Analysis #9 - The Postmortal Society

When going about our daily lives, the majority of us rarely sit down to think about something so bleak and unpleasant as death. Many of us shudder and cringe at even the slightest mention of the word whose meaning has, for the most part, remained unchanged throughout time. The word "death" carries with it a mysterious, depressing, and terrifying aura filled with unimaginable pains, horrors, and darkness. We would much rather talk about life and all of the bright opportunities we are given, the joys we experience, and the wonders of human achievement and valor we witness. Our emphasis on the importance of living has consequently created in us a fear and unwelcoming attitude towards death, which is seen as an antithesis of life itself. Biomedicine and technological advances have provided us with the tools and knowledge necessary to fight infectious diseases and thus live longer healthier lives, but they have also embedded in us the notion that we should not just want to live longer, but that we should want to live forever. Any doubts we may have on our ability to "freeze eternity" (Lafontaine, 306) and live forever young are immediately bludgeoned by society's reassurance that not only is immortality possible, but that it is our right and responsibility to conquer death.

Above is an image taken from a website on the evolution of technology (http://www.swictech.com/artificial-intelligence-and-inkling.html). The image shows a half-woman/half-robot hybrid whose missing midriff exposes lose ends of metal wires and gizmos. The "woman" in the picture is a classic example of what one might typically imagine if man were to meet machine - the birth of a human robot. The image of a human robot (better yet, the idea itself of the possibility of a human robot) was unimaginable and seemingly impossible for past generations, yet today, it is easily accepted as feasible and for some, an expected outcome of our continually advancing technoscience. Newly obtained scientific (or shall we say pseudo-scientific?) knowledge of the possibility of prolonging life by eliminating death has absorbed the minds of many individuals within society. Mortality, which was once seen as an unwelcomed yet inevitable natural process in life, has now become the "motivation to find a biomedical arsenal to fight death and extend life" (Lafontaine, 299). Unlike past generations, modern societies have "[deconstructed] death into a series of physiological stages" (Lafontaine, 299) that can be separated into differentiated forms of death - that is, functional death (loss of function in one or more organs), clinical death (loss of function in the entire body), and elementary death (loss of function in cells of all tissues). This deconstruction of death holds implications for the shifting meaning of not only bodily health, but of identity and self as well. As we frantically chase after the idea of reengineering our bodies to fit in the technology-obsessed world in which we live, we fail to realize that biopolitics, implemented as "a new form of social control" (Lafontaine, 300), has been manipulating our minds and bodies to change and control the power we have (or used to have) over our own identities.

The life extension movement that we have become so absorbed in reveals much about our peceptions of human perfectibility. As Celine Lafontaine states in her reading titled "The Postmortal Conditon", "postmodern society is characterized by the belief in perfectibility itself" (Lafontaine, 301). According to science, aging and death are seen as accidental effects of natural selection (Lafontaine, 300) and must thus be reversed or buffered. Health would consequently need to be promoted and delivered in order to help people prolong life and ultimately cheat death. This growing emphasis on the need to optimize human capacities through the eradication of aging has led many to fear the dangerously thin line between "necessary care and performance-based medicine" (Lafontaine, 302). This concern however does not seem to have any effect on technoscience and nanomedicine, which reassures the public that "the much-awaited technological revolution will be a salvation, since it carries the hope of an existence spared at long last from illness and death" (Lafontaine, 305). The decision of whether or not such a revolution is truly a "salvation" should not be up to those who have created its existence in the first place. The meaning and value of life begin to change as attitudes and approaches to death begin to shift towards a more clinical and medicalized understanding of again within the body. According to biotechnology, an individual undergoing aging is seen to represent a "temporarily depotentialized life, awaiting its future resuscitation" (Cooper, 8).

The field of regenerative medicine claims that its goal is to "protect the old and promote growth" (Cooper, 9), but how will the old be protected if current science is using this sort of technology to put an end to the process of aging? Growth is desired, yet continued growth is what leads to aging and eventually death. Promoting growth while shunning aging and death seems to be an ironic gesture since once cannot exist without the absence of the other. Our quest for infinite longevity and obsession with fighting death have blinded us from realizing how we have become puppets in the hands of bioeconomics. We as individuals have "become consumers called upon to make financial investments in extending [our] own lives" (Lafontaine, 309) without even knowing it. As Cooper states, "as the life sciences and their cutting-edge biotechnologies become ever more integrated into the circuits of capital accumulation, it is clear that no appeal to the lost sanctity of human life will protect us from the incursions of the market" (Cooper, 16). This sad, yet undeniable fact is evidence of our inability to better understand the possible consequences of our choices before it is too late. We have allowed ourselves to fall victim to the demands of the market by hastily accepting what science tells us and claims to be true. As technology continues to become more advanced and human knowledge more abundant, I fear for mankind. As I sit here reading articles discussing the pitfalls of biomedicine and technoscience, I cannot help but feel a little grateful that I was not born in an era in which I would have to witness this scientific exploitation at work.


Works Cited:

Cooper, Melinda. 2006. “Resuscitations: Stem Cells and the Crisis of Old Age”. Body and Society 12(1): 1-23.

Lafontaine, Celine. 2009. “The Postmortal Condition: From the Biomedical Deconstruction of Death to the Extension of Longevity”. Science as Culture 18(3): 297-312.

Analysis #8 - Of Living & Dying, Growing & Aging

As living, breathing organisms all humans experience life and death through biological and physiological development and growth as well as physical and mental deterioration associated with the aging process. In modern times, the onset of technological advances and medical knowledge has allowed for us to extend our life expectancies, living beyond the age limits of what previously was understood to be the maximum lifespan possible for humans. As Sharon R. Kaufman states in her piece on "Dementia-Near-Death and "Life Itself"", "prevention, enhancement, and intervention are possible, even into advanced age. We can choose, and it is our responsibility to choose, because biomedical technique has extended choice to every aspect of existence, including the timing of death" (Kaufman, 28). Not all may agree with Kaufman's use of the word "responsibility" within the context of choice. Some may view our ability to prolong or speed up death as a necessary choice and human right, while others may find it to be a crude insult and disturbance to the natural processes of life and death. It is our changing understandings and perceptions of identity, life, and health that are influencing our outlook on the definition of death - both of the body and of the self or being.

