Angela Balzano, Per farla finita con la famiglia. Dall’aborto alle parentele postumane, Meltemi, 2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17549
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2038-3460
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Federica Timeto
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Angela Balzano, Doing Away with Family. From Abortion to Posthuman Kin, Meltemi, 2021
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Book Reviews
2022-03-26
2023-06-30
2022-03-26
2023-10-23
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TS
Federica Timeto
2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17549
213
Ca' Foscari University of Venice
2038-3460
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Angela Balzano, Doing Away with Family. From Abortion to Posthuman Kin, Meltemi, 2021
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17549/16397
12
Book Review                                                               213
   Angela Balzano
Per farla finita con la famiglia. Dall’aborto alle parentele postumane
[Doing Away with Family. From Abortion to Posthuman Kin], Milano,
Meltemi, 2021, pp. 200

Federica Timeto Ca' Foscari University of Venice

    Hoping for reproductive degrowth as a path to multispecies justice and
non-familistic unprecedented alliances, in her latest book Angela Balzano
reframes the Foucauldian analysis of biopower and biopolitics according
to a transfeminist, materialistic and ecosystemic approach, and carries on
her longstanding dialogue with such authors as Donna Haraway, Sarah
Franklin, Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, to name but a few. The
book adopts a situated interdisciplinary perspective that has the feminist
Studies of Science and Technology as its point of departure, and has a the-
oretical approach that sometimes adopts a pamphlet-like style. Here, fig-
urations, intended as located and transformative cartographies, entangle
theoretical focuses (identified in the book as “ritornelli speculativi” [spec-
ulative refrains] with contemporary embodied accounts (called Embedded
Living-withs - Convissuti radicati), which root them in the situated experi-
ence of Balzano as a transfeminist activist and academic and inside present
and historical Italian feminist struggles for reproductive justice.
    The book fills a considerable gap of much contemporary debate around
reproductive labor, which, as in the case of Social Reproduction Feminism
(Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser 2019), often still maintains a taken-for-
granted humanism due to its Marxist roots, and, at the same time, distances
itself from the winding technophobias of some eco-veg-feminist positions.
Reading this book, it becomes crystal clear that the flourishing of multi-
species lives is not incompatible with new technologies of re/production in
the abstract, it is rather incompatible with the capitalistic system that pri-
oritizes more profitable animal-machines compositions, colonizing “dis-
posable” lives for the sake of totalizing value extraction. At the same time,
distinguishing between primary and secondary goods is not necessary,
given that extractivism regards wheat as well as silicon and that both ex-
tractivism and our so-called “ecological footprint” are not the same for
everyone, which among other things makes the definition of Anthropocene
meaningless, unless we disaggregate its parts and confront it on a political
level.
    Can the contemporary re/productive system be turned against itself
and reconceived in playful, desiring and generative ways to counter its pre-
sent identitarian, xenophobic and necrophilic semantics and pragmatics?
Can this be done with re-spect for other-than-human lives, that is setting
aside the human exceptionalism that dictates the agenda of anthropocen-
tric solutions for imminent catastrophes, which coincidentally see the same
214                                                         Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
responsible actors as the only visible victims to whom tailored solutions are
addressed? After all, extinction is a classic fantasy of privileged humans,
for whom the worst-case scenario is something yet to come, whereas there
are catastrophes that clearly happened because of such privileged subjects
and still mark the memories and experiences of many, such as slavery, gen-
ocides, forced migrations and factory farming. “Homo sapiens was born
because other, not white and non-Western, humans have died and because
entire ecosystems have been adapted to his needs", writes Balzano without
ambiguity (p. 69, book reviewer’s translation).
    The book includes three chapters whose “musical” structure opens and
closes with two corresponding Intros and Outros. In the first chapter, go-
ing from the figuration of Trotula, the first renowned Medieval medical
practitioner, to the history of abortion in Italy, the transfeminist fight for
chemical abortion and its artistic tactics (the Sfertility Game, collectively
created by the Favolosa Coalizione and illustrated by Percy Bertolini) are
discussed to counter the fundamentalist constellation of the pro-life imag-
inary and political alliances. Balzano deals with science, in her own words,
as a “huge case of mansplaining” (p. 28, book reviewer’s translation), in
which female human and nonhuman bodies are signified by a plethora of
normative roles that, while regulating them, also instrumentalize their
value and reinforce their re/productive functions: think about the birth of
modern gynecology and its racist-sexist complicity with slavery, as well as
the capitalization of female animals inside the animal-industrial complex.
Here, the author also discusses the male hormonal contraception, experi-
mented from 1999 to 2012 at the Sant'Orsola Hospital in Bologna, but
whose trial has been discontinued notwithstanding the limited side effects
compared with female oral contraception.
    In the second chapter, the concept at the core of the book, the Cy-
borgfare, i.e. the automatized biocapitalistic regime that succeeds to the
workfare – without actually replacing it – is introduced by means of a trans-
species posthuman family of figurations that goes from ectogenesis to
cloned and genetically improved animals (the well-known Dolly the sheep
and the lesser-known Rosita, the cow producing super-proteic milk),
through the HeLa cells expropriated from the body of Henrietta Lacks
