Proprietary Technologies and the Ownership of the Body

Companies hold the patents to many different kinds of body-modifying technologies, including prostheses, hormone pills, makeup and hair dyes. Hormone pills seem more severe and permanent than hair dye, but in the eyes of the legal system, they hold the same importance, the same degree of being claimed but an outside corporate force.

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In a similar vein, other people can also claim a stake in the technologically modified body, namely people in the medical institution who prescribe the pills and/or wield the knife. Lili Elbe’s relationship with her plastic surgeon is a good example of this. Her description of him as “her master, her creator, her Professor” suggests that her surgeon had some degree of ownership over her (Stone, 1991 p.327) . Therefore, individual “others”, not just corporate ones, can enter into this question of ownership.

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If people use these proprietary technologies, these technologies owned by some “other”—be it a corporate entity or a personal entity—do they affect the degree to which people own themselves?

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Haraway (1991) writes: “Bodies are maps of power and identity.,” (p. 180) and it follows that actors would try to compete for the body’s power, compete to shape its identity. Proprietary technologies affect the ownership of the body through the process of being written on the body. Two actors, the self and the “other”, can write on the body. If there is a self that fully owns the body, then that self would assume ownership of any proprietary technological modifications to the body. Conversely, these proprietary technologies may compete with the self for ownership of the body, so that the body becomes a dually-owned entity.

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The specific problems of ownership depend on the direction of the inscription process after some “other” has technologically modified the body. It is all a matter of subject position (Williams, 1991 p. 3). Who or what is the subject, and who or what is the object? If the self is the subject/actor/owner, then the body become the object/property that is written upon. If this is the directionality, then transsexuals—and cissexuals, I would add—become “subjects who choose to engineer themselves” (Hausman, 2005 p. 9). The body is more fully self-owned, and the outside technologies no longer belong to the outside entities that originally engineered them.

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If the body is the subject and the self is the object, then the technologies that transsexuals and cissexuals use on their bodies are that which engineers them. These technological components constitute the person and shape the person’s identity. Then, the medical institutions construct the gendered body with their surgeries and hormones (Hausman, 2005 p. 13), and they take part in the ownership of this constructed body. In sum, if the body writes on the self, and the body is modified with technology, then the owners of that technology compete with the self for the ownership of the body.

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The language of ownership is fundamentally dichotomous. There is an actor, the owner, and an object, the property, that exist in opposition to one another. This dichotomous inscription process that I have set up is both important and false. Presenting the direction of inscription and the actors involved in inscription as either/or entities allows me to disentangle the different owner/property relationships. Yet, these two processes and two identities co-occur. They move past one another and work against one another, creating a complex web of ownership in which subject/object relationships are fluid.

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So far, I have discussed external technologies owned by external actors. But what if the body itself can be understood as a technology? In this case, the web of ownership becomes more complex, the relationships become more fluid DNA is lines of code, lines of A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s creating a program that “inscribes itself on us”, as Natasha (2009) wrote in the blog. DNA writes the code for hormones, and if hormone pills are a technology, then why not understand the hormones themselves as technology? Hormones are sunshine machines (Haraway, 1991) in some respects; they are invisible particles informing cell clusters to “radiate gender”, as Val explains in the My Right Self project (Williams, 2008). If biology is technology, then the biological body is both the owner of the technology and the technological property. Here, the binary of owner-property established with the self and the “other” blurs, as the body owns itself; there is no second actor.

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My neat and clean owner-property dichotomy has already begun to break down, and the assumptions that underlie this paper further complicate things. First, I assume that there is some sort of “self” that exists independently of the inscribed body. As SarahLeia pointed out in a comment on “Gender + the “‘natural self'”, there may be no “natural self”, just a body written on by culture. If this is true, them my owner/property argument breaks down. There is no independent self; the body is the self. The body is that which writes and is written upon. The body and the “other” engage in the ownership struggle; the self is absent or just a construction of the body and the “other”.

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Second, I assume that the owner-property relationship is a useful way to conceptualize the relationship between the self and the body. Can people own themselves? I know that I find the idea of people owning other people disturbing, but self-ownership feels qualitatively different, perhaps because there is a implication that in owning oneself, one becomes more real (whatever that means) and less an artifice of society. Even though the owner/property construction is problematic, it allowed me to separate different actors into discrete categories and to discuss how these different actors overlap and interact. These relationships are present and salient, and for that I think the construction is worthwhile.

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References

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Haraway, D. (1991). “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

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Hausman, B. (2005) “Introduction: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender.” In Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology and the Idea of Gender (pp. 1-19). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University.

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Natasha. (2009, February 11). “DNA Technology (and Decisions of Passing).” Gender and Technology Spring 2009: Blogs at Bryn Mawr. Retrieved February 13, 2009, from http://gandt.blogs.brynmawr.edu/2009/02/11/dna-technology-and-decisions-of-passing/

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SarahLeia (2009, February 12). Comment 1 on The Doctor (2009, February 11). “Gender + the ‘natural self’.” Gender and Technology Spring 2009: Blogs at Bryn Mawr. Retrieved February 13, 2009, from http://gandt.blogs.brynmawr.edu/2009/02/11/gender-the-natural-self

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Stone, S. (1991). “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” In P. Hopkins (Ed.) (1998). Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology (pp. 322-341). India University Press.

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Williams, A.R. (2008) “My Right Self: Val.” My Right Self Project. Retrieved February 13, 2009 from http://www.myrightself.org/Web%20Pages/Val/Main.htm

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Williams, P. J. (1991). The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

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Note: the process of converting this to a blog post removed the italics from my references. I’m just going to go ahead and say that this isn’t a big deal.