HR101A: Minds & Bodies

Third Essay Assignment

 

A 5-7 page essay is due at the beginning of class on Monday, April 28. However, you may hand it in at any time up to the beginning of the "oral presentations" during the exam period, Monday, May 5, at 9:00 AM.

Below are a series of suggested topics. Please note that we are most interested in seeing you use the texts that we have read and discussed in class to pursue your own interests and to develop your own theses. If your interests lead you in a direction different from those suggested in the topics below, please see Prof. Harriott or Prof. Epstein to discuss your ideas and to get permission to address a different topic.

  1. The “Bodies” Exhibit: We considered the very beginnings of life during our discussion of stem cell research and now we are faced with moral and ethical issues concerned with the treatment of the dead. Provide an argument for or against the capitalistic and artistic pursuits of plastination and the exhibition of human bodies. It would be appropriate to refer to Descartes and your paper should include your interpretation of the identity of the specimens (models versus body) used in the exhibit. (Useful References: Video of 20/20 segment; Bodyworlds; van Dijck, J. 2001. "Bodyworlds: The Art of Plastinated Cadavers." Configurations Vol. 9 no. 1 pp. 99-126 (Scholar Google).
  2. Science and technology, the economy and government played a major role in the eugenics movement of the early 1900’s. Are the genetic technologies and social policies of today “eugenical” practices in disguise? Discuss how they differ or are comparable to the eugenic policies of the past. Also consider the application (or misapplication) of science to the “betterment” of humanity.
  3. James Watson, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix predicted a “gloomy” outlook for Africa. (For example, see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21362732/) What did he mean? Is there any scientific evidence to support his prediction? What do we know about race?
  4. “They are all but stomachs, and we all but food,” Emilia says of men and women. “They eat us hungerly, and when they are full / They belch us” (3.4.106-108). Write on the depiction of gender in Othello. Consider how women are seen by both male and female characters, how the various male characters understand and treat women, and how ideas of gender shape the characters’ actions. On the other hand, “male” is a gender, too. You might choose to write about how the actions of male characters are influenced by certain ideas of masculinity.
  5. Write about race in Othello. Pay particular attention to the character of Othello: how he is depicted as more or less different and foreign by different characters in different portions of the play; how he sees his own place in Venetian society; how his own understanding of race and of himself changes over the course of the play.
  6. Hwang’s Gallimard falls in love with an Asian man, believing him to be a woman. Throughout the play, Hwang suggests a connection between conceptions of race and conceptions of gender. Write about the construction of race and gender in Hwang’s M. Butterfly.
  7. Is race an issue to society and individual identity in the contemporary U. S. in the same way it is in the Venice (or England) of Shakespeare’s Othello? Are contemporary American conceptions of the “East” or of the non-Western world similar to or different from the views ascribed to the “West” in M. Butterfly? Use the texts and topics we have studied to discuss some element of contemporary public debate and discourse. Some issues that come to mind are: the Presidential race (no pun intended); the status of Tibet and the Beijing Olympics; the economic power of China and India; the occupation of Iraq and U.S. relations with the Middle East and the “Arab World.” But there are many others that you might think of on your own.
  8. One of Michel Foucault’s most famous concepts is “panopticism”—total surveillance, a vision of society under perpetual, total, authoritative observation, which is inevitably internalized by individuals and shapes their behaviors and even their bodies. Is this a legitimate concept? Do new technologies of global observation (think “Google Earth”) make it seem more real, or less so?
  9. John Searle doubts that computers could ever really think in the way that we understand people to think. Daniel Dennett thinks they could—in fact, in some ways he thinks they already do. What do you think? Is there a difference between the way a computer “knows” something and the way a person does? (This is the issue at stake in Searle’s “Chinese box” analogy.) What, if anything, would prevent a robot from possessing thought, understanding, or belief in the manner of the human brain?
  10. Are we entering a “transhumanist” era? Choose an example from contemporary science or culture and discuss its implications, as you see them, for our sense of the “human.”