Copula

Sexual Technologies, Reproductive Powers

By Robyn Ferrell

Subjects: Continental Philosophy
Series: SUNY series in Gender Theory
Paperback : 9780791467541, 190 pages, June 2006
Hardcover : 9780791467534, 190 pages, June 2006

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Table of contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. The Maternal in Its Natural Habitat
2. Brave New World
3. Reproducing Technology
4. Conceiving of Feminism
5. Feminism Is a Kind of Time
6. The Lore of the Father
7. The Figure of the Copula
8. The Body as Material Event
9. The Technology of Genre
Bibliography
Index

Explores the conceptual schema underlying our understanding of reproductive technologies.

Description

How will the ability to manipulate human reproduction change our social world and the relationship between the sexes? Taking an explicitly interdisciplinary approach to gender and reproductive technology, Robyn Ferrell examines this question in the light of feminist theories of sexual equality and sexual difference, arguing that technology itself can be seen as a kind of reproduction. Invoking a concept of reproduction that understands it as generic, Ferrell asserts that in any reproduction, something is produced of a kind that was there before and yet that is also new. Technology is therefore generically reproductive, since it produces new matter of the same kind. In addition to key figures in French feminism, Ferrell draws from psychoanalysis and contemporary continental thinkers ranging from Heidegger to Haraway.

Robyn Ferrell is Associate Professor in Creative Writing in the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and the author of several books, including Genres of Philosophy and Passion in Theory: Conceptions of Freud and Lacan.