Biotechnology and Culture

Description

Untangles the broad cultural effects of biotechnologies

Biotechnology and Culture
Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics
Edited by Paul Brodwin

Untangles the broad cultural effects of biotechnologies

"A timely and perceptive look from many acute angles, at some of the most anxiety producing issues of the day." —Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley

"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

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.

Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics 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.

Paul Brodwin, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Adjunct Professor of Bioethics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, is the author of Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power and a coeditor of Pain as Human Experience: Anthropological Perspectives.

Theories of Contemporary Culture—Kathleen Woodward, general editor

Sujets

• Medical
• Médecine
• Bioethics
• Technology
• Ethics
• Anthropology
• Cultural Studies
• Technologie
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 janvier 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253028259
• Langue: English

Extrait

Biotechnology and Culture
Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics is Volume 25 in the series
THEORIES OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE CENTER FOR 21 ST CENTURY STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MILWAUKEE
Kathleen Woodward, General Editor
Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion   Herbert Blau
Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations   Edited by Kathleen Woodward
Electronic Culture: Fictions of the Present Tense in Television, Media Art, and Virtual Worlds   Margaret Morse
Ethics after Idealism: Theory—Culture—Ethnicity—Reading   Rey Chow
Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture, 1972–1996   Meaghan Morris
The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language   Gabriele Schwab
Re-viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture   Lynne Joyrich
Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation   Edited by Jane Gallop
Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video   Edited by Patrice Petro
Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question   Edited by Angelika Bammer
Libidinal Economy   Jean-François Lyotard
Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions   Kathleen Woodward
Indiscretions: Avant-garde Film, Video, and Feminism Patricia Mellencamp
Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism   Edited by Patricia Mellencamp
The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War   Susan Jeffords
The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern   Herbert Blau
Feminist Studies/Critical Studies   Edited by Teresa de Lauretis
Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture   Edited by Tania Modleski

Memory and Desire: Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis   Edited by Kathleen Woodward and Murray M. Schwartz
Displacement: Derrida and After   Edited by Mark Krupnick
Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities   Edited by Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan
The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions   Edited by Teresa de Lauretis, Andreas Huyssen, and Kathleen Woodward
The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture   Edited by Kathleen Woodward
Performance and Postmodern Culture   Edited by Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello
Biotechnology and Culture
Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics
EDITED BY PAUL E. BRODWIN
Indiana University Press / Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Biotechnology and culture : bodies, anxieties, ethics / edited by Paul E. Brodwin.       p. cm.—(Theories of contemporary culture ; v. 25)    Includes bibliographical references and index.    ISBN 0–253–33831-X (cl : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–253–21428–9 (pa : alk. paper)       1. Biotechnology—Social aspects.   I. Brodwin, Paul.   II. Series.    TP248.2.B55117    2000    303.48′3—dc21 00–040970
1    2    3    4    5    05    04    03    02    01    00
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction    PAUL E. BRODWIN
Part I: Genealogies
  1. Life and Death at Strangeways: The Tissue-Culture Point of View    SUSAN M. SQUIER
  2. Immortality, In Vitro: A History of the HeLa Cell Line    HANNAH LANDECKER
Part II: Maternity in Question
  3. “From Generation to Generation”: Imagining Connectedness in the Age of Reproductive Technologies    THOMAS W. LAQUEUR
  4. Mediating Intimacy: Black Surrogate Mothers and the Law    DEBORAH GRAYSON
  5. Body Boundaries, Fiction of the Female Self: An Ethnographic Perspective on Power, Feminism, and the Reproductive Technologies    GILLIAN M. GOSLINGA-ROY
  6. An All-Consuming Experience: Obstetrical Ultrasound and the Commodification of Pregnancy    JANELLE S. TAYLOR
Part III: Ethics and the Technological Subject
  7. Computerized Cadavers: Shades of Being and Representation in Virtual Reality    THOMAS J. CSORDAS
  8. Chorea/graphing Chorea: The Dancing Body of Huntington’s Disease    ALICE RUTH WEXLER
  9. The Ventilator/Baby as Cyborg: A Case Study in Technology and Medical Ethics    ROBERT M. NELSON
10. The Ethics of the Organ Market: Lloyd R. Cohen and the Free Marketeers    DONALD JORALEMON
Part IV: Biotechnology and Globalization
11. Reach Out and Heal Someone: Rural Telemedicine and the Globalization of U.S. Health Care    LISA CARTWRIGHT
12. Biotechnology on the Margins: A Haitian Discourse on French Medicine    PAUL E. BRODWIN
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is truly a collaborative effort. Most of the contributors presented earlier versions of their chapters at the conference Biotechnology, Culture, and the Body held in April 1997 at the Center for 21st Century Studies, a postdoctoral research institute at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The center director, Professor Kathleen Woodward, provided the leadership and resources to make the conference a success. I am also indebted to the editorial care and wisdom of Dr. Carol Tennessen, associate director, and Dr. Nigel Rothfels, associate editor for center publications, who oversaw the passage from conference to book.
In addition to the essays collected here, the conference featured exciting work by several other scholars: Richard Doyle, Kathryn Montgomery, Mary Mahowald, Patricia Marshall, Panivong Norindr, Angela Wall, and José van Dijck. During the conference, the artwork of physician Eric Avery kept us mindful of our visual and visceral engagements with biotechnologies. Finally, the insights from discussants Michael Fischer and Helen Longino and an anonymous reviewer have found their way into the introduction as well as several of the chapters. I would like to thank all the participants in this process for their hard work and creative dedication.
The chapter by Gillian M. Goslinga-Roy was originally published in Feminist Studies 26.1 (2000), and it is reprinted here by permission of the publisher, Feminist Studies , Inc.
Biotechnology and Culture
INTRODUCTION
PAUL E. BRODWIN
Since 1970, a host of new medical technologies has transformed the experience of birth, illness, and death in Euroamerican society. 1 The technologies have created new images of the body—perhaps even undercut “the body” as a cultural category—and they have changed the ways we think about human identity, connectedness, and the limits of the life span. This book takes up the ramifying cultural effects of recent biotechnologies. It explores the personal and political stakes of several clinical procedures: surrogacy, organ transplantation, genetic screening, artificial respiration, ultrasound and digitized images of the body, as well as the precursor field of tissue-culture research. These technologies have emerged from years of specialized laboratory and clinical research. They come with the aura of objective science and the prestige of a highly trained and credentialed class of experts. The meanings of these technologies, however, quickly escape professional control and infiltrate the diverse domains of everyday life. This process begins again with every new media frenzy over genetic testing or human cloning, and it limns the passage from science to popular culture and from professional medicine to the intimate realms of bodily experience. This is the background for Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics.
The book examines how people debate, criticize, and re-imagine these contemporary interventions into the human body. It clarifies the fears and longings that surround biotechnologies: for instance, the fantasies of immortality connected with organ transplantation, or the desire to know the likely cause of one’s death through genetic diagnosis. Of course, these cultural implications are not only a matter of personal reflection. Biotechnologies also acquire compelling political meanin