Introduction

Metaphor as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

T.L. Cowan

University of Toronto
tl.cowan@utoronto.ca

Jas Rault

University of Toronto
jas.rault@utoronto.ca

Abstract

Metaphors are critical sites of analysis for feminist scholars of science and technology because of what they both conceal and divulge about the conditions of their historical emergence and the persistence of those conditions. As researchers and editors, we find ourselves oriented to work that takes up the task of contesting uncontested metaphors, considering how metaphor “invades” (Tuck & Yang 2012, 3) and evacuates meaning. This Special Section carries on the dynamic practice in feminist STS of taking the work, and ambivalent potentiality, of metaphor seriously. In this Introduction, we draw together scholarship that informs what we identify as the "metaphor-work" of feminist STS—the work of allegory, myth, metaphor, figurative and associative discourse, and their analysis—as central to the methods by which we make and remake meanings that matter to feminist technocultures. Throughout the metaphor-work collected here, the contributors propose that paradigm change comes through the collective refusal of some metaphors, through the re-evaluation of others, and the introduction of new metaphorical frames and figures to reorient our work.

Keywords

feminist methods; metaphors; metaphor-work; metaphor refusal; metaphor as paradigm; anti-colonial technoculture

We need metaphors! Metaphors offer an (entwined material and imagined) future that has not arrived and the future we live and have already lived through (McKittrick, 2021).

Metaphors are critical sites of analysis for feminist scholars of science and technology because of what they both conceal and divulge about the conditions of their historical emergence and the persistence of those conditions. So frequently the metaphors we choose reveal our hand, reveal whether we choose to maintain the status quo, or to shake things up. As many feminists know from experience, there are few quicker routes to becoming the least popular person in a room than to insist on the literalness of a concept that others want to insist is simply a turn of phrase, to draw attention to what or how a particular metaphor means, what the metaphor drags in with it. Writing about what gets dragged into discourses of immigration and migration with metaphors such as “pests” and “invasive others,” Bridget Anderson observes that metaphors “are at their most effective when they are surreptitious and uncontested, not when they are applauded or called out, but when they pass unremarked into our language” (2017, 14). Feminists tend to remark and contest: what logics do we reproduce when we describe that exciting new research with the colonial metaphors of “pioneering” or “breaking new frontiers,” or describe research that is taking impressive risks as an example of “wild West” thinking? Is “dissemination” always the best word we can think of to explain the circulation and communication of ideas, or can we find a metaphor slightly less associated with semen as the seed(s) of knowledge? When we use “dark” to describe a bleak or violent period of history, or “shady” in reference to some suspicious practices, what cultural resonances are we harnessing? When we refer to work that needs revising as “awkward,” “weak,” “unrefined,” or “poor” as opposed to “graceful,” “strong,” “elegant,” or “rich” for work that strikes us as particularly excellent, what kinds of ableist and classist norms are we internalizing and passing along?

To pose these questions of ourselves and others is a signature feminist killjoy move (Ahmed 2010). In fact, is it not a feminist rite of passage to be hazed by the jeering taunt, “It’s just a figure of speech”? While feminists’ attention to metaphor, other figures of speech, visual signifiers, or turns of phrase including jokes, pronouns, names of buildings, “men at work” and bathroom signs might make us unpopular (humorless and uncollegial) with our non-feminist counterparts, there are few things as thrilling, are there not, than to be present when another feminist really goes for it against a troubling metaphor? Or to be that feminist going off, finally unable to take for one more second that metaphor or joke, and to see the appreciative recognition of the one or two others in the room who are right there with you? For feminist STS scholars, metaphors can be bonding, galvanizing, and polarizing. We love them and we leave them.

Why Metaphor? Why Not Metaphor?

For us, one of the most influential and galvanizing reflections on metaphor comes from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in their essay “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (2012). In it, they explain, “When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation” (3). The metaphorization of decolonization replaces one thing —“the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (21)—with another thing —“other civil and human rights-based social justice projects” (2). This metaphorization disappears Indigenous priorities and recenters the priorities, well-being, futures, innocence, and good intentions of white settlers. Living and working in Canada, as we do, means being bombarded with the invitation to metaphorize decolonization, to participate in and normalize the violences of settler colonialism all while celebrating Canada’s successes and global leadership in “human rights” (Razack, Smith, and Thobani 2010; Dryden and Lenon 2015). Every level of government, as well as most academic and arts events, make some kind of land acknowledgment and regularly claim to be decolonizing this or that topic, all while federal and provincial governments fund, and police enforce, land theft, resource extraction and processing, pollution and infrastructural divestment in Indigenous territories and communities. In Canada, public discourse compulsively and compulsorily performs what Audra Simpson has called “the ruse of consent”: the grand deception and collective delusion, foundational to settler colonial well-being, “that Indigenous peoples had all things been equal would have consented to have things taken, things stolen from them” (Simpson 2017, 12). The hallucinatory daily experience of having colonialism and Indigenous Peoples “recognized” by settler structures of governance, arts, culture, and academia, in order to continue the projects and violences of settler colonialism through the same or sometimes updated tactics (Coulthard 2014), makes the brutal equivocations of metaphor viscerally pressing. Given the urgency and high stakes of metaphor, this Special Section brings together scholars thinking about what metaphor might kill and what it might create.

