To do or not to do?

Yesterday I sat in a determinologist’s waiting room before very minor surgery to remove a cyst.  And there before my eyes were descriptions of procedures that changed one’s appearance without any cutting.  I’ve been in general dead set against any purely cosmetic surgery, or at least in my own case.  Still, I thought it would be interesting to discuss these fairly non-invasive procedures with feminist philosophers.

Some examples:  One device, called something like a skin pen, has fine needles that puncture one’s skin and so kick off a self-repair repair process that activates the deposit of new collagen.  Loss of collegen is a major factor in looking older, but injections of fillers are another way to go.  Another poster promised to reduce fat cells without any invasive procedure.  I’m not sure, but it may have involved killing fat cells by freezing them.  Surrounded by adverts for this stuff it can become hard to distinguish between fact and fancy.

i expect these procedures are expensive.  I have no idea which are safe and which, if any,  aren’t.  But they seem closer to coloring one’s hair than to having a facelift.  What do you think?

my version of wordpress has decided not to do links right now.  Here’s a site for Skin Pen:

http://www.skinpen.com

 

 

The Sunday Cat permits comparisons with dogs

But only because it is Eddy Izzard:

I have one; shouldn’t you?

There’s a new campaign and t-shirt:

Promoting the presence, awareness, and progress of women in traditionally male dominated fields. http://teespring.com/stores/this-is-what-we-look-like

Follow the link and you can get your own very cool t-shirt.

Nancy McHugh on food fear and righteous eating

Feminist philosopher Nancy McHugh was interviewed on Utah Public Radio by Tom Williams on his show Access Utah. They talked about the lecture she was giving at Utah State University on food marketing, food fear, and orthorexia. They also talked about her forthcoming book, The Limits of Knowledge. You can listen to her talk about “clean eating” here.

CFP: Essays on Technology

Contrivers’ Review Call for Essays on Technology

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” an essay that blurred the boundaries between the organic human being and the human being as a machine, a set of social practices, and cultural modes of communication and representation. Since then the postmodern turn represented in texts like Haraway’s “Manifesto” has been itself superceded. We see a resurgence of Enlightenment thought–and all the baggage it brings–in initiatives like the re:enlightenment project and The History Manifesto. However, we undoubtedly live in a world inundated with technology so that Haraway’s claim that “We are all chimera” remains accurate even if the ground of technology, politics, and gender have dramatically shifted since 1985.

As part of our long term investigation of technology and the humanities, politics, and arts, Contrivers’ Review invites submissions on any subject relating to gendered and LGBT cultures and their intersection with technology broadly defined. Some issues that might be covered include:

Social media, violence, and harassment
Gender, Feminism, and gaming culture
Discrimination in the Tech Industry/Silicon Valley/Gamer Culture
Feminist and Queer history/historiography of new media
Creating/Creative Communities
Technologies of bodies
Gender, professionalism, and online identities
Feminist Digital Humanities

Contrivers’ Review is an intellectual journal not a scholarly, refereed publication. As such, we publish essays and reviews that bridge academic audiences and the wider public. Submissions and pitch letters should be addressed to a broad audience, not fellow specialists in the academy. Essays should be between 1,500 and 3,000 words. Please send us a query letter at editors@contrivers.org. For more information, please refer to our masthead.