Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction (Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture)

Drawing on a rich array of twenty-first-century speculative fiction, this book demonstrates how the commodification of life through biotechnology has far-reaching implications for how we think of personhood, agency, and value. Sherryl Vint argues that neoliberalism is reinventing life under biocapital. She offers new biopolitical figurations that can help theoretically grasp and politically respond to a distinctive twenty-first-century biopolitics. This book theorizes how biotechnology intervenes in the very processes of biological function, reshaping life itself to serve economic ends. Linking fictional texts with material examples, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction shows how these practices are linked to new modes of exploitative economic relations that cannot be redressed by human rights. It concludes with a posthumanist reframing of the value of life that grounds itself elsewhere than in capitalist logics, a vision that, in a Covid age, might become fundamental to a new politics of ecological relations. "This book demonstrates how speculative fiction elucidates the ways the regime of epivitality enables the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital. At the same time, however, the fictions I analyze also provide imaginative resources to counteract this regime's biopolitical sorting of life into valued and disposable configurations. The importance of articulating a liveable life outside of this logic is why this book is also a project of posthuman ethics. New biotechnological entities such as GMO animals created as research tools or immortal cell lines derived from human bodies are key exemplars of what I argue is the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital. Yet, as the chapters in this book will theorize, this real subsumption of life is pervasive and not simply embodied in these innovative products of biotechnology. In industries such as cryonics, IVF and surrogacy services, transplantation and other biological harvesting practices, synthetic biology, and clinical labor, subjects and objects, organic and manufactured beings, persons and things blur into one another as biology becomes caught up in projects of bioeconomic innovation, and as capital becomes interested in humans less for their capacity to provide labor-power and more for their capacity as biological entities"-- Provided by publisher This book demonstrates how developments in biotechnology such as cloning, synthetic biology, surrogate pregnancies, organ transplants and more have significant implications for personhood, ethics, and governance. Drawing attention to the commodification of life, it shows how the biological functions of life itself are shaped to economic agendas.