Metaphor has the power to materialize and dematerialize. As researchers and editors, we find ourselves oriented to work that takes up the task of contesting uncontested metaphors, considering how metaphor “invades” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 3) and evacuates meaning, political and strategic specificity. We are invested in attending to how metaphor can casually recenter and glorify whiteness, hetero-cis-ness, hyper-ablebodiedness and hyber-ablemindedness, natalist, masculinist, and monied-class dominant cultural norms and biases, and effortlessly reproduce ongoing legacies of injustice and violence. Undoubtedly, there are other metaphoric framings that need to be returned to their literal sense. As Max Liboiron argues in Pollution is Colonialism, “Pollution, scientific ways to know pollution, and actions to mitigate pollution are not examples of, symptoms or metaphors for, or unintentional by-products of colonialism, but rather are essential parts of the interlocking logics (brain), mechanisms (hands and teeth), and structures (heart and bones) of colonialism that allow colonialism to produce and reproduce its effects in Canada, the United States, and beyond” (2021, 15–16). Liboiron’s point—that there is no other way to understand pollution than as ongoing enactments of colonial occupation, destruction, dispossession, and toxic lack of accountability—calls us to refuse the figurative, dematerializing pull of metaphor. Keavy Martin notes that “metaphor hovers in the middle of ‘is’ and ‘is not’: “The metaphorical ‘is’ at once signifies ‘is not’ and ‘is like’’’ (Ricoeur quoted in Martin 2022, 15). When we make something figurative, we let it off the hook of “is” by counterbalancing it with metaphor’s shrug: well, it actually is not. Thus, the power of metaphor goes both ways—it avows and disavows, simultaneously confirms and denies.

This Special Section carries on the dynamic practice in feminist STS of taking the work, and ambivalent potentiality, of metaphor seriously. Evelyn Fox Keller’s research on “the traffic in normal scientific research between metaphors and machines, between software and hardware, between language and science” (Keller 1995, x) has been influential in establishing this practice. In her collection of lectures given at the Critical Theory Institute in 1993, Keller remarked that “a great deal more needs to be done to sort out the complex lines of influence and interactions of cultural norms, metaphor, and technical development” (xiv). And over the past thirty years, feminist scholars of technoscience have indeed done a great deal more. In “Moored Metamorphosis: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies,” Banu Subramaniam draws attention to the substantial “body of work [which] argues that metaphors and images are not harmless products of science but instead are constitutive of science” (2009, 958). And in this essay, Subramaniam memorably adds to this body of work, deftly unpacking and repacking the metaphor of the leaky "pipeline"—the most relentless metaphor used to explain the lack of women and people of color in the sciences (964). Rather than “pouring more women and students of color” into the pipeline, Subramaniam offers a feminist STS analysis so that “we might describe the pipe as one that contains, constrains, limits and cuts off the oxygen of the travelers within… [and] we might start rooting for the leaks” (964). When we see the pipe rather than the leaks as the problem, this same metaphor can be used for very different purposes.

Finding and following a troubling metaphor is a method by which feminist STS proposes new solutions to persistent problems. Taking on the question “Should feminists clone?” Deboleena Roy notes that “the idea of cloning can produce several discomforts for feminists” in part because cloning is particularly prone to metaphorical use (2018, 135). Rather than sidestepping this discomfort, and grounded in the solid feminist STS understanding that “metaphors lead to paradigm change” (136), Roy fleshes out the steps of genetic subcloning into a new feminist method, the five-part “Sub/FEM/cloning” process: “(1) isolate your dilemma; (2) ligate the dilemma to vectors of figuration; (3) transform the dilemma; (4) select and analyze new connections; and (5) collect your reconfigured dilemma” (139). In her approach to metaphor, Roy demonstrates her Sub/FEM/cloning method, isolating, transforming, and reconfiguring the dilemma of subcloning into a more nuanced metaphor and shifted paradigm for doing molecular feminism within a biology lab and well beyond. In the “technocultural imagination” (Balsamo 2011) of feminist STS, metaphor can be both meaning and method.

Metaphor-Work

Throughout the metaphor-work collected in this Special Section, the contributors propose that paradigm change comes through the collective refusal of some metaphors, the re-evaluation of others, and the introduction of new metaphorical frames and figures to reorient our work. Contributors approach the concept of metaphor capaciously: the myth of Daphne and Apollo in epigenetics (Kenney); “virtual poetics” as metaphor for Black artistic expression (McCartha); “intactness” in colonial environmental sciences (Blacker); the technoculutral genealogies and crip activism of the “canary in the coal mine” (Jaworski); queered digital models of viral transmission (McKinney and Cifor); trans- crip “careful slugs” in computer science (Britton and Pritchard); “tunneling” in networked technologies (Llamas-Rodriguez); “troubleshooting” in STS pedagogies (Wu); nature in feminist technologies of gathering (Paredes); the metaphor of the “Vitruvian nurse” in working practice (Smith and Willis); and the economic weaponization of fruit trees in tenancy and economic oppression (Cruse). The essays collected here work to do justice to the urgency and innovation that metaphor and its companion figurations bring to feminist STS today.

As editors, we are less interested in parsing or disciplining the differences between metaphor and metonymy, synecdoche, figurative language, myth, or allegory than we are in work steeped in the material histories, consequences, and potentialities of what Martha Kenney, in this volume, calls “the metaphoric tissue of technoscience.” This is a tissue that connects feminist STS to bodies of scholarship that both define STS and to those that may not always be understood as central to the field, but that inform the editorial choices we made and the conversations we hope this Special Section opens into. In this introduction, we gesture to some of the scholarly conversations within and beyond STS that orient our understandings of metaphor-work—including the work of allegory, myth, metaphor, and other forms of figurative and associative discourse, and their analysis—as central to the methods by which we make and remake meanings that matter to feminist technocultures.

