Justin Lutz December 10, 2012 WMST 601 Final Paper

The Cyborg in the Trailer Park: Envisioning a Southern Epistemology

The ultimate hope and imminent scope of this work is to provide a space in which

we can reconsider feminist and postmodern conceptions of ironic and situated

epistemologies within the context of the American South and the regional culture which

thrives there. While the South has been spatially and historically constructed as

fundamentally other within the United States, the idiosyncrasy and crass distinction that

has been so pivotal for setting the South apart--now seems to be waning, eroded by the

homogenizing stream of globalization and neoliberal capitalistic dogma that swept over

America post WWII--leaving a hollow landscape of strip malls and urban sprawl in its

wake. That is to say, the Southern landscape has been evolving ferociously throughout

the last half-century, with rapid industrial growth and increased mobility; this is,

lamentably, what is often referred to as the “New South”--a transfiguration of everything

you loved about the South, with nothing you didn’t! The ethereal notion of a “New South”

is a national fantasy that perpetually situates the South and Southerners on a teleological

march towards modernity, while simultaneously representing the region as hopelessly

(and even comically) anachronistic.

My goal here is not to disavow the various constructions and productions of the

American South and Southern-ness, however, but instead to advocate for a dynamic,

unstable, ironic, unpredictable, and rhizomatic reconceptualization of contemporary

Southern belonging within a postmodern and feminist framework, with the hope of

illuminating the character of a peculiarly Southern way of knowing--a Southern

epistemology that eschews holism and origin in favor of partial perspectives and

temporal disjuncture.

Drawing primarily on the work of feminist theorists like Donna Haraway and

Patricia Hill Collins, I will illustrate the striking similarities between what I am calling a

Southern epistemology, and the incredible work that has been done in feminist

standpoint Theory, as well as theories of intersectionality; I will consider these theories,

along with my own personal experience and identity as a Southerner, so as to illuminate

the myriad similarities between questions of Feminist and Southern belonging and/or

alterity. With Haraway’s cyborg serving as the centrifugal metaphor in this piece, we

will be able to see just how much these feminist theories might benefit from a

technological reconceptualization. What follows is--put it clearly--a cyborgic

rapprochement of irony and social location that seeks to illuminate a non-monolithic

Southern epistemology. As Haraway (1991) describes it:

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg (1).

The irony for which Haraway is advocating is a provocative mechanism for combating the

feminist paradox of double consciousness--also known as “outsider within” paradigm 1

1 The approach suggested by the experiences of outsiders within is one where intellectuals learn to trust their own personal and cultural biographies as significant sources of knowledge. In contrast to approaches that require submerging these dimensions of self in the process of becoming an allegedly unbiased,

made famous by Patricia Hill Collins in her work on Black Feminist epistemologies.

Haraway’s vision of women in the integrated circuit is a sensual dystopia fraught with

contradiction, incongruence, and chimeric orientations that have long been seen to be a

part of women’s experience, but are just now being articulated in a way that seems

revolutionary at least. Still reeling from First-Wave Feminism’s well-intentioned, yet

none-the-less-totalizing legacy--an unintended consequence of First-Wave Feminism’s

appeal to a common language among women across the globe.

Out of this oversight emerges the critical rebuttal of Feminist Standpoint

theorists like P. H. Collins, who rightfully point out the hegemonic limits of a

predominantly white, American, and middle-class feminist movement, which was

essentially tone-deaf to the crescendo of ironic epistemes and intersecting identities

pouring out from the margins mainstream feminism. It is this postmodern turn towards

situated knowledges, partial perspectives, standpoint, and intersectionality that most

interests me and, I believe, is most salient for constructing a new (Southern)

epistemology--one that is indebted to the affective labor of generations of feminists--and

one that, I believe, is irrevocably feminist in its critical orientation(s).

It is important to make clear here that what I am describing is a personal feminist

epistemology, and one that is steeped in questions of space, place, and perspective. Given

that, I think it is important to acknowledge my own standpoint as both privileged

researcher and humble student. In the valley of these two positions, I have come to

objective social scientist, outsiders within bring these ways of knowing back into the research process. At its best, outsider within status seems to offer its occupants a powerful balance between the strengths of their sociological training and the offerings of their personal and cultural experiences. Neither is subordinated to the other (Collins, 1986, p. S29).

develop an epistemological approach that is admittedly and uncontroversially

autobiographical, indeed shaped by personal identity as a Southern, gay, white male born

to a working poor family. My personal feminist epistemology emerges out of the

amalgam of my personal as well as academic experiences; now, just as Collins predicted, I

find myself entangled within the permeable boundaries of inside and out--occupying an

ironic double consciousness as (in this case) both researcher and the researched; both

object and subject. This insistence on self-valuation is, in itself, a feminist provocation in

it’s refusal to embrace simple binaries of inside/outside and self/other.

