Ambiguous Bodies, Biopower and the Ideologies of Science Fiction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18778/2353-6098.4.03Keywords:
Science fiction, Foucault, biopower, biotechnology, ideologyAbstract
Contemporary Hollywood film narrates the fear of monstrous science; attending to the modulations of medicine, capital and the body. The filmic body is employed to illustrate the power of the new biotechnologies to create and sustain life and the new sets of social relations which are a consequence of the marriage of capital and medicine. In the Hollywood film, persons who do not fit the ideal healthy persona have a moral duty to pursue repair and transformation. Constructed as inherently lacking, the unhealthy body becomes a repository for social anxieties about control and vulnerability, vis-à-vis the enormous and exponentially expanding science and technology fields. Hierarchies of embodiment are played out on the Big Screen as imperfect bodies are excluded from public life, power and status and urged to strive for “optimization”. Late modern societies present the possibility of new technologies which have the potential to radicalize bodies. However, these potential modulations are ultimately derived from a set of ideologies around the body and the power of the individual to enact an individualized solution. Contemporary narratives circulate around ownership of capital and the price of “repair.” This marriage of science and capital in popular narratives may be indicative of concerns for our future, as the power to make and repair life seems to rest increasingly in the hands of an elite.
References
Braidotti, Rosie. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Print.
Google Scholar
Davis, Leonard. “The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: On Disability as an Unstable Category.” Disability Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. 231-42. Print.
Google Scholar
Easthope, Anthony. Contemporary Film Theory. London: Longman, 1993. Print.
Google Scholar
Flynn, Susan. “Equality, Culture and Representation: Considerations on the Film Industry.” Considering Disability 1 (2015): 15-26. Print.
Google Scholar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17774/CDJ12014.14.20575874
Flynn, Susan. “‘Get Your Legs Back’: Avatar (2009) and the Re-booting of American Individualism.” Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts. Ed. Benjamin Fraser. New York: Wallflower Press, 2016. 200-15. Print.
Google Scholar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7312/fras17748-016
Flynn, Susan. “New Poetics of the Film Body: Docility, Molecular Fundamentalism and Twenty First Century Destiny.” American, British and Canadian Studies 24:1 (2015): 5-23. Print.
Google Scholar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/abcsj-2015-0001
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1973. Print.
Google Scholar
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print.
Google Scholar
Greene, Todd William. “Three Ideologies of Individualism: Toward Assimilating a Theory of Individualisms and their Consequences.” Critical Sociology 32.1 (2008): 117-37. Print.
Google Scholar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920507084628
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 80 (1989): 65-107. Print.
Google Scholar
Hughes, Bill, and Kevin Patterson. “The Social Model of Disability and the Disappearing Body: Towards a Sociology of Impairment.” Disability & Society 12 (1997): 325-40. Print.
Google Scholar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599727209
Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Print.
Google Scholar
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Tucker, R. C. New York: Norton, 1978. Print.
Google Scholar
Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Print.
Google Scholar
Oliver, Mike. The Politics of Disablement. London: Macmillan, 1990. Print.
Google Scholar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20895-1
Reeve, Donna. “Cyborgs, Cripples and iCrip: Reflections on the Contributions of Haraway to Disability Studies.” Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions. Ed. Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes, and Lennard Davis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 91-111. Print.
Google Scholar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137023001_6
Rose, Nicolas. The Politics of Life Itself. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.
Google Scholar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400827503
Shapiro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.
Google Scholar
Springer, Claudia. “The Pleasure of the Interface.” Screen 32.3 (1991): 303-23. Print.
Google Scholar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/32.3.303
White, Julie A., and Joan Tronto. “Political Practices of Care: Needs and Rights.” Ratio Juris 14.4 (2004): 425-53. Print.
Google Scholar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9337.2004.00276.x
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Unported License.
