Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex Quotes

“Firestone accepts that culture and history have played important roles in shaping the way we conceive of men, women, (and children) and their differing roles but that underlying all these interpretations are some basic anatomical continuities — unchangeable until now. It is not therefore economic class that underlies oppression but biological and physical characteristics. As she puts it: “Nature produced the fundamental inequality.” This claim about the reality of sex difference and its natural consequences —there are women and there are men and women suffer precisely because of their womanness — puts her at odds with the majority of feminism, past and present. She is interested neither in more subtle analyses of the cultural meaning of sex and gender, nor in reclaiming a positive essence of female physicality (celebrating birth, for example, or the specificities of female sexual experience). As Stella Sandford puts it: “On the main points that constitute her distinctive contribution to feminist theory she finds herself in opposition to the mainstream of US radical feminism.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“Firestone’s approach to the question of sex is refreshingly blunt. Sex difference is real. Men and women exist, and possess asymmetrical physical capacities that have historically made existence for women extremely difficult and frequently unpleasant or even lethal. Firestone’s particular strand of materialism is therefore not only historical but also profoundly biological, thus material in an older, more classically philosophical sense. We can compare Firestone’s materialism to the explicitly “vulgar” materialism of La Mettrie for whom “[t]he human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual movement.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“Although Firestone’s acknowledgment that the personal (the unconscious sexual drives) is not only political but also more fundamental than the political — and indeed structurally prior to any political scenario (democratic, repressive, or revolutionary) makes for a serious and unique challenge and possible contribution to historical materialism, her use of the terminology of the natural/non-natural, in particular, ultimately poses more questions than answers.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“First if this future is beyond technology — for there is a hint that technology dissolves into a new form of communication — it is also, of course, and this was the point, beyond sex class. Androgyny is a negative definition for what would in the end not be negative but generalized. The genuinely revolutionary demand made by The Dialectic of Sex, is not for artificial reproduction, or women’s liberation, or a technological utopia, but for a culture in which the very idea that genital difference influenced all forms of life would seem quite simply ludicrous, as unlikely, as mythical, as the idea that from dragon’s teeth would spring armed men . . . .”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“Firestone is certainly not an uncomplicated technophile. Her attitude to the technologies central to her project is surprisingly indifferent. Her writing is not marked by the technophilia that animates Haraway’s cyborg and makes it so engaging (loveable even) and she is not seduced by the prospect of that technologically achieved divorce from the body that so engaged later cyberfeminism. On the contrary, Firestone wants the body returned to its rightful owner, defended from intruders (which is how developing fetuses are seen). Firestone did not like humans or machines much. The fantasy of pregnancy without “deformation” produces a startling image of body hate and/or body fear. Haraway convincingly reads Firestone’s position in terms of bodily alienation that can only be intensified through its submission to technological domination. On the other hand, Firestone’s problem is not to be solved by dissolution and post-human border confusion, but by a refreshed—if extra-ordinarily defensive — form of bodily integrity. This position finds an echo amongst feminists developing contemporary perspectives on reproductive technologies, many of whom have noted with unease the increasing focus on the child and the relative obliteration of the mother in contemporary fertility discourses.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“In Something’s Missing, Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch discuss what they term the shrinking of utopian consciousness within technocratic modernism and in so doing make a useful distinction between banal and revolutionary forms of utopia. The first are entrenched in the dominant social order, tending to confirm or perfect it. On this basis they contain nothing that is not already possible and have no potential that is not already known. The second, the revolutionary forms, provoke the genuinely new, and as a consequence, are not yet possible. This kind of utopia, according to Bloch, is
[n]ot . . . nonsense or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it. Not only if we travel there, but in that we travel there, the island of utopia a rises out of the sea of the possible — utopia, but with new contents.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“Prepare the ground as Firestone may, insisting on the sober materialist approach to analysis, tracking the history, there is a sense here, that despite all this, technology continually exceeds its assigned role — if that role is simply to be the instrument through which to realize the possible in the real. It contains something more, a desire: the state of feminism is such that it needs something, and technology becomes that, or comes to stand for that something.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“A mutual cancellation: in an article Firestone approvingly cites Kathie Amatniek’s Progression on the stages of women, from traditional womanhood (“beautiful but powerless”), to uppity women, through sisterhood (“Powerful!”), to the final goal, “HUMANHOOD THE ULTIMATE!” The terminal priority of the female sex is not the end point of this revolution and nor is an information revolution, if this implies the subordination of human relations to machine logics. This kind of stance may come as some surprise to those who remember Firestone for her artificial wombs and presume her feminism aligns directly with those later versions of technophile feminism that were resolutely anti-human and explicitly set out to fuse with information technology rather than pass through it. It is tempting to suggest that the kinds of technological fixes for which Firestone is best known are essentially located not in the final phase of this model, but rather pre-figure forms of existence that might be expected to develop in the middle (transitional) stage.