The chief point is that without an organizing dominance hierarchy, social order supposedly is seen to break down into individualistic, unproductive competition.

Asia and freed them on Cayo Santiago. Mter a period of social chaos, they organized themselves into six groups containing both sexes and ranging in size from three to '47 animals. The monkeys were allowed to range freely over the thirty-seven-acre island and to divide space and other resources with little outside interference. The first major study undertaken of them was of their sexual behaviour, including periodicity of oestrus, homosexual, autoerotic, and 'nonconfonnist' behaviour. Carpenter's conclusions noted that intragroup dominance by males was strongly correlated with sexual activity, and so presumably with evolutionary advantage. All the sexist interpretations with which we have become monotonously familiar were present in the analysis of the study, including such renderings of animal activities as, 'Homosexual females who play masculine roles attack females who play the feminine role prior to the formation of a female-female consort relation' (Carpenter, '964, p. 339). In harmony with the guiding notion of the ties of sex and dominance in the fundamental organization of the rhesus groups, Carpenter performed what on the surface is a very simple experiment, but one which represents the whole complex of layered explanation of the natural body politic from the physiological to the political. After watching the undisturbed group for one week as a control, he removed the 'alpha male' (the animal judged most dominant on the basis of priority access to food, sex, and so on) named Diablo, from his group. Carpenter then observed the remaining animals for one week, removed the number 2 male, waited another week, removed the number 3 male, waited, restored all three males to the group, and again observed the social behaviour. He noted that removal of Diablo resulted iIi immediate restriction of the territorial range of the group on the island relative to other groups. Social order was seriously disrupted. 'The group organization became more fluid and there was an increase in intra-group conflict and fights . .. After a marked disruption lasting three weeks, the group was suddenly restructured when the dominant males were released' (1964, p. 362). Social order was restored, and the group regained its prior favourable position relative to other groups. Several questions immediately arise. Why did Carpenter not use as a control the removal of other than dominant males from the group to test his organizing hypothesis about the source of social order? Literally, he removed the putative head from the collective animal body. What did this field experiment, this decapitation, mean to Carpenter? First, it must be examined on a physiological level. Carpenter relied on A Political Physiology of Dominance 17 biological concepts for understanding social bodies.

nd techniques of medical, educational, and industrial management

The functionalist disciplines underlay strong ideologies of social control

Josie seems notto have seen her world in terms of trading sex for 'privilege', but to Yerkes that economic link of physiology and politics seemed to have been scientifically confirmed to lie at the organic base of civilization

Mind would order and rule lower functions to create society.

t has always been a feature for the use of the chimpanzee as an "'l'erimental animal to shape it intelligently to specification instead of trying to preserve its natural characteristics. We have believed it impor-tant to conven the animal into as nearly ideal a subject for biological research as is practicable. And with this intent has been associated the hope that eventual success might serve as an effective demonstration of the possibility of re-creating man himself in the image of a generally acceptable ideal.

e come face to face with the necessity of a dialectical understanding of scientific labour in producing for us our knowledge of nature

social disciplines was the project of human engineering - that is, the project of design and management of human material for efficient, rational functioning in a scientifically ordered society.

the liberal theory of society (based on functionalism and hierarchical systems theories)

he biosocial sciences have not simply been sexist mirrors of our own social world. They have also been tools in the reproduction of that world, both in supplying legitimating ideologies and in enhancing material power.

he ironically named historical materialism based on reproduction

Through labour, we make ourselves individually and collectively in a constant interaction with all that has not yet been humanized. Neither our personal bodies nor our social bodies may be seen as natural, in the sense of existing outside the self-creating process called human labour. What we experience and theorize as nature and as culture are transformed by our work. All we touch and therefore know, including our organic and our social bodies, is made possible for us through labour.

capitalist ideology of culture against natur

she accepted that there are natural objects (bodies) separate from social relations

seeing technical control as a solution

the total control of now alienated bodies in a machine-determined future.

Firestone located the flaw in women's position in the body politic in our own bodies, in our subservience to the organic demands of reproduction. In that critical sense she accepted a historical materialism based on reproduction and lost the possibility for a feminist-socialist theory of the body politic that would not see our personal bodies as the ultimate enemy

epression of nature.

individual and political bodies to show the extraordinary patriarchal and authoritarian structure of our conceptions and experiences of bot

cultural repression

The body politic is in the first instance seen to be founded on natural individuals whose instincts must be con-quered to make possible the cultural group

by agreeing that lnature' is our enemy and that we must control our 'natural' bodies (by techniques given to us by biomedical science) at all costs to enter the hallowed kingdom of the cultural body politic as defmed by liberal (and radical) theorists of political economy, instead of by ourselves. This cultural body politic was clearly identified by Marx: the marketplace that remakes all things and people into commodities.

We have allowed the theory of the body politic to be split in such a way that natural knowledge is reincorporated covertly into techniques of social control instead of being transformed into sciences of liberation.

Women know very well that knowledge from the natural sciences has been used in the interests of our domination and not our liberation, birth control propagandists notwithstanding.

This anti-liberation core of knowledge and practice in our sciences is an important buttress of social control.'

The degree to which the principle of domination is deeply embedded in our natural sciences, especially in those disciplines that seek to explain social groups and behaviour, must not be underestimated.

domination, especially of domination based on differences seen as natural, given, inescapable, and therefore moral.

Without question, the modem evolutionary concept of a population, as the fundamental natural group, owes much to classical ideas of the body politic, which in tum are inextricably ioterwoven with the social relationships of production and reproduction.

imians, Cyborgs, and Women collects essays written from 1978 through 1989, a period of complicated political, cultural, and epistemological foment within the many feminisms which have appeared in the last decades.

this book treats constructions of nature as a crucial cultural process for people who need and hope to live in a world less riddled by the dominations of race, colonialism, class, gender, and sexuality.

A cyborg is a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine. But, cyborgs are compounded of special kinds of machines and special kinds of organisms appropriate to the late twentieth century. Cyborgs are post-Second World War hybrid entities made of, first, ourselves and other organic creatures in our unchosen 'high-technological' guise as information systems, texts, and ergonomically controlled labouring, desiring, and repr~­ducing systems. The second essential ingredient in cyborgs is machines 10 their guise, also, as communications systems, texts, and self-acting, ergono-mically designed apparatuses.

his book should be read as a cautionary tale about the evolution of bodies, politics, and stories. Above all, it is a book about the invention and reinvention of nature