A Feminist Technoscientific Approach to Disability and Caregiving in the Family

The goal of this chapter is to propose productive ways to merge scholarship in feminist disability studies and science and technology studies in order to better account for the ways in which medical knowledge and medical technologies influence caregiving patterns in the home. In drawing together these literatures on gender, technology, and disability, I propose that we might undertake new ways of critically analyzing care. Intimate interactions involved in care are technologically mediated, sophisticated, and embodied; thus, we cannot begin to understand care without understanding the medicalized, biotechnological context in which it is taking place. Rather than being an endorsement of seeing disability strictly in the context of health or medical knowledge/technologies, this chapter is driven by curiosity: How do scientific thinking and health-related technologies infuse the intimate labor of caregiving? How does this affect all people’s lives, including both disabled and nondisabled providers and recipients of care? Rather than seeking to undermine the social and political aspects of disability, this chapter suggests expanding the scope of disability studies analysis to include science, medicine, and technology.