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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This book balances a multifaceted pose – written on the cusp of feminist theory on the body, science and technology and the social sciences and humanities in the current landscapes of HIV prevention. The image on the cover of this book depicts the HIV virus as rendered by the 3D artist Alexey Kashpersky – an illustration that calls forth novel imaginings of HIV that are creative and open-ended, but nevertheless real. This artwork both provokes new ways of thinking and calls new worlds into being, but manages to hold on to the reality of HIV, not only its materiality, but the affective force of the virus in terms of the lives it touches. Such imaginative engagement with the real resonates with my intentions in this book. The following pages provide a feminist theorisation of the development of vaginal microbicides, female-initiated HIV prevention methods designed as creams, rings, gels and sponges that women can insert vaginally before having sex to protect themselves against infection. As such I aim to provide a critical and imaginative intervention into the social sciences and humanities in HIV, while never losing sight of the reality of HIV infection and the realities lived with the virus. Simultaneously, I aim to provide a critical intervention into the field of feminist theory that engages the materiality of the body, science and technology, by utilising the microbicide as an analytical ally and conversing with the figures that emerge from my empirical research, to reflect on the constitutive mechanisms of feminist theory itself, including my own engagement and contribution here. Above all, this book is focused on creating novel imaginaries that espouse the real, in terms of the real of the HIV epidemic, as well as a more philosophical engagement with matter.
At present, contemporary materialist feminism is pushing the parameters of feminist critique beyond the human, into posthuman terrains. These developments are often articulated as an explicit response to the so-called cultural turn and its focus on the body as a site for discourse and processes of signification to invest. In contrast to this anthropocentrism, a motley crew of nonhuman allies have entered feminist debate and provoked significant insights into how matter comes to matter – materiality's own dynamism. Through powerful insights from philosophy and the natural sciences, the body has emerged as a contingent, inherently differentiated and multiple entity which seeps out of its skin and is rather defined in relation to its environment – space, time, nonhuman others and allies. However, as rich as this posthuman landscape of contemporary feminism is, issues of normativity so central to the 'cultural turn' have faded into the background and with it novel analyses of oppressive and subversive sex/gender materialisations. Consequently, feminist issues at stake in the same 'historical moment' as contemporary materialisms run the risk of remaining un(der) analysed.
One such feminist issue unfolding in the same historic moment as, what I will come to call, feminist neomaterialism is the development of vaginal microbicides. Vaginal microbicides are developed, explicitly, as female-initiated HIV prevention. In light of the increasing feminisation of the HIV epidemic, the development of vaginal microbicides carries the promise of women's empowerment. At present, vaginal microbicides are being tested in clinical trials and have been since the early 1990s, with mixed results. I will reflect on the ways in which the campaign for microbicides has been voiced as an explicit feminist campaign, largely fuelled by an understanding of gender dynamics that speaks in terms of women's empowerment, and aims – beyond HIV prevention as it were – to transform gender and sexual power relations. I understand the idea of a microbicide to have generated a complex object that is aimed at protecting women against the HIV virus by engaging their specific physiological vulnerability while intervening into the power relations that place women at risk of HIV infection, through its specific incorporation into women's sexual practices. This idea has come to be enacted and articulated through biomedicine and consequently it has materialised into various microbicide candidates. This engagement with biomedicine has generated the promise for the materialisation of an efficacious microbicide, but what happens to feminist ideals of empowerment when they materialise through biomedical process?
Ultimately, the book presents and critiques the consequences of materialising feminist ideals through biomedical process and the clinical trials specifically, and concludes that despite those ideals, and despite the ethical concerns with women's vulnerability within the trials, the pursuit of the promise of vaginal microbicides has not engaged with the full complexity at stake. I will argue that in order to engage the full ethical complexity and transformative potential at stake in the field of microbicide development, a different way of thinking the field is pertinent, an analytical toolkit, or certain imaginary, attuned to the complex relationality the development of microbicides generates.
