Genomic visions: Nature, biotechnology, and sexual difference.
Item
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Title
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Genomic visions: Nature, biotechnology, and sexual difference.
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Identifier
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AAI3283143
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identifier
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3283143
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Creator
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Garlick, Stephen R.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Patricia Ticineto Clough
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, General
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Abstract
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With the advent of high-profile biotechnology projects such as the Human Genome Project (HGP), genetic science promises to reshape the ways in which we think about the relationship between nature and society. While critical attention has to date mostly been focused on issues associated with race, in this dissertation I examine the relationship between genomic science, biotechnology, and the concepts of sex and gender. My research draws together several bodies of work that have until now had little contact. Most notably, on the one hand, feminist critiques that tend to view scientific institutions and technological practices as identifiably masculine, and, on the other hand, science and technology studies that emphasize the disunity of technoscientific cultures. I argue that these two approaches can be reconciled by theorizing both science and gender as technological modes of desire that seek to establish a common set of relations to the natural world. In substantiating this claim, the dissertation presents a historical study of the relations between sex, gender, and genetic science from the eighteenth century up to the present day. Most notably, I suggest that early photographic practices provide a useful model by which to theorize the technological character of both gender and genomics. By drawing out a crucial tension in biological thought between meaning and information in relation to 'sex', I show how the HGP and associated biotechnologies promote an ambivalent cultural shift away from meaningful, organic bodies, and towards virtual, bioinformatic bodies. I suggest that a critical examination of new biotechnologies such as cloning allows us to recognize that the exaggerated public image of genomics is actually a conservative force, which obscures the potential for rethinking the nature of sexual difference contained within the history of genetic science. Ultimately, my argument is that both biological technoscience and gender respond to one of the central problematics of modernity---the need to reconcile control over nature with the desire to submit to the ultimate authority of that same nature.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
