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The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy Nanoethics DOI 10.1007/s11569-014-0203-0 ORIGINAL PAPER Hacking the Body and Posthumanist Transbecoming: 10,000 Generations Later as the mestizaje of Speculative Cyborg Feminism and Significant Otherness Lissette Olivares Received: 4 June 2014 / Accepted: 30 June 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract This essay gives a situated introduction to body hacking, an underground surgical process that seeks to transform the body’s architecture, offering an ethnographic account of the affects that drive this corporeal intervention for performance artist Cheto Castellano, and later, for the author. A brief history of recent body modification movements is offered. Through these situated stories of corporeal transformation there is an exploration As an experimental essay that seeks to disrupt the borders between artistic practice and research, I must extend thanks to the agents that have directly supported this hybrid work. To Cheto Castellano, whose “significant otherness” has provided a foundation for our collaborative research and practice for over a decade. To Donna Haraway, for her generous feedback on an early draft of 10,000 Generations Later. To Lucian Gomoll, whose feminist collaboration has deeply enriched my research practices. To Beatriz da Costa, whose critique helped my project to grow, and whose matter I hope to hold under my skin one day. To Luk Kahlo and Matsya, the canine companion species who transmit the universe’s secrets through vectors of saliva and affect. Any mistakes are my own. L. Olivares (*) History of Consciousness Department, UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA, USA e-mail: liolivares@fulbrightmail.org of Eva Hayward’s concept of transbecoming, exploring the perpetual change of the body in transition, particularly in relation to posthumanistic transformations. The article closes with a speculative cyborg feminist body modification project titled 10,000 Generations Later, which explores how a subdermal archive of silicone implants stored under the author’s skin may assist her in a posthumanist transbecoming after the death of her companions species toy poodle Luk Kahlo, and perhaps even in a distant future. The author argues that this project becomes an apparatus of mestizaje between speculative cyborg feminism and significant otherness. Keywords Becoming with . Body hacking . Companion species . Cyborg feminism . Science fact . Science feminism . Speculative feminism . Speculative fiction . Significant otherness . Subdermal implant . Subdermal archive . Posthumanities . Transbecoming “And God said, Let us make man in our image, and after our likeness.” Genesis I:26 “Why Not?” Cheto Castellano “We Have Never Been Human” Donna Haraway [12] L. Olivares Sin Kabeza Productions, New York, NY, USA A Situated Introduction to Body Hacking L. Olivares Museum and Curatorial Studies, Multi Institutional Research Cluster, Los Angeles, CA, USA The first time I learned about body hacking was when my partner, Cheto Castellano, revealed his dream of having horns, a transfiguration he planned on making a reality as soon as he found Author's personal copy Nanoethics someone capable of performing the subdermal implant procedure. Not an easy feat considering that most doctors endowed with both the corporeal and surgical knowledge to realize such a transformation tend to label such interventions as unnecessary mutilations.1 For my partner, a visual and performance artist, the decision to pursue subdermal implants was a carefully conceptualized transformation that would play a significant role in the way that he sculpts his own image of the self, and responds to society’s normative interpellation of his gendered and racialized body.2 In addition, this new molding would allow him to perpetually contest hegemonic constructions of identity inherited from western modernity that have been forcefully inscribed upon his body and psyche through generations of colonization. In Castellano’s postcolonial and posthumanistic origin story dormant genes had robbed him of his physical likeness to deer and other horned creatures, while a conservative biopolitical regime whose notion of the ideal body is based on a patriarchal god continued to regulate his attempt to remedy this genetic and physical dissonance. Enter the body hacker. Body Hackers are not not surgeons, that is, they have developed specialized anatomical knowledge of the body, and the good ones are adept at cutting and suturing the skin, maintaining sterile conditions, and preventing infection as they enter and modify the body with specialized equipment (scalpel, needle, mold, etc.). Unlike surgeons however, body hackers are not endowed with the formal training or medical degrees that are required by the modern biomedical industry to undertake such procedures.3 1 In her in depth analysis of the recent history of body modification Victoria Pitts highlights how mainstream media frames body modification as mental illness and pathology, pointing out the predominant tendency for body modifications that “do not beautify the body according to social norms, or that are painful,” to become discursively framed as self-mutilation, thus helping to associate these bodies with social deviance ([21], 17). See: [22] 2 Despite the tendency for body hackers to claim autonomy over the narrative their body gives through corporeal transformation, it is important to remember that bodies are always engaged in a relational semiotics, and are interpellated, or called into being, by diverse power structures. 