Above is an image taken from an anti-aging resource site (http://resveratrolformula.com/). The image is an advertisement for Resveratrol, the so-called "anti-aging breakthrough of the decade", which can "slow down the aging process, increase healthy lifespan, fight free radical damage, support cardiovascular health, improve cognitive function, and much much more". At the very bottom of the ad are the words: "turn on your anti-aging gene" accompanied by a link to a video clip on how Resveratrol apparently works. The above image is signifiicant in several ways - first, it acknowledges our growing concerns of aging and our desperate attempts at either reversing or stopping it in its track. Second, the advertisement implies that women are more prone to the distresses of aging by including a picture of a woman (as opposed to a man or both woman and man) looking concerned about the toll that age is taking on her once-beautiful and once-flawless skin. By attaching the word "gene" to "anti-aging", the advertisement attempts to lure in its audience (or shall we say victims?) into viewing the anti-aging formula as scientific, one that can be easily placed within the biomedicine or clinical context. Of course, there is no such thing as an anti-aging "gene", but target audiences can easily be duped into thinking that it does exist because people "are not willing to seriously confront the question of the body physical with anything other than current scientific wisdom" (or in this case, what appears to be the "facts" of science" (Lock, 331).

Views of aging and reactions to death vary widely across cultures and are thus, important in studying our perceptions of what it means to live or to be alive and how our lives or deaths define who we are - that is, how we choose to identify ourselves and how others may identify with us. As mentioned earlier, Kaufman's piece on aging focuses on dementia towards what appears to be the onset of death and how dementia, "as a mutable category of knowledge and cultural form, obscures the distinction between life and death" (Kaufman, 23). Our views on aging and dementia cannot be isolated from the role culture has in shaping our understandings of the importance of "memory, control, and reason" as well as the "existing order of things" in our lives. Anything that disrupts our abilities to maintain normal consciousness, cognition, and expressive capacity is considered to reflect pathological medical conditions that must be distinguished from "normal senile degeneration" (Kaufman, 25). Social scientists and clinicians encounter difficulty when evaluating age-related behaviors and claim that "dementia occurs when aging changes exceed a particular limit" (Kaufman, 27). But what are the implied limits? Who gets to define what these limitations are and what they entail? Is it even our right to debate over the value of another person's life through evaluating their "quality of life"? (Kaufman, 27). By either allowing or ceasing the use of feeding tubes to patients, are we not placing certain values on the meaning of life by claiming our "right" to determine which lives are worth saving and which are better off letting go? In Kaufman's article, Alzheimer's was explained to be a disease that is "like a prism of that refracts death into a spectrum of its parts: death of autonomy, death of memory, death of self-consciousness, death of personality, death of the body" (Kaufman, 30). Humans are complicated beings and it makes perfect sense that we view death in terms of its various components. However, this separation of the components makes it all the more difficult to assign the right or "appropriate" time to guide a dementia patient along the path towards death. Out of the 5 types of death mentioned above, which one is the correct indicator of declining life and which one reflects the point at which aging becomes no longer normal and instead becomes pathological and thus a burden on the patient, patient's family, and society as a whole?

Just like senility has been medicalized, so too has the body itself. In her piece on "The Politics of Mid-Life and Menopause", Margaret Lock discusses North America's obsessive focus on menopause and what it may imply about the "loss, failure, and decreptitude" (Lock, 333) or middle-aged post-menopausal women. Older women, compared to younger women as well as their male counterparts, are deemed as "a liability to society in their latter years" (Lock, 334) due to their economic costs to society in regards to their increased longevity and post-menopausal state, which is considered "[going] against nature" (Lock, 334). The problem with viewing older women as a burden to society stems from the emphasis on the "body chemistry prior to middle age", which is used "as a standard measure of what is "normal" (Lock, 336). In this sense, aging is seen as pathological and women are the main target for much of the blame of this "deficiency disease" (Lock, 343) that debilitates and makes women dependent on hormone replacement therapy. Why are only women being targeted for their reduced reproductive capacities when men too exhibit similar deteriorating signs of aging (i.e. reduced sperm count and motility)? Our views on aging and death reveal much about our culture and the various values we place on members of society as well as their worth to society through their contributions. Death was once seen as an uncontrollable natural process which takes it own course, regardless of our hopes or efforts to slow it down. In modern times, death (along with life) has now become almost a sort of luxury in the sense that we are given the option to manage our deaths and time them according to our needs and the needs of our families. Such "opportunities" were unimagineable in past times and perhaps it is this unimaginative, yet now possible medical intervention that is the source of our inability to handle our newfound power over life and death.



Works Cited:

Lock, Margaret. 1993. “The Politics of Mid-Life and Menopause: Ideologies for the Second Sex in North America and Japan”. In Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine in Everyday Life. Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock, eds, Pp. 330-363. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kaufman, Sharon R. 2006. “Dementia-Near-Death and ‘Life Itself’”. In Thinking about Dementia: Culture, Loss, and the Anthropology of Senility. Annette Leibing and Lawrence Cohen, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Pp. 23-42.

Analysis #7 - The Drug of the 21st Century: Neuroenhancements

In the hustle-bustle of everyday life surrounding academics, busy work schedules, and social interactions, we constantly find ourselves extremely overwhelmed, mentally stressed, and physically exhausted. For the majority of Americans, who are consistently reminded of the need to strive for optimal production and success, having the time and energy to stay focused is a strenuous and seemingly impossible challenge that must be encountered each day. Anxieties and pressures associated with performance in both school and work have created a demand for neuroenhancers that would give people the opportunity to boost their cognitive functions. Adderall and Ritalin, drugs that were initially created to help children and adults with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), are now being abused by undiagnosed and unprescribed individuals who take these stimulants for "nonmedical" purposes" (Talbot, 2). Advances in medicine and improvements in marketing strategies have combined with societal expectations and demands to create in us the attraction to the idea of consuming neuroenhancing drugs to keep up with society, our peers, and ultimately, ourselves.

