300209 Gender, Technology and (Global) Society (S) (SoSe 2017)

This seminar course examines the relationship between gender, technology and society. It accepts the premise that gender identities are not fixed nor determined purely by physiology; their social construction affects ideas of masculinity and femininity and other sexual identities. In the same time science and technology also have their socially constructed aspects; there is a co-shaping of society and technology that has been recently taken up by various social scientists as in the „social construction of technology“ thesis, in the actor-network theory by Bruno Latour, and in the feminist approach of science by Donna Haraway.
The question that this seminar than examines is how gender and technology are interrelated and what kind of implications this relationship has for human beings and for their everyday life. As Haraway states, interpenetration or inseparability of the human and the technological is characteristic of contemporary global society. She argues that the fusing of the human and the technological offers us a model of a post-gender world. Keeping these theoretical frameworks in mind, the course will explore the gender-technology-relationship in the domain of new reproductive technologies (NRT). It is assumed that these new reproductive technologies fundamentally challenge existing binaries of sex/procreation, nature/culture, biology/sociality, heterosexuality/homosexuality, local/global, gift/commodity to name just a few. They also challenge our extant understandings of kinship and other forms of social relatedness by creating new possibilities of forging human relationships while at the same time playing on gendered ideas of male and female roles and desires. As deeply gendered devices new reproductive technologies raise also questions about the nature of innovation itself and bio-power which influence human life deeply. They are global in reach but reproduce global inequalities. The seminar will study how technologies such as “in vitro fertilization” (that makes surrogacy possible) and foetal imaging (that allows pre-birth sex selection) pose challenges to the idea of NRTs as technologies of hope and to the philosophy of technological determinism.