and, eventually, the social robots as a blatant example of contemporary
feminized labor. Always complexifying her arguments, Balzano wonders
whether what Herzig and Subramanian (2017) call “life in the age of bio-
everything”, the present time in which biotechnologies value everybody all
the time (cognitive labor included, which is never disembodied), only ter-
ritorializes our desires without escape.
    However, Balzano’s lucid reasoning never leads her to refuse such bio-
technologies per se and further problematizes how different (never merely
additive) technosocial compositions must always take into account the dif-
ferent partialities that are configured together. Thus, which different com-
positions they can make happen, depending on the embodied actors and
Book Review                                                               215
the networks they are imbricated into. This is clearly explained through an
apparently “futuristic” (although already technically implementable) ex-
ample such as ectogenesis, that is the growth of a foetus outside of the
uterus, which could potentially be employed either for heteronormative
pro-life reasons or for transfeminist liberatory ones, although undoubtedly
the current socio-economic conditions do not seem to privilege any of the
minority scenarios that Balzano wishes for.
    The last chapter, containing the proposal of the author for re/produc-
tive degrowth, centers around posthuman trans-species kinships, going
back to the much divulged and misinterpreted slogan “Make Kin not Ba-
bies” by Donna Haraway (2016) and situating it, among other examples,
in the geopolitical routes of outsourced parenting and migrating minors
travelling alone. Rephrasing Paul Preciado against catholic nationalism,
Balzano intones the slogan "closed legs, open harbors" as a way to reclaim
a “vulvar” autonomous space of pleasure, desire and – why not – dysfunc-
tionality, that is strongly political (so different, for example, from the one
longed for by Patricia MacCormack, 2020, who appeals to a vulvar princi-
ple which is detached from actual women’s bodies) and subtracted from
the all-pervading power of capital. A further anti-dualistic corrective of the
presumed return of Haraway to earth is then offered when Balzano differ-
entiates the latter’s chthonic and compostist vision of Gaia from the hy-
pothesis of James Lovelock: "Haraway is not Lovelock, she does not forget
that feminist techno-science has a lot to learn from the knowledge of the
earth" (p. 131, book reviewer’s translation). This goes hand in hand with
never taking the advancements of technoscience for granted, but always
problematizing the social norms that orient them. Let us consider the case
of gene editing of CRISPR-Cas 9, a relatively inexpensive technique that
can be employed with “corrective” functions and that could be considered
a biomimetic technology, given that it is already used by bacteria, working
as a kind of immune system. What are the social norms that such technique
supports? Who is funding these studies? For whom? Do the goals of the
resulting assemblages pursue a sympoietic a-hierarchial becoming-with, or
the existing hierarchies of the living? By working with “nature”, biomim-
icry risks orienting its generative “pluripotentiality” and emerging pro-
cesses towards the privatization of specific forms of life incorporating it
into the economic realm and further extending the colonization of zoe
(Johnson and Goldstein 2015). On the contrary, what posthuman kinships
require is taking care of and composting with different and proliferating
assemblages like those that the Diatoms, the last figuration that Balzano
introduces, create: microalgae actually working as chthonic goddesses, in-
visible breathing Amazons travelling across borders being nurtured by and
nurturing multiple ecosystems, that are shared among many dimensions,
spaces and agents.
    This book talks about technosocial, naturecultural assemblages but also
216                                                            Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
works like an assemblage itself, where several writing styles and heteroge-
neous subjectivities are brought together in a way that gives space to dif-
ferences while making them resonate the one with the other in “melodic
landscapes”: here, plural voices, human or not, answer the questions that
the author alone cannot respond to, nor would she claim the right to. Self-
determination is most often a privilege, reproduction is not the same for
everyone, reproductive technologies are not accessible to everyone every-
where in the same way: the explicit choice of a feminist standpoint that
overtly criticizes universality by dismantling the disembodied truths of sci-
ence and its narratives, but at the same time never opts for relativism as the
alternative, continuously makes it clear that no technology exists in a void,
so no technology can be discussed without considering the network of
practices and apparatuses in which its representations and imaginaries are
embedded. At the same time, no body, not even the one incorporating the
authorial voice, can speak in the singular and always requires to be located
in relational webs crosscutting the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, ability
and species, which makes it impossible to yield to both utopian and dysto-
pian scenarios.
    The book has the merit of combining the theoretical and the empirical
as in the more fruitful tradition of feminist STSs, whose also borrows the
self-reflexive approach. It does not only problematize the current applica-
tions of technoscience that look for the extraction of lively capital through
numerous case studies and with a strong theoretical backing; it also has the
merit of supporting the plea for a truly liberated and ecosystemic techno-
science, one that is eventually accessible and usable beyond the privilege
of a certain kind of human being and possibly oriented to the well-being
and flourishing of all lives: "We can connect to the network or to the earth,
we do not have to choose" (p. 22, book reviewer’s translation), writes Bal-
zano: what we should try to avoid is the language of management and ra-
ther adopt one of respons-ability that puts forth our involvement in others’
lives as well as our constitutive co-dependency. Our entangled partialities
and vulnerabilities are a condition of possibility, not a lack thereof.