Furthermore, it is imperative to make clear that, just as feminist epistemologies

and the experience(s) of women are not fixed, monolithic, or determinative--neither are

Southern epistemologies, identities, or experiences. Indeed, what it means to be

“Southern” or a “Southerner” has been fundamentally destabilized much in the same

manner that essentialist conceptions of “Woman” were challenged in the wake of

feminist movements. This is where Haraway’s cyborg ethics are particularly helpful for

articulating the perspectival and ultimately contingent nature of epistemology, when the

epistemological position is conceived (partly) as the throbbing nexus of race, class,

gender, language, nation, sexuality, creed, faith, ability, capacity, taste, sensibility, space,

place, identity and dis-identification, which locate these splintered subjectivities on

individual, interpersonal, and collective axes of affect that give rise to what Raymond

Williams, in The Long Revolution (1961), calls “structures of feeling,” which he defines as

“the meanings and values which are lived in works and relationships--and clarify the

processes of historical development through which these structures form and change

(319).”

Williams’ articulation of “structures of feeling” affords us a fantastic model for

considering alternative modes of collectivity and belonging structured not on the

smothering conditions of pre-determined categories of social identity, but instead

operates on a rubric of interpersonal and collective affinities that do not presume any

natural connection between individual, idiosyncrasy, or (outwardly-imposed) category of

social belonging/identity. This turn towards affinity and away from identity echoes the

character of larger feminist critiques of dichotomies and binarisms that offer the illusion

of choice in the same moment that they foreclose the ultimate possibilities of the hollow

choices they seem to offer. For those subjects who do not fit neatly (or at all) into the

conventional social categories they are offered, affinity seems to be a postmodern respite,

but it does not begin to bridge the gap between individual affective realities and

oft-traumatic popular fictions/mythologies that circulate within and throughout society

and culture in perpetuity.

This disconnect between affective reality and social location is at once original sin

and messianic savior; at once the site of identity and dis-identification--the necessary,

but not sufficient--condition of social existence. This unfortunate paradox of modern

social mis-identification does not deter Haraway; rather, she embraces the inherent

contradiction between social identity and the affective surpluses which escape it; she

considers these ironic and conflicting positions as a necessary (but perhaps not

sufficient) condition for reimagining epistemological orientations in the world of the

cyborg: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social

reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political

construction, a world­changing fiction (1991).” She then goes on to state­­with refreshing clarity­­her

inspiration for conceiving of a chimeric cartography of “fruitful couplings”­­

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. [...] By the late nineteenth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics (Ibid).

My intention is unpack the intersectional foundations of Haraway’s endearingly

dystopian landscape of cyborg affinities in order to envision a regionally-informed,

place-based, perspectival, and ironic epistemology that--while not monolithic--is still

constitutive of something that we might now begin to call Southern.

The work of feminist standpoint theory is foundational to my vision of a Southern

epistemology, and helps to emphasize the importance of place and positionality within

epistemological debates. By charting the various social positions of particular subjects,

we are perhaps in a better position to account for marginalized voices and perspectives

that might have otherwise been drowned out by the universalizing tendencies of modern

Western liberal popular democracy.

Theorizing standpoint can be particularly useful when analyzing the relationship

between regional and national identities, but before discussing the peculiar history of

the South in the United States, I’d like to first peer deeper into feminist constructions of

intersectionality and the insight it provides into the interwoven structures of

domination and oppression that pervade society. First, though, I’d like to expand on this

all-too-pervasive two-dimensional model of intersectionality, to offer a

multi-dimensional cosmic model of intersectionality instead--one which is finally able 2

account for the ways in which fragmented identities interact and influence each other.

