Ericka Johnson
Professor
How are patients made by and in their interactions with healthcare and medical technologies? How are their bodies known and presented? What role does gender play and how do medical technologies (re)create gender for patients?
Refracting bodies through technology
Technologies refract discourses. They articulate silent understandings, highlight cultural values, emphasize subtle ideas. Studying technological artefacts can help trace the discursive contours within which we live. And give us words to challenge them. I research medical technologies and material discursive practices of the body. Employing theoretical tools from feminist science studies, I find my academic home at the juncture of STS and medical sociology.
Publications
2023
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Books
A Cultural Biography of the Prostate
What contemporary prostate angst tells us about how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality.
About the book
We are all suffering an acute case of prostate angst. Men worry about their own prostates and those of others close to them; women worry about the prostates of the men they love. The prostate—a gland located directly under the bladder—lurks on the periphery of many men's health issues, but as an object of anxiety it goes beyond the medical, affecting how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality. In A Cultural Biography of the Prostate, Ericka Johnson investigates what we think the prostate is and what we use the prostate to think about, examining it in historical, cultural, social, and medical contexts.
Research Project
In media
Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals
On the frontier of feminist technoscience research, Ericka Johnson’s collaborative project Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explores how the gendered body is produced in and by medical technologies".
Ericka Johnson interviewed by Taylor Fox-Smith, Macquarie University and the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia in a podcast, New Books Network.
