Science, Species and Subjectivity

Abstract

Animal experimentation in the name of scientific inquiry dates back to antiquity, excusing animal suffering as necessary to benefit human society and medical advancement. Science fiction narratives geared mainly to an adult audience have explored the ethical and social ramifications of experimentation and augmentation in the name of technological progress, giving rise to such figures as the cyborg, android or chimera. Donna Haraway (1991) has described the cyborg as a hybrid figure, disturbing traditionally-upheld boundaries between nature and technology, organic and machine. The cyborg, according to Haraway, is “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as of fiction […] Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs — creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted” (p. 149). Simultaneously evoking the promise of technological Utopia through augmentation and an anti-technology backlash, “cyborgs are a product of fears and desires that run deep within our cultural imaginary” (Balsamo 1996, p. 32). As products of the laboratory environment, experimental animals in fiction can be usefully understood as cyborg figures in two ways — as a “coupling” between an organic entity and a machine, or “as the identity of organisms embedded in a cybernetic information system” (p. 11).