Cyborg Babies

R. Davis-Floyd; Joseph Dumit

ISBN 10: 0415916046 / ISBN 13: 9780415916042

Published by Routledge, New York, 1998

About this Item

A real nice clean unmarked 368 page first edition softcover with 1 low in number line. All agree, though, that technology has caused or at least paved the way for serious social changes in the way children are conceived, gestated, born, and raised. The writers look not only at how technology has changed the processes but how it has shaped our views of childbirth and childcare. Technologies addressed range from artificial insemination to the use of ultrasound and even teddy bears that comfort a baby with the sounds of the womb. The range of philosophies explored is equally wide. Size: 9h x 5 1/2w.

Seller Inventory # 4692

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Cyborg Babies
• Publisher: Routledge, New York
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415916046
• ISBN 13: 9780415916042
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Book Type: Book

About this title

Synopsis

From fetuses scanned ultrasonically to computer hackers in daycare, contemporary children are increasingly rendered cyborg by their immersion in technoculture. As we are faced with reproductive choices connected directly with technologies, we often have trouble gaining perspective on our own cultural co-dependency with these very same technologies. Our notions of fetal health, maternal risk and child IQ are inseparable from them.

CyborgBabies tracks the process of reproducing children in symbiosis with pervasive technology and offers a range of perspectives, from resistance to ethnographic analysis to science fiction. Cultural anthropologists and social critics offer cutting-edge ethnographies, critiques, and personal narratives of cyborg conceptions (sperm banks, IVF, surrogacy) and prenatal (mis)diagnosis (DES, ultrasound, amniocentesis); the technological de- and reconstruction of birth in the hospital (electronic fetal monitors, epidurals); and the effects of computer simulation games and cyborg toys and stories on children's emergent consciousness.

Contributors include Janet Isaacs Ashford, Elizabeth Cartwright, David Chamberlain, Jennifer Croissant, Charis M. Cussins, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Joseph Dumit, Eugenia Georges, Anne Hill, Mizuko Ito, Emily Martin, Steven Daniel Mentor, Janneli F. Miller, Lisa Mitchell, Lisa Jean Moore, Rayna Rapp, Matthew A. Schmidt, Syvia Sensiper, Elizabeth Roberts and Sherry Turkle.

Examining the increasing cyborgification of the American child, from conception through birth and beyond, Cyborg Babies considers its implications for human cultural and psychological evolution.

About the Author

Robbie Davis-Floyd is a Research Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Birth as anAmerican Rite of Passage (1992) and co-editor of Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-CulturalPerspectives (1997). Joseph Dumit is an NIMH Research Fellow in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the co-editor of Cyborgs andCitadels: Anthropological Interventions in EmergingSciences, Technologies and Medicines (1997) and is assistant editor of Culture, Medicine and Society.