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

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Shildrick, Margrit.

Mykitiuk, Roxanne, 1962-

Series:

Basic bioethics.

Basic bioethics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bioethics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (301 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, ©2005.

Language Note:

English

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, postructuralist, and queer theory.

Contents:

Contents; Series Foreword; Acknowledgments; I Introduction; 1 Beyond the Body of Bioethics: Challenging the Conventions; II Critical Differences; 2 Attending to Difference: Phenomenology and Bioethics; 3 Admitting All Variations? Postmodernism and Genetic Normality; III Thinking Through Crisis; 4 The Measure of HIV as a Matter of Bioethics; 5 Addiction and the Bioethics of Difference; 6 Liberatory Psychiatry and an Ethics of the In-Between; 7 A Bioethics of Failure: Antiheroic Cancer Narratives; IV The Challenge of Biotechnology; 8 Biomedicine and Moral Agency in a Complex World

9 Reproductive Technology and the Political Limits of Care10 Genetics and the Legal Conception of Self; 11 The Devouring: Genetics, Abjection, and the Limits of Law; V Rethinking the Materiality of Embodiment; 12 A "Genethics" That Makes Sense: Take Two; 13 Queer Kids: Toward Ethical Clinical Interactions with Intersex People; Contributors; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

1-282-09769-5

9786612097690

0-262-28352-2

1-4237-4810-7

OCLC:

63147996