The Biopolitics of Embryos and Alphabets: A Reproductive History of the Nonhuman

Abstract

Biopolitics and posthumanism have been passé theories in the academy for a while now, standing on the unfashionable side of the fault line between biology and liberal thought. This is because they can help to explain an increasingly important (and contested) influence in modern democratic politics-that of nostalgia. As Ruth A. Miller argues in this book, nostalgia is the mode of engagement with the world that allows thought and life to coexist, productively, within democratic politics. Situating this argument in feminist theories of biopolitics, this unusual and erudite book demonstrates that nostalgia is not as detrimental to democratic engagement as scholars have claimed.