In this class the emphasis is on recent scholarship in the intersections of gender, race, nation, and the sciences. I have organized the sections of the class around intellectually stimulating areas of rhetorical scholarship and discussion, rather than around a strict historical time-line or around a thematic outline of the field, beginning with some of those who have set the foundations for contemporary rhetoric, particularly as related to science, such as Nietzsche, in his Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols and Foucault, in his The Order of Things. The next subsection of the class looks at recent work on the interdependency of the rise of modern science and colonialism, including the raced and gendered dimensions of the colonial enterprise, and the critical role of the concept of "nature" in that, as in the works of Londa Schiebinger, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. The second sub- section looks at the area of medicine, life sciences and the body, and highlights the politics, law, and science of race and gender, and the shifting ontologies of medical objects and subjects, and includes the work of Nancy Tuana as well as Deirdre McClosky. The next major section deals with our embodied, sensual relations to visual media as rhetorically constructed. We will ground ourselves in key texts of phenomenology by Merleau-Ponty and his followers and then, from the perspective of these theoretical concerns about the body, pursue an analysis of the different media technologies before whose screens our bodies so frequently sit: film, video, television, computer, etc. Sample readings include texts by: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Baudrillard, Susan Bordo, Marshall McCluhan, Steven Shaviro and Vivian Sobchack.