ABSTRACT
FemaleMan© and OncoMouseTM are both creatures of genetic technologies and, along with the modest witness, of writing technologies. Within specific instrumental- physical-narrative fields, and only in such located fields, even if the field domains are globally distributed, the nature of my three revamped figures is to be artifacts, tools, and substitutes. They are agents, in the double sense, for some worlds rather than others. Inside the stories where they circulate, they trouble kind and force a rethinking of kin. Gender, that is, the generic, is askew in the transgenic mouse and the oxymoronic hominid. They do not rest in the semantic coffins of finished categories but rise in the ambiguous hours to trouble the virginal, coherent, and natural sleepers. They visit Robert Boyle in his sanitized, nighttime, restricted, public spaces. Lively self-moving entities, they are undead and unsaved; they are profane. The transgenic mice and the four Js of the world inhabit an unfixed but not infinite material-semiotic field where possible lives are at stake. Russ’s Female Man was the four Js, a clone, four white women, genetically identical, living alternate histories, inhabiting different chronotopes, but meeting in a time warp. OncoMouse and its transgenic kin are composite organisms, tailored tools whose boundary crossing is like the FemaleMan’s. Both OncoMouse and the FemaleMan are unnatural; both force a revaluation of what may count as nature and artifact, of what histories are to be inhabited, by whom, and for whom.