The core questions at the root of this Special Section are, Which metaphors are at work? And how do these metaphors work? In AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag explains that “saying a thing is or is like something-it-is-not is a mental operation as old as philosophy and poetry, and the spawning ground of most kinds of understanding, including scientific understanding, and expressiveness” (1990, 93). Metaphor shapes us and while “one cannot think without metaphors…[,] that does not mean there aren’t some metaphors we might well abstain from or try to retire” (93). Just as there are some metaphors we need to expel from our ways of framing technocultural existences and relationships, we also see that new metaphors are needed to help us frame our experiences, our designs, practices, innovations, inventions, reimaginings, and emergent expressive cultures. Experimenting with new metaphors to communicate our ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic commitments is just as important as contesting old ones. Indeed, metaphor can offer a way of working, a method for naming, examining, offering relational paradigms for understanding the knowledges, priorities, and lives that are so regularly and continuously instrumentalized and then discarded or rendered impossible, expendable, and invisible, within technoscientific research and its cultures.

Considering the centrality of metaphor to feminist STS, we likely do not need to convince readers of Catalyst that metaphors matter. But perhaps it is useful to consider how metaphors (are) matter. Mel Y. Chen’s Animacy: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, which moves across cognitive and anthropological linguistics, helps us to understand that while language matters, language is not enough: “Words more than signify; they affect and effect. Whether read or heard, they complexly pulse through bodies (live or dead), rendering their effects in feeling and active response. They are a first level of animation, one in which we deeply linguistic creatures attached to our own language are caught, but not the last. Indeed, language is but one discourse among many in a cacophony of anti-, re-, and mis-coordinations between objects, things, and beings” (2012, 52). We recall Karen Barad’s similar sentiment in Meeting the Universe Halfway to move beyond representationalism in the attention we pay to scientific discourses. Taking metaphor seriously in technoculture is not to reinforce the belief that language means everything, nor to reproduce a representationalist approach to knowing and being. Rather, it allows us to focus on the pitfalls we encounter when we attempt to “turn everything (including material bodies) into words” and to describe phenomena from “above or outside the world” (Barad 2007, 133). To pay attention to metaphor is to be concerned with and contest the “unexamined habits of mind” and beliefs that continue to have “excessive power” (133) over our capacities to at once form, and expand beyond, our current consensual realities.

Cree and Métis filmmaker and theorist Loretta Todd (2005) examines some settler colonial habits of mind by drawing attention to the foundational metaphor, in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” that structures Western philosophy, science, aesthetics, and culture. Drawing on D’arcy Rheault’s Anishinaabe Mino-Bimaadiziwin (The Way of a Good Life), Todd explains, “Anishinaabe tradition is…in contrast to a subject/object metaphysics or the geography—cultural, psychological, philosophical—of the Cave. It is not a matter of coming out of into, or of finding enlightenment. We are already living in a universe that is alive not made of shadows or illusions.…And we are about relationships. And light is alive and shadow is not dead” (2005, 118–19). Todd is not suggesting that we need new metaphors to understand Indigenous aesthetics, or filmmaking—that universe and those relationships are already alive and already exist. Rather, she offers a critical take on the enlightenment metaphors that de-animate some objects, things, beings. Todd quips, “Look, I’m not suggesting that Western philosophy is all Plato, Plato, Plato, Cave, Cave, Cave....But as a foundational myth, it is preeminent in the West” (114). This Greek myth, built on the out-of-darkness-into-light metaphor, creates and continuously draws us into a European philosophical vision and version of a white human-centric world. Where a metaphor comes from matters because metaphor both reflects and materializes the worlds we can know. In this way, metaphor can shift the grounds, waters, skies of our scholarship, from the deathly and deadly stolen geographies of settler colonial heteropatriarchy towards the living and enlivening enmeshed relational grounds, waters, skies that so much of the best work (in feminist STS and beyond) already comes from and builds. The most compelling and useful metaphors are those that bear the weight of what they mean so they might come to mean again and again.

Legacies and Extensions

Siri is not a woman but an idea of a woman...Technologies that are gendered as women are not extensions of women under patriarchy; they are, in fact, extensions of men (Sharma, 2022).

