Honors Theses

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

Advisor

David Watkins, Ph.D.

Department

Political Science

Publication Date

4-23-2025

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Abstract

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.

Permission Statement

This item is protected by copyright law (Title 17, U.S. Code) and may only be used for noncommercial, educational, and scholarly purposes.

Keywords

Undergraduate research

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