Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
nology violate the natural order, for ideas of that kind have gotten us
into trouble in the past. She recognizes that, unfortunately, this stance
puts her at odds with many of her colleagues in progressive movements
around the globe that deploy arguments about purity and danger to resist
forceful intrusions of global capitalism. She laments, “Perhaps it is per-
verse for me to hear the dangers of racism in the
opposition
to genetic
engineering and especially transgenics at just the moment when national
and international coalitions of indigenous, consumer, feminist, environ-
mental, and development nongovernmental organizations have formed
to oppose 'patenting, commercialization and expropriation of human,
animal and plant genetic materials.' ”
38
But this is a perversity that
Haraway decides she can live with. She opposes the patenting of many
life-forms, including human genes, because the practice commodifies
genetic resources and also excludes the participation of indigenous
people, who have a right to decide how these resources are used. But she
rejects all contentions that affirm the need to protect species boundaries
as a primary good, for such policies are at odds with her belief that the
primary responsibility of feminist theory and the new science studies is
to call all such boundaries into question, and to deconstruct and thereby
reject all claims about wholeness.
Many of Haraway's personal political commitments are laudable ones.
She hopes that her work will support efforts by a host of local groups
to make “claims rooted in a finally amodern, reinvented desire for justice
and democratically crafted and lived well-being.” But her approach
forbids producing arguments that could make these “claims” evident as
coherent and persuasive positions to illuminate personal and policy
choices. What she calls for instead are ongoing “contestations”—“con-
testations for possible, maybe even liveable, worlds of globalized techno-
science.”
39
In a world in which many of the plans and strategies of global
corporations are hatched in secret with little public awareness or debate,
one can only hope that such contestations spread and flourish. But
Haraway's perspectives on these matters offer little in the way of guid-
ance for those with specific causes to advance or battles to carry to those
in power. “We must cast our lot with some ways of living on this planet,
and not with others,” she suggests.
40
Yet other than observing that ways
of living are endlessly contestable (which they certainly are), her writ-
ings offer no tangible suggestions about where, when, how, and in which
