Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology (review)

The ontological metaphor of this anthology's main title is a playfully clever and potentially invertible trope. Might this anthology just as easily have been called Cells of Computing, Genes of Gigabits or Bits of Bios/BIOS to explicate the intended conjunction of biology, science and technology? The phrase is extensively applicable, providing the editors with a plethora of meanings and schemata to smartly traverse. The use of the term Bits delimits the need for engaging with "life as a whole"—employing binary digits for ontological measure—while specifying the techno-bios foci of the text. The life of bits, inversely, prefigures the conversion of life processes into technological methods, both an ancient and modern praxis. Further attenuated by its subtitle, Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology, this lively and ambitious anthology intermixes "bits and pieces" of these overarching and overlapping fields filtered through much-needed feminist scrutiny and examination.

The synecdochical looseness of "bits and pieces" of life largely suits this anthology. It only becomes tedious when "bits" suggestively infers quantitative equivalence to cells or genes, rendering their functionality dangerously binary and teleological. Although the concept of information was introduced to biological discourse in the early 1950s, it soon became obvious that its use was quantitatively imprecise, thus, not literally applicable but rather metaphoric. The biologist Richard Dawkins offers an apt clarification:

The genetic code is not a blueprint for assembling a body from a set of bits; it is more like a recipe for baking one from a set of ingredients. If we follow a particular recipe, word for word, in a cookery book, what finally emerges from the oven is a cake. We cannot now break the cake into its component crumbs and say: this crumb corresponds to the first word in the recipe; this crumb corresponds to the second word in the recipe, etc.

[1].

The fifth publication in the In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science Series of the University of Washington Press, Bits of Life evolved out of a series of seminars and conferences held between 1996 and 2005 under the auspices of the international exchange program Media, Cultural Studies, and Gender: Looking for the Missing Links, funded by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research. Further support and direction was given by the Danish research project "Cyborgs and Cyberspace: Between Narration and Sociotechnical Reality" directed by one of the editors, Nina Lykke. She, along with co-editor Anneke Smelik, culled from these gatherings a collection of 12 scholarly papers by 14 authors. Together they organized their selection into four well-focused feminist trajectories mapped onto and through the intersecting fields of Bioscience, Media and Technology as Part 1: Histories and Genealogies; Part 2: Reconfigured Bodies; Part 3: Remediated Bodies; and Part 4: Philosophies of Life.

As feminist practice emerges out of a blending of scholarly and materialist concerns, or academic activism, here is a caveat to an otherwise extremely positive review. The editors specify the temporal parameters of the anthology as contemporary—post-WWII to the present—however, I found an unfortunate referential omission of the primary text on feminism and the biological, Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 tome The Second Sex. Charting biological data of the female from the simplest organism to the most complex, de Beauvoir's assertions are formidable and would have further grounded the text in feminist theory, complementing the solidity of technofeminism on which it is already strongly based. Another feminist reference omitted is The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone. Published in 1970—shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut declared laws banning the use of contraceptives for married women unconstitutional (1965) and before the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion (1972)—Firestone called...