Science and Technology Studies; Transnational Feminist Theory; Reproductive, Regenerative, and Genetic Technologies

Drawing on feminist theory, this paper uses a feminist lens to analyze the gendered representations and discourses of artificial intelligence in cinema history. In particular, this paper conducts an in-depth analysis of the representations of female robots and AI in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2013).

This paper received First Class Honors at Trinity College, Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

As our contemporary problems of climate change, pandemics, tech reform, and worldwide wealth inequality demand global solidarities, cooperation, and collective and empathetic imagination, we need approaches that can carve critical pathways for an inclusive technological future. Much as technology is created to transcend borders and cultures, this essay proposes that cross-cultural feminism can do the same. This essay pioneers a framework that enables us to strive for global solidarities while decolonizing the feminist "common sense" that is institutionalized into how technologies are shaped. We advocate for an approach grounded in the materiality (embodiments), mobility (social movements), and modality (codes and modes of design). We believe this threepronged lens can inform practice and help set the tenor for how to build cross-cultural feminist technologies for an inclusive future.

Biology Commodification and Women Self-determination. Beyond the Surrogacy Ban abstract: Starting with the analysis of the recent European Parliament's stands on surrogacy, in the frame of the wider bioethical debate on reproductive rights, the aim of this essay is twofold. Considering the low number of States that allow surrogacy on a commercial basis and the relatively low percentage of live births from surrogacy itself, this paper aims firstly to trace and problematize the recurring arguments against surrogacy, involving in the analysis not only appeals and campaigns promoted against it, but also the interventions of the European Court for human Rights and of the Committee on Social Affairs. Secondly, examining the bioethical perspectives not against surrogacy, from the neoliberal to the feminist and materialist approaches, the essay aims at presenting some of the possible thesis in favour of the recourse to new reproductive technologies.

Book chapter in Assisted Reproduction in Movement: Normalizations, Disruptions and Transmissions, edited by Merete Lie and Nina Lykke, to be published with Routledge for the book series Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality.

“Cellular Origins” discusses a new technology for embryo selection which has recently been widely adopted in UK fertility clinics: time-lapse embryo imaging. This technique, which represents a non-invasive alternative to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), involves the close observation of early embryonic development in vitro, thereby making it possible to select embryos for implantation in the womb by evaluating embryonic growth patterns. Tentatively hailed by the scientific and clinical community as a paradigmatic shift in IVF, time-lapse imaging produces new visual mediations of extracorporeal embryos and foregrounds temporal parameters as key indicators for selection. The time-lapse videos produced with this technology play a central role in this practice, both as a technical means for selection and as visual illustrations of the time-lapse approach in patient communication and marketing.  I distinguish three different kinds of embryo images which have emerged with this new technology (individuals, collectives, and populations) and consider what the implications may be if time-lapse imaging becomes the “new normal” in embryo selection. With this reading, I suggest that time-lapse embryo imaging is instrumental in a contemporary rewriting of human origin stories that shifts the value ascribed to these cell divisions and destabilizes notions of what counts as life.