Donna Haraway’s feminist cyborg—perhaps the most enduring, famous, and famously-contested metaphor in feminist STS—“has no origin story in the Western sense” (1991, 151). Theorizing against the logic of foundational myths, Haraway devises a metaphor for a new, late twentieth-century feminist consciousness: “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” (151–52). The metaphor of the cyborg offers both a provocative analysis and a method, a way of working out a new course for feminist scholars and activists to engage, rather than claim innocent separation from, the toxic mix and muck of the sciences, technologies, and capitalisms of white supremacist heteropatriarchal militarism for a start. In an interview published shortly after this manifesto had become “a cult text,” Haraway reconsiders her use of metaphors, describing them as “descriptive technologies” that enable “a kind of science-fictional move of imagining possible worlds” (Penley, Ross, and Haraway 1990, 8, 10). Thanks to women of color and Chicana feminists, such as Paula Moya (1996) who immediately took up the colonial heritage at work in some of her metaphors, Haraway needed to grapple with the “cultural imperialism” she mobilized in her efforts to imagine and articulate antiracist feminist methods and worlds: “There’s also the problem, of course, of having inherited a particular set of descriptive technologies as a Eurocentric and Euro-American person. How do I then act the bricoleur that we’ve all learned to be in various ways, without being a colonizer; picking up a trickster figure, for example, out of Native American stories? How do you avoid the cultural imperialism, or the orientalizing move of sidestepping your own descriptive technologies and bringing in something to solve your problems?” (Penley, Ross, and Haraway 1990, 10). To paraphrase Dionne Brand (1990), no metaphor is neutral. Like all technologies, metaphors inherit the worldviews, legacies, values, and problems of those who make them, but trying to escape those inheritances by picking up something new, turning it into a metaphor for your own purposes by ignoring (or instrumentalizing) the cultural significance, material contexts, or sacredness of that new figure or figuration reproduces colonial compulsions to dispossession, to entitlement thinking. This Special Section considers how metaphor might solve some of our problems while creating others; and, moreover, how our metaphors themselves have their own problems, or are actually part of the problem.

The problems named, solved, and created by Haraway’s metaphors have been generative for feminist STS. Building on and against Haraway’s cyborg—and her legendary declaration, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (1991, 181) —micha cárdenas “stitch[es] together the image of an android goddess from the experiences and concerns of trans women of color” (2018, 26). Thinking of metaphor as tool, and tool as metaphor, cárdenas considers Audre Lorde’s anthemic, “‘the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house,’ [which] fram[es] the question of tools through a metaphor to slave rebellions in a way that would discourage scholars from using tools created by oppressive systems” (2018, 27). Mobilizing metaphor as method, cárdenas brings together Lorde’s and Haraway’s feminist epistemologies, and fashions the android goddess as an assemblaged, collective entity who “knows that she is made by the master’s tools, yet she still seeks to resist the master” (2018, 30). One of the biggest problems of Haraway’s cyborg metaphor is the way it has been taken up by fans to simplify Haraway’s extended and extensive analysis to generalize the metaphor, abstract it, and thereby delink it from women of color feminism in favor of a universalized (default white) version of women-as-cyborg. Developing her own metaphor, cárdenas moves with it, elaborating, “androids cannot biologically reproduce, and neither can many trans women, but our code can self-replicate infinitely. Learning from examples seen in science fiction, an android is a figure of rebellion, deemed less than human but striving to be more than human…a figure of awakening to consciousness of oppression and the necessity for resistance to fascism and colonialism” (2018, 26, 36). Grappling with the material histories and consequences of metaphors allow us not only to clap back against metaphors that oppress, but also to signal boost new metaphors, to performatively emancipate ourselves, taking on new epistemological shapes, or manifesting the knowledges that dominant epistemologies and sign systems have long undermined and attempted to destroy.

In Dear Science, Katherine McKittrick asks us to “sit with metaphor,” so that we can “take seriously how metaphors are necessarily illuminating, and are indeed structured by and through, the complex groundedness of black life” (2021, 10). Tracing the ways that Black people, expressive cultures, geographies, selfhoods, are “reduced to metaphor, analogy, trope, and symbol,” McKittrick urges us to “reckon with the materiality of metaphors” (10). This is sitting with metaphors long and hard enough to ground their material histories, staying with the Black life they come from and futures they have wanted to efface, to render “metaphorically unliving…preconceptualized as dead and dying” (11). Thus, McKittrick’s address to science asks scientists and STS to reckon with metaphor not only to reveal the conditions and consequences of this racist trope or that, but also to take seriously the Black life that metaphor enlivens or annihilates. As McKittrick exclaims,

this is not a request to abandon metaphors. We need metaphors! Metaphors offer an (entwined material and imagined) future that has not arrived and the future we live and have already lived through….Metaphors function to radically map existing useable (entwined material and imagined) sites of struggle and liberation and joy! Metaphors move us. Metaphors are not just metaphoric, though. They are concretized. This means—if we believe the stories we tell and share—that the metaphoric devices we use to think through black life are signaling practices of liberation (tangible, theoretical, imaginary) that are otherwise-possible and already here (and over there). (11–12)

Sitting with and following the materiality of metaphor as an analytic framework is not only a critical move, but a method of working through lives and worlds and lifeworlds that are not only “otherwise-possible” but “already here.” That is, McKittrick’s Dear Science is a exhortation to metaphor, not only to new ways of knowing and being and relating but also towards an articulation and apprehension of the knowings and beings and relations that ground so many Black, Indigenous, anti-racist, and anti-colonial trans- feminist and queer and crip realities/worlds already.

