The Postracial Imagination: Gattaca's Imperfect Science

We live in a time of competing discourses of race, discourses that are especially fraught in the industries of science and medicine. Not, however, according to President Bill Clinton, who in his 2000 speech lauding the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) proclaimed that "in genetic terms all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same"—in other words, that the HGP provided definitive evidence race is not biological.¹ Yet, soon after, in an important 2004 issue of Nature: Genetics that published the proceedings of a conference on "Race and the Human Genome," even though the editors concluded with a call to move beyond race—traditional "paradigms of human identity based on 'races' as biological constructs" must give way, and researchers will need to provide "new explanatory framework[s] . . . that can accommodate new knowledge from a new generation of research"²—at least two articles demonstrated reluctance to completely part with a biological basis to race. As much as humanists and many in the life and social sciences would like to assume a consensus has been settled, race as biological is still a debated issue, and in light of the rush by pharmaceutical corporations to use race as the basis for new race-based biologics, the debates may continue indefinitely.

With such competing discourses at play, it is not surprising that ethnographers of scientific practice have observed confusion in researchers tasked with databasing and organizing DNA samples. In conversations with researchers who catalog and must organize DNA samples into groups, Duana Fullwiley found many of them at a loss to provide a succinct and exact definition of race; instead, they often offered her commonsense notions about race and human differences—that race can be described by reference to five categories.³ In other words, in those very spaces where one might assume scientists would be functioning with a high degree of exactitude about race and ethnicity, instead their practices are infused with meanings and definitions they have drawn from the everyday vocabulary of race that circulates throughout culture—the imaginary of race from which Americans today draw. Other studies have demonstrated that researchers who explicitly intend to scrub race categories from the software programs they develop for use in multinational genetic studies find race applied in explanations of their findings, either by journalists who inaccurately report their studies by using race or by their institutions' publicists, who know the value of sexing up a report by referring to the hot topic of race.⁴ There is a Möbius strip through which meanings about cultural categories and scientific findings about race move: scientists, journalists, and a cultural imaginary on which both draw. In this Möbius strip, even when scientists practice "postrace" science—a science that attempts to re-locate the language of race onto continental ancestry—the popular media as well as corporate industry direct such a discourse back into the language of "race."

Part of this Möbius strip, where attempts to get "postracial" are fed back into previous race discourses, is mobilized in our own cultural criticism, a dynamic evident in critical readings of Gattaca (dir. Andrew Niccol, 1997), a film about genetic discrimination that stakes a claim to being postracial. Critics have repeatedly faulted the film for biologizing race, particularly because, the argument goes, it participates in a liberal logic of multiculturalist typecasting that reinfuses race just where it was supposed to be absent. Such readings, however, mobilize the very terms of race groupings that the film attempts to refuse. Both the film and, I will argue, such interpretations of it reveal the profound paradox that knots up conceptualizations of race today. Perhaps best demonstrated in the term postracial, whose very use of racial references the category it intends to overwrite, race is sublated into these attempts to move beyond it. I will suggest that the only way both to capture the tension and provide a road toward a destination beyond race is to highlight our problematic historical moment through readings of precisely such recalcitrant texts. Rather than dismissing them for participating in an atavistic visual...