The above image, taken from a blog on Adderall on the college campus (http://thestudypill.wordpress.com/), is a poster-like visual that says (in large letters) "that twenty five thousand dollar ticket will look fabulous next to the A+ paper on your cell wall" and then asks (in much smaller font) "is it worth it?" The image depicts in the background a pair of lips about to intake an Adderall XR pill. This image and the message it sends are very powerful in the sense that they address two important aspects of neuroenhancing drugs - their ability to effectively improve cognitive function and their potentially dangerous side effects. What makes neuroenhancers like Adderall and Ritalin dangerous is not only their "high potential for abuse...and serious cardiac problems" (Talbot, 2), but also people's tendency to underestimate and ignore these potential hazards. In her article on "Brain Gain: The Underground World of Neuroenhancing Drugs", Margaret Talbot informs readers that "white male undergraduates at highly competitive schools...are the most frequent collegiate users of neuroenhancers" (Talbot, 2). Talbot also discusses the results of an online poll published in the scientific journal Nature, which stated that "a majority of the fourteen hundred readers who responded said that healthy adults should be permitted to take brain boosters for nonmedical reasons, and sixty-nine percent said that mild side effects were an acceptable risk" (Talbot, 3). Debates on using neuroenhancers as a sort of "cosmetic neurology" (Talbot, 3) as a way to increase performance are not something that should be taken lightly and they are definitely sending us on a slippery slope. Time is of the essence to all of us, yet the idea of allowing undiagnosed individuals to use medications that were "developed for recognized medical conditions" (Talbot, 3) seems like an unfair and crude insult to those that actually require the drugs to assist them in medically diagnosed cognitive deficiencies. For those that highly criticize the use of medicine and technology to serve nonmedical purposes, the popularity of nonmedical uses of neuroenhancers may appear to be a living nightmare and a failed attempt by society to do better for its people. Yet can we really blame the abusers of Adderall and Ritalin when societal pressures may be the source of their popularity to begin with? After all, as Talbot tells her readers, "the demand is certainly there: from an aging population that won't put up with memory loss; from overwrought parents bent on giving their children every possible edge; from anxious employees in an efficiency-obssessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture, where work never really ends" (Talbot, 3). It is a sad, yet inevitable truth that we have allowed ourselves to become so enveloped by productivity and success that we are willing to do anything (even if that means taking drugs) in order to pull ourselves through and make it to the top.

The concept of neuroenhancers may seem straightforward enough (take the drugs, enhance cognitive function, focus better, become successful), yet that would be a vulgar oversimplification of the processes involved as it fails to define the term "enhancement'. As one of the cofounders of NeuroInsights states, "We're not talking about superhuman intelligence. No one's saying we're coming out with a pill that's going to make you smarter than Einstein!...What we're really talking about is enabling people" (Talbot, 4). By enabling, I believe he is referring to the possibility of giving people the opportunity to expand their abilities and perform better than they otherwise normally would without the assistance of the drugs. However, it seems many people who abuse the drugs believe the pills are some sort of magical "smart drugs" (Talbot, 2) that are completely benign without any potentially dangerous side effects. Although some people might be unaware of the potential hazards of taking neuroenhancers, perhaps the majority of them knowingly consume them in order to keep up with the "baseline competitive level [that] reorients around what these drugs make possible" (Talbot, 6). Social and academic anxieties are not the only pressures society places on us to work harder and perform better. As Talbot states, neuroenhancers "have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus" (Talbot, 11). As we become more scientifically equipped and medically knowledgeable, we strive to find "multiple opportunities for therapeutic interventions" through biomedicine (Rose, 206) to target neurological disorders.

Technological advances and interventions cannot be blamed to be the sole culprit causing our attraction to and reliance on neuroenhancers. In a society based on capitalism, marketing is an important aspect of a functioning economy. As Nikolas Rose suggest in his piece on "The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century", mental disorders today are "vital opportunities for the creation of private profit and national economic growth" (Rose, 209). The lay public are drawn into the idea of viewing diseases in a "clinical form" (Rose, 214) through direct-to-consumer advertisement and presentation of disorders and diseases alongside "advice on the [existence and] use of pharmaceutical treatments of the [conditions]" (Rose, 217). Marketing clothes, hair products, or electronic gizmos and gadgets is one thing, but marketing neuroenhancers and pyschostimulants is a whole different thing. It becomes a concern when drugs become "entangled with certain conceptions of what humans are or should be - that is to say specific norms, values, and judgments internalized in the very idea of these drugs" (Rose, 220). Neuroenhancers cannot be discussed in isolation of social, cultural, and political factors that have shaped its creation and demand in the first place. We wouldn't find ourselves depending so heaviliy on neuroenhancers if we weren't pressured to constantly perform beyond our physical and mental capabilities. As Talbot suggests, "every era has its defining drug" (Talbot, 1). It does not come to me as a big surprise that in our era, which places much value and emphasis on productivity and efficiency, neuroenhancers have become the predominant drug of the twenty-first century. In today's modern world, most of us would do anything to get that extra boost of energy or that extra half an hour to complete our duties in order to stand out among the rest (or just barely get through the day). The frequency and popularity of the abuse of neuroenhancing drugs today should serve as important indicators of where we may be going in terms of future dependency on medical science. We are becoming more and more obsessed and addicted to the "benefits" science may offer us, failing to see that these opportunities come with strings attached.



Works Cited:

Rose, Nikolas. 2007. Neurochemical Selves, in Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pp. 187 – 223.

Talbot, Margaret.  “Brain Gain: The Underground World of ‘Neuroenhancing’ Drugs”. The New Yorker, April 27, 2009. 

Analysis #6 - The (Not So Obvious) Meaning of Food

If there's one thing in the world that we all share it's eating. Every human, every living organism, every tiny particle of life form on Earth must take in nutrients in order to sustain itself and survive. Although the types and availability of food resources themselves may vary across cultures and geographical regions, we all partake in the universally accepted and essential activity of eating. The most basic (and most obvious) reason for eating is to provide our bodies with the energy it requires to function properly - energy that we are able to obtain from consuming animal and plant products, which sustain us through nutrients such as carbohydrates, proteins, fats, sugars, and vitamins. In recent times, much emphasis has been placed on the value and functionalities of these nutrients, creating what Gyorgy Scrinis classifies as the "ideology or paradigm of nutritionism [which] has come to dominate, to undermine, and to replace other ways of engaging with food and of contextualizing the relationship between food and the body" (Scrinis, 39). Our growing obsession with the biochemical composition and nutrients of foods has led us to become more dependent "on nutritional experts as a source of knowledge about food" (Scrinis, 46). Our nutritionally reductive approach to food reflects not only society's changing demands and values (of health and diet), but it also displays our infatuation with the "perfect body" and the power it holds in shaping and maintaining our identities.

