Download or read book Sex in an Age of Technological Reproduction written by Carl Djerassi and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carl Djerassi is one of "the fathers of the Pill"--he was awarded the National Medal of Science for the first synthesis of a steroid oral contraceptive--and has had a prolific additional career as a writer of fiction, plays, and dialogues about science. In these two plays, ICSI and Taboos, he dramatizes the social transformations and contested viewpoints created by advances in reproductive science and technology. Two of the most startling developments in contemporary science have radically disrupted the historical connection between sex and reproduction: in vitro fertilization and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI)--an assisted reproductive technique that directly injects a single sperm into an egg. The word play ICSI--designed for classroom readings--presents, in the format of a contentious talk-show dialogue, the science of direct-injection fertilization and the ethical issues connected with it. A DVD included in the book provides video of the ICSI injection process as viewed through a microscope, to be used in performances of the ICSI one-act dialogue. Taboos, a full-length play, turns the screws on characters that reflect a polarized America. Two couples--lesbian partners and a conservative husband and wife struggling with infertility--must make choices in a drama that examines the disjunction of sexual reproduction and the physical act of sex.
Download or read book An Immaculate Misconception written by Carl Djerassi and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2000-06-21 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most challenging issues of the 21st century is the impending separation of sex (in bed) and reproduction (under the microscope) as a result of recent advances in contraception and assisted reproduction. Many of the ethical and societal issues associated with these new reproductive technologies, notably intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), are raised in an unusual format — namely in dialogic form — which is both entertaining and pedagogically informative./a
Download or read book Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written by Judd Trichter and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in a near-future LA, a man falls in love with a beautiful android—but when she is kidnapped and sold piecemeal on the black market, he must track down her parts to put her back together. Bad luck for Eliot Lazar, he fell in love with an android, a beautiful C-900 named Iris Matsuo. That's the kind of thing that can get you killed in late 21th century Los Angeles or anywhere else for that matter – anywhere except the man-made island of Avernus, far out in the Pacific, which is where Eliot and Iris are headed once they get their hands on a boat. But then one night Eliot knocks on Iris's door only to find she was kidnapped, chopped up, sold for parts. Unable to move on and unwilling to settle for a woman with a heartbeat, Eliot vows to find the parts to put Iris back together again—and to find the sonofabitch who did this to her and get his revenge. With a determined LAPD detective on his trail and time running out in a city where machines and men battle for control, Eliot Lazar embarks on a bloody journey that will take him to the edge of a moral precipice from which he can never return, from which mankind can never return. Judd Trichter's Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is a science fiction love story that asks the question, how far will you go to save someone you love?
Download or read book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written by Walter Benjamin and published by . This book was released on 2023-03-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Benjamin discusses whether art is diminished by the modern culture of mass replication, arriving at the conclusion that the aura or soul of an artwork is indeed removed by duplication. In an essay critical of modern fashion and manufacture, Benjamin decries how new technology affects art. The notion of fine arts is threatened by an absence of scarcity; an affair which diminishes the authenticity and essence of the artist's work. Though the process of art replication dates to classical antiquity, only the modern era allows for a mass quantity of prints or mass production. Given that the unique aura of an artist's work, and the reaction it provokes in those who see it, is diminished, Benjamin posits that artwork is much more political in significance. The style of modern propaganda, of the use of art for the purpose of generating raw emotion or arousing belief, is likely to become more prevalent versus the old-fashioned production of simpler beauty or meaning in a cultural or religious context.
Download or read book The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction written by Henry T. Greely and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-30 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Will the future confront us with human GMOs? Greely provocatively declares yes, and, while clearly explaining the science, spells out the ethical, political, and practical ramifications.”—Paul Berg, Nobel Laureate and recipient of the National Medal of Science Within twenty, maybe forty, years most people in developed countries will stop having sex for the purpose of reproduction. Instead, prospective parents will be told as much as they wish to know about the genetic makeup of dozens of embryos, and they will pick one or two for implantation, gestation, and birth. And it will be safe, lawful, and free. In this work of prophetic scholarship, Henry T. Greely explains the revolutionary biological technologies that make this future a seeming inevitability and sets out the deep ethical and legal challenges humanity faces as a result. “Readers looking for a more in-depth analysis of human genome modifications and reproductive technologies and their legal and ethical implications should strongly consider picking up Greely’s The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction... [It has] the potential to empower readers to make informed decisions about the implementation of advancements in genetics technologies.” —Dov Greenbaum, Science “[Greely] provides an extraordinarily sophisticated analysis of the practical, political, legal, and ethical implications of the new world of human reproduction. His book is a model of highly informed, rigorous, thought-provoking speculation about an immensely important topic.” —Glenn C. Altschuler, Psychology Today
Download or read book Queering Reproduction written by Laura Mamo and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-03 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally developed to help heterosexual couples, fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization and sperm donation have provided lesbians with new methods for achieving pregnancy during the past two decades. Queering Reproduction is an important sociological analysis of lesbians’ use of these medical fertility treatments. Drawing on in-depth interviews with lesbians who have been or are seeking to become pregnant, Laura Mamo describes how reproduction has become an intensely medicalized process for lesbians, who are transformed into fertility patients not (or not only) because of their physical conditions but because of their sexual identities. Mamo argues that this medicalization of reproduction has begun to shape queer subjectivities in both productive and troubling ways, destabilizing the assumed link between heterosexuality and parenthood while also reinforcing traditional, heteronormative ideals about motherhood and the imperative to reproduce. Mamo provides an overview of a shift within some lesbian communities from low-tech methods of self-insemination to a reliance on outside medical intervention and fertility treatments. Reflecting on the issues facing lesbians who become parents through assisted reproductive technologies, Mamo explores questions about the legal rights of co-parents, concerns about the genetic risks of choosing an anonymous sperm donor, and the ways decisions to become parents affect sexual and political identities. In doing so, she investigates how lesbians navigate the medical system with its requisite range of fertility treatments, diagnostic categories, and treatment trajectories. Combining moving narratives and insightful analysis, Queering Reproduction reveals how medical technology reconfigures social formations, individual subjectivity, and notions of kinship.
