Introduction

Metaphor as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

T.L. Cowan
University of Toronto
[Link]@[Link]

Jas Rault
University of Toronto
[Link]@[Link]

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-c0lonial technoculture

Cowan, T.L., and Jas Rault. 2022. “Metaphor as Meaning and Method in Technoculture.” Catalyst:
Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (2): 1–23.
[Link] | ISSN: 2380-3312
© T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, 2022 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license
Special Section: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in 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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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;

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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

11 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (2) T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, 2022
Special Section: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

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

12 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (2) T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, 2022
Special Section: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

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.”

13 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (2) T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, 2022
Special Section: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

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

14 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (2) T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, 2022
Special Section: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

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.

15 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (2) T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, 2022
Special Section: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

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

16 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (2) T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, 2022
Special Section: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

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

17 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (2) T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, 2022
Special Section: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

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 [Link]

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).

23 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (2) T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, 2022