The image above, taken from a bodybuilding blog (http://www.bodybuilding4idiots.com/blog/163/7-cardio-myths-expelled-once-and-for-all/), depicts a simple picture of a fork, knife, and plate. Seems normal enough, yet the plate is the centerpiece in this image as it is shown tied around and knotted by a measuring tape. The message of the image is clear and concise: it reminds us of the all-too-familiar phrase "you are what you eat". This image is a good example of the nutritional reductionism, biomarker reductionism, and genetic reductionism that Scrinis discusses in his chapter "On the Ideology of Nutritionism". As the image suggests, our experience with food and eating is something "that must be measured, monitored, and scientifically managed" (Scrinis, 46). Unlike our hunting and gathering ancestors, modern humans have modified the meaning of eating and have extended its definition to incorporate not only its essential role for survival, but a more broader landscape of its usages in terms of identity maintenance. Food is no longer just food; it has now become the very grounds on which we evaluate food products and make health-conscious decisions about what to eat and what not to eat. Hillel Schwartz argues, in R. Marie Griffith's chapter on "The Erotics of Abstinence in American Christianity", that "modern dieting is itself a central ritual in what has become the predominant religion of late twentieth century America: the worship of the body beautiful, lean, and physically fit" (Griffith, 38). Such "worshipping" of the body does not serve merely as a figure of speech. In fact, as Griffith informs us, "American culture's treasured doctrine of the perfectible body is deeply indebted to Christian currents that have perceived the body as central for pushing the soul along the path to progress" (Griffith, 38). This path to progress was most easily indexed through "the size and fitness of his or her body" (Griffith, 41) and would entail abstinence from food (during the early fourth century C.E.), which was seen as "a means of purification, a sign of grief, a work of charity, or an expression of penitence, and the desire for God's mercy" (Griffith 36). In this sense, food was used as a way to maintain spiritual health, by advising Christian followers to consume foods from the Kingdom of God while avoiding "worldly" or fattening foods (Griffith, 42). Food not only holds a biological and/or physiological importance on our bodies, but according to early forms of American Christianity, it also maintained a religious power over our bodies and souls.

Edward Dumke, author of Christian diet book The Serpent Beguiled Me and I Ate: A Heavenly Diet for Saints and Sinners, advises readers that "thou shalt consume sufficient protein but thou shalt limit the amount of animal protein...Thou shalt create a diet in complex carbohydrates...Thou shalt create a diet low in saturated fat" (Griffith, 44). Such religio-scientific advice regarding food intake mirrors the nutritionally reductive approach mentioned earlier in Scrinis' chapter that discusses our narrow focus on the biochemical breakdown or nutrient composition of the foods we consume. Much like Dumke, "nutritionists highlight the distinctions between good and bad cholesterol, good and bad fats, and good and bad carbohydrates" (Scrinis, 44). This "nutri-quanitification" (Scrinis, 43) is evident in other nutrition discourses such as macrobiotics, which, "like traditional diets, categorizes food into better and worse options" (Crowley, 37). Food becomes once again something that can be distinctively measured and within macrobiotics, it is "understood to precede and to give rise to every thought, speech, feeling, and act" (Crowley, 38). Macrobiotics does not use food as a means of controlling spiritual enlightenment or maintaining culturally-imposed images of the ideal body; it instead "offers satisfactions derived not from trying to fit one's body to an unattainable ideal, but from exerting some control over gender" (Crowley, 38) by allowing individuals to adjust their daily intake of yin and yang (feminine and masculine energy, respectively). According to macrobiotics, certain foods (i.e. fruits and alcohol) are categorized as "yin foods" while others (i.e. meat and eggs) are categorized as "yang foods". The belief that by "eating certain foods cooked in certain ways, an individual can achieve a healthy new gender balance" (Crowley, 40) parallels the beliefs of nutritional reductionism in the sense that foods can be broken down according to their various nutrients and can serve functional purposes in bodily health.

While going about our daily lives and busy work schedules, we rarely think twice (or even once) about the all-too-mundance activity of eating. We partake in the activity of eating everyday without stopping to think about how our choices of food have been influenced by the advice of nutritional experts, marketing strategies of the food industry, and dietary guidelines established by the government and various other institutions. Food holds a very powerful control over our lives simply due to the fact that we require it for our very survival. Yet food "has the capacity not only to nourish the body but also to alter personality and behavior" (Crowley, 40) through religious, gender, social, and cultural systems of power.


Works Cited:

Gyorgy Scrinis, 2008. “The ideology of Nutritionism,” Gastronomica 8(1): 39-48.

R. Marie Griffith, 2001. “Don’t Eat That’: The Erotics of Abstinence in American Christianity.” Gastronomica 1(4): 36-47.

Karlyn Crowley, 2002. “Gender on a Plate: The Calibration of Identity in American Macrobiotics.” Gastronomica 2(3): 37-48.

Analysis #5 - Medicalizing "Deviance"

"Disease" is universally accepted as causing some form of abnormality or state of ill-compromised health that disrupts an individual's normal everyday life experience. Although the actual definition of the term "disease" differs widely cross-culturally and geographically, its existence is acknowledged in all human societies. One culture may view "disease" as being caused by the effects of misfortune or acts of witchcraft or contact with natural/spiritual phenomena, while another may associate it with scientifically proven psychological, physiological, or mental medical conditions interfering with the body. It is this latter definition of "disease" that is of interest here and will serve as the main focus of this analysis, which will concentrate primarily on the causes and effects underlying the medicalization of social problems or "deviance" in Western societies.

The image above, taken from The Global Sociology Blog (http://globalsociology.com/2010/01/16/medicalization-of-deviance-as-strategy/), depicts the socially acceptable and socially unacceptable perceptions of what one may generalize to be considered social problems. In this particular cartoon, on the left frame we see a young boy telling his mother that laziness was the reason behind his incompletion of his homework (labeled socially unacceptable) and on the right frame we see the same young boy telling his mother that laziness syndrome had been the culprit behind his uncompleted homework (labeled socially acceptable). This cartoon provides a straight-forward demonstration of Western notions of the tendency (and necessity) to medicalize any (or rather, every) social problem we experience. As the cartoon illustrates, laziness itself is not sufficient to explain why we were unable to finish our homework or mow the lawn or walk the dog or take out the trash or pay our electricity bills or whatever it is that we were just too darn lazy to do. However, laziness immediately becomes a socially acceptable cause of idleness and lack of progress as soon as a medical term is attached. As absurd as it sounds, "laziness syndrome" apparently serves as a legitimate medical condition  that can excuse us from our daily responsibilities and duties. This medicalization of social problems or social "deviance" can be seen quite frequently in our society. Reduced (or uncontrollably heightened) sexual desire among single and married individuals becomes medically coined as Inhibited Sexual Desire (ISD) and Sexual Addiction, respectively. As Janice M. Irvine states in her article on "Regulated Passions", "diseases are artifacts with social history and social practice" (Irvine, 314) and "inhibited sexual desire and sexual addiction are two of the most recent medical constructions of sexual disease and disorder" (Irvine, 315). In a time during which increasing number of people were exhibiting concerns of sexual dysfunctions, "sexologists, with their appeal to scientific legitimacy and medical authority, were riding a wave or popularity in a vast market eager for a new approach to sexual problems" (Irvine, 316). 

