This special issue explores intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. The papers emerged out of a 2014 research seminar on Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Through innovative engagement with rich empirical cases and theoretical trends in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and STS, the papers trace local and global circulations of technoscience. They illuminate ways in which science and technology are imbricated in circuits of state power and global (...) inequality and in social movements resisting the state and neocolonial orders. The collection foregrounds the importance of feminist postcolonial STS to our understandings of technoscience, especially how power matters for epistemology and justice. (shrink)

In December 2010, the governor of Mississippi suspended the dual life sentences of two African American sisters who had been imprisoned for sixteen years on an extraordinary condition: that Gladys Scott donate a kidney to her ailing sister Jamie Scott. The Scott Sisters’ case is a highly unusual one, yet it is a revealing site for inquiry into US biopolitics more broadly. Close attention to the conditional release and its context demands a broader frame than traditional bioethics and helps to (...) push science and technology studies analysis of race past its conventional focus on genetics. This article draws on the Scott Sisters’ case as a site for interrogating the US context of racialized mass incarceration and kin-oriented and consumerist valorization of organ donation. Tensions between racialized exclusions, the promise of consumerist freedom, and the lack of expectations of the state are foundational to a distinctly American biological citizenship. By putting the Scott Sisters’ case into conversation with broader arguments about incarceration as a site of racialization and STS literatures of organ transplantation and of biological citizenship in diverse geographical sites, this article seeks to articulate some of the racialized contours of biopolitics in the United States. (shrink)

In contrast to discussions of BiDil, this paper explores racial meaning-making processes around an old generic hypertension drug. By unpacking a vignette about race and thiazide outside marketing or medicine, it shows that racialization of drugs exceeds those spheres and moves in unpredictable ways.

If we want to understand the allure of pharmaceuticals, we need to look beyond both medical efficacy and profit motives. The success of a drug depends not only on these, but also on how it mobilizes prior conceptions of identity. The extent to which a drug is taken — or talked about — is related to commodity properties that exceed the physiological and the economic. In implicit contrast to the discussions of BiDil elsewhere in this collection, I explore how the (...) links between race and pharmaceuticals can be both unstable and generative even when the drug in question is old and generic. By attending closely to an encounter around generic thiazide outside of a medical or marketing context, I show that although pharmaceuticals can seem to rely on scientific data and marketing for their power, they are, in fact, also subject to claims on many more registers that cannot quite subsume or refute each other. (shrink)

This article uses Betty Friedan’s idiosyncratic invocations of heart disease in her work from the 1960s through the 1990s, as well as her autobiographical comments about it and her theory of the feminine mystique, to grapple with a feminist articulation of heart disease. Although this leading cause of death for women in industrialized countries has been peripheral to feminist health discourse and most women’s preoccupations, heart disease played an interesting narrative role in Friedan’s work and life. Drawing on Friedan’s unconventional (...) philosophy of health provides an opportunity to problematize health awareness and reconsider the role of disease and health in feminist critique more generally. As we try to understand gendered stories of disease that are emerging at the dawn of the 21st century, rereading Friedan can help illuminate the limits, possibilities and dangers of framing heart disease as a ‘women’s health issue’. (shrink)

This paper is informed by my own participant observation and uses my own ethnography which included conducting in-depth interviews with anonymous paid egg donors and observing a listserv for women considering, pursuing, or having completed egg donation, to illustrate the way that power operates at this particular site of the reproductive center in postmodernity. After outlining who the consumers and providers of eggs are, I will use Foucault's concepts of biopower, disciplinary power, and normativity to describe how anonymous paid egg (...) donation plays a socially useful role in reproducing privilege and in preserving the myth of the nuclear family. Drawing on feminist theorizing to problematize altruism, I will show how the construction of the altruist narrative feeds the preservation of that myth by giving egg donors appropriately feminine motivations. Finally, I will focus on one particular site of resistance on the part of egg donors—controlling their self-presentation, tweaking the pool of eggs—to underscore the simultaneity of control of and control by egg donors. (shrink)