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“In comparison with cyberfeminist texts rife with irony, gynocentric metaphors, and poetic references to cultural theory, Firestone’s book has an appeal of its own, something that could, following Melissa Gregg, be conceptualized as Firestone’s affective voice. Gregg refers to a particular contagious affect in the forms of address adopted by an author that has the power and effect of engaging readers and activating them into critical practices — be these textual or other. Sarah Franklin has suggested that the importance of The Dialectic of Sex lies in its analysis and critique of gender and discrimination more than in the concrete solutions that it proposes. The appeal of Firestone’s affective voice could well be added to the list: committed to rethinking culture, technology, gender, and society, it is occasionally blunt, seldom ironic, incessantly passionate, and contagious in its urgency.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“Irony is a matter of interpretation, of recognizing something as ironic, and there is little guarantee that the views of people producing and reading the texts meet. Indeed, irony involves moments of misunderstanding and messy meaning and it may well function as a kind of boomerang if ironic distance is erased and things are read literally. Saying one thing and meaning another is a means of joining contradictory views but it also has the effect of creating distance. In the case of cyberfeminism, this may mean distance toward cyber/technoculture and feminism alike. It may also be that irony functions more efficiently in the context of experimental media art projects than in the genre of academic writing.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“[…] — the problem of the unthinkability of anything outside and beyond the legacies of sexual polarization that limit perception, and above all the invisibility of this problem.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“Indeed they are entirely opposite—while the former seeks to eliminate reproductive difference the latter intensifies it. If there is any take-home lesson from the literature on IVF or surrogacy it is that they are costly, painful and labor intensive procedures in which women are not less defined by sex, gender or biology but more so. As a consequence this highly medicalized and increasingly commercialized — but almost wholly unregulated, undocumented and unmonitored — sector, which is largely orientated toward the production of nuclear families (even, controversially, among lesbians), is unlikely to become a force that liberates women. What Firestone provides is a helpful set of insights into precisely how and why this would be exactly what we would expect to happen, much as she might be as unlikely as any of her feminist contemporaries to prescribe a solution (though one suspects she would have told women to abandon the take-home baby aspiration along with the quest for a perfect bustline).”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“Women still bear the vast brunt of the physical, emotional, and organizational labor involved in contraceptive use — whether any devices are available at all, whether they are safe or not, and when they fail. For the majority of the world’s women modern contraceptive measures such as the pill, condoms, injectibles, or IUDS are simply not an option—a situation that is exacerbated by the matricidal policies toward abortion and family planning by many of the world’s wealthiest countries (only family planning based on abstinence was supported under the “pro-Africa” Bush administration — a policy with extremely deleterious consequences for the ability of anti-retroviral treatment to prevent the spread of AIDS as well as for rates of maternal and child mortality).
Access to safe, affordable, or free abortion is similarly limited.
Famously, there is no country in the world where women have the
legal right freely to make up their own minds about termination or
continuation of pregnancy. Thus, despite the emphasis by many modern
democratic nations on the protection of various individual rights
and freedoms, women’s reproductive rights remain in an essentially
pre-modern condition—a condition decried by both Firestone and
Beauvoir as biological feudalism.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“In Firestone’s dialectic of tech (or specifically reprotech), it is the revolutionary capacity of technological progress that establishes the crucial link between feminism, population control, and ecological sustainability. Greater technological control over both production and reproduction is thus the ultimate ethical and political imperative that links the future of the female to the future of the human race, as the rate of population growth eventually becomes a matter of human survival, against which biology can no longer be protected as a “moral” question. “Thus,” she argued,
