Digital Bodies: Cyborgs, Biometrics, and Corporeal Data

In this course we will learn about the ways human bodies interface with digital technologies. Medical scans, prosthetic limbs, and technologies like the Pacemaker promise to protect and supplement the human body, and feminists and disability scholars have at times embraced the empowering potentials of the cyborgian body. Yet the ways in which the human body is digitized—its data harvested, charted, and merged with technologies—also have more dystopian valences. We will discuss how medical technologies, CGI, phone apps, and corporations have translated and used the data of the human body, and how this changes definitions of "human."