Ethics of the body : postconventional challenges / edited by Margrit Shildrick and Roxanne Mykitiuk.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Shildrick, Margrit.

Mykitiuk, Roxanne, 1962-

Series:

Basic bioethics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bioethics.

Physical Description:

vi, 288 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [2005]

Summary:

The provocative contention of the postmodernist and feminist essays in Ethics of the Body is that conventional bioethics is out of touch, despite its growing profile. It is out of touch with an ongoing phenomenological sense of bodies themselves; with the impact of postmodernist theory as it problematizes the certainties of binary thinking; and with a postmodern culture in which bioscientific developments force us to question what is meant by the notion of the human self. The authors demonstrate that the conventional normative framework of bioethics is called into question by issues as wide ranging as genetic manipulation, disability, high-tech prosthetics, and intersexuality. The essays show how both the theory and practice of bioethics can benefit from postmodernism's characteristic fluidity and multiplicity, as well as from the insights of a reconceived feminist bioethics. They address issues in philosophy, law, bioscientific research, psychiatry, cultural studies, and feminism from a "postconventional" perspective that looks beyond the familiar ideas of the body, proposing not a bioethics about the body but a radical ethics of the body.

After exploring notions of difference in both feminist and postmodernist terms, the book considers specific issues-including HIV, addiction, borderline personality disorder, and cancer-that challenge the principles of conventional bioethics. The focus then turns to questions raised by biotechnology: one essay rethinks the traditional feminist ethics of care in the context of new reproductive technology, while others tackle genetic and genomic issues. Finally, the book looks at embodiment and some specifically anomalous forms of being-in-the-body, including a consideration of intersex infants and children that draws on feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theory.

Contents:

1 Beyond the Body of Bioethics: Challenging the Conventions / Margrit Shildrick 1

II Critical Differences

2 Attending to Difference: Phenomenology and Bioethics / Philipa Rothfield 29

3 Admitting All Variations? Postmodernism and Genetic Normality / Jackie Leach Scully 49

III Thinking Through Crisis

4 The Measure of HIV as a Matter of Bioethics / Marsha Rosengarten 71

5 Addiction and the Bioethics of Difference / Helen Keane 91

6 Liberatory Psychiatry and an Ethics of the In-Between / Nancy Potter 113

7 A Bioethics of Failure: Antiheroic Cancer Narratives / Lisa Diedrich 135

IV The Challenge of Biotechnology

8 Biomedicine and Moral Agency in a Complex World / Sylvia Nagl 155

9 Reproductive Technology and the Political Limits of Care / Carol Bacchi, Chris Beasley 175

10 Genetics and the Legal Conception of Self / Isabel Karpin 195

11 The Devouring: Genetics, Abjection, and the Limits of Law / Karen O'Connell 217

V Rethinking the Materiality of Embodiment

12 A "Genethics" That Makes Sense: Take Two / Rosalyn Diprose 237

13 Queer Kids: Toward Ethical Clinical Interactions with Intersex People / Katrina Roen 259.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0262195232

0262693208

OCLC:

57001898