in view of accelerating technology, a revolutionary ecological movement would have the same aim as the feminist movement: control of the new technology for humane purposes, the establishment of a new equilibrium between man and the new artificial environment he is creating, to replace the destroyed “natural” balance.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“The critique of the male medical establishment and in particular the medicalization of childbirth were already becoming prominent concerns within the emerging women’s health movement, and engendering its related critiques of biological determinism, sexism in science, and patriarchal epistemology. At the same time, the issue of population control dominated the global planning agenda, as well as the family planning one. The intertwined debates about abortion, contraception, planned parenthood, and population growth all concerned access to technology, improvements in basic research on reproduction, and technological innovation, and espoused a linear technological trajectory of increased biological control in which birth control = population control = evolutionary control.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“Firestone’s comprehensive vision of a future, more progressive era defined by greater reproductive control seems strongly influenced by the tradition that equated technological innovation with social progress through greater mastery of human evolution— a tradition we might call progressive biofuturism.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“In the same way that Firestone’s embrace of scientific and technological progress as manifest destiny tips its hat to Marx and Engels, so also it resembles (perhaps even more closely) the Marxist-inspired biofuturism of the interwar period, particularly in Britain, in the work of writers such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, Julian Huxley, Conrad Waddington, and their contemporaries (including Gregory Bateson and Joseph Needham, the latter of whose embryological interests led to his enduring fascination with the history of technology in China). Interestingly, it is also in these early twentieth century writings that ideas about artificial reproduction, cybernation, space travel, genetic modification, and ectogenesis abound. As cultural theorist Susan Squier has demonstrated, debates about ectogenesis were crucial to both the scientific ambitions and futuristic narratives of many of the United Kingdom’s most eminent biologists from the 1920s and the 1930s onward. As John Burdon Sanderson (“Jack”) Haldane speculated in his famous 1923 paper “Daedalus, or Science and the Future” (originally read to the Heretics society in Cambridge) ectogenesis could provide a more efficient and rational basis for human reproduction in the future:
[W]e can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“In the following reading of Firestone on the question of technology I suggest we do read her as flawed and as “failed,” but that this is both a necessary condition of the well-known contradictions that inevitably beset the feminist movement more broadly, and that they are what Firestone told us to expect (and why).”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“It is not enough simply to point out that Firestone insisted that technology alone can never “liberate” social relations. Such a response leaves unanswered the question of why she has been so often portrayed as saying that it can. Ironically, the common misreading of Firestone on this point only confirms one of her manifesto’s central claims — that the “dialectic of sex” cannot even be fully comprehended in a society in which questioning its a priori status is so counter- intuitive as to appear “insane.” It thus remains important to ask what the positioning of Firestone as a naïve technological determinist and the frequent chastisement of (an oversimplified version of) her claim that new reproductive technologies could bring about women’s liberation reveals about the evolution of feminist debate over reproduction and technology?”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“The famous feminist fallacy version of Firestone also requires that we forget her repeated proviso that without a revolutionary transformation of society’s views of gender, kinship, and marriage new reproductive technologies would be more likely to further subordinate women than to liberate them (“to envision it in the hands of the present powers is to envision a nightmare,” she cautioned). As Debora Halbert points out in a more careful reading of The Dialectic of Sex on the question of technology,
Firestone clearly articulated [that] the problem is not [reproductive] technology but the underlying sex-roles that it may or may not reproduce . . . [T]echnology alone will not liberate women and men, instead there must be a transformation in the way sex-roles are understood, a transformation that can only take place if technology is used to give women choices other than childrearing.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“In 1998, the avant-garde publisher Semiotext(e) issued Airless Spaces, a collection of Firestone’s stories set in and out of mental hospitals, a life she herself had lived for many of the silent years following the publication of The Dialectic of Sex. Like Piercy’s Connie Ramos, Firestone’s characters are desperate inside the hospital and destitute when out. Years of medication and institutional routine have left one unable to read, write or “care about anything, and love was forgotten”:
She was lucid, yes, at what price. She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.
Who is “she” in this story? Airless Spaces contains 51 vignettes, divided into headings such as “Hospitals,” “Losers,” “Obituaries,” and “Suicides I Have Known.” So recognizably autobiographical are elements of these that their status as fiction becomes suspect. (One rather vindictive obituary is for an actual feminist, dead at 50, who had helped to overthrow the founding principles of a woman’s group that Firestone started in the East Village, the coup that finally provoked her withdrawal from the women’s movement.) These romans - à – clef reinforce the question still directed at Firestone’s project: is their author’s self-described “madness” the fate reserved for those who would contest sexual difference?”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“The adventures of the dialectic,” writes Maurice Merleau- Ponty, “are errors through which it must pass, since it is in principle a thought with several centers and several points of entry, and because it needs time to explore them all.” If ever a text should be read as a work of what Merleau-Ponty calls situated consciousness—both that of the writer and the reader—it is this transmission from the earliest years of second wave feminism. As he writes of its predecessors, so we conclude of The Dialectic of Sex: “it is incomplete so long as it does not pass into other perspectives and into the perspectives of others.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone

“—“Sex class is so deep as to be invisible”—The Dialectic of Sex is a passionate, brilliant and uncompromising book.”
― Mandy Merck, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone