Affirmative Essentials
1AC
“Sharers… envision a life force, a sort of living ether, that pervades every atom of their
universe. Each drop of water, each breath of air, holds a thousand bits of life in it, growing
and struggling... Why, even without breathmicrobes, the bacteria in your gut outnumber your
own body cells. And you’d be very sick without them, even on Valedon. On Shora, life builds
everything, from raft to coral. Whereas Valedon’s ocean breaks upon crustal rock, a thing
never shaped by life - the granite that makes up the foundation; this was born of fire, not
water. In Sharer experience, only the dead ever reach that foundation.”
This passage from Joan Slonczewski’s science fiction novel A Door Into Ocean shows an alien
resident from an ocean planet called “Shora” explaining the alien race’s understanding of
nature to a human boy. This ideology models a ecologically concerned opinion in the realworld conflict between dominating vs balanced approaches to the natural world. Our reading
acts as an interrogation of our current relationship with nature, specifically the ocean. Our
method, which we will call ‘queering nature,’ serves to revolutionize the way we think about,
discuss, and perform sexuality.
Merrick 08, (1) PhD History (UWA), Senior lecturer at Curtin University, (Helen, “Queering nature: close encounters with the
alien in feminist science fiction,” in Pearson, Wendy G. and Hollinger, V. and Gordon, J. (ed), Queer Universes: Sexualities in
Science Fiction, pp 216-232. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R?func=dbin-jumpfull&local_base=gen01-era02&object_id=20732)//ED
‘Queering nature’ seems an appropriate theme for enquiries into sexuality in science
fiction, especially from the perspective of feminist and queer theories. Whilst it may not
immediately suggest an overt comment on sexualities, it is inarguable that ‘nature’ as well as ‘culture’ is
heavily implicated in our understandings and performances of sexuality.1 Indeed, just as
our constructions of sexuality (and the strictures of normative heterosexism) infuse every aspect of our
culture/s, so too do sexualized assumptions underpin our constructions of ‘nature’. And
further, the ways we think about ‘nature’ impact upon and constrain our notions of
sexuality. Wendy Pearson observes that science fiction has the potential to ‘interrogate the ways in
which sexual subjectivities are created as effects of the system that sustains them’ (‘Alien
Cryptographies’ 18). I want to further her argument to suggest that the variety of discourses and ‘knowledges’
that have come to stand for (or take the place of) ‘nature’ are one such system. Attention to
nature is an important facet of critical considerations of sexuality, particularly
considering the pre-eminence of the biological sciences in (over)determining the
category/ies of ‘sex’, and the fact that ‘for many people … sexuality—and particularly
heterosexuality—can be envisioned only within the category of the “natural”’ (Pearson,
‘Science Fiction’ 149). I want to re-visit the loaded space of ‘the natural’ and consider how
‘queering nature’ might further question normative notions of sexuality and gender.
Whilst queer theory obviously engages with ‘nature’ on the level of regulatory
discourses around notions of biology, feminist science studies and ecofeminist theory
have a particular (and different) investment in the discursive positioning and uses of nature.
Such theories are engaged in critiquing a broad range of biological and life sciences in
which the construction of ‘human nature’ and ‘nature’ are implicated in often unstable
and contradictory ways. Similarly, feminist SF texts may reflect on the ways in which
we constitute and reproduce ‘human’ and ‘nature’, most strikingly through the familiar
SF figure of the alien. In this essay, I focus on SF stories which feature a central (and
often sexualized) female/alien encounter; I explore, in particular, how an ‘othering’ of
the human might ‘queer’ nature through a close reading of Amy Thomson’s The Color of Distance (1995). In
concluding, I consider how certain notions of ‘kinship’ (as recently deployed by Donna Haraway and Judith
Butler) might help advance the challenges to heteronormativity that are implicated in
‘queering nature’.
The naturalization of heterosexuality has been historically accompanied by the
heterosexualization of nature – ‘queering nature’ is an attempt to move beyond the
restrictive binaries of feminine/masculine and hetero/homosexual.
Merrick 08, (2) PhD History (UWA), Senior lecturer at Curtin University, (Helen, “Queering nature: close encounters with the
alien in feminist science fiction,” in Pearson, Wendy G. and Hollinger, V. and Gordon, J. (ed), Queer Universes: Sexualities in
Science Fiction, pp 216-232. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R?func=dbin-jumpfull&local_base=gen01-era02&object_id=20732)//ED
The notion of kinship is also a useful way of reconceptualizing the relations among the
three theoretical threads informing my reading of ‘queered nature’. Ecofeminism might
appear unlikely ‘kin’ to feminist science studies and queer theory, not least because
many within the academy continue to view ecofeminism with some suspicion as being
overly ‘essentialist’ (Sandilands, ‘Mother Earth’; Soper). And although ecofeminism and feminist
science studies arguably both stem from Carolyn Merchant’s classic The Death of Nature (1980),
they have developed along divergent discursive and political paths.2 Yet, partly in
reaction to tensions between ecofeminisms’ cultural and constructivist trends, critics such
as Greta Gaard and Catriona Sandilands have argued the need for a ‘queered’ ecofeminism. An
important driver for cross-fertilization between ecofeminism and queer theory has been
the failure of much ecofeminist and environmental politics to recognize its
heterosexism—not least in its figuration of ‘a nature that is both actively de-eroticized
and monolithically heterosexual’ (Sandilands, ‘Unnatural Passions’ 33). A queer ecofeminist
perspective, in contrast, argues that ‘the naturalization of heterosexuality has been
historically accompanied by the heterosexualization of nature’ (Sandilands, ‘Unnatural Passions’ 34);
the very nature/culture relation itself, which is mapped as feminine/masculine,
‘becomes one of compulsory heterosexuality’ (‘Toward a Queer’ 131). When nature is feminized
it is also, Gaard notes, eroticized, an argument that appears to contradict Sandiland’s characterization of nature as ‘deeroticized’; this tension highlights the internal contradictions and instabilities of such
regulatory discursive regimes. That is, our ‘knowing’ of nature is de-eroticized through
the mediation of the mechanized, objective, ‘disembodied’ discourses of traditional
western sciences, even as the ‘domination’ and subjugation of nature allowed (even
encouraged) through such knowledge puts it in the realm of the (eroticized) feminine
half of the nature/culture binary. Not surprisingly, such tensions are constantly evoked and
expressed through SF, most famously in what many consider its founding text, Frankenstein (1817): true to its Romantic
influences, the text sets Victor’s pursuit of technoscientific dominion against an ideological commitment to the ‘natural sublime’.3
The work of Gaard and Sandilands (among others) suggests an ecofeminist approach that
aligns with queer theory on a number of levels, particularly in the need to move beyond
the restrictive binaries of feminine/masculine and hetero/homosexual. As with queer theory,
‘gender’ is not situated in ecofeminist theories as the ‘privileged’ category of
oppression. Rather, ecofeminism calls for a non-reductionist, interdisciplinary, and
synthesizing understanding of a whole series of interlocking relations, from gender to
race, sexuality, economics, globalism, and, of course, the environment. Both queer
theory and ecofeminism have as political goal and analytical method the assumption
that (gender) identity is not fixed, but is unstable, mutable, and fluid. Sandilands, for
example, identifies the importance of what she terms ‘performative affinity’ for a political
project such as ecofeminism, where material ecological goals, and an emphasis on a
multiplicity of political affinities with numerous ‘others’, results in a recognition of the
failure of the term ‘woman’ to act as a ‘content-filled subject position’ (Sandilands, ‘Mother Earth’
29). A queered ecofeminist ‘performative affinity’ relies, Sandilands argues, ‘on the insertion of a
strongly parodic understanding of nature and its discourses’ (‘Mother Earth’ 33). Such
‘performative affinities’ between women and nature—which ‘allow[s] for the possibility
of each to disrupt the other’ (Sandilands, ‘Mother Earth’ 36)—recall the kinds of ‘subversive
repetition’ that Butler suggests might ‘call into question the regulatory practice of
identity itself’ (Gender Trouble 32). Subverting or disrupting gendered and sexed identity and
the category ‘woman’ thus requires, in a queer ecofeminism, a disruption—or
queering—of nature: ‘To queer nature, in this context, is to question its normative use,
to interrogate relations of knowledge and power by which certain truths about
ourselves have been allowed to pass without question’ (Sandilands, ‘Mother Earth’ 37). At the
heart of a queer-ecofeminist reading, then, is a sustained attention to the ongoing
re/inscriptions of the nature/culture binary in our understandings of sexed and
gendered subjectivities (and embodiment), particularly as regulated and constrained
through the narratives of western scientific discourse.
Thus, _____ and I advocate that we should substantially increase exploration of our
relationship to Earth’s oceans through narration and discussion of Joan Slonczewski’s science
fiction novel A Door Into Ocean.
We will emphasize three specific themes in A Door Into Ocean which demonstrate/represent
methods of breaking down heteronormative assumptions in our understandings of sexuality
and in our relationship to nature:
First is “The Figuration Of The Alien” - use of the “Alien” subject in ecofeminist science fiction
embraces the possibility of different ways of knowing – this queer ecofeminist disruption
offers a rethinking of binaries within sex, gender, and nature.
Merrick 08, (3) PhD History (UWA), Senior lecturer at Curtin University, (Helen, “Queering nature: close encounters with the
alien in feminist science fiction,” in Pearson, Wendy G. and Hollinger, V. and Gordon, J. (ed), Queer Universes: Sexualities in
Science Fiction, pp 216-232. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R?func=dbin-jumpfull&local_base=gen01-era02&object_id=20732)//ED
What might these ‘alien biologies’ and encounters suggest about the potential for
undermining or destabilizing the ‘naturalized’ reinscription of heterosexual bio-social
systems? Most of the texts I have discussed do not seem to upset significantly the
conventional sexualized binaries for their human characters, who are ultimately
reinscribed into the heterosexual code. However, the possibility of different forms—
both biological and cultural—of sexed and gendered structures and societies are
developed through the figure/s of the alien. Thus, even if not entirely successful, the
conjunction of alien possibilities with human re-containment perhaps literalizes or
figures the difficulty of escaping this binary within our current human forms of
thought, codes, social forms, and sciences. Science fiction has, in a sense, always
occupied the fault line between the ‘two cultures’. Its potential for queered eco/feminist
disruptions offers ways of telling new stories about nature, humans, and others that
might disrupt traditional and restrictive binaries of thought infecting our notions of
nature/culture, human/non-human, epistemology, and ontology. Feminist and SF
stories of ‘queer nature’ might, if nothing else, help progress our ‘difficult labor of
forging a future from resources inevitably impure’ (Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter 241).
Second is “Alien Biologies” Instead of attempting to combat forces of nature, the residents of Shora understand that
interactions with nature should be give-and-take rather than relationships of dominance. A
scene from page 54 demonstrates this ideology:
“The storm died at last, but most of the outer tunnels were flooded… It mattered little, since
all the silkhouses were gone. Where Merwen had lived, only a few battered fragments of
paneling still stood, jagged as a cracked eggshell. The surface of the raft was torn and
stripped to the gnarled wooden core, while many outlying branches had been ripped off
altogether. Some floated beyond, thudding when they crashed. Spinel was stunned at the
wreckage, but everyone else seemed too busy for that, sweeping debris, and pumping out
flooded tunnels, and hauling up the new silk panels he and Lady Nisi had built and stored
below.
“Be easy,” said Merwen, sensing his distress. “It will be months till we get another storm that
big.”
“But everything is… gone.”
“Only the outer shell. We’re still here. What else do we need? …We’ll build a new house, and paint new designs in all the wall moss. It will
make a lovely change.”
The Alien residents of Shora represent an alternate understanding of ‘being in’ and knowing
nature. This different way of knowing demands the construction of different scientific
discourses and the imagination of new biotechnologies represented through the novel’s alien
culture. This notion of ‘alien biologies’ signifies not just biologically different species, but also
different practices, systems of knowledge, and the intersections between physical being and
socio cultural discourses.
Merrick 08, (4) PhD History (UWA), Senior lecturer at Curtin University, (Helen, “Queering nature: close encounters with the
alien in feminist science fiction,” in Pearson, Wendy G. and Hollinger, V. and Gordon, J. (ed), Queer Universes: Sexualities in
Science Fiction, pp 216-232. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R?func=dbin-jumpfull&local_base=gen01-era02&object_id=20732)//ED
Alien encounters are of course a very charged trope in SF history. As Istvan Csiscery- Ronay observes, ‘[a]nxiety
over
sexual power and purity underlies most articulations of alienhuman contacts’;
significantly, the alien ‘has always disturbed the deep-lying connection between biology
and human culture’ (228-29). Even if it is ultimately defused or recontained, the science fictional alien is
immanently disruptive: suggestive of the multiple sexualized and racialized binaries
which inflect the category ‘human’, inevitably invoking the other, even as it may be
registered as undesirable. However, it is when the alien is deployed as tool for thinking
through both (human) nature/s and culture/s that such binaries might be destabilized.
If the alien differs from us ‘only’ in terms of its biology, it potentially does little to
advance us beyond the realms of the metaphysical anti/pro-naturalist differentiation
between human and non-human. That is, to recall Csiscery-Ronay again, if the alien figures primarily
as biologically rather than ontologically Other, then (as when dealing with racial difference) it is often
too easy to ‘conflat[e] cultural difference with putative natural difference’ (Csicsery-Ronay 229).
I want to turn now to some SF examples that are open to readings that ‘queer nature’. Of course many SF texts lend
themselves to a queered understanding of nature in one aspect or another, from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984)
and Triton (1976), John Varley’s GAEAN trilogy (1979-84), and more recently, Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) and The
Salt Roads (2003). In this essay I have deliberately chosen to focus on a number of lesser known authors, for two reasons. Firstly, I
believe it is important to widen the scope of our reading beyond the usual canon, to explore the different forms of ‘feminism’ that
might be recognized or produced through ecofeminist and queered readings, and to recognize the potential for ‘queered’ readings
of what might appear fairly traditional SF treatments. Secondly, I want to look specifically at female-alien encounters, which are less
easily mapped as masculinized culture versus feminized nature, or as an (heterosexually) eroticized colonialist ‘tourism’. The texts
discussed below share a central concern with the environment and human relations to ‘nature’ which encompass the ways we
represent nature. Concomitantly, these texts are concerned with alternate understandings of ‘being in’ and knowing ‘nature’, which
demand the construction of different scientific discourses and often imagine new biotechnologies, usually represented through an
alien culture. One way of encapsulating these themes is through the notion of ‘alien biologies’, which signify not just biologically
different species (and ontology), but also different practices and systems of knowledges (alien biological technosciences), and finally
the intersections (too easily dissolved in the ‘human-nature/human-culture split) between physical being/matter and sociocultural
discourses. Unlike
more traditional SF readings which parallel the human/alien with a
gendered dichotomy, in these texts the problematics of difference and otherness are
located around the dualism of human/non-human, thus suggesting the possibility of
escaping the heterosexual bind. For as Hollinger warns, ‘An emphasis on gender risks the
continuous reinscription of sexual binarism’, that is, the ‘reinscription of an
institutionalized heterosexual binary’ (24). In these stories, gender is not the most
significant marker of the human/alien relation. Rather, the tensions in human-alien
relations reflect the ‘purifying’ practices of scientific (and colonialist) discourses which
contribute to the delineation of human from other. In Marti Steussy’s Dreams of Dawn (1988), the survival
of a sentient alien race, the Kargans, is threatened by human colonization of their home planet. The crisis on Karg has been
precipitated by the presence of a human colony which has co-existed with the Kargans for years by ignoring their existence.
However the humans’ non-native husbandry, agriculture, and imported foods are poisoning the Kargan young. Eventual resolution
is brought about, primarily through the actions of the human girl Disa, who has grown up with Kargans (as part of her survey-team
family) and is both fluent in their language and at home in their damp cave environs. Ultimately, the solution arrived at by Disa and
the Kargans is to change human biochemistry so they can survive on native Kargan proteins. Overturning
the
xenophobic speciesism of humans thus effects a radical change in the human/nature
relation, where instead of changing the world to suit humans, human biological and
environmental practices are altered to suit their new environment. Such interventions
into scientific and cultural discourses around nature and human are intensified in texts
where the boundaries between human and alien are destabilized through a much more
intimate encounter: where ‘acting like’ the alien, ‘performing’ an ‘other’ subjectivity
equates—as in queer theory—with ‘being’ the alien. Intimate and eroticized encounters with alien others
are a recurring motif in Naomi Mitchison’s classic Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1976), which tells of the space-faring
communications expert and xenobiologist, Mary. The world of Memoirs is a tolerant one, and acceptance of others encompasses
race, species, fauna and animals. All life, even only potentially sentient life, is routinely treated with respect (to the extent that
scientists communicate with and obtain permission from animals such as dogs who consent to cooperate in experiments) (31).
Memoirs may be read very productively through a queer/ecofeminist lens: not only does the spacewoman Mary have a ‘sexualized’
relation with a Martian, she also twice becomes ‘pregnant’ through alien encounters. As part of an experiment with self-generating
alien tissue to test for potential intelligence, Mary offers to host a graft of this particular alien. Her body responds as if she were
pregnant, and she perceives the graft (which she calls Ariel) in very intimate terms, as ‘flesh of [her] flesh’; she receives sensual
enjoyment from their interactions: ‘It liked to be as close as possible over the median line reaching now to my mouth and inserting a
pseudopodium delicately between my lips and elsewhere’ (54). Her second alien ‘pregnancy’ is ‘activated’ by the Martian, Vly,
producing the haploid ‘not entirely human’ child Viola (67). Viola is a ‘queer’ progeny indeed; ‘fathered’ by a hermaphrodite alien
(who later becomes a mother itself [143]) through a primarily communicative act—the standard sexed and gendered
heteronormative system is certainly ‘skewed’ in this particularly unfaithful re-productive event.
Third is “Queer Kinship” - queer notions of kinship in A Door Into Ocean challenge the
contemporary heterosexual norms of family structure. Residents of the ocean moon “Shora”
in the novel demonstrate non-normative notions of kinship by reproducing without men,
practicing polyamory, and forming homogeneous “family” structures independent of
heredity.
A passage from page 50 of the novel demonstrates an example of this:
“After generations of breeding without males, Sharer anatomy no longer enabled
heterosexual coupling. Sharer women “conceived” by fusion of ova, a process requiring
lifeshaper assistance and the consent of the Gathering.”
Narration and discussion of the novel fosters acceptance of queer notions of kinship, which is
key to 1) destabilize the status quo heteronormative interactions between nature and culture
and 2) overturn the idolization of heterosexual kinship patterns.
Merrick 08, (5) PhD History (UWA), Senior lecturer at Curtin University, (Helen, “Queering nature: close encounters with the
alien in feminist science fiction,” in Pearson, Wendy G. and Hollinger, V. and Gordon, J. (ed), Queer Universes: Sexualities in
Science Fiction, pp 216-232. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R?func=dbin-jumpfull&local_base=gen01-era02&object_id=20732)//ED
In this final section, I want to consider briefly the idea of ‘queered
kinship’, and how it might function as a
metaphor for thinking through a queered ecofeminist perspective on ‘naturecultures’ (in
Haraway’s words [from “Birth of the Kennel”? give title, even if no page number). Certainly from both an ecofeminist
as well as a queer perspective it seems more appropriate to think in terms of the
‘translation’ mode of kinship, rather than the ‘purifyin.g’ mode of oppositions, to recall
Latour’s distinction. Recently, spurred by heated and difficult debates over gay marriage and
childrearing, Judith Butler has argued that it is politically and theoretically necessary to
attend to notions of kinship as we negotiate contemporary changes in family structures
away from the ‘heterosexual norm’ toward what she describes as ‘post-Oedipal kinship’
(cited in Campbell 645 ). As Butler notes, debates on gay marriage and kinship ‘have become sites of
intense displacement for other political fears ... fears that feminism ... has effectively
opened up kinship outside the family, opened it to strangers’ (‘Kinship’21). Indeed, drawing on
Haraway and ecofeminist theorists [such as whom?], we might reflect that certain feminists have indeed
opened up ‘kinship’ to include even non-human strangers. Butler traces the radical
changes in contemporary anthropological practice and resulting theories of kinship,
which have moved from the concept of a ‘natural’ relation to the more performative
notion that ‘kinship is itself a kind of doing’, a practice of self-conscious assemblage:
Debates about the distinction between nature and culture, which are clearly heightened
when the distinctions between animal, human, machine, hybrid, and cyborg remain
unsettled, become figured at the site of kinship, for even a theory of kinship that is
radically culturalist frames itself against a discredited ‘nature’ and so remains in a
constitutive and definitional relation to that which it claims to transcend. (Butler, ‘Kinship’ 37)
There are obvious resonances here with Haraway’s more recent approach to such
questions, which she figures under the rubric ‘companion species’; this is her
replacement for the cyborg as figure for telling her ‘story of co-habitation, co-evolution,
and embodied cross-species sociality’ (Companion Species 4).7 A narrative for ‘cross-species
sociality’ which might result in ‘queered kin’ seems a highly appropriate aid for rereading and potentially destabilzing the heteronormative surface of ecofeminist stories
of alien-human encounters. From this perspective, even those texts where the ‘demands’ of
reproduction produce reinscriptions of heteronormativity might offer alternatives to, or
a break in [in what sense “a break”?], ‘oedipal’ heterosexual kinship patterns, especially where
they cross species boundaries. For, as Butler notes, the breakdown of traditional kinship ‘not
only displaces the central place of biological and sexual relations from its definition, but
gives sexuality a separate domain from that of kinship’ (‘Kinship’ 37). Alternative kinship
patterns are of course a familiar theme in SF, featuring in the wellknown work of Le Guin, Delany, and
Octavia Butler, among many others.8 In Color and Through Alien Eyes (1999), extended kinship patterns amongst humans are
evident: group marriages of at least six people (and often more) are apparently the norm in Thomson’s future and are not confined
to internal monogamous male/female partnerships. By the close of Through Alien Eyes, Juna’s daughter Mariam is emerging into a
very queer set of kin indeed. As well as numerous human parents, there are her alien ‘brother’ Moki and Tendu ‘uncle’ Ukatonen, a
kinship which is formalized when Juna, Mariam, and the Tendu are accepted into a group marriage (that includes Juna’s brother).
And while she is purely human born, Mariam certainly does not recreate the ‘image of her father’; having been linked with the
Tendu since the womb, she is, if not ‘some half-alien thing’ as her father fears (161), certainly not ‘just’ human. Group marriages
blending different species are also a common feature of the society depicted in Steussy’s Dreams of Dawn, which can include pairs
and single humans of either sex, and in the specific case of ‘Dawn circle’ a non-gendered alien ‘sheppie’ and two female Kargans
plus their ‘groundlings’. In Dawn, companionable and even loving relations between human and alien are seen as a normal
consequence of such ‘queered’ families: ‘such attachments weren’t unusual for children raised in the multispecies kinship of a FirstIn circle’ (Steussy 2). Thinking about queered notions of ‘kinship’ that involve human and non-human others also provides different
perspectives on Octavia Butler’s XENOGENESIS series. Not for nothing are the ooloi, the Oankali third sex, known as ‘treasured
strangers’ (104). One crucial function of the Oankali ‘third sex’ in the reproductive/genetic mixing of Oankali young is to ensure
that sufficient diversity emerges from the very close male/female dyad who are often siblings. A strangely compounded two-sex
system this may be, but even in this small fact it challenges familial notions of kinship and sexuality; even more so when humans
are added to form the five person, three-sexed, two species ‘construct’ family. Quite apart from the very different conjugal or
reproductive functioning of this queer family, traditional social and emotive relations are also disrupted. For the human couples, as
for the Oankali, the intense emotional and psychological male-female relation enabled and mediated by the ooloi essentially
disallows heterosexual intercourse—or indeed any kind of touching. In an interesting homosocial spin on human/Oankali kinship,
the only people one can in fact touch each other are children or samesex relatives. Pearson’s
reading of the figure of
the hermaphrodite as a Derridean ‘supplement’ to the two-sex system in a number of SF
texts is of interest here (‘Sex/uality’). Even when dealing with texts where the primacy of apparent
reproductive need drives a reinforcement of a biologically ‘necessary’ heterosexuality,
the introduction of ‘supplements’—in the case of Butler’s trilogy, the ooloi—as necessary to complete
or bridge the reproductive heterosexual system might, as Pearson notes, invite us to question
‘whether the apparent plenitude of the twosex system ... does not also need
supplementation ... in the so-called real world’ (‘Sex/uality’ 118). Indeed, when the relations that
bind are no longer traced to heterosexual procreation, the very homology between
nature and culture ... tends to become undermined. (Butler, ‘Kinship’ 39)
2AC Overview
(OUTLINE- NOT BLOCKS)
Our method = queering nature = “to question its normative use, to interrogate relations of knowledge and power by which certain
truths about ourselves have been allowed to pass without question”
How do we queer nature? – through our narration because … “Its potential for queered eco/feminist disruptions offers ways of
telling new stories about nature, humans, and others that might disrupt traditional and restrictive binaries of thought infecting our
notions of nature/culture, human/non-human, epistemology, and ontology. Feminist and SF stories of ‘queer nature’ might, if
nothing else, help progress our ‘difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure’”
ways our narration breaks down heteronormativity and binaries:
1) alien figuration
a. figure of the alien is disruptive because it is “suggestive of the multiple sexualized and racialized binaries
which inflect the category ‘human’, inevitably invoking the other, even as it may be registered as undesirable”
b. alien is ontologically other, not just biologically other, meaning that it differs from us in its non-conformity to
binaries rather than its physical differences
c.
that deconstructs sex, gender, and nature/culture binaries
2) alien biologies
a. parts of the story where “instead of changing the world to suit humans, human biological and environmental
practices are altered to suit their new environment.”
b. that deconstructs speciesism and fosters a better relationship with nature
c.
kornfeld card
3) queered kinship
a. destabilizes the status quo heteronormative interactions between nature and culture
i. Debates about the distinction between nature and culture, which are clearly heightened when the
distinctions between animal, human, machine, hybrid, and cyborg remain unsettled, become figured
at the site of kinship, for even a theory of kinship that is radically culturalist frames itself against a
discredited ‘nature’ and so remains in a constitutive and definitional relation to that ‘which it claims
to transcend.
ii. “when the relations that bind are no longer traced to heterosexual procreation, the very homology
between nature and culture ... tends to become undermined”
b. overturns the idolization of heterosexual kinship patterns.
i. Two-sex system NEEDS supplements (i.e. trans people and hermaphrodite people)
ii. Lots of examples in sci-fi of non-normative kinship
iii. the breakdown of traditional kinship ‘not only displaces the central place of biological and sexual
relations from its definition, but gives sexuality a separate domain from that of kinship’
c.
Solvency summary: “A narrative for ‘cross-species sociality’ which might result in ‘queered kin’ seems a highly
appropriate aid for re-reading and potentially destabilizing the heteronormative surface of ecofeminist stories
of alien-human encounters”
Heteronormativity is really bad
Sedgwick ‘8 (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 2008 The Epistemology of the Closet)//gingE
From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, scenarios of same-sex desire would seem to have
had a privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in Western culture to scenarios of both genocide and
omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are known even today to the law of half of the United
States and to the Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed with the name of a site of
mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a double history. In the first place there is a history of the mortal
suppression, legal or subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people, through burning, hounding,
physical and chemical castration, concentration camps, bashing —the array of sanctioned fatalities
that Louis Crompton records under the name of gay genocide, and whose supposed eugenic motive becomes only the more
colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized minority identity in the nineteenth century. In the second place, though,
there is the inveterate topos of associating gay acts or persons with fatalities vastly broader than their own extent: if
it is
ambiguous whether every denizen of the obliterated Sodom was a sodomite, clearly not
every Roman of the late Empire can have been so, despite Gibbon's connecting the eclipse of the whole
people to the habits of a few. Following both Gibbon and the Bible, moreover, with an impetus borrowed from Darwin, one of
the few areas of agreement among modern Marxist, Nazi, and liberal capitalist
ideologies is that there is a peculiarly close, though never precisely defined, affinity
between same-sex desire and some historical condition of moribundity, called
"decadence," to which not individuals or minorities but whole civilizations are subject.
Bloodletting on a scale more massive by orders of magnitude than any gay minority
presence in the culture is the "cure," if cure there be, to the mortal illness of decadence.¶ If a fantasy
trajectory, Utopian in its own terms, toward gay genocide has been endemic in Western culture
from its origins, then, it may also have been true that the trajectory toward gay genocide was
never clearly distinguishable from a broader, apocalyptic trajectory toward something
approaching omnicide. The deadlock of the past century between minoritizing and universalizing understandings of
homo/heterosexual definition can only have deepened this fatal bond in the heterosexist imaginaire. In our culture as in Billy Budd,
the phobic narrative trajectory toward imagining a time after the homosexual is finally
inseparable from that toward imagining a time after the human; in the wake of the homosexual, the
wake incessantly produced since first there were homosexuals, every human relation is pulled into its shining representational
furrow.¶ Fragments of visions of a time after the homosexual are, of course, currently in dizzying circulation in our culture. One of
the many dangerous ways that AIDS discourse seems to ratify and amplify preinscribed homophobic mythologies is in its pseudoevolutionary presentation of male homosexuality as a stage doomed to extinction (read, a phase the species is going through) on the
enormous scale of whole populations. 26 The
lineaments of openly genocidal malice behind this
fantasy appear only occasionally in the respectable media, though they can be glimpsed even there
behind the poker-face mask of our national experiment in laissez-faire medicine. A better, if still deodorized, whiff of that malice
comes from the famous pronouncement of Pat Robertson: "AIDS is God s way of weeding his garden." The saccharine lustre this
dictum gives to its vision of devastation, and the ruthless prurience with which it misattributes its own agency, cover a more
fundamental contradiction: that, to
rationalize complacent glee at a spectacle of what is imagined
as genocide, a proto-Darwinian process of natural selection is being invoked —in the context of a Christian fundamentalism
that is not only antievolutionist but recklessly oriented toward universal apocalypse. A similar phenomenon, also
too terrible to be noted as a mere irony, is how evenly our cultures phobia ab Hit HIVpositive blood is kept pace with by its rage for keeping that dangerous blood in broad,
continuous circulation. This is evidenced in projects for universal testing, and in the needle-sharing implicit in William
Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of tattooing HIVpositive persons. But most immediately and pervasively it is
evidenced in the literal bloodbaths that seem to make the point of the AIDS-related
resurgence in violent bashings of gays —which, unlike the gun violence otherwise ubiquitous in this culture, are
characteristically done with twoby-fours, baseball bats, and fists, in the most literal-minded conceivable form of body-fluid contact.¶
It might be worth making explicit that the use of evolutionary thinking in the current
wave of Utopian/genocidal fantasy is, whatever else it may be, crazy. Unless one
believes, first of all, that same-sex object-choice across history and across cultures is one thing
with one cause, and, second, that its one cause is direct transmission through a nonrecessive
genetic path—which would be, to put it gently, counter-intuitive — there is no warrant for imagining that gay populations,
even of men, in postAIDS generations will be in the slightest degree diminished. Exactly to the degree that AIDS is a gay disease,
its a tragedy confined to our generation; the long-term demographic depredations of the disease will fall, to the
contrary, on groups, many themselves direly endangered, that are reproduced by direct heterosexual transmission. ¶ Unlike
genocide directed against Jews, Native Americans, Africans, or other groups, then, gay
genocide, the once-and-for-
all eradication of gay populations, however potent and sustained as a project or fantasy of modern Western
culture, is not possible short of the eradication of the whole human species. The impulse of the species toward its own eradication
must not either, however, be underestimated. Neither must the profundity with which that omnicidal
impulse is
entangled with the modern problematic of the homosexual: the double bind of
definition between the homosexual, say , as a distinct risk group, and the homosexual as a potential
of representation within the universal. 27 As gay community and the solidarity and visibility of gays as a
minority population are being consolidated and tempered in the forge of this specularized terror and suffering, how can it fail to be
all the more necessary that the avenues of recognition, desire, and thought between minority potentials and universalizing ones be
opened and opened and opened?
2AC Solves Dualism
Dualisms bad/binaries/ecofeminism solves them
Gaard, 1997 (Greta Gaard, eco-feminist writer, scholar, activist, and filmmaker, she writes about queer theory, vegetarianism,
and animal liberation, Cofounder of the Minnesota Green Party, she’s written books about the politics of ecology, she’s a Professor
of English the University of Wi-River Falls, and a community faculty member in Women’s Students at Metropolitan State
University, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” Winter of 1997, JSTOR, Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
The first argument linking ecofeminism and queer theory is based on the observation
that dominant Western culture's devaluation of the erotic parallels its devaluations of
women and of nature; in effect, these devaluations are mutually reinforcing. This
observation can be drawn from eco feminist cri- tiques that describe the normative
dualisms, value-hierarchical thinking, and logic of domination that together
characterize the ideological framework of Western culture. As Karen Warren explains, value
dualisms are ways of con- ceptually organizing the world in binary ,disjunctive terms,
where in each side of the dualism is "seen as exclusive (ratherhan inclusive) and oppositional (rather
than complementary),and where higher value or superiorityis attrib- uted to one disjunct (or, side of the dualism)than the other"
(1987, 6). Val Plumwood's 1993 critique of Western philosophy pulls together the most salient features of these and other
ecofeminist critiques in what she calls the "master model, "the
identity that is at the core of Western culture
and that has initiated, perpetuated, and benefitted from Western culture's alienation
from and domination of nature. The master identity, according to Plumwood, creates and depends on a "dualized
structure of otherness and negation"(1993, 42). Key elements in that structure are the following sets of
dualized pairs: culture/nature reason/nature male/female mind/body(nature)
master/slave reason/matter(physicality) rationality/animality(nature) reason/emotion(nature)
mind, spirit/nature freedom/necessity(nature) universal/particular
human/nature(nonhuman) civilized/primitive(nature) production/reproduction(nature)
public/private subject/object (Plumwood 1994, 43) Plumwood does not claim completeness for the list. In the argumentthat
follows, I will
offer a number of reasons that ecofeminists must specify the linked
dualismsof white/nonwhite, het-erosexual/queer financially
empowered/impoverished, and reason/theerotic.3 Ecofeminists have uncovered a number of
characteristics about the inter- locking structure of dualism. First, ecofeminist
philosophers have shown that the claim for the superiority of the self is based on the
difference between self andother, as manifested in the full humanity and reason that
the self possesses but the other supposedly lacks.This allegedsuperiorityof the self, moreover, is usedto
justifythe subordinationof the other (Warren1990, 129;Plumwood 1993, 42-47). Next, ecofeministshave workedto show the
linkageswithin the devaluedcategoryof the other,demonstratinghow the associationof qualities fromone oppressedgroupwith
anotherservesto reinforcetheirsubordination. The
conceptual linkagesbetween women and
animals,women and the body, or women and nature, for example, all serve to
emphasizethe inferiorityof these categories (Adams 1990; 1993). But while all categoriesof the other sharethese
qualitiesof being feminized,animalized,and naturalized,socialist ecofeministshave rejectedanyclaimsof primacyforone formof
oppressionor another,embracinginsteadthe understandingthat all formsof oppressionare
nowsoinextricablylinkedthatliberationeffortsmustbeaimedatdismantling the system itself.
The domination of women and the domination over nature are linked. We must examine the
relationship between the two to understand other forms of domination, exploitation, and
violence.
Thompson, 2006 (Charis Thompson, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Associate Director of the Science,
Technology, and Society Center at UC Berkeley, read Philosophy, Psychology, Physiology at Oxford, received her Ph.D. from the
Science Studies program at UC San Diego, previously taught at Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell University,
at U of I Urbana, and at the History of Science Department at Harvard University, “Back to Nature? Resurrecting Ecofeminism after
Poststructuralist and Third-Wave Feminisms,” September 2006, PDF from JSTOR, Accessed: 6/25/14, RH)
In The Death of Nature Merchant
argued persuasively for a view that subsequently became one
of the two core tenets of ecofeminism: that the domination of women and the
domination of nature are structurally linked. (As alluded to above, the second core tenet was a recognition
and celebration of the values and activities traditionally associated with women, including childbirth and various kinds of
nurturing.) She
suggested that it was necessary to “re-examine the formation of a world
view and a science that, by reconcep- tualizing reality as a machine rather than a
living organism, sanctioned the domination of both nature and women.”9 Merchant
was motivated by her recognition of an isomorphism in critiques of capitalism in the
women’s movement and the ecological movement, noting that “both the women’s
movement and the ecology movement are sharply critical of the costs of competition,
aggression, and domination arising from the market economy’s modus operandi in nature
and society.” In examining the Scientific Revolution, she made a historical argument that the rise of
modern science and its economies was the motor of these twin oppressions. The
corollary—that equality for women and care of the environment are two parts of a
single remedy to modern exploitation—united feminists and ecologists in an urgent
call to action. In her detailed elaboration of the “historical interconnections between women and nature that developed as the
modern scientific and economic world took form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” Merchant provided an
empirical and theoretical ge- nealogy for the forms of oppression of women and of the
environment so characteristic of capitalism. Most important, she made the case that the oppression of
women and of the environment are linked, textually, ideologically, and empirically, in
the same large his- torical development—namely, what she termed “the death of nature.” Much as Robert K.
Merton had done in his work on the Puritan spur to capitalism and to science, Merchant tied science, technology, and the economy
to values and beliefs characteristic of moder- nity.10
2AC Coalitions
Coalitions solve-empirics prove
King, 1995 (Ynestra King, coeditor with Adrienne Harris of Rocking the Ship of State: Towards a Feminist Peace Politics,
writer, teacher, and activist living in NYC, founder of Women and Life on Earth and the anti-militarist movement, and the
Committee on Women, Pollution and Environment, she is working on a Visiting Scholar at the Barnard Center for Research on
Women, “Engendering a Peaceful Planet: Ecology, Economy, and Ecofeminism in Contemporary Context,” Winter 1995, JSTOR,
Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
We also work in coalition with the "Northin the South" in which ecofeminism links up
with the environmental justice movement, which has emphasized the racial dimension
of the ecological crisis and demonstrated that communities of color are
disproportionately impacted. Again, for us links between ecology and peace require an
analysis of the environmental impact of the military in its production of weapons and
waste and in the ecological devastation of war. Here in the United States eco feminists were active in our
opposition to the Gulf War and inl ending public visibility to the ever more devastating environmental impact of the abstract war
technologies that kill, poi-son, and destroy indiscriminately, with long-term effects on both people and nature which cannot be
anticipated. Here "thinking like an ecofeminist "involves making abstract connections concrete, as when I discovered, during the
duration of my pregnancy with my son, that in the time it took me to grow and birth one human being eighty thousand children in
the Persian Gulf had starved to death or died of causes directly attributableto the weapons used by U.S. forcesduring the war. The
need for thinking that is inventive and both personal and historical,in which our sense
of time and of relationshipsbecomes appropriate to understanding our own world,is
part of the workof ecofeministartistsand visionaries,in whose work diverse narratives
and apparently unrelated phenomenon are relatedto one anotherin varyingmodesof expressionandcommunication.
