Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

[Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women]

1997; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 25; Linguagem: Inglês

0707-8412

Anne Balsamo, Jan Clarke,

Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations

In Technologies of Gendered Body, boundaries between and technologies are blurred when author Anne Balsamo describes forms of technological embodiment in contemporary US culture that illustrate the ways in which gendered identities are technologically produced for material bodies (p. 154). In an analysis of bodybuilding, cosmetic surgery, reproductive technologies, virtual reality and science fiction narratives, Balsamo reveals cultural contexts that inscribe technologies of gendered bodies. Balsamo argues that technologies as social, economic and institutional forces too often reproduce, rather than challenge or obscure, gendered identities of material bodies.To set context for her analysis of technologies, Balsamo begins with a concise and insightful analysis of relevance of cyborgs in popular culture and feminist postmodern theory. In essay entitled Reading Cyborgs Writing Feminism, she describes cyborgs of popular culture -- Frankenstein's monster, Maria from Metropolis, Max Headroom, RoboCop and Terminator toys -- as familiar technological and organic hybrids of contemporary everyday life. She lays out framework for her analysis by drawing on insights from feminist theorists (Donna Haraway, Ruth Bleir, Paula Treichler) who provide discursive readings of cyborgs. She also challenges panic postmodernists (Jean Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, and Arthur Kroker) who do away with body in postmodern cultural theory. To reinsert gendered material in postmodern theory, Balsamo then describes new body technologies as part of an emergent cultural formation of techno-body (p. 159), and highlights textual maps that feminists provide of cyborgs in fictional narratives.Feminist bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery offer cultural and historical contexts for Balsamo to question how women's are technologized, and role of social in technological reproduction of gendered bodies. Balsamo's detailed descriptions of technologically recrafting female through feminist bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery reveal persistence with which gender and race hierarchies structure technological practices (p. 55). Surprisingly, feminist bodybuilding is not necessarily a site of resistance. Instead, Balsamo describes it as a rearticulation of power relations in which idealized other for white women is strong male body, and for women of colour other is white female body. Women of colour, therefore, belong in a particular way in of feminist bodybuilding. Despite array of imaging technologies that are employed by cosmetic surgeons, technological view of a doctor's medicalized gaze produces an assembly line approach to beauty where 'difference' is made over into sameness (p. 58), and reconstructed are quite traditionally gendered. Balsamo also notes that not only do cosmetic surgeons often reject women of colour as patients, but also facial reconstructions for women of colour are often called corrective surgery (e. …