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>> 189 Notes Preface 1. Treichler 1999, 2 (italics in the original). Chapter 1 1. Spear et al. 1999, 552. 2. “BRCA” stands for “breast cancer,” although mutations of BRCA1 and BRCA2 can increase risk for ovarian and other cancers as well. BRCA research is an early example of a research program known as genomics, which I define broadly as the investigation of the role of genes in health and disease based on knowledge of the human genome—in particular, on the characteristics of the genome of an individual or group. 3. With regard to AIDS, Treichler explains: “The AIDS epidemic is cultural and linguistic as well as biological and biomedical. To understand the epidemic’s history, address its future, and learn its lessons, we must take this assertion seriously. Moreover, it is the careful examination of language and culture that enables us, as members of intersecting social constellations, to think carefully about ideas in the midst of a crisis: to use our intelligence and critical faculties to consider theoretical problems, develop policy, and articulate long-term social needs even as we acknowledge the urgency of the AIDS crisis and try to satisfy its relentless demand for immediate action” (1999, 2). See also Levins 2000. 4. Hayles 1993. 5. Waldby 1996, 5. 6. Harding 2006, chapter 7. 7. Ibid., 4–5. See also Harding’s distinction between “bad science” and “science as usual” (Harding 1991, chapter 3). According to Rouse (2004), these insights are what set feminist science studies apart from studies of the sociology of scientific knowledge. 8. Jasanoff 2004, 3. 9. See Longino 1990. 10. One could say it is a version of the idea that medicine functions as a state ideological apparatus. 190 > 191 26. Lowe 1995. In this way, Lowe departs from the work of biosociality theorists like Rose (2007). There are, I believe, two problematic assumptions on which the biosociality concept rests: (1) that the somatic self is more or less a new development (when in fact women and people of color have long been forced to lead corporeal existences); and (2) that the somatic self can be deciphered and theorized independent of economic structure. I do not disagree with biosocial theorists like Rose that developments in biomedicine and in the culture at large have brought about a particular somatic subjectivity, only with whether this constitutes a break with past cultural logics. I explore this point more fully in chapter 6. 27. This is another point of departure for Lowe (1995): he calls on the critic both to account for economic structure and to attend to the governing practices of particular systems of oppression that cannot be reduced to it. 28. Hartmann 1997; Barrett 1997; Nicholson 1997. 29. Lowe 1995, 109. 30. Sunder Rajan 2006; Cooper 2008; Waldby and Cooper 2008. 31. Rose 2006, 160–61. 32. See Feenberg 1991 for a critical theory of technology perspective. 33. Stevens 2008. 34. Stabile 1992. 35. Stabile 1995, 415. 36. This is one way in which I part company with scholars like Rose who draw on Foucault to make the case for interpretations of health discourses that disavow any notion that biomedicine acts as an ideological state apparatus. My approach here is that Foucault is helpful in understanding the production of new subjectivities (in particular how work on the body replaces explicit ideological appeals), but that new subjectivities do not necessarily tell us about the working of dominant interests. I say more about this in the conclusion. 37. Oyama, Griffeths, and Gray, 2001. 38. See Nelkin and Lindee 1995 and van Dijck 1998 for an appraisal of popular representations of genes. 39. I provide a more complicated reading of genomics in chapter 5, especially with regard to gene-environment interaction. 40. Haraway 1989, 15. 41. Happe 2000. 42. Ohmann 1996. 43. Butler 1990. 44. Harding 2006, 82. See also Condit 1999a. 45. This perhaps explains the somewhat surpring results of ethnographic work that has studied the attempt of scientists to disavow race in favor of other terms, employing different software programs to do so. See, for example, Fujimura and Rajagopalan 2011. 192 > 193 poor relief, and sterilization—all topics with which the family studies deal” (1988, 30). The discovery of Mendelism in 1900 appeared to provide solid scientific evidence of the mechanism by which traits are passed down among generations, although researchers did not know exactly what the substance of heredity was. The concept of the gene would be hypothesized for the first time by Wilhelm Johannsen in...

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