Event Description

For the next virtual Lunch Lecture at Science History Institute, Patrícia Martins Marcos (University of California, San Diego) will give a talk entitled “Bridging Divides: Inscribing Racialized Bodies into the Narratives of Science, Medicine, and Beyond”.

The body—with definite article—presents a peculiar scientific and medical object of inquiry. On the one hand, its naturalized status rendered bodies into the exclusive domain of biological inquiry; a domain devoid of a history and knowable only through laboratory work. On the other hand, however, this worldview presupposes a telos of stasis and stability: the idea that modern ideas of humanity, liberal individuality, and the Western somaticization of being represent not only an ontological fact, but a permanent, immutable reality.

This talk will tackle the disciplinary boundaries delineated by the historiography of science and medicine, and consider what can be gained when historians engage with noncanonical fields like Black studies. By engaging with the genealogies of fields like the history and philosophy of science (HPS) and science and technology studies (STS), this talk will center the elisions performed both by archival expectations about (single) authorship and tacit assumptions about who can embody reason versus who can only signify its object of study.

To understand how in the 1800s became the century of the body—as a predictive, empirical, and epistemic object of knowledge-making in medicine, surgery, anthropology, sexology, and criminology—and more specifically, how notions of modern, prototypical humanity were construed, it is necessary to study 18th-century scientific formations about the not-yet-modern human and pay close attention to colonial contexts.

Wednesday, November 25, 2020, 1:00–2:00 pm EST

Source: https://www.sciencehistory.org/event/lunchtime-lecture-patricia-martins-marcos

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