Download or read book The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written by Elissa Marder and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book grows out of a longstanding fascination with the uncanny status of the mother in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and photography. The mother haunts Freud's writings on art and literature, emerges as an obscure stumbling block in his metapsychological accounts of the psyche, and ultimately undermines his patriarchal accounts of the Oedipal complex as a foundation for human culture. The figure of the mother becomes associated with some of psychoanalysis's most unruly and enigmatic concepts (the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, the crypt, and magical thinking). Read in relation to deconstructive approaches to the work of mourning, this book shows how the maternal function challenges traditional psychoanalytic models of the subject, troubles existing systems of representation, and provides a fertile source for nonmimetic, nonlinear conceptions of time and space. The readings in this book examine the uncanny properties of the maternal function in psychoanalysis, technology, and literature in order to show that the event of birth is radically unthinkable and often becomes expressed through uncontrollable repetitions that exceed the bounds of any subject. The maternal body often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies such as photography and the telephone, which attempt to mimic its reproductive properties. To the extent that these technologies aim to usurp the maternal function, they are often deployed as a means of regulating or warding off anxieties that are provoked by the experience of loss that real separation from the mother invariably demands. As the incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of language, the mother is inherently a literary figure, whose primal presence in literary texts opens us up to the unspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that might otherwise have remained unimaginable.
Download or read book The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media written by Walter Benjamin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-31 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of influential essays on the visual arts that were made possible by machines, and the implications for the future of culture.
Download or read book This Man s Pill written by Carl Djerassi and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-04-23 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: October 15, 1951 marks the birthday of one of the key episodes in 20th century social history: the first synthesis of a steroid oral contraceptive in a small laboratory in Mexico City - an event that triggered the development of the Pill. Carl Djerassi has been honoured worldwide for that accomplishment, which ultimately changed the life of women and the nature of human reproduction in ways that were not foreseeable. On the 50th anniversary of this pivotal event, Djerassi weaves a compelling personal narrative full of self-reflection and occasional humour on the impact this invention has had on the world at large and on him personally. He credits the Pill with radically altering his academic career at Stanford University to become one of the few American chemists writing novels and plays. This Man's Pill presents a forcefully revisionist account of the early history of the Pill, debunking many of the journalistic and romantic accounts of its scientific origin. Djerassi does not shrink from exploring why we have no Pill for men or why Japan only approved the Pill in 1999 (together with Viagra). Emphasizing that development of the Pill occurred during the post-War period of technological euphoria, he believes that it could not be repeated in today's climate. Would the sexual revolution of the 1960s or the impending separation of sex ("in bed") and fertilization ("under the microscope") still have happened? This Man's Pill answers such questions while providing a uniquely authoritative account of a discovery that changed the world.
Download or read book Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written by Pamela Caughie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of ten original essays is the first to read Virginia Woolf through the prism of our technological present. Expanding on the work of feminist and cultural critics of the past two decades, this volume offers a sustained reflection on the relationship between Walter Benjamin's analyses of mass culture and technology and Woolf's cultural productions of the 1920s and 1930s. It also brings out the extent to which Woolf was beginning to image the technological society then taking shape. This book takes part in contemporary efforts to rethink modernism as a more globalized and technologized phenomenon
Download or read book Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction written by Gianmario Borio and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is undeniable that technology has made a tangible impact on the nature of musical listening. The new media have changed our relationship with music in a myriad of ways, not least because the experience of listening can now be prolonged at will and repeated at any time and in any space. Moreover, among the more striking social phenomena ushered in by the technological revolution, one cannot fail to mention music’s current status as a commodity and popular music’s unprecedented global reach. In response to these new social and perceptual conditions, the act of listening has diversified into a wide range of patterns of behaviour which seem to resist any attempt at unification. Concentrated listening, the form of musical reception fostered by Western art music, now appears to be but one of the many ways in which audiences respond to organized sound. Cinema, for example, has developed specific ways of combining images and sounds; and, more recently, digital technology has redefined the standard forms of mass communication. Information is aestheticized, and music in turn is incorporated into pre-existing symbolic fields. This volume - the first in the series Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century - offers a wide-ranging exploration of the relations between sound, technology and listening practices, considered from the complementary perspectives of art music and popular music, music theatre and multimedia, composition and performance, ethnographic and anthropological research.
