BODIES OF TECHNOLOGY: Women’s Involvement with Reproductive Medicine

Bodies of Technology is based on the premise that technology and society mutually shape one another, and on a concern for women’s health and autonomy. A basic question is one of cultural appropriation: Do technologies take on different shapes, different practices, and have different impacts as they spread from one place to another? By juxtaposing a number of culturally and historically contextualized studies of similar technologies, the editors demonstrate that although technologies globalize by spreading among cultures, they are also localized by the cultures they encounter.

The first part of the book investigates how potential users of hormone-based contraceptives are represented as these technologies are developed in laboratories and field tests. The next section explores the political and economic processes that regulate access to and practices of assisted fertilization. The final section focuses on individual users engaging with fetal diagnostic technologies in clinical practice. Taken as a whole, the book points out the need and the possibilities for women to become directly involved in the shaping of technologies that so strongly affect their health and their daily lives.