3 For a fascinating analysis of the historical development of the surgical and medical discipline in the late 19th century, and the role of anaesthesia in its development, see [19] The term body hacking, also known as biohacking, emerged in the 90s alongside the dotcom revolution, and is generally used by a cyberpunk wing of the body modification scene. 4 In Hacking the Future, a manifesto written by self defined body hacker Lukas Zpira for example, he argues that the term was made necessary to “define a movement of artists, researchers and thinkers working around mutations and using body modification as a medium,” with an aesthetic influence in manga culture, comics, science fiction films, and an affiliation with contemporary techno medical discoveries [28]. Zpira’s manifesto emphasizes both aesthetic and conceptual differences in the application of body modification, and seeks to distance itself from the references and goals of the body modification movement known as the Modern Primitives, who are best known for their mimesis of tribal and indigenous body modifications. 5 Author Victoria Pitts historicizes the rise of a “body art movement” taking place in the early 1990s, which borrowed from a range of established traditions and subcultures, including, “performance art, punk, queer activism, pro-sex feminism, SM/leather feminism, New Age spiritualism, and Western Tattooing.” (Pitts 2012, ([21], 4)) Pitts points out that while various forms of body modification have become hugely popular among youth and others, a significant portion can be characterized as outside the mainstream. These non-mainstream modifiers she argues “create not only spectacle and controversy, but also new forms of social rebellion through the body.” ([21], 7–8) Depending on their conceptual and performative interests, body modifiers may address sexual politics, gender inequality, and cultural identity through their transformation of the body. Within queer cultural practices these body markings may play a symbolic role in breaking away from homonormativity within mainstream gay rights movements, marking agents as “queers among queers.”6 (Pitts 2012, ([21] , 3) 4 For an extended consideration of cyberpunk and its ties to body modification see: [23] 5 For an in depth analysis of the cultural politics of the group known as the Modern Primitives see: [24] 6 For an extended analysis of the use of body modification as queer visibility, see: [24] Author's personal copy Nanoethics Pitts marks the publication of V. Vale and Andrea Juno’s Modern Primitives as a pivotal moment in the rise of body modification as a subcultural movement. This book, which was published first in 1985, and sold more than 60,000 copies in 6 prints by 1996, features a range of practitioners including now recognized subjects linked to performance art, feminist, and queer activism, including Raelyn Gallina, Genesis Breyer P. Orridge, and Fakir Musafar, amongst many others. 7 Fakir Musafar is one of the most recognized founders of the ‘modern primitive’ movement, and describes his interest in body modification as a postmodern decolonial gesture, emphasizing the group’s interest in contesting western modernity’s repressive relationship to the body, and he asserts: “we had all rejected the Western cultural biases about ownership and use of the body. We believed that our body belonged to us…[not to] a father, mother, or spouse; or to the state or its monarch, ruler, or dictator, or to social institutions of the military, educational, correctional, or medical establishment.”8 Pitts points out that the Modern Primitives have provoked significant postcolonial critique, as the majority are white westerners, primarily US and European subjects, whose mimesis and appropriation of indigenous body modification practices may unwittingly render these cultures as purely aesthetic Others, available for western use and consumption. Pitts herself is critical of the 7 Genesis Breyer P. Orridge, together with h/er wife Lady Jaye Breyer P. Orridge developed a pandogyne project to evolve into a new gender and merged identity called Breyer P-Orridge; together they underwent numerous surgical procedures, including breast implants and cosmetic facial surgery, to achieve this united but separate self. Both Genesis and Lady Jaye are featured in the recent documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, directed by Marie Losier, (2011). Raellyn Gallina, calls herself “the grandmother of piercing” and uses body modification as a technology of healing. To hear her reflection on the 20th anniversary of the publication Re/Search Body Modification issue, go to: <<https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bZRA0JmSIpQ>>(Last Accessed June 21, 2014). Fakir Musafar is a pioneer of the modern primitives and continues to practice body modification today. See: Body Play and Modern Primitives Quarterly, begun in 1991, partially available online: <<http://www.bodyplay.com/bodyplay/index. htm>>(Last Accessed on June 21, 2014) 8 Cited in [25] tendency for those in the Modern Primitive group to idealize indigenous cultures, thus reinforcing the ‘noble savage’ trope so prevalent within the problematic history of the anthropological discipline. Furthermore, she argues that the deployment of indigenous practices by white westerners engages in a kind of symbolic ethnicity contest in which non-western corporeal practices are pitted against western ones, however she questions whether colonialism’s fixed and fetishized construction of exotic others gets overturned in this contest between so-called civilized and primitive bodies, and whether that binary relation may even be reinforced. (Pitts 2012, 77) Pitts emphasizes that many agents within the Modern Primitive movement were also affiliated with sadomasochistic and eroticized body practices that were being used within queer communities and who saw their use of body modification as linked to sexual and spiritual expression and free speech. ([21], 8–10). Similarly, Pitts explains that many women within the body modification scene have argued that the use of modification is linked to a pro sex feminism SM culture that helps to redefine women’s corporeal expression and “undermine traditional norms of female sexuality that require women to be passive and undesiring.” (Pitts 2012, ([21] , 10)) Subversive body modification is also present in Transgender* history, and ‘the cut’, or gender reassignment surgery, performed by both medical doctors and body hackers, is often a rite of passage in transgender and transsexual transitioning.9 My own use of the term “body hacker” builds upon this layered history of body modification. In particular my use of the term body hacker seeks to emphasize the difference between practitioners trained and employed by the biomedical industrial complex, and those that are outside or marginal to 9 Judith Butler points out the difficult process of securing gender reassignment surgery, since the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is often necessary for insurance plans to cover the surgical procedure. Butler argues that “the relation between gender identity and mental health would have to change radically, so that economic and legal institutions would recognize how essential becoming a gender is to one’s very sense of personhood, one’s sense of well being, one’s possibility to flourish as a bodily being.” Judith Butler, “Undiagnosing Gender,” Transgender Rights, ed. Paisley Currah et al. (Minn: U of Minn. Press, [20]) 296. Author's personal copy Nanoethics this disciplinary formation.10 When I use this term, I also activate a hacker ethos that seeks to liberate knowledge from powerful imperial archives. Furthermore, since the performativities of women, queers, people of color, and animals have historically been suppressed as primary sites of knowledge production on their own terms, my activation of the term hopes to encourage an epistemological intervention that emphasizes the body’s importance in critical discursive analysis. Resisting Against the Pathologization of Body Modification In most states and countries there is no legal sanction for piercing the skin’s dermis without a medical degree, however, such procedures are generally accompanied by the use of anaesthesia, which is strictly regulated and must be administered by a licensed medical expert. For a growing group of committed body modifiers (practitioners and subjects), neither the lack of anaesthesia, nor the legal sanctions that may emerge to prohibit these corporeal interventions, prevent them from experimenting with their bodies and pursuing the corporeal transformations that they deem necessary to accompany their transformations of the self. While not all 10 I admit that this is a very broad grouping, and would like to emphasize that not all body modification practitioners who are outside the domain of the biomedical complex may self identify as body hackers. To clarify my intention in using this terminology, I would like to insist that body hackers are those who are willing to risk legal and moral sanctions in their effort to undertake nonnormative corporeal transformations. A context specific analysis of each society’s normative values would be necessary to further substantiate the use of this term. Curiously cyborg body hackers, whose key figures like Lukas Zpira and Cyborg Sampa, wish to draw a distance between themselves and the Modern Primitives, nonetheless share a commitment to performing their modifications through an underground network of practitioners that are generally self trained and operate outside of traditional medical complexes. Thus, to reiterate, my definition is distinct from that available in Zpira’s hacktivist manifesto. In contrast, Orlan, a feminist performance artist, would not be labeled as a body hacker under my use of the term, because not only is Orlan’s modification work performed by surgeons who are trained by the modern biomedical industrial complex, her surgeries also take place within the medical operating room. Furthermore, she refers to her modifications as situated within the history of plastic surgery. Nonetheless, despite her self proclaimed distance to the afore cited body modification movements, her work may similarly be critiqued for its appropriation of the aesthetic image of the exotic other. For an interesting analysis of Orlan’s work, please see: [6] procedures are complicated, there are significant risks involved, as everybody has differences in the way they acclimate to both pain and healing. The legal constraints and normative values expressed by the medical industry towards what they label ‘dangerous’ or extreme’ modifications may prevent the people who undergo these procedures to receive medical care in the event of complications, as they may fear that doctors can either ask them to incriminate the person who conducted the procedure, or, have themselves subjected to psychological evaluation, and at worse, be committed to a psychiatric facility. 