In correspondence with its theoretical/empirical balance, the book has two aims: to provide an analysis of the field of microbicide development that is robust enough to articulate the complexity of its promise and material effects – something I will argue a discourse of empowerment is not fully able to do; and to utilise the microbicide as an analytical ally in a provocative debate with contemporary materialisms, especially confronting the neglect of particularly feminist issues materialising in the world at present. Key questions I concern myself within this book are: what are the consequences of feminist theory's move beyond the human? How has this move impacted on feminist theory as a political project? These questions become pertinent when feminist neomaterialism leaves the wondrous world of strange critters provided by a range of natural sciences behind, and enters a time of HIV, and the search for its eradication through offshore human clinical trials. Above all, this book constitutes feminist theorisation of vaginal microbicides – a mode of doing theory in which new imaginaries and real problems are intimately related and my own position as theorist/researcher is never taken for granted.
NEW MATERIALISMS, POLITICAL TEMPORALITIES
In the current landscape of feminist theory a 'material turn' is unfolding that looks to the materiality of the body, often in relation to the constitutive power of the natural sciences. What characterises this turn is the engagement with how matter comes to matter, in which we no longer end at our skin, but rather come into being in relation to human and nonhuman actors within particular environments. This material turn is often understood as a critical response the 'cultural turn' that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, marked by psychic processes of subject formation and linguistic signification – leading to understandings of sex, gender and sexuality that allegedly lost sight of the body and materiality more broadly defined. These theories, often marked as 'new materialism', seek to engage the relations between nature and culture, instead of merely focusing on cultural (de)construction. Indeed, key to this theoretical terrain are the breakdowns of the oppositions between biology and society, nature and culture, human and nonhuman. It is important to state that the so-called new feminist materialism encompasses a wide array of theoretical interventions and trajectories, ranging from engagements with matter's literacy (Kirby 1997, 2011), to engagements with sexual difference and its futurity (Grosz 2005, 2011) to the constitutive role of the sciences (Barad 2007) to more ecological investigations (Haraway 2016). This school of thought is far from singular and as such is espoused to different scholarly genealogies.
Furthermore, not only is its materialism plural, these 'new materialisms' carry a loaded temporality. There is nothing necessarily new about the current materialist moment and situating this mode of thought as new has the effect of obscuring the feminist work that contemporary materialisms are embedded in. Materialist critiques can be identified throughout various past feminist theoretical works, from Simone de Beauvoir's engagement with biology (1949/1997), to Shulamith Firestone's feminist revolution through technology (1970), Emily Martin's discourse analysis of the reproductive system (1989), Sandra Harding's postcolonial critique of science (1986, 1991) and of course, Donna Haraway's critique of the distinction between nature and culture (1976, 1978). Rather, the new of the feminist 'new materialisms' hinges on a neglect of these theories. As Sara Ahmed writes: 'When we describe what it is that we do, when we consider how it is that we arrive at the ground we inhabit, we need to appreciate the feminist work that comes before us, in all its complexity ... we should avoid establishing a new terrain by clearing the ground of what has come before us. And we might not be so willing to deposit our hope in the category of "the new" ' (Ahmed 2008: 36). The manner in which we situate our theoretical interventions, where we find our theoretical belonging, has direct methodological and analytical implications.
As such, current feminist critiques within and in response of so-called new materialisms take on the problematic genealogy of contemporary materialist newness to seek alternate histories and genealogies. This critical engagement with genealogy almost instantaneously becomes a question of politics. What kinds of politics are constituted through a neglect of feminist science studies and postcolonial contributions, in what Sara Ahmed for instance has called new materialism's 'founding gesture'?
The temporality of the current materialist moment is indeed a point of debate, often articulated through its definition. Should we speak of new materialisms (Coole & Frost 2010), material feminisms (Alaimo & Hekman 2008), neomaterialism (Braidotti 2000)? These questions are not so much attempts to canonise the field, as they are questions of politics phrased through temporal, genealogical, scholarly belonging. Here I wish to stress that I mark my approach as neomaterialist, which holds on to past feminist materialist theory my own work is clearly embedded in and indebted to, while also marking the contemporary emergence of the current debates, and the bodies of work my approach directly speaks to.
