Infrahumanisms (eBook)

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

Megan H. Glick (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2018
288 Seiten
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-0259-8 (ISBN)

Infos

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.

Produkt-Details

• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie des Mittelalters
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften
• ISBN-10: 1-4780-0259-X / 147800259X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4780-0259-8 / 9781478002598