Material Bodies: Biology and Culture in the United States (American Studies - A Monograph)

'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. Biology and Cuture in the United States, American Studies, A Monograph Series, Volume 286 Cover 1 Titel 4 Imprint 5 Acknowledgements 8 Table of Contents 10 Preface 14 Introduction: Biologizing Culture / Culturing Biology 22 Familiar Strangers, or, When Biology Meets Culture 66 Disciplining Biology 33 Biocultures: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis? 39 Biology and the Research Imagination of American Cultural Studies 42 Subjects in Biological Difference (Race and Gender) 45 I. The Materialism of Biological Encounters 66 1. Embodied Encounters: Emergence and Emergency 66 On the Materialism of Biological Encounters 69 Biology and Human Mobility 88 A Culpable Biography 94 The "Yellow Peril" Medicalized: Chinese Immigrants and the Bubonic Plague of 1899/1900 98 Biological Transit across the American Hemisphere 104 Yellow Fever and the Biopolitics of Location 114 The White Man's "Biological Burden": Empire and Disease 125 Cuba and the Reed Yellow Fever Commission 127 The Philippines and the Specter of "Colonial Burnout'' 131 2. The Public Life of Public Diseases: Epidemics and the Mass Media 136 Public Opinion and Public Diseases 138 Disease Imaginaries and Narrative Form 154 "Dark Invaders": The Military Response Narrative 160 Biomedical Jeremiads, or, How Have the Revelers Fallen 164 From Scratch: Medical Sherlocks 168 Imagined Immunities for Imagined Communities 174 Conclusion: Biological Encounters and the Culture of Blame 177 II. Not Normatively Human: Cultural Grammars and the Human Body 178 1. Corporeal Norms and the Experience of Inequality 178 Norms as Imaginary Grammar of Cultural Oughtness 184 The Normal and the Pathological: Canguilhem 188 Normalizing Society: Foucault 196 Communicative Normalization: Habermas 203 When Life Goes Public: Biological Normophilia(s) 208 Norms and the Institutionalization of Judgment 227 At the Far End of the Normative Body: Late Life and Disability 231 2. "Age" as Cultural Norm and Form 232 The Age Chill Factor: Late Life as Bio-Cultural Pathology 237 Normal Not to Be Normal: Gerontology and Age Studies 247 "New Age"? Late Life and the Promises of Molecular Biology 259 Apocalyptic Embodiment: The Civic Identity of Late Life 267 Where "Age" Is: Cultural Topographies of Late Life 275 "Age": Embodied Selfhood or Cultural Brand Name? 288 3. Exception Incorporated: Disability as Inscription of Cultural Otherness 289 Oppositional Bodies, or, Disability's Challenge to Able-Bodied Normativity 299 The Hero's Two Bodies: Disabled Veterans 306 Left Behind: Disability in Veteran (Auto)Biographies 310 "A Culture of Hope"? Disability as Media Format 321 Zones of Vulnerability: Disability and Environmental Exposure 325 Spectral Disabilities, or, What You See Is What you (Don't) Get 331 Markers of (Un)Certainty: "Age," "Disability" and Communicative Interaction 342 III. Corporeal Semiotics: The Body of the Text / the Text of the Body 346 1. Textualizing Life—an Incomplete Project 346 Bodies in Emergence and Emergency 353 National Intimacies: The "Politics of Life" and the Religious Right 356 Re-Writing the Book of Life: Genomics 360 Finding a Text for the Book of Life 368 Biological Futures 372 Parables of the Possible: Contours of an Enhanced Life 377 We the People, in Order to Have More Perfect Bodies: Biotechnology and Neoliberal Governance 386 2. Representations and the Traces of Suffering 391 Putting It in Words, or, Another Distrust in the Signifier 397 Emphatic Embodiment 403 Private Practice: Pain as Inner Experience 406 The We of Pain 411 Pain as Relationship and Relation 417 3. The Silent Killer: Cancer(s) 418 Stories We Die By: Cancers as Story Generators 432 Somatics, Semantics and the Allegory of Unregulated Growth 438 When the Flesh Becomes Word, or, The SemioticModel of Human Embodiment 442 InConclusive: Human Biology and the Work of Cultural Critique 450 Biology, American Studies and Cultural Critique 450 Figures of the Collective: Human Biology as Cultural Idiom and Issue 454 References 460 Backcover 505 Universitätsverlag,Winter,GmbH,Heidelberg;,ISBN,978-3-8253-6860-9 Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg,ISBN 978-3-8253-6860-9