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352 11 Whole Bodies, Whole Persons? Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, and Biology evelyn fox keller by way of thinking about bodies If cultural studies have a core principle, it is a negative one: against universality , against any and all suppositions of a “human nature,” physical or behavioral . From cultural studies, we learn both of the diversity of bodies and of their manifest cultural malleability. As Elizabeth Grosz says, bodies are “male or female, black, brown, white, large or small . . . not as entities in themselves or simply on a linear continuum with its polar extremes occupied by male and female bodies . . . but as a field, a 2-D continuum in which race (and possibly even class, caste or religion) form body specification . . . a defiant affirmation of a multiplicity, a field of differences” (quoted in Rose 1998: 7). Biology, too, teaches us about diversity: In an important sense, one might say the genome project is a diversity project. But having as its subject a far broader range of bodies, the diversity with which biology—and even genetics—is concerned is not solely that which obtains among individual beings (human or otherwise): its subject is also the diversity of species.Thus, the Human Genome Project (HGP) is in fact misnamed, for it aims both to identify the genetic counterpart of individual phenotypic differences and to establish the genetic basis of a generic human nature—as in the human genome.What makes human bodies recognizable as human,and so clearly distinguishable from the bodies of other organisms? From a biological perspective, human bodies have a structural commonality transcending even differences of sex: they walk erect, they have a distinctive body plan, they are equipped with five senses, linguistic capacity, consciousness , and so on. These properties are human universals. To be sure, such “universals” are overlaid by differences of all sorts, not only of sex but Whole Bodies, Whole Persons? / 353 of eye color, hair texture and color, height, weight, handedness, physiognomy , and a zillion other differences we usually think of as primarily, if not entirely, biological.They are also overlaid by a vast number of other differences we generally think of as primarily, if not entirely, cultural. But none of these variations compromise our ability to recognize a member of the human species as such.In this sense,then,we might usefully speak of a universal human body. Even so, what exactly do we mean by “universal”? Certainly we don’t mean that every biologically human organism must be so equipped, for we know that some people cannot walk erect and some are blind, deaf, linguistically incompetent,or perhaps not even conscious.And though some people might argue that consciousness (or the capacity for consciousness) is a prerequisite for legal (or moral) definitions of “human,” virtually no one today would want to suggest that blind or hearing-impaired people are in any sense less than human. Clearly, we do not want to claim possession of a full set of human universals as prerequisite to human rights. Yet we might want to consider such universals as necessary to a notion of a “whole body”—that is, as long as such a description does not compromise the claims of individuals with less than whole bodies to full membership in the social category of “human.” Or that, at least, is what I want to suggest. In other words, I want to take the risk of political incorrectness and argue that people with special needs are indeed handicapped—that they have less than whole bodies.1 Might we say something analogous about personhood or subjectivity? Probably, no other concept has been under more sustained attack from cultural studies than that of the “self.”As Clifford Geertz wrote, almost thirty years ago: The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement and action, organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures. (1979: 229) At the time,his claim might have seemed radical.Today,at least in many academic circles, it has become a truism. Subjects are epiphenomena, constructed by culturally specific discursive regimes (marked by race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on), and subjectivity itself is more properly viewed as the consequence of actions, behavior, or “performativity” than as...

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