This Special Section is energized by research on and with metaphors, rooted in their genealogies and materialities, and invested in their potential to reorient our critical attentions and perceptions beyond the limits of habitual academic “descriptive technologies” (Penley, Ross, and Haraway 1990, 10). Beth Coleman, for example, models such work by thinking through race as a complex technolocultural metaphor: “the metaphor of the levered mechanism, with its denotation of functionality as opposed to intrinsic element, may be applied to instantiations of race….Neither ignoring the history of slavery nor turning a blind eye to its legacy, a rigorous conception of race suggests that agency is possible within repressive systems and that this agency often renegotiates the tools of mastery….Race as a technology—as a prosthesis of sorts—adds functionality to the subject, helps form location, and provides information” (2009, 194). Coleman stays with the metaphor of race as technology, grounded in Black histories and contemporary practices of mobilizing the agential, anti-racist, and affective potentialities of this technology towards breaking “the Western trajectory of reason” (202). Coleman works with metaphor to trace a more “rigorous conception of race,” to suggest Blackness as a technocultural “sensibility” (202). In her formulation, the technocultural metaphor of race “argues for a greater, rather than lesser, degree of agency” (200). Metaphor has proven to be an especially resonant technology, or tool, for scholars in and beyond STS to assemble previously divergent or unconnected sensibilities, ideas, and experiences about race and racism. The turn and re-turn to metaphor in contemporary Black studies—we think here of Christina Sharpe’s “wake” (2016), Tiffany Lethabo King’s “shoals” (2019), Keguro Macharia’s “frottage” (2019)—has shaped so much of our thinking and renewed our belief in our collective need for metaphor as a powerful “conceptual strategy” (Macharia 2019, 5), as meaning and method, as materiality and epistemology, as being and becoming, as a form of consciousness and inhabitation.

As scholars of media technologies, our editorial impulse towards this Special Section is also motivated by the intensification of (indeed, the explosion of) metaphor-work in digital technoculture: the implementation of metaphor and other figurative, comparative, associative, and indexical naming work to introduce and familiarize users with new technocultural "extensions of men" (Sharma 2022, 17); the critical-cultural-theoretical-analytic work of understanding these new associations, what they drag in with them, how they structure contemporary life; and the strategic conceptual work of introducing new metaphors to reorient technocultural futures. We think again about how metaphors work, and which metaphors are at work. Scholars like Lily Kay (1995) and Evelyn Fox Keller (1995, 2003) have shown the ways that computational and cybernetic metaphors and logics came to shape biological and life sciences throughout the twentieth century. And by the twenty-first century, we would be hard pressed to find any aspect of life (sciences or not) that is untouched by the computational metaphors of commercial networked digital culture (Hayles 2005; Katzenbach and Larsson 2017). From clouds (Hu 2015; Amoore 2020), to platforms (Gillespie 2017; Singh 2018; Singh and Banet-Weiser 2022), space (White 2006), searching (Noble 2018), sharing (Christen 2012; Wemigwans 2018), liking (Coté and Pybus 2007; Fuchs 2011; Adair and Nakamura 2017) to community (Nakamura 2015; Nakamura, Stiverson, and Lindsey 2021), not to mention labor (Gregg 2011, 2014; Cowan and Rault 2014; Fuchs and Sandoval 2014; Elerding and Risam 2018; Rand 2019; Sharma 2020; Poel, Nieborg, and Duffy 2021) or privacy (Marwick and boyd 2018; Eubanks 2018; Benjamin 2019), vast vocabularies have shifted signifiers in the past twenty or so years. The metaphorization endemic to digital technologies drags cultural values across time and practice, as Rault (2020) shows in their research on metaphors of transparency from modernist architecture, to settler colonial governance to digital duplicity, and as Cowan (2019) traces in regimes of digital hygiene. We are particularly compelled by scholarship that attends to values, cultural knowledges, practices and aesthetics, material histories, and futures that are dragged along, discarded, and/or transformed in the vast and intensified metaphorization of pre-internet referents in digital languages, ecologies, socialities, and economies.

Digital technoculture is all metaphor and all material. As online sites relocate our sense of situatedness, metaphor threatens to overshadow the material sites and lived conditions of mining, construction, assembly, circulation, waste, and so on, that support digital infrastructure, and obscures their geopolitical, industrial, and environmental consequences (Gajjala 2013; Hogan 2015, 2018; Roberts 2016, 2019; Nakamura 2014; Duarte 2017; Posada 2022; Grohmann and Qui 2020). Metaphor’s abstraction can serve to absolve privileged technocultural participants from addressing, for example, the hazardous “labor of extracting and disposing of digital technologies” (Noble 2016). The challenge for feminist STS is to anchor the lines of accountability and relationality to the material conditions and consequences that metaphor has a tendency to untether.

Metaphor’s Relationship Work

Metaphor’s affordances of abstraction make it possible to pick and choose the attachments we take seriously, those we strategically ignore, and those we purposefully manipulate “to show or perform trustworthiness” (Talking Treaties Collective 2022, 45). In “Kinship Is Not a Metaphor,” Keavy Martin (2022) considers the lasting damage of metaphor as manipulation, abuse, and willful breach of trust as well as the potential of metaphor as relationship-building and sustaining. Focusing on the kinship metaphors deployed by representatives of the British Crown in treaty negotiations with Cree nations in Treaty 6 Territory (on the Canadian Prairies), Martin shows how settlers mimic, in effort to destroy and replace, the Indigenous kinship relations and responsibilities settlers are adopted into through treaties. White European settlers break the responsibilities of treaty by treating treaties as if the kinship relationships and responsibilities are metaphorical, merely figurative, abstract, a rhetorical flourish, rather than ongoing, binding responsibilities. Indeed, seizing upon Indigenous concepts and practices of kinship, strategically mimicking and manipulating the grammars of kinship, in effort to destroy and replace them with white heteropatriarchal structures of relation, is amongst the vicious and pernicious of settler colonial tactics (TallBear and Willey 2019; Betasamosake Simpson 2017; Rifkin 2010; Morgensen 2010, 2011).