2AC Method
Metaphors Good
Metaphors effectively express ideas that would otherwise lose potency
Zheng and Song 10(Zheng Hong-bo and Song Wen-juan, Zhejiang Wanli University and Ningbo Dahongying College,
US-China Foreign Language, Volume 8, No.9, Metaphor analysis in the education discourse: A critical review,
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED514704.pdf,PS)
2. Application of metaphor analysis in education¶ Metaphor creation has been used in academic settings to encourage learners¶ ’¶
insight and understanding.¶ Metaphors are created to illuminate and solidify their understandings.
For example, in¶ Tea¶ ching Is Like...¶ ?,¶ a¶ group of teachers report¶ ed¶ on the effect of writing and talking about the metaphors
they created to symbolize their¶ views¶ of themselves as educators. They concluded, “Writing a metaphor for their work can focus
and energize educators” (H¶ agstrom,¶ et¶ al., 2000, p. 24).¶ The
belief that an analysis of metaphor use is a
reliable way of making otherwise unvoiced assumptions¶ explicit, which has informed
the methodology of a number of recent of educational research.¶ It seems fair to say that research in
this area has so far tended to fall into 3 categories: studies which deal ¶ with the interactions between learners and institutions
(Hoffman & Kretovics, 2004), studies which consider¶ teachers’¶ attitudes towards or perceptions of teaching (Oxford, et al., 1998)
and studies about¶ the learners’ beliefs¶ of learning (Bozlk, 2002).¶ 2.1 Education model and metaphor¶ During the past few
decades, more
and more educators and researchers have succeeded in freeing their minds¶
sufficiently to embrace or imagine many metaphors of teaching and learning to live by. The
existing literature¶ mainly discusses the metaphors demonstrating the way in which students relate to faculty and educational¶
institutions, for example, concept depicted in the student as client metaphor; expectations generated from the ¶ students as
customers metaphor; implications of the students as junior partners metaphor (Comesky, McCool,¶ Byrnes & Weber, 1992).¶ Hence,
many new metaphors describing the interaction between students and their institutions
of higher¶ education have been¶ proposed. Three frequently used metaphors are “¶ the student as a customer¶
”¶ (Comesky,¶ et¶ al.,¶ 1992; Schwartzman, 1995),¶ “¶ the student as a product¶ ” (Sirvanci, 1996)¶ ,¶ and “¶ the student as
employee¶ ” (¶ Hoffman,¶ & Kretovics, 2004). These 3 metaphors have emerged from the quality movement in the for-profit sector
of¶ business and industry.¶ More significantly, teaching as persuasion metaphor has been offered as a new pedagogy for the new ¶
millennium (e.g., Murphy, 2001; Alexander, Fives, Buehl & Mulhern, 2002).¶ 2.2 Teaching with the aid of metaphor¶ Since metaphor
functions as a cognitive instrument of observing the world and creating new senses, it is¶ significant to introduce metaphor into
language teaching. According to Ortony (1975, p. 45),¶ “metaphors are¶ necessary an¶ d not just nice” and he explain¶ ed¶ that there
are various
ways in which metaphor can facilitate learning.¶ Metaphor can impress a
concept or idea through the powerful image or vividness of the expression. Metaphor can¶
also capture the inexpressible¶ in¶ formation that what a metaphor conveys is virtually
impossible to express in any¶ other way without losing the potency of the message.¶ The cognitive
turn in linguistics has shifted attention to problems of meaning, idiomaticity and metaphoricity ¶ in language. For teachers of foreign
languages, these insights may be useful for traditional hurdles in language¶ teaching and learning, and may provide more efficient
and creative ways of presenting English language data for¶ learners from other cultures.¶ The
pedagogical usefulness
of metaphors as a teaching and memory device has a strong research literature.¶ M¶ any¶ of
the early research¶ es¶ sought to demonstrate the role of vivid image-evoking metaphors in complex¶ memory tasks. For
example, the awareness of cognitive metaphor would offer a more solid and
comprehensive¶ tool for the teaching/learning of figurative expressions.¶ The research of
metaphor’s applications in vocabulary¶ teaching found that the introduction of metaphor in teaching does make memorizing some
senses of a word much¶ easier. The research of its application can also be done into idioms and proverbs. The comparative analysis
of¶ Chinese and English metaphorical uses can also be a strand of current research. ¶ The application of metaphor in teaching
foreign language can contribute to the research on SLA (Second¶ Language Acquisition), and deepen and broaden the research on
metaphor as well. Metaphor theory can help¶ extend learners’ understanding of different senses of a single word and enhance
speakers’ or hearers’ ability of¶ communication (CAI, 2003).¶ Therefore, it is periodically advocated that metaphors should be used
in direct classroom instruction to aid¶ learners¶ ’¶ understanding of subject content through analogy between familiar experience
and new concepts or to¶ raise learners’ awareness of specific everyday uses of language, for example¶ , exploring metaphors in
science¶ (Cortazzi & Jin, 1999, p.154).
Metaphors enable people to derive meaning from otherwise inscrutable realities
Jensen 06(Devon F.N. Jensen, PhD, Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University of Calgary, March 2006, da: July
1 2014, Metaphors as a Bridge to Understanding Educational and Social Contexts,
http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/5_1/PDF/JENSEN.PDF,PS)
Looking at all the variables, it seemed as though the research path led scientists to the thoughts and ¶ perceptions of the participants.
With this assumption, educational scientists turned to language as a cred¶ -¶ ible means for revealing the inner world of educational
practitioners. Some of the early work in this area¶ (Beers & Bloomingdale, 1983; Byrd, 1977; Faunce & Wiener, 1967; Gallup
Organization, 1969; Lewis,¶ 1973; Payne, 1970; Regan, 1967)T revealed that the research process could gain a greater understanding¶
of the educational world through accessing the thoughts and perceptions of teachers. Teachers were¶ taken at their word, because
those words were seen to represent their thinking. In other words, language¶
provided the medium through
which the external world could get a picture of the educators’ internal¶ world. Teachers and
administrators could describe their perceptions in words to the researcher and the¶ researcher could then study and analyze those
words for meaning. The researcher now had an academic¶ foundation on which they could make sense of the educators’ inner
world through language.¶
A whole new door of educational analysis was opened up as
researchers turned to the language of¶ teachers, administrators, and students better to understand the
world of education. Numerous qualitative¶ methods appeared in a greater number of research projects and journal articles as the
nature of educa¶ -¶ tional research expanded and became more diversified. As well, this shift in educational research also ¶ changed
the nature of the relationship between the researcher and the participant. In this paradigm of¶ qualitative educational inquiry,
reality was not definable and was not something that could be hypothe¶ -¶ sized. Instead,
the participant and researcher co-created reality through reflective processes, of which¶ narrative inquiry led the way in placing
importance on voice and language as a means of revealing the¶ participant’s story and reality.¶ Two influential researchers who
have furthered language and narrative as a valid means of educa¶ -¶ tional inquiry are Clandinin and Connelly (Clandinin, 1985;
Clandinin, Connelly, & Michael, 1986,¶ 1989, 1996a, 1996b; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, 1993; Connelly, Clandinin, & Helen, 1997).
Their¶ work revealed that
language is a credible vehicle for collaboration between the
researcher and partici¶ -¶ pants in opening up new interpretations and understandings
of education. Out of their work emerge¶ co-constructed accounts of the educator’s reality and working world. These
narrative methods were able¶ to shed greater light on the educator’s inner landscape. Methodologically, narrative inquiry
relies on lan¶ -¶ guage devices such as image, metaphor, simile, and description as means of data
analysis, as these are¶ the language tools most commonly used by participants to derive
meaning from a complicated reality.¶ This is how metaphors begin to have
epistemological and ontological validity as an educational research method. One of the
underlying assumptions of any research endeavor, whether qualitative or¶ quantitative, is that there is an attempt to understand
better the environment being studied. In attempting¶ to make sense of the research context, the researcher has the desire to improve
it, change it, or know it¶ better somehow. To achieve this, researchers and participants often draw on preexisting knowledge and ¶
practice to account for current experiences. This is exactly what metaphors accomplish. Metaphors
enable the
connection of information about a familiar concept to another familiar concept, leading
to a new¶ understanding where the process of comparison between the two concepts
acts as generators for new¶ meaning. Figure 1 provides an illustration of this idea.
SF Key
Science fiction is key to help us understand our modern relationship to dominating the
environment
Smits, 6 (Martijntje, professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, November 2nd, 2006, “Science Fiction: A
Credible Resource for Critical Knowledge?” Bulletin of Science Technology & Society 2006 26: 52, National Association for Science,
Technology & Society http://bst.sagepub.com/content/26/6/521.full.pdf)--CRG
However, in
postulating the positive function of SF for informing us on future risks, Dinello
neglects to discuss the possibility that SF in general might contain as much myth as technologism does and that its main
significance might be more in reinforcing myth than in informing us about the more
real and prosaic dangers of new technologies. The prime significance of myth, like that of religious myth,
generally is in grasping human suffering and the relationships of man and world in a story that offers us a sense of order and
meaning. The
storylines of salvation and doom are a vast constant in religious as well as
secular myth: In a world of continuous, often revolutionary social transformations, devastating
wars, and ecological hor- rors, there remains ample motivation to continue to assuage
and explain suffering through the construc- tion of symbolic, highly charged, and
cognitively simplified myths, even when such religious ideologies are constructed in decidedly post-metaphysical
ways. (Alexander & Smith, 1996, p. 258) In this way, most SF seems captured as much in the quasi-religious discourse of salvation
and doom as technologism does. Both
genres imagine either our dreams or our nightmares, more
than telling us any- thing about the actual state of affairs in our technolog- ical culture,
about the complex networks of humans and things and their ambivalences and
changing values. Thus, SF and technologism might be much more closely related than Dinello admits. Instead of the
one being a solid source of criticism for the other, they appear as two sides of the same
kind of quasi-religious logic. Even more so, because both build on at least three shared assumptions that have long
been contested in STS: Both technologism and SF stories gene. rally assume (a) that the relationship between technology and social
effects is linear (new technology automati- cally has benign or bad effects on humans, nature or society), (b) that technology is an
autonomous force that one cannot steer in alternative directions, and (c) that nature and technology, or humans and technol- ogy,
are mutually exclusive categories whose offspring, often called cyborgs, are either embraced (utopism) or abhon°ed (dystopism).
Instead, STS scholars would state that actual relations between technology and society are complex and quite unpredictable and
that there are many possible outcomes, of which SF’s worst-case scenarios are but one. These insights could have inspired Dinello to
develop his central questions in a more subtle way. With much emphasis, Dinello promises a “focused perspective on the most
important question of the twenty-first century: Is technology out of control ?” Unfortunately, Dinello does not explain his conviction
that this is the most important question. Instead, he
predictably refers to the classic plot prevalent in SF
since the publication of Frankenstein, Mary Shel1ey’s 1818 novel: technology, designed
by humans to master nature and get rid of necessity, dramatically turning into its
opposite, taking over power and enslaving humans by making them dependent on
technology and taking away their freedom once again.
Science fiction helps to destroy hierarchy’s- means SF is key to destroy patriarchy and
heteronormativity
Fekete, 1 (John, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies and English Literature at Trent University, as well as a member of the
Cultural Studies PhD Program and the Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture, and Politics. Recognized as an international figure
in the field of modern and postmodern theory and in the antifoundational transformation of theory from the 1970s, March 2001,
“Doing the Time Warp Again: Science Fiction as Adversarial Culture,” Science Fiction Studies, #83 = Volume 28, Part
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/fek83.htm)--CRG
Science fiction commentary today largely presupposes the democratization and
decentralization of the modern system of Art, and the revaluation made possible by the
loosening of the value hierarchy that had authorized the exalted status of a centralized
high Art canon and the correspondingly low status of the popular or commercial
literatures and paraliteratures (to which sf has tended to belong). The nuts and bolts discourse on sf
nowadays shows little anxiety about the genre’s non-canonical status. The agendas of Science
Fiction Studies, the pre-eminent regular home of academic sf scholarship, for example, have shifted during the 1990s, as indeed the
journal anticipated at the beginning of that decade (Csicsery-Ronay Jr., "Editorial"). As a result, a
variety of
deconstructive and counter-canonical readings have increased the theoretical density of
the journal and given it a new-left intellectual face that is double-coded, Janus-like, turning both
to cultural critique and to a critique of the traditional presuppositions of critique. It is interesting to note a
continuing consensus in sf scholarship on advancing the adversarial culture and
producing an alternative discourse around creative writing of an alternativist character.
At the same time, critiques frequently "post" their own grounding, as happens with other double-codings of postmodern culture,
where the basic intellectual categories (certainties) of modernity are called into question and recoded. Feminist
and post-
feminist, Marxist and post-marxist, modernist and post-modernist, humanist and post-humanist, historicist and post-historicist,
gendered and post-gendered analytic and theoretic modes of discourse step by step
refashion a dialogic space that begins to appear post-critical. It is probably fair to say that the
"posting" of the adversarial culture foreseen in Baudrillard’s hypothesis of the hyperreal reduction of distance between the fictive
and the real, in Lyotard’s libidinal aesthetic, and in the assumptions of a number of postmodern antifoundationalists, has not yet
been robustly theorized or persuasively disseminated. Nevertheless, the post-critical
horizons of science fiction
discourse have been announced, even if related agendas are only slowly and cautiously
emerging. Into this context arrives Carl Freedman’s Critical Theory and Science Fiction. In a science fiction milieu where
dedicated works of theory reflecting on the nature of science fiction itself are relatively rare, such a book is to be welcomed,
especially as it makes a real contribution by drawing attention to relationships between critical theory and sf. At the same time, the
book has a strong adversarial parti pris that seems emblematic of an earlier time, or perhaps of the more traditional pole of an
emerging debate. The book’s twin purposes—to show that science
fiction is an intrinsically criticaltheoretical generic mode, and to establish canonizing, critical-theoretical readings of five
best-of-type sf texts by Stanislaw Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Philip K. Dick—draw a line in the
sand. The proposed generic definition and related critical canon will select out much of known science fiction and select in a limited
array of texts grounded on historiosophical or philosophical premises that have much in common with the foundations of the
selective traditions of elite Literature. The bottom line is that a highly selective generic definition of the kind that Freedman
proposes would substantially narrow the legitimate membership of the sf genre and dovetail at least in part with impulses toward
the kind of legitimation that is neither in the interests of the wide audiences that appreciate sf for its variety, nor any longer
necessary as a strategy for drawing academic attention to sf. On closer scrutiny, indeed, the
exclusionary legitimating
argument turns out to be working the other side of the street, using the known and
demonstrable appeals of sf to legitimate a narrowly critical reading strategy.
Feminist science fiction theorists are key-instead of seeing women and nature as objects to
be “mastered” they counter this normative notion with an alternative mindset of pressing on
the importance of connection, not exploitation, of the Earth. People would no longer seek to
dominate the nature, but seek to understand their entanglement and relationship with
nature.
Donawerth, 1990 (Jane Donawerth, Professor at the University of Maryland, serves as Director of Writing Programs, has
had multiple books published, “Utopian Science: Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction,” pp. 548-550, 1990,
PDF from JSTOR, Accessed: 6/25/14, RH)
changing mindset?
-breaks down the hierarchies
-question our inter connectedness
-feminist epistemology is good
Feminist science theorists have shown that male scientists from the seventeenth century on have
conceived of nature as a potentially unruly woman to be mastered and penetrated for
her secrets. "The image of nature that became important in the early modern period was
that of a disorderly and chaotic realm to be subdued and controlled," argues Carolyn
Merchant. Nature is conceived of by scientists as associated with women, according to
Sandra Harding, and "an immensely powerful threat that will rise up and overwhelm culture unless [it] exerts severe
controls."'9As an alternative to the destructive view of nature in traditional male science,
feminist science theorists posit a revision of nature and humanity's relation to her.
"Women's identification with earth and nature," argues Joan Rothschild, must form "the basis for
transforming our values and creating new ecological visions." Such a new science, according
to Haraway, would stress connection to, not domination over nature; according to Evelyn Fox Keller,
it would see nature not as passive but as resourceful; according to Merchant it would
be as "antihierarchical"; and according to Rose it would stress "the feminine value of
harmony with nature" (according to Rose). Such a science would seek "new and pacific
relationships between humanity and nature and among human beings themselves,"
argues Hilary Rose; and according to Keller, it would seek "not the power to manipulate, but
empowerment-the kind of power that results from an understanding of the world
around us, that simultaneously reflects and affirms our connection to that world."20
Such a vision of nature has long been implicit, and more recently, explicit in women's science fiction. In Andre Norton's Breed to
Come (1972), for example, humans return to an earth their race had almost destroyed and tell the intelligent felines who have risen
to civilization, "Do not try to change what lies about you; learn to live within its pattern, be a true part of it." The former Terrans are
warning the current ones not to produce a destructive technology but to develop a partnership with nature. The view of nature of
men and women in works by women is often sharply different. In Sargent's The Shore of Women(1986), women's scriptures record
"the spirit of Earth, in the form of the Goddess" speaking to women: "You gave men power over Me, and they ravaged Me. You
gave them power over yourselves, and they made you slaves. They sought to wrest my secrets from Me instead of living in
harmony with Me." As a result, women assume political power, and enforce separation from men as well as limited technology and
limited reproduction that keep the ecology in balance. Even in the prototype of all science fiction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
(1818), the concept of harmony with nature is implicit, a concept that Frankenstein violates with his science. Whereas Elizabeth's
relation to nature-"the sublime shapes of the mountains, the changes of the seasons, tempest and calm, the silence of winter, and the
life and turbulence of our Alpine summers"-was one of "admiration and delight," Frankenstein's view of "the world was . . . a secret
which I desired to divine." His obsession begins when he leaves for the all-male society at the university where there "were men
who had penetrated deeper" than those who "had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but [to whom] her immortal lineaments
were still a wonder and a mystery." In utopian fictions by women science fiction writers, the most common metaphor for the
relation of humans to nature is "the web of nature." In Piercy's, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) Luciente warns Connie, "We're
part of the web of nature," when she urges putting immortality, or at least longevity, as a major goal of science; and in Joan
Slonczewski's Door into Ocean (1986), scientists facilitate nature's own processes, "when the web stretches . . . to balance life and
death." Thus feminist science theorists and women science fiction writers share a utopian vision of nature and science in
partnership.2' As
a result of the inclusion of women in science, feminist historians of science
and science theorists have argued that a revised science would be different because of
the culturally different qualities assigned to women. A feminist science will include
acknowledgement of subjectivity in its methods; it will look at problems not just
analytically but also holistically; it will aim for the complex answer as best and most
honest; and it will be decentralized and organized cooperatively. In all these ways, a feminist science is utopian,
since these conditions, values, and goals do not describe contemporary science. In feminist
science theory, subjectivity as an ideal includes feelings, intuition, and values. "A feminist epistemology [for the
sciences]," writes Hilary Rose, "insists on the scientific validity of the subject, on the need to unite cognitive and affective domains; it
emphasizes holism, harmony, and complexity rather than reductionism, domination,
and linearity." In A Feeling for the Organism, Evelyn Fox Keller reads Barbara Mc- Clintock's scientific career as an example
of allowing "the objects of . . . study [to] become subjects in their own right," thus "fostering a sense of the limitations of the scientific
method, and an appreciation of other ways of knowing." A study by scientist Jan Harding suggests that girls in our society who
choose scientific careers more often than boys who do so recognize that "science has social implications," and choose science as a
means of developing "relatedness, capacity for concern, and an ability to see things from another's perspective." Subjectivity in
science must also encompass values and ethical context: science must be "context dependent" according to Merchant, connected to
"social implications" according to Jan Harding, based on "relational thinking" according to Hein, grounded in women's experience
and, so, a "labor of love" according to Rose.22
A science fiction, feminist epistemology will make us question the interactions between the
human and nature to truly understand the complexity and entanglement of the system.
