Deus Ex Machina: Exploring the Feminist Phenomenology of Body, Motherhood, and Technology

Deus Ex Machina: Exploring the Feminist Phenomenology of Body, Motherhood, and Technology

Presenter(s)

Aila Carr-Chellman

Comments

1:20-1:40, Kennedy Union 312

Description

Either by nurture or nature, we have a social situation wherein the control and domination over people is necessary for the world to function. The modern man is made instrumental to anything and everything, spurring systematic disconnection and alienation. The physical, psychological, and social alienation of women, in particular, is crucial for understanding the true nature of personhood. What alternative narratives of existence could emerge if the patriarchal structure of our world were dismantled? What would it mean to understand ourselves outside of a system that strips us of our connection to the social and relational world? I seek to contribute to a tradition of corporeal phenomenologists; philosophers that seek a more free version of existence through the lived body. The process of women grappling with the social distinction of Mother creates a unique relational and existential perspective that is important to understanding freedom in life. A technologizing world will continue to make all things, people or otherwise, mere means to an end. The ontological perspective of Women, of a lived corporeal reality, is essential in creating a more free world. My project seeks to draw upon the liberatory thinkers like Merleau-Ponty, Haraway, Heidegger, and De Beauvoir to reconsider our existential situation through the eyes and bodies of women. This project is to understand more deeply how a traditionally masculine project of control and domination perpetuates systemic disconnection, exploitation, and the dismantling of humanness in the most inherent sense.

Publication Date

4-23-2025

Project Designation

Honors Thesis

Primary Advisor

David J. Watkins

Primary Advisor's Department

Political Science

Keywords

Stander Symposium, College of Arts and Sciences

Deus Ex Machina: Exploring the Feminist Phenomenology of Body, Motherhood, and Technology

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