Cyborg Babies

Cyborg Babies explores the increasingly pervasive role of technology in childrens lives, from conception to birth to childcare. From foetuses scanned electronically to wired toddlers, children are being rendered cyborg by their immersion in technoculture. The contributors, who include Sherry Turkle, Emily Martin and Mikuko Ito, discuss the co-development of the human and the machine. While much popular reporting swings between presenting technology as monstrous or science as saviour, Cyborg Babies argues for a more complex analysis, and provides a range of perspectives from cultural anthropologists to social critics. Subjects discussed include: popular reporting of cyborg babymaking, including IVF, sperm banks, surrogacy, ultrasound and amniocentesis the technological management of childbirth in hospitals the technologically-saturated world of childhood, from vitamin injections to TV toy tie-ins.

Author Biography

Robbie Davis-Floyd is a Research Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Birth as anAmerican Rite of Passage (1992) and co-editor of Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-CulturalPerspectives (1997). Joseph Dumit is an NIMH Research Fellow in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the co-editor of Cyborgs andCitadels: Anthropological Interventions in EmergingSciences, Technologies and Medicines (1997) and is assistant editor of Culture, Medicine and Society.