Science Depends on and Creates Cultural Imagery and Vernacular
Science Depends on and Creates Cultural Imagery and Vernacular: But Not for Long?
by Tamrat Hathway
Within institutions that claim themselves to be neutral entities there will always lie a bias, a set of beliefs that structure the rest of the institution. Hospitals are one of those institutions. Emily Martin illuminates to us in her text “The Sperm and the Egg”, that through the language used to describe their findings we can see the influence of social norms and cultural imagery shapes scientists observations, as well as the influence the dominant voices within the institutions have on their descendant scientists who maintain the illusions of their predecessors and perpetuate them through their new research under the claim that their language is purely scientific.
These biases and beliefs institutions are forced onto those who enter into these institutions, Anne Fausto-Sterling’s “The Five Sexes Revisited” tells us of many intersex peoples’ rejection of their surgical assignment. The dimorphic image of the human body that’s being up held by the surgery. The Image of the Human body only being able to look within a certain frame ways lead to many ablest as well as xenophobic beliefs, not to mention beauty standards that only work to shame people who don’t fit that image. Described as a standard, it actually is an illusion that dismisses the many possible forms of the body.
The solutions both Fausto-Sterling and Martin came up with include the development of language that allows for Intersex folk to have ways to describe themselves, to masses who most-likely have never even herd of intersex people. Another project is to take the problematic metaphors and “personhood” away from entities like the sperm and the egg and replace them with terms that avoid bestowing any kind of personality in hopes to either truly take away cultural imagery from our research and observations o broaden our cultural imagery with what we research and observe.