Imagining cloned Americans: Post -Dolly revisions of the genetic explanation
Abstract
The purpose of the present study is to examine critically the impact of nuclear transfer cloning technology on contemporary American cultural values pertaining to individual uniqueness, reproductive freedom, biotechnological innovation, and the role of religion in public life. Establishing the centrality of the “genetic explanation” in these values, that is, the popular notion that one's genetic make-up determines one's identity and kinship with others, the project proceeds from the question of how the presumed genetic replication of citizens through cloning contributes to this view. What does imagining cloned Americans reveal about the function of genetic accounts in citizens' rights, corporate investments, civic bioethics, and national history? To answer this question, the project develops a comparative analysis of the creative fictions about cloning Americans in novels, short stories, and films with the speculative narratives about national cloned subjects in bioethics discussions, legal debates, scientific hypotheses, and theological texts, focusing on the points where these accounts have attempted to negotiate the new representational issues raised by cloning and related genetics technologies. Rather than reflecting an essentialist reliance upon genetic make-up in assessing the value of human reproductive cloning, these fictions and the cloning scenarios in the American public debate following the creation of Dolly, the first cloned mammal, together reveal the political efficacy of the genetic explanation. Although these cloning scenarios dramatize in some predictable ways the reductive ideology through which “genes” substitute for “person,” they also illustrate the contingent and therefore politically strategic aspects of genetic essentialism, emphasizing the continuing challenges presented by eugenics, historical representation, the ownership of life, and secular religion. Viewing cultural conceptions of cloning through an American national lens, the project demonstrates the usefulness of American Studies methods in examining a contemporary development in international science as a cultural phenomenon with distinctly American dimensions.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Somerville, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American studies
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