Dennis Krämer

In an essay published in 1980, Michel Foucault argues drawing on the life story of Herculine Barbin – a French hermaphrodite who grew up in a girls’ boarding school in the mid-nineteenth century, maintained romantic relationships with women, and was later compelled by the medicojuridical system to assume the male sex – that the search for a ›true sex‹ represents a project of modernity. What remains unclear to date is the role that classifications played in this search. This article therefore recenters Barbin’s biography and argues that the contemporary determination of her sex rested on the enforcement of a new medico-juridical classificatory regime that is characteristic of the modern treatment of hermaphroditism. Building on Foucault’s reflections as well as contemporary sources, this claim is developed from three perspectives: (1) the classification of living beings, (2) the classification of hermaphroditism, and (3) resistance to gender-binary classifications. The article concludes by sketching the implications of the classification of sex variations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Digital contact tracing is used in different countries to help contain the COVID-19 pandemic. It raises challenging empirical and ethical questions due to its complexity and widespread effects calling for a broader approach in ethical evaluation. However, existing approaches often fail to include all relevant value perspectives or lack reference to empirical data on the artifact in question. In this paper, we describe the development of an interdisciplinary framework to analyze digital contact tracing from an empirical and ethical perspective. Starting with an analysis of methodological tensions in the attempt to analyze digital contact tracing, we, firstly, set out three methodological premises regarding (a) a specific view of technology, (b) a fruitful normative perspective, and (c) ways to gather empirical knowledge about the object under investigation. Secondly, we inspect consequences of these premises to develop our research methodology. In doing so, we argue for a postphenomenological perspective on technology, solidarity as an important concept to guide the ethical perspective, and an empirical approach based on qualitative social science research and the concept of affordances. We illustrate these considerations by referring to our analysis of the German Corona-Warn-App as an instance of contact tracing based on the Exposure Notification Framework by Google and Apple. We then discuss the implications of using such a framework, including considerations concerning future developments of technologies similar to or inspired by the current concepts of contact tracing.