ISD and sexual addiction became increasingly accepted as being medical disorders because the "proposal that any behavioral excess could lead to dependence fit nicely with the popular and widespread generalization of ideas about addiction represented by such figures as the workaholic, shopaholic, and compulsive gambler" (Irvine, 317). By medicalizing these disorders as being a form of sexual disease, it allows those suffering from them to remove personal responsibility by blaming uncontrollable sexual desires on mechanisms of the brain that are "locked...in early childhood" (Irvine, 321) and "encoded into the hardwiring of the brain" (Irvine, 322). The medicalization of sexual disease can be seen as a result of cultural and social ideologies of sex. Irvine states that "both ISD and sexual addiction rely heavily on self-diagnosis and serve as beacons for the individual who feels a sense of inadequacy or incongruence with cultural or interpersonal sexual norms" (Irvine, 323).  Perhaps this can explain one of the dangers behind medicalizing social problems. ISD and sexual addiction may not truly be medical disorders; they may in reality be socially invented forms of sexual "disease" created as individuals fell under the cultural pressures of sex and how much (or little) sex a "normal" person should be getting. Despite the medicalization of ISD and sexual addiction, "the diagnosis of ISD remains controversial among sexologists, with little consensus regarding operational criteria" (Irvine, 324). I would think if ISD was categorized as being a medical disorder, its method and mode of diagnosis should be more agreed upon and universally understood, at least within the medical professionals. Currently, experts in both sexology and addictionology are "[looking] hopefully and confidently to the future of neurochemistry for unlocking the determinants of their diseases" (Irvine, 326). But what happens if neurochemistry cannot explain the reasoning behind ISD and sexual addiction? If, contrary to what sexologists and addictionologists believe, these sexual disorders are not caused by "a specific neural system in the brain" (Irvine, 321), will their medicalization be invoked? If they are maintained, in which forms will they take?

Much in the same way that sexual desires have been medicalized is the pathologization of male and female homosexuality. Jennifer Terry's chapter on "Medicalizing Homosexuality" states that doctors' expertise concerning the body gave them authority to comment on the causality, prevalence, and treatment of any socially deviant behavior that they could plausibly link to heredity or to bodily processes" (Terry, 40). It comes as no surprise that homosexuality became subject to Western tendencies of medicalization since homosexuality was not very well understood and therefore widely unaccepted in modern societies. "Homosexual bodies, as they were imagined by physicians, were objects to be measured, zones to be mapped, and texts to be interpreted" (Terry, 41). Irvine's piece on "Regulated Passions" also discusses the "biomedical tradition [of quantifying] desire" (Irvine, 320) and exhibiting the "impulse to map desire and its varied disorders in the body" (Irvine, 320). Western notions of medicine seem to emphasize on the mapping of disorders and signs of social deviance on the human body, which isn't surprising since biomedicine seeks to stray away from subjective components of illness and move towards objective aspects of medicalized disorders. Homosexuality has been medicalized and discussed in terms of nervous degeneration, congenital predisposition (Terry, 45-50), evolutionary throwbacks, and what Freud calls "an immature stage of psychosexual development" (Terry, 61). 

Like ISD and sexual addiction as well as homosexuality, behaviors considered to be reflections of social "deviance" are medicalized in an attempt to validate their existence as a result of events that can be scientifically proven. Medicalization of social "problems" can be seen as beneficial to those suffering from the disorders since "the seemingly neutral and scientific language of disease may offer palpable relief to those who secretly worry that their sexuality is inadequate or out of control" (Irvine, 328). 

Homosexual men and women beseeched doctors to make sense of their unusual desires and to defend them against criminal charges and religious intolerance" (Terry, 42). Despite sufferers' opportunity to use medicalized definitions of social disorders to divert personal responsibility to biological causes of disease, medicalizing disorders "cannot really be said said to eliminate moral stigma or enhance "cure"" (Irvine, 330). What really needs to be looked at are the various social, cultural, and political factors allowing for the medicalization of social concerns and the tremendous effects they are having on professionals as well as those afflicted. We need to be able to realize that social and cultural ideologies are shaping the ways in which we view the body as a form of object to be manipulated and studied by science and as an individual entity that should be viewed and valued by the qualities it possesses. 

Works Cited:

Irvine, Janice M. 1995. "Regulated Passions: The Invention of Inhibited Sexual Desire and Sexual Addiction". In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Sci Works ence and Popular Culture". Edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla. Pp. 314-337. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Terry, Jennifer. 1999. “Medicalizing Homosexuality”. In An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 40-73.           

Analysis #4 - The "Heal" in "Heal(th)"

Cross-cultural studies have shown that the term "healing" can have very different meanings and manifestations in various social and cultural settings. Despite dominance of Western biomedicine, research on traditional forms of healing may reveal the possibility of alternative or ethnomedical methods of healing. For those accustomed to Western knowledge and notions of scientific thought, religious healing appears to be a rather far-fetched concept. The idea of fusing bits of science here and there with what seems to be magical, mystical, or supernatural illusions sounds impractical and inaccurate based on Western standards of medicine. But perhaps hastily overlooking the power that these ethnomedical approaches may hold could be a narrow-minded mistake on our part as they may prove to be just as valuable in various healing processes.

Above is an image from an online blog (http://www.prometheus-burning.com/). The image is a pyramid depicting the various components of a faith-based healing model. Unlike a biomedical healing model, which would mainly emphasize the need for accurate diagnoses and medical attention, this faith-based healing model incorporates all the different aspects of an individual's life. This is not to say that Western healing processes do not find nutrition, exercise, attitude, support, and meaning and purpose significant in healing patients; the point here is that traditional approaches to healing place a much heavier emphasis on the latter components of healing rather than the purely medical component that is more commonly seen in Western biomedicine. Navajo religious healing is one example of a traditional approach that focuses on the role of diagnosis in a "patient-centered therapeutic process" which "[imbues] narrative with healing power" (Howard & Milne, 544). The above image depicts a medical component of the healing process, which the Navajo exhibits through their emphasis on the fact that the success of a healing ceremony ultimately “is predicated on an accurate diagnosis” (Howard & Milne, 546). Properly diagnosing patients is a medical act in itself since without it, there would be no objective basis on which to determine the most appropriate method of treatment and healing.

