Gender, Technology and Embodiment

Essay Paper 2: Race, Genetics, Kinship, and Culture

5-6 pages, due in class Thursday, April 18

“Affiliative self-fashioning accounts for how identities culled from genetic genealogy are shaped not only by “received-facts” but also by desires for diasporic connection—a confluence that impacts root-seekers’ evaluations of genetic genealogy testing and, in turn, the way that the data it provides is incorporated into their lives” (Alondra Nelson, 259).

For this essay, write a theoretically informed essay on the question of how genetics and “genomic styles of thought” affect the understanding of race-ethnicity (racial-ethnic categories, identity and kinship, cultural affiliation, tribal membership; difference and disease).

How do genetic ways of thinking play a role in constructing racial-ethnic categories? What are the consequences of this “geneticization” of race? Discuss examples and the social and ethical issues they raise.

To focus your essay, you may choose to focus either on the topic of repro-genetic testing and disease (Roberts) or genetic ancestry testing (Nelson, Tallbear).

Address the debate regarding whether such novel ways of materializing and experiencing racial or kinship identity is a form of genetic essentialism (or genetic reductionism). Draw on specific examples and analyses from readings to examine this debate.

Donna Haraway

Genetic fetishism (141-142)

Dorothy Roberts, “Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies”

Race as invented social grouping (789-790)

Stratified Reproduction

Neoliberalism (785, 786, 791)

Eugenics, Eugenic thinking (796, 797, and used elsewhere)

Biological citizenship (793, 794)

Alondra Nelson “The Factness of Diaspora”

Diaspora, Diasporic Affiliation, Diasporic Relatedness (262, 254, 261-262)

Diasporic Resource (261)

Factness (facticity) of Diaspora (265)

Cultural authenticity, authentic expertise (258)

Affiliative Self-fashioning (259)

Imprecise Pedigree, genetic cousins (260)

Kimberly TallBear, “Can DNA determine who is American Indian?” and “DNA and Native American Identity.”

Cultural Affiliation, Cultural identity (1 and throughout; p. 71 in DNA and Native American Identity)

“Native American” Identity vs. Tribal identity/affiliation (2,)