The Scarlet Letter | Season 2 |Episode 5 | Margrit Shildrick

In this mind-expanding episode you'll hear from Professor Margrit Shildrick — a feminist philosopher shaking up how we think about bodies, prosthetics, and what it means to be human. From heart transplants to microchimerism, she explores the messy, fascinating intersections of feminist theory, bioethics, and posthumanism. It's deep, it's weird, and it might just change how you think about yourself.

First published 2017.

The Scarlet Letter podcast is produced by the Feminist Legal Studies Group. This podcast features interviews with feminists connected to the law, discussing their life, work, and feminist perspectives. It's perfect for anyone passionate about feminist legal scholarship.

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Transcript | The Scarlet Letter | Season 2 |Episode 5 | Margrit Shildrick

Janice Richardson: [00:00:00] Good morning and welcome to this episode of Scarlet Letter, the monthly podcast of the Feminist Legal Studies Group at Monash University's Faculty of Law. Today, I'm joined by Margrit Shildrick. Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Stockholm University, who's interested in a number of philosophical issues with important implications in bioethics, prosthesis, and theories of the monstrous.

Welcome.

Margrit Shildrick: Thank you very much.

Janice Richardson: Perhaps you could start by telling me a little bit about what feminism means to you.

Margrit Shildrick: Oh, okay. What feminism means to me, certainly as an academic, is [00:01:00] really using feminist ways of thinking and feminist ideas to dig deeper into the issues that I'm interested in and that I think are really concerning.

It's not so much about looking at how women function in the world or what happens to women, although clearly there's questions of discrimination and oppression are also being addressed. But that's not my primary purpose. My primary interest is how to develop feminist theory and to use that in thinking about all sorts of areas that have been closed.

Two different ways of thinking, and feminist theory was one of the first ways, I think, that actually provided us with different ways of thinking.

Janice Richardson: So a different way of getting into philosophical issues that have an impact in everyday life. That's right, yeah. Is there a point when you began to identify as a feminist?

I, it's it's a really interesting question, and I [00:02:00] think, I probably first began to identify as a feminist very early on. I read, at one point you could be a feminist polymath because there were only three or four books around, and of course I read them all. I'm talking, way back into the late 60s.

Margrit Shildrick: But I also went to that very famous Oxford History Workshop where feminism wasn't really developed in the UK, where I'm from. And that was the first time that I actually thought to myself, it's not just about marching on the streets demanding our rights, there's much more to it than that. It is about how you understand the world, how you think about things, not just about, I want to change things, but change them within the system that already exists.

You could actually think about the system itself as being different. So that, that Oxford History Workshop was a very important mark for me. And I think at that point I probably I had begun to call myself a feminist and I've never stopped since. So that's really, I don't know, I think that's it. maybe 1970, something like that.

It [00:03:00] was very early.

Janice Richardson: Now, we've just heard you give a fantastic paper to our group. Could I ask you just to say something more about your research? Yes.

Margrit Shildrick: The paper that I have just been talking about was with the legal theory group, thinking through the implications of micro humorism in the ethical and judicial field.

But that's part of a much, much larger research project on prosthesis, which is about rethinking human embodiments through rethinking prosthesis, if you like. So people think of prosthesis as being exterior. usually artificial their add ons or their replacements. So you break an arm or a leg and you get a prosthetic arm or leg you have things added onto you.

But because I've been working for so many years in a project around heart transplantation, I began to think of prostheses as [00:04:00] not necessarily being either artificial or external, but also visceral and organic. So hearts, lungs, livers, anything you can transplant, of course, could count for me as a prosthesis.

So every time you replaced one organic organ with another organic organ, that would very much expand how you understood prosthesis. It was not it was not a traditional way of thinking about it at all. And from there I got into thinking about cells and The micro chimeric cells, which I should explain, are cells that don't identify by DNA with the main cellular body of that particular person.

So it's DNA from somewhere else, someone else, or some other could be animal even circulating within the same body and not merging remaining separate, but circulating. throughout the body. I'm thinking of those as prostheses [00:05:00] also that were circulating within the body because they play a part in maintaining health possibly fighting off pathogens There's a debate whether or not they cause any damage themselves, but one really big area of thought is that they are also restorative and helpful.

So they are augmenting the body in that sense. So the research I was doing around re embodiment was already thinking about how are we moving towards the post human. And of course, when you say that to people, they immediately think about robots and cyborgs and, things like that. I wanted to get away from just thinking that, which still remains to a large extent, but also to think much more clearly about the visceral prosthetic way in which we live our bodies.

And that has also tied in with my other major [00:06:00] area of research, which is critical disability studies, whereas, of course, people with disabilities very often will use prostheses and that's becoming more and more technical, so you get the link up between mechanical aids and the existing nerves.

So it's, it's a real crossover point. And I just thought the kind of way that we've been thinking about prosthesis, which comes out of, the experience of wars, basically civil war in America. initially, and then the two world wars is really quite dated. It was about restoring people.

And what I wanted to think about through the various organic and visceral prostheses is not about restoration. Not even about simple augmentation, but a sense of supplementing body where the supplement is an ambiguous thing that both takes over. and augments at the same time. So it's a very ambiguous, risky and beneficial thing at the same time.

[00:07:00] So that's the research I'm doing now, which I hope will result in a book. Which I'm supposed to be writing at this very moment.

Janice Richardson: Oh, sorry.

