Becoming Biosubjects: Bodies. Systems. Technologies by Neil Gerlach et al. (review)

Becoming Biosubjects is an informative and thought-provoking book on the infiltration of biotechnology into modern Canadian society and the legal system. The authors investigate the social, legal, and cultural mechanisms that govern biotechnologies. Using a Foucauldian conceptualization of governance, they examine how biotechnologies “intervene on living matter at the molecular level” (p. 5). Throughout the book, Neil Gerlach and his co-authors argue that the governance of biotechnologies is changing our understanding of what constitutes a body, a human, and a life. They predict that these changes will have vast implications for the legal system and society at large.

“Social science fictions,” the narratives that “conflate future possibilities and existing social realities into an unstable and yet shared, present experience” (p. 5), are a central focus of this book. Gerlach et al. use the concept to demonstrate that biotechnologies are governed based on expectations of future developments and not on current realities. The pervasiveness of social science fictions is an essential part of how biogovernance operates within modern Canadian society and of how biotechnologies are perceived by agents of the legal system and individuals in society.

In each chapter of Becoming Biosubjects, the authors present a case study related to one of four legal issues that have been complicated by the development of biotechnology: the use of genetic technologies in criminal justice practices, policies surrounding reproductive technologies, the patenting of higher life forms, and bioterrorism. The authors argue that, in the criminal justice realm, genetic technologies are being used to keep track of the population in a way that impedes legal boundaries of bodily integrity. With respect to the regulation of reproductive technologies, Gerlach et al. describe how, due to expected developments in the field, the state’s regulation has shift ed from focusing on individual women to families. The case study of the patenting of higher life forms reveals how courts have been left to address applications for patents, in the absence of regulations by the Canadian Parliament. In regards to responses to bioterrorist threats, Gerlach et al. argue that regulations in Canada and elsewhere are ignoring individual privacy and bodily integrity as the government continually attempts to guarantee security.

Through these case studies, Gerlach et al. demonstrate that projections of future developments are affecting the current governance of biotechnology. Social science fictions are being reinforced and made sense of through media and popular culture, as well as through legal, parliamentary, scientific, and everyday discourses. Social science fictions play a key role in influencing the future development of biotechnology, because they are becoming the ways in which we understand it in the first place. These narratives legitimate biotechnological developments, and they ease the emergence of biotechnology into society; they provide a way for biogovernance to know its subjects and how bodies, humans, and lives are constructed. At the same time, social science fictions are also obscuring biotechnology, making both the technology and the narratives more difficult to question and critically analyze.

Gerlach et al. navigate through the web of social science fictions to provide an interesting and intricate picture of the operation of biogovernance in contemporary Canadian society. They see it as an emerging feature of Canadian society and argue that examining biotechnologies, and the narratives surrounding them, can provide insights into how biogovernance will continue to develop new definitions of the body, life, and humans. The emerging new forms of knowledge are now a fundamental consideration of all governance strategies, and as Gerlach et al. conclude, “we are all biosubjects” (p. 188).

Becoming Biosubjects demonstrates why biogovernance is an important area of study, as it is already changing definitions of the body, humans, and life. These changing definitions will have far-reaching effects within the legal system as they necessitate a new understanding of the legal person. This book will interest those who are concerned with the individual case studies of biotechnology (the criminal justice system, reproductive technology, patent laws, and bioterrorism). It will also be...