While kinship is not a metaphor, Martin explains, metaphor creates new relationships, or brings unlike things into relation. Metaphors “work to draw out relationships; they reveal the connections that we may not have seen or noticed before...Indeed, metaphors sound very much like treaties, that practice of kinmaking, that coming together to create something new” (Martin 2022, 11). The essays in this Special Section reckon with the histories and materialities of metaphor—where they come from and where they take us, as well as the relationships and responsibilities made, inherited or refused in metaphor.

This Special Section has been written entirely within the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as editors we have found ourselves especially attuned to the relationships forged, severed, state-sanctioned, and pathologized during this time. Metaphors abound: lockdown, social distance, pods (generally meaning heterofamilial units), bubbles, front line workers, stay home to stay safe, etc. So many of these metaphors effectively double down on the dangerous delusions that homes are safe, paid labor can be done from them, care networks can be reduced to six people (or whatever arbitrary number your local government proscribed), and the people forced to continue in-person work will be appropriately protected or at least paid. Pandemic existence, for many professors and students, came to mean online meetings in digital “rooms”—with students, collaborators, colleagues, friends. More dangerous delusions emerge from this metaphorization of space, that “new media” (in this case Zoom and other video conferencing software) is neutral and non-placed—an empty shell that is both everywhere and nowhere—and that gathering well simply means signing in. When, in the first months of the pandemic, anti-racist, anti-colonial, trans feminist queer, and Indigenous, gatherings were subject to repeated “Zoom bombing” (Nakamura, Stiverson, and Lindsey 2021); when the Zoom corporation agreed to block and deplatform anti-colonial meetings and events that centered Palestine and/or Palestinian scholars, we were starkly reminded of the non-neutrality, the social, geopolitical locatedness of our online meeting spaces and the intentional strategies required to create the conditions for virtually meeting or gathering well. In this context, it feels to us that accounting for the relationship-work of metaphors is particularly pressing, timely, and urgent.

Metaphor-Work Here and How

The contributions collected in this Special Section contend with our world and its complexities by bringing new thinking to metaphor through speculative comparison, and speculative design, storytelling, myth-making, poetics, modeling, pedagogy, manifesto, and, across the board, accounting for and counting on the relational force of metaphor as meaning and method.

The cover art for this issue of Catalyst depicts process-pieces from ABOUT 26 SQUARES, a multimedia-dance work developed and performed by DROUGHT SPA—a project by alex cruse and Kevin CK Lo. We commissioned cruse to create a work of art for this cover, and she developed this abstract glyph, along with the two images printed with her artist statement, in conversation with the themes of this Special Section. Cruse works with photographs of citrus mold that she cultivated from fruit growing in the San Francisco Bay area, as an interrogation of how “the presence of fruit trees increases the value of this private property, and how landlords enjoy the fruits of tenants’ reproductive labor as their mortgages are paid off in full – if not in excess – each month.” Projecting figurative images created through the labours of fruit-abduction and human and more-than-human dance improvisation, cruse and her collaborator Lo, use metaphor as a method to interrogate private property and housing insecurity.

In “Daphnia and Apollo: An Epigenetic Fable,” Martha Kenney “work[s] within the metaphoric tissue of technoscience to tell a feminist fable about Daphnia – small crustaceans who display remarkable epigenetic responses to their environments.” Kenney develops a method of “speculative comparison,” which “is designed to intervene in the politics of comparability by calling naturalized analogies into question and to open up different possibilities for thinking and doing relations.” Kenney denaturalizes the analogy between these Daphnia crustaceans and the myth of Daphne—an analogy mobilized to glorify abuse—to offer a model for “agential and relational biology where species are made through sensuous response.” Working through myth and speculative myth-making is a metaphor-method that encourages us to think differently about what myths we inherit and how we might shift what they mean to us and our more-than-human subjects of study, in the long tradition of feminist re-fabling.

Like Kenney, Madison McCartha’s “Notes Toward a Virtual Poetics: An Essay on Solaris, Assemblage, and Blackness” interrogates the racial and relational violences normalized in STS storytelling and myth-making. McCartha calls our attention to a poetics for STS in its mythic, science fictional guise. In this essay, metaphor becomes a poetics of resonant, resistant opacity. McCartha’s virtual poetics of Blackness comes from Stanislaw Lem’s story (and later Andre Tarkovsky’s film adaptation) Solaris, in which the “entire surface of the planet isn’t just covered by but ‘is’ an immense, opaque semi-fluid mass; a black ocean who resists actively the scientists’ attempts to test, touch, or describe it.” For McCartha, “the poetics active on Solaris imagines for [STS] a speculative research method in which both ‘scientist’…and ‘object of study’ become equal agents and participants in ways that are complex, non-objective, and affectively charged.”

The scientific methods employed to erase the agential matters of biodiversity and enable ongoing settler colonial projects of dispossession and extraction are taken up anew by Sarah Blacker. “Technologies of Quiescence: Measuring Biodiversity, ‘Intactness,’ and Extractive Industry in Canada,” takes on the tools, technologies, and models used to justify settler colonial extractive sciences and reiterate stories of innocence. Blacker focuses on the ways that the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute uses the environmental metaphor of “intactness” to produce “technologies of quiescence” that “minimize or displace concern and produce apathy…conceal and suppress evidence that colonial violence has been done (and is still underway).” Blacker shows that this production of apathy and unconcern is not inherent to the tool of the “biodiversity intactness index” itself, but is strategically generated by ways that the concept of intactness is metaphorized by the Alberta government to produce the idea of “pristine” or “untouched” environmental conditions and “eras[e] the harm done by industry and the settler colonial state more broadly.” By tracing the historically contextual meanings attached to "intactness," Blacker shows metaphor to be a method for Alberta’s extraction industry, a contribution to the settler colonial politics of measurement and an affective technology to excuse and pursue settler colonial dispossession.

