Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction

Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-1-108-83900-6
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 280 Seiten, Format (B × H): 203 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 499 g

Reihe: 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Vint, Sherryl

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Religion & Wissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religion & Wissenschaft
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wissenssoziologie, Wissenschaftssoziologie, Techniksoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: neoliberalism and the reinvention of life; 1. Suspending death, reinventing life: the immortal vessel; 2. The new flesh: vital machines and reimagining the human; 3. Capital reproduction: maternity and productivity; 4. Surplus value: transplantation and fungible life; 5. Life industries: vitality as commodity; 6. Living to work: biocapital, synthetic biology, and the precaritization of labor; 7. Life optimized: pharmaceutical health and disposable bodies; 8. Surplus vitality and posthuman possibilities; Conclusion: capitalism, biopolitics, and a new body politic.

Über Autor(innen)

Vint, Sherryl
Sherryl Vint is a professor at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She has published widely on speculative fiction and posthumanism, including Science Fiction (2021) for MIT's Essential Knowledge series, and the edited collection After the Human (2021). She is a recipient of the SFRA's Lifetime Achievement Award.