This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Shildrick, M. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Genetics, Normativity, and Ethics

Some Bioethical Concerns

University College Dublin, m.shildrick{at}liverpool.ac.uk

Where feminist critiques of bioscience have uncovered a whole set of operations that range round the Foucauldian notions of biopower and normativity, and have explored genetic discourse in particular to question the stability of self-identity, feminist bioethics has lagged behind. Despite an engagement with the technologies of postmodernity, including those associated with genetic research (and especially in its relation to reproduction), there has been, with relatively few exceptions, a reluctance to explore the implications of postmodernist theory. The difficulty is that bioscience itself is now throwing up a problematic that destabilizes the central agent of ethical theory - the modernist sovereign subject. Using the field of genetics and the mapping of the human genome as a focal point, this paper suggests that bioethics should move on from conventional analytic strategies and, like feminist science studies, embrace uncertainty and complexity. The task is to fashion a new form of ethical response grounded in the notions of embodied connection and fluidity.

Key Words: bioethics • embodiment • genetics • identity • postmodernity • power

Feminist Theory, Vol. 5, No. 2, 149-165 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1464700104045405


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?