Rethinking Lists: Perhaps The Rhetoric of Bioethics?

Now that I've passed the prelim - thank heavens - I need to start developing my lists and field statements. It's difficult to picture exactly how these all will work together. Unfortunately, one of the people I wanted to do a list with is no longer going to be at our department (my thoughts on that would deserve an entirely different post). So, I've been trying to think up what might make useful lists, and how I might configure the different faculty around into the lists. Originally, I had the following three: "Activism and the Problem of Circulation in Public Writing" (Gallagher), "Material Rhetoric" (Britt), and "Ethical Engagement with the Other" (Sullivan). But I'm beginning to rethink the third list because it was just too widespread - covering questions like what is a writer? How do we imagine the writing suject? How does writing create community?

I'm thinking now I might title it "The Rhetoric of Bioethics." By bioethics, I'm drawing from Joanna Zylinska's definition in Bioethics in the Age of New Media. For Zylinska, bioethics should be imagined as an "ethics of life" where "life names both the physical, material existence of singular organisms (what the Greeks called zoe) and their political organization into populations (bios)" (xiii). Traditional bioethics has been focused on zoe, with an explicit exclusion of bios; however, whenever we face singular decisions regarding individual beings, their lives and health, we are already situated in and drawing on a broader political context (xiii). Thus, bioethical decisions have moral and political influences and consequences. Within contemporary debates, though, not only do we see a shifting line about what counts as an ethically significant being shifting (e.g. the Spanish Parliament's extension of human rights to great apes), but also a disintegration of the boundary between what counts as a living being and a nonliving being (see work in STI on the "posthuman").

The battleground of bioethical debates seem to be a rich place at which many of my interests intersect - animal abuse and domestic violence, animal studies and posthuman studies, ethical engagement with the other, law, ontology and definitions of materiality, etc. - and as such, I think this is a place that I need to explore. I can picture several projects emerging from reading these texts. (1) What metaphors are used to represent the subjects of bioethics? What is at stake in these representations? (2) What metaphors are used to represent the relationship between subjects? What are the accordances and limitations of these representations? (3) How does work in bioethics relate to contemporary law? To continental philosophy? To scientific research (e.g. ethology, etc.)? (4) What rhetorical strategies are these scholars using to argue for alternate bioethical/biopolitical ways of relating to the Other?

Here is a bit of my preliminary list (obv. it needs to be cut down):

The Rhetoric of Bioethics

Adams, Carol J. Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. New York, NY: Continuum Publishing Inc., 1995. Print.

Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2004. Print.

Bates, B. R. "Care of the Self and American Physicians' Place in The "War on Terror": A Foucauldian Reading of Senator Bill Frist, Md." Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31.4 (2006): 385-400. Print.

Bardini, Thierry. Junkware.

Beihl, Joao and Torben Eskerod. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment.

Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like To Be A Thing.

Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects.

Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2008. Print.

Campbell, Timothy C. Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto and Craig Willse. Beyond Biopolitics: Essays of Governance of Life and Death

Costa, Beatriz da and Kavita Philip. Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Print.

Condit, C. M. "Feminist Biologies: Revising Feminist Strategies and Biological Science." Sex Roles 59.7-8 (2008): 492-503. Print.

---. The Meanings of the Gene: Public Debates About Human Heredity.

---. “Rhetorical Formations of Genetics in Science and Society.” Rhetoric Review. (2001).

Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics.

Cooper, Melinda. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.

Critical Art Ensemble. Molecular Invasion (Autonomedia).

---. Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, Eugenic Consciousness.

DeLuca, K. M. "The Possibilities of Nature in a Postmodern Age: The Rhetorical Tactics of Environmental Justice Groups." Communication Theory 9.2 (1999): 189-215. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and The Sovereign, V. I.

---. The Beast and the Sovereign, V. II

---. The Animal that Therefore I Am.

Doyle, Richard. Wetlands: Experiments in Postvital Living.

---. On Beyond Living.

---. Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noovosphere.

Engnell, R. A. "Materiality, Symbolicity, and the Rhetoric of Order: "Dialectical Biologism" As Motive in Burke." Western Journal of Communication 62.1 (1998): 1-25. Print.

Esposito, Roberto. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print.

Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality.

---. The Birth of the Clinic (selections to be determined).

Gronnvoll, Marita and Jamie Landau. “From Viruses to Russian Roulette to Dance: A Rhetorical Critique and Creation of Genetic Metaphors.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 40.1 (2010). Print.

Halberstam, Judith M. and Ira Livingston. Posthuman Bodies (Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative)

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.

---. ModestWitness@Second_Millenium_FemaleMan_Meets_Oncomouse.

Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print.

Lynch, J. A. "Articulating Scientific Practice: Understanding Dean Hamer's Ogay Geneo Study as Overlapping Material, Social and Rhetorical Registers." Quarterly Journal of Speech 95.4 (2009): 435-56. Print.

---. “Geography, Genealogy, and Genetics: Dialectical Substance in Newspaper Coverage of Research in Race and Genetics.” Western Journal of Communication. (2008).

Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.

Nadesan, Majia Holmer. Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life.

Parikka, Jussi. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.

Petersen, Alan and Alan R. Petersen. The Body in Question: A Socio-cultural Approach.

Pettman, Dominic. Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines

Pruchnic, Jeff. “Rhetoric, Cybernetics, and the Work of the Body in Burke’s Body of Work.” Rhetoric Review 25.3 (2006): 275-296.

Rajan, Kaushik Sunder. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life

Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century.

Rotman, Brian. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being.

Serres, Michel. The Parasite.

Shea, Elizabeth. How the Gene Got Its Groove. State U of New York P. 2008. Print.

Sheller, M. "Bodies, Cybercars and the Mundane Incorporation of Automated Mobilities." Social & Cultural Geography 8.2 (2007): 175-97. Print.

Thacker, Eugene. After Life.

---. Biomedia.

Uexkul, Jakob von. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: A Theory With Meaning.i

Waldby, Catherine and Robert Mitchell. Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism.

Wills, David. Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics.

Wilson, J.C. “(Re)Writing the Genetic Body-Text: Disability, Textuality, and the Human Genome Project.” Cultural Critique. (2002).

Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.

Wolfe, Cary. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minneapolis P, 2003. Print.

Zylinska, Joanna.  Bioethics in the Age of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Print.