Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction

A theorization of how the bioeconomy and biotechnology remake 'life itself,' creating crises in ethics and governance.

Sherryl Vint (Author)

9781108839006, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 October 2021

280 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.52 kg

'… rich and compelling … the larger political and ethical ramifications of Vint's project in Biopolitical Futures could not be more urgent or clear.' Hugh C. O'Connell, Science Fiction Studies

Drawing on a rich array of twenty-first-century speculative fiction, this book demonstrates how the commodification of life through biotechnology has far-reaching implications for how we think of personhood, agency, and value. Sherryl Vint argues that neoliberalism is reinventing life under biocapital. She offers new biopolitical figurations that can help theoretically grasp and politically respond to a distinctive twenty-first-century biopolitics. This book theorizes how biotechnology intervenes in the very processes of biological function, reshaping life itself to serve economic ends. Linking fictional texts with material examples, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction shows how these practices are linked to new modes of exploitative economic relations that cannot be redressed by human rights. It concludes with a posthumanist reframing of the value of life that grounds itself elsewhere than in capitalist logics, a vision that, in a Covid age, might become fundamental to a new politics of ecological relations.

Introduction: neoliberalism and the reinvention of life
1. Suspending death, reinventing life: the immortal vessel
2. The new flesh: vital machines and reimagining the human
3. Capital reproduction: maternity and productivity
4. Surplus value: transplantation and fungible life
5. Life industries: vitality as commodity
6. Living to work: biocapital, synthetic biology, and the precaritization of labor
7. Life optimized: pharmaceutical health and disposable bodies
8. Surplus vitality and posthuman possibilities
Conclusion: capitalism, biopolitics, and a new body politic.

Subject Areas: Impact of science & technology on society [PDR], Religion & science [HRAM3], 21st century history: from c 2000 - [HBLX], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS]