In Cronenberg's "New Flesh" and Foucault's clinic the life/death division is given a process or many processes of its own. The clinical perspective, transgressing boundaries, relativized life and death, bringing the latter "down from the absolute in which it appeared as an indivisible, decisive, irrecoverable event; volatilised it, distributed it throughout life in the form of separate, partial, progressive deaths, deaths that are so slow in occurring that they extend even beyond death itself." While self-alienating, the new mortalism produced by the clinical perspective was anything but demystifying. It promised that the body could be manipulated, its processes reversed or suspended. On the cultural level, since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the body armed with technology has replaced the soul and is presently displacing the psyche. Viewed as primordial potentiality, bio-power, or cyborg, the body does not die; it reverts or converts, mutates or regenerates. Cyborgs in particular, states Haraway in "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies", are "suspicious of the reproductive . . . For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth with the possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous . . . potent. We have all been injured…and require regeneration, not rebirth." Haraway dreams a "utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world beyond gender," sex and death.

Haraway's discussion of nature’s objective agency corresponds well with the power of Max’s monstrosity. Haraway links nature (the scientific object) to the coyote metaphor and describes it as "the world's witty agent and actor with whom we must learn to converse" (Simians). "This potent trickster," Haraway writes, "can show us that historically, scientifically, ethically, politically, technologically, and epistemologically-be imagined as genuinely social and actively relational." Indeed Max's relational scientific development/genesis articulates the epistemological shift that Haraway envisions not only because it acknowledges the dialogism between scientific rationality and monstrosity but also because it involves regular engagement with the bodies and agencies of scientific objects. The monstrous body is a site where feminisation is put into process. While the monstrous body is not essentially feminine; it is however, a discursive site that is often articulated as feminine.

Using sections of animals to supplement human anatomy is becoming so common, it has spawned a catchy new term: farmocology. Baboons are giving up their hearts for human transplant. Pigs are being genetically engineered to produce human insulin in their milk. However, the most disturbing transgenic development concerns the US government. Since 1963 NASA has poured money into research aimed at creating a Human/animal hybrid capable of living in the environments of other planets. The research is designed to produce a being with a human brain contained in the body constructed from several animals. Since the beginning of genetic discovery, amazing claims were made for this new science. Not only would all disease be a thing of the past, you could also pick your children from a catalogue. Individual genes were said to control individual traits – everything from eye colour to intelligence. However this search for single genes for complex human traits such as anti-social behaviour or mental disorders seems seriously misguided. In fact even straightforward attributes such as height is the result of several gene pairs working in consort, and even that is only part of the equation. Environment plays such a large part that it cannot possibly be overruled. The balance of influence between nature and nurture, heredity and environment is still unmeasured. But the genetically altered Max is not far wrong when she believes that she cannot give in to genetic destiny.

Max's body is the subject of scientific experimentation. In consequence of physically experiencing the adverse side-effects of this monstrous invasion of her own body and after having worked closely with a crusading cyber-journalist, Max is sceptical and resistant to the truth of scientific rational explanations/power. Such scepticism coincides with the feminist claim that science must be understood as a relational process rather than an objective, masculine ideal. Relational science provides feminists with position from which to define and struggle over the agenda of scientific knowledge. Historically, women’s bodies have been positioned as passive objects for masculine scientific scrutiny. Within a relational model of science however, women can redefine and reinvent the position of scientific objectivity as one of active agency rather than as one for the inscription of scientific knowledge and truth. Indeed Max becomes amenable to such reinvention because of her own bodily experiences of scientific genetic modification and state indoctrination begin to inform her actions of resistance.

A new hope: we can still witness Nietzsche's crazed insight that God is dead--and the stench of his rotting corpse is still filling the cosmos. The death of God has been a protracted event and it has been accompanied by a domino-effect, which has brought down numerous familiar ideals. These metaphysically founded certainties have floundered and made space for something more complex, more playful and infinitely more disturbing. The crisis has for the feminine element produced not a melancholy downward spiral into loss and decline but rather a joyful opening up of new possibilities.