The Body as a Technology, Technological Object, and Techno-normativity.

• In Event: 540 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Biomedicine and Health II

Abstract

Biology and biomedicine are now overcoming methodological individualism; in no longer being dictated by neo-Darwinism, in abolishing the concept of the individual in reconstructions of past research, and even in going back to Darwin’s writings and notes the dogma of individualism unravels and is revealed as a concept that not only doesn’t hold up in view of latest research (from epigenetics to gut-biomes), but it never held up in the first place.
For sociology to come to grips with that, without falling for old fallacies of reductionist alternatives, it must critically appraise the options and opportunities that the body offers, when it is no longer viewed as individual unit nor from an epistemically privileged point of view. Here, we suggest just such a decolonial perspective of the body that Sociology, in particular sociologist of science, knowledge, technology, medicine, and gender/sex will have to deal with in the years to come.

Authors

• Alexander I. Stingl, Drexel University

• Sabrina M. Weiss, Rochester Institute of Technology