Suchergebnisse

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

Recent advances in the fields of genomics and biotechnology have greatly expanded the discretionary autonomy of human beings over their bodies. Biology has so become a new and alluring terrain for the enlightenment project of self-realization and selffulfilment. These developments have been co-evolving with the global expansion of neoliberal capitalism. This article states that there is a common logic at work in both areas, leading not only to the emergence of a global market in biological materials but also to a re-calibration of the biology of human life into lively capital. For this reason, the new "freedom" of constructing the body according to one's own preferences and desires in a dialectical inversion entails new obligations and constraints. In the end, only the technologically enhanced human body is fit for the neoliberal world of social cut-backs and can avoid being consigned to a new, this time biologically defined underclass.

"Recent advances in the fields of genomics and biotechnology have greatly expanded the discretionary autonomy of human beings over their bodies. Biology has so become a new and alluring terrain for the enlightenment project of self-realization and self-fulfillment. These developments have been co-evolving with the global expansion of neoliberal capitalism. This article states that there is a common logic at work in both areas, leading not only to the emergence of a global market in biological materials but also to a re-calibration of the biology of human life into lively capital. For this reason, the new 'freedom' of constructing the body according to one's own preferences and desires in a dialectical inversion entails new obligations and constraints. In the end, only the technologically enhanced human body is fit for the neoliberal world of social cut-backs and can avoid being consigned to a new, this time biologically defined underclass." (author's abstract)

Mobilität ist eine der Schlüsselerfahrungen unserer Zeit. Sie scheint im Gefolge technisch-ökonomischer und politisch-sozialer Veränderungen allumfassend geworden zu sein. Dabei verändern die Erfahrungen, die Menschen in und mit Mobilität machen, auch die Funktion und den Stellenwert ihrer Kulturen. Durch die anhaltende Mobilität werden Kulturen aus ihren traditionellen nationalen Verankerungen gelöst (werden also selbst mobil), die mobiler gewordenen Menschen sind aber mehr als zuvor darauf angewiesen, zur Bewältigung ihrer Erfahrungen auf ihre kulturellen Ressourcen zurückzugreifen (sie zu mobilisieren). Diese Ambivalenz von Kulturen in/der Mobilität ist für die Beiträge des vorliegenden Bandes erkenntnisleitend. Im Kontext der zahlreichen Publikationen zu den Themen Globalisierung, Migration und Kultur stellt das Potsdamer Forschungsprojekt insofern eine Besonderheit dar, als es linguistische und literaturwissenschaftliche, historische und systematische, empirische und theoretische Zugriffsweisen auf innovative Weise verbindet. Das besondere des hier leitenden Ansatzes besteht darin, dass hier nicht einfach Kulturen als geschlossene Systeme vergleichend gegenüberstellt werden, sondern Formen und Szenarien der interkulturellen Begegnung im Mittelpunkt der Betrachtung stehen werden. Diese Szenarien sind von ihrem Wesen bzw. ihrer Verfasstheit solcherart, dass sie mit Bezug auf eine nationale Kultur nicht mehr angemessen zu beschreiben wären. Sie stellen vielmehr Momente des Aushandelns nicht konvertierbarer kultureller Andersartigkeit dar, die zur Reflexion und Vermittlung mit der Eigenkultur zwingen.

"Bringing together insights from masculinity studies and age studies for the first time, this volume focuses on the gendered and relational perspectives in cultural representations of Alzheimer's disease. In the cultural context of many societies, Alzheimer's disease has come to represent the 'dark side' of longevity in the 21st century. While the dream of a long life has become a real possibility for many people, it has simultaneously given rise to new anxieties focused on cultural fears of 'demented' old age. In expert discourse as well as in personal accounts, Alzheimer's has produced what might be called a 'master narrative' that limits representation and narration and questions traditional views of selfhood and human development. Combining a comparative and interdisciplinary approach with a gendered perspective, the essays in this volume engage with Alzheimer's as a disease of ageing masculinities, drawing on representations of the disease in many different cultural contexts. Examining a broad range of source material, including memoir, film, poetry and prose fiction, this book looks at work from a wide range of authors, including Anne Carson, Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen."--

From self-help books and nootropics, to self-tracking and home health tests, to the tinkering with technology and biological particles - biohacking brings biology, medicine, and the material foundation of life into the sphere of »do-it-yourself«. This trend has the potential to fundamentally change people's relationship with their bodies and biology but it also creates new cultural narratives of responsibility, authority, and differentiation. Covering a broad range of examples, this book explores practices and representations of biohacking in popular culture, discussing their ambiguous position between empowerment and requirement, promise and prescription

From self-help books and nootropics, to self-tracking and home health tests, to the tinkering with technology and biological particles - biohacking brings biology, medicine, and the material foundation of life into the sphere of »do-it-yourself«. This trend has the potential to fundamentally change people's relationship with their bodies and biology but it also creates new cultural narratives of responsibility, authority, and differentiation. Covering a broad range of examples, this book explores practices and representations of biohacking in popular culture, discussing their ambiguous position between empowerment and requirement, promise and prescription.