Marking Bioethics

While I suspect that much of the debate over Catherine Myser's provocative essay "Differences from Somewhere: The Normativity of Whiteness in Bioethics in the United States" (2003) will focus on just how "white" bioethics is, her essay might mark the beginning of a broad awareness of how much of American bioethics remains "unmarked." The notion of marking as used by Myser is borrowed from semiotics, and it designates the way signifiers are in some manner modified or qualified (Colapietro 1993, 139-40). Attention to the unmarked has been a key feature in the work of critical theory and cultural-studies scholars, revealing how what we think of as natural is actually constructed, how what we see as a binary opposition is actually part of a hierarchy, how what we determine to be supplementary to our discourse is actually central to it. Myser's analysis foregrounds how odd it is that the theoretical developments of cultural studies have had such little impact on bioethics. One may wish to believe that the bioethics world's disinterest in this particular area of academia simply reflects a reticence to get caught up in transient academic fashions; we would rather wear the tested classics of Aristotle and Kant than the potentially short-lived fashion of Foucault and Derrida. We certainly do not want the New York Times writing yearly articles ridiculing the intellectual trends at ASBH conferences as they do about the MLA. But I must confess that I doubt that this is the reason that one rarely hears the names Butler, Bourdieu, Benjamin, Spivak, Said, and Fanon cited, much less even known, by so many in the field.

This oversight, I believe, has profoundly impoverished bioethics. Often we seem to become interested in ideas about ten years after they have been well explored by the rest of the humanities. One must admit that it is a shame that bioethics does not get to play a role in the shaping of ideas and issues in the liberal arts regions of the university. For example, it seems quite curious—and to some degree disheartening—that the recent and intriguing new field of disability studies has developed with little interest from the bioethics community.

A more arresting issue, however, concerns how we have remained largely unconscious of the relation of our intellectual constructs to issues of class, race, and, to a lesser extent, gender. Race is a key issue for Myser. Her critique of "sociocultural diversity research" is particularly bracing; what was thought to be openness to otherness might be simply a form of cultural tourism. The kind of self-consciousness that her work heralds might indicate a future trend in bioethics that begins to mark the unmarked in our theory. For example, it is difficult for me not to connect our myopia to the issues surrounding intersex infants and the discipline's own unchallenged gender assumptions. Myser has moved the issue of race beyond simply asking why bioethics has been a discipline dominated by Anglos and instead begins to question how this predominance has affected the discipline's conceptual categories. By marking the other social factors embedded in the discipline's worldview, bioethics will become a more honest and sophisticated discipline. But I also believe that actively engaging in critical theory will broaden our conceptual language. Myser has introduced the notion of "whiteness," but one can only hope that an entire array of additional critical terms will widen our world, such as episteme, hegemony, queer, orientalism, subaltern, habitus, alterity, fetishism, and gaze. If, as Wittgenstein suggests, "The limits of my language means the limits of my world," one can only hope that bioethics will both come to recognize the limits of its conceptual language and expand beyond it.