Biopolitical futures in twenty-first-century speculative fiction / Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vint, Sherryl, 1969- author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in twenty-first-century literature and culture.

Cambridge studies in twenty-first-century literature and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Speculative fiction--21st century--History and criticism.

Speculative fiction.

Biotechnology in literature.

Bioethics in literature.

Biopolitics in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 271 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Summary:

Drawing on a rich array of twenty-first-century speculative fiction, this book demonstrates how the commodification of life through biotechnology has far-reaching implications for how we think of personhood, agency, and value. Sherryl Vint argues that neoliberalism is reinventing life under biocapital. She offers new biopolitical figurations that can help theoretically grasp and politically respond to a distinctive twenty-first-century biopolitics. This book theorizes how biotechnology intervenes in the very processes of biological function, reshaping life itself to serve economic ends. Linking fictional texts with material examples, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction shows how these practices are linked to new modes of exploitative economic relations that cannot be redressed by human rights. It concludes with a posthumanist reframing of the value of life that grounds itself elsewhere than in capitalist logics, a vision that, in a Covid age, might become fundamental to a new politics of ecological relations.

Contents:

Cover

Half-title page

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Neoliberalism and the Reinvention of Life

Chapter 1 Suspending Death, Reinventing Life: The Immortal Vessel

Chapter 2 The New Flesh: Vital Machines and Reimagining the Human

Chapter 3 Capital Reproduction: Maternity and Productivity

Chapter 4 Surplus Value: Transplantation and Fungible Life

Chapter 5 Life Industries: Vitality as Commodity

Chapter 6 Living to Work: Biocapital, Synthetic Biology, and the Precaritization of Labor

Chapter 7 Life Optimized: Pharmaceutical Health and Disposable Bodies

Chapter 8 Surplus Vitality and Posthuman Possibilities

Conclusion: Capitalism, Biopolitics, and a New Body Politic

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 22 Sep 2021).

ISBN:

1-108-98317-0

1-108-98331-6

1-108-97938-6

OCLC:

1260689133