The Genetic Imaginary
The Genetic Imaginary

Author: Neil Gerlach

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780802085726

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DNA testing and banking has become institutionalized in the Canadian criminal justice system. As accepted and widespread though the practice is, there has been little critique or debate of this practice in a broad public forum on the potential infringement of individual rights or civil liberties. Neil Gerlach's The Genetic Imaginary takes up this challenge, critically examining the social, legal, and criminal justice origins and effects of DNA testing and banking. Drawing on risk analysis, Gerlach explains why Canadians have accepted DNA technology with barely a ripple of public outcry. Despite promises of better crime control and protections for existing privacy rights, Gerlach's examination of police practices, courtroom decisions, and the changing role of scientific expertise in legal decision-making reveals that DNA testing and banking have indeed led to a measurable erosion of individual rights. Biogovernance and the biotechnology of surveillance almost inevitably lead to the empowerment of state agent control and away from due process and legal protection. The Genetic Imaginary demonstrates that the overall effect of these changes to the criminal justice system has been to emphasize the importance of community security at the expense of individual rights. The privatization and politicization of biogovernance will certainly have profound future implications for all Canadians.

Television and the Genetic Imaginary
Television and the Genetic Imaginary

Author: Sofia Bull

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-05-30

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1137548479

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This book examines the complex ways in which television articulates ideas about DNA in the early 21st century. Considering television’s distinct aesthetic and narrative forms, as well as its specific cultural roles, it identifies TV as a key site for the genetic imaginary. The book addresses the key themes of complexity and kinship, which function as nodes around which older essentialist notions about the human genome clash with newly emergent post-genomic sensibilities. Analysing a wide range of US and UK programmes, from science documentaries, science fiction serials and crime procedurals, to family history programmes, sitcoms and reality shows, Television and the Genetic Imaginary illustrates the extent to which molecular frameworks of understanding now permeate popular culture.

Global Nature, Global Culture
Global Nature, Global Culture

Author: Sarah Franklin

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2000-09-26

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1446264998

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`An excellent book. The authors have the rare capacity to handle popular culture and case studies in a theoretically informed manner. Original and well researched′ - Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University Understandings of globalization have been little explored in relation to gender or related concerns such as identity, subjectivity and the body. This book contrasts `the natural′ and `the global′ as interpretive strategies, using approaches from feminist cultural theory. The book begins by introducing the central themes: ideas of the natural; questions of scale and context posed by globalization and their relation to forms of cultural production; the transformation of genealogy; and the emergence of interest in definitions of life and life forms. The authors explores these questions through a number of case studies including Benneton advertising, Jurassic Park, The Body Shop, British Airways, Monsanto and Dolly the Sheep. In order to respecify the `nature, culture and gender′ concerns of two decades of feminist theory, this highly original book reflects, hypothesizes and develops new interpretive possibilities within established feminist analytical frames.

The Cinematic Life of the Gene
The Cinematic Life of the Gene

Author: Jackie Stacey

Publisher: Duke University Press Books

Published: 2010-04-02

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13:

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A leading feminist film theorist argues that the cinema animates the tropes of and enacts our fears about cloning and other kinds of genetic engineering.

The Cinematic Life of the Gene
The Cinematic Life of the Gene

Author: Jackie Stacey

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2010-04-02

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0822390949

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What might the cinema tell us about how and why the prospect of cloning disturbs our most profound ideas about gender, sexuality, difference, and the body? In The Cinematic Life of the Gene, the pioneering feminist film theorist Jackie Stacey argues that as a cultural technology of imitation, cinema is uniquely situated to help us theorize “the genetic imaginary,” the constellation of fantasies that genetic engineering provokes. Since the mid-1990s there has been remarkable innovation in genetic engineering and a proliferation of films structured by anxieties about the changing meanings of biological and cultural reproduction. Bringing analyses of several of these films into dialogue with contemporary cultural theory, Stacey demonstrates how the cinema animates the tropes and enacts the fears at the heart of our genetic imaginary. She engages with film theory; queer theories of desire, embodiment, and kinship; psychoanalytic theories of subject formation; and debates about the reproducibility of the image and the shift from analog to digital technologies. Stacey examines the body-horror movies Alien: Resurrection and Species in light of Jean Baudrillard’s apocalyptic proclamations about cloning and “the hell of the same,” and she considers the art-house thrillers Gattaca and Code 46 in relation to ideas about imitation, including feminist theories of masquerade, postcolonial conceptualizations of mimicry, and queer notions of impersonation. Turning to Teknolust and Genetic Admiration, independent films by feminist directors, she extends Walter Benjamin’s theory of aura to draw an analogy between the replication of biological information and the reproducibility of the art object. Stacey suggests new ways to think about those who are not what they appear to be, the problem of determining identity in a world of artificiality, and the loss of singularity amid unchecked replication.

