The da Vinci: A (Dis)abling Machine of 21st Century Medicine

Abstract

This paper analyzes the da Vinci surgical system as a media technology situated intrinsically, while not expressively, as an assistive media technology, marketed and designed with an “ideology of ability” (Siebers, 2008) at its core. From trademarks to the materiality of the device, the da Vinci produces a set of tensions instructive in understanding how medical technologies treat the condition of human operators as deficient to defend their value (Wise, 2012) while expanding access but also producing impairment in a variety of ways – symbolically, materially, institutionally, and politically. Approaching the da Vinci as a (dis)abling machine that both relies on media representations of disability and is itself a media technology operating to produce (dis)ability, helps bring a critical perspective to a machine that otherwise fails to be interrogated by scholars of disability and media, even though its potential social and material consequences range far beyond the operating room.