From Techno-sex to Techno-tots
Edited by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit
From fetuses scanned ultrasonically to computer hackers in daycare, contemporary children are increasingly rendered cyborg by their immersion in technoculture. As we are faced with reproductive choices connected directly with technologies, we often have trouble gaining perspective on our own cultural co-dependency with these very same technologies. Our notions of fetal health, maternal risk and child IQ are inseparable from them. Cyborg Babies tracks the process of reproducing children in symbiosis with pervasive technology and offers a range of perspectives, from resistance to ethnographic analysis to science fiction. Cultural anthropologists and social critics offer cutting-edge ethnographies, critiques, and personal narratives of cyborg conceptions (sperm banks, IVF, surrogacy) and prenatal (mis)diagnosis (DES, ultrasound, amniocentesis); the technological de- and reconstruction of birth in the hospital (electronic fetal monitors, epidurals); and the effects of computer simulation games and cyborg toys and stories on children’s emergent consciousness. Examining the increasing cyborgification of the American child, from conception through birth and beyond, Cyborg Babies considers its implications for human cultural and psychological evolution.
CONTENTS
Joseph Dumit and Robbie Davis-Floyd
Introduction, Cyborg Babies: Children of the Third Millenium
PART I – CYBORG CONCEPTIONS
Matthew A. Schmidt and Lisa Jean Moore
Constructing a Good ‘Catch,’ Picking a Winner:
The Development of Techno-Semen and the Deconstruction of the Monolithic Male
Charis M. Cussins
“Quit snivelling, cryo-baby–we’ll work out which one’s your mama!”
Steven Daniel Mentor
Witches, Nurse-Midwives, and Cyborgs: IVF, ART, and Complex Agency in the World of Technobirth
Janet Isaacs Ashford
Natural Love
PART II – THE TECHNO-FETUS
Monica Casper
Fetal Cyborgs and Technomoms on the Reproductive Frontier: Which Way to the Carnival?
Lisa Mitchell and Eugenia Georges
Baby’s First Picture: The Cyborg Fetus of Ultrasound Imaging
Emily Martin
The Fetus as Intruder: Mother’s Bodies and Medical Metaphors
Rayna Rapp
Refusing Prenatal Diagnosis: The Uneven Meanings of Bioscience in a Multicultural World
David Chamberlain
Babies Don’t Feel Pain: A Century of Denial in Medicine
PART III – MACHINES AND MOTHERS: POSTMODERN PREGNANCY, CYBORG BIRTH
Elizabeth Roberts
“Native” Narratives of Connectedness: Surrogate Motherhood and Technology
Joseph Dumit with Sylvia Sensiper 
Living with the ‘Truths’ of DES: Toward and Anthropology of Facts
Elizabeth Cartwright
The Logic of Heartbeats: Electronic Fetal Monitoring and Biomedically Constructed Birth
Robbie Davis-Floyd
From Technobirth to Cyborg Babies: Reflections on the Emergent Discourse of a Holistic Anthropologist
PART IV – TECHNO-TOYS AND TECHNO-TOTS
Jennifer Croissant
Growing Up Cyborg: Developmental Stories for Postmodern Children
Mizuko Ito
Inhabiting Multilple Worlds: Making Sense of SimCity 2000 TM in the Fifth Dimension
Sherry Turkle
Playing with Artificial Life
Anne A. Hill
Children of Metis: Beyond Zeus the Creator. Paganism and the Possibilities for Embodied Cyborg Childraising