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68 Chapter Five Stumped by Genes DNA, Disability, and Prosthesis a new field of thought is emerging that, for want of a better term, is being called biocultures—the study of the scientificized and medicalized body in history, culture, and politics. biocultural approaches have been used to explore various kinds of phenomena from the out-of-boundary1 disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, medical sciences, and so on. biocultural analysis is to these discourses as theory has been to the humanistic discourses . in this chapter, i take a biocultural approach to examining genetics and use this culture-based way of knowing to look at certain issues in the field of genetic and medical research. one notion of prosthesis approaches genetics through a reconceptualization of the idea of prosthesis that is permeable to medical and technological ways of thinking and to linguistic- and humanities-oriented ways of knowing. This type of analysis might begin with the observation that the original meaning of prosthesis in english is “addition,” notably first used not in a physiological or technological sense, but in a grammatical one as an element that is added to a sentence. This original grammatical meaning is transformed at the end of the eighteenth century into a medical meaning— something that is added in surgery. The comfortable continuation between science and the humanities was very much a sign of those times; in today’s science-self-segregated world, a jump between the two disciplines would be harder to make. The meaning of prosthesis as something that is added to the body becomes much more widely used in the middle and late nineteenth century, when it comes to mean, fairly exclusively, an artificial limb or part that supplements the original but missing body part. Stumped by Genes • 69 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, prosthesis as a supplement to grammar or parts of speech is connected to prosthesis as a supplement to body parts. as Jacques derrida’s work on Jean-Jacques rousseau and the supplement has shown, rousseau’s famous “essay on the origin of Language ” took late-eighteenth-century readers into an inquiry about the way that human language develops. in looking at rousseau, derrida develops a theory of the “supplement.” he notices that rousseau opposes nature and society and sees the latter as a supplement of nature. rousseau, according to derrida, privileges nature and fits it into a series of oppositions, including health and disease, purity and contamination, good and evil, and speech and writing. by this privileging of nature, language can be thought about as a supplement—something prosthetic that is added to nature rather than being of nature itself. spoken language, according to rousseau, is closer to nature than written language, which is further away from the natural origin of words. derrida’s theory is in opposition, for example, to noam chomsky ’s notion of language as inherently part of human nature—as hardwired into the brain and therefore not a prosthetic. so being human becomes an aspect of supplementarity. humans are not natural because language, at least written language, is a supplement. Theses oppositions can be seen as defining a new set of expectations about what is human and how the human animal fits into the biosphere— the anthropocene world that is inhabited by and made habitable (or inhabitable ) by the human animal. This ambiguity also can be found in the original disability-related notion of prosthetics in the word stump, a word that refers to both the part of body that remains and the prosthetic that replaces what is missing. The stump of a limb is replaced by a wooden leg, also referred to as a stump. The cut-down root of a tree is a stump, and by analogy the limb that is removed from the body is also a stump. ironically, the wooden leg participates in the original sin of the removal by being part of the metaphoric and metonymic tree so that the human gains a stump from the stump created in the tree. The analogies continue as one is foiled by tripping on a stump and then comes to be stumped by the difficulty of the tree and by the stomping sound made by the stump leg, which combines the fleshly stump with the wooden stump. The prosthetics industry in the nineteenth century got its jump-start following the civil War in the United states, a war in which more american soldiers died than in all other Us wars combined. Massive numbers...

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