Transhumanism, Mothers, and Replacism of the Body

 From Mary Harrington:

One of my core arguments in Feminism Against Progress, is that the story of the industrial age is one of enclosure. This is a dynamic that, at every step, “liberates” a store of captive value by dissolving what was previously ordered relationally, in a process the political economist Karl Polanyi calls “disembedding”. Once stripped of social governance, the now “liberated” land, resources, creatures, or people are subjected ever more nakedly to the pressures of the market, which delivers economic gains but at considerable, albeit frequently obscured, social cost.

Ivan Illich’s 1980 work Gender explored specifically the “disembedding” of men and women, via the destruction of socially-governed distinctions between the sexes. This process, in his view, is the key enabling condition for modernity, in that it allows homo economicus to emerge as our era’s aspirational ideal. (Read more.)