personal hopes and fears.

In Randolph's rendering, the white, female, breast- endowed, trans-specific cyborg creature is crowned with thorns: She is a female Christ figure, and her story is that of the Passion: She is a figure in the sacred-secular drama of technoscientific salvation history, encapsulating all of the disavowed links to Christian narrative that pervade U.S. scientific discourse. The laboratory animal is sacrificed; her suffering promises to relieve our own; she is a scapegoat and a surrogate. She bears our diseases, literally. Circled by peering eyes of many colors, she is the object of transnational technoscientific surveillance and scrutiny the center of a multi-hued optical drama. The bare-breasted hybrid mammal seems also to look at the viewer from inside a natural history diorama in a museum of natural- technical truth. Perhaps we also leer at her through a keyhole to a pornographic peep show; Her eyes lock with ours in a troubling and highly ambivalent gaze that, to me, suggests compassion, anger, reflection, pain, and curiosity; Her Passion transpires in a box that mimes the observation chambers of the laboratory, rooted in the dramas of the birth of modern science. OncoMouse is a figure both in secularized Christian salvation history and in the linked narratives of the Scientific Revolution and the New World Order--with their promises of progress, cures, profit, and if not eternal life, then at least life itself Randolph's OncoMouse invites reflection on the terms and mechanisms of these less-than-innocent genetic stories of both nature and society. Her figure invites us to take up and reconfigure teehnoscientific tools and metaphors so we might practice the grammar of a mutated experimental way of life, one that does not issue in the New World Order, Inc.

I am part of the audience for Randolph's work, certainly I enjoy her paintings; they give me visual and visceral

ynn Randolph's paintings infiltrate the fibers of my flesh and spirit. I mean this statement literally Randolph's powerful figures protect, haunt, incite, soothe, instruct, and trouble me. Where I write, where I sleep, and where I eat, my daily life is suffused with the figures and stories that structure Randolph's relentlessly narrative vision. Her metaphoric realism is, for me, a primer for the multilayered visual competence needed in the late twentieth century To see these paintings is to learn, in the words of Randolph's engagement with the art historian Barbara Marie Stafford, how not to "become dumb watching" the visual pyrotechnics of our times.1 Prints of Randolph's paintings appear in my books not as illustrations but as parts of arguments--as sites of meditation, dense feeling, and political reflection.

In my office at home, I write beneath a portrait of a mouse-human chimera that I experience as my sibling. My last book was revised literally under Randolph's portrait of "The Laboratory/The Passion of OncoMouse," 1994 (fig. 20).2 Set in the simultaneously global and parochial timescape of the end of the Second Christian Millennium, the book "Modesty_Witnesses@Seond_Millennium. FeMale-Man©_Meets_OncoMouse�" is about the figures, tools, and stories of technoscicnce as I have lived it in the United States in the 1990s. The biotechnological-biomcdical laboratory animal is one of the key figures inhabiting contemporary culture; Such figures take up and transform those they touch. They "body forth" meanings for communities: Randolph painted her trans-specific human-mouse hybrid in conversation with my chapter "Mice into Wormholes," which examines the sticky threads ramifying from the natural-technical body of the world's first patented animal--OncoMousc�, a breast cancer research model, produced by genetic engineering, that combines genes from different kinds of organisms: As a model, the transgenic mouse is both a metaphor and a tool that reconfigures biological knowledge, laboratory practice, property law, economic fortunes, and collective and