Reference no: EM132250991
Paper : Gender, Technology and Embodiment
The aim of this essay is to analyze the relationships betweenbio-technologies, gender, and bodies/embodiment.
Draw on readings to explain and apply concepts and examples that you find most significant or relevant to address how new biotechnologies (including biomedical technologies, as well as visualization or imaging technologies) are changing our ways of understanding and experiencing the body and sex-gender. Drawing selectively on readings and your examples, discuss questions such as:
• How biotechnologies are creating new types of knowledge, ways of relating to the body, and new ethical questions.
• The connections between technological control/transformation, and gendered social "scripts"-about bodies, identities, and gender norms.
• How do these biotechnologies entail new ways of visualizing, and knowing, manipulating the body and "life"?
• How do they create new ways of being human? Of being biological (Rose, p. 17)?
• What forms of social control over bodies are involved?
• How are social differences (gender, race) reproduced or altered through these technologies?
Concepts from which to select:
Embodiment (Shapiro p. 3); Body as process (Balsamo p. 3)
Techno-Embodiment (Balsamo, p. 5), Technology (Balsamo, p. 10)
Biomedical Technologies (Shapiro, p. 8, Rose)
Social scripts/Gender scripts (Shapiro, p. 9, p. 164)
Biopolitics/Subjectivity (Rose, 22-27)
Clinical gaze/technological gaze (Balsamo, p. 57, Sturken and Cartwright)
Lifestyle drugs (Mamo and Fosket, 925, 931-932, 936-937 and throughout)
Biomedicalization (Mamo and Fosket, 926-927, 931 and throughout)
Production of Bodies (927 and throughout)
New Natural/Re-writing the natural (933, 940 and throughout)
Your essay should be closely grounded in the readings. Be sure to give specific citations from the text as evidence to illustrate and support the points you make. Give page number and cite/quote relevant passages from the text.
6-8 pages, double-spaced