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Re: LIFESCIENCE: Monsters + Genders

 
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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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PROFRICHAR@aol.com wrote:
> 
>  (ii) Is gender exclusive to reproduction & technology issues?
> 
> an interesting question but i am not sure if i understood it
> 

I didn't explain myself well enough on this suggestion. What I meant was
that it seems that the majority of articles dealing w/ gender and
bioscience focus on reproductive technologies & not on other
bioscientific fields. I _don't_ want to suggest that these endeavors are
not useful, they're absolutely positively necessary, since reproductive
technologies are one issue in which gender and sexuality have
traditionally been inscribed, assumed, contested, transformed, etc.

But, how does gender insert itself into genomics and the setting up of
computer databases? Organ transplantation and the objectification and
interchangability of body parts? Bioethics debates over stem cell research?

Now, on the one hand it seems reductive to simply state that the
majority of geneticists are white males, etc. etc., since this says
nothing about the discourse and network of relationships in which
subjects as scientists are positioned. On the other, though, suggesting
that a certain scientific paradigm (say, the notion of DNA as the
"master molecule" during the post-war period) is "masculine" or the
product of a scientific patriarchical reasoning can tend to essentialize
heterogeneous groupings of concepts and practices, and this fails to
account for a genealogy of these concepts - how they come about, what
conditions exist such that the idea of DNA as the "book of life" during
the 1950s can become not only a viable theory, but a widely accepted one.

Again, while critical interventions in issues surrounding reproductive
technologies are absolutely necessary, what is also interesting in terms
of gender and bioscience are those fields which appear on the surface to
be universal and value-neutral with respect to gender. Genomics is a
good example, because it claims to be nothing other than the
informational archiving of universal and species-specific genetic data -
something which, perhaps because of its mathematical rhetoric, seems
harmless. But those databases do not of course exist in a vacuum - they
are connected to different uses and applications, and that data itself
is subject to a variety of meanings (what certain genes "do", what
disease predispositions they make one open to, what physio-psychological
conditions are attributed to them). Evelyn Fox Kellner and N. Katherine
Hayles have been exploring this kind of path w/ respect to gender, in
mid-century genetics and cybernetics, respectively.

Asking about gender in locales where it is neutralized - for example, by
the language of information and data - would then mean asking how
something like gender is "smuggled" in (say, in the form of genetically
inherited "behavior" predispositions), and as a result, how "culture"
is, in this case, the backdrop from which certain scientific assumptions
concerning "nature" are made....

Eugene



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