11 In an effort to lessen the risk associated with their practice body hackers are careful in selecting their patients. Likewise, those undergoing procedures must make sure that their body hacker has a solid record of successful modifications. For some, the desire for modification leads to a DIY body hacking experience, or “self surgery”.12 The illegality and subversive aspect of performing or acquiring such procedures also proves to be one of its greatest attractions for many body hackers. Brian Decker, for example, one of the most respected body hackers in the US, commented that despite his surgical capacity he wasn’t interested in performing surgeries that traditional doctors are willing to do. Instead of capitalizing on his surgical knowledge, he emphasized the importance of offering an affordable service, so that the modifications do not become available for only an elite crowd.13 Despite its relative affordability, there is no doubt that the most extreme body modifications are limited to a relatively small but growing global community. One of the most important sites for disseminating information about body modification is BMEZine, “the largest and oldest full-spectrum body modification publication on the planet,” which was founded by Shannon Larratt, an artist, computer programmer, and modification enthusiast in 1994. This site, a precursor to Facebook by almost a decade, allows users to create profiles, share stories about their 11 People who undergo numerous corporeal modifications are often thought to be psychologically unsound, or suspected to have body dysmorphic disorder, which is defined in the discipline of psychology as a condition where one’s own body is subject to acute self hatred. For an extended discussion of the pathologization of subjects who undergo body modification see: [22] 12 One example is “Liao”, a Chinese CEO, who has performed his own tattoos, subdermal implants, and genital beading with selfmade prosthesis. Shannon Larratt, Meet Tommy Meat” [16]. 1. 13 Brian Decker, Personal Interview. NY:2008 Author's personal copy Nanoethics modifications, and post pictures of their works in process. As Larratt explains: “when I got into body modification, it seemed like an alien idea. I didn’t know anyone else interested in it, I wasn’t aware of any body modification community willing to embrace me, and any media or public message about it was deeply negative and judgmental.” [18] BMEZine, (the acronym BME stands for Body Modification Ezine aka Be Me Zine) endeavored to become a virtual meeting point that would enable “a mix of community support, political activism, and hard information.”14 According to its own wiki page, the goal of BME includes an initiative to “politically and commercially encourage the ethical growth of body modification and manipulation,” as well, as to: “never judge one body modification or manipulation activity as more “right” than another, and never succumb to public (mainstream or non-mainstream) pressure to draw this line.” In addition to each voluntary profile, the site includes an extended encyclopedia as well as many other knowledge bases that inform visitors about modifications and their risks. Sites like BME and the networks of body modification practitioners that appear in their encyclopedia and profile database offer an alternative support and information network for those seeking to undergo modifications. Though this site has been critiqued for its liberal emphasis on customization, individuality and personal freedom, which may ignore the relational consequences of corporeal transformations, it at once offers a space where bodies under construction may be narrated according to a lexicon that is not determined by the medical establishment. Witnessing a Posthumanist Transformation It was a cold winter in New York when Castellano’s appointment for horn implants with Brian Decker was scheduled. It had taken numerous visits to his piercing studio in Brooklyn to convince him that Castellano was serious about the procedure and trustworthy. I recorded the operation with a video camera. With meticulous 14 Shannon Larratt, [17] detail the greater part of an hour was spent preparing and sterilizing the tools and tracing an elaborate geometric pattern across Castellano’s forehead to ensure that the implants would be straight. Decker explained that no one’s face is exactly symmetrical, and therefore, to make the horns look even required precision. Before beginning the procedure Decker warned that in a worst case scenario, Castelllano’s body could reject the implants, and he also explained that subdermal implants could potentially flip with a hard blow to the operated area. Despite these warnings Castellano authorized the operation. Decker began with an incision of approximately 3 cm on the skin that covers the frontal bone. He used a set of custom tools designed by him to separate the layers of skin and to open a pocket where the silicon mold would rest. The silicon mold itself, a Generation 1 half dome of approximately 2 cm in width and height, was designed by Steve Haworth, who is hailed as the creator of contemporary 3D silicon subdermal implants, as well as numerous other innovations in the world of modification.15 The same procedure was repeated on the other side of his head, and though the image of a spatula entering the head’s skin and protruding above Castellano’s eyebrow was shocking to me, I was surprised at how quickly the procedure was over, in no more than 40 min. Decker stitched up the incisions and gave detailed instructions for the care of the wounds before we left. In less than 3 days the swelling from the operation had subsided and fortunately, the precise detail of the implant’s placement had yielded what looked like perfectly symmetrical horn implants. Once the stitches were removed Castellano’s skin healed quickly, and there are currently almost no visible scars from the procedure, making the implants look perplexingly integrated, as if always a part of his body. There are complex transformations in the everyday interactions Castellano has with society, that change drastically from one context to another, and which I am unable to detail here. For Castellano, the