LIFESCIENCE: Monsters + Genders

[Eugene Thacker <maldoror@eden.rutgers.edu>]

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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Hello everyone -

re: the "gender" thread, I absolutely agree that there are complex and
difficult questions concerning the role of the female subject in
relation to NRTs, ARTs, as well as the various ways in which "natural"
processes such as childbirth are represented. However, at the risk of
adding to the topics already being discussed, two suggestions:

(i) Is there a clear nature/technology demarcation in childbirth? How do
we differentiate between "nature" and "technology" in the childbirth
process in the technologically-advanced cultures of the west? Isn't the
so-called natural biological process of childbearing intricately woven
into a network of technologies and institutions (regular visits to a
doctor, medical tests, pregnancy classes, changes in diet and lifestyle,
and so on)? How exactly do we isolate a natural process called
childbirth when that process is co-extensive with its explication
_as_a_natural_process_ by biomedical and biological science? This
condensation of the natural and the technical - or better yet the
biological and the technical - occurs in examples such as the use of
ultrasound imaging: what happens to the nature-technology borders when
the results of an ultrasound test confirm that a child is "normal" (that
is, a biologically natural human being)?

(ii) Is gender exclusive to reproduction & technology issues? How do
issues relating to gender emerge in other bioscientific fields? For
example, we might begin by suggesting that gender and sex are fused into
a single entity in modern genetics - reducible either to the difference
of a single chromosome (X or Y), or, in more complex instances, gendered
"behaviors" are speculatively attributed to a network of genes,
intracellular processes, and biochemical pathways (the infamous
geneticising of homosexuality). In addition, while genomics does promise
to bioinformatically account for general health and disease-control on a
molecular level, it also a highly individualizing field. The production
of SNP databases (targeting not populations but the individual
differences from one human being to another on a genetic level), the
promises of "pharmacogenetics" (individually-tailored drugs or gene
therapties), show that the enculturated classification of "types" (based
on gender, sexuality, ethnicity) will become a useful tool of
classification. This in itself is nothing new to western biomedicine,
except insofar as gender is only considered on a molecular, genetic, and
informational level. Which brings up the possibility of bizarre hybrids,
such as a molecular sexuality, or genetically-anomalous ethnicities.

Eugene


-- 
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