Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human, 

Автор: Christopher Peterson
Название: Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality
ISBN: 0823245209 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780823245208
Издательство: Wiley EDC
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On February 18th, 2009, Sean Delonas published a controversial cartoon in the New York Post depicting two policemen shooting and killing a monkey with the caption: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” On the adjoining page was a photo of President Barack Obama signing this very piece of legislation into law. Although public debate over the cartoon has centered entirely on its potentially racist overtones, we might ask from a Darwinian perspective how the stereotype of the black ape works to disavow a universally shared human apehood. How might we comprehend animality in non-pejorative terms?
Whereas in contemporary race and sexuality studies the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible, Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians such as Senator Rick Santorum equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality.
Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J.M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. Insofar as humanizing the abject only vacates the structurally empty and infinitely transposable position of “the animal,” he argues that all forms of belonging—no matter how open and hospitable they are toward others—inevitably produce “beasts” whose exclusion contradicts our apparent desire for nonviolence. While one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable—even if ultimately unattainable—ideals, Bestial Traces shows that by maintaining such principles we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence precisely by failing to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.

Название: Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human
ISBN: 1479801259 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781479801251
Издательство: Mare Nostrum (Eurospan)
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Uses literature to understand and remake our ethics regarding nonhuman animals, old human beings, disabled human beings, and cloned posthumans

Literary Bioethics argues for literature as an untapped and essential site for the exploration of bioethics. Novels, Maren Tova Linett argues, present vividly imagined worlds in which certain values hold sway, casting new light onto those values; and the more plausible and well rendered readers find these imagined worlds, the more thoroughly we can evaluate the justice of those values. In an innovative set of readings, Linett thinks through the ethics of animal experimentation in H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, explores the elimination of aging in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, considers the valuation of disabled lives in Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away, and questions the principles of humane farming through reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, where cloned human beings are used systematically by the government as organ donors. By analyzing novels published at widely spaced intervals over the span of a century, Linett offers snapshots of how we confront questions of value.In some cases the fictions are swayed by dominant devaluations of nonnormative or nonhuman lives, while in other cases they confirm the value of such lives by resisting instrumental views of their worth--views that influence, explicitly or implicitly, many contemporary bioethical discussions, especially about the value of disabled and nonhuman lives.

Literary Bioethics grapples with the most fundamental questions of how we value different kinds of lives, and questions what those in power ought to be permitted to do with those lives as we gain unprecedented levels of technological prowess.