From Disciplinary Gaze to Biological Gaze: Genetic Crime Thrillers and Biogovernance

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 31, no. 3, 2001 From Disciplinary Gaze to Biological Gaze: Genetic Crime Thrillers and Biogovernance Neil Gerlach Imagine an America where violent crime rates have quadrupled over the past century, inexorably rising to a level that would be incomprehensible to previous generations. Imagine that the nature of violent crime seems to have changed, taking a turn toward casual sociopathy where the representative crime has become calculated serial murder rather than a one-off crime of passion. Imagine the resulting level of public fear, rampant to the point where civic-mindedness is replaced by a fortress mentality, walled communities, pervasive video surveillance , and electronic monitoring as the public sphere is virtually abandoned as too risky. In this imaginary America, the fearful public turns angrily upon its governments , demanding more decisive action and inquiring as to why traditional practices of crime control are not controlling crime. Faced with the political consequences of admitting that the state cannot actually control crime, federal and state governments respond with a massive expansion of the number of prisons and police officers, a toughening of sentences, threestrikes laws, the elimination of parole, and a relaxation of restrictions on the use of deadly force in apprehending suspects. In other words, all the traditional modes of crime control are strengthened and yet, crime rates do not fall. Prisons are bursting until one must speak of the proportion of total population that is incarcerated, rather than mere numbers. Since traditional methods are not working , attention turns to the nature of criminality and the forms of expertise charged with understanding and rehabilitating criminals. Where, our imaginary government asks, have our criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, social workers, and prison managers gone wrong? Why can we not detect potential criminals and contain them and why can we apparently not rehabilitate those who have committed crimes? Perhaps criminals cannot be rehabilitated. Imagine that at just this moment, someone declares they have found a link between biology and a tendency toward violent crime. Canadian Review of American Studies 31 (2001) 96 These are the enabling conditions for a new form of crime management which, I suggest, is not imaginary at all, but part of a governmental shift toward authorizing biological science, as a form of expertise, to manage production, reproduction, and surveillance through biotechnology. I refer to this process as “biogovernance,” the use of biotechnology to manage risky populations and populations at risk.1 In a number of discursive sites, biogovernance is currently under negotiation, for example, the Human Genome Project, reproductive technologies, cloning, genetically engineered foods, hybrid animals and plants, gene therapy, and DNA profiling and data banking. Some analysts (notably Nelkin and Lindee in The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon) have argued that the focus on genetic science over the past few years within science, government, and popular culture has led to the closure of debate around biological determinism, supplanting psychological, social, and cultural explanations for human behaviour . However, the ongoing representation of debates around genetic determinism versus free will and nature versus nurture suggests that this is not a settled question and is in fact a source of unsettling questions about the relationship between biology, behaviour, biotechnology, and social control. We are in a moment when discourses of biotechnology are under formation and a mutually constitutive interaction is ongoing between literature , science, and criminal justice concerning how we speak about biogovernance in the realm of social control. In this article, I examine an important site of this discourse production: genetic crime thrillers. This literature is a widely disseminated and prominent site for representations and debates about biotechnology in crime management. Specifically, I examine two recent novels: Michael Cordy’s Crime Zero (1999), and Daniel Hecht’s The Babel Effect (2001). Both novels are good examples of biogovernance at work, exploring the questions of how we are redefining criminality in the current social and scientific context and the governmental implications of it. While providing ambiguous answers to those questions , the novels are a terrain in which discursive battles are fought over the risks controlled and unleashed by biogovernance as a form of social control. Biogovernance and the Risk Society I...