BUCH
Material Bodies
Biology and Culture in the United States
American Studies – A Monograph Series, Bd. 286
2018
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Bibliografische Daten
Abstract
‘Material Bodies’ is a book about the multiple connections, exchanges, interfaces, between biology and culture. It explores how Americans, past and present, have been empowered or constrained by biological factors (real or imagined), how the biology of human life has been holding a special place within US culture, organizing people's praxis, and at the same time also their desires and fears. Positioned at the intersection of somatic and semantic systems, this volume seeks to bring the resources of materialist cultural critique to an exploration of various material arenas of human life, ranging from the public life of public diseases, the cultural grammars of the human body in genetics, in age and disability, all the way to the tensions between suffering and (its) representations in the available cultural archives. In the arguments presented here, human life and particularly the human body manifest themselves as an endowment, even a resource, but also as sites of questioning, of reflexivity, even of limitation, sites which mark the involuntary dimension of human existence as they impose inexorable limits on individual or collective hopes and projects.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
| Zwischenüberschrift | Seite | Aktion | Preis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cover | Cover | ||
| Titel | III | ||
| Imprint | IV | ||
| Acknowledgements | VII | ||
| Table of Contents | IX | ||
| Preface | XIII | ||
| Introduction: Biologizing Culture / Culturing Biology | 1 | ||
| Familiar Strangers, or, When Biology Meets Culture | 45 | ||
| Disciplining Biology | 12 | ||
| Biocultures: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis? | 18 | ||
| Biology and the Research Imagination of American Cultural Studies | 21 | ||
| Subjects in Biological Difference (Race and Gender) | 24 | ||
| I. The Materialism of Biological Encounters | 45 | ||
| 1. Embodied Encounters: Emergence and Emergency | 45 | ||
| On the Materialism of Biological Encounters | 48 | ||
| Biology and Human Mobility | 67 | ||
| A Culpable Biography | 73 | ||
| The "Yellow Peril" Medicalized: Chinese Immigrants and the Bubonic Plague of 1899/1900 | 77 | ||
| Biological Transit across the American Hemisphere | 83 | ||
| Yellow Fever and the Biopolitics of Location | 93 | ||
| The White Man's "Biological Burden": Empire and Disease | 104 | ||
| Cuba and the Reed Yellow Fever Commission | 106 | ||
| The Philippines and the Specter of "Colonial Burnout'' | 110 | ||
| 2. The Public Life of Public Diseases: Epidemics and the Mass Media | 115 | ||
| Public Opinion and Public Diseases | 117 | ||
| Disease Imaginaries and Narrative Form | 133 | ||
| "Dark Invaders": The Military Response Narrative | 139 | ||
| Biomedical Jeremiads, or, How Have the Revelers Fallen | 143 | ||
| From Scratch: Medical Sherlocks | 147 | ||
| Imagined Immunities for Imagined Communities | 153 | ||
| Conclusion: Biological Encounters and the Culture of Blame | 156 | ||
| II. Not Normatively Human: Cultural Grammars and the Human Body | 157 | ||
| 1. Corporeal Norms and the Experience of Inequality | 157 | ||
| Norms as Imaginary Grammar of Cultural Oughtness | 163 | ||
| The Normal and the Pathological: Canguilhem | 167 | ||
| Normalizing Society: Foucault | 175 | ||
| Communicative Normalization: Habermas | 182 | ||
| When Life Goes Public: Biological Normophilia(s) | 187 | ||
| Norms and the Institutionalization of Judgment | 206 | ||
| At the Far End of the Normative Body: Late Life and Disability | 210 | ||
| 2. "Age" as Cultural Norm and Form | 211 | ||
| The Age Chill Factor: Late Life as Bio-Cultural Pathology | 216 | ||
| Normal Not to Be Normal: Gerontology and Age Studies | 226 | ||
| "New Age"? Late Life and the Promises of Molecular Biology | 238 | ||
| Apocalyptic Embodiment: The Civic Identity of Late Life | 246 | ||
| Where "Age" Is: Cultural Topographies of Late Life | 254 | ||
| "Age": Embodied Selfhood or Cultural Brand Name? | 267 | ||
| 3. Exception Incorporated: Disability as Inscription of Cultural Otherness | 268 | ||
| Oppositional Bodies, or, Disability's Challenge to Able-Bodied Normativity | 278 | ||
| The Hero's Two Bodies: Disabled Veterans | 285 | ||
| Left Behind: Disability in Veteran (Auto)Biographies | 289 | ||
| "A Culture of Hope"? Disability as Media Format | 300 | ||
| Zones of Vulnerability: Disability and Environmental Exposure | 304 | ||
| Spectral Disabilities, or, What You See Is What you (Don't) Get | 310 | ||
| Markers of (Un)Certainty: "Age," "Disability" and Communicative Interaction | 321 | ||
| III. Corporeal Semiotics: The Body of the Text / the Text of the Body | 325 | ||
| 1. Textualizing Life—an Incomplete Project | 325 | ||
| Bodies in Emergence and Emergency | 332 | ||
| National Intimacies: The "Politics of Life" and the Religious Right | 335 | ||
| Re-Writing the Book of Life: Genomics | 339 | ||
| Finding a Text for the Book of Life | 347 | ||
| Biological Futures | 351 | ||
| Parables of the Possible: Contours of an Enhanced Life | 356 | ||
| We the People, in Order to Have More Perfect Bodies: Biotechnology and Neoliberal Governance | 365 | ||
| 2. Representations and the Traces of Suffering | 370 | ||
| Putting It in Words, or, Another Distrust in the Signifier | 376 | ||
| Emphatic Embodiment | 382 | ||
| Private Practice: Pain as Inner Experience | 385 | ||
| The We of Pain | 390 | ||
| Pain as Relationship and Relation | 396 | ||
| 3. The Silent Killer: Cancer(s) | 397 | ||
| Stories We Die By: Cancers as Story Generators | 411 | ||
| Somatics, Semantics and the Allegory of Unregulated Growth | 417 | ||
| When the Flesh Becomes Word, or, The SemioticModel of Human Embodiment | 421 | ||
| InConclusive: Human Biology and the Work of Cultural Critique | 429 | ||
| Biology, American Studies and Cultural Critique | 429 | ||
| Figures of the Collective: Human Biology as Cultural Idiom and Issue | 433 | ||
| References | 439 | ||
| Backcover | 484 |
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