-This evidence talks about “A Door Into the ocean” and how it saw tech as being able to create a yield but not exploit the earth
-Solves exploitation?
Donawerth, 1990 (Jane Donawerth, Professor at the University of Maryland, serves as Director of Writing Programs, has
had multiple books published, “Utopian Science: Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction,” pp. 553-554, 1990,
PDF from JSTOR, Accessed: 6/25/14, RH)
For women science fiction writers, a
science that incorporates sub- jectivity and sees humans in
partnership with nature would also emphasize relational thinking and acknowledge
a responsibility to understand the complexity of the whole. In Piercy's utopian future, Luciente
explains that "We're cautious about gross experiments. 'In biosystems, all factors are not knowable.' First rule we learn when
studying living beings in relation." Even physics is presented as based on relations, as aiming at complexity. In Le Guin's The
Dispossessed(1974), the physicist Shevek reaches for a theory of time that relates the cyclical to the linear: " We
don't want
purity, but complexity," he urges; "A complexity that includes not only duration but
creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry, but ethics."26 Such a new
science, not analytical and objectively distanced, but holistic and connected to people
and other living beings, would necessarily be organized differently from our current
science. According to Joan Roths- child, it would question our current "technological
ideals": "that bigness equals efficiency, that a high degree of specialization is always
necessary, that value be placed on quantity criteria, that specialist elites must be
created." Such questioning is worked out at length in Mitchison's second science fiction novel, Solution Three (1975), where a
future earth that has bred specialized plants finds its entire flora threatened by a virus and sends scientists back to nature to gather a
larger less specialized gene pool. And much women's science fiction from Herland (1915) to Woman on the Edge of Time (1975) to
A Door into Ocean (1986) imagines technology depending not on bigness but on a
sustained yield, one which does not deplete the earth and her resources. "Our technology did
not develop in a straight line from yours," says Luciente in Piercy's novel; "We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We
can afford to waste . . . nothing. You might say our-you'd say religion?-ideas make us see ourselves as partners with water, air,
birds, fish, trees." An emphasis on a science situated in a decentralized, nonhierarchical society, and operated as a craft industry
creates a special problem for recent women novelists, who seem to traditional science fiction fans to be antiscience reactionaries. In
Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985), in the postholocaust Kest society, computer technology is used mainly for aesthetic
purposes, and other sciences and technologies are developed in homes and through apprentice systems. In Slonczewski's A Door
into Ocean (1986), the invaders from Valedon have trouble recognizing the scientists and the laboratories, since scientists are not
labelled by dress, and science is practised as a craft industry with organic rather than mechanical tools. Perhaps the placing of
science in the homes of these peoples is important symbolically for the authors: the place of science indicates communal
responsibility for its outcomes.27
Feminist science fiction makes us reflect on the history of science and its impacts on women
Donawerth, 1990 (Jane Donawerth, Professor at the University of Maryland, serves as Director of Writing Programs, has
had multiple books published, “Utopian Science: Contemporary Feminist Science Theory and Science Fiction,” pp. 537-539, 1990,
PDF from JSTOR, Accessed: 6/25/14, RH)
The concern for increased participation by women in science has an analogous utopian
reflection in science fiction by women. A crucial difference between the science depicted
in men's science fiction and women's science fiction is, quite simply, the participation of
women. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Darko Suvin has rightfully pointed out the lack of
women scientists in American science fiction (but failed to add that he had read almost exclusively science
fiction by men). Since at least the early 1960s, women writers have regularly characterized women as scientists; examples include
Mary, biologist and specialist in alien communication in Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962); the biologist Takver
and the physicist Mitis in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974); Kira, biologist, M.D., and "the de facto head of her
department at the university" in Pamela Sargent's Cloned Lives (1972-76); Margaret, the black computer expert in Up the Walls of
the World (1978) by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon); Varian, vet- erinary xenobiologist and co-leader of the expedition in Anne
Mc- Caffrey's Dinosaur Planet Survivors (1984); and Jeanne Velory, black physicist and astronaut in Vonda McIntyre's Barbary
(1986). Even the earliest woman writer for the pulp magazines, Clare Winger Harris, in a 1928 short story, includes a woman
scientist: Hildreth, chemist and astronomer, assistant to her father in his home laboratory and soon to be assistant to her new
husband. This
interest of women science fiction writers in women scientists seems not only
a result of changes in women's careers in the 1960s but also of the struggle to educate
women in the sciences in the late nineteenth century.4 Women scientists as characters in
women's science fiction, moreover, seem a legacy of the earlier feminist utopias. In Mary Bradley
Lane's Mizora (1880-81), for example, chemists and mechanical engineers make the all-woman
society a technological utopia. And in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), female geneticists have bred cropproducing and disease-resistant trees, as well as quiet cats that do not kill birds, while other women have developed sciences
unknown to Gilman's con- temporaries-language as a science, sanitation, nutrition, and a kind of psychology-history. The
feminist utopias, as well as contemporary wom-en's science fiction, make us see a
history of women in science, not just a few great women who seem to be historical
anomalies. In one of the earliest feminist utopias, ThreeHundred YearsHence (1836), written when most women were still
denied college educations, Mary Griffith shows a future historian relating a woman's invention of a new power that replaces steam,
as well as restoring proper credit to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "for introducing into England the practice of inoculation for the
small-pox." Such a vision of restoring women to the history of science is shared by Naomi Mitchison in Memoirs of a
Spacewoman;her hero Mary reflects: I may be out of date, but I always feel that biology and, of course, communication are
essentially women's work, and glory. Yes, I know there have been physicists like Yin Ih and molecular astronomers-I remember old
Jane Rakadsalismyself, her wonderful black, ageless face opening into a great smile! But somehow the disciplines of life seem more
congenial to most of us women.5 In 1962, when many colleges were still effectually segregated by race and want ads were still
separated by gender into male and female occupations, Mitchison presents, as a matter of course, the participation of women of
color in science. What these utopian and science fiction writers offer, more importantly than portraits of individual women
scientists, is a revision of past and future science history that includes women as rightful participants. In this way, they share a goal
with feminist historians of science.
Discourse Shapes Reality
Discourse shapes reality.
Mack-Canty, 2004 (Collen Mack-Canty, assistant professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Idaho,
Ph.D. in Political Science with an emphasis in feminist theory from University of Oregon, she does research and publishes articles
that discuss ecofeminism, third-wave feminism, and feminist families, “Third-wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the
Nature/Culture Duality,” Autumn of 2004, Routledge Press, Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
Some ecofeminists, who
follow the Wittgenstein idea that concept formation is strongly
influenced by language, make linguistic interconnections to explain subjugation. They
maintain that language is pivotal in maintaining mutually reinforcing sexist, racist, and
naturist views of women, people of color, and nonhuman nature. They call our
attention to the considerable extent that Euro-American language contains
illustrations of sexist-naturist language depicting women, animals, and nonhuman
nature as having less value than men. Related to this approachis the ecofeminist animal welfare "analysis that
the oppression of nonhuman animals, is based on a variety of women-animal connections: for example, sexist-naturalist
language, images of women and animals as consumable objects, pornographic representations of
women as meat, male-perpetuated violence against women and nonhuman animals" (Brennan 1988, 176 quoted in Warren2000,
126). Another method-that of making symbolic and literary interconnections-is seen in a new genre of literary analy- sis: ecofeminist
literary criticism. This genre has emerged as a way to appraiseliterature according to criteria of ecological and feminist values.
Ecofeminists using this approach,maintain that the literary canon needs to be reconsideredto include a de-homocentric approach.
“Not Our Feminism”
Reject their generic feminism or ecofem bad- it doesn’t apply to us
Gaard, 10 (Greta, professor at University of Wisconson, ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker,
“New Directions for Ecofeminism:Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment,
volume 0, number 0, pp. 1–23doi:10.1093 Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for theStudy of
Literature and Environment, file:///Users/gema/Downloads/isle.isq108.full-libre.pdf)--CRG
In sum, then, feminists
and ecocritics utilizing feminism's “wave” metaphor will
inadvertently erase the history of ecological feminism and feminisms of color from both
feminism and ecocriticism alike. Given such inaccuracies, we would do well to find a different
metaphor for describing the developments of ecocritical history-one that includes the
contributions of feminisms in its framework, not just as a footnote or augmentation-so that the future of
ecocriticism may rest on firmer ground, and the new developments of ecocritical perspectives on
sexuality, psychology and species may flourish by drawing from deeper historical roots." Buell as well as Adamson and Slovic
agree: an inclusive narrative of ecocritical history will recognize tl1at each development contains, moves forward, augments, and
interrogates the developments that precede it. Ecocriticism
is expand- ing beyond-but must not eraseits origins and multiple, continued developments.
Topicality/Framework Answers
2AC A2 T “Exploration”
1. We meet –
2. Counter-interpretation - Exploration includes discursive exploration of the ocean as a
concept
Earnest 10(Mary Kate Earnest, Professor of English at the University of Texas, Early English Studies, Volume 3, 2010, da: July 1
2014, A Ecocritical Exploration of the Unique Nature of Oceans in The Blazing World,
https://www.uta.edu/english/ees/pdf/earnest3.pdf,PS)
¶ The early modern period was a time of¶ expansion, as scientific¶ philosophy developed through pursuit of new knowledge and ¶
understanding; great thinkers such as Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and¶ Francis Bacon laid the foundations of the scientific
revolution. This¶ movement and its scientific achi¶ evements brought a new worldview, a¶ mechanistic approach, which Robert
Hooke describes in his¶ Micrographia¶ :¶ ‚we may perhaps be inabled to discern all the secret workings of Nature,¶ almost in the
same manner as we do those that are the productions of Art,¶ a¶ nd are manag’d by Wheels, and Engines, and Springs, that we
devised by¶ human Wit.‛¶ 3¶ This desire to know the ‚secret workings of Nature‛ inspired¶ a new conceptualization of the world
and a new relationship between¶ humankind and natural phenomena. Carolyn Me¶ rchant describes negative¶ aspects of this new
relationship: ‚As the sixteenth century organic cosmos¶ was transformed into the seventeenth century mechanistic universe, its life¶
and vitality were sacrificed for a world filled with dead and passive¶ matter.‛¶ 4¶ Slowly, the world seemed more machine than
organism;¶ therefore, with the advancement of science came a loss of intimacy with¶ nature, a loss of interconnection between and
humans and their¶ surroundings. At
first glance, oceans dwell within this broad concept of nature;
however, I suggest further investigation reveals that oceans resist such classification. To
explore shifting paradigms of nature requires an understanding of¶ past and present
environmentalism. Humans are part of nature and,¶ therefore, inter related with their object
of study. Subjectivity is inevitable,¶ and necessitates an awareness o¶ f¶ definitions of ecology¶ as well as¶ humankind’s role in
constructioning those definitions¶ . Neil Evernden¶ contends that inter¶ -¶ relatedness is the crux of ecology a¶ nd a commonly¶
misunderstood or over¶ -¶ simplified concept. The inter¶ -¶ related essence of¶ ecology is not merely a matrix of causal connections,
but rather ‚a genuine¶ intermingling¶ of parts of the ecosystem. There are no discrete entities.‛¶ 5¶ Subsequently, there¶ exists no
single, dominant, correct perceived model of¶ nature. Throughout history, different ways to interact with and understand¶ the
environment emerge from scientific advancement, technological¶ innovation, and climate change. Describing the changing tren¶ ds
of today,¶ Howarth contends, ‚Science is evolving beyond Cartesian dualism toward¶ quantum mechanics and chaos theory, where
volatile, ceaseless exchange is¶ the norm. While some forms of postmodern criticism are following this¶ lead, many humanists still
c¶ ling to a rationale bias that ignores recent¶ science.‛¶ 6¶ One sees evidence of the more recent argument in modern social¶
networking technology and Internet discourse. Organicism, particularly its¶ notions of interconnection and causation, will soon be
essenti¶ al to the¶ survival of our planet. Investigating
this paradigm shift away from¶ organicism
within early modern discourse can illuminate new approaches¶ and solutions to
contemporary environmental issues.
3. Reasons to prefer –
A) Written in the context of Earth’s oceans, unlike arbitrary context-less definitions
B) Only internal link to portable skills – learning about the ocean in the abstract is hardly
useful knowledge, but understanding our relationship and responsibility to nature is an
important life skill
C) NEG ground – they don’t have a right to the DA’s they say they lose – we force them to
do case specific research and prepare innovative arguments
4. Reasonability – as long as they get links, you shouldn’t vote against us – competing
interpretations incentivizes a focus on trivial distinctions between out of context definitions
1AR Extensions T “Exploration”
Exploration isn’t only physical – it includes relationships
Earnest 10(Mary Kate Earnest, Professor of English at the University of Texas, Early English Studies, Volume 3, 2010, da: July 1
2014, A Ecocritical Exploration of the Unique Nature of Oceans in The Blazing World,
https://www.uta.edu/english/ees/pdf/earnest3.pdf,PS)
Early modern perceptions of oceanic space diverged¶ from standard perceptions of
nature on land (or land¶ -¶ nature)¶ because oceans presented a different type of wilderness.¶ Because oceans defied early
modern definitions of nature,¶ they refused to support¶ the developing mechanistic approach¶ in the way that land¶ -¶ nature did.
I examine Margaret¶ Cavendish’s The Blazing World to illustrate how the liminal¶
position of oceans within the humankind - nature paradigm¶ necessitated a hybrid
mechanistic¶ -¶ organic relationsh¶ ip and¶ representation. This exploration
demonstrates how oceans, as¶ an extraterrestrial space distanced from traditional, terrestrial¶ nature, constituted
a different kind of natural phenomenon¶ and contributed to a global mentality.
Experimenting with¶ human¶ kind’s perceptions of, and approaches to, nature¶ suggests that the organic/mechanistic dichotomy is
an overly¶ -¶ simplified paradigm, and that the human/nature partition is¶ equally simplistic due to differing “natures” of
terrestrial¶ verses oceanic space. Oce¶ ans do not fit neatly under the¶ paradigm of “nature,” they deviate through resistance and¶
idiosyncrasy. Charting oceans proves an effective step in¶ diversifying definitions, representations, and perceptions of¶ nature.
2AC A2 “State Key”
The state has been horrible to the eco-fem movement
Kirk, 1997 (Gwyn Kirk, scholar-activist concerned with gender, racial, and environmental justice, taught environmental
studies, women’s studies, political science, and sociology at Rutgers, the University of Oregon, University of San Francisco, Antioch
College, Colorado College, Hamilton College, and Mills College, she has also published eight books, her articles regarding
feminism, ecology, and transnational feminism have been in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Berkeley Women’s Law Journal,
Foreign Policy in Focus, Frontiers, Peace Review, and Social Justice, in 2002, she received a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University
of Hawaii, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Women’s Leadership Institute at Mills College, she is the founding member of
International Women’s Network Against Militarism, Ph.D. in sociology from London School of Economics, Masters in Town
Planning from Leeds Polytechnic, 1997, “Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice: Bridges across Gender, Race, and Class,” JSTOR,
Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
Women make up the majority of local activists in environmental justice organizations, sometimes because they have a sick child or
because they have become ill themselves. Illnesses caused by toxins are often difficult to diagnose and treat because they affect
internal organs and the balance of body function- ing.Women have been persistent in raising questions and searching for plausible
explanations for such illnesses, sometimes discovering that their communities have been built on contaminated land or tracing
probable sources of pollution affecting the neighborhood.14They
have publicized their findings and
taken on governmental agencies and corporations responsible for contamination. In
so doing they are often ridiculed as "hysterical house wives" by officials and reporters who have trivialized their research as emotional and unscholarly. By contrast, Lin Nelson
honors this works as kitchen table science. In October 1991 women were 60 percent of the participants at the First National People of
Color Envi- ronmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. Many urban gardenersin northern cities are elderly women, while
in rural areaswomen work on family garden plots, planting, harvesting, and processing fruit and vegetables for home use.15As
ethnobotanists, women know backcountry areasin great detail because they go there at different seasons to gather herbs for
medicinal purposes. Among Mexican Americans, for example, curanderas-traditional healers-continue to work with
herbalremedies.16 This detailedknowledge is learnedfrom olderpeople, as is also the case with some Native Americans and others
who live in ruralareas. Gender is significant for women in the environmental justice movement, but thisisnot aconcept of
genderdivorcedfromraceandclass.Women activistssee their identity as women integratedwith their racialand class identities, with
race and/or class often more of a place of empowerment for them than gender. Al- though they recognize their own subordination
based on gender, they are not interested in separatingthemselves from the men in their communities and frame their perspectives,
as women, in class- and race-conscious ways.
2AC Framework Frontline (One Off)
1. We meet – USFG should be defined by the constitution and the preamble says “We
the people” – I am an example of USFG action in the same way that an XO or courts
counterplan is an example of USFG action/
2. Counter interpretation: the aff should be allowed to have a discussion about the topic
rather than a topical discussion.
3. Resolved is to reduce by mental analysis, Random House 11
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/resolve)
4. Should indicates desirability, OED 11
(http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/should?region=us)
5. Permutation do both interpretations – they are not mutually exclusive
6. Definitions of words are arbitrary – we assume words mean particular things because
we are accultured to think so, but really, meaning changes over time – this means that
‘predictability’ is fundamentally arbitrary
7. The entire 1AC is an impact turn to framework
8. Policy debates are inevitable – solves all their offense
9. Deliberation DA – framework uses masculine claims of rationality to determine what
knowledge is legitimate for public debate pushing unproductive knowledge to the
private sphere – There is only a risk that interruptions like the affirmative are able to
reclaim the public sphere
Peterson in 2000 V. Spike Peterson. “Rereading Public and Private: The Dichotomy that is Not One1” SAIS Review. Vol 20,
Num 2. Pp 11-29. Summer-Fall 2000. //ED
In Homer and Thucydides, the
meanings of public and private are delineated in relation to the
demands of war and the moral dilemmas they pose. In this sense, their accounts link the
state’s external affairs to “impossible” internal dilemmas. In contrast, the most familiar account of
public and private, provided by Aristotle, avoids the question of war and external affairs. Instead of a tragic choice between
competing but parallel claims to loyalty, Aristotle
“resolves” the dilemma by privileging the public
sphere over the private. Here, the public realm of politics constitutes the highest
association, a realm of freedom and equality, where citizens pursue the good life. This
higher realm depends upon but encompasses the private sphere, which is characterized
not by freedom but necessity, and involves not equal but naturally hierarchical
relationships. In this account, the public sphere of free, equal, reasoning citizens is
masculinized by the exclusion of women and feminized characteristics, while the
private sphere of contingency, inequality, and emotional attachments is feminized by
the relegation of women and characteristics of femininity to it. This is the “model” of
public and private most frequently assumed in the Western tradition of social and
political theory. Arguably its greatest significance is in defining the boundary and
elevating the status of “politics”: the dichotomy distinguishes what is deemed political
and therefore what is politicized. That which is associated with the private sphere is
denied the status of being political, hence, denied the important sense of being
contingent (not given), contestable (not fixed), and of collective interest (not simply personal). Not only
do we inherit a bounded domain of citizenship and political power, but we also inherit
a subordinated sphere of naturalized inequality. Or so we assume. What Aristotle intended is the
subject of ongoing debate, but he is clear about the interdependence of public and private, which is often lost in modern
accounts.14 This interdependence was both emotional and economic. The public sphere depended as much on the cultivation of
virtue, love, and emotional attachments15 as it did on the economic productivity of the oikos (household). Hence, on the one hand,
Aristotle’s account is more complex and less binary than conventionally assumed. On the other, however, his characterization does
establish the hierarchy of public over private (and masculine over feminine), and his avoidance of war and external affairs and
omission of (non-oikos) market exchanges introduce differently problematic simplifications.
