the recalcitrant nature of bodies and materiality at large. Instead, trans-humanist
conceptualizations of the post-human translate into the desire to realize the
disembodied human self of the Enlightenment as he [sic ] can be enhanced by science,

medicine, and technology in order to avoid disease, ageing, and eventually death.
It appears as a dream of perfection and infinitude that may harbour a disregard for
vulnerability, thus conflicting with feminist ethics.
Conclusion
The humanities—with their focus on human cultures rather than natures—are
changing from within. This process is not new, but as of recent years it is quite a
troubled and noisy one. The scope and capacity of the humanities have been
changing radically for decades as they have been challenged by interdisciplinary
approaches, such as feminist and gender research, critical animal studies, media
studies, or science and technology studies. The object of study, the human condition,
has in fact been drastically reconfigured within these areas of scholarship. In this
vein, animal studies scholar Cary Wolfe argues for a form of post-humanities, a term
designed to provoke the taken-for-granted-ness of what humanities research today
entails (Wolfe 2007). Moreover, post-humanities might be regarded as “a useful way
of tracking scholarly conversations” (Haraway 2008: 308). We suggest that the term
post-humanities can assist in a form of transdisciplinary mapping exercise of the
changing notions of the human, which are at stake within the humanities and
interdisciplinary socio-cultural research, but also in mapping out other forms of
humanisms and ideas of the human condition that circulate in the wider cultural
imaginary.
This may not be such a novel approach as it might at first appear. Feminist
research has perhaps “always already” been post-human in the sense of
deconstructing the assumptions that underpin how “the figure of Man (sic) naturally
stands at the centre of things”. In the 1980s, Nancy Hartsock described the
disembodied counterpart that haunted standpoint feminism as “abstract masculi-
nity”. Today, as feminist research has come to designate a kind of sensibility to a wide
range of relations of power and knowledge, and the embodied subjectivities they
engender, and not merely a focus on gender per se, it appears as if our heterogeneous
field is open and ready to engage with not just the problem of androcentrism but that
of anthropocentrism as well.
To conclude our limited cartography, we advocate post-humanist gender studies
because it may open up feminist analysis to the shifting relationship between the
human and the non-human (animal, machine, environment), natures and cultures,
the popular and the scientific. Post-humanities as feminist analytical practices work
for us to re-tool the humanities so as to meet up with the on-going transformations
of our worlds (Åsberg 2008; 2009b). This is important for feminist research, we argue,
as these transformations are also inflected by changing patterns of gender, age,
ethnicity, and sexuality, and vice versa. Post-humanities as feminist practice both
include and step outside the comfort zones of human (culture), “humanism”, and the
humanities. Informed by feminist technoscience studies, we see post-humanities not
as a universal appraisal of interdisciplinary omnipotence but as zooming in on the
nitty-gritty of specific nodal points of material-semiotic entanglements. It may
help us to inhabit, in simultaneously critical, creative, and reciprocal manners, the
meaningful materialities of emerging naturecultures (Haraway 2003), the new,

unsettled Self – Other relations pertaining to gendered and sexualized, aged and
racialized, human and non-human ideals of embodiment—and the inclusions and
exclusions they engender. In any case, the world keeps stirring.
Notes
1
Pace the conservative party’s, the Christian Democrats, spectacular election posters in Sweden 2010
where party leader Göran Hägglund is photographed in profile juxtaposed with animals such as a gorilla,
hyena, ostrich, and buffalo (iconic of various human bad behaviours like mobbing, harassment, or denial)
over the slogan “For a more humane Sweden”.
2
In May 2005 “The Sex Wars”, a documentary on radical feminism and the women’s shelter movement
in Sweden, was broadcast on Swedish national television. It entailed an interview with the chair of the
national women’s shelter organization, who was questioned about the contents of a book review in the
organization’s newsletter. The review, of Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto, contained the quote
“men are animals”, and the reporter Evin Rubar pressures the chairwoman being interviewed regarding
this statement. This was the starting-point of a public outcry of anti-feminist sentiments that rippled
through public and academic debates and took on gargantuan proportions.
3
From the perspectives of evolutionary biology the human species (Homo sapiens sapiens) locates itself in
the taxonomic order of primates.
4
In a quite striking example of how science fiction can turn into science fact and vice versa, this famous
mission statement was (as pointed out by feminist technoscience and media scholar Constance Penley)
indexical of the American imagery to which the scientific institution of NASA appealed in order to
underline the intrepid quality of outer space exploration.
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Beyond the Humanist Imagination

Article in NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research · December 2011

Cecilia Åsberg Redi Koobak

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CECILIA ÅSBERG*, REDI KOOBAK* & ERICKA JOHNSON**

immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language

Granted, language entails a strong performative dimension, Barad argues with

historical (dialectical) materialisms to new (non-dialectical) materialisms.

Old body troubles

the social constructionist assumptions that the sexed/gendered body is primarily

medical and biological research.

Post-humanities as feminist practices

disembodied human self of the Enlightenment as he [sic ] can be enhanced by science,

meaningful materialities of emerging naturecultures (Haraway 2003), the new,

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CECILIA ÅSBERG, REDI KOOBAK & ERICKA JOHNSON**