Unlike Western medicine, Navajo religious healing processes “collapse the dichotomy between natural and supernatural, as they include physiological, psychological, cultural, social, and spiritual factors” (Howard & Milne, 546). The removal of this dichotomy, along with a loose correlation between symptom and cause, “distinguishes Navajo ethnomedicine from Western medical healing therapies” (Howard & Milne, 546). Western medicine would not approve of the incorporation of the supernatural or spiritual being into medical discourse. However, as Joseph S. Alter asks in his piece on modern medical yoga, “where is the proof that prana flows through the sushumna; where is the evidence that yogis can live forever by stopping their breath and the flow of their semen? Conversely, where is the proof that they cannot? It is the power of these unanswerable questions that makes yoga powerful” (Alter, 141). Alter’s quote is applicable in this context since it addresses the Western medicine’s refusal to consider non-medical traditional forms of medicine. Just like we don’t have any proof to answer Alter’s questions, we also do not know for sure whether or not religious healing processes truly work. The fact that we cannot objectively state with hard evidence that religious healing is invalid may make it all the more possible. 

It is not uncommon in any patient-physician/sufferer-healer relationship to witness varying levels of physician/diagnostician confidence. Despite potential allegations of incompetence, “Navajo people do not abandon the use of diagnosticians, since etiological complexity and the necessity of choosing the right ceremonial course of action make them indispensable to the therapeutic process” (Howard & Milne, 548). The Navajo place much importance on attitude, support, and meaning/purpose. The attitude of an individual (willingness to share private information that may assist during the healing process or genuine sincerity of forgiveness during a Native American Church meeting) may determine whether or not the individual will truly be cured. Both healers and patients emphasize the need to “allow every individual the opportunity to better understand the nature of his own problems, a process that is seen as central to healing efficacy” (Howard & Milne, 551). Through the help of the diagnostician, a patient would be able to see the meaning and purpose behind their assigned healing process. The purpose could mean seeking forgiveness for previous misbehavior (required by the NAC) or coming to one’s one sense of the causes of their maladies through narration.

Even within Navajo religious healing, many differences differentiate the healing processes of the NAC from those of the Traditional Navajo religion. Despite these differences, however, the various “views of cause and treatment can be negotiated to find a common ground, creating an innovative syncretic form” (Howard & Milne, 559). Perhaps this is something we could apply in Western notions of medicine. Rather than forcefully separating ourselves from the more traditional methods of healing, it might be helpful to try and “[bridge] the differences between the two healing systems by incorporating important elements in each” (Howard & Milne, 560). Unlike Western medicine, the Navajo healing processes emphasize the importance of narration and the “effective potential of language itself” (Milne, 564). According to the Navajos, “narration of illness experience is the process by which thought and speech are used to bring the body back to a state of health” (Howard & Milne, 564-565). The focus on helping the patient discover his/her own cause(s) of illness demonstrates the importance that Navajo healing processes place on the individual’s understanding of meaning and purpose as well as the other components involved in accurately diagnosing and treating an ill individual.



Works Cited:

Alter, Joseph S. 2005. “Modern Medical Yoga: Struggling with a History of Magic, Alchemy, and Sex”. Asian Medicine 1(1): 119-146.

Howard, Wilson and Milne, Derek. 2000. “Rethinking the Role of Diagnosis in Navajo

Religious Healing”. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14(4): 543-570.

Analysis #3 - Put Your Money Where Your Brain Is

The human brain has always managed to fascinate us through its complex functions, mechanisms of communications, and storage of mass amounts of information. Compared to other animals, humans have the largest brain to body size ratio, making the human brain one of great interest to scientists and researchers alike. Advances in technology as well as biomedicine have provided us with new tools that have helped to expand our knowledge and understanding of the human brain and how it works. Studies on the human brain, like any other scientific study, tend to focus on viewing the human brain through an objective lens. This may be ideal in studies dealing with measurable or quantifiable components of the brain's functions (i.e. the damaging effects of alcohol on irreplaceable brain cells), but it may not be the most appropriate to apply in studies involving mental or psychiatric illness as the latter is based on the subjective experiences of the patient and is thus harder to physically detect by strictly objective biomedical standards. Objectifying human experiences with mental illness, which may be problematic as it tends to oversimplify the various sociocultural factors involved in its creation, is the controversial talk among scholars today and is the focus of this analysis.

The above image, from the Bioinformatics team at Becker Medical Library (http://beckerinfo.net/bioinformatics/?p=675), is a cartoon that depicts two frames illustrating how we see ourselves and how our professors see us. (I have extended the term "professors" to encompass a broader category of professionals including professors, medical professionals, researchers, scientists, etc.) The left cartoon frame portrays us as being "complex human beings" with "hopes, dreams, and aspirations". The right cartoon frame, however, portrays us as being seen simply as a brain on a stick whose sole purpose is to contribute to science (through research, for example). The way this cartoon portrays humans as merely "brains on a stick" may seem like a crude joke to some, yet I find a great deal of truth hidden amidst the sardonic humor behind this cartoon. It seems that in recent times, with the onset of technological and medical advances, scientists and researchers have been dangerously eager to place a blanket of objectivity over humans and the experiences we face as complex human beings. Simon Cohn discusses this emphasis on objectivity in his piece on "Picturing the Brain Inside, Revealing the Illness Outside: A Comparison of the Different Meanings Attributed to Brain Scans by Scientists and Patients". In examining the effects of brain scan images to both scientists and patients, Cohn states that "for the neuroscientists, making images is ostensibly about doing science - gaining objectivity through the identification of definitive material things without having to resort to the messy external subjectivity of a behaviour-based classification of disease" (Cohn, 66). The term "messy" used in this context carries with it a negative connotation, suggesting that any subjective factors involved in mental or psychiatric illness are bothersome, overly complicated, and in the need of organization or even complete removal.