10. Privilege DA – Fairness and predictability is not neutral or objective but rather shot
through with biases produced by dominant power relations. Their notion of fairness
glosses over issues of inequality.
Delgado 92, Law Prof at U. of Colorado, 1992 [Richard, “Shadowboxing: An Essay On Power,” In Cornell Law Review, May]
We have cleverly built power's view of the appropriate standard of conduct into the
very term fair. Thus, the stronger party is able to have his [their] way and see himself
[themselves] as principled at the same time. Imagine, for example, a man's likely
reaction to the suggestion that subjective considerations -- a woman's mood, her sense of
pressure or intimidation, how she felt about the man, her unexpressed fear of reprisals if she did not go ahead -- ought to
play a part in determining whether the man is guilty of rape. Most men find this suggestion
offensive; it requires them to do something they are not accustomed to doing. "Why," they say, "I'd have to be a mind reader
before I could have sex with anybody?" "Who knows, anyway, what internal inhibitions the woman might have been
harboring?" And "what if the woman simply changed her mind later and charged me with rape?” What we never notice is that
women can "read" men's minds perfectly well. The male perspective is right out there in the world,
plain as day, inscribed in culture, song, and myth -- in all the prevailing narratives.
These narratives tell us that men want and are entitled to sex, that it is a prime
function of women to give it to them, and that unless something unusual happens,
the act of sex is ordinary and blameless. We believe these things because that is the
way we have constructed women, men, and "normal" sexual intercourse. Notice what the
objective standard renders irrelevant: a downcast look; ambivalence; the question, "Do you really think we should?"; slowness
in following the man's lead; a reputation for sexual selectivity; virginity; youth; and innocence. Indeed, only a loud firm
"no" counts, and probably only if it is repeated several times, overheard by others, and accompanied
by forceful body language such as pushing the man and walking away briskly. Yet society and law accept
only this latter message (or something like it), and not the former, more nuanced ones, to mean
refusal. Why? The "objective" approach is not inherently better or more fair. Rather, it is
accepted because it embodies the sense of the stronger party, who centuries ago found himself
in a position to dictate what permission meant. Allowing ourselves to be drawn into reflexive,
predictable arguments about administrability, fairness, stability, and ease of
determination points us away from what really counts: the way in which stronger
parties have managed to inscribe their views and interests into "external" culture, so
that we are now enamored with that way of judging action. First, we read our values and
preferences into the culture; then we pretend to consult that culture meekly and humbly in order to
judge our own acts. A nice trick if you can get away with it.
11. Stabilization DA – Framework is an attempt to stabilize debate – this excludes nonheteronormative bodies and arguments from our discussions
12. Sequencing DA - Framework seeks to shift the focus back to male-centered ideals by
censoring the feminine. The aff is a perquisite to any productive form of politics –
without breaking the bars on our cage we will always be censored
Mojab 02 (Shahrzad, director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute and an Associate Professor in the Department of
Adult Education and Psychology at University of Toronto, Canada; “Information, Censorship, and Gender Relations in Global
Capitalism” Information for Social Change 1)//ED
It is important to know more about the ties that bind censorship to gender. Even when
one barrier is removed, others emerge to ensure the reproduction of the status quo. For
instance, after decades of struggle, beginning in late nineteenth century, legal barriers to women's access to parliament and political
office were removed in the West and, later, in many non-Western states. This was achieved, not simply through access to
information, but rather due to women's determination to create knowledge and consciousness, and engage in mobilizing and
organizing (sit-ins, demonstrations, picketing, leafleting, singing, etc.) in schools, homes, streets, churches, and university campuses.
However, states and state-centred politics continue to be male-centred. Even when women have a
proportionate participation in the parliament, there is no guarantee that they would all advocate feminist alternatives to an
androcentric agenda; and this is the case for the simple reason that women can be as patriarchal in their politics as some men are.A
more adequate approach to the understanding of censorship is, I believe, to see it not as an irrational practice, as a mischievous
attitude, or a technical problem of obstructing channels of communication. Censorship
is an integral part of the
exercise of gender power, class power, and the powers of the nation, ethnicity, religion
and governance. Not only does it deny women access to information, but also limits
their participation in the creation of knowledge, and denies them the power to utilize
knowledge.If in pre-modern times the church was the major player in creating knowledge, today the market produces,
disseminates, and utilizes much of the knowledge, which has achieved the status of a commodity. Knowledge is "intellectual
property." Even the knowledge created in public and semi-public institutions such as universities is increasingly geared to the
agenda of the market, and serves the promotion of market interests. Moreover, Western states primarily entertain the market as the
lifeline of economy, culture and society. They increasingly aim at giving all the power to the market. In dictatorial regimes,
however, the state still plays a prominent role in censoring the creation and dissemination of knowledge. From Peru to Turkey, to
Iran and to China, states
suppress activists, journalists, libraries, bookstores, print and
broadcast media, satellite dishes and the Internet. They often do so by committing violence against the
citizens and the communication systems they use.Although we may find much gender-based subtlety in the
techniques of limiting women's access to information, I believe that the subtlest censorship
is denying feminist knowledge a visible role in the exercise of power. The state, Western
and non-Western, rules through privileging androcentric knowledge as the basis for
governance. The conduct of national censuses, for instance, continues to be based on androcentric worldviews in spite of
devastating feminist critique. To give another example, women are now recruited into Western armies in combat functions, but
states continue to ignore feminist and pacifist knowledge that challenges the very phenomenon of war and violence (Cynthia Enloe,
2000). Women themselves can be and, often, are part of the problem. In the absence of feminist consciousness, they generally act as
participants in the reproduction of patriarchal gender relations. In Islamic societies, when men engage in the "honour" killing of
their wives, daughters or sisters, sometimes mothers participate in or tolerate the horrendous crime (Mojab, 2002). The
democratisation of gender relations is a conscious intervention in a power structure that is closely interlocked with the powers of
the state, class, race, ethnicity, religion and tradition. For both women and men, challenging patriarchy means defying one's own
values, worldviews, emotions, and traditions. At the same time, it involves risk taking including, in some situations, loss of life.
Women's full access to androcentric knowledge will not disturb the status quo. I argue that, in the absence of feminist
consciousness, women may even act as ministers of propaganda and censorship. They will not be in a position to exercise the
democratic right to revolt against oppressive rule. In the West, feminist knowledge cannot be suppressed through book-burning,
jailing, torture, and assassination. Censorship is conducted, much more effectively, by stigmatizing and marginalising feminist
knowledge as "special interest," while androcentrism is promoted as the norm, the canon, and "human nature." That is why, I
contend, that if we fill all the media institutions with female managers and staff, if we give all educational institutions to women, or
hand over all high-rank military positions to women, the androcentric world order with its violence, war, poverty, and
degenerating environment will continue to function. Globalization, as it is understood in mainstream media and in state discourses,
is nothing new; it emerged with the rise of capitalism; the main engine of globalization is the capitalist market, and it is promoted
and planned by capitalist states through various organs such as the G8, World Bank, European Union, World Trade Organization,
International Monetary Fund, etc. The impact of this globalization on women has been largely negative, especially in the developing
world. Millions of girls aged 5 to 15 are recruited into the global prostitution market. Millions more leave their families and
countries to raise some income as maids. However, other forms of globalization or, rather, internationalization have been in the
making. For instance, feminism has evolved as an international movement in spite of the opposition of conservatives in many parts
of the world. It has been able to put women's demands on the agenda of states and international organs such as the United Nations.
Media are also important actors in globalisation. Women have had more presence in the media both as producers and as targets or
sources of entertainment and information programming. There is considerable progress, for instance, in the production of women
and feminist press in many developing countries. The Internet and desktop publishing present new opportunities for more media
activism. Egypt has a women's television channel. Focusing on the question of censorship, the crucial issue is freedom of speech not
only for women but also more significantly, for feminists and feminist knowledge. Feminist knowledge and consciousness is the
primary target of censorship. Do the globalizing media allow women of the developing countries to learn about the achievements of
Western women in fighting patriarchy? Do women of the West learn from the struggles of women in India, Jamaica or Saudi
Arabia? Do the global media allow women everywhere to know about the Beijing Conference and its aftermath? Do they
disseminate adequate and accurate information about the World March of Women? My answers are rather in the negative. The
cyberspace is much like the realspace that creates it. The fact that many individual women or groups can set up their websites does
not change power relations in the realspace. The negative stereotyping of women, for instance, cannot change without the
dissemination of feminist consciousness among both men and women. Even if stereotyping is eliminated, gender inequality will
persist. "Gender-based
censorship" cannot be overcome as long as gender relations remain
unequal and oppressive. It can, however, be reduced or made less effective. While the concept
"gender-based censorship" is useful, it should be broadened to include "censorship of feminist knowledge." The following are just a
few ideas about what we may do:A) Creating theoretical and empirical knowledge about gender-based censorship, and especially
the censorship of feminist knowledge and feminist movements. B) Disseminating this knowledge and awareness among citizens.
Using this knowledge for the purpose of dismantling patriarchal power. Knowledge makes a difference when it is put into practice.
C) Making this knowledge available to policy makers and integrating it into policy making in the institutions of the market, the
state, and non-state and non-market forces. These
goals will not be achieved in the absence of feminist
and women's movements. If censorship is not a mistake, but rather it is an organ for
exercising gender and class power, resistance to it, too, should be a part of the struggle for
a democratic regime.
13. Rationalism DA – assertions like “You have to read a plan” enforce a norm of white
masculinity and a political sphere governed exclusively by western rationality and
pragmatics – this always leads to increased violence.
14. Grassroots DA - only grassroots movements OUTSIDE THE USFG solve.
Mack-Canty, 2004 (Collen Mack-Canty, assistant professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Idaho,
Ph.D. in Political Science with an emphasis in feminist theory from University of Oregon, she does research and publishes articles
that discuss ecofeminism, third-wave feminism, and feminist families, “Third-wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the
Nature/Culture Duality,” Autumn of 2004, Routledge Press, Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
Making political interconnections is integral to ecofeminism, which has always been a
grassroots political movement motivated by pressing pragmatic concerns (Warren2000, 35).
In addition to women's activism to sustain their families and communities, the relationship of environ- mental and women's health
to science and development projects, animal rights, and peace activism are examples of issues that cause ecofeminists' concern and
motivate their activism. Connections between grassroots activism and ecofeminist theory are explained by Stephanie Laharas
follows: Ecofeminist
political goals include the deconstruction of oppressive social
economic and political systems and the reconstruction of more viable social and
political forms.No version of ecofeminist theory dictates exactly what people should do in the face of situations
encountered... [This]theory advocates a combined politics of resistance and creative
projects... [Ecofeminism] contributes an overall framework and conceptual inks to the
political under- standing of the interplay between social and environmental issues
and routes to political empowerment through understanding the effects of one's
actions extendedthroughmultiplehumanandnonhumancommunities.(1996,15 quotedin Warren2000,35-6
15. Hierarchies DA - framework has historically be used to justify patriarchal domination
and oppression by controlling the lense through which we perceive reality
Mack-Canty, 2004 (Collen Mack-Canty, assistant professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Idaho,
Ph.D. in Political Science with an emphasis in feminist theory from University of Oregon, she does research and publishes articles
that discuss ecofeminism, third-wave feminism, and feminist families, “Third-wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the
Nature/Culture Duality,” Autumn of 2004, Routledge Press, Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
A second approach some ecofeminists take to understand the ideology that perpetuates
domination is an analysis of conceptual frameworks that have functioned historically
to perpetuate and justify the dominations of interconnected subjugations. Conceptual
frameworks function as socially constructed lenses through which one perceives
reality. These conceptual frameworks can be oppressive, as Val Plumwood's (1996) explanation
of the part played by rationalism in the domination of women and nonhuman nature
illustrates. Plumwood deconstructs the notion of rationalism to explain how structures of domination are based "in hierarchically organizedvalue dualism (such as man/woman, nature/culture, mind/body) and an exaggeratedfocus on reason and
rationality divorced from the realm of the body, nature, and the physical" (Warren2000, 24). Warren,herself, makes similar
conceptual connections. She
locates these connections in an oppressive patriarchal conceptual
framework, mediated by what she calls "alogic of domination." This "logic"provides the moral
premise for domination/subordination relationships based on socially constructed dualistic notions of superiority/inferiority.
16. Attaching a voter to framework is a voting issue because it implies that what we have
to say is invaluable, the aff should have never happened, and our argument should be
removed completely from the debate space – that type of offensive and exclusionary
violence should be rejected on face – nothing makes kids quit the activity more than
telling them “we don’t want you here”
17. Link turn - we produce substantially better versions of citizenship and action by
questioning the implicit criteria that framework is built upon
18. Prefer reasonability – competing interpretations cause a race to the bottom that
decimates substantive debate
2AC Framework-Topical Version
1) There is no topical version:
a. any movement that starts within the state will be co-opted.
b. changes we make in the debate space are important
2) Topical version would never solve – need grassroots movements outside of the
government - that’s the grassroots DA on case. (Fiat doesn’t solve this because it’s an
issue of long-term implementation.)
3) A plan text would moot our entire 1AC. In the debate community, a topical plan text
defines an entire case when it’s present and allows the negative to segue into a notat-all-topical discussion of Keynesian economics or hegemony. Having a plan text
would destroy our aff’s ability to force a discussion about the topic.
2AC Framework-Switch Side Debate Good
1) Personal Agency DA: Switch side debate is bad because when we refuse to take a side,
we never grasp a hold on the reality of how ocean policies are implemented in the
first place. Debating without grasping true knowledge in one particular issue is what
precludes debate agency, we never become informed about how ocean policy in the
status quo hurts feminine subjects means at best their education is shallow.
2) Your notion of switching side is fundamentally exclusionary and small-minded—just
because we talk about ecofem on the aff and neg doesn’t mean we aren’t switching
sides. Our methodology on the neg is a direct answer to our aff, so we are switching
sides on how we should fight heteronormativity and patriarchy.
3) Any topical development aff really is a case neg to our aff because we are a K
of the way we develop the ocean in the status quo – if they are prepared to
answer our argument on the aff then they are also prepared to answer it on the
neg – if they say we are wrong about this then this means we ARE excluded.
4) Objective Disconnect DA- Switch Side debate promotes distance from the argument to
the viewpoint of the debaters, which only produces shallow debate education. SSD is
a practice only privileged, white people can afford because it leaves no room for true
agency or morality.
Wise 2007 Wise, T. (2007). White Like Me. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press.
I say that this process is white because in my experience it appeals to the way
white folks, especially the affluent ones that can typically afford debate, view the
world, and equally seems repugnant to people of color for the same reasons.
White folks have the luxury of looking at life or death issues of war, peace,
famine, unemployment, or criminal justice as a game. So for me to get up and
actually debate, for example, whether or not full employment is a good idea or
racial profiling a bad one--as if there's really a debate about that or should be
one--is already a white-identified act. People of color, it seems, are not as likely to
want to argue the finer points of whether or not we should let poor people starve
in order to reduce overpopulation--an argument that gets made all the time by
competitive debaters because it wins rounds. The amoral and often racist cretins who believe
that shit and write books saying it make really good sources, and since indicting a source for
being a racist cretin has never won a single debate round anywhere, they'll keep on being cited
as if they were something other than modern-day Goebbels knock-offs. Although I never
heard a debater argue that we should implement Naziism as a national political
system, the unspoken rules of competitive debate pretty much say that if they
did, and if they did it well, and if the other team couldn't provide some
compelling reason why Naziism would be, um, bad--and believe it or not genocide
and racism wouldn't necessarily be enough for that purpose--the Nazis would
win.
5) Reading our advocacy on the aff is key to solve. The aff and neg serve different roles in
debate and the ballot is always a question of whether the aff is good or bad. Reading
our K on the neg makes it a form of reactionary politics to whatever the aff is and
forces us to never discuss the structural problems in the status quo and the patterns
represented by the resolution.
6) It’s key to have our advocacy as the center of the debate so the neg can run Ks and
Disads against us to truly test our advocacy—that can’t happen when we’re neg.
7) aying we can read it on the neg relegates our advocacy to half the rounds we have—
we need to be able to run our advocacy in every round, not just the ones the
dominant system decides are ok.
8) Switch Sides debate is a technology that fashions a liberal citizen subjectivity that
justifies the archetype of American exceptionalism
GREEN Dpt of Comm Studies, Univ of Minn & HICKS Assoc. Prof of Human Comm Studies, Univ of Denver
2k5
Day also demonstrated his commitment to free speech more radically than Schlesinger by abandoning Schlesinger’s
deployment of ‘clear and present danger’ as an external value to regulate the reasonableness of speech. Yet, Day’s
defence of debating both sides elides the national particularity of how free speech was being put to work in the global
struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism. One way that Cold War liberalism helped to transform the
national particularity of the United States into a universal form of liberalism was through the constitution of free speech
as a democratic norm. As
a cultural technology debating both sides contributed to
American exceptionalism by transforming students into the concrete embodied
performers of the universal norms of free speech. In other words, by instantiating a desire for full
and free expression, the pedagogical technique of debating both sides became a
mechanism by which the student-debater-citizen becomes an exceptional
‘American’ the bearer of universal norms of liberal democracy.
2AC Framework-Role Playing Good
1) Minority Participation DA- Role Playing only leads to exclusion in the debate
community, making debate relevant for people of color should be what we strive for.
bell hooks 1990, black feminist and author, postmodern blackness
It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about
heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow
recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized
audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims
to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact
then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not
simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including
styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially elites, and
white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the
streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory
theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about
reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice. From a different standpoint Robert Storr makes a similar
critique in the global issue of _Art in America_ when he asserts: To be sure, much postmodernist critical
inquiry has centered precisely on the issues of "difference" and "otherness." On the
purely theoretical plane the exploration of these concepts has produced some important results,
but in the absence of any sustained research into what artists of color and others outside the
mainstream might be up to, such discussions become rootless instead of radical.
Endless second guessing about the latent imperialism of intruding upon other cultures only compounded matters,
preventing or excusing these theorists from investigating what black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists were
actually doing. Without adequate concrete knowledge of and contact with the non-white
"other," white theorists may move in discursive theoretical directions that are
threatening to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice which would support
radical liberation struggle.
2) Moral Bankruptcy DA- Role Playing ensures that there is no intrinsic value to debate in
the first place. Role playing means that there is no pedagogical value to debate which
only leads to shallow debates.
2AC Framework- Ground
Ground—you get ground, F/W is ground, Pic out of something, read a K. They have access to
specific queer theory K’s with links. Make them prove a distinction between ground and
enough ground.
1AR FW (One Off)
Extend 2AC 10 - By reading framework they are asserting their privilege in debate in a violent
way. They find it “unfair” that because our 1AC has no plan text they suddenly don’t have
access to the standards they feel entitled to. They think they have an inherent right to things
like fair ground and reasonable limits whereas in reality, every other type of person in debate
doesn’t have those same rights because we are systemically discriminated against in this
activity. Rights of fairness and education are denied to millions each and every day, used as a
label of otherness, a tool of their oppression. Only discussions and proposals like our
affirmative are able to break down this heteronormative thought process – that’s Delgado 92
Critique Answers
A2 K Generic
Generic Critique Response
Any scholarship other than those created through an ecofeminist lens is inherently wrongreject their K because of their refusal to incorporate the ecofeminist
Gaard, 10 (Greta, professor at University of Wisconson, ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker,
“New Directions for Ecofeminism:Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment,
volume 0, number 0, pp. 1–23doi:10.1093 Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for theStudy of
Literature and Environment, file:///Users/gema/Downloads/isle.isq108.full-libre.pdf)--CRG
'These omissions in ecocritical omissions are not merely a biblio graphic matter of
failing to cite feminist scholarship, but signify a more profound conceptual failure to
grapple with the issues being raised by that scholarship as feminist, a failure made more egregious
when the same ideas are later celebrated what presented via non- feminist sources. For example, the animal studies
groundwork of vegan feminists and ecofeminists is barely mentioned in the currently
celebrated field of posthumanism, yet feminist scholarship both pre- dates and
helpfully complicates that work: consider, most recently; how Adams (2010) augments Cary Wolfe's (2003)
complication of the humanfanimal binary with categories not just of Wolfe's humanized
human,animalizedhuman,humanizedanima1,andanimalized animal, but also animalized woman and femimied animal, terms that
Omissions and distortions
of feminist ecocriticism are one part of the problem; appropriation is another.
foreground the genderfspeciesfecology connections that are so re]- evant to eoocriticism.