A cosmic model of intersectionality is robust enough to replace the flat and

depthless world of identities and experiences that are confined to the graph paper world

of a two-dimensional intersectionality, where where intersections aren’t simply points

on a geometric plane, but a perpetual negotiation of risk, reward, desire, comfort,

affinity, and yes--even identity. A Southern epistemology reveres the theoretical work

already done by theorists of intersectionality, and Southern identity is a direct

beneficiary of this academic and affective labor. The South, both geographically as well as

demographically, epitomizes intersectionality within its history as a space of African and

Native American diaspora at the hand of imperialist powers that not exploited not only

labour and capital, but sexual pleasure and reproductive labour, as well. The South is

historically and in fact constituted by a multiplicity of cultures and bodies that lead to

complex, varied, and pluralistic identities and experiences.

My conception of a Southern epistemological position is one steeped in irony.

Certainly, the turn to postmodernism in feminist theory leaves room for irony in an

epistemological sense. DiPalma and Ferguson (2006), trace the benefits of utilizing this

2 What physical models and/or scientific analogies can we appropriate to better understand Intersectionality? By this I mean–are there more robust models for conceiving Intersectionality that exceed the parameters of longitude and latitude that so often dominate discourses of Intersectionality? It seems to me that the first step is to throw away a two­dimensional conception of intersectionality–to instead add the crucial Z­axis that gives Intersectionality–and life itself–profound depth. But not all intersections are created equal, and intersections themselves interact and affect each other, each of them with an individual weight that–just as it does on a cosmic scale–carries gravity, and it is this force which is responsible metaphorically for the dynamic and interactive nature of intersecting identities and various other structures of affinity that have become crucial to identity formation in the twenty­first century.

type of irony and counterpoint in an epistemological rapprochement of ideas that seem

incompatible or irreconcilable. The critical capacity to handle uncertainty and ambiguity

is vital in the postmodern arena, and irony appears to be the prevailing trope for doing

this.

Irony is also a revelatory lens through which individual subjects are often able to

vocalize the grotesque gap between subjective identity and representation in

mainstream media, popular discourse, and social relations. Ironic epistemes are

indispensable when envisioning a Southern epistemology, if perhaps only to deal with

hegemonic stereotypes that perpetuate the South as mythologically anachronistic,

irrevocably racist, and yet hopelessly chivalric and even romantic. Indeed the position of

the Southerner is split and splintered, yet making sense of this position ironically seems

to suture up the fissure that splits vision and position.

The troubled regional history of the South within the United States echoes

Haraway’s declaration that the cyborg has no need for origin stories or holisms, as it is

inherently partial, incomplete, and happily “illegitimate”--

Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not remember the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection­ they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential (1991).

The South shares a similar history as perpetually othered region of the U.S., which

historian David R. Jansson refers to, in his work on the American South, as a process of

“internal orientalization;” Jansson (2005) explains that,

This discourse consists of a tradition of representing the American South as fundamentally different from the rest of the United States, and an important

strand of this tradition involves construing ‘the South’ as a region where racism, violence, intolerance, poverty and a group of other negative characteristics reign. In contrast, ‘America’ is understood as standing for the opposite of these vices (265).

The South has been constructed historically and mythologically as essentially other and

backwards within the optimistic and revisionist historical narrative that the U.S.

perpetuates in order to expunge its hypocritical and often despicable histories, which,

contrary to popular perception--did not “originate” in the South. The South, as a

marginalized and highly differentiated part of the United States, shares a lot in common

with the ways of knowing of other marginalized populations or cultures, including of

course, the shared influences of feminist epistemologies and experiences.

It has been my objective here to lay a theoretical foundation for imagining the

structures of feeling that might make up a Southern epistemology. By understanding the

importance of place, position, and irony within the postmodern feminist epistemologies

Donna Haraway and her radical conception of cyborg as epistemology, we are able to open

up a space for conceiving of a bevy of new epistemological orientations social locations

that subvert conventional wisdom as such.

Bibliography

Collins, P. H. (1986). Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought. Social Problems, 33(6), S14–S32. doi:10.2307/800672

Collins, P. H. (1991). Black feminist thought : knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Dipalma, C. & Ferguson, K. E. (2006). Clearing ground and making connections: Modernism, postmodernism, feminism. In K. Davis, M. Evans, & J. Lorber (Eds.), Handbook of gender and women’s studies (pp. 127-145). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women : the reinvention of nature. New York (N.Y.): Routledge.

Williams, R. (1992). The long revolution. London: Hogarth Press.