Infrahumanisms

Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/personhood

Megan H. Glick (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

288 Seiten

2018
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-0116-4 (ISBN)

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In Infrahumanisms Megan H. Glick considers how conversations surrounding nonhuman life have impacted a broad range of attitudes toward forms of human difference such as race, sexuality, and health. She examines the history of human and nonhuman subjectivity as told through twentieth-century scientific and cultural discourses that include pediatrics, primatology, eugenics, exobiology, and obesity research. Outlining how the category of the human is continuously redefined in relation to the infrahuman-a liminal position of speciation existing between the human and the nonhuman-Glick reads a number of phenomena, from early twentieth-century efforts to define children and higher order primates as liminally human and the postwar cultural fascination with extraterrestrial life to anxieties over AIDS, SARS, and other cross-species diseases. In these cases the efforts to define a universal humanity create the means with which to reinforce notions of human difference and maintain human-nonhuman hierarchies. In foregrounding how evolving definitions of the human reflect shifting attitudes about social inequality, Glick shows how the consideration of nonhuman subjectivities demands a rethinking of long-held truths about biological meaning and difference.

Megan H. Glick is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Wesleyan University.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Toward a Theory of Infrahumanity 1
Part I. Bioexpansionism, 1900s-1930s
1. Brief Histories of Time: Nature, Culture, and the Making of Modern Childhood 29
2. Ocular Anthropomorphisms:Eugenics and Primatology at the Threshold of the "Almost Human" 56
Part II. Extraterrestriality, 1940s-1970s
3. On Alien Ground: Extraterrestrial Sightings, Atomic Warfare, and the Undoing of the Human Body 85
4. Inner and Outer Spaces: Exobiology, Human Genetics, and the Disembodiment of Corporeal Difference 110
Part III. Interiority, 1980s-2010s
5. Of Sodomy and Cannibalism: Disgust, Dehumanization, and the Rhetorics of Same-Sex and Cross-Species Contagion 139
6. Everything except the Squeal: Porcine Hybridity in the Obesity Epidemic and Xenotransplantation Research 159
Conclusion. The Plurality Is Near: Techniques of Symbiotic Re-speciation 196
Notes 209
Bibliography 247
Index 263

Erscheinungsdatum	19.10.2018
Reihe/Serie	ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise
Zusatzinfo	35 illustrations
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	544 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie des Mittelalters
Themenwelt	Naturwissenschaften
ISBN-10	1-4780-0116-X / 147800116X
ISBN-13	978-1-4780-0116-4 / 9781478001164
Zustand	Neuware