A2 Edelman
2AC — Edelman K
( ) the role of the ballot is to vote for the team who best methodologically and performativly
reshapes the topic and the debate space in the vision of queer ecofeminism
( ) The affirmative never declared a stance based on any future representations. The purpose
of the 1AC is to reshape and reform queer and nature politics as it is now
( ) The “Queer Kinship” contention solves the K. Representing a science fiction world in which
women no longer reproduce in the classic heterosexual way that we know now. This means
that we don’t view reproductive futurism the way the negative claims we do
( ) Edelman’s concept of queer negativity is totalizing and is much too simple in it’s view of
queer optimism- Edelman leads to a form of queer nihilism where we are forced to take
absolutely no actions against queer oppression
Snediker, 6 (Michael, professor and philosopher at Mount Holyoke College, “Queer Optimism,” Postmodern Culture,
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.506/16.3snediker.html)--CRG
Juxtaposed with Lee Edelman's 2004 book, No Future, the orchestratively powerful but
nonetheless opaque queer pessimism of the above theorists would seem like kid stuff (to
invoke Edelman's own charged turn to this formulation). The queer pessimism of Butler and Bersani, circuited from text to text in a
persuasiveness inseparable from its occludedness, brings to mind Jean Laplanche's enigmatic signifier.[17] Edelman's
queer
pessimism, by contrast, insistent on its own absolute non-enigmatic unequivocality, might suggest the draconian
bravura of a superego were Edelman's project not so pitted against the superego, pitted
against all forms of stable identity except the "irreducible" (No Future 6) identity of the death
drive. Though moving beyond the strictures of psychoanalysis, it is difficult for me not
to hear in the sheer absoluteness of Edelman's dicta something like a superego's
militancy. Edelman insists that "the only oppositional status to which our queerness
could ever lead would depend on our taking seriously the place of the death drive we're
called on to figure" (30). Edelman, as the passage I've cited suggests, doesn't seem to leave queers
a lot of options, even as the option he adjures hardly seems self-evident. The egregious
militancy of No Future presents an apogee of what I've been calling queer pessimism. Or
if not an apogee, then a sort of pessimism-drag. My own thinking differs from Edelman's in many ways, and might often go without
saying.[18] How, for instance, could a project attached to queer optimism not bristle at a book that insists unilaterally that "the only
oppositional status" available to queers demands fealty to the death drive? Edelman's book certainly trounces optimism, but the
optimism he trounces is not the optimism for which my own project lobbies. Edelman writes thus: The structuring optimism of
politics to which the order of meaning commits us, installing as it does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through
signification, is always, I would argue, a negation of this primal, constitutive, and negative act. And the various positivities
produced in its wake by the logic of political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow
escape, and not redouble, such negativity. My polemic thus stakes its fortunes on a truly hopeless wager: that taking the Symbolic's
negativity to the very letter of the law . . . that turning the force of queerness against all subjects, however queer, can afford an
access to the jouissance that at once defines us and negates us. Or better: can expose the constancy, the inescapability, of such access
to jouissance in the social order itself, even if that order can access its constant access to jouissance only in the process of abjecting
that constancy of access onto the queer. (5)
As I've made clear, and as this essay's final section will make clearer, queer optimism
is no more attached to "the
logic of political hope" than No Future is. Even as I think there are some forms of hope worth
defending, I'm not interested, for present purposes, in demarcating good and bad hopes, hegemonic and nonhegemonic
attachments to futurity. To the extent that my own project seeks to recuperate optimism's potential critical interest by arguing for its
separability from the promissory, I'm
here insisting that there are ways of resisting a pernicious
logic of "reproductive futurism" besides embodying the death drive. If Edelman opines that all
forms of optimism eventually lead to Little Orphan Annie singing "Tomorrow," and therefore that all forms of optimism must be
met with queer death-driven irony's "always explosive force" (31), I oppositely insist that optimism's limited cultural and theoretical
intelligibility might not call for optimism's grandiose excoriation, but for optimism to be rethought along non-futural lines.
Edelman's hypostasization of optimism accepts optimism as at best simplistic and at
worst fascistic. This hypostasization leaves unthinkable queer optimism's own proposition that the reduction of optimism to
a diachronic, futurally bound axis is itself the outcome of a machinery that spits out optimism as junk, and renders suspicious any
form of "enjoyment" that isn't a (mis)translation of jouissance, "a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law"
(25), the production of "identity as mortification." Enjoyment, anyone?[19]
( ) Turn: Quality of Life — caring about the future is good. Thinking constructively about
future possibilities improves our quality of life.
WFS 2 — World Future Society, nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization founded in 1966, 2002 (“A brief
overview of the study of the future and the services of the World Future Society,” Available Online at
http://www.wfs.org/ownermanual.htm, Accessed 04-10-2007)
To meet the challenges of the future, we need to find out about what we can plausibly
expect in the years ahead so we can understand what our options are. We can then set
reasonable goals and develop effective strategies for achieving them.
Many people believe it is impossible to know anything about the future, so the future can simply be ignored. This is a very serious
mistake. It's true, of course, that we can know only a little about the future, but that little is extremely important, because a
knowledge of the future—even when it's very uncertain—is critical in making wise decisions, in both our professional and personal
lives.
Learning what we can know about the future enables us to think constructively about it
and do things that will contribute to our achieving a desirable future, because
preparation is needed to meet the challenges of the future and take advantage of the
new opportunities opening up.
We humans really do have the ability to think constructively about the future,
anticipate many future events, envision desirable goals, and develop effective strategies
for realizing our purposes. By learning about current trends and likely future
developments, we can develop a mental data bank and set of blueprints for improving
our future life. These assets can help us to succeed in whatever we seek to achieve.
Proactive, future-oriented thinking can lead to greater success in both work and private affairs. The future will happen,
no matter what we do, but if we want it to be a good future, we need to work at it. As Adlai
Stevenson put it, "Change is inevitable; change for the better is a full-time job."
( ) Not our optimism. Edelman’s conception of optimism is only the concept of premature
decisions- the aff only focuses on reforming now
Snediker, 6 (Michael, professor and philosopher at Mount Holyoke College, “Queer Optimism,” Postmodern Culture,
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.506/16.3snediker.html)--CRG
In the vernacular, optimism
is often imagined epithetic-ally as "premature": as though if the optimist at
would qualify
optimism as a temporary state of insufficient information. The phrase "woefully optimistic," on the
hand knew all that she could eventually know, she would retract her optimism altogether. Prematurity
other hand, implies that the knowledge that would warrant optimism's retraction might never arrive. As an epithet, "woefully" (like
"hegemonic," "dubious," or "premature") subjects
optimism to an outside judgment, the likes of which
the optimist in question is presumed unable to make. It is difficult to imagine an optimist, as
conventionally understood, denominating her own optimism as woeful or premature. Indeed, the moment at which a
person is able to characterize her optimism as such might well mark the moment at
which being optimistic cedes, as a position, if not to being pessimistic, then to
something like being realistic. (I will return to the idea that being pessimistic potentially is potentially equivalent to
being realistic.) The epithets delineated, that is, do not describe optimism so much as impose a
diagnosis external to it that would make further characterizations of optimism (and
more to the point, attachments to optimism) unnecessary.
( ) Perm do the plan and reject reproductive futurism- while we attempt to make the world
better for women and queers now, we don’t have to look towards a perfect future
( ) No link- The plan doesn’t put any value of heterosexual reproduction and makes no claim
about the future
( ) Queer negativity fails, 4 reasons: it’s essentialist, indebted to discourse, exclusionary
towards women, and it’s counterproductive to real social change
Bateman, 4 (R. Benjamin, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia. His dissertation, currently underway,
explores gay autobiographies from 1880 to the present. His research interests include modernism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory,
“The Future of Queer Theory,” on Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke UP, ns 65-66, The Minnesota
Review, http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf1.shtml)--CRG
Since its inception, queer
theory has provoked readers with its radical negativity—its hostility
to identity politics, to all essentialist accounts of gender and sexuality and to anything smacking
of heteronormativity. Michel Foucault problematized the homosexual subject of gay and lesbian
politics by showing its indebtedness to disciplinary discourses inherited from nineteenth century
sexology and eugenics. Judith Butler, whose Gender Trouble galvanized queer theory, alleged that sex and not
simply gender is socially constructed and that political appeals to the category "woman"
entrench an exclusionary essentialism. And Leo Bersani argued that queer culture models
anti-communalism through its sadomasochistic and frequently anonymous sexual
practices. Gaining credibility as a queer theorist, it appears, necessitates the assumption of
increasingly radical, and at times counterintuitive, political positions.
( ) Perm queer the alternative- negativity should be a queered consideration of the positive
and negative for a more nuanced solution
Selfhood Resignified, 10 (Blog written by an anonymous queer-identified, "academic,” currently in my second year of
Ph.D. work in Feminist Studies, December 2, 2010, “Optimistic? Well, Theoretically:” Found on Selfhood Resignified,
http://selfhoodresignified.wordpress.com/tag/queer-theory/) --CRG
Albeit reductionist, queer
optimism might be better understood as a new version, or close relative, to
curiosity or potentiality. “Queer optimism” Snediker writes, “doesn’t aspire toward happiness, but
instead find happiness interesting” (3, emphasis his). Optimism is thus not the belief in
something positive or promissory, but rather an openness, an intrigue, with the idea of the
positive or promissory. For Snediker it is a “meta-optimism” in that it “wants to think about feeling good, to make disparate
aspects of feeling good thinkable. (3, emphasis his). In direct resistance to Edelman, Snediker asks, “why does rejection of
a primary attachment to futurity…necessarily require the embodiment of negativity ?”
(24). Despite its misleading name, queer optimism rejects and complicates this binary framework of affect and temporality. It is
not an acquiescence of the positive, but rather a queered consideration of the positive, the negative, and
that which has yet to be revealed from nuance.
( ) Edelman doesn’t do anything for real queer individuals- in fact he only hurts them as he
renders them a parasite in our society
Bateman, 4 (R. Benjamin, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia. His dissertation, currently underway,
explores gay autobiographies from 1880 to the present. His research interests include modernism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory,
“The Future of Queer Theory,” on Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke UP, ns 65-66, The Minnesota
Review, http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf1.shtml)--CRG
Such extremity finds full expression in Lee Edelman's polemic, No Future. Subtitled Queer Theory and the
Death Drive, the book argues that politics as we know it relies upon a future-oriented logic that is indissociably intertwined with
heterosexuality and with what Edelman terms "reproductive futurism." On Edelman's reading, the face of the child, epitomized by
Dickens's Tiny Tim, coerces us—through conjuring our compassion—into subordinating our present wants and enjoyments to the
always-deferred, future needs of "innocent" children. Tim's vulnerability turns vindictive, Edelman proceeds, when conservatives
use 'protecting children' as a pretext for discriminating against gays and lesbians. Nowhere
is this disguised
homophobia more apparent than in recent 'arguments' against gay marriage. But when
gays and lesbians respond by insisting that they value marriage, children, and their
society's future—and not simply the ephemeral delights of sex and drugs, as
conservatives would have it—they abandon the subversive force of queer sexuality.
Instead of pleading for seats at heteronormativity's table, Edelman argues, queers should consent to their
figuration as parasites upon the social order and embody the death drive for which
they have come to stand.
( ) Perm do both: There is a great deal of pessimism and negativity that mixes with our ecooptimism. An approach combining both solves
Sturgeon, 3 (Noel, York University, Dean, Professor, BA Political Studies - Bard College, Annandale, NY 1979, PhD History of
Consciousness (Politics) - University of California, Santa Cruz 1991, “Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context,
and Religion,” edited by Eaton, Lorentzen, google books,
http://books.google.com/books?id=4dlOAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA101&lpg=PA101&dq=%22ecofeminism%22+%22pessimism%22&so
urce=bl&ots=EGSI70RLA&sig=q9qsm0ChRAAcnWV5JR59kDvEYgI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uh60U9f0NOXMsQTN8oDwCg&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAw#v=o
nepage&q=%22ecofeminism%22%20%22pessimism%22&f=false)--CRG
Environmental problems, it has been pointed out frequently, do not honor fixed spatial areas, whether they be de-lined
as national areas or spaces of private property. This characteristic of environmental problems has been, at different moments, the
source of environmentalist claims
for the need for a new global cooperation as well as a deep _
about the possibilities of solving environmental crises. The optimism of the global
environmentalists has a negative side, however, and that is the use that can be made of the
“universalizing” momentum of environmentalism by forces of technocratic,
exploitative, neocolonialist, neo-capitalist political economies. Southern
environmentalists, like Guha, have thus critiqued the ways in which consciousness of these
environmental problems are “global” in another sense, that is, tools for colonialist
projects of northern exploitation of southern peoples and lands.”
( ) Reject Edelman’s psychoanalysis — it forecloses progressive possibilities.
Bateman 6 — R. Benjamin Bateman, doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia, 2006 (“The Future of Queer
Theory,” The Minnesota Review, ns 65-66, Spring, Available Online at http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/
bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf1.shtml, Accessed 04-08-2007)
But his
book falters as it comes increasingly to rely upon arcane appeals to Lacanian
psychoanalysis (conspicuously absent from this book is a single reference to Foucault). Edelman's argument runs something
like this: a stubborn kernel of non-meaning resides at the core of language, forcing each signifier to find its meaning in the next ad
infinitum, thus preventing signification from ever completing itself or establishing meaning once and for all. This internal limit
subtends and makes possible all meaning-making while simultaneously disrupting it. An unbridgeable gap, it marks the place of a
recalcitrant, functionless, and socially corrosive jouissance—an excessive enjoyment over which language, society, and the future
stumble. Heterosexual culture, anxious to name and contain this minatory abyss, casts homosexuals as it and into it. They are "…the
violent undoing of meaning, the loss of identity and coherence, the unnatural access to jouissance…"(132). One might fault
Edelman, as John Brenkman has, for transposing a rule of language onto the order of being. But even
if one takes his
equation seriously, one must ask what is gained by actively occupying a structurally
necessary role. In other words, if the Real must exist for the Symbolic to function, then
the abyss will remain whether homosexuals agree to inhabit it or not. Edelman
acknowledges this reality but argues that if homosexuals exit the abyss a new subaltern
will be compelled to enter it. Better, then, to remain inside and mirror back to
heterosexuality what troubles it most—meaninglessness, death and antisocial desire.
Unfortunately, Edelman provides few details as to how we might accomplish this task,
and his insistence elsewhere that the powers-that-be will clamp down with unmitigated
force to repress and disavow the encroaching Real renders such a strategy less than
appealing. At one point he encourages queers to pursue a more traditional politics
alongside his radical recommendation (29), but he fails to acknowledge that if the former
succeeds—and the dominant culture brings queers and/or their practices into its fold—
then the latter's intended audience will no longer be listening.
Perm 1AR
Queer negativity does not leave enough room for change, but a combination of traditional
queer theory (negativity) with optimism can solve
Selfhood Resignified, 10 (Blog written by an anonymous queer-identified, "academic,” currently in my second year of
Ph.D. work in Feminist Studies, December 2, 2010, “Optimistic? Well, Theoretically:” Found on Selfhood Resignified,
http://selfhoodresignified.wordpress.com/tag/queer-theory/) --CRG
In many ways,
Queer Optimism is Snediker’s attempt to trouble the framework of queer negativity,
that he believes monopolizes and limits queer theory. Almost immediately, Snediker’s introduction calls for “a
reconceptualization of optimism itself” (2). Optimism, as it is conventionally understood, is often
equated with prematurity or naivety, and rarely associated with queerness (1). Consequently,
queer theory has historically “had more to say about negative affects than positive
ones”(4). Yet, as Snediker preemptively clarifies, his redefinition of optimism aims to uncouple
positivity and futurity from our understanding of optimism. Undeniably queer optimism is
a direct response to what Snediker calls “queer pessimism” (i.e. Edelman). By subtly weaving his
notions of queer optimism throughout his close readings of classic literary texts, Snediker
posits that, thus far, queer theory has not queered queer literature to its fullest extend.
Optimism good 1AR
Queer politics should be hopeful, not fatalistic. There is room for progressive change.
Ahmed 6 — Sara Ahmed, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2006
(“Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12, Issue 4, Available Online to
Subscribing Institutions via Project Muse)
If orientations point us to the future, to what we are moving toward, then they also
keep open the possibility of changing directions, of finding other paths, [End Page 569]
perhaps those that do not clear a common ground, where we can find hope in what
goes astray. Looking back is what keeps open the possibility of going astray. We look
back, we go behind; we conjure what is missing from the face. This backward glance
also means an openness to the future, as the imperfect translation of what is behind us.
As a result, I would not argue that queer has "no future" as Edelman suggests—though I
understand and appreciate this impulse to "give" the future to those who demand to inherit the earth, rather than aiming for a share
in this inheritance. Instead,
a queer politics would have hope, not even by having hope in the
future (under the sentimental sign of the "not yet") but because the lines that accumulate through
repeated gestures, the lines that gather on skin, already take surprising forms. We have
hope because what is behind us is also what allows other ways of gathering in time and
space, of making lines that do not reproduce what we follow, but instead create new
textures on the ground. It is interesting to note that in landscape architecture the term desire lines is used to describe
unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they
are supposed to follow. Deviation
leaves its own marks on the ground, which can even help
generate alternative lines, which cross the ground in unexpected ways. Such lines are
indeed traces of desire, where people have taken different routes to get to this point or
that point. It is certainly desire that helps generate a queer landscape, shaped by the
paths that we follow in deviating from the straight line.
Focus on Future good 1AR
Turn: Meaning to Life — embracing futurity is necessary to find meaning in our lives now.
Striving for a better future creates a better present.
Unger 7 — Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Roscoe Pound Professor of Law at Harvard University, 2007 (The Self Awakened:
Pragmatism Unbound, Published by Harvard University Press, ISBN 0674023544, p. 151)
The hope held out by the thesis that we can change our relation to our contexts will
remain hollow unless we can change this relation in biographical as well as in historical
time, independent of the fate of all collective projects of transformation. It will be
hollow as well unless that change will give us other people and the world itself more
fully. That the hope is not hollow in any such sense represents part of the thesis implicit
in the idea of futurity: to live for the future is to live in the present as a being not fully
determined by the present settings of organized life and thought and therefore more
capable of openness to the other person, to the surprising experience, and to the entire
phenomenal world of time and change. It is in this way that we can embrace the joy of
life in the moment as both a revelation and a prophecy rather than discounting it as a
trick that nature plays on spirit the better to reconcile us to our haplessness and our
ignorance.
The chief teaching of this book is that we become more godlike to live, not that we live to become more godlike. The reward
of our striving is not arousal to a greater life later; it is arousal to a greater life now, a
raising up confirmed by our opening up to the other and to the new. A simple way to grasp the
point of my whole argument, from the vantage point of this its middle and its center, is to say that it explores a world of ideas about
nature, society, personality, and mind within which this teaching makes sense and has authority.
