Just life : bioethics and the future of sexual difference / Mary C. Rawlinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rawlinson, Mary C., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Feminist theory.

Bioethics.

Physical Description:

xxvi, 266 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2016]

Summary:

Just Life reorients ethics and politics around the generativity of mothers and daughters rather than the right to property and the sexual proprieties of the oedipal drama. Invoking two concrete universals-everyone is born of a woman and everyone needs to eat-Rawlinson rethinks labor and food as relationships that make ethical claims and sustain agency. Just Life counters the capitalization of bodies under biopower with the solidarity of sovereign bodies. Book jacket.

Contents:

I Critique of Rights 9

1 State of Nature! Property, Propriety, and the Rights of Man 15

The Endeavor: Hobbes on Life and Man's Nature 16

Covenant, "Our Best Endeavour": Speech, Death, and the Myth of Assent 21

The Power to Name: Abstraction in the Discourse of Rights 28

Rousseau and Hegel: Customs, Codes, and the Gender Division of Labor 36

2 Capitalized Bodies: Bioethics, Biopower, and the Practice of Freedom 49

From Sovereign Power to Biopolitics: Conceptualization, Sexualization, and Capitalization 52

The Capitalization of Life 60

Critical Phenomenology of Life as a Practice of Freedom 71

II Refiguring Ethics 79

3 Antigone and Ismene: Hard Heads, Hard Hearts, and the Claim of the Right 83

Death Is Woman's Work 85

Ismene Runs Around 94

Ismene's Ethics of Life: Mobility, Forgiveness, Negotiation 99

A Coda on Death: Beyond the Oedipal Family 102

4 Demeter and Persephone, "Unies Sous Le Meme Manteau" 106

Mothers and Daughters: Violence and (Maternal) Power 107

Life / Death: Shadow of the Frolicking Girls 115

Collaborating Agencies: Constancy, Generativity, Solidarity 121

III Livable Futures 129

5 Eating at the Heart of Ethics 133

Everything is Connected with Everything Else: Agribusiness, Biocapital, and the Right to Life 138

Differentiae: Why Eating Is an Ethical Issue for Humans 146

Terroir: Food Justice or Politics of the Seed 153

6 A Working Life 162

Global Inequity: Invisible Labor, Blind Consumers, and the Myth of the "Free Market" 165

Labor and the Just State 170

Happiness or Meaningful Work: Politics of Collaboration 176

Looking Back at Women's Labor 180

IV Sovereign Bodies: Politics of Wonder or the Right to be Joyful 185.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780231171748

0231171749

9780231171755

0231171757

OCLC:

926049936

Publisher Number:

40025793062