The Body in American Culture Blog

No blog is required this week!  On Dec. 7th, we’ll be focusing on cyborgs.

Here are some questions to think about as you read:

1. What is a cyborg?  How does the body factor into discussions about cyborgs?

2. Some philosophers and cultural studies scholars have proposed that we are becoming “posthuman” and, in many ways, are moving beyond the body (see humanityplus.org).  What do you think?

3. How do present-day cyborgs—and cultural debates about them—compare to the earlier history of body modification in the United States?

Readings:

• Hari Kunzru, “You Are Cyborg” (interview with Donna Haraway) in Wired (2003) (ER)
• Ted M. Butryn and Matthew A. Masucci, “It’s Not About The Book: A Cyborg Counternarrative of Lance Armstrong,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 27 (2003): 124-144 (ER)
• Leslie Swartz and Brian Watermeyer, “Cyborg Anxiety: Oscar Pistorius and the Boundaries of What It Means to Be Human,” Disability & Society 23, no. 2 (2008): 187-190 (ER)
• Browse New York Times articles on Oscar Pistorius—please bring to class one article that you find interesting or useful (ER)
• Michael Sokolove, “In Pursuit of Doped Excellence,” New York Times (18 January 2004) (ER)
• Jack McCallum, “Steroids in America: The Real Dope,” Sports Illustrated (11 March 2008) (ER)

This week, our discussions will focus on:

• Leslie Reagan, Dangerous Pregnancies

Please post your three discussion questions and either a muddiest point or important connection in the comments.

This week, our discussions will focus on:

• Margot Canaday, “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill,” Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (December 2003): 935-957 (ER)
• John W. Dower, “Race, Language, and War in Two Cultures: World War II in Asia,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness During World War II, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 169-201 (ER)
• Beth Linker, “Feet for Fighting: Locating Disability and Social Medicine in First World War America,” Social History of Medicine 20, no. 1 (2007): 91-109 (ER)
• George H. Roeder, Jr., “Censoring Disorder: American Visual Imagery of World War II,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness During World War II, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 46-70 (ER)
• David Serlin, “Engineering Masculinity: Veterans and Prosthetics after World War Two,” in Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm, eds., Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics in America (New York University Press, 2002), 45-74 (ER)

Please post three discussion questions plus either a muddiest point or important connection in the comments.

This week, our discussions will focus on:

• Edward Slavishak, Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh
• John Williams-Searle, “Cold Charity: Manhood, Brotherhood, and the Transformation of Disability, 1870-1900,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York University Press, 2001), 157-86 (ER)

Please post three discussion questions and either a “muddiest point” or important connection in the comments.

This week, our discussions will focus on:

• George Chauncey, Gay New York

Please post three discussion questions and either a “muddiest point” or important connection in the comments.

This week, our discussions will focus on:

• Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project, Introduction and Chapters 1-4, xvii-138
• Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, “Designing the Electric Body: Sexuality, Masculinity, and the Electric Belt in America, 1880-1920,” Journal of Design History 14, no. 4 (2001), 275-289 (ER)
• Sander L. Gilman, “The Racial Nose” in Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton University Press, 2000): 85-118 (ER)
• Johanna Schoen, “Between Choice and Coercion: Women and the Politics of Sterilization in North Carolina, 1929-1975,” Journal of Women’s History 13, no. 1 (2001): 132-156 (ER)
• Andrea Tone, “Black Market Birth Control: Entrepreneurship and Criminality in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (September 2000): 435-459 (ER)

Please post three discussion questions and either a “muddiest point” or important connection in the comments.

This week, we will be discussing Martin Pernick’s The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (Oxford University Press, 1996)

Because the midterm essay is also due this week, no blog entry is required.

This week, our discussion will focus on:

1. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization

2. Kristen Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American War, ch. 4 and 6 plus cartoons from ch. 5

Please post your three discussion questions and either a “significant connection” or “muddiest point” below.