References
Arruzza, C., Bhattacharya, T. and Fraser, N. (2019) Feminism for the 99%. A Man-
       ifesto, London, Verso.
Johnson, E. R. and Goldstein, J. (2015) Biomimetic Futures: Life, Death, and the
       Enclosure of a More-than-Human Intellect, in “Annals of the Association of
       American Geographers”, 105 (2), pp. 387-396.
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble, Durham, Duke University Press.
Herzig, R. and Subramaniam, B. (2017) Labor in the Age of “Bio- Everything”, in
       “Radical History Review”, 127, pp. 103-124.
Book Review                                                               217
MacCormack, P. (2020) The Ahuman Manifesto. Activism for the End of the An-
     thropocene, New York, Bloomsbury.

                                    ***
    Silvia Cervia
Genere e scienza come costruzione sociale. Il ruolo delle istituzioni nello
sviluppo della ricerca [Gender and Science as a Social Construction. The
role of institutions in research development], Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2018,
pp. 216

Ilenia Picardi University of Naples Federico II

    The gender issue, a topic widely addressed in feminist science studies
in previous decades, has also recently emerged in the public sphere and as
a target for institutional policies in academic and research environments.
One reason for this emerging attention involves the European Union’s
(EU’s) incentives for universities to address the underrepresentation of
women in research and innovation and to adopt specific gender equality
plans and strategies. The book Genere e Scienza come costruzione sociale by
Silvia Cervia retraces the process of the progressive definition of the issue
as a social construct, specifying the role that feminist reflection and activ-
ism played in this process while revealing its hidden pitfalls. The theme is
highly relevant because, as the author points out, gender and science con-
stitute a paradigmatic arena for exploring the process of building scientific
knowledge and its meanings.
    The volume explores the vast research literature about female partici-
pation in science in the arduous attempt to reconstruct a taxonomy of con-
cepts that, as highlighted in the analysis carried out in the initial chapters
of the book, coexists in a multiplicity of interpretative perspectives. This
work reconsiders different theoretical views in the sociology of science,
such as Merton’s normative system of science, the sociology of scientific
knowledge, the empirical programme of relativism (Collins 1985; Collins
and Pinch 1993), laboratory studies (Latour 1997; Knorr Cetina 1995), and
the post-academic science (Ziman 2000), looking for traces of the gender
issue and any points of similarity (or disagreement) with the feminist re-
flection on the relationship between gender and science. In this excursus,
the author focuses in particular on the distinction between elements that
are external and internal to science that contribute to gender segregation.
External elements refer to forms of (self or hetero) exclusion of women
deriving from the organizational functioning of science and its practices,
while internal elements correspond to material (objects of investigation)