operation was a success, and though he has faced challenges with his appearance, he is content with his body modification, and has continued to experiment with his body, adding additional tattoos, scarifications, subdermal and dental implants, as well as a bipedicle flap on his abdomen. His 15 Haworth’s work is featured in numerous television programs, and in the documentary Flesh and Blood, Directed by Larry Silverman (2010). Author's personal copy Nanoethics most recent corporeal dream is to design a marsupial pocket made of skin, but it has not yet been realized. Why vs Why Not? Confronting the “god-Like” Body of Genesis with Post-Essentialist Transbecomings Without a doubt the most recurrent question people will ask is Why? (why perform such a modification, why undergo health risks to achieve such a transformation?, why the willingness to endure pain?, etc.) The response Castellano usually gives these inquisitors is Why not? This post-essentialist question reverses the normative logic and power inherent in the question why? - Why Not? reverses the inquisitive gaze, requiring each emitter to ask themselves about their values and their relationship to their own body. Why Not? simultaneously opens a constellation of possibilities. If one does not depart from the idea that the body is already perfect, in its ideal state, as we have inherited from the Judeo Christian tradition which articulates the human body as a body made in the likeness of god, then what are the possibilities that become available when we begin with a conceptualization of a body that is far from “hemilich”(homely) “perfect” or “ideal” at its inception? To envision the body as a malleable material that can be shaped into a model that better fits with who we are or who we want to become is part of what theorist Eva Hayward explores in her concept of transbecoming, or what she theorizes as: “the emergence of a material, psychical, sensual and social self through corporeal, spatial, and temporal processes that trans-form the lived body.” ([13], 226) Hayward is concerned with the psychosomatic transformations that accompany transsexual gender reassignment surgery, and argues for a mode of analysis that pays attention to the expressiveness of bodies undergoing transformation, in particular through hormone therapy. For me, one of the most compelling aspects of Hayward’s theorization of transbecoming is that it emphasizes the sustained transformation of corporeal experience, contesting the myth of a stable corporeal form, that is bound by a singular corporeal experience. In a continued analysis of the affective transformations that accompany transsexual transitioning Hayward’s empathic and autoethnographic column “The subtle process of transformation,” similarly emphasizes the unending process of transition, asserting that: “Moving toward yourself through your body is less about a horizon in which change stops than about how to embrace the endless process of change.” [14] Like Hayward, I am interested in the social, psychic, and physical transformations undergone by the bodies we inhabit, in the technologies that we implement to enable these changes, and in the politics of the resulting and enduring transformations. While Hayward’s autoethnographic experience brings her closer to an analysis of the complex chemical transformations undergone by her transsexual body in transition, her theorization of transbecoming is not limited to either transsexual or transgender transitioning, and I believe is a productive framework for approaching the performative politics of corporeal transformation in diverse contexts. While subdermal implants may not explicitly alter the chemical emissions of the body, my experience as a witness and accomplice in my partner’s transformation of the self has made me more sensitive to the subtle and not so subtle transformations in everyday life that have accompanied his corporeal change. In an effort to share the process of corporeal transformation I scheduled an appointment with Decker for my own subdermal implant. Like Castellano I was interested in the decolonial gesture of this transformation, in its contestation of the normative body, and in a companion posthumanist framework, I sought an implant that would simulate the biological process of a bivalve invertebrate. I took as my model the pearls that are formed in the soft mantle of oysters. For these mollusks parasites are usually the culprits to what human culture considers an extraordinary body transformation; these invaders become lodged in the mollusk’s soft inner body and become irritants that trigger the protective growth of nacre, a substance composed of hexagonal platelets of aragonite, which creates a layered structure where light passes along the axis of one crystal and is reflected and refracted by another to produce a rainbow of light and color, and which through subsequent layers becomes what we know as the pearl. The wonder of the bivalve’s corporeal transformation, which also includes an average process of sex change four times a year, consolidated my desire for a strand of subdermal half domes on my wrist.16 While my modification is much more subtle in the way it is seen and acknowledged by others, it has 16 I am grateful to Eva Hayward’s column, “The Sexual and ethical ambiguity of the beloved bivalve,” which gave me insight into the sexual transformations of the “beloved” oyster [15]. Author's personal copy Nanoethics nonetheless transformed the way I construct and project myself to the world around me, it has marked a rite of passage in my own posthumanist transbecoming. 