Description
Book SynopsisA study of the mutually constituitive relations between Western biomedicine and Ango- American literature in the 20th and early 21st centuries, tracing the interwoven processes by which both fields have transformed the course of human life.
Trade Review“
Liminal Lives offers very strong and important theoretical insights into relationships between scientific knowledge and practice and literary production. Its innovative methodology creates possibilities for better communication and exchange between scientific, literary, and social scientific knowledge in a way that will be very useful to others interested in interdisciplinary science studies.”—Catherine Waldby, author of
AIDS and The Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference“A brilliant and provocative exploration of how biomedicine and literature, particularly science fiction, are together reconfiguring the very shape of the entire life span, producing adoptable embryos, giant babies, interspecies pregnancies, and regenerated old bodies—all in the context of a new and grim bio-economy in which hearts and kidneys are for sale and earrings are fabricated out of fetal remains.”—Kathleen Woodward, author of
Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions“Susan Merrill Squier’s
Liminal Lives is compelling, timely, imaginative, and wonderfully provocative.”—Priscilla Wald, author of
Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative FormTable of ContentsList of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Networking Liminality 1
1. The Uses of Literature for Feminist Science Studies: Tracing Liminal Lives 25
2. The Cultured Cell: Life and Death at Strangeways 58
3. The Hybrid Embryo and Xenogenic Desire 89
4. Giant Babies: Graphing Growth in the Early Twentieth Century 112
5. Incubabies and Rejuvenates: The Traffic between Technologies of Reproduction and Age Extension 146
6. Transplant Medicine and Transformative Narrative 168
7. Liminal Performances of Aging: From Replacement to Regeneration 214
Coda: The Pluripotent Discourse of Stem Cells: Liminality, Reflexivity, and Literature 253
Notes 281
Works Cited 315
Index 335
