This dissertation examines the constitutive relation of gender and performance to knowledge production in the genetic sciences in twentieth and twenty-first century US. In recent decades, a series of contradictions have emerged in the field of breast and ovarian cancer genetics that challenge common distinctions between biological nature and cultural artifice. From laboratory practices of cloning and patenting genes to medical practices of treating genetic risk as a disease by surgically removing healthy breasts and ovaries, this project argues that scientific understandings of genetic “natures” are drawing on mimetic “second natures” as a privileged mode of inquiry, evidence, and intervention. Combining archival and ethnographic research with critical analysis of medial, textual, and visual cultures, each chapter of this dissertation takes up a key paradox that inheres in the new genetics. In the process, it illuminates the rise of an alternative approach to knowledge production in which stakeholders are highlighting the ontological ambivalence of scientific knowledge objects, rather than treating them as natural or unmediated matters of fact. Across diverse social, scientific, clinical, economic, and legal domains, this project shows how practices of staging the artifice of biological nature and rendering mimesis apparent have come to characterize modes of knowing and intervening in bodies. This epistemic shift toward staging the constructedness of biological realities signals three broader mutations in contemporary economies of gender and technoscience. First, conventionally feminized modes of knowing such as affect, imitation, and relation are increasingly vital, not inimical, to scientific practice. Second, lay actors are playing a more active and critical role in producing and contesting genetic knowledge. And lastly, by staging, rather than effacing, the construction of genetic natures, lay and expert stakeholders are rendering newly apparent the uneven social, economic, and political landscape of women’s health.
Nye, Alice C.,
"Stages of Risk: Economies of Ambivalence in Cancer Genetics"
(2014).
Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0SQ8XRH
