Content area
Full text
Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke. Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred. London: Zed Books, 2000.
Cosmodolphins is designed to destabilise the ruling narrative and its everyday effects, such as the problem many contemporary men have relating to those who are unlike themselves. As ecofeminists maintain, this masculine psychological conditioning is heavily implicated in the global ecological crisis and it inflames the major political struggles of our time-classism, racism, sexism, ageism, and speciesism. Thus, in the 21st century, the predicament facing thoughtful, middle-class, White men is:
How can those who are different from us-workers, women, natives, children, animals, rocks-also be equal to us?
Is there any way for us to relate to these "others" beyond controlling their "wild" natures?
Danish academics Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke have written a delightfully entertaining book, elucidating arguments from two decades of ecofeminist literature with techniques from cultural studies. This is not a new genre: The boundary between ecofeminism and cultural studies, particularly the French psychoanalytic approach known as ecriture feminine, has always been permeable. The French feminists they draw on are Cixous (1981), Irigaray (1985), and Kristeva (1984). They name Merchant (1980), Adams (1990), Warren (1990), and others among their ecofeminist antecedents, and Haraway's (1989) feminist reflections on science are a major influence, though sitting uneasily alongside the ecofeminist substance of the book.
In pursuing their project of "de-naturalising otherness," Bryld and Lykke focus on "the network of meanings circulating between Technology-Science-ModernityWhiteness-Masculinity" (p. 198). In particular, they trace the ways in which these hegemonic markers regulate the discourses of rocket science, dolphin studies, and astrology. Their research material ranges from interviews with practitioners in the three "iconic" fields to texts, particularly, phallocentric sci-fi novels. Their data gathering takes them to both the United States and former USSR-and the rise of astrology during the demise of the Soviet state is an interesting side theme of the book. The authors find that a common metonymic substitution occurs in the discourses of rocket science, dolphin studies, and astrology. The function of this displacement is to provide modern men with subconscious libidinal relief from acknowledgment of the mother's body and its fundamental role in producing the species. In Bryld and Lykke's words, each discourse supplies "disembodied origin stories that...