On Immunity : An Inoculation (9781555973278) by Eula Biss Read Free Book Online Page B

Inside, he darted through the stacks selecting picture books at random, while the question of whether or not I was the press continued to bother me. I understood it as a broader question of belonging. In my mind, I do not belong to the press even if my writing is published by the press. And if the opposite of the press is a poet, then I am both.
    My son returned with a book about a baby alien who gets lost on Earth where nobody speaks her language, a book about a bat who lives with a family of birds who do not hang upside down like she does, and a book about a monkey who is teased for walking on two legs instead of four. The wordplay in Gakky Two-Feet was very funny to my son, but he did not understand the central conflict. Why, he wondered, does it bother the other monkeys when Gakky walks on two feet? “They feel threatened by his difference,” I said. “What does threatened mean?” he asked.
    It took me some time to define threatened because I was looking back through the books. Belonging and not belonging is a common theme of children’s books, and maybe of childhood itself, but I was surprised that all these books were about the same thing. They were all about the problem of “us” and “them.” The bat does not really belong with the birds even though she lives with the birds, and the alien is not at home on Earth. In the end, the bat is reunited with her bat mother and the alien is rescued by her alien parents, but some questions remain. “How can we be so different and feel so much alike?” one of the birds asks the bat. “And how can we feel so different and be so much alike?” another bird wonders.
    Bats and birds may be of different biological classes, but they are both, as any child can see, flying things. Stellaluna , the book about the bat, allows for some confusion of categories, some disruption of boundaries. But “us” and “them” thinking insists on one belonging firmly to one category or another—it does not make room for ambiguous identities or outsider insiders. It does not allow for bat-bird alliances or resident aliens or monkeys who are in the process of evolving. And so the opposition between “us” and “them” becomes, as Wendell Berry warns, “the very opposition that threatens to destroy them both.”
    “I know you’re on my side,” an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call “troubling dualisms.” These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman.
    The metaphor of a “war” between mothers and doctors is sometimes used for conflicts over vaccination. Depending on who is employing the metaphor, the warring parties may be characterized as ignorant mothers and educated doctors, or intuitive mothers and intellectual doctors, or caring mothers and heartless doctors, or irrational mothers and rational doctors—sexist stereotypes abound.
    Rather than imagine a war in which we are ultimately fighting against ourselves, perhaps we can accept a world in which we are all irrational rationalists. We are bound, in this world, to both nature and technology. We are all “cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras,” as Haraway suggests in her feminist provocation “A Cyborg Manifesto.” She envisions a cyborg world “in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”
    All of us who have been vaccinated are cyborgs, the cyborg scholar Chris Hables Gray suggests. Our bodies have been programmed to respond to disease, and modified by technologically altered viruses. As a cyborg and a nursing mother, I join my