The role of metaphor in the manufacturing of unlivable, or the production of livable, environments continues in Sophia Jaworski’s “Chemical Disability and Technoscientific Experimental Subjecthood: Reimagining the Canary in the Coal Mine Metaphor.” Jaworski traces the racialized and animalized genealogical meanings of the ubiquitous “canary” as a form of sacrificial life under conditions of toxic chemical exposure. Jaworski writes that, while chemically sensitive communities claim and potentiate “canary knowledges” as a “series of creative improvisations which blend technology and material culture to combat chemical exposure’s embodied consequences and support access to shared atmospheres,” the metaphor runs the risk of individualizing “systemic, institutionalized toxicities.” This essay offers crip modeling as a way to imagine tools for feeling and acting against regimes of imperceptibility. As method and model “the canary metaphor can invite a practice of accountability towards the atmospheric volatility of wafting, airborne, aromatics—an ethics-based chemical kinship between fume- and vapor-exposed lifeforms.” Thinking about modeling as a metaphoric method offers us a great deal to consider when we grasp the persistence and ubiquity of modeling as a form of technoscientific communication to the general population.

Offering a queer genealogy for contemporary digital models of COVID-19 viral transmission, Cait McKinney and Marika Cifor's “On Digital Models: Responding to Viral Metaphors in Pandemic Times,” reads COVID-19 models in conversation with HIV models to “demonstrat[e] how models can support personal responsibilization, be used to blame ‘bad’ actors, and justify the creep of new surveillance practices under the rubric of ‘Data for Good.’ They work from critical HIV and queer studies to consider how “viral metaphors operate as models” and “argue that the people and behaviors that are opaque to viral models and their methods of capture present potential avenues for speaking back to digital virality’s terms.” They show that models and metaphors have sexual politics and material consequences for the people, practices, desires, and cultures they seek to manage or contain: “This is a queer imperative, because we only sort of know what stigmas will flow from COVID-19 modeling: how they will be used against people who party, do drugs, and hook up, and how they will place blame on poor, Black, Brown, queer, and trans people’s necessary proximities to each other.”

The material consequences and crip, trans- queer potentialities of computer science models and methods are explored through proliferating metaphor, speculative fiction, lucid and ludic imaginaries in Ren Britton and Helen Pritchard’s “For Careful Slugs: Caring for Unknowing in CS (Computer Science).” This contribution follows “the commitments of crip technoscience which understands interdependence to be a political technology” in order to draw alternate practices for a CS otherwise. With images and figuration, Britton and Pritchard develop these metaphors “in service of multispecies flourishing, consent, disability accessibility, anti-racism, trans*feminist joy, lubricating accountability, and unknowing practices” and invite Catalyst readers to “bring these practices into the Computer Science lab before starting an assignment, project, meeting,” and use them to initiate and experiment with new CS design methods.

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez digs into “The Tunnel Metaphor in Networked Technologies,” tracing the ways that “tunneling,” a metaphor that once worked in the service of the "otherwise" that Britton and Pritchard propose, has been overtaken by white heteromasculinist border, spatial, network imaginaries and technologies. Grounded in women of color and chicana feminist mestiza knowledges (Anzaldúa 1987) and methodologies of the oppressed (Sandoval 2000), tunneling has been a metaphor of resistance and fugitivity. Llamas-Rodriguez “turn[s] to the metaphor of the tunnel to illustrate how emancipatory language of border resistance becomes co-opted in technoculture.” He follows this metaphor across science fiction film, video games, and digital platforms to understand how it has come “to cast vanguard forms of online connectivity and celebrated forms of networked transgression in terms that are distinctly white, masculine, upper class, and adhering to liberal tenets of individual mastery.” Llamas-Rodriguez stays with this metaphor not only to explore its drift and expose the people and values that are celebrated along the way. We see this essay as a contribution to the feminist STS that not only traces the violences of metaphor’s ungroundedness, but calls for a reinvigorated orientation to the people, material practices, and knowledges from which a metaphor gained its purchase in the first place.

Thinking about how metaphor has the power to orient and reorient us towards each other, and the impact metaphor can have on how we orient ourselves towards and with each other, Veronica Paredes takes up the metaphors that guide feminist technologies of gathering in “Natural Metaphors for Network Gathering: Technologies of Meeting at the Allied Media Conference.” Writing from her own experiences of learning, organizing, and working at the Allied Media Conference (AMC), with the Feminist Technology Network (FemTechNet) and the Situated Critical Race and Media (SCRAM) collective, Paredes approaches the challenge of gathering or meeting well as a critical feminist technology. She frames her essay as a way “to express, and better understand, my gratitude for the AMC” and the organization’s capacity to “cultivate feelings of joy, celebration, and creativity amongst such disparate groups.” Learning from AMC, Paredes argues that “How a group meets and gathers warrants deliberation. It also holds influence over who comprises the group in subtle but important ways….Unexpectedly, these lessons were communicated in modes as diverse as very practical instructions for how different people might navigate the conference to expressive, poetic language evoking nature metaphors.” Paredes focuses on the nature metaphors used within AMC communities, especially in the work of adrienne maree brown and Complex Movements, as a way to understand the shifted technologies needed to facilitate grounded, liberatory, joyous, and creative methods of gathering, meeting, networking, organizing, and researching.

