Shulamith Firestone and the Meat Masks

The troubled feminist visionary never lost her gift for prophecy

I am privileged to teach an annual summer school on the philosophy of technology alongside two brilliant political scientists, Jon Askonas and Nathan Pinkoski. In one of these sessions, I quoted a coinage by pharma entrepreneur and trans activist Martine Rothblatt: “persona creatus”. It refers to Rothblatt’s hope, expressed in From Transgender to Transhuman, that through technology innovation humans will one day transcend our form and nature altogether, evolving from “homo sapiens” to a new species he calls “persona creatus”.

On this occasion one of the seminar participants had a background in ancient philology, which he drew on to note that “persona creatus” betrays more than it intends: he glossed it not as “creative person” but “begotten mask” or “meat mask”. It’s an unintentionally vivid characterisation of the Meat Lego paradigm, and paradox, that underpins the flagship transhumanist rights issue: gender identity.

Flesh, technology, and masks returned to my mind this week, as I revisited the opening chapter of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) - a flawed but never less than remarkable text. It remains one of the most influential works of the mid-century women’s movement, and set the ball rolling for modern radical feminism. It did the same, too, for radical feminism’s principal antagonist today: trans activism, and behind trans activism the burgeoning empire of Big Biotech that Rothblatt heralds with “persona creatus”, and Jennifer Bilek has recently decried in Transsexual Transgender Transhuman.

What is extraordinary about Firestone’s vision is that she responded more or less as it was happening to the shift from industrial to cyborg era: that is, the turn inward from technologising the world to technologising ourselves. For all its flaws, The Dialectic of Sex reveals someone profoundly insightful about the tech transition through which she was living, even if her interpretation of those insights was sometimes bizarre. And though she later developed schizophrenia and eventually died alone in a studio flat in New York, the details of Firestone’s later delusions suggest that, for all that it took a darkly tragic turn, the gift of prophecy never completely deserted her.