Nov 03 2009
The apocalyptic body
I guess this is my lucky year. This is the first time (as far as I can recollect at least) that all of my courses overlap in subject matter and discourse. Oppression whether it be patriarchal, environmental or economic, I have been forced to reckon with its varying forms. This week I got to grapple with “technoppression” or technology used as a tool for apocalyptic domination. I have become more than familiar with Hollywood’s admonition that machines or technology will first enhance and eventually replace mankind at a final showdown (see every Will Smith movie for examples). Despite my exposure to such influences, I rarely considered the implications of rapidly developing technology and its impact on the concept of the human body. Earlier this summer I read Bodies by Susan Orbach a psychologist who explored the idea of the manufactured western body. According to Orbach the body has become a form of work on which we are constantly improving, fixing and changing in order to become “better” versions of ourselves. Granted enhancement for beautification purposes is hardly a new topic but she drew upon the indispensability and the decreasing diversity of the “perfect” body that Quinby mentions. Even right now as I think about this I realize that this is evident is quite a few places. I had the opportunity to read another book titled Killing the Black Body, which mentioned the history of eugenics in this country and its racialized targeting of African Americans for sterilization. I was horrified to find out that many of the hysterectomies preformed even into the 1970’s upon black women were without their consent in attempt to eliminate the “black” gene and all of the social baggage that comes with it in this country. I do not know if it would be a stretch to say that this was an earlier form of genetic engineering but I believe that this continued technological development will only negatively affect those who do not fit in the idealized mold. “Programmed perfection” is so pervasive its somewhat upsetting. Personally I can easily draw and example from the issue of black females and their hair. It is shocking and disappointing that black females spend billions of dollars annually on making their hair look “right” through the use of weaves, corrosive chemicals and other magical tricks. Usually the finished product no longer mirrors the tenacious and unique curls that springs from their heads but instead is a sleek and shiny imitation of the idealized European standard.
Jahneille, this is such an important discussion and one that I hope you will raise further in class, even though, like you, I find it upsetting to realize the extent to which science and technology have served the most horrendous forms of oppression. Some of them are directly oppressive and dominating, as you say–in eugenics and experiments on people. Others take the form of self-inflicted efforts to meet standards of beauty that are narrowly elitist but spread through the culture. At the same time, as others have pointed out here, science and technology have been valuable in improving lives in many ways too, so that the issue is how to work with it without taking up the mantle of domination of others and the world.