Pregnancy as protest in interwar British women's writing: an antecedent alternative to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
This article explores three earlier works—Charlotte Haldane's Man's World (1926), Vera Brittain's Halcyon, or the Future of Monogamy (1929), and Naomi Mitchison's Comments on Birth Control (1930)—in which pregnancy, instead of figuring as illness or debility, becomes a form of resistance to the status quo. These works engage with biomedicine, however, rather than abjuring it. Through a reading of these works, this article argues that the intersection of medical humanities and science fiction (SF) can enrich both: medical humanities can push SF to go beyond the canon, and SF can challenge any characterisation of...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Bigman, F. Tags: Science Fiction and Medical Humanities Source Type: research
'Limbitless Solutions: the Prosthetic Arm, Iron Man and the Science Fiction of Technoscience
Early last year, a non-profit organisation called ‘Limbitless Solutions’ modelled a 3D printed prosthetic arm on a fighting suit that features in the popular superhero film series, Iron Man (2008–2013). In addition, ‘Limbitless Solutions’ resourcefully deployed the fictional character and inventor of the Iron Man suit, weapons specialist and philanthropist, Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr, in a celebrity/superhero endorsed promotional short film, showing ‘Tony’, the ‘real Iron Man’, gifting the futuristic military styled ‘gauntlet’ to Alex, a 7-year-o...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Smith, S. Tags: Science Fiction and Medical Humanities Source Type: research
Living with others inside the self: decolonising transplantation, selfhood and the body politic in Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring
This article examines anxieties concerning organ transplantation in Nalo Hopkinson's prize-winning novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998). The main focus is how this novel re-imagines subjectivity and selfhood as an embodied metaphor for the reconfiguring of broader sociopolitical relations. In other words, this article analyses the relationship between the transplanted body and the body politic, arguing that a post-transplant identity, where there is little separation between donor and recipient, is the foundation for a politics based on responsibility for others. Such a responsibility poses a challenge to the race and class...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: McCormack, D. Tags: Science Fiction and Medical Humanities Source Type: research
Visionary medicine: speculative fiction, racial justice and Octavia Butler's 'Bloodchild
Medical students across the USA have increasingly made the medical institution a place for speculating racially just futures. From die-ins in Fall 2014 to silent protests in response to racially motivated police brutality, medical schools have responded to the public health crisis that is racial injustice in the USA. Reading science fiction may benefit healthcare practitioners who are already invested in imagining a more just, healthier futurity. Fiction that rewrites the future in ways that undermine contemporary power regimes has been termed ‘visionary fiction’. In this paper, the authors introduce ‘vis...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Pasco, J. C., Anderson, C., DasGupta, S. Tags: Science Fiction and Medical Humanities Source Type: research
Towards a structure of feeling: abjection and allegories of disease in science fiction 'mutation films
This article considers differences between the representation of mutation in science fiction films from the 1950s and the present, and identifies distinctive changes over this time period, both in relation to the narrative causes of genetic disruption and in the aesthetics of its visual display. Discerning an increasingly abject quality to science fiction mutations from the 1970s onwards—as a progressive tendency to view the physically opened body, one that has a seemingly fluid interior–exterior reversal, or one that is almost beyond recognition as humanoid—the article connects a propensity for disgust t...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Pheasant-Kelly, F. Tags: Editor's choice Science Fiction and Medical Humanities Source Type: research
Zombie tapeworms in late capitalism: accelerating clinical and reproductive labour in Mira Grant's Parasitology Trilogy
Biomedicine is increasingly shaped by the speculative economical values of neoliberal capitalism. A key feature of this new bioeconomical regime is the patenting and circulation of organisms and tissue samples, allowing rapid commercialisation of bacterial, animal and human biomedical materials. When thinking about this trend towards commercialisation, we must consider the ways by which biomedicine has been shaped by economics to better address these exploitative relationships between medical researchers and subjects. These fraught questions of agency and exploitation can be addressed through the concept of clinical labour...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Attebery, S. Tags: Science Fiction and Medical Humanities Source Type: research
Whereto speculative bioethics? Technological visions and future simulations in a science fictional culture
This article critically examines the development and current state of speculative bioethics (bioethics discourse concerned with future technologies) as reflecting an intensifying science fictionality, a cognitive/perceptual mode in which the imagined future begins to exert increasing degrees of influence on the present, culminating in a collapse of distance between the two. Future technologies thereby come to be viewed as generating practical ethical issues that need to be addressed well in advance of their arrival. Although this appears to be a prudent effort, it actually bypasses the present as a site of moral agency and...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Schick, A. Tags: Science Fiction and Medical Humanities Source Type: research
Human life as digitised data assemblage: health, wealth and biopower in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story
