Bill Wittlin, (PhD graduate, S&TS, Cornell University)
From its inception, the psychiatric profession has been an arm of the state, with the specific task of constructing identity, not through psychiatric treatment per se, but rather by the drawing of boundaries between the normal and the pathological. Though technology has always mediated psychiatric practice, is it possible that current psychotropic drug technology is a qualitatively different phenomenon?
Thorazine, the first modern psychotropic, focused the treatment of the sickest patients on the delivery of a drug, rather than on hospitalization per se. At the time of its discovery in 1955, there were 600,000 hospitalized mentally ill. Today, with the Prozac-type anti-depressants and with Ritalin, we have 30,000,000 children and adults on just these few drugs. I wish to make the case that today's vastly greater number of "patients," as well as their relative health can best be understood as the creation of a hybridized subject.
Biomedical psychiatry makes psychoactive drugs critical actors in a sociotechnical system that articulates technologies that include cybernetics, the Human Genome Project, PET scans, genetic testing, and theories of abnormal brain chemistry. Psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual values are hidden from view as biomedical psychiatry becomes a powerful closure mechanism structuring the debate over what constitutes our identity. New boundaries are being drawn that exclude identity as a search for meaning. When patients become cyborgs and psychiatrists chemical engineers, perhaps the most important questions to ask are, do cyborgs even have identities? How do hybridized subjects manifest their new techno-identities? And finally, what spaces exist to support alternate identities?
Otniel Dror, (PhD from History of Science, Princeton University, now at the Getty Center)
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries physiologists and clinicians took emotions and transformed them into modern objects of biomedical knowledge. They generated, isolated, purified, quantified and recorded emotions; and produced new instruments for visualizing and representing emotions in curves and numeric tables.
The new technologies for recording emotions rendered emotional experience as visual image, and displaced emotions from the privacy of the mind to the communal space of representation, from personal experience to scientific knowledge and from the subjective to the objective. They created new possibilities by mechanically transgressing the emotional divide between private and public.
The unique experience of Self that the new representations and their mode of production provided for subjects was often reported in this literature: to see one's own emotional flux displayed on a scale of intensities and to see it respond to one's self manipulation. The Will and Emotion were now represented as shifting dials of machines in this new psycho-mechanical relationship, and subjects exhibited, manipulated, and discussed their emotions through the mediation of laboratory instruments.
In my presentation I will study the novel interactions that emerged from the encounters between emotion-gauging technologies, experimenters, and their subjects. I will argue that the new technologies and their novel representations altered the shape of human self-awareness. They encouraged new modes of human-machine interaction, enabled new forms of reflexivity, mediated between individuals and promoted new forms of public confessions. I will also suggest that these techno-representations were a modern and particularly masculine form of communicating and exchanging emotions--of creating an emotional economy--inside the laboratory and clinic.
Shobita Parthasarathy, (S&TS, Cornell University)
The promise of diagnostics and therapeutics based on genetic information and manipulation has stimulated extensive discussions among government officials, biotechnology companies, scientists, physicians, activists, and bioethicists, who struggle to predict and determine the impact of new genetic research and technological development. In the case of breast cancer genetics, for example, a variety of women's groups have become involved in political contention in order to define both genetic technologies and their own identities in relation to the emergence of molecular genetics. This paper will focus on the experiences of these groups in the United States and Great Britain, who have become involved in debates about genetic testing for breast cancer and patenting the breast cancer genes. As both the US and Great Britain demonstrate high incidences of breast cancer and significant commitments to genetic research and development, breast cancer charities, feminists, women's environmental activists, and breast cancer activists have been involved in vigorous debates about breast cancer genetics in the two countries. These activists contest definitions of disease, identity, woman, nature, invention, and risk.
How have women's groups tried to interpret the genetic etiologies for breast cancer and new technological capabilities? How have these discoveries and involvement in discussions about genetic testing and patenting shaped the collective identities of various women's groups? What influence have women's groups in the United States and Great Britain had in discussions about genetic testing and patenting? How do these interactions differ across political cultures? Through interviews and document collection from breast cancer activists, breast cancer charities, and feminists in the United States and Great Britain, I will understand the influence of new genetic technologies on the collective identities of women's groups and the role of the women's voices in the political development of new technologies.
Go back to Technology & Identity Conference
Last Update: February 1, 1999
"Psychiatrist As Chemical Engineer, Patient As Cyborg"
"Constructing Identities: Technologies of Emotion and the Mediated Self"
"Gendered Genes: The Politics of Breast Cancer Genetics in the United States and Great Britain"