Firestone’s technological utopianism prefigured queer theory and cyborg feminism

Evidence

In this belief, Firestone is at once quintessentially modern and incipiently postmodern. Her ”biological essentialism” has come to be seen by postmodern feminism as the hallmark and primary pitfall of feminist modernity. The triumphant rationalism of every aspect of her thought and textual form finds its culmination in her utopian commitment, which she shared with Marcuse, to modern technology’s progressive ability to ”liberate” humankind from the constraints of this essential, but transcendable, nature. Unlike Marcuse, or Horkheimer and Adorno, she does not take into account the devastating domination of nature by instrumental rationality that has been one of modernity’s most dangerous legacies. At the same time, her commitment to eliminating the social significances of sexual difference, along with her belief in the potential of technology to liberate women from those signifi- cances, has deep resonance with a range of postmodern feminist thinking, from queer theory, with its denaturalization and disruption of malefemale sex as well as gender dualisms, to Harawayan cyborgian socialism, with its vision of the ineluctable, and potentially liberatory, interpenetration of the human and the technological. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 879

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School volume’s treatment of Marcuse’s technological liberation thesis as the shared modern lineage. — connects to: Queer theory aims to deconstruct gender binaries, not eliminate them. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 856; Anti-binary theories can align misogynists with radical feminists — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 629; Intimacy became a temporary experience molded by speculative technologies (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Intimacy became a temporary experience molded by speculative technologies #expands (0.70)
• Speculative technologies actively embed speculation into modern society #corroborates (0.70) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 252
• Utopian political imagination tests postmodernism’s capacity to imagine change #qualifies (0.70)