10000 Generations Later (aka Your Matter Matters to me): A Speculative Cyborg Feminist Subdermal Archive While I am inspired by the figure of the cyborg within the genres of Science Fact and Science Fiction (in novels, theory, film, technology, transmedia, and experimental art), and believe that my corporeal modification projects should be framed within cyborg history, I am nonetheless resistant to the generalized tendency to conflate the cyborg with a masculinist post-human creature (Fig. 1).17 The cyborg that was originally envisioned by Dr. Manfred E. Clynes and Dr. Nathan Kline in 1960 championed super endowed (masculine) bodies that would allow “free man to explore” the unyet colonized frontier of outer space. One of the first cyborg figures they introduce is a rat equipped with an osmotic pump implanted under the skin that automatically releases biochemical substances into the organism, a model through which human enhancement was envisioned in the near future.18 Writing in the midst of the Cold War and Reagan’s “Star Wars” rhetoric, Haraway proposes a very distinct cyborg as an “ironic appropriation” - a “monstruous” and “illegitimate offspring of militaristic patriarchal capitalism,” capable of developing resistance technologies to the “imperialist 17 Please note that there is a difference between posthuman and posthumanist. I recur to Lucian Gomoll, who demarcates the differences: “posthuman is a hybrid figure characterized primarily by the overlay and interactions of human and machine.[…] Whereas discourses in the poshtumanities contribute to the decentering of classical notions of the human, offering a renewed emphasis on the relational or coevolutionary […] Posthumanists place us into radical relationality with other species, with whom we have co-evolved and co-exist.” (Gomoll, [6], 2) <<http://totalartjournal.com/archives/1764/posthumanperformance/>> (Last Accessed June 21, 2014). 18 The osmotic pump was developed by S. Rose and had already been outfitted in rats, rabbits and humans, administering continuous heparin injections. Klynes and Klein suggested that the same technology could be used to administer “psychic energizers” to keep the astronaut continuously awake and fully alert on flights of moderate duration, and proposed that the pump might even be used to “inject protective doses of pharmaceuticals” to combat radiation in space, amongst numerous other uses. Clynes & Klein, “Cyborgs and Space,” Astronautics, (September 1960), p 27, 74–75. fantasies of technohumanism built into policy and research projects.”19 [9, 10] For many cyborgologists, including Donna Haraway, and Chris Hables Gray, (editor of The Cyborg Handbook), the cyborg is enmeshed with a particular moment of science history, when Cold War politics and a defense imaginary inspired by the technologies featured in the genre of science fiction, were colliding as historical conjuncture [3]. Haraway’s cyborg manifesto explains: “From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and body realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both domination and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. ([9], 154) As Haraway emphasizes, her figure of the cyborg offers an alternative perspective, where connections are drawn between animals, humans, and machines, identities understood not as wholes, but rather as bodies enmeshed with each other in specific historical moments. Attentiveness to these entanglements offers a politicized perspective capable of focusing both on oppression and liberation. Haraway’s theorization of the cyborg and cyborg feminism inspired diverse generations of feminists to continue analyzing both the oppressive and liberatory potentialities within technoculture. Scholar Chela Sandoval, for example, articulates the links Haraway’s theorization of the cyborg and the methodologies developed by differential U.S third world feminism, pointing to their theorization of critical 19 Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative,” (SDI) a technological development program that White House officials claimed might use “lasers, microwave devices, particle beams, and projectile beams” to counter enemy nuclear attacks was rebranded as “Star Wars” by his critics, in part because it seemed to cite the popular motion picture, and also because the announcement came “just weeks after President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech.” See: <http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/march-23-1983reagan-proposes-star-wars-missile-defensesystem/?_php=true&_ type=blogs&_r=0> (Last Accessed on June 21, 2014). Author's personal copy Nanoethics mestizaje as a technological apparatus that inspired Haraway’s cyborg figure. ([26], 166,8) In an effort to further extend the liberatory possibilities of cyborg feminism, Sandoval critiques what she sees as a conflation between women of color as identity and cyborg feminism as theory, since as she argues, “differential U.S third world feminist criticisms is often misrecognized and underanalyzed by readers when it is translated as a demographic constituency only (women of color), and not as a theoretical and methodological approach in its own right.” (Sandoval 170,1) For Sandoval, it is important to denaturalize what she sees as a misrecognition of a stable identity labeled “women of color” and to instead recognize a methodology of the oppressed that is developed by the “particular” work of differential U.S third world feminism. Sandoval points out that Haraway recognizes this problematic ellision and amends her position in latter work, stating, “I would be much more careful about describing who counts as ‘we’ in the statement ‘we are all Fig. 1 10,000 Generations Later is a corporeal architecture and archive designed to store “significant” matter (organic and inorganic) under the