Growing up a female in a very male oriented society, I am constantly reminded “it’s a man’s world” and the signs have only become more apparent as I immerse myself deeper into our society. I have spent a lot of my personal time dealing with sexual health and women’s reproductive rights, collaborating with organizations and lobbying. I chose the two images above because of the loaded messages they convey and how that is greatly influenced both by science and culture.
The neutral standpoint of biomedicine as “indifferent to the good and the bad-to human values and morality in general…Instead of judging, medicine diagnoses…” (Gordon 28) that Deborah Gordon chronicles in “Tenacious Assumptions in Western Medicine” has been revealed as being much more influenced by culture than previously presented. Where man meddles, such as in research, grand rounds, and cadaver autopsies judgment and cultural biases inevitably come into the mix. As Laurence Kirmayer’s “Mind and body as metaphors: hidden values in biomedicine” describes, illness has been placed as the irresponsibility of the individual and “the patient is seen as choosing to be sick, rejecting the physician’s help and, with it, the legitimate sick-role” (Kirmayer 64). The individual and its parts have been “removed from their context…’decontextualized’” (26) and this breakdown of the body removes power from the owner itself. By separating each organ into a separate unit instead of the powerful and connected entity it is, biomedicine removes man’s autonomy and possession over it. The concept of the sick role is also an important one to note because it is a great example of the view biomedicine puts on individual as only acting in naturalistic accepted ways such as an approved sick role. The sick role specifies how the individual must act as “sick”, what they must do to “cure” themselves, and the appropriate time they are allowed to inhabit this role. Any deviation from this role is not only unacceptable but looked down upon in both biomedicine and our society.
The creation of life is one of the most fundamentally pure and awe-inspiring acts of nature man has been able to understand. On a very basic level, union of a sperm and egg is the catalyst to a chain of events of cell division and formation of a human being. However, Emily Martin’s analysis of the incredibly loaded imagery of reproduction in her article “The Egg and the Sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles” goes into detail of the great difference between each genders reproductive organs and processes. Man and his sperm are represented as produced, viral units that are driven for egg fertilization. Woman and the egg, on the other hand, are represented as “unproductive” (Martin 488) and passive. In most visual representations of sexual reproduction, sperm are shown as vibrant movers flailing under the microscope while the egg is seen as a much more ethereal creature floating around in universe “awaiting her mate’s magic kiss, which instills the spirit that brings her to life” (Martin 490). The imagery that is firmly planted in our culture and biomedicine perpetuates gender roles of women as the “gentler sex” and places women’s reproductive organs “as biologically interdependent, while male organs are viewed as autonomous, operating independently, and in isolation” (Martin 490). The biomedical and culture approved role for woman is that of mother and Martin notes how pervasive this role plays by noting the disproportionate knowledge on the physiology of sperm in comparison to female counterparts and that it is not accident which places “the burden of birth control to be placed on women” (Martin 493). Therefore the image representing reproductive rights, is nice in theory but as has been demonstrated entirely unrealistic in terms of our culture and politics.
Advancements in technology with ultrasounds and procedures such as amniocentesis have allowed biomedicine to shine a bigger lens on women and their reproductive rights and health. The new discoveries made by science regarding sexual union is still stuck in the old imagery of the past and does not aim at furthering woman’s role in choice and autonomy. These procedures shift the power even less from women onto the fetuses they carry. The role we have placed on females as life bearer strictly limits women from any deviation.
As a woman, equality is something we must always strive and work for. The structures are in place to oppress woman in many aspects and biomedicine clearly plays a huge role in this. It is through open discussion and the work of anthropologists and biomedicine to mediate a catalyst for change in the ways we see our bodies.
Works Cited
Gordon, Deborah. "Tenacious Assumptions in Western Medicine." Biomedicine Examined. Ed. Maragaret Lock and Deborah Gordon. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1988.21-55
Kirmayer, Laurence. "Mind and Body as metaphors: hidden values in biomedicine." Biomedicine Examined. Ed. Maragaret Lock and Deborah Gordon. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1988.57-93
Martin, Emily. "The Egg and the Sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical make-female roles." Signs. 16.3 (1991): 485-501.
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