Drownproofing: Technology, Race, and Gender in Understanding the Conceptualization of Bodies

• In Event: Technology and/in Racial Formations

Abstract

Drownproofing is a body technique, developed after years of observation and training and based on the most novel scientific theories of the 1940s. The main objective of this technology was the prevention of drowning. Taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology between 1945 and 1999 as a required course, drownproofing proved to be more than a survival method. For those examining it closer, it revealed itself as a technology of control and a philosophy imbued with notions of race and gender. In this paper, I will show how drownproofing used race and gender as techniques in order to categorize and separate bodies, and, most importantly, to justify those categorizations and separations even in the eyes of those who were subject to them. Using insights from the literature on race, gender, and biomedicalization, I reframe popular views on drownproofing to show how we transform our way of conceptualizing different bodies to make them conform with certain ideas of race and gender. Drownproofing connects technology, technique, race, gender, the body, and the way we formulate categories. For all these reasons, this paper is very relevant for this panel.

Author

• Amanda Almeida Domingues, Cornell University