Search results for ""Author Valerie Hartouni""

When a baby can be made in a test tube, when embryos can be frozen for later fertilization, when a woman can carry to term a child that shares none of her genetic material, what is natural about the creation of life? This is the question addressed by Valerie Hartouni in her consideration of the cultural effects of new reproductive technologies as expressed in video images, popular journalism, scientific debates, legal briefs and policy decisions. This text tracks the circulation and communication of various myths, images, and stories pertaining to new reproductive technologies and their effects, both imagined and real, during the last two decades. While addressing topics ranging from surrogacy and cloning to adoption and abortion, the author analyzes culture for clues to what these manifestations tell us about issues of personhood, be they race, gender, or class-based. She finds both the emergence of new anxieties about the nature of selfhood and the recurrence of old myths about individuality, sexuality, property and family. The burdens caused by these cultural concerns have fallen disproportionately on women, particularly women of colour, as the political apparatus attempts to adjust to societal changes in the face of demographic and technological change. The book traces the dialectic between crisis and containment unleashed by reproductive technologies, and illustrates the degree to which at the end of this century we are still living out the dreams and nightmares of the previous ones. Ultimately, however, the author argues that the anxiety around new reproductive technologies provides openings for alternative understandings and tentative challenges to implant themselves.

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Visualizing Atrocity takes Hannah Arendt’s provocative and polarizing account of the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann as its point of departure for reassessing some of the serviceable myths that have come to shape and limit our understanding both of the Nazi genocide and totalitarianism’s broader, constitutive, and recurrent features. These myths are inextricably tied to and reinforced viscerally by the atrocity imagery that emerged with the liberation of the concentration camps at the war’s end and played an especially important, evidentiary role in the postwar trials of perpetrators. At the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal, particular practices of looking and seeing were first established with respect to these images that were later reinforced and institutionalized through Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem as simply part of the fabric of historical fact. They have come to constitute a certain visual rhetoric that now circumscribes the moral and political fields and powerfully assists in contemporary mythmaking about how we know genocide and what is permitted to count as such. In contrast, Arendt’s claims about the “banality of evil” work to disrupt this visual rhetoric. More significantly still, they direct our attention well beyond the figure of Eichmann to a world organized now as then by practices and processes that while designed to sustain and even enhance life work as well to efface it.

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