Manchester University Press
Introduction
Abstract
This introduction considers tissue transfer as a boundary practice in multiple senses, unsettling conventional distinctions between self and other and between life and death, and challenging the limits of the body's capacity to transform and the ethical limits of scientific practice. It reviews how Gothic tropes and intertextualities have characterised representations of the processes from the nineteenth century to the present. It also reflects on the critical conundrum that attends this historicist reading of Gothic as hallucinatory mimesis, of reality become fantastic in its horrors, and offers an analytic framework for working the terrain between imaginative representation and the suffering that it indirectly refracts: the coinage bodies dis(re)membered describes four ways that Gothic can conduct ambiguous cultural work within these discursive borderlands. I identify Gothic narrative tropes in historiography of transplantation science and immunology, and review how vulnerable bodies, strange time and confining spaces of a Gothic mode may help to express biopolitical dimensions of particular transfer milieux. Finally, I defend the value of work in fantastic modes for medical humanities and comment on how transfer Gothic responds to calls in the critical medical humanities for attention to the distributed nature of health-related practice, in a nexus both global and local.
Abstract
This introduction considers tissue transfer as a boundary practice in multiple senses, unsettling conventional distinctions between self and other and between life and death, and challenging the limits of the body's capacity to transform and the ethical limits of scientific practice. It reviews how Gothic tropes and intertextualities have characterised representations of the processes from the nineteenth century to the present. It also reflects on the critical conundrum that attends this historicist reading of Gothic as hallucinatory mimesis, of reality become fantastic in its horrors, and offers an analytic framework for working the terrain between imaginative representation and the suffering that it indirectly refracts: the coinage bodies dis(re)membered describes four ways that Gothic can conduct ambiguous cultural work within these discursive borderlands. I identify Gothic narrative tropes in historiography of transplantation science and immunology, and review how vulnerable bodies, strange time and confining spaces of a Gothic mode may help to express biopolitical dimensions of particular transfer milieux. Finally, I defend the value of work in fantastic modes for medical humanities and comment on how transfer Gothic responds to calls in the critical medical humanities for attention to the distributed nature of health-related practice, in a nexus both global and local.
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures ix
- Preface x
- Acknowledgements xi
- Introduction 1
- 1 Clinical necropoetics 39
- 2 The bioemporium 67
- 3 Clinical labour and slow violence 92
- 4 Possession? 127
- 5 Scalpel and metaphor 161
- Coda 185
- Filmography 189
- Bibliography 190
- Index 213
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures ix
- Preface x
- Acknowledgements xi
- Introduction 1
- 1 Clinical necropoetics 39
- 2 The bioemporium 67
- 3 Clinical labour and slow violence 92
- 4 Possession? 127
- 5 Scalpel and metaphor 161
- Coda 185
- Filmography 189
- Bibliography 190
- Index 213
