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Transformed States
Medicine, Biotechnology, and American Culture, 1990–2020
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Martin Halliwell
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
Honourable Mention, British Association of American Studies Book Award
Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications, and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the COVID-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post–Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century.
The book draws on original research spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden to show how the politics of science and technology shape the medical uses of biotechnology. Some of these technologies reveal fierce ideological conflicts in the arenas of cloning, reproduction, artificial intelligence, longevity, gender affirmation, vaccination and environmental health. Interweaving politics and culture, the book illustrates how these health issues are reflected in and challenged by literary and cinematic texts, from Oryx and Crake to Annihilation, and from Gattaca to Avatar.
By assessing the complex relationship between federal politics and the biomedical industry, Transformed States develops an ecological approach to public health that moves beyond tensions between state governance and private enterprise. To that end, Martin Halliwell analyzes thirty years that radically transformed American science, medicine, and policy, positioning biotechnology in dialogue with fears and fantasies about an emerging future in which health is ever more contested.
Along with the two earlier books, Therapeutic Revolutions (2013) and Voices of Mental Health (2017), Transformed States is the final volume of a landmark cultural and intellectual history of mental health in the United States, journeying from the combat zones of World War II to the global emergency of COVID-19.
Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications, and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the COVID-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post–Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century.
The book draws on original research spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden to show how the politics of science and technology shape the medical uses of biotechnology. Some of these technologies reveal fierce ideological conflicts in the arenas of cloning, reproduction, artificial intelligence, longevity, gender affirmation, vaccination and environmental health. Interweaving politics and culture, the book illustrates how these health issues are reflected in and challenged by literary and cinematic texts, from Oryx and Crake to Annihilation, and from Gattaca to Avatar.
By assessing the complex relationship between federal politics and the biomedical industry, Transformed States develops an ecological approach to public health that moves beyond tensions between state governance and private enterprise. To that end, Martin Halliwell analyzes thirty years that radically transformed American science, medicine, and policy, positioning biotechnology in dialogue with fears and fantasies about an emerging future in which health is ever more contested.
Along with the two earlier books, Therapeutic Revolutions (2013) and Voices of Mental Health (2017), Transformed States is the final volume of a landmark cultural and intellectual history of mental health in the United States, journeying from the combat zones of World War II to the global emergency of COVID-19.
Author / Editor information
MARTIN HALLIWELL is professor of American thought and culture at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. He is the author and editor of fifteen books, including Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945–1970 and Voices of Mental Health: Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970–2000 (both from Rutgers University Press).
Reviews
“Transformed States is a measured, thorough, and absorbing account of the dangers and opportunities offered by biotech in addressing US healthcare challenges since the 1990s. Halliwell is imaginative and capacious in envisaging healthcare challenges, running from the micro level of organisms in the gut to the macro level of planetary precarity.”— Paul Williams, author of Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics
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Frontmatter
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Contents
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List of Illustrations
ix -
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Preface
xi -
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Introduction
1 - Part One Genetic States
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1 Genomics, Diversity, and the Millennial Imagination
21 -
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2 Embryonic Entanglements
47 - Part Two Conscious States
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3 Health in the Neuronal Workspace
71 -
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4 Augmented Lives
98 - Part Three Dynamic States
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5 Keeping On
125 -
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6 Traveling Through
154 - Part Four Perilous States
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7 Pandemic Culture
179 -
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8 Invisible Toxicities
207 -
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Conclusion
235 -
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Acknowledgments
243 -
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Notes
247 -
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Index
351
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 15, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9781978817906
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781978817906