Hong-An Wu continues to consider the feminist technologies of gathering, but specifically in community pedagogical strategy. In “Troubleshootingcaring Technologies in Pedagogical Practice,” Wu tells the story of working in a digital pedagogy environment and dealing with the problems that inevitably arise, with equipment malfunctions, space inadequacies, and issues with network connectivity. Wu’s essay shifts our focus to technoscientific pedagogical relations: between self and technology, between teachers and students. Troubling and staying with the weaponized metaphor of “troubleshooting,” Wu imagines and theorizes a new set of feminist methods afforded by replacing “shooting” with “caring” as a way to foster practices of agential, engaged learning and being together. We might also read Wu’s essay as a survival manual that coaches us “to center the question of what is the trouble needing care and how to meet those needs, troublecaring asks us to not give up on trouble but to care about which trouble we caregive, especially when our caring relations are not reciprocal.”

Also a survival manual of sort, Jamie Smith and Eva Willis’s manifesto, “We Refuse to Cope! The Vitruvian Nurse, the Code of Conduct, and Nurses’ Lived Knowledge,” addresses questions of care and reciprocality. By manifesting the figure of the Vitruvian Nurse as an “a uniformed woman who goes out of her way to attend to everyone’s needs in an unconditional and subservient way where her self-value correlates with her ability to serve others to the detriment of herself,” Smith and Willis are able to imagine that other models of nursing practice are possible. This Commentary piece contributes not only to the STS tradition of metaphor-work, but also in the tradition of the manifesto, a genre that Haraway has characterized as a “feminist theoretical document—a coming to terms with the world we live in and the question ‘What is to be done?’ (Haraway quoted in Gane 2006, 136). Haraway explains, “manifestos provoke by asking two things: where the holy hell are we, and so what?” (Gane 2006, 136) and Smith and Willis answer both of these questions.

We have organized the essays by linking some connections through proximity, as we signal above, but also hope that readers will notice other equally critical links and read in multiple directions. For example, Paredes’s study of the nature tropes that serve anti-oppressive gathering-tactics in feminist QTBIPOC organizing also links to Kenney’s attention to the Daphnia’s ability to grow “defensive helmets, neckteeth, or tail spines when exposed to chemicals called kairomones released by nearby predators” as a potentially galvanizing metaphor in feminist epigenetics. In turn, Kenny’s attention to surviving predatory chemicals might link with Jaworski’s work on the colonial legacy and living history of the canary in the coal mine metaphor in the chemically sensitive community. Llamas-Rodriguez's attention to tunneling in the expressive cultures of video games and networked digital culture shares a commitment to returning to and reclaiming a once-libratory metaphor, like the black surface of Solaris. McCartha’s speculations towards Black technocultural “virtual poetics” might also be read alongside Britton and Pritchard’s proposals for a CS of anti-racist crip trans*feminist multispecies flourishing and joy. Blacker’s engagements with the settler colonial politics of measurement can be put into conversation with McKinney and Cifor’s concern for the sexual politics of models, as well as Smith and Willis’s manifesto against standardized models of nursing, which in turn might link with Paredes’s and Wu’s attention to how the metaphors we live with impact the care we give and receive. As editors, we have organized these contributions through a line of connections that can take readers through a conversation running from the top to bottom of the table of contents. But we are excited by readers’ feminist tendencies to draw outside the lines of this linear table, across these contributions and connecting to the “metaphoric tissue” of feminist STS well beyond this Special Section.

Postscript: Cover Image by Alex Cruse

Titled "ABOUT 26 SQUARES", the cover image for this issue of Catalyst examines the function and weaponization of metaphor in the context of tenancy and economic oppression. It consists of a rectangular digital collage whose foreground depicts a square enclosed by a thin red border, containing dynamic and abstract color fields, and a background consisting of faint, digital artifacts in purple and teal arranged across a field of muted yellow-gray. In dialogue with El Lissitzky's About Two Squares, this work contends that through novel forms of collaboration and communication, metaphor's power can be wrested from the State, towards horizons of revolutionary possibility.

For more about alex cruse’s work, please visit https://alexcruse.xyz.

Acknowledgements

Thank you especially to Deboleena Roy and Lauren Savit for supporting this issue with good humor and patience. And to the close and careful readings from Catalyst lead editors Laura Foster, Nassim Parvin, and Anne Pollock as we were writing this introduction. Another huge thank you to Catalyst’s copy editor, Joanne Muzak, for her goodwill and acuity in the final stages. Thank you to all the contributors and the full Catalyst editorial team for helping us to pull this off amid pandemic exigencies. We also owe a great debt and are grateful to Lindsay Leblanc for being with us throughout the initial proposal and collective research, thinking, and writing that got us started.

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Author Bios

T.L. Cowan is Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.

Jas Rault is Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.

Together Cowan and Rault co-direct two digital research environments, The Cabaret Commons and the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC). They are also co-authors of Heavy Processing for Digital Materials (forthcoming with Punctum Books).