..................... | ...... | mailing list archive |
..... | ||
HOME
SEARCH FAQ |
Main IndexRe: LIFESCIENCE: Monsters + Genders
--------------------------------------------------------- ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99 LIFESCIENCE Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09 http://www.aec.at/lifescience --------------------------------------------------------- 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 -- ]]]] bioinformatic bodies ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] _ ]]]]]]]]]]]]] http://gsa.rutgers.edu/maldoror/index.html ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] _ ]]]]]] ftp_formless_anatomy ]]]]]]]] http://www.formless.org ]]]]]]]] _ ]]]]]]]]]]]]]] maldoror@eden.rutgers.edu ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] _ ]]]]]]]]]]]] _ ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] _ ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] _ ]]]]]]]]]]] Fake_Life Platform ]]]] http://web.t0.or.at/fakeshop/fake_life.html ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] _ ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are subscribed to the English language version of LIFESCIENCE To unsubscribe the English language version send mail to lifescience-en-request@aec.at (message text 'unsubscribe') Send contributions to lifescience@aec.at --------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|