How Medical Technologies Materialize Oppression

Abstract

Biomedical practice can encode and perpetuate oppressive ideologies. This encoding and perpetuation, scholars like Liao and Carbonell (Citation2023) convincingly argue, can occur not only via social practices, but also through medical technologies themselves. In other words, medical technologies can “materialize oppression”: they can be biased in a way that systematically “reflects and perpetuates unjust power relations” (Liao and Carbonell Citation2023, 9).

In this paper, I examine how medical technologies materialize oppression, offering a preliminary, non-exhaustive taxonomy of the mechanisms of this materialization. While scholars like Liao and Carbonell focus primarily on physical medical instruments, I offer new examples that illustrate these mechanisms at work, focusing on medical data classification technologies and infrastructures. A clearer view of how these mechanisms operate suggests possibilities for building technologies that liberate rather than oppress.