| Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/Personhood Contributor(s): Glick, Megan H. (Author) |
|
 |
ISBN: 1478001518 ISBN-13: 9781478001515 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $26.55 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: December 2018 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Science | Philosophy & Social Aspects - Philosophy | Movements - Humanism |
| Dewey: 128 |
| LCCN: 2018015848 |
| Series: Anima: Critical Race Studies Otherwise |
| Physical Information: 0.7" H x 6" W x 8.9" (0.90 lbs) 288 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In Infrahumanisms Megan H. Glick considers how conversations surrounding nonhuman life have impacted a broad range of attitudes toward forms of human difference such as race, sexuality, and health. She examines the history of human and nonhuman subjectivity as told through twentieth-century scientific and cultural discourses that include pediatrics, primatology, eugenics, exobiology, and obesity research. Outlining how the category of the human is continuously redefined in relation to the infrahuman-a liminal position of speciation existing between the human and the nonhuman-Glick reads a number of phenomena, from early twentieth-century efforts to define children and higher order primates as liminally human and the postwar cultural fascination with extraterrestrial life to anxieties over AIDS, SARS, and other cross-species diseases. In these cases the efforts to define a universal humanity create the means with which to reinforce notions of human difference and maintain human-nonhuman hierarchies. In foregrounding how evolving definitions of the human reflect shifting attitudes about social inequality, Glick shows how the consideration of nonhuman subjectivities demands a rethinking of long-held truths about biological meaning and difference. |