Genes and the Bioimaginary
Genes and the Bioimaginary

Author: Professor Deborah Lynn Steinberg

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2015-06-28

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1409462552

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Genes and the Bioimaginary reflects on the rise and cultural apotheosis of the gene, examining the ‘genetification’ of culture and shedding light on emergence of the gene at the intersection of science and culture and as a product of science as culture. Employing a distinctive array of interdisciplinary analytic tools, it explores the rise of the gene in several respects: as a site of knowledge production crossing boundaries between the clinical-scientific and the popular; as a gateway technology and locus of transforming bioethical values and modes of bodily governance; and as site of spectacle, projective fantasy and attachment.

Biopunk Dystopias
Biopunk Dystopias

Author: Lars Schmeink

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1781383766

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'Biopunk Dystopias' contends that we find ourselves at a historical nexus, defined by the rise of biology as the driving force of scientific progress, a strongly grown mainstream attention given to genetic engineering in the wake of the Human Genome Project (1990-2003), the changing sociological view of a liquid modern society, and shifting discourses on the posthuman, including a critical posthumanism that decenters the privileged subject of humanism. The book argues that this historical nexus produces a specific cultural formation in the form of "biopunk", a subgenre evolved from the cyberpunk of the 1980s. Biopunk makes use of current posthumanist conceptions in order to criticize contemporary reality as already dystopian, warning that a future will only get worse, and that society needs to reverse its path, or else destroy all life on this planet.

Transpositions
Transpositions

Author: Rosi Braidotti

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2006-03-27

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0745635954

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"This book offers an account of ethical and political subjectivity in contemporary culture. It makes a case for a non-unitary or nomadic conception of the subject, in opposition to the claims of ideologies such as conservatism, liberal individualism and techno-capitalism. Braidotti takes a stand against moral universalism, while offering a vigorous defence of nomadic ethics against the charges of relativism and nihilism. She calls for a new form of ethical accountability that takes "Life" as the subject, not the object, of enquiry. The nomadic ethical subject negotiates successfully the complex tension between the multiplicity of political forces on the one hand and the sustained commitment to emancipatory politics on the other."

Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights
Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights

Author: Erik Parens

Publisher: Georgetown University Press

Published: 2000-09-28

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9781589013940

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As prenatal tests proliferate, the medical and broader communities perceive that such testing is a logical extension of good prenatal care—it helps parents have healthy babies. But prenatal tests have been criticized by the disability rights community, which contends that advances in science should be directed at improving their lives, not preventing them. Used primarily to decide to abort a fetus that would have been born with mental or physical impairments, prenatal tests arguably reinforce discrimination against and misconceptions about people with disabilities. In these essays, people on both sides of the issue engage in an honest and occasionally painful debate about prenatal testing and selective abortion. The contributors include both people who live with and people who theorize about disabilities, scholars from the social sciences and humanities, medical geneticists, genetic counselors, physicians, and lawyers. Although the essayists don't arrive at a consensus over the disability community's objections to prenatal testing and its consequences, they do offer recommendations for ameliorating some of the problems associated with the practice.

The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, fourth edition
The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, fourth edition

Author: Ulrike Felt

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-12-16

Total Pages: 1210

ISBN-13: 0262338114

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The fourth edition of an authoritative overview, with all new chapters that capture the state of the art in a rapidly growing field. Science and Technology Studies (STS) is a flourishing interdisciplinary field that examines the transformative power of science and technology to arrange and rearrange contemporary societies. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field, reviewing current research and major theoretical and methodological approaches in a way that is accessible to both new and established scholars from a range of disciplines. This new edition, sponsored by the Society for Social Studies of Science, is the fourth in a series of volumes that have defined the field of STS. It features 36 chapters, each written for the fourth edition, that capture the state of the art in a rich and rapidly growing field. One especially notable development is the increasing integration of feminist, gender, and postcolonial studies into the body of STS knowledge. The book covers methods and participatory practices in STS research; mechanisms by which knowledge, people, and societies are coproduced; the design, construction, and use of material devices and infrastructures; the organization and governance of science; and STS and societal challenges including aging, agriculture, security, disasters, environmental justice, and climate change.