A2 K Psychoanalysis
1) Perm do both, Science fiction plays a crucial role in psychoanalysis- inclusion of our
narrative is key to solve their K
Fekete, 1 (John, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies and English Literature at Trent University, as well as a member of the
Cultural Studies PhD Program and the Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture, and Politics. Recognized as an international figure
in the field of modern and postmodern theory and in the antifoundational transformation of theory from the 1970s, March 2001,
“Doing the Time Warp Again: Science Fiction as Adversarial Culture,” Science Fiction Studies, #83 = Volume 28, Part
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/fek83.htm)--CRG
Under the heading of critical theory, Freedman names
psychoanalysis as a secondary version of
critical theory, its task being to develop the concept of subjectivity missing in Marx; and he also adds the "less important"
body of "postdialectical" poststructuralism. He treats them as distinct interpretive technologies, and
sometimes turns to these secondary tools to supplement his primary one. If one were to reflect
on the emergent formation of "theory" in cultural studies, one might meditate on the intriguing peculiarity
of yoking together into a single configuration a number of disparate theorists—most typically
Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche—whose theoretical legacies are widely variant if not
incommensurable, and whose followers have often been at each other’s throats. To be sure,
these are all ideologies of suspicion, with specific additional features, but both the additional features and the consequences of
turning suspicion on one another are productive of conflictual interanimations that are as important as the critical disposition they
share. Freedman fails to take much advantage of the intellectual strengths of this configuration. In fact, he
intends to avoid
practical deviance from the Marxist master discourse in the work that the book actually
does, even when he comes to supplement the discourse of critique with a discourse of
utopianism.
2) We solve their impact - Science Fiction has large psychoanalysis undertones
SEE, 14 (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, June 26, 2014, “Critical and Historical Works About SF” http://www.sfencyclopedia.com/entry/critical_and_historical_works_about_sf) --CRG
By the 1970s a large
body of sf criticism had been built up, though much of it was and is difficult to get hold
of. The earlier notion that sf should be judged by criteria different from those normally
applied to conventional literature began steadily to lose ground in the 1970s to the view that sf is
strong enough to be gauged by the same standards that prevail elsewhere in literary criticism. Very naturally, however, the
literary analysis of sf tends to this day to be argued thematically and structurally, and to
eschew a criticism grounded in concepts of psychological realism on the one hand or metaphorical
power on the other. Although this is inevitable, mimetic realism and good characterization being qualities somewhat marginalized
by the very nature of sf, it
does help explain why even now sf criticism has not generally
developed a vocabulary enabling judgmental distinctions to be well made; that is, when
explaining why some books and stories are worse than others (an explanation that sf criticism feels called upon to make more
seldom than is healthy), it does not usually do the job with much conviction.
A2 K SF Cap
1) Science fiction helps to break down capitalist ideology
Fekete, 1 (John, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies and English Literature at Trent University, as well as a member of the
Cultural Studies PhD Program and the Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture, and Politics. Recognized as an international figure
in the field of modern and postmodern theory and in the antifoundational transformation of theory from the 1970s, March 2001,
“Doing the Time Warp Again: Science Fiction as Adversarial Culture,” Science Fiction Studies, #83 = Volume 28, Part
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/fek83.htm)--CRG
Freedman’s argument, simplified, is that real sf
is Marxist, and that therefore Marxists should pay more
attention to it. He claims an affinity between critical theory and science fiction, summarized in the equivalence relationship:
"each is a version of the other" (xv). While he makes no effort to show that critical theory is fictional (see also endnote 2 below), he
is prepared to substitute strategically the more euphemistic "critical-theoretical" for
"Marxist," since the work that the book does in many of its pages is literary criticism
and the slippages around "critical theory" provide a lot of wiggle room for the
argument. While he does not ultimately show much Marxism in sf, he does successfully build a case to show
that a number of first-rate sf works can be organized together into a critical intellectual
tradition. Building that case, partly by argument and partly by extended readings that display elements resonant with the
concerns argued, is the main achievement of Freedman’s book. Nevertheless, he overstates the importance of this selective tradition
as equivalent to the essence of science fiction—its intrinsic generic characteristic—to the neglect, marginalization, or exclusion of
other virtues or achievements. This inflated system of definitions and descriptions is then turned prescriptive, and slipping back up
to the societal level of critical theory, the
literary tradition thus constructed is assigned a
gatekeeping task that will impact on future membership: the redemptive task, in the
absence of other historical-revolutionary agencies, of keeping critical theory alive and
making it effective (in order to break the total reification of the world). Through the system of slippages
around "critical theory," it is hoped that literature can be pressed into social service.
2) The very beginnings of SF are traces back to anti-capitalist struggles
SEE, 14 (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, June 26, 2014, “Critical and Historical Works About SF” http://www.sfencyclopedia.com/entry/critical_and_historical_works_about_sf) --CRG
The cautious interest being shown in sf by the US academic world bore its first fruits in 1959, in the
shape of the critical journal Extrapolation. For many years this was stencilled, not printed, which suggested that
the financial support it was receiving from academia at large was small; nevertheless it
lived on. Two further academic magazines about sf followed, both (in different ways) a little livelier: Foundation: The Review
of Science Fiction in the UK from 1972, and Science Fiction Studies in the USA from 1973. The former – as much fannish as academic
– emphasized reviews and critical and sociological studies of contemporary and post-World War Two sf; the latter – more strictly
academic – concentrated
on writers of sf's past plus only the more academically acceptable
of the present, with good coverage of European sf and some interesting and, to many,
unexpected Marxist criticism. A relative newcomer has been Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, published since 1988.
A2 K Intersectionality
1) No link – extend the second Merrick evidence, which says “ecofeminism calls for a
non-reductionist, interdisciplinary, and synthesizing understanding of a whole series
of interlocking relations, from gender to race, sexuality, economics, globalism, and, of
course, the environment”
2) While historically eco-feminist movements have been mostly white women, there
have been successful movements and coalitions built. Even if they win a risk of a link,
a coalition strategy is the step in the right direction. They also essentalize ALL ecofeminist movements, because there have been non-white women in the movement.
Their evidence also doesn’t assume the third wave feminist movement
3) Perm do both
Mack-Canty, 2004 (Collen Mack-Canty, assistant professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Idaho,
Ph.D. in Political Science with an emphasis in feminist theory from University of Oregon, she does research and publishes articles
that discuss ecofeminism, third-wave feminism, and feminist families, “Third-wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the
Nature/Culture Duality,” Autumn of 2004, Routledge Press, Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
In the West, an
ecofeminist focus in activism emerged during the second wave of the
women's movement and was predicated on seeing the relations between militarism,
sexism, racism, classism, and environ- mental damage. By the middle 1980s, many women, committed
to direct action against militarism, started naming themselves ecofeminists to depict the interdependencies of their political
concerns (Sturgeon 1997, 27). As
ecofeminism evolved, it took up additional ... issues such as toxic
waste, deforestation, military and nuclear weapons policies, reproductive rights and
technologies, animal liberation, and domestic and international agricultural
development (Sturgeon1997,25), in its efforts to reweave the nature/culture dualism. The roots of ecofeminist theory can also
be seen in earlier feminisms as Val Plumwood explains: From early and liberal feminism, it takes the impulse to
integrate women fully as part of human culture and from socialist feminism, it draws
an understand- ing of the processes and structures of power and domination. From radical
feminism, it takes the critique of the masculinity of dominant culture and the aspiration to replace it, to affirm whathas been
denigrated (.1992, 13) Ecofeminism is distinct, however, in its insistence that nonhuman nature is a feminist concern
(Warren1997).Ecofeminist theory utilizes principles from both ecology and feminism to inform its political orga- nizing and its
efforts to create equitable and environmentally sound life- styles. From ecology, it
learns to value the
interdependence and diversity of all life forms;from feminism, it gains the insights of a
social analysis of women's oppressionthat intersects with other oppressionssuch as
racism, colonialism, classism, andheterosexism (Lahar1991,42).Ecofeminism, in its use of
ecology as a model for human behavior,suggests that we act out of a recognition of
our interdependencywith others, all others:human and nonhuman. In so doing, it builds on
Carol Gilligan's (1982)"ethic of care" in that-the relational caring position (whereeveryone's needs must
be taken into consideration in relation to all others), in ecofeminsim is extended to other races,
nationalities, and to the nonhuman world. Ecofeminist politics embrace
heterogeneous strategies and solutions (Diamond and Orenstein 1990, xii). Ecofeminists do share a
broadvision of a society beyond militarism, hierarchy,and the destruction of nature, but
like feminism itself, they often have different analyses and strategiefor achieving them
(Plumwood 1992, 10). In many ways, an ecofeminist style of politics represents Foucault's (1980)notion of
"local resistance" against power relations. Praxis, for Foucault, should be located in local contextual moral
values ratherthan universalizing principles. Like Fou- cault,ecofeminists
understandpowerasa"multiplicityofforcerelations" that are not centered, but are
diverse and are constantly being reproduced (Quinby 1990, 123). While ecofeminism
emphasizes local activism, it also maintains the importance of a global perspective. In
ecofeminism, where everything is seen as interconnected and/or interdependent, there is a serious regard for women whose
cultures and geographic locations are being eroded as a result of so-called development projects that are being foisted on the
thirdworld(Heller1992;WellsandWirth1997).Ecofeminists challenge the relationship between economic growth and exploitation of
the natu- ral environment (Mies and Shiva 1993), and as noted above, ecofeminist anthologies contain work by and about women
resisting ill-conceived development projects in the third world, in addition to those in the West.
4) No link-Evolution of eco-fem means its no longer a bunch of middle class white
women
Mack-Canty, 2004 (Collen Mack-Canty, assistant professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Idaho,
Ph.D. in Political Science with an emphasis in feminist theory from University of Oregon, she does research and publishes articles
that discuss ecofeminism, third-wave feminism, and feminist families, “Third-wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the
Nature/Culture Duality,” Autumn of 2004, Routledge Press, Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
As the second wave of feminism progressed,however,lesbians, women of color, and thirdworldwomen began asserting their voices into the debate, arguing that their social
locations provided them with different vantage points and different conceptions of
themselves other than those being articulated by white, middle-class feminists
(Fraserand Nicholson 1990, 33). In this regard,some women of color authors, such as Gloria Anzaldua (1981)and bell
hooks (1984), are also examples of theorizing from embodiment, during this period, to call
attention to the intersec- tionality of racism, and heterosexism with sexism, further
illustrating the unevenness in the movement of second-wave feminism into third-wave
feminism. Demands from women of color and/or third-worldwomen that the dif- ferences among women occupying different
social locations be acknowl- edged,facilitated recognizing the universalism inherent in both the femi- nist argumentsforequality
andfordifference(FraserandNicholson 1990). As a result, feminists
became more likely to addressthe
intersectionality of various "isms" with sexism (Cohen et al. 1997). As feminists increas- ingly took account
of the differences that exist among women, many feminists also moved from the tenets of modernism with its notion of a unified
subject, that is, a universal (female)nature, to several postmodern tenets, especially the notion of a multiple and socially construed
subject (Malson et al. 1989). Third-wave
feminism emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s with the
development of new considerations and emphases in feminism (Arneil 1999). In addition to the
recognition of the diversity of the subject women and their differing, often interrelated oppressions, feminists recognized other
concerns and as a result, developed new emphases. Among these features is the tendency to move away from foundational
theoretical schools, often accompanied by a loss of faith in the ability of established socio-political theories to account for women's
situations. Third-wave feminism, instead, thoughtfully selects from among the tenets of different foundational theories, while
expanding on an emphasis developed in the second wave of adding women's perspectives to established explanations. Like some
authors in later second-wave feminism, third-wave feminists work to make women's situated embodied perspectives "the" explanations while embracingthe diversityanddifferencesin perspectivesamong women. Third-wave
feminism, in particular,
refutes dualistic thinking in general-thinking that divides the world into hierarchical
dichoto- mies with one aspect regardedas superiorand the "other"regardedinferior,recognizing instead the existence of multiplicities. Todayfeminists commonly speak to the
intersectionality of various "isms" with sexism (Cohn et al. 1997), recognize the social constructedness of categories (Malsonet al.
1989),question the relatednotions of dualism andhierarchy (Plumwood 1992), and work to further develop theories from women's
situated and embodied perspectives (Arneil 1999). Third
wave is seen as an evolution, albeit a less than even one,
in feminist thought generally,not a breakfrom the past. While second wave worked for
the need to include women in the public sphere, together with the need to recognize that private concerns
merited public atten- tion, and later second wave began to work for a general recognition of the interrelatedness of class, race, and
heterosexism with sexism, third wave responds to additional concerns, some significant to its historical times. Among these
problems is the fundamentalist backlash to the women's movement, the so-called "postfeminist" feminism, cultural sexualiza- tion
of girls, traditional sex and gender categorization, an increasingly globalizing economy, with its accompanying
"maldevelopment"projects, particularly their disproportionate effects on women and children, and increasingly
precariousenvironmental problems.To no small extent, the
higher educational opportunities allowed to
women by second-wavefemi- nists' policymaking and the subsequent theorizing many
of these women undertook, together with the significant contribution of women of color
and/or third-worldwomen's challenges, have contributed to the expan- sion of feminist
theory, enabling third-wave feminists' awareness of the concerns they respond to.
Below, I discuss three examples of feminism: generationalfeminism, postcolonial feminism, and ecofeminism. In their present form,
these feminisms illustrate many of the current expressions of third-wavefeminism, particularlythe reweaving of the nature/culture
duality by theorizing from embodiment.
5) Aff key to solve - only way to get rid of exclusive history is to educate ourselves
Kirk, 1997 (Gwyn Kirk, scholar-activist concerned with gender, racial, and environmental justice, taught environmental
studies, women’s studies, political science, and sociology at Rutgers, the University of Oregon, University of San Francisco, Antioch
College, Colorado College, Hamilton College, and Mills College, she has also published eight books, her articles regarding
feminism, ecology, and transnational feminism have been in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Berkeley Women’s Law Journal,
Foreign Policy in Focus, Frontiers, Peace Review, and Social Justice, in 2002, she received a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University
of Hawaii, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Women’s Leadership Institute at Mills College, she is the founding member of
International Women’s Network Against Militarism, Ph.D. in sociology from London School of Economics, Masters in Town
Planning from Leeds Polytechnic, 1997, “Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice: Bridges across Gender, Race, and Class,” JSTOR,
Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
Giventhewidespreadandprofoundlyseriousnatureofenvironmentadlegrada- tion,
environmentailssueshavegreatpotentialforbringingpeopletogetheracross linesof race
and class. For such collaboration to work, people need to have some basis for knowing one
another, some shared stake in the community, and the prospect for developing trust
despite differences in culture, ethnicity, and class. There needs to be authentic connection based on
honesty and mutual respect. Much has been written about building bridges across linesof
differencein the past decade or so.18One obstacle is ignorance-simply not knowing each
other's experience as well as not understanding its significance-though people in oppressed groups always know more about dominant groups than the other way
around.Otherobstaclesincludetreatingothergroups'concernsaslessmeaning- fulthanone'sownandalackof
trustbetweenpeopleseparatedbyprofound differencesin classand culture.The bridgesto be built areemotionalas
well as intellectual,makingpersonalconnectionsthat reachacrossour segregatedlives.
Alliancesrequireconscientiouslistening,honesty,activecompassion,and a will- ingnessto be selfcritical.Learningaboutothersmeansbeing open to uncer- taintyandsurprise,anabilityto suspenddisbelief,andasenseof easewithourselvesso thatwe can be fullypresentto eachother.19This requiresettingsand projectswherepeoplecanworktogetherto developa
sharedpoliticalcultureand language,providinga key role for individualswhose experiencesand connec- tionsenablethemto crosslines.
Women of color poin tout to white women that we conveniently ignore our privilege
as white while emphasizing our oppression as women.To build bridges across
gender and race for white feminists means understanding that womenof color cannot
separate race and ethnicity from gender, any more than we can ourselves.We have to
make allianceswith women and men of color and, in the process, may have to deal with
what we consider to be sexist attitudes and behav- ior. White women need to
acknowledge the ways we sustain, perpetuate, and benefit from racism, albeit often
unknowingly-in itself an aspect of privilege. Those of us who write and teach about ecofeminism need to
remedy the class, race, and ethnic limitations of our perspectives so as to build authentic alliances that cross race and class lines. We
need to use our privilege in the interests of social justice. It is important to make a distinction here between a politics of
solidarity,implying support for others in struggle, and a politics of engagement where we are in struggle together.
A2 K Essentialism
1) No link – extend the second Merrick card, which says “ecofeminism calls for a nonreductionist, interdisciplinary, and synthesizing understanding of a whole series of
interlocking relations, from gender to race, sexuality, economics, globalism, and, of
course, the environment”
2) We don’t essentalize-their evidence is about a certain author that we didn’t cite in our
1ac. However, Merchant’s claims weren’t essentialist, and she realizes there is NO
universal female behavior
Thompson, 2006 (Charis Thompson, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Associate Director of the Science,
Technology, and Society Center at UC Berkeley, read Philosophy, Psychology, Physiology at Oxford, received her Ph.D. from the
Science Studies program at UC San Diego, previously taught at Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell University,
at U of I Urbana, and at the History of Science Department at Harvard University, “Back to Nature? Resurrecting Ecofeminism after
Poststructuralist and Third-Wave Feminisms,” September 2006, PDF from JSTOR, Accessed: 6/25/14, RH)
Ecofeminism is nearly always criticized for its essentialisms in supposedly equating women with nature and conflating one woman
with another, without regard for, say, class, race, nation, able-bodiedness, and age. But while
some varieties of
ecofeminism may have equated women with nature in an essentialist manner,
Merchant’s argument does this as an empirical rather than a priori fact; indeed, she argues
expressly against the error and dangers of reifying the identification. Similarly, she argues
explicitly against the idea that there is a universal female behavior and against
depictions that uniformly cast woman as a nurturer. The affiliation between women and nature does
interest her, but for the under- lying argument, not for its own essential identification: “ Women and nature have an
age- old association—an affiliation that has persisted throughout culture, language and
history,” Merchant tells us, but “it is not the purpose of this analysis to reinstate nature as the
mother of humankind nor to advocate that women reassume the role of nurturer
dictated by that historical identity. Both need to be liberated from the anthropomorphic and stereotypic labels that
degrade the serious underlying issues.”14
A2 K Race
1) No link – extend the second Merrick card, which says “ecofeminism calls for a nonreductionist, interdisciplinary, and synthesizing understanding of a whole series of
interlocking relations, from gender to race, sexuality, economics, globalism, and, of
course, the environment”
2) Their K is essentialist - they assume that all people of a certain race experience
oppression in the same way which is NOT TRUE – the thesis of our aff is that identity is
much more complex than their K grants it – link turn and means no alt solvency
3) Eco-feminism is key to combat the environmental injustice-environmental issues
disproportionately affect women of color—(good perm card)
Kirk, 1997 (Gwyn Kirk, scholar-activist concerned with gender, racial, and environmental justice, taught environmental
studies, women’s studies, political science, and sociology at Rutgers, the University of Oregon, University of San Francisco, Antioch
College, Colorado College, Hamilton College, and Mills College, she has also published eight books, her articles regarding
feminism, ecology, and transnational feminism have been in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Berkeley Women’s Law Journal,
Foreign Policy in Focus, Frontiers, Peace Review, and Social Justice, in 2002, she received a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University
of Hawaii, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Women’s Leadership Institute at Mills College, she is the founding member of
International Women’s Network Against Militarism, Ph.D. in sociology from London School of Economics, Masters in Town
Planning from Leeds Polytechnic, 1997, “Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice: Bridges across Gender, Race, and Class,” JSTOR,
Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
The people most affected by poor physical environments in the United States are
women and children, particularly African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinas.
