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

Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology investigates contemporary entanglements of biology and technology from the perspectives of feminist science studies. Emerging from an international exchange that involved universities from the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the book is enriched by the transnational conversations from which it originated. This important volume presents a solid genealogy of feminist cultural studies of technoscience; a compelling array of essays that interrogate technoscientific embodiments, artifacts, practices, and theories; and a potent figuration—that of "bits of life." The editors, Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke, explain that bits of life "signifies today's cultural fusion of the biological and technological" (p. ix). The figure—a "daughter of Haraway's cyborg"—is intended to "strike a middle road between the metaphorical and the material" (p. xii) as it departs from the predominant emphasis on social constructivism within feminist theory: "The emphasis on life marks a shift away from the deconstruction of layers of textuality, and toward an understanding of the inextricable entanglement of material, biocultural, and symbolic forces in the making and unmaking of the subject" (pp. xxiii-xxiv). Even as this volume both emerges from and contributes to a rich body of specifically feminist science and cultural studies, it proposes far-reaching disciplinary and methodological challenges, as the editors insist that the consideration of bits of life "forces a new relationship between the natural sciences and the social sciences," challenging us to "develop scientific thinking at the intersection of different domains" (p. xiv).

The first section, "Histories and Genealogies," presents three different cross-disciplinary mappings of the development of feminist studies of technoscience. The first two essays, "Feminist Cultural Studies of Technoscience: Portrait of an Implosion" by Nina Lykke and "Roots and Routes: The Making of Feminist Cultural Studies of Technoscience" by Maureen McNeil, offer fresh perspectives on the constitution of this field, as Lykke writes from a Scandinavian perspective, noting that science and technology studies have been performed in Scandinavian universities since the early 1980s, and McNeil includes cultural anthropology and studies of visual culture in her genealogy, along with the perhaps more expected categories of literary studies of science, British cultural studies, and feminist science-fiction studies. Although both essays bring us to "feminist cultural studies of technoscience," the two genealogies cover rather different territories, which in and of itself is intriguing. These lucid, detailed, and complementary histories of the field make this collection even more valuable for use within graduate seminars. This section concludes with an interview of Donna Haraway, conducted by Nina Lykke, Randi Markussen, and Finn Olesen, in which Haraway discusses the separate genealogy of feminist science studies scholars, who are rarely mentioned within "canonized versions of the history of science studies" (p. 40). The fact that, as Haraway puts it, "we do know their genealogies very well," but that "they do not know ours" (p. 40) underscores the significance of the histories in the first section of this book.

Lykke and Smelik's figuration of bits of life is agile, as bits of life appear in surprisingly divergent forms in different essays—for example, the disintegrating hormonally sexed body, the dismissed mitochondrial DNA of the donor mother of in vitro fertilization (IVF), and the multimedia software "MyLifeBits," a medium for personal memories. Celia Roberts, in "Fluid Ecologies: Changing Hormonal Systems of Embodied Difference," argues that the "contemporary hormonally sexed body . . . is disintegrating into 'bits'" (p. 46). These bits are not discrete, however, but interconnected with larger systems and flows. While the hormonal body Roberts describes demands complex and nuanced understandings of sex and gender, old-fashioned misogyny reappears in other technological discourses, as some bits of life are discounted. In the high-tech environments of Dutch human and bovine IVF, for example, Amade M'Charek and Grietje Keller note that the genetic contribution of the human donor mother is trivialized and...