Special Issue: The Body and Technology
Research Articles
Donna J. Drucker
Introduction: The Body and Technology, pp. 8-10
Show abstract
This issue has its origins in the July 2020 ICOHTEC online conference, when online-only academic events were still new and their longevity in the academic world was uncertain. The embodied nature of academic conferences was a given, until suddenly it was not. It was at this conference that some of the other authors in this issue and I gave papers in a video-conference atmosphere for the first time. Thus, these articles were written, presented, and edited in a world in which our bodies as academics were physically separate and only partially visible through video-conference technology. Online, we could still engage with each other’s ideas, faces, and voices, yet the spontaneous coffee break conversations and free-flowing exchanges of ideas that characterize academic conferences outside the panel setting were absent. As scholars of technology, we were perhaps particularly aware of the ways that video-conference technologies kept the conference format alive in practice but less so in spirit. Our minds were together, but our bodies were apart […]
Full text:
Donna J. Drucker
The Diaphragm in the City: Contraceptive Research at the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, 1925–1939, pp. 11-32
Show abstract
This article traces the research and publications of the physician and birth control advocate Dr. Hannah Stone (1893–1941). Stone used her position at the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (later the Margaret Sanger Clinical Research Bureau) in New York City from 1925 to 1939 to research different brands and sizes of diaphragms, test spermicide recipes, present and publish research in academic settings, and field requests from independent researchers asking to test their contraceptives on the clinic’s patients. She was also a key participant in a U.S. Court of Appeals case that dismantled the last vestiges of the 1873 Comstock Act. Her research, publications, and advocacy emphasized the range of women’s body types and the challenges of developing barrier contraceptives that would work for them all. She established methods of data collection and representation that would become standard in contraceptive research through the mid-twentieth century.
Full text:
Jacqueline H. Wolf
“They said her heart was in distress”: The Electronic Fetal Monitor and the Experience of Birth in the U.S.A., 1960s to the Present , pp. 33-61
Show abstract
After Joseph DeLee’s call in 1920 for obstetricians to perform routine medical interventions during birth, obstetricians in the United States began to adopt a series of standards, hoping to create the ideal conditions for “normal” labours. This predisposed obstetricians to embrace the electronic fetal monitor in 1969, years before researchers tested the machine for efficacy. Several well-publicised tragedies relating to births—including the thalidomide crisis in 1962—similarly predisposed the American public to accept the fetal monitor quickly. Continually monitoring the fetal heart rate during labour seemed a surefire safeguard for fetal wellbeing compared to intermittent use of the less flashy fetal stethoscope. Obstetricians envisioned only benefits from continual monitoring, including a reduction in stillbirths and in the incidence of cerebral palsy. Using the history of the electronic fetal monitor in the United States as a case study, this article explores the negative consequences for physicians and mothers of setting rigid standards for “normal” birth.
Full text:
Azumi Tsuge
Women’s decision-making and their experiences in the changing socio-technical system of prenatal testing in Japan, 1980s to the 2010s , pp. 62-80
Show abstract
This article analyzes the notions of woman’s body, reproduction, and choices regarding prenatal testing over the last three decades in Japan from interviews with women about their experiences of pregnancy and prenatal testing. First, the historical background of abortion and prenatal testing in Japan is described focusing on the decriminalization of abortion under the 1948 eugenic policy, subsequent disabled liberation movement against the policy, and how it clashed with women’s liberation movement for reproductive choice. Then the article shows how women’s attitudes towards prenatal testing have changed over time referring to the interview data, and analyzes factors affecting their decisions regarding whether to take a prenatal test. As the development of testing technology plays a crucial part, and it is important to grasp the interrelationship between technological development, social changes and individual women’s attitudes and their families’ roles/norms in their decision-making, the analysis regards the complex co-development of technological, political, and cultural factors as a dynamic socio-technical system of prenatal testing in Japan. By doing so, it reveals the implicit politics revolving around the imagery of “mothers giving birth to healthy babies,” and the ambivalent positioning of prenatal testing.
Full text:
Camilla Mørk Røstvik
Safer, Greener, Cheaper: The Mooncup and the Development of Menstrual Cup Technology in the Twentieth Century, pp. 81-103
Show abstract
When the Mooncup® menstrual cup was launched in the United Kingdom in 2002, it joined a history of innovations that began in the 1900s. Like other commercialised menstrual products, such as disposable pads and tampons, the menstrual cup sits at the crossroads of medical device safety concerns, environmentalism, and economic debates surrounding ‘period poverty.’ Analysing how and when the brand emerged in the longer history of menstrual cup technology, this paper asks what it means for menstruating bodies to utilise the menstrual cup as a technology during its re-emergence as a novel and increasingly popular control mechanism for menstrual blood leakage. Specifically, this paper considers how the silicone properties of the Mooncup made it a viable commercial technology where other visually similar, but materially different, cups had failed in terms of popularisation. To do so, the article draws on an interview with a company employee, materials relating to the regulation of the cup, and literature from Critical Menstruation Studies. Situating it in menstrual technological history and within the specifics of the Mooncup product helps both broaden the historiography of menstrual cups, and reveals how this technology was developed during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Full text:
Marcin Stasiak
Objects, Agency, Discontinuity: Orthopaedic Devices and People with Polio-Related Disabilities in Poland after 1945, pp. 104-124
Show abstract
This text addresses the general question of how medicine-based objects—for example, leg-braces, crutches, orthopaedic boots, and corsets—were included in the daily-life routines of so-called “polio-survivors” in Poland from the early 1950s onwards. It discusses orthopaedic devices as both part of the state policy towards disabled people and sites of negotiating discursive rules. This highlights the issues of agency and decision-making for people with disabilities. To explore the tension between top-down plans and individual agency, the article draws on individual life stories. The source basis for this article is formed by twenty-three interviews recorded by the author between 2012 and 2015. The article examines attitudes towards supportive gear in several life stages: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and late adulthood. In life-long perspective orthopaedic devices appear as ambiguous objects. They have triggered a range of responses from rejection to total acceptance. Transformations of attitudes, the article shows, were closely connected with certain life stages—an observation with many practical outcomes.
Full text:
Magdalena Zdrodowska
Prosthetic performances: artistic strategies and tactics for everyday life, pp. 125-145
Show abstract
The prosthesis is an object filled with various values. In medical and rehabilitative discourses, prostheses are instruments that “fix” “dysfunctional” bodies. This article, instead, uses the disability studies perspective in which they are perceived as social, cultural and political actors. Their usage as well as rejection may be read as a political act and/or identity statement. This article analyses case studies of public acts of rejection of the prosthesis or the contrary – their excessive use. Prosthetic performances by individuals with disabilities drew the public’s attention to broader social problems, such as the “technological fix” of people who do not perceive themselves as broken and the inaccessibility of the public sphere and public spaces. As it turns out, prostheses have been used to challenge the very notion of “disability.”
Full text:
Book Reviews
Betsey Price
Review of Eat Like a Human: Nourishing Foods and Ancient Ways of Cooking to Revolutionize Your Health by Bill Schindler, pp. 148-151
Show abstract
no abstract for this article
Full text:
Viktor Pál
Review of The Contamination of the Earth: A History of Pollutions in the Industrial Age by François Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux, pp. 152-153
Show abstract
no abstract for this article
Full text:
Roberta Biasillo
Review of A Monastery for the Ibex: Conservation, State, and Conflicts on the Gran Paradiso, 1919-1949 by Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, pp. 154-156
Show abstract
no abstract for this article
Full text:
