Last week, feminist visionary Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, died at the age of 67. As Sarah Franklin discussed in her essay “Transbiology: A Feminist Cultural Account of Being After IVF”:
Firestone is of course famous, or infamous, for her advocacy of new reproductive technologies as a means of freeing women from the tyranny of biology by liberating them from pregnancy. For this prediction, her 1970 publication The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution has long drawn regret and vitriol from critics accusing its author of all manner of folly—from technological determinism and biological essentialism to sheer naïveté.
Franklin’s article, arising out of the 2009 Scholar & Feminist Conference The Politics of Reproduction: New Technologies of Life, explores Firestone’s “utopian faith in technological progress” and reviews the swirling controversies within feminism around the appropriate role of technology in reproduction. These concerns remain very much present in contemporary discourse—The Scholar & Feminist Online issue “Critical Conceptions,” in which Franklin’s essay appears, further explores the complicated landscape of reproductive technology, and legal scholar Dorothy Roberts’ 2012 Helen Pond McIntyre lecture on “Race, Gender, and the New Biocitizen,” will also take up the ways in which technological advances in reproductive medicine can further inequality.
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