New developments in biotechnology radically alter our relationship with our bodies. Body tissues can now be used for commercial purposes, while external objects, such as pacemakers, can become part of the body. Property in the Body: Feminist Perspectives transcends the everyday responses to such developments, suggesting that what we most fear is the feminisation of the body. We fear our bodies are becoming objects of property, turning us into things rather than persons. This book evaluates how well-grounded this fear is, (...) and suggests innovative models of regulating what has been called 'the new Gold Rush' in human tissue. This is an up-to-date and wide-ranging synthesis of market developments in body tissue, bringing together bioethics, feminist theory and lessons from countries that have resisted commercialisation of the body, in a theoretically sophisticated and practically significant approach. (shrink)

Reproductive technologies, says Thompson, are part of the increasing tendency to turn social problems into biomedical questions and can be used as a lens to see the resulting changes in the relations between science and society."--BOOK JACKET.

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of (...) pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty, a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals. (shrink)

In Subjectivity without Subjects, well-known philosopher and feminist theorist Kelly Oliver looks at aspects of popular culture, film, science, and law to examine contemporary notions of paternity and maternity. Oliver studies the roles of paternal responsibility, virility, and race in such events as the Million Man March and the Promise Keeper's movement and suggests alternative ways to conceive of self-other relations and the subjective identity at stake in them. In addition she offers a detailed analysis of particular works by such (...) well-known filmmakers as Polanski, Bergman, and Varda in developing a theory of identity that opens the subject to otherness and difference. (shrink)

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise (...) the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie. (shrink)

Familiarity with Charles Darwin's treatise on evolution is essential to every well-educated individual. One of the most important books ever published--and a continuing source of controversy, a century and a half later--this classic of science is reproduced in a facsimile of the critically acclaimed first edition.

This collection of key writings, selected by Luce Irigaray herself, presents a complete picture of her work to date across the fields of Philosophy, Linguistics ...

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to (...) acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

A passionate celebrator of "sexual difference," Luce Irigaray was never simply after the social equality that her generation so publicly demanded. She was seeking more fundamentally a society that celebrated the differences between the genders and their coming together in a union without hierarchy. As she formulates it in this compellingly readable introduction to her own thought, Irigaray is writing about how "I" and "You" become "We." Exploring along the way women's experiences of motherhood, abortion, the AIDS crisis and the (...) beauty industry, this book presents one of the most important thinkers of our day in her own words."--Jacket. (shrink)

The question "Where do we come from?" has fascinated philosophers, scientists, and artists for generations. This book reorients the question of the matrix as a place where everything comes from (_chora_, womb, incubator) by recasting it in terms of acts of "matrixial/maternal hospitality" producing space and matter of and for the other. Irina Aristarkhova theorizes such hospitality with the potential to go beyond tolerance in understanding self/other relations. Building on and critically evaluating a wide range of historical and contemporary scholarship, (...) she applies this theoretical framework to the science, technology, and art of ectogenesis (artificial womb, neonatal incubators, and other types of generation outside of the maternal body) and proves the question "Can the machine nurse?" is critical when approaching and understanding the functional capacities and failures of incubating technologies, such as artificial placenta. Aristarkhova concludes with the science and art of male pregnancy, positioning the condition as a question of the hospitable man and newly defined fatherhood and its challenge to the conception of masculinity as unable to welcome the other. (shrink)

The identification and valorization of unacknowledged, feminized forms of economic productivity has been an important task for feminist theory. In this article, we expand and rethink existing definitions of labour, in order to recognize the essential economic role women play in the stem cell and regenerative medicine industries, new fields of biomedical research that are rapidly expanding throughout the world. Women constitute the primary tissue donors in the new stem cell industries, which require high volumes of human embryos, oöcytes, foetal (...) tissue and umbilical cord blood. Such material is generally given for free in the advanced industrial democracies, constituted as a surplus (‘spare’ embryos) or waste (umbilical cord ‘afterbirth’, cadaveric foetuses, poor quality oöcytes) whose generative powers should not be withheld from others. At the same time, among impoverished female populations in developing nations, such biological material is now often procured through frankly transactional relations, where women undertake risky procedures for small fees. In each case, female bodily productivity is mobilized to support bioeconomic research, yet the economic value involved in these relations is largely unacknowledged. In this article, we consider both the gift economy and the transactional economy for reproductive tissues as a form of labour. In order to fully conceptualize the specificities of feminized productivity in the bioeconomy, we distinguish between earlier feminist theories of reproductive labour and the emerging practices generated by stem cell research, which we term regenerative labour. We consider how historical transformations in the regulation of feminized labour and the technical repertoires of stem cell research renegotiate the productivity limits of female reproductive biology, opening it out to novel and profitable forms of surplus value and enrolling women in complex negotiations over their role in bioeconomic activity. (shrink)

In this fascinating and inventive work, A. David Napier argues that the central assumption of immunology—that we survive through the recognition and elimination of non-self—has become a defining concept of the modern age. Tracing this immunological understanding of self and other through an incredibly diverse array of venues, from medical research to legal and military strategies and the electronic revolution, Napier shows how this defensive way of looking at the world not only destroys diversity but also eliminates the possibility of (...) truly engaging difference, thereby impoverishing our culture and foreclosing tremendous opportunities for personal growth. To illustrate these destructive consequences, Napier likens the current craze for embracing diversity and the use of politically correct speech to a cultural potluck to which we each bring different dishes, but at which no one can eat unless they abide by the same rules. Similarly, loaning money to developing nations serves as a tool both to make the peoples in those nations more like us and to maintain them in the nonthreatening status of distant dependents. To break free of the resulting downward spiral of homogenization and self-focus, Napier suggests that we instead adopt a new defining concept based on embryology, in which development and self-growth take place through a process of incorporation and transformation. In this effort he suggests that we have much to learn from non-Western peoples, such as the Balinese, whose ritual practices require them to take on the considerable risk of injecting into their selves the potential dangers of otherness—and in so doing ultimately strengthen themselves as well as their society. _The Age of Immunology,_ with its combination of philosophy, history, and cultural inquiry, will be seen as a manifesto for a new age and a new way of thinking about the world and our place in it. (shrink)

Feminist analyses have made important contributions to the sociocultural experiences of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. This article draws upon recent theorizing within science studies to focus on the mattering of these processes. Specifically, the article expands upon Mauss's notion of the ‘gift’, which Diprose develops through the idea of ‘corporeal generosity’. I am interested in corporeal generosity insofar as it circumvents descriptions of relationships in terms of a closed economy in which resources are exchanged without excess or remainder. Corporeal generosity (...) refers to the often missed but nevertheless inescapable debt that a body owes to other bodies. At the same time, this embodied ‘gifting’ is both unpredictable and intrusive – there is as much possibility of threatening the integrity of bodies as there is of opening new possibilities. (shrink)

The inhuman in the humanities : Darwin and the ends of man -- Deleuze, Bergson, and the concept of life -- Bergson, Deleuze, and difference -- Feminism, materialism, and freedom -- The future of feminist theory : dreams for new knowledges -- Differences disturbing identity : Deleuze and feminism -- Irigaray and the ontology of sexual difference -- Darwin and the split between natural and sexual selection -- Sexual difference as sexual selection : Irigarayan reflections on Darwin -- Art and (...) the animal -- Living art and the art of life : women's painting from the western desert. (shrink)