host’s skin cyborgs.’” (Sandoval 170,2) In her most recent reconsideration of this statement, Haraway explains, “I have come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species […]” ([10], 9) In her turn to dogs and companion species Haraway is at once arguing for an extended emphasis on “significant otherness, through which the partners come to be who we are in flesh and sign.” Yet it in this turn that Haraway argues “by the end of the millennium, cyborgs no longer do the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the threads needed for critical inquiry.” ([10], 9) I am sympathetic to Haraway’s foregrounding of canine and multispecies companions in her recent work, however recognizing the feminist, antiracist, and postcolonial legacies of cyborg feminism makes it impossible for me to place the cyborg figure completely in the background. Instead, I hope that 10,000 Generations Later continues to work towards a problematization of taxonomic boundaries within these queer families of cyborgs and companion species. Just as differential U.S third world feminists emphasized mestizaje as an apparatus of consciousness, one that demystified the idea of a stable unitary identity, and that emphasized our always partial and problematic co-constituted histories, so I hope to continue this tradition in my own emphasis on the mestizaje between feminist cyborgs, and their significant others. It is my hope that an apparatus of mestizaje will allow us to focus on the relationalities between cyborgs, feminists, and companion species of all types, and that this may help us to foreground the limits of anthropocentric hierarchy, which as Haraway reminds us, threatens all waterbased life today. Attention to performativities is a vital methodological approach in Posthumanistic studies, an emerging field of investigation that relies on the “crucial recognition that non-humans play an important role in naturalcultural processes, and a refusal to take a distinction between humans and nonhumans for granted.” (Barad 200, 36) Naturalcultural inquiry is an approach that understands all becoming as ‘becoming with’, a framework built through entanglement. Donna Haraway uses the term “becoming with” to dislodge the notion of a discrete individual body, since as she insists, “to be one is always to become with many,” highlighting the multispecies intraconnections that construct the world and bodies we live in. ([12], 4) For naturalcultural scholars species interdependence, or what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “unruly edges” Author's personal copy Nanoethics is the rule, rather than the exception. ([27], 3) These studies build on developmental biological research which asserts the importance of reciprocal induction, a process that depends on “mutual co-shaping” or coevolution. This co-evolutionary foundation and trope of “becoming with” is integral to Haraway’s development of the term companion-species, whose etymological history resurrects the act of sharing meals and sitting at the table together. Companion Species, the subject of a manifesto, and a way of thinking and feeling life that Haraway translates for her readers, depends on coconstitution- a way of living one’s research with those we love, a method that does not develop theory upon the body of our multispecies kin- but that emerges from living together, from drawing knowledge from our most intimate and quotidian contact zones. As a student of Haraway’s I inherit a responsibility to work from a feminist hermeneutic of knowledge production, one that recognizes that “knowledge is always an engaged material practice and never a disembodied set of ideas.” ([11], 199). This ethical and epistemological emphasis is the basis of Haraway’s “situated knowledges,” a mode of feminist objectivity that reclaims the sensory system and that insists on the particularity and embodiment of all vision. [8] In concert with Haraway, Karen Barad insists that a performative understanding of scientific practices emerges from a direct material engagement with the world, and she adds that, “humans are not the only ones engaged in performative enactments.” [1, 2] Re-Membering Luk Kahlo’s Significant Otherness Luk Kahlo is of the canine species, a hybrid toy poodle who crossed the Mexican border for the United States in 2000. Scraggly, off-white, brown button eyes, 7 lbs of softness anchored by a pink belly. I remember him most in bed, beside me, beside my partner, in the middle, almost always under the covers. The first one to kiss me in the morning, to push me to the side, his warm wet tongue, sometimes overly moist with excitement, sometimes sticky with thirst. He was the first dog I ever had a chance of getting close to. I inherited my asthma at least in part from the pollution emitted by the GM motor vehicle factory that contaminated the air of Elizabeth’s skies, a condition that when allied with the conventions of the biomedical industrial complex coded me as allergic, with the strict prescription of keeping all furry haired critters at a distance. Things changed in 2003 when Luk arrived at my home and I began to learn the performative codes of canine relationality. I never imagined that 8 years of canine companionship could have such an impact on my construction and transformation of the self. My becoming with Luk suffered a brutal fallout when on January 17th of 2011, at 4:20 pm, our lover, mentor, partner, compañero, and fellow border-stomper transformed and left this world. Luk fought three operations and 10 days of intensive care until he was overcome by acute pneumonia - his body harboring and cultivating another type of life-form in tension with his own existence. Stricken with grief, we stayed