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Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside)

Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction By Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside)

Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction by Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside)


Summary

This book demonstrates how developments in biotechnology such as cloning, synthetic biology, surrogate pregnancies, organ transplants and more have significant implications for personhood, ethics, and governance. Drawing attention to the commodification of life, it shows how the biological functions of life itself are shaped to economic agendas.

Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction Summary

Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction by Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside)

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.

About Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside)

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.

Table of Contents

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.

Additional information

NGR9781108839006
9781108839006
1108839002
Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction by Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside)
New
Hardback
Cambridge University Press
2021-10-07
280
N/A
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