Conference:
New Technologies of Gender

Sponsored by the Feminist Studies Research Unit of the Institute for Humanities Research, and the Center for Cultural Studies


October 20-21
University of California, Santa Cruz
Oakes Learning Center

Challenging oppositions between the technological and the organic, the mechanistic and the corporeal, the technical and the social, "New Technologies of Gender" explores feminist work on technology and gender. The conference honors two UCSC scholars who have been formative in defining feminist analyses of the gendered implications and applications of technology: Donna Haraway and Teresa de Lauretis. It features the work of innovative multidisciplinary thinkers whose approaches break new ground in feminist studies. What does it mean to ask about the relation between technology and gender? How do technologies of gender interact with other technologies of identity such as race, species, sexuality and subjectivity? How do new technologies reinscribe or challenge old constructions of identity? This conference questions dichotomous understandings of the technological and, by rearticulating the conceptual boundaries of technology, gender, and identity, seeks to redefine the place of technology in feminist scholarship.

Notes on Speakers:

Donna Haraway is a professor in the History of Consciousness and Women's Studies departments at UCSC. Her books include: Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991); and Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouseª (Routledge, 1997). Her current work, Birth of the Kennel, is on dog "naturecultures"and the humans and non-humans who inhabit them.

Teresa de Lauretis is a professor in the History of Consciousness department at UCSC. Her books in English include Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Indiana, 1984); Technologies of Gender (Indiana, 1987); The Practice of Love (Indiana, 1994); and three edited volumes of essays. She has also guest-edited two special issues of journals, including the "Queer Theory" issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (1990).

Juliana Schiesari is Associate Professor of French and Italian at UC Davis. She is the author of The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Sym-bolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Cornell, 1992). Her current project, Beauty and the Beast, is on the domestication of animals..

Carla Freccero is Professor of Literature and Women's Studies at UCSC. Her books include the co-edited Premodern Sexualities (Routledge, 1996) and Popular Culture: An Introduction (NYU, 1999).

Sue-Ellen Case is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theater and Dance at UC Davis. Her books include Feminism and Theatre (Methuen, 1988) and The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture (Indiana, 1996).

Jennifer Gonzalez is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at UCSC. Her essays have appeared in Frieze, World Art, Diacritics, The Cyborg Handbook (Routledge, 1995), and Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000).

Anjali Arondekar is the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Women's Studies at Smith College and will be joining the Women's Studies department at UCSC as Assistant Professor in 2001. Her current work explores the link between colonial and post-colonial communalism, modernization and sexuality in India.

Judith Halberstam teaches queer studies, gender studies, film, and literature at UC San Diego. She is the author of Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke, 1995); Female Masculinity (Duke, 1998); and The Drag King Book (with Del LaGrace Volcano, Serpent's Tail (1999).

Monica J. Casper, Associate Professor of Sociology at UCSC, is the author of The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery (Rutgers, 1998). Her current research is on environmental health controversies.
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