Technology Diary – 10/3

For this week’s Technology Diary, I read Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” and I was hit with an idea almost immediately when I saw the line, “Modern science is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality” (1). I thought of pace-makers and a little later on I thought of the birth control implant & IUD, because those are intimate relationships with a machine inside humans who wish to continue living healthy lives without inconvenience. Later on I read that “the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (1). That sentence made think once again of birth control, especially because of the control of one’s own reproduction. I decided to focus on birth control after I read in the “Informatics of Domination” that eugenics and population control were opposites on the scale of natural and unnatural (7).

While birth control has been used by millions of individual women to control when they reproduce, it has also been used as a weapon against both sex and race. Women in several countries back in the 1970s and 1980s were forced to receive Depo Provera injections and essentially stop reproducing by force, regardless if they want to or not. While ‘eugenics’ and ‘population control’ are opposites on a scale of naturalness, it was the same idea when it came to the use of birth control for forced sterilization. In this day and age, the use of forced sterilization continues to exist including a case of forced sterilization of women in a California prison population that ended back in 2010.

While birth control is a wonderful piece of technology to prevent accidental production, it can easily be used against women. This is an issue in addition to the denial of birth control which puts a woman at risk for reproducing when she is not emotionally or financially ready.