Patients who voluntarily participate in the research study outlined in Cohn's article receive "a copy of the scan to take home as a kind of thank you gift" (Cohn, 74). The copy of the brain scan has profoundly different meanings for the scientists and the patient. While "the researchers perceive the value of the scans only in terms of the work in the lab, and view giving the patients a copy merely a contractual duty with no other consequence or significance" (Cohn, 67), the patients view the scans as a way to "legitimize their conditions in a new way and make them 'real'" (Cohn, 67). Again, the scientists' attitudes of indifference towards the copies of the brain scans demonstrate how they value the organ only for the objective information it can provide to their research and not to the subjective or personal experiences of the patients. Cohn continues on to state that we live in an era in which "new biological knowledge is being used as the grounds for individual identities and forms of sociality" (Cohn, 68), forcing people to develop and organize relationships with others "through technologies that divide and categorize" (Cohn, 68). This process of separation and categorization is partly responsible for the behavior of the patients who take home copies of their brain scans to show others in an effort to "redefine the whole well self from the diseased part" (Cohn, 75). This need to "re-conceptualize their suffering" (Cohn, 74) rests on the patients' desire to objectively "demarcate mental from physical illness" (Cohn, 75) by locating the physical source of the illness on the brain scan. Patients would do this in the hopes of authenticating their conditions and labeling them as "a social object" that is separate from the person behind the mental illness. The use of the processes of brain scans to diagnose mental illnesses such as schizophrenia "have shifted from the realm of human subjectivity and interaction to one of apparent objectivity via the hardware and the vastly complex mathematical algorithms used to identify brain abnormality" (Cohn, 76). In this sense, we have grown to ignore the importance of sociocultural determinants of health and have instead shifted to a much more narrow, objective view of illness.

Much like scientific objectivity has affected studies on brain functions and their relations to mental illness, cultural ideology has also shaped our views on various psychiatric disorders. In his piece titled "A Description of How Ideology Shapes Knowledge of a Mental Disorder (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder)", Allan Young discusses the role of ideology in the production of knowledge. The Institute for the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder emphasizes on "its division of mental labor" (Young, 117) and the need for the therapists and staff "to behave as if they believe the ideology's propositions are true" (Young, 126). Like the patients in Cohn's article, who hope for a cure to their now physically and objectively defined mental illnesses, the veterans who suffer from PTSD in Young's article hope to "[exculpate] themselves of moral responsibility for their present state", which they can now classify as exhibiting "sickness without psychosis - an attractive idea to someone who fears he is going crazy or who was once diagnosed as psychotic" (Young, 127). Both articles demonstrate how patients, despite being aware that objectifying their experiences downplays the importance of their subjective experiences, strive to use objectively conceptualized definitions of their mental illness in order to separate themselves from their psychiatric conditions. The patients may feel this need to "prove" themselves to others within various social spheres since "in the end it required the recognition and affirmation of others as much as the [patients] themselves" (Cohn, 79). Science's emphasis on pure objectivity without the influence of subjective experiences and society's focus on social acceptance both play crucial roles in shaping discourses on health and illness. This in turn may have a huge impact on the ways we view humans as both people and as pure subjects of study. Such views can present implications of how and where biomedicine may lead us in the future.

 Works Cited:

Cohn, Simon. 2010. “Picturing the Brain Inside, Revealing the Illness Outside: A Comparison of the Different Meanings Attributed to Brain Scans by Scientists and Patients”. Pp. 65-84. Technologized Images Technologized Bodies. Edited by Jeanette Edwards, Penny Harvey, and Peter Wade. New York: Berghahn Books.

Young, Allan. 1993. “A Description of How Ideology Shapes Knowledge of a Mental Disorder (Postraumatic Stress Disorder)”. Pp. 108-128. Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life. Edited by Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Analysis #2 - How can "health" be measured?

Numbers can provide an efficient way to organize and classify people in various situations. We walk into a restaurant and we see above the doors “Capacity 168”. We open up the morning’s newspaper and read the headings titled “52 Residents Saved in Local Fire”. We watch on television the latest breaking news that claim scientists have “successfully treated 174 out of 250 lung cancer patients in a research study”. These are but a few nonfictional and fictional examples of how people are organized and addressed as numbers. Organizing people into numbers is not in itself harmful, as long as the numbers are not being used to place numerical values on people. Under such circumstances, people become recognized only by the numbers they represent and the relative value behind these numbers. Although this appears to happen rather frequently in today’s society (i.e. a businessman’s “worth” to a company as being measured by how much sales he can rake in monthly, the number of winning cases a lawyer carries as a measurement of his/her level of competence and value to prospective clients, etc.), it is disturbingly frightening to imagine a world in which health becomes a target of such numerical categorization.

The above image, found on a business coach’s personal blog (http://www.tanveernaseer.com/more-than-just-a-number), shows three individuals with numbered white tags on their foreheads. Above this image are the words: “I’m More Than Just a Number”. The blog uses this image to help its readers understand that a successful business mindset is to look not just at the numbers, but “the person behind those numbers…who they are, what their interests are, and what they enjoy/dislike about your product or service” (http://www.tanveernaseer.com/more-than-just-a-number). I believe this same mindset should be applied when providing health care to people on a local, national, international, and global scale. In Vincanne Adams’ chapter titled “Against Global Health? Arbitrating Science, Non-science, and Nonsense through Health”, she describes the shift in the role of science in defining the meaning of health. She states that “the foundational grounds for its inquires was always health as seen in real patients with real diseases, [which] could be contrasted with later efforts to pursue “science” as an end in and of itself through colonial or postcolonial medicine” (Adams, 43). These later efforts, which emphasized the need to focus on empirical evidence, led to a “shift from health to “science”” (Adams, 43). This shift would eventually lead to the representation of patients as merely people with numbers attached to them, much like the image provided above. Each patient would be labeled as either a success or a failure in a research study. The socio-cultural, political, or economic backgrounds of patients are ignored unless their “relevance can be justified by [their] ability to advance real, scientifically based interventions” aimed at improving health (Adams, 46). Such a statement demonstrates that people are increasingly becoming evaluated by their scientific worth – that is, whether or not they can provide empirical numbers to strengthen a scientific claim. Adams discusses the emphasis pharmaceutical sciences place on statistical evidence and suggests that “it is the prioritizing of pharmaceutical consumption and its research agenda over the prioritizing of health that leads to” problems of racial and social inequalities on study populations that have no other way to obtain health except to enroll in clinical trials (Adams, 48).

