Teaching

Reproductive technologies are a strategic site for thinking through the relationship between sex and society because they simultaneously involve individual bodies, family formation, and powerful social institutions like the medical profession, the law, and the marketplace. Each week, we will discuss one form of technology, from conceptive technologies, like in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood and artificial insemination, to contraceptive technologies like birth control, abortion and sterilization. Each technology is paired with a social scientific concept, such as medicalization, kinship, commodification, and social inequalities, including gender, race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The central goals of this class include developing your ability to analyze reproductive technologies from a social science perspective and developing your research and writing skills.