Many women of color and poor white women are active in hundreds of local
organizations campaigning for healthy living and working conditions in working-class
communities, in communities of color, and on Native American reservations, which are
all disproportionately affected by pollution from incin- erators, toxic dumps, pesticides,
and hazardous working conditions in industry and agriculture.1oThis movement
drawson concepts of civil rights, and its orga- nization, too, has roots in the civil rights
movements as well as in labor unions, Chicano land grant movements, social justice
organizations, and Native Ameri- can rights organizations. Its tactics include organizing
demonstrations and ral-lies, educating the public, researching and monitoring toxic sites, preparing and presenting expert
testimony to government agencies, reclaiming land through direct action, and maintaining and teaching traditional agricultural
practices, crafts, and skills. Specific organizations represent different mixes of these strands, depending on their memberships,
geographical locations, and key issues. Ex- amples include West Harlem Environmental Action, the Mothers of East L.A., the
Southwest Organizing Project (Albuquerque), and the Citizens' Clearing- house for Hazardous Wastes (Virginia). Besides opposing
hazardous conditions, the
environmental justice move- mental so has a powerful
reconstructive dimension, involving sustainable projects that intertwine ecological,
economic, and cultural survival. The 4-H Urban Gar- dening project in Detroit, for
example, coordinates well over one hundred small gardens citywide and relies on the
expertise of local people, mostly elderly Afri- can American women, who
raisevegetables, both for individual use and to supple- ment food prepared at senior
centers, as well as crops for sale: loofah sponges, fresh herbs, honey, and worm boxes for fishing." Many of these women were
brought up in ruralareasin the southern United Stateswhere they learned about gardening before coming to Detroit for work in the
1930s and 1940s.
By draw- ing on local people's knowledge, these gardening projects provide
fresh produce at little financial cost, contribute to the revitalization of inner-city
communities, and give a sense of empowerment that comes from self-reliance. When
people are outdoors working they also make neighborhoods safer by their presence, watch- fulness, and care. An additional goal is
to teach young people about gardening, strengthening connections between the generations and helping young people to become
more self-supporting. Examples of sustainable projects in ruralareasin- clude the White Earth Land Recovery Project, a project that
produces wild rice and maple sugar on Native American land in Minnesota, and Tierra Wools, a New Mexico worker cooperative of
twenty people-most of them women-that owns some three thousand head of Churro sheep and produces high quality, hand-woven
rugs and clothing and organically produced lamb.12 Their objec- tives include economic development and environmental
protection, as well as cultural revivaland conservation.13
4) Perm do both
Kirk, 1997 (Gwyn Kirk, scholar-activist concerned with gender, racial, and environmental justice, taught environmental
studies, women’s studies, political science, and sociology at Rutgers, the University of Oregon, University of San Francisco, Antioch
College, Colorado College, Hamilton College, and Mills College, she has also published eight books, her articles regarding
feminism, ecology, and transnational feminism have been in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Berkeley Women’s Law Journal,
Foreign Policy in Focus, Frontiers, Peace Review, and Social Justice, in 2002, she received a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University
of Hawaii, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Women’s Leadership Institute at Mills College, she is the founding member of
International Women’s Network Against Militarism, Ph.D. in sociology from London School of Economics, Masters in Town
Planning from Leeds Polytechnic, 1997, “Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice: Bridges across Gender, Race, and Class,” JSTOR,
Accessed: 6/27/14, RH)
Women make up the majority of local activists in environmental justice organizations, sometimes because they have a sick child or
because they have become ill themselves. Illnesses caused by toxins are often difficult to diagnose and treat because they affect
internal organs and the balance of body function- ing.Women have been persistent in raising questions and searching for plausible
explanations for such illnesses, sometimes discovering that their communities have been built on contaminated land or tracing
probable sources of pollution affecting the neighborhood.14They have publicized their findings and taken on governmental
agencies and corporations responsible for contamination. In so doing they are often ridiculed as "hystericalhousewives" by officials
and report- erswho have trivializedtheir researchas emotional and unscholarly. By contrast, Lin Nelson honors this works as kitchen
table science. In October 1991 women were 60 percent of the participants at the First National People of Color Envi-ronmental
Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. Many urban gardenersin northern cities are elderly women, while in rural areaswomen
work on family garden plots, planting, harvesting, and processing fruit and vegetables for home use.15As ethnobotanists, women
know backcountry areasin great detail because they go there at different seasons to gather herbs for medicinal purposes. Among
Mexican Americans, for example, curanderas-traditional healers-continue to work with herbalremedies.16 This detailedknowledge
is learnedfrom olderpeople, as is also the case with some Native Americans and others who live in ruralareas. Gender
is
significant for women in the environmental justice movement, but thisisnot aconcept
of gender divorced from race and class. Women activistssee their identity as women
integrated with their racial and class identities, with race and/or class often more of a
place of empowerment for them than gender. Al- though they recognize their own subordination based on
gender, they are not interested in separatingthemselves from the men in their communities
and frame their perspectives, as
DA/CP Answers
A2 DA generic
We solve the root cause of all war and violence impacts – queer ecofeminism, specifically in A
Door Into Ocean, endorses because passivity as an effective form of resistance
Moody 2K, (Nickianne, “Aphasia and Mother Tongue: Themes of Language Creation and Silence in Women’s Science
Fiction,” Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and Interpretations, pg. 179)//ED
Defining science fiction is a quagmire, especially when considering how it was redefined by publishers, writers, booksellers and
readers during the 1980s. The definition used by this study was therefore Norman Spinrad's infamous statement that science fiction
is whatever is sold as science fiction. The study's main focus became two groups of writers, one predominantly male and the other a
group of women writers who continued to write and had their writing signified as science fiction. They wrote fiction which
addressed and explored contemporary science and scientific practice, new technology and social change. Both groups, that is
cyberpunk and feminist science fiction, were recognized by critics and readers from
outside a specialist interest in the genre. Both prospective futures featured imminent
and far-reaching social change. Cyberpunk proposes an urban high-tech dark future medievalism, which was not
denied by the feminist fiction. However, in contrast women writers offered the possibility of a collective
[end page 179] pastoral guild-ordered life in the fictional future which may nor may not
utilize new technology. In order to consider the representation of silence in this fiction
we are going to look at a smaller group of the feminist science fiction writers. It is a pleasing
peculiarity of the genre that feminist writers could appropriate science fiction forms, conventions and marketing for their critique of
contemporary society and social relations. Dystopian representations of technological transformations in culture, society and the
experience of the working environment become dominant themes in science fiction of the 1980s. Utopian and dystopian writing
built on the tradition of New Wave in the 1970s to provide an informal site for debates concerning the nature of contemporary
experience and extrapolative contingencies in near future patterns of social organization. During the same period cyberpunk
considered postmodern identity and corporate capital, by focussing on the city and re-employing the conventions of hardboiled
detective or mystery fiction. Whereas
these narratives concentrated on the experience of the
individual and their actions, women's science fiction visualized a ‘postindustrial’
society from a very different perspective. Their response to the evolution of such a
society was to propose alternatives to patriarchy and effect speculative transformations
of society through communal will. The meeting of language and patriarchy raises
critical debates in this fiction which directly address the prospect of social change. Suzy
McKee Charnas' opening to Walk to the End of the World (1979) is a good example of the general premise shared by these novels:
‘They [the men] forbade all women to attend meetings and told them to keep their eyes lowered and their mouths shut and to mind
their own business, which was reproduction’. 1 Either
through cataclysm, ecological disaster, war or the
social change wrought by alien contact, a sharp division has arisen between men and
women, with women existing in a state not just of inequality, but of powerlessness. The
novels commonly envisage a state of post-feminism. Central to Haden Elgin's (1984) construction of
society in the late twentysecond century is the 1991 amendment to the United States Constitution which revokes women's rights. 2
In consequence they are declared to be legal minors who must have male guardians. In The Handmaid's Tale (1985) we witness the
passing of the feminist movement that is our past as it is suppressed by religious fundamentalism in the wake of a future nuclear
war. 3 Themes
of language and its relationship to the physical and cultural environment
have long been popular topics in science fiction. Since the 1930s the problem of alien
contact in linguistic terms has been seen as more than just the need for a universal
translator. It has also figured [end page 180] prominently in future extrapolations of human
society. Katherine Burdekin published Swastika Night in Britain in 1937, under the name Murray Constantine. In the narrative's
fictional world the Nazi Reich has endured for 700 years and Burdekin offers a feminist critique relating power politics to gender
politics. Women have been reduced to empty vessels, with no name, no voice and no language of their own. The narrative
forewarns that women will eventually cease to exist in a world totally populated by men, leading to the demise of the species.
However, Burdekin sees the women's complicity in keeping silent at the beginning of this assault on their civil rights as the cause of
the tragedy. 4In Lefanu's (1988) history of women's science fiction writing, she demonstrates how feminists
turned to
science fiction to analyse social and literary constructions of women as gendered
subjects. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1974) is often taken as the prime example, for Piercy enters the genre to
engage with Shulamith Firestone's views on gender and technology. Piercy uses science fiction conventions to bring the theoretical
debate into sharper relief. 5 Twenty years later, Piercy's He She and It (1992) can take on the cyberpunk of male writers and respond
in fiction to Donna Haraway's cultural interrogation of the cyborg. 6 Other writers such as Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)
and Zoë Fairbairns (Benefits, 1979) also found the dystopian aspect of the near future diegesis ideally suited for their exploration of
sexual politics, feminist debate and cultural anxiety. In
the 1980s more authors became interested in
linguistic theory and researched it as they would any other ‘science’. Feminist writers
began to use feminist linguistic theory as a premiss for a science fiction narrative— a
way of disseminating that theory in a popular form and a process of extrapolation both
to test and to explore the theory. For example, Miller Gearhart in The Wanderground (1979) experiments in the first
part of the text with her use of language. 7 Cyberpunk writers (or Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, 1962) 8 use a similar technique
to produce a futuristic argot. Miller Gearhart invents words and expressions complementary to the society of women that she is
outlining, gradually drawing together an interconnecting series of narrative and purely descriptive chapters. The prose only
becomes clear to the reader when the action is imperative and the language used to describe the city, the purges and the hunts is
startlingly contemporary. Therefore the experience of our own time intrudes directly on to the previous rhythm of the text which
has been constructed by the utopian writing. A
common motif used by the group of writers that we are
considering is the examination of the role of language in the construction of
institutionalized oppression. Aphasia and speech are central metaphors [end page 181]
which are used recurrently in woman's science fiction. At the beginning of the novels
women are rendered mute or knowingly speak a language which is not their own. They
exist as a dispossessed or subjugated indigenous population. Some narratives respond
to this situation by constructing or promoting a language spoken by women, which can
express the experience of women and thus empower them. Others foresee an
increasingly gendered stratification reaching a point where the two sexes are unable to
communicate with one another. Language is seen as something which is always in a
state of change and these societies are themselves in flux. These novels are neither
utopian nor dystopian. I would call them eutopias, which adapt the discourse for
constructing an alternative future, allowing them to debate a range of contingencies.
Social change and a new society in this fiction necessitate a new language. The novels are
challenging, they distance and disconcert their readers. Moreover, the narrative conclusions are not
necessarily certain, especially as the fictive future is often only present in fragments and
snatches. There are inconsistencies and elisions which require active reading. Novels such as
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale use pseudo-documentary discourse which provides ample room for speculation on the
part of the reader. This appears to be a very important aspect of the novels' presentation. In this way the writer draws attention to
the fact that she is using a construction of the future to examine the past and contemporary experience. The issues that are
constantly reiterated are presented as moral concerns firmly rooted in economic, social and physical power relations.
Frequently the starting point for these novels is the recreation of classical attitudes to
the speech of women, the founding tradition of Western political thought. For in Plato's
Republic women are silenced. The private speech of the household, the speech of
women, is judged to lack either the form for philosophical argumentation or the force
for poetry. It was therefore seen as without meaning, unformed, chaotic, the speech of
doxa and mere opinion and not truth. Moreover, household speech could neither be
heroic nor part of the philosophic male quest for wisdom through dialogue. Thus
women were excluded from politics and from participating in philosophic discourse.
Women had no place to bring their thoughts to a public arena. And as one sex was
confined to the private sphere and the other had access to the public, the two could not
speak to one another. This is a dramatic premiss which is taken literally by writers such as Sheri Tepper in The Gate to
Women's Country (1988). 9 The aphasia found within these texts is partially brought about by
characters physically being prevented from speaking, but frequently the silence is selfimposed. The novels consider an older definition of aphasia, [end page 182] of being unable
to voice thought in words. Although the ability to voice thought enables autonomy, as
the inability prevents it, it is often a rite of passage. Silence is seen as productive and not
just a prelude to confession or evil, its signification in Greek drama. Silence,
contemplation and selfknowledge are seen as strategies to confront patriarchy. A direct
example of this is the plot to Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean (1986). A patriarchal
society attempts to colonize a matriarchal one. The invasion of the planet is justified by
a colonial discourse of protection and order, with the objective of bringing patriarchal
law to a backward society of women. The Sharers of that planet are seen as a valuable
resource as they possess knowlege of life science lost to the patriarchy through a major
and destructive war. A large number of these feminist futures see a return to rural order
as capitalism collapses under its own weight. The Sharers’ response to the invasion is
collective silence and not individual speech: Day by day, a wall of deafness crept
inexorably from raft system to raft system, cluster to cluster. All around the globe,
natives were shutting their ears and mouths to Valian troops, Iridian and Dolomite
alike. Nothing seemed to break that silence, not shouting, beating, imprisoning. In
other narratives passive resistance comes in the form of language creation . Native
Tongue, written by a doctor of linguistics, is the prime example of this approach. These
women, the women of linguists for years back, had taken on a task of constructing a
language that would be just for women. A language to say things women wanted to
say, and about which men always said ‘Why would anybody want to talk about that?
Linguists in this diegesis have risen to the top of the professional and social hierarchy.
The economic necessity to trade with alien worlds relies on the skills of translators
which are at a premium. In order to retain one professional group's monopoly over this
essential service, their wives and daughters become a working resource and gradually
come to recognize themselves as such. In Native Tongue, silence or being silenced
forces women to take action and to learn to speak for themselves. In A Door into Ocean
silence, or as it is referred to in the text, unspeaking, has great cultural significance. It is
seen as a form of violence and in this fictional society it is the ultimate deterrent. As
well as being violent it is a response to violence. Unspeaking can be undertaken
between individuals and groups and it is an action to settle differences. In an extreme
form silence is a response to pain, a way [end page 183] of controlling pain called
whitetrance. Whitetrance is complete silence and withdrawal to the extent that if you
talk to a person in whitetrance the ‘mental invasion’ will kill them. The experience of
many changes in social behaviour is not necessarily harmony, but conflict, debate and
discussion which is resolved or mediated by speech rather than physical violence.
Frequently speech and violence in these narratives are interlocked by cogent imagery.
Alternatively, quite a lot of the women's writing moves towards giving women a voice denied
by patriarchal language. The language created by Haden Elgin in Native Tongue called Láadan provides the following
terms. The women have used their science to create a language which will voice their feelings and facilitate collectivity. For
example: radema: to non-touch, to actively refrain from touching rademalh: to non-touch with evil inte nt radéela: non-garden, a
place that has much flash and glitter and ornament, but no beauty radiidin: non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so
much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none
of them to help. 12 However,
this writing is not just amelioration, neither should it be seen as
writing for comfort. Its goal is not to provide space for the fantasy of autonomy. Irigary
sees the silence of the female other as ensuring the autosufficiency of the male. 13 She
raises the question just as these writers do: what would happen if the other wanted to
speak? Not all of the writers are certain, but they are quite aware of the responsibility
attached to the freedom to determine one's actions. Aphasia takes many forms in this
fiction and it is generally seen as part of a process through which women learn to value
themselves and learn to contribute to and work as a community. The narratives are set
within or acknowledge a harsh dystopian future as part of their diegesis. Language and
the power of speech are seen as holding counter-cultural potential. In the cyberpunk novels
language is often referred to as a virus. In Native Tongue it is unknown what releasing a new language will do. All right, then
suppose we begin to use it, as you say we should do. And then as more and more little girls acquire Láadan and begin to express
the perceptions of women rather than those of men, reality will begin to change, isn't that true? 14 Language
is seen as
something more complex than a social variable, a magic cure or a narrative resolution.
It reveals complicity and the responsibility [end page 184] of the speaker or listener. The
fiction combines a representation of women's experience in a male-dominated culture
with linguistics as a central speculative concept. Women's autonomy is seen to exist
within the reciprocated relations of a community—a community which can operate
because it can communicate clearly and freely. The books address a need for women to
challenge the patriarchal base of language if they are to change the patriarchal base of
society. Silence is a major part of that imaginative process. In Greek the term ataxeria
makes a connection between silence and freedom from anxiety. The anxiety
predominant in these narratives is pain and death, which is one of the ways that
Slonczewski's whitetrance is used. There is however also a fear for the loss of agency.
Silence is not just the result of fear: it allows protagonists to conquer fear and thus
escape their social incapacitation. Le Guin acknowledges this duality in one of her ‘sayings from the valley’ in
Always Coming Home (1985): When I'm afraid I listen to the silence of field-mice When I'm fearless I listen to the silence of the
mousing cat. 15 The
creation of a new language and the freedom to explore history and the
possibility of change allows women to share collective experience. This new language is
used to illustrate a democracy where all can speak. The feminist texts view social
change as a long-term plan. This is very much the case in Always Coming Home (1985) where Le Guin sets out her
society by examining its imaginary form through a melange of ethnographic and anthropological data. A decisive moment in the
history of this future postnuclear war Northern California society is the confrontation between a patriarchal and a matrilineal
society. The distinction between the two forms of social organization is examined in terms of culture, and the management of
resources, ineffective economies and land use result in personal and societal impoverishment. One of the most effective contrasts
between the two societies is found in their use of language: The Dayao [patriarchy] seemed never to decide things together, never
discussing and arguing and yielding and agreeing to do something before they did it. Everything was done because there was a law
to do it or not to do it, or an order to do it or not to do it. And if something went wrong it seemed never to be the orders, but the
people who obeyed them who got blamed. 16 As Burdekin has already acknowledged the relationship between silence and
complicity, these novels negotiate the relationship between action and responsibility. They do so by extending metaphors around
the power of language, silence and speech. As Offred in The Handmaid's Tale is able to [end page 185] remember her mother's
stories about the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, she also remembers the Commander's wife Serena Joy from an
Evangelical television programme: She wasn't singing then. She was making speeches. She was good at it. Her speeches were all
about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home… She doesn't make speeches anymore. She has become
speechless. She stays at home, but it doesn't seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she has been taken at her
word. 17 The
conclusion to these novels is not decisive. Speech has often been created and
the aphasia of women has produced wise counsel. However, the new status quo is seen
as fragile and only sustainable if the members of the community are committed to talk
and to engage in the continual creation of language and the shared experience this
engenders. Once more the clearest example of this is the conclusion to The Handmaid's Tale, where we are returned as readers
to Atwood's framing device for the novel (i.e. the lecture being given to the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadan Studies). The text that
has just been read by the reader (or heard in the fiction) is now addressed as something which requires interpretation. We do not
know what happened to Offred, but like the characters at the symposium we can celebrate the consignment of Gilead to a future
past. However, for Atwood this is a precarious course, and we need to be vigilant in public speech and private study. In
exploring these diegeses with clear dystopian or utopian contingencies the
eytmological, legal and social construction of language forms part of the way in which
these narratives return to the grim realities and histories of gendered experience. This is
a practice which is unwelcome in the hegemonic consensus of a post-feminist,
consumer-orientated society.