Deborah Lynn Steinberg

Twice Told Tales: Transformation, Recuperation and Emergence in the Age of Consent Debates 1998

In this article we explore the narratives and discursive frameworks which were deployed in the second Age of Consent debate in the British House of Commons in order to identify shifts, continuities and emergent elements in sexual politics in the late 1990s. In the first section we will be looking at questions of theory and method. Here we will draw, particularly, on ideas of narrative and discourse, exploring their relation to each other and how stories provide the warp and weave of discourse. The next section is concerned with the House of Commons as a discursive space. The third section identifies the sexual stories told in the course of the debate. The final two sections of the paper focus on the discursive specificity of Blairism and its characteristic grand narratives of civilization and progress and discourses of rationality.

A most selective practice: The eugenic logics of IVF

Abstract This article provides a report on a survey undertaken in 1990 of clinic practices of and practitioner attitudes toward screening patients and embryos in the context of IVF and GIFT treatment. In so doing, it focuses on an underexamined aspect of the professional IVF/GIFT culture. In its examination of particular screening criteria that emerged as significant in the survey, this article considers: (a) contradictions that emerge in responses regarding what counts as discrimination and discriminatory screening; (b) implications of selection policies in relation to social profiles of IVF/GIFT patients; and (c) ways in which IVF/GIFT selection practices can be seen to relate to the reproduction of ableist, class oppressive, (hetero)sexist, and racist social divisions. Considered within the context of the historical role of the medical profession as an agent of social control, particularly in the context of sexuality, notions of “breeding,” and the construction of common sense discourses of “proper” family, the findings in this survey raise important questions about the conditions for womens reproductive choice and autonomy and about the (re)production of those conditions through the specific professional practices examined here.

Feminism confronts the genome: introduction

IntroductionContemporary genetics has generated both pervasive cultural transformation andconsiderable hyperbole. The notion that life has become and is increasingly beingrearticulated through genetification is evidenced amply by foundationaltransformations in everyday as well as professional vernaculars of kinship,health, personal and social identity, and in social–institutional practices crossingover the labours and economic futures of science and medicine, agriculture,pharmaceuticals, business marketing and policing, to name only a few. Theideological reach of genetics and the ideological work of the gene has beenindisputably profound and extensive. Interestingly this has occurred notwith-standing that genes and the science of genetics, in material terms, have for themost part not delivered on the extravagant claims attributed to them. Geneticshas not paid off in a transformation of curative medicine and genetic diagnosticinnovations have had little appreciable impact on either disease prevention orcare. The mapping of the human genome has not paid off significantly in theway of understandings, biological or social, of the human condition or the distinc-tions between or interrelatedness of species. Genetically modified foods have notredressed poverty or hunger; pharmacogenetics has not produced ‘smart’ drugs.So the spread of genetic ideas and investments in the possibilities of the genewould seem to owe much to their ‘fit’ with the times, to both comfortablecommon sense as well as uncomfortable points of social and cultural rupture,which genetification would seem to fill.One of the key achievements of feminist scholarship, and one of the centre-points of both feminist activism and feminist epistemology, has been the develop-ment of a critique of science. The advent of genetics and the purported geneticsrevolution has been articulated on a conceptual terrain in which critical ideas con-cerning reproductive rights, ecology, embodiment, bioethics, choice and agencyhave been reshaped by feminism, whether or not this is explicitly acknowledged

American dreamin’: Discoursing liberally on the Oprah winfrey show

Abstract This paper explores several versions of the “American Dream,” which frame, and are produced within, the Oprah Winfrey Show. We begin by examining the conventional narrative of rags to riches, freedom and opportunity, mom, baseball, and apple pie most commonly associated with the American Dream and most graphically taken up as a liberal politics within the text of the Show. We then go on to consider the alternative American Dreams—therapy version, family version, female version, and civil rights version. We explore the ways in which these differing Dreams can, on the one hand, reveal the underside, the betrayal, the failures to deliver of the conventional Dream, and yet, on the other hand, work precisely to recuperate it.

