Brainwashing: Taking Another Turn with Biology

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my good colleagues Kristin Spilker and Malin Noem Ravn for their comments on this paper.

Notes

For our series of short position papers, “Taking Turns”, we invite Nordic as well as non-Nordic scholars to a conversation on the contemporary challenges for feminist and gender research. The name is, of course, a pun on various “turns” within feminist theory, like the linguistic turn or the material turn, but it also signifies a possibility for feminist scholars and gender researchers to take turns in expressing positions and perspectives on the changes and challenges emerging in our field. In the current issue, Merete Lie, Professor at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), takes up the public discussions on the value and relevance of gender studies around the much-hyped Norwegian television show “Brainwash”. Inhabiting the field of social anthropology, Professor Lie's main research interests are gender and technology, assisted reproduction, medical imaging technology and globalization. She is the editor of He, She and IT Revisited: New Perspectives on Gender in the Information Society (2003), has co-authored Renegotiating Local Values. Working Women and Foreign Industry in Malaysia (1994, with Ragnhild Lund), and co-edited Making it in China (2008, with Ragnhild Lund and Gard Hopsdal Hansen).

¹ In Norwegian: “Er vi født sånn eller blitt sånn—hvorfor oppfører vi oss slik vi gjør?”, “Hvorfor er så mange redd for biologi, og hvilke konsekvenser kan det få når man ikke tar hensyn til den?” (http://www.nrk.no/programmer/sider/hjernevask/).

² Dagens Næringsliv (a daily newspaper focusing on business life).