Mirella Deocadiz
Gender, Information, Science and Technology
Beauty: A Cultural Construction or the Natural Order?

In the article, “The Face Value of Dreams”: Gender, Race, Class and the Politics of Cosmetic Surgery, Bañales argues that the reason why women choose to get plastic surgery is that it serves to alter or erase racial or ethnic markers. However, in Dull and West’s article “Accounting for Cosmetic Surgery: The Accomplishment of Gender”, cosmetic surgeons talk about restoring the ‘natural order’ of things rather than conforming to a societal standard. This paper aims to discuss whether the perception of beauty and attractiveness are social constructions or whether this perception takes root in more biological grounding.

 The Gay Gene

GIST

Professor McCormack

2/8/11

Webpaper #1

“Interpretations of Gender in Two Communities: Transsexuals and Third-World Women”

Words continually evolve, their connotations and definitions shift and are forgotten and replaced as the generations pass. The mutability of language causes people to connote certain words differently. This semester, I am taking an course cross-listed in both English and Biology called “The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories”. This comment from one of my classmates prompted my essay:
 

First day of class, the gap between gender and technology seemed so large that most of the students in my gender and technology class had trouble describing the interaction between them. However, we have learned that technology has served an important role in altering gender in the current society by reading articles on sex roles in virtual society and medical procedures such as hymenoplasty. Before discussing the interaction between gender and technology, I believe it is important to talk about how my initial thought about gender and technology. Before taking this class at Bryn Mawr College, I, personally, did not have a good idea of gender and was being ignorant about it because I did not know about the complexity of the subject.

Vivien Chen

Survival of the Selfless 

“A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past actions and future actions and their motives – approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who with certainty can be thus designated makes the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals” – Charles Darwin