The Depersonalisation of Women through the Administration of ‘ In Vitro Fertilisation’

‘In vitro fertilisation’ is a series of technological procedures designed by medical scientists to intervene in, alter and extract parts of the bodies and to interfere with the reproductive processes of women. It has been offered, received and lauded by medical scientists, the press and various government committees as ‘progress’, as caring, and as a response to the needs and demands of infertile couples. Representations of, descriptions of and public debates about ‘in vitro fertilisation’ have been dominated by a rhetoric of benevolence and remarkably lacking in critical assessment, particularly regarding its impact on women’s health and autonomy. Feminist challenges and resistance to this a priori assumption of medical scientific beneficence and particularly our attempts to re-orient analysis of ‘in vitro fertilisation’ in terms of women’s reproductive rights and women’s liberation, generally have not been given recognition or serious consideration in so-called ‘public’ forums of discussion about the implications of this technological innovation. My intention in this chapter is critically to examine ‘in vitro fertilisation’, specifically in terms of how it effects women’s health and social status. In so doing I will challenge the image of benevolence that has so far dominated its representations. I will argue that it is an image which has depended on, and is only possible through, exclusion of attention to the meaning of ‘in vitro fertilisation’ for women.

The Bad Patient Estranged Subjects of the Cancer Culture

Cancer has long been a cultural touchstone: a metaphor of devastation and a spectre of social as well as bodily anomie and loss. Yet recent years have witnessed significant transformations in perceptions of cancer, particularly in perceptions of the cancer patient. This paper is concerned with the ‘struggles of subjectivity’ emergent in this transvalued cancer culture. Explored from the standpoint of the ‘bad patient’, and drawing on media and cultural methodologies, the paper will consider the convergence of medicine, morality and popular iconography as they are embedded in the imageries, imaginaries and representational economies of the cancer culture industry. Of particular concern in this context are the (re)composures of the patient, as liminal figure, caught between clinical imperative and cultural fantasy.

The Face of Ruin: Evidentiary Spectacle and the Trial of Michael Jackson

The Michael Jackson trial represented a spectacular and, indeed, macabre event on a global scale. The trial keyed into a number of contemporaneous cultural anxieties and fascinations. These include: a seemingly inexhaustible popular craving for celebrity, excess and scandal; the totalising proliferation of surveillance culture; the “corruption” of jurisprudence itself through the televisualisation of criminal trials (most notably that of OJ Simpson); the mediatised proliferation of “paedophilia”; and, perhaps most profoundly, Michael Jackson himself as a figure of rupture and ruin. This paper focuses on the British television documentary, Michael Jacksons Boys, which was aired in the United Kingdom one week prior to the start of the 2005 Michael Jackson trial on charges of child sexual abuse and abduction. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the trial. This is followed by an explication of our social semiotic approach to the analysis of the film, including a discussion of our theoretical tools. We then provide a summary of the key terms and storylines set out in Michael Jacksons Boys. In the main body of the paper, we explore three arising themes that are embedded and emblematised in this instance. The first of these themes is the intense cultural fascination with Michael Jackson as a monstrous figure. A second theme concerns the nature of evidence and the cultural production of the evidentiary. The third theme is the proliferation of cruelty realism as a subgenre of televisual representation that has infiltrated wider arenas of social practice.

Estranged Bodies Shifting Paradigms and the Biomedical Imaginary

This introductory article provides a contextual and theoretical overview to this special issue of Body & Society. The special issue presents five selected case studies – focusing on the contexts of transplantation, psychiatry, amputation and war, and a transvalued media ecology of cancer – to offer meditations on a number of interlinked questions. The first of these is the entanglement of biomedical governance – political/economic as well as self-disciplinary – with the nexus of estrangement, which can denote both the distancing of otherness and self-division. Second is the realm of feeling, of phantasmatic projection and of the ways in which the biopolitical becomes reciprocally, discursively, enmeshed in a wider cultural imaginary. Third is the shifting terrain of gender and