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C 2002) Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 23, Nos. 3/4, Winter 2002 (°

Introduction

Biomedical Sciences and Popular Culture: Mutually Constitutive, Not Oppositional This collection of articles began as a seminar that I organized in 1999 for the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association on the theme “Biomedical Sciences and Popular Culture.” The project was originally intended to bring together scholars from across the disciplines whose research focused on the critical intersection of biomedical and popular discourses and practices to facilitate new means of intellectual exchange and collaboration. Although we came from disparate disciplinary locations spanning the human and natural sciences, we discovered that our work shared a common commitment to addressing the question of how human identities and differences are negotiated in and through biomedicine. This negotiation is complex, for even though the authority of biomedicine is often perceived to be unilateral, biomedicine and popular culture always work in collaboration as mutually constitutive discourses. The essays in this special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities explore this collaboration, focusing specifically on its perils and its promises. My paper, “Blood, Race, and National Identity: Scientific and Popular Discourses,” examines the symbolic significance of blood in the twentieth century and its role in determining the composition of a national community along racial lines. By drawing parallels between Nazi notions of blood and racial purity and historically contemporaneous U.S. policies regarding blood and blood products, I reveal a disturbing proximity in discourse and policy. While the Nazis attempted to locate Jewish racial essence and inferiority in blood, and instituted eugenic measures and laws forbidding racial admixture, similar policies existed in the U.S., based on the so-called “one drop rule” that systematically discriminated against African-Americans. Chris Leslie’s contribution, “Fighting an Unseen Enemy: The Infectious Paradigm and the Conquest of Pellagra” is concerned with popular and biomedical accounts of the appearance of pellagra at the turn of the last century. Many of these accounts portrayed the disease as communicable despite early evidence to the contrary suggesting it was attributable to nutritional factors. The nonspecific nature of its symptom profile along with the enormous range of cure-alls offered to the public made the etiology of pellagra open to a variety of interpretations. However, 167 C 2002 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 1041-3545/02/1200-0167/0 °

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as Leslie shows, the infection paradigm and genetic determinism hindered efforts to understand and treat pellagra. In “The Epidemiology of ‘Regrettable Kinship’: Gender, Epidemic, and Community in Todd Haynes’ [Safe] and Richard Powers’ Gain,” Lisa Lynch analyzes two contemporary cultural texts about women and environmentally-linked illnesses to rethink commonplace understandings of the relationship between gender, disease, and community formation. By reading these narratives side by side, Lynch is able to address difficult issues about gendered subjectivity and the fragile construction of collective political identity. While the female protagonists in the texts Lynch examines relate differently to their illnesses, both texts portray the ways in which women negotiate the potential and limitations of “illness communities.” In his contribution, “Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies,” Robert McRuer calls for the recognition of the points of convergence between AIDS theory, queer theory, and disability theory. McRuer points out ways in which minority identity groups such as people with AIDS, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, and those with so-called disabilities, whose status has been described by others as “impaired,” have resisted this judgment by calling its ideological underpinnings into question. He contends that a critical alliance between AIDS theory, queer theory, and disability theory will ultimately help us to realize the full range of different kinds of bodies and corporeal experiences while also combating the application of normativizing judgments. Eugene Thacker’s paper, “Bio-X: Removing Bodily Contingency in ‘Regenerative Medicine’” addresses whether or not regenerative medicine can be harnessed to repair the damage wreaked on the body through disease and injury and whether there is an ethical price to pay for such advances. Thacker turns to both science fiction and recent developments in regenerative medicine for clues about the future of the body and medical practice. Thacker suggests that regenerative medicine uses the body as its own resource for the purposes of preserving life, but by attempting to remove the body from the limitations of both mortality and contingency, regenerative medicine fundamentally alters the meaning of “human.” As I reflect on this project today, I am struck by the way each of these papers reminds us of the urgency to be mindful of the ways in which not only biomedical discourse but all authoritative discourses can and have been used for both humane purposes and the purposes of dehumanization. In the aftermath of the September 11th tragedy, the number of hate crimes in the U.S. committed against Arabs, Arab-Americans, and those of Muslim descent climbed exponentially. When we compare the September 11th attacks to Pearl Harbor, we must also remember that the infamy associated with that event also extended to the mass evacuation and internment of persons of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific coast states by President Roosevelt acting as Commander in Chief. In both World War II and the current War on Terror, racial and ethnic identity were and are used as a mark of suspicion and as a criterion for enemy status.

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The essays in this special volume and recent world events suggest that when it comes to issues of identity and difference, dualistic thinking can itself constitute a “weapon of mass destruction.” To guard against the deployment of such weapons, we need to move beyond the reductionist division of the world into the familiar camps of us and them. Allyson D. Polsky Center for the Humanities Wesleyan University Middletown, CT 06459 [email protected]