http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

The politics of life itself Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century

The dramatic advances in DNA technology over the last few years are the stuff of science fiction. It is now not only possible to clone human beings it is happening. For the first time since the creation of the earth four billion years ago, or the emergence of mankind 10 million years ago, people will be able to choose their children's' sex, height, colour, personality traits and intelligence. It will even be possible to create 'superhumans' by mixing human genes with those of other animals for extra strength or longevity. But is this desirable? What are the moral and political consequences? Will it mean anything to talk about 'human nature' any more? Is this the end of human beings? Post Human Society is a passionate analysis of the greatest political and moral problem ever to face the human race.

The Problem with NatureOur Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution

The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism

If a lexicon were compiled of the greatest inhumanities man has visited on his fellows, the Holocaust would surely be the preeminent subject. The Nazi "final solution," promulgated in January 1942 at the Wansee Conference, was dedicated to the permanent eradication of Judaism. It was not a conceptual reshuffling of religious identity by conversion but rather a physical destruction. This genocidal purging was deemed a necessary program to rid the world, and more specifically the Aryan people, of the genetic reservoir of polluting Jewish genes.How this monstrous endeavor could be conceived and accomplished is the subject of Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors. Dr Lifton, a renowned psychiatrist and author, spent a decade interviewing Nazi doctors and concentration camp survivors to piece together the horrifying process by which German physicians aided (for the most part willingly) in the destruction of 6 million innocent men, women, and children. Dr Lifton

The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

This essay examines Kishwar Desai’s Origins of Love (2012) in order to foreground how the novel is complexly reflective of the biomedical technologies strategically deployed by medical practitioners and prospective parents for the purpose of reinforcing caste-based bionormative notion of family that artificial reproductive technology is assumed to have problematised. The essay also demonstrates how the use of bioenhancement facilities has led to the revival of neoliberal eugenics enmeshed with state-led biopolitics. The essay draws on the concept of renaturalisation discussed by Tamar Sharon in order to examine how the schizophrenic or deterritorialising potential of reproductive technology is reconfigured and domesticated by the medicolegal practitioners in order to reterritorialise the normative structures of kinship and family formation within a capitalist consumerist culture.

‘These were made-to-order babies’: Reterritorialised Kinship, Neoliberal Eugenics and Artificial Reproductive Technology in Kishwar Desai’s Origins of Love

Abstract:This essay examines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a piece of literature that captures an epistemic transition in biomedical practices from healing a diseased body to controlling and engineering a human body, anticipating the modern medical practices of our bioengineered era. The process of artificially engineering a bioscientific creature by gathering materials from anonymous sources, and Victor Frankenstein’s ability to pre-select the physical features of the Creature, anticipate the baby-making procedures practiced in the domain of artificial reproductive technology (ART). This essay aims to foreground how the novel offers a fictional engagement with bioethical crises triggered by ART developments that have problematized our bionormative notion of the family as a heterosexual unit.

Victor's Progeny: Premonition of a Bioengineered Age

This paper discusses Jodi Picoult’s Change of Heart: A Novel in order to foreground how the received heart triggers anxiety and the narrative crisis in the heart recipient who develops an ambiguous...

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23311983.2018.1557584

“Imagine what it would be like to have a brand-new heart”: Biosentimentality and embodied-relationality in Change of Heart: A Novel

“Who Knows What Lies out There beneath the Surface?”: A Study of Big Little Lies from a Trauma Perspective

The essay examines Robin Cook's (1977) Coma and Priscille Sibley's (2013) The Promise of Stardust that dramatize the reified and disposable status of the brain-dead patients who are classified as nonpersons. The essay argues that the man-machine entanglement as depicted in the novels constructs a deterritorialized and entangled form of subjectivity that intervenes in the dominant biomedical understanding of personhood and agency that we notionally associate with a conscious mind. The essay concludes its arguments by discussing Alexander Beliaev's (1925) Professor Dowell's Head which depicts human subjectivity as an essentially embodied and distributive phenomenon and interrogates the Cartesian mind body dualism embedded in the dominant biomedical narratives.

/pdf/embodiment-and-entangled-subjectivity-a-study-of-robin-cook-19f9kvk7os.pdf

Embodiment and Entangled Subjectivity: A Study of Robin Cook’s Coma , Priscille Sibley’s The Promise of Stardust and Alexander Beliaev’s Professor Dowell’s Head

Manali Karmakar

Papers

‘These were made-to-order babies’: Reterritorialised Kinship, Neoliberal Eugenics and Artificial Reproductive Technology in Kishwar Desai’s Origins of Love

Victor's Progeny: Premonition of a Bioengineered Age

“Imagine what it would be like to have a brand-new heart”: Biosentimentality and embodied-relationality in Change of Heart: A Novel

“Who Knows What Lies out There beneath the Surface?”: A Study of Big Little Lies from a Trauma Perspective

Embodiment and Entangled Subjectivity: A Study of Robin Cook’s Coma , Priscille Sibley’s The Promise of Stardust and Alexander Beliaev’s Professor Dowell’s Head