The rise of global health sciences, as explained by Adams, has changed the way we measure health. A patient may die, yet a treatment is deemed “successful” if it fulfills its original objective – that is, if the treatment reduces the malady (i.e. tumor size), it is considered a success even if it comes at the expense of the patient’s life. Such way of thinking “requires embracing the notion that health itself could be located in a specific organ rather than in a whole person. In this logic, death itself was absorbed within the notion of health” (Adams, 49). Health becomes subject to technological and statistical calculations of “profit and loss” (Adams, 50), which may be dangerous as it justifies the action of sacrificing the few “for the sake of obtaining more robust numbers that could tell us that more…could be saved in the future if we furthered our knowledge of the scientific “evidence base”” (Adams, 50).

Changing notions of health have forced health to do “more than just eliminating disease. It is made to do the work of generating scientific studies and producing evidence-based outcomes that don’t always mesh well with the goals of patient care” (Adams, 55). This brings into mind Good and Good’s chapter on “Learning Medicine: The Constructing of Medical Knowledge at Harvard Medical School”, in which they describe how an emphasis on “competence” has led medical students to focus more on medicine as a science rather than the patient as a person. When asked to “reflect on the meaning of being a good physician, two juxtaposed themes quickly emerged – “competence” and “caring”” (Good & Good, 91). Being competent meant understanding the “language of the basic sciences, with “value-free facts and knowledge, skills, techniques, and “doing” or action” (Good & Good, 91). Being caring meant understanding the “language of values, of relationships, attitudes, compassion, and empathy” (Good & Good, 91). This juxtaposition between “competence” and “caring” seems very similar to the dichotomy between “science” and “non-science” as described in Adam’s chapter on global health sciences. It is the challenge between being able to see people as numbers (representing science) and being able to see the people behind the numbers (representing non-science/social science). This challenge is “built into American medicine as a cultural institution and the struggle between technology and humanism, between science and culture” (Good & Good, 93). The real question is then, is it possible for us to find a healthy balance between the two worlds? Can we see beyond the numbers stamped onto the bodies of each and every individual?

WORKS CITED

Adams, Vincanne. 2010. “Against Global Health? Arbitrating Science, Non-Science, and Nonsense through Health”. In Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality”. Edited byJonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland. Pp. 40-58. New York: New York. University Press,

Good, Byron J. and Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio. 1993. “Learning Medicine: The Constructing of Medical Knowledge at Harvard Medical School”. Pp. 81-107. In Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life. Edited by Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Analysis #1 - Naturalizing Social & Cultural Constructions of Gender Roles

Perhaps what sets humans apart from any other animal species is our ability to learn and acquire cultural and social understandings of our interactions with our world and with each other. But what happens when we become too consumed by culture, granting it permission to take over our lives and to blind us from what we truly need to see? Such seems to be the case in the scientific portrayal of the male and female reproductive systems, in which objective scientific facts get shoved aside to make room for culturally imposed ideas of gender roles.

Above is an image found on the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) website (http://www.cpsu.org.au/issues/news/19431.html). The poster states rather bluntly that “women [are] like men, only cheaper” and depicts two businesswomen smiling and giving each other high-fives. I found this image to be very powerful because it utilizes irony to send a message to its audience that these women are being paid lower wages for the same jobs held by men. The enthusiastic smiles of the two women undermine the seriousness of the issue of gender discrimination, while simultaneously suggesting the idea that perhaps women are being paid less because they “happily” accept the low wages (not knowing that they are being held at a great disadvantage or knowing that they are yet choosing not to react). Such gender discrimination in the workforce is not uncommon today, since we live in a society that continues to impose on us culturally established “traditional” gender roles, in which the male is seen as the strong, active, knowledgeable being and the female as the passive, obedient, dependent counterpart. These same gender roles are being used by scholars in medical texts to describe the roles of the reproductive systems of males and females. In Emily Martin’s article “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles”, she discusses the cultural implications placed on the roles of these gametes. Many, if not all, of medical texts described the sperm as “the one that makes it all happen” (Martin, 496). We would expect scientific journals to present information as objectively as possible, yet we see medical texts favoring and emphasizing the various ways in which “sperm, despite their small size, can be made to loom in importance over the egg” (Martin, 491). Scientific papers classify menstruation as “the death of tissue…a chaotic disintegration of form…a failure” (Martin, 487) and the female as “unproductive” and “degenerating” (Martin, 488) since she ceases to produce eggs after birth. The male body, on the other hand, is celebrated since it continues to produce sperm from puberty throughout life.

The image above, unlike depictions of the egg in medical texts, does not necessarily portray the women as being the passive “Damsel in Distress” awaiting rescue. If this were the case, I believe the image would have shown two housewives or helpless women tied onto some rusty railroad tracks. Instead, the women are portrayed as businesswomen – that is, women who have been given more active roles (in a traditional sense. The same has happened with the onset of new research and evidence showing the egg as being more active and the sperm as more of a “receptor” (Martin, 496).  Although such evidence has forced scientists to give “the egg an active role, that role is drawn in stereotypically feminine terms” (Martin, 496-497). This situation is reflected in the image above, which bluntly states that “women [are] like men, only cheaper”. Such a statement contains a deliberate choice of words to send the message across that women are like men, that they can attempt to be like men but will never be accepted as their equals. Just like the egg is being given a larger, more active role, women are given the chance to pursue careers that were once deemed to be strictly for males. However, this new active role given associated with the egg comes with its own disadvantages, much in the same way that these women pursuing these “male” careers are being given much lower wages.  

The image that I have included in this analysis illustrates the harsh reality that we may be unable to see past our cultural lens when viewing the objective facts that science has to offer. Rayna Rapp, in her piece called “Accounting for Amniocentesis”, also states that “bounded representations of biological and social bodies are deeply linked to nature/culture oppositions in the history of Western thought” (Rapp, 60). We accept science as being objective, yet “science itself can be viewed as constructed by social and cultural processes” (Rapp, 63). Is this perhaps the reason why we find it so difficult to separate cultural imagery with biological science?

Towards the very bottom of the image are the words: “If you don’t like it, help us right it”. Such a statement indicates that there are people and organizations working fighting for the end of gender discrimination. In a similar sense, we have scholars like Emily Martin, who suggest that “waking up [sleeping metaphors in science], by becoming aware of when we are projecting cultural imagery onto what we study, will improve our ability to investigate and understand nature…will rob them of their power to naturalize our social conventions about gender” (Martin, 501). Both the articles of Martin and Rapp as well as the image provided in this analysis are proof that we are in need of change. If we are to learn more and better understand ourselves, we must first be aware of the various lenses through which we view our world and be careful in merging matters of nature with social and cultural constructions.