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Chapter 7 - Life Optimized

Pharmaceutical Health and Disposable Bodies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2021

Sherryl Vint
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
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Summary

This chapter addresses discourses of self-optimization and especially pharmo-chemical reconfigurations of life. Drawing on anthropological critiques of clinical drug trials and the economic hegemony of chemical corporations that Kaushik Sunder Rajan calls pharmocracy, this chapter thinks through how health and profit intersect in these industries, and what this nexus means for concepts of sociality and governance. It reads three speculative texts: Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous makes visible the ongoing production of inequality through the uneven distribution of pharmaceuticals, for both treatment and for enhancement; Sue Burke’s Semiosis envisions a new kind of society made possible through a posthumanist ethos that engages other species, including plants, through rubrics of collaborative survival instead of accumulative appropriation; and Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle contrasts Western and Indigenous epistemologies and scientific practices in a tale about a biochemical company and a catastrophic chemical spill. Each suggest ways to optimize the social vitality of life rather than its economic productivity, and the hopeful communities they propose demonstrate how a posthumanist dispositif of personhood enables this new orientation toward life and the living.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Life Optimized
  • Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book: Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction
  • Online publication: 16 September 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108979382.008
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  • Life Optimized
  • Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book: Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction
  • Online publication: 16 September 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108979382.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Life Optimized
  • Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book: Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction
  • Online publication: 16 September 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108979382.008
Available formats
×