Copula

Explores the conceptual schema underlying our understanding of reproductive technologies.

How will the ability to manipulate human reproduction change our social world and the relationship between the sexes? Taking an explicitly interdisciplinary approach to gender and reproductive technology, Robyn Ferrell examines this question in the light of feminist theories of sexual equality and sexual difference, arguing that technology itself can be seen as a kind of reproduction. Invoking a concept of reproduction that understands it as generic, Ferrell asserts that in any reproduction, something is produced of a kind that was there before and yet that is also new. Technology is therefore generically reproductive, since it produces new matter of the same kind. In addition to key figures in French feminism, Ferrell draws from psychoanalysis and contemporary continental thinkers ranging from Heidegger to Haraway.

“Copula presents a brave, exceedingly smart, original, and necessary argument, while engaging the big questions of life now facing us. The scholarship is extraordinary in its breadth and Ferrell returns to older arguments and makes them seem fresh and terribly pressing. Ferrell makes us realize how much the arguments about sexual difference matter, perhaps especially now.” — Elspeth Probyn, author of Blush: Faces of Shame

“Robyn Ferrell’s mastery of a rich and broad set of resources yields a stimulating text that continues a contemporary European tradition in social ontology, one that diagnoses the subtle interdependencies of metaphysics and social theory. This is done in a way so as to present both contemporary academic philosophy and feminist theory with significant challenges to some of their more precious premises. If Ferrell’s proposals on the metaphysically unique source of both modern technology and modern democracy are correct, for example, this would compel a reorientation of several versions of feminism and of the philosophy of technology.” — Mary Beth Mader, The University of Memphis

Robyn Ferrell is Associate Professor in Creative Writing in the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and the author of several books, including Genres of Philosophy and Passion in Theory: Conceptions of Freud and Lacan.