Biotechnology and Culture

The cultural debates over biotechnology clarify the fears and longings of our age. Biotechnologies are not just medical interventions; they pose profound challenges to conventional notions about identity, human connectedness, and society. With every new media frenzy over surrogacy, cloning, organ transplantation, and the like, people raise troubling questions: can a child have two mothers? Should we learn our genetic futures? Are organs gifts or commercial products? This book traces such questions and their political and personal stakes over the last hundred years and in several contemporary locations.As birth, illness, and death increasingly come under technological control, struggles erupt over who should control the body and define its limits and capacities. Biotechnologies make the traditional facts of life into matters of expert judgement and partisan debate. They blur the boundary separating people from machines, male from female, and nature from culture. In these diverse ways, they destroy the taken-for-granted gold standard of the body. This creates both anxiety and exhilaration the public sphere, because without the natural body, the legitimacy of dominant social arrangements is seriously undercut.Biotechnologies, thus, become a convenient, tangible focus for political contests over the nuclear family, legal and professional authority, and relations between the sexes. However, these medical interventions also transform intimate personal experience. Giving birth, building new families, and surviving serious illness now immerse us in a web of machines, expert authority, and electronic images. We use and imagine the body in radically different ways, and from these emerge new collective discourses of morality and personal identity.In Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics contributors from several disciplines examine these broad cultural effects. In this book, the same technologies (surrogacy, tissue-culture research, and medical imaging) are analysed by historians, anthropologists, cultural critics, and feminists. The moral anxieties raised by biotechnologies and the circulation of these instruments across class and national boundaries are the other interdisciplinary themes. The approach here favours complex social dramas of the refusal, celebration, or ambivalent acceptance of new medical procedures. Eschewing polemics or pure theory, contributors show biotechnology collides with everyday life and reshapes the political and personal meanings of the body.

Essays on technology's effect on our relationship with our bodies: "A timely and perceptive look . . . at some of the most anxiety producing issues of the day." —Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley As birth, illness, and death increasingly come under technological control, struggles arise over who should control the body and define its limits and capacities. Biotechnologies turn the traditional "facts of life" into matters of expert judgment and partisan debate. They blur the boundary separating people from machines, male from female, and nature from culture. In these diverse ways, they destroy the "gold standard" of the body, formerly taken for granted. Biotechnologies become a convenient, tangible focus for political contests over the nuclear family, legal and professional authority, and relations between the sexes. Medical interventions also transform intimate personal experience: giving birth, building new families, and surviving serious illness now immerse us in a web of machines, expert authority, and electronic images. We use and imagine the body in radically different ways, and from these emerge new collective discourses of morality and personal identity. This book brings together historians, anthropologists, cultural critics, and feminists to examine the broad cultural effects of technologies such as surrogacy, tissue-culture research, and medical imaging. The moral anxieties raised by biotechnologies and their circulation across class and national boundaries provide other interdisciplinary themes for discourse in these essays. The authors favor complex social dramas of the refusal, celebration, or ambivalent acceptance of new medical procedures. Eschewing polemics or pure theory, contributors show how biotechnology collides with everyday life and reshapes the political and personal meanings of the body. Contributors include Paul Brodwin, Lisa Cartwright, Thomas Csordas, Gillian Goslinga-Roy, Deborah Grayson, Donald Joralemon, Hannah Landecker, Thomas Laqueur, Robert Nelson, Susan Squier, Janelle Taylor, and Alice Wexler. "This impressive collection offers a number of rich examples of why the development of anthropological studies of science, technology, and their disruptive social effects is a leading edge of critical enquiry." —Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University