Throughout these pages, such contemporary embeddedness comes to the fore through Donna Haraway's socialist feminist theory and her roots in historical materialism, as well as Judith Butler's engagement with materiality within a scene of gender performativity. Here I wish to underline that my own work is also indebted to Australian feminist materialist theory on the body and sexual difference published in the 1990s, in particular the work of Catherine Waldby, Moira Gatens and Elizabeth Grosz, even if these theorists do not feature as prominently as Haraway and Butler in this book. Catherine Waldby's AIDS and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference (1996) has inspired much of my own research. The manner in which she engages the constitutive power of biomedical discourse, her attention to nature/culture binaries within what she understands to be the (bio) politics of biomedicine and her argument for a more hybrid understanding of sexual bodies is directly in line with the arguments I will come to outline in this book. In a similar manner, Moira Gatens' Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporality (1996) has been an important work in terms of my understanding of the relations between ethics and embodiment. Furthermore, Moira Gatens' work, as well as Elizabeth Grosz's critique on the sex/gender distinction, has been key to my own critical engagement with the discourse of women's empowerment in microbicide discourse.
However, the current theoretical moment, as well as the current time of HIV, is also decidedly different. Catherine Wadlby's AIDS and the Body Politic mostly reads as a critique against biomedicine, with particular focus on the non-scientific, that is normative components of what she calls the biomedical imagination. Although I do not necessarily disagree with such an analytical methodology, it is also not fully able to encompass what is at stake in the contemporary moment of HIV science. In particular, it does not serve to engage a reading of the field of microbicide development as a critique against science, because this field explicitly endeavours to constitute a feminist science. This also feeds into the different current theoretical materialist moment in which similar arguments are made within feminist theory, but they are made through an inhabitation of science, not by critical opposition. This leads into another difference between these studies and my own work. Both Waldby's and Gatens' focus on imagination as a point of entry into matter, and indeed Waldby's biomedical imagination and Gatens' Imaginary Bodies resonate with my own work. However, what I understand to be the value of doing empirical research, in combination with doing theory and focusing on imaginative points of entry, is that your object comes alive and starts 'kicking back', speaking back. This comes to the fore in my theoretical discussions where the objects that emerge through my research directly interrogate my own theoretical practices. This is not so much to say that my empirical objects constitute a limit to theory, but that I am not the only one with agency here, even if my research is textual.
Thus, in short, I have problems with the concept of 'new materialism' because it does not do justice to the materialism of Australian feminist theory, socialist feminism, feminist science studies, including postcolonial critiques of science, as well as Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter (although most often in critical relation). However, current materialisms are indeed emerging in forms that are different from, even if espoused by, past engagement. These neomaterialist fields are exciting and inspiring and effective in order to analyse and engage the ways our worlds come to matter, the way we come to matter, or fail to matter. The task throughout this book is to engage this contemporary moment vividly, while paying heed to the analytical, methodological and political vicissitudes of contemporary materialisms. Not the least in moments of self-reflection, where I call to task the constitutive power and complicity of my own theoretical interventions. Thus the theory engaged within this book functions in multiple ways. I argue that the development of microbicides has much to gain from a neomaterialist framework of thought while the vaginal microbicide raises key questions for such a theoretical engagement.
The field of vaginal microbicide development pays heed to both the specific vulnerabilities of 'the female body' that make women more susceptible to HIV, as well as the gendered power relations that leave women at a higher risk of HIV infection within the power dynamics of their sexual relationships. This mutual engagement places the field at a fascinating juncture that speaks to the theoretical projects of neomaterialism. Because the idea of a microbicide constitutes women's bodies as sites of power transformations, the microbicide signifies and materialises a disruption of dichotomous or dualist thought. However, this is not how the field conceives of itself as it is grounded in women's health, and its conceptualisation of women's empowerment in which a distinction between natural sex and cultural gender is key.
This dualist mode of thought has affected the way in which power is understood to function, that is a separation between nature and culture in which only the realm of culture is understood to be ridden with power relations and nature is understood to pre-exist culture and is thereby removed from processes of power. Second, this dualism has had direct effects on the role ascribed to science and especially the natural sciences. As nature is preexistent and devoid of power relations, natural scientists show us the real that pre-exists their investigations, which cultural practices then inscribe and social sciences can remark upon. In short, a nature/culture dichotomy and the dualist thought that ensues is a mode of thought that does not 'enter' scientific process itself, but rather upholds the authority of the natural sciences to determine the real. Therefore, the manner in which the field articulates their own engagement leaves women's socio-sexual vulnerability to HIV infection under the representation of the advocacy campaigns and the physiological receptivity of the female body to the virus under the auspices of biomedicine.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Materialities of Sex in a Time of HIV"
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Copyright © 2018 Annette-Carina van der Zaag.
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