I With recent and emerging developments in technology, we are witnessing a process of cultural and social redefinition where the foundations of how we understand the body, the human and the parameters of health are being radically transmuted. These changes resonate both across global political discourses and within individuals’ personal lives; they are both intimate and remote affecting broad sociopolitical understandings, and the minutiae of everyday lived experience. At the core of these redefinitions is a scientific and, primarily, biological discourse that reduces all forms of life to the molecular level and that...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Dolezal, L. Tags: Science Fiction and Medical Humanities Source Type: research
Science fiction and the medical humanities
Research on science fiction within the medical humanities should articulate interpretative frameworks that do justice to medical themes within the genre. This means challenging modes of reading that encourage unduly narrow accounts of science fiction. Admittedly, science studies has moved away from reading science fiction as a variety of scientific popularisation and instead understands science fiction as an intervention in the technoscientific imaginary that calls for investment in particular scientific enterprises, including various biomedical technologies. However, this mode of reading neglects science fiction's critica...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Miller, G., McFarlane, A. Tags: Science Fiction and Medical Humanities Source Type: research
Accessing the Future: a Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction
Djibril Al-Ayad's and Kathryn Allan's Accessing the Future is a creative manifesto for disability rights, self-determination and the cultural relevance of speculative fiction. Beginning with the query, "What is much of science and technology, if not the ongoing pursuit of accommodations?",1 Al-Ayad and Allan introduce disability studies and science fiction as naturally complementary fields, with the former encouraging intersectionality in the latter and questioning the nature of accessibility. Al-Ayad and Allan state that "[d]isability, like all assumptions of what is and is not ‘normal’, is defined by society'...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Tweed, H. Tags: Electronic pages - Science fiction and medical humanities Source Type: research
Breath in the technoscientific imaginary
Breath has a realist function in most artistic media. It serves to remind the reader, the viewer or the spectator of the exigencies of the body. In science fiction (SF) literature and films, breath is often a plot device for human encounters with otherness, either with alien peoples, who may not breathe oxygen, or environments, where there may not be oxygen to breathe. But while there is a technoscientific quality to breath in SF, especially in its attention to physiological systems, concentrating on the technoscientific threatens to occlude other, more affective aspects raised by the literature. In order to supplement the...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Rose, A. Tags: Open access Electronic pages - Science fiction and medical humanities Source Type: research
Rewinding Frankenstein and the body-machine: organ transplantation in the dystopian young adult fiction series Unwind
This article follows one of the young protagonists in the series, who is entirely constructed from donated tissue, and analyses how Shusterman explores the complicated relationship between body and mind and between self and other as the teenager matures into an adult. It will be shown that, by framing the story of a transplanted individual along the lines of a coming-of-age narrative, Shusterman inter-relates the acceptance of a donor organ with the transitional space of adolescence and positions the quest for embodied selfhood at the centre of both developments. By highlighting the interconnections between medical discour...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Wohlmann, A., Steinberg, R. Tags: Electronic pages - Science fiction and medical humanities Source Type: research
The subjective cut: sex reassignment surgery in 1960s and 1970s science fiction
This article considers the way in which ethical concerns about sex reassignment surgery and especially the research and clinical practice of the sexologist Dr John Money (1921–2006) is being negotiated in the 1960s and 1970s novels Myra Breckinridge and Myron by Gore Vidal and The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter. Drawing on the theories of gender and embodiment developed by Money, the article reads the novels as a critical response and discursive interaction with emergent sexological concepts. (Source: Medical Humanities)
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Sellberg, K. Tags: Electronic pages - Science fiction and medical humanities Source Type: research
Design, fiction and the medical humanities
This paper sets out to explore the similarities between the developing discipline of speculative and critical design (SCD) and science fiction, and their relevance to the medical humanities. SCD looks beyond ‘commercial design’ to consider what sort of things we should, or should not, be designing in order to create preferable futures. It does so by extrapolating from current social, economic, political and scientific knowledge, designing artefacts, experiences and scenarios which communicate futures and alternative realities in tangible ways. By first outlying the relevance of SCD to the medical humanities, th...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Strachan, C. G. Tags: Electronic pages - Science fiction and medical humanities Source Type: research
L Ron Hubbard's science fiction quest against psychiatry
Layfayette Ronald Hubbard (1911–1986) was a colourful and prolific American writer of science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. During the time between his two decades of productivity and his return to science fiction in 1980, Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology. In addition to its controversial status as a religion and its troubling pattern of intimidation and litigation directed towards its foes, Scientology is well known as an organised opponent to psychiatry. This paper looks at Hubbard's science fiction work to help understand the evolution of Scientology's antipsychiatry stance, as well as the alternative t...
Source: Medical Humanities - November 23, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Hirshbein, L. Tags: Electronic pages - Science fiction and medical humanities Source Type: research
