This is the tenth in a series of notes to eleven lectures for my class Technology and Culture.

Wallace and Gusterson brought us closer to the everyday life aspect of technology. I emphasized the struggling and the uncertainty that comes with being thrust in a world where tools and their requirements make new positions for human beings to inhabit, along with new dilemmas (what factory to build, how to handle one's relationship with an industrial employer) and contradictions (bombs as metaphorical babies).

Rapp focuses us further on the interactional consequences of technologies that directly touch our bodies.

  1. All technologies do so (from irrigation ditches and plows, to printing press and atomic bombs), more ore less directly.
  2. Little research so far has centered on the direct experience of individuals of the encounter with the technology (the tool and its people)

Amniosynthesis and sonogram including

  1. the machines as the product of engineering and scientific advances ("the Cartesion language of modern science")
  2. the people who run the machines (doctors and technicians talking to patients)
  3. the significant others of the pregnant woman who interpret both the above with practical consequences (spouses, parents and friends, the media)

With reference both to

  1. hegemonic practices
  2. "local" ("multicultural") interpretation

Rapp mentions the first one with insight, particularly when criticizing early feminism critiques (1997b: 33) but her basic interest is in the local interpretations as she stresses the multiplicity of the women's talk about the tests (along with a nice critique of the dangers of using the main official categories of people (1997a: 129-30). But her main interest is in the new constraints that have been placed on women by, above all the new technologies, and, though she mutes this somewhat, the shift in the State's role in controlling female bodies (by the legalization of some abortions.)

  1. distancing of the body
  2. separation of the body of the woman from the body of the IT (fetus?baby?) within her.
  3. intrusion of many others in telling the woman about her body (and that of IT)
  4. reconstruction of the woman's primary responsibility on what is to happen to IT (including whether it is to be born)
  5. authority of the medical personel to talk about State sponsored choices
  6. replacement of the man onto a periphery
  7. etc.

One may disagree with some of the more political statement that she produces in passing as if they were unproblematic, but one cannot fail to see that everything, every "reading" of a test or image, as well as every legal ruling, has a form (e.g. objectification of IT's body) and a consequence.

Note for example the implicit controversy about how to label IT: baby? or fetus? Each word has major implications for subsequent action, whether taken or not. Rapp's choice of "fetus" (the technical, medical world) both aligns her with the scientific hegemony (rather than various religious subcultures) and with a political choice.

Let's see how this might work during an actual labor.