The biohack.me forums were originally run on Vanilla and ran from January 2011 to July 2024. They are preserved here as a read-only archive. If you had an account on the forums and are in the archive and wish to have either your posts anonymized or removed entirely, email us and let us know.
While we are no longer running Vanilla, Patreon badges are still being awarded, and shoutout forum posts are being created, because this is done directly in the database via an automated task.
Could you see feminism and a reclaiming of bodily autonomy as part of the Biohacking practice?
Let me know any thoughts, has any one thought about how Biohacking/transhumanism might connect to gender and feminist politics?
Comments
-
There are a lot of transgender people in the biohacking community, possibly because many transgender people have been thinking about their body and modifying it in other ways for so long anyway, that what we currently do seems very tame in comparison. Also, some of the stuff on the horizon is extremely enticing to many trans people.
And many people with uteruses are already cyborgs but just don't think of themselves that way- an IUD is one of the most effective forms of birth control, lasts 3-10 years, and some also stop mensuration. It's also one of the coolest cyborg implants that exists.
More broadly, bodily autonomy isn't just feminist politics, it's human politics. No one should be allowed to tell anyone else what must or must not be done to their own body, and this is a core tenant of much of the biohacking community.
-
Yeah. Cybersilk, you should come to a Meetup. You'd see that it already is.
-
@tekniklr said:
There are a lot of transgender people in the biohacking community, possibly because many transgender people have been thinking about their body and modifying it in other ways for so long anyway, that what we currently do seems very tame in comparison. Also, some of the stuff on the horizon is extremely enticing to many trans people.And many people with uteruses are already cyborgs but just don't think of themselves that way- an IUD is one of the most effective forms of birth control, lasts 3-10 years, and some also stop mensuration. It's also one of the coolest cyborg implants that exists.
More broadly, bodily autonomy isn't just feminist politics, it's human politics. No one should be allowed to tell anyone else what must or must not be done to their own body, and this is a core tenant of much of the biohacking community.
Thank you, wow so brilliant reading your response. I know that a lot of people are capitalising on implant technologies and Biohacks for monetary reasons but it also seems embedded in a political context.
It kind of reminds of the second wave feminist movement in the 70s with books coming like "Our Bodies, Our Selves" talking about access to abortion before Roe V Wade, seeking to give people knowledge of their bodies outside of an institutional context.
-
@Cassox said:
Yeah. Cybersilk, you should come to a Meetup. You'd see that it already is.
For sure, are there any in London? -
Biohacking is the use of technology to improve the human condition.
I love the use of science and technology to improve our lives.
Are there aspects that are unique to a female body that technology has the ability to improve upon? (pro tip, yes.) To ask if Biohacking has a connection to feminism is like asking if a hammer has a connection to building a house. Or a drill. Or a level, a paint roller, or a pencil.
There are less obvious tools, too. Like water. The humans who build the house drink water. If that water has E.Coli. in it, or is simply saturated in toxic fracking runoff, it's obviously going to slow down the construction of that house...
Biohacking, in it's simplicity, gets into using applied science to help different human conditions. I would argue birth control, cesarean sections and tampons are all different things one could argue as various forms of biohacking that we already use to improve our lives, just as modern insulin or hip replacements may be used in either gender.
Biohacking, in my eyes, also has little to do with an 'agenda' or 'goal'. The goal of it's existence is to improve the human condition. Malpracticed, deceitful, or unconsensual medical application is a malicious form of assault and torture. There is no justification for it, and no label can justify it.
-
I'm currently writing my thesis about feminist conceptions of biohacking! Love to hear your thoughts here.
If you're into academic literature, feminism has a long lineage of engagement with cyborgs - start with Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto and work forward from there. A good (but very dense) book on the topic of feminist biohacking before it was "biohacking" is Seizing the Means of Reproduction by Murphy. Jillian Weise is a cyborg with a prosthetic leg who does some pretty insightful stuff about cyborgs and disability.
I'm gonna be honest though, a lot of it doesn't look at modern practices of biohacking too favorably. Really comes down to what ideology the biohacking practice stems from - the kinda Silicon Valley tech-bro transcendence of biology can't really be conceptualized as a feminist project.
From my research, my personal opinion is that a lot of the "bodily autonomy" claimed by biohackers was hard-won by decades of feminist struggle. And some practice hacking to achieve a "transcendence" of biology, when, for ages, women practiced hacking as a method of survival - such as DIYabortion. And not specifically feminisms, per se, but organizations such as the Transspecies Society advocating for cyborg rights are, again, following the lineage of many other groups which struggle/d for their rights - women, indigenous cultures, animals etc.