Margrit Shildrick: But I get sidelined very easily because it keeps developing in more and more interesting ways. And the ethical, juridical. element of that has been not really looked at all, and had struck me as being one of the areas I absolutely must think about.

Janice Richardson: That sounds fascinating. And, but when you talk about post human in that sort of way, One of the implications that people may think is what happens to thinking sexual difference? And the feminist issues around that. And you do have some really interesting feminist issues in the talk in which you talked about really a model in which you don't define the self through a sort of, How it's different from another but [00:08:00] think about it in a much messier way.

Do you want to say something about really that linkage between feminism and your work?

Margrit Shildrick: I think it's really interesting because the question of sexual difference has always been made more problematic by I suppose any kind of postmodernist thinking. And, it's always been a question of where does sexual difference come in if you're thinking about cyborgs, for example.

Which was something obviously Donna Haraway addressed, and Rosie Braidotti also has had that issue around where do you go with sexual difference if you're thinking in this way. And one of, one of the ways in which I think sexual difference. does really matter still is in terms of biological development, that there are real differences within the biological bodies which I would, relate to sexual difference, but not to gender.

And I think, although I suppose a lot of feminists have always made that distinction between sexual difference and gender, I think it's now coming [00:09:00] home to roost in a different way, that we actually have to look very seriously at biology. And the development of the fetus and the embryo, what is actually going on at that biological stage that produces sexual difference?

And how does that actually play out in terms of the interests that I have now, around things like women who have never been pregnant nevertheless carrying male chromosomes? Am I still all woman, or does that make me a sort of crossover? And I think these are questions that haven't been thought about yet, and will be, and need the input of biology, that we have to stop being suspicious about biology.

Certainly in my career, and lifetime even, the feminist suspicion of biology was there so strongly that men controlled women's bodies was almost like a mantra. And if men controlled women's bodies, then [00:10:00] it must be that biomedicine, biology, et cetera, et cetera, was oppressive and not telling us the truth.

And that has created, aside from people like Donna Haraway and Linda Burke I suppose Anfesta Starling, there's, there's not that many women who've actually been coming out of biology and telling you this is not how it works. And I think now we just need to get over suspicion of biology and start thinking about what do we have in common?

How do we think similar things, but through different things different starting points? And I think sexual difference is one of them that is really clear to me. So working around some of the questions I have with a neuroscientist has been really interesting. I wouldn't claim to understand everything that she tells me, but I get enough to think I wish I'd, I wish I'd been open to this before.

I wish I hadn't waited so long in order to be open to the biological [00:11:00] side of things. And I wish that would happen in all feminism now.

Janice Richardson: It's so interesting, actually, to hear about a feminist philosopher actually being involved in such interdisciplinary projects particularly with medics in this sort of way, and really altering the imaginary in certain ways, or challenging that imaginary.

That's the ambition.

Margrit Shildrick: It's certainly the ambition that you would want to alter the imaginary, but I think the experience of working on. On the heart transplant project, which is interdisciplinary itself and was actually brought into being by a cardiologist myself and a health scientist who I think it was public health even, started off interdisciplinary, grew and began to involve more and more people, has really opened my eyes to all sorts of things about how you can work together, which is an interesting thing in the first place, but also, What questions do you have in common, and whether [00:12:00] sexual difference is as important a difference as we think it is?

This has been a long term question, as starting with the oregari, did you get that wrong? And it's not about gender, but it is about sexual difference. So you get all sorts of interesting questions about transplanting organs between a man and a woman. What does it mean?

If you begin to see organ transplantation not as the replacement of faulty parts with spare parts, if you begin to take an ontological view of somehow this will alter your identity and your sense of self and your phenomenological experience of the world, what does it mean if you have organs that are from a different sex and Some people have several organs, or they may have the same organ replaced over time, because they do wear out.

You might have a couple of organs that come from, one from a male donor, one from a female donor. And, in terms of the experience that people [00:13:00] have, they are acutely concerned. about what this means to them, although generally still in gender stereotype terms. It's like they don't know the biology of it, but they definitely are worried on the gender stereotype and will, I don't know, claim all sorts of weird behavior that they never did before.

We had a man who suddenly said he he'd started liking the color pink. So he must have had the heart of a woman or a gay man. And he was absolutely convinced of this. He wasn't terribly upset by it. He was just convinced that this is, the genesis of a different interest in the color pink.

But pink used to be the color for boys anyway. It's historically located. There are all sorts of really interesting things go on, but the new biological science is now Genuinely looking at, does it make a difference even two or three years ago, the implication was that it didn't make any difference at all.

The sex [00:14:00] of the person that the heart came from the age made a little bit of difference but not a huge amount. So things like sex or race were completely discounted as being of interest. And now there's a lot of biological stuff about recovery rates overall improvement what happens to the immune system, which ties in with my interest in microchemerism about who are you actually importing into your body and what are the markers.

So sexual difference comes back in there and I think it's because of being a feminist I can think about it. Yes. Because I wanted to think about it before reading any of the biological stuff. So I think it's just, yeah, it gives you a platform to think about things in a different kind of way, starting in a different place.

Janice Richardson: I think that's an excellent way of describing what feminist philosophy can bring to such an important area. Yeah, I think that's certainly so for [00:15:00] me.

Yeah. That's absolutely fascinating, and I'd like to thank you very much for speaking to us today.