Download or read book The SciArtist written by Walter Grünzweig and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2012 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title presents criticism, commentaries, and creative responses to Carl Djerassi's literary texts, taking the author's achievements far beyond 'the Pill'
Download or read book Reproducing Reproduction written by Sarah Franklin and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproducing Reproduction addresses these debates in a range of sites in which reproduction is being redefined and argues persuasively for a renewed appreciation of the centrality of reproductive politics to cultural and historical change.
Download or read book A Global History of Sexuality written by Robert M. Buffington and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-24 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Global History of Sexuality provides a provocative, wide-ranging introduction to the history of sexuality from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Explores what sexuality has meant in the everyday lives of individuals over the last 200 years Organized around four major themes: the formation of sexual identity, the regulation of sexuality by societal norms, the regulation of sexuality by institutions, and the intersection of sexuality with globalization Examines the topic from a comparative, global perspective, with well-chosen case studies to illuminate the broader themes Includes interdisciplinary contributions from prominent historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and sexuality studies scholars Introduces important theoretical concepts in a clear, accessible way
Download or read book Technologies of Sexuality Identity and Sexual Health written by Lenore Manderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technologies of Sexuality, Identity and Sexual Health highlights the complex ways in which sexuality is expressed and enacted through local ideologies, global identities and material cultures, and their influence on people's sexual health and well-being. Its impetus is the renewed interest in technology and the 'social life of things,' including pharmaceuticals, expanded sexual and related surgery, the growing exploitation of markets for sexual and contraceptive products, and the impact of these on sexual and health practices and outcomes. Organised loosely into three parts, the opening chapters concentrate on female contraception, its availability, and the varied cultural significance attached to the ability to control its use, exploring the politics of reproductive health and birth control, and the ties between technology and power. The middle section turns its attention to men, and the impact of traditional and contemporary concerns about masculinity, and the social and sexual roles of men. The final chapters look at the commonalities across cultural borders and sexual gendered identities - how products and procedures travel, not only through the formal channels of globalisation, but also informally, carried by individuals across cultural and social boundaries through sexual, social and commercial interactions. The volume brings together anthropologists, sociologists and cultural studies scholars, both senior and emerging, from around the globe. Offering an important and topical contribution to the developing global literature on sexuality, sexual identity, culture and health, it is of interest to researchers and advanced students in these areas.
Download or read book Raiding the Icebox written by Peter Wollen and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raiding the Icebox is a kaleidoscopic review of the avant-garde and radical subcultures of the twentieth century, and explains how the most powerful artistic statements of the era redrew the line between high and low art. Beginning with an analysis of the role of Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet, Wollen argues that modernism has always had a hidden, suppressed side which cannot easily be absorbed into the master-narrative of modernity. Wollen reviews the hopes, fears and expectations of artists and critics such as the Bauhaus movement, as fascinated by Henry Ford's assembly line as they were by the Hollywood dream factory, concluding with Guy Debord's caustic dystopian vision of an all-consuming "Society of the Spectacle." Finally, Wollen chronicles the emergence of a subversive sensibility as he explores some of the unexpected new cultural forms which non-Western artists are taking as modernism enters into crisis at the beginning of a new century: reversing the rules of the game and raiding the icebox of the West.
Download or read book Cultural Conceptions written by Valerie Hartouni and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the meaning of "life" in an era of emerging biotechnology. What happens to prevailing beliefs about the uniqueness of individual life when life can be cloned? Or to traditional understandings of family relationships when a child can have up to five parents? These are some of the questions addressed by Valerie Hartouni in her consideration of the cultural effects of new reproductive technologies as reflected in video images, popular journalism, scientific debates, legal briefs, and policy decisions. In Cultural Conceptions, Hartouni tracks the circulation and communication of various myths, images, and stories pertaining to new reproductive technologies and their effects, both imagined and real, during the past two decades. While addressing topics ranging from surrogacy and cloning to adoption, ultrasound imaging, and abortion, Hartouni looks to American popular culture for clues to what these new -- and not so new -- reproductive practices tell us about issues of personhood. Hartouni investigates the emergence of new anxieties about the nature of selfhood as well as the recurrence of age-old myths regarding individuality, sexuality, property, and family. She argues that both are being played out in cultural contests over the meaning and organization of women's reproductive capacity. In her discussion of provocative issues such as The Bell Curve controversy and the Baby M. case, Hartouni traces the dialectic of crisis and containment unleashed by reproductive technologies. Ultimately, however, Cultural Conceptions argues that the anxieties that surround new reproductive technologies provide openings for alternative understandings and practices of life to emerge andchallenge those currently in place. A thoughtful, daring, and original look at this complex set of issues, Cultural Conceptions provides an much-needed guide to our nation's psyche as we approach the new millennium.
