Material Bodies: Biology and Culture in the United States

In: American Studies – A Monograph Series v.286

Abstract

Cover -- Titel -- Imprint -- Acknowledgements -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Biologizing Culture / Culturing Biology -- Familiar Strangers, or, When Biology Meets Culture -- Disciplining Biology -- Biocultures: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis? -- Biology and the Research Imagination of American Cultural Studies -- Subjects in Biological Difference (Race and Gender) -- I. The Materialism of Biological Encounters -- 1. Embodied Encounters: Emergence and Emergency -- On the Materialism of Biological Encounters -- Biology and Human Mobility -- A Culpable Biography -- The "Yellow Peril" Medicalized: Chinese Immigrants and the Bubonic Plague of 1899/1900 -- Biological Transit across the American Hemisphere -- Yellow Fever and the Biopolitics of Location -- The White Man's "Biological Burden": Empire and Disease -- Cuba and the Reed Yellow Fever Commission -- The Philippines and the Specter of "Colonial Burnout'' -- 2. The Public Life of Public Diseases: Epidemics and the Mass Media -- Public Opinion and Public Diseases -- Disease Imaginaries and Narrative Form -- Dark Invaders": The Military Response Narrative -- Biomedical Jeremiads, or, How Have the Revelers Fallen -- From Scratch: Medical Sherlocks -- Imagined Immunities for Imagined Communities -- Conclusion: Biological Encounters and the Culture of Blame -- II. Not Normatively Human: Cultural Grammars and the Human Body -- 1. Corporeal Norms and the Experience of Inequality -- Norms as Imaginary Grammar of Cultural Oughtness -- The Normal and the Pathological: Canguilhem -- Normalizing Society: Foucault -- Communicative Normalization: Habermas -- When Life Goes Public: Biological Normophilia(s) -- Norms and the Institutionalization of Judgment -- At the Far End of the Normative Body: Late Life and Disability -- 2. "Age" as Cultural Norm and Form