with his corpse for over a week, and then performed funerary rites that transformed him into ashes. For many of us, the greatest challenge we encounter in life is the transbecoming we must undergo when we are confronted with death and the corresponding corporeal absence of our most beloved companions. The intense desire to keep Luk with us led to the idea of incorporating him physically into our bodies, and so, in a commemorative ritual, my partner and I used his ashes to create a tattoo ink for our skins, literally trying to fuse part of Luk’s corporeal trace into our flesh. As I struggled to accept the loss of this great love and teacher, I turned to science fiction novels to help transport me to distant worlds where he was not yet gone. It was in this period that I reread Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy. In this series of novels an alien race called the Oankali travel throughout the universe collecting genetic material from diverse species. The Oankali survive and thrive through symbiogenesis, incorporating genetic differences from diverse species into their own corporeal archives, constantly transforming the architecture of their genes with alien life-forms. The Oankali assert that their capacity for genetic engineering holds the potential to transform and reform a hierarchical glitch they assert is prevalent throughout Tellurian species and that they attribute to the “humanicide” that almost annihilated the human race in an apocalyptic nuclear war on Earth prior to their arrival. The Oankali believe that the only way the human species will survive is if they accept genetic coupling with their alien race, in an effort to subdue the hierarchical pre-disposition in their genetic makeup.20 Their primary human interlocutor, who doubles as the narrator of the first novel, is Lilith Iyapo, a woman who 20 For Butler, a Black feminist, the Oankali’s self righteous approach to genetic engineering is likely a parallel to the rhetoric of social darwinism in the history of human slavery, and to the rhetoric of progress in the colonization of indigenous communities. Author's personal copy Nanoethics Fig. 2 As matter is added to the subdermal archive additional silicone modules will create a tactile surface on the body despite the loss of her family, and latter involuntary capture and confinement, nonetheless harbors a strong and unique will to survive. Though Iyapo is eventually able to bond with this alien culture, she nonetheless struggles with her role as a captive, and later, as an interlocutor amongst the Oankali and humans. Nonetheless, despite Iyapo’s conflicted being, she accepts that she will have to adapt to the Oankali in order to survive. Though many humans resist Iyapo as a traitor, she becomes a bridge between human and alien cultures, while her increasingly transpecies ‘brood” offer alternative directions throughout the trilogy. Butler’s SF (science fiction, speculative feminist, science feminism) writing is rife with both science fact and speculative invention, and in the process of my mourning, her story of involuntary resuscitation by aliens and the genetic architectural manipulation of her character’s bodies allowed me to envision a speculative future where Luk’s impact in my flesh might become the basis for a transformation of both my body and consciousness. 10,000 Generations Later is a speculative project of the flesh, a subdermal time capsule and archive inspired by Octavia Butler’s multispecies storytelling and in particular, the co-evolutionary potential she projects onto corporeal archives. My intention with this project is to construct a subdermal archive composed of the matter that has influenced the evolution of my consciousness. Using body hacking technologies I hope to preserve diverse materialities within silicon casings that will be stored under my skin. Genetic donations (voluntarily donated) such as hair, skin cells, nails, from those who have influenced my research and inspired me in this lifetime, as well as nano intertextual media (images, books, websites, found objects) would become part of my body, a surface to touch, and to transfer to another’s care at the onset of my own corporeal evanescence. Like the malas, or prayer beads, used by spiritual practitioners to resurrect affects and enhance consciousness, these subdermal implants would become a lifelong collection of matter that matters to me. At once, in my own speculative projections, I would like to ensure that if my body is taken captive and resuscitated by an alien race, that they will find clues as to the processes of transformation that influenced my life on this earth, and in a best case scenario, if they were to revive me, that the matter I hold dear in this lifetime, my significant others, would accompany me in my next transbecoming (Fig. 2). As the matter that matters to me increases over time, I would extend the subdermal implant archive creating a tactile surface across my upper body. References 1. Barad K (2003) Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: J Wom Cult Soc 28(3). Chicago: University of Chicago 2. Barad K (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke UP, Raleigh 3. Butler OE (1987) Dawn: book one of the xenogenesis series. Warner Books, New York 4. Butler OE (1988) Adulthood rites: book two of the xenogenesis series. Warner Books, New York 5. Butler OE (1989) Imago: book three of the xenogenesis series. Warner Books, New York 6. Gomoll L (2011) Posthuman performance. Total Art, Vol.1. <<http://totalartjournal.com/archives/1764/posthumanperformance/>> Last Accessed June 21, 2014 7. Gray C et al (1995) The cyborg handbook. Routledge, NY 8. 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