Deadly Biocultures : The Ethics of Life-making

A trenchant analysis of the dark side of regulatory life-making today In their seemingly relentless pursuit of life, do contemporary U.S. “biocultures”-where biomedicine extends beyond the formal institutions of the clinic, hospital, and lab to everyday cultural practices-also engage in a deadly endeavor?Challenging us to question their implications, Deadly Biocultures shows that efforts to “make live” are accompanied by the twin operation of “let die”: they validate and enhance lives seen as economically viable, self-sustaining, productive, and oriented toward the future and optimism while reinforcing inequitable distributions of life based on race, class, gender, and dis/ability.Affirming life can obscure death, create deadly conditions, and even kill. Deadly Biocultures examines the affirmation to hope, target, thrive, secure, and green in the respective biocultures of cancer, race-based health, fatness, aging, and the afterlife.Its chapters focus on specific practices, technologies, or techniques that ostensibly affirm life and suggest life’s inextricable links to capital but that also engender a politics of death and erasure.The authors ultimately ask: what alternative social forms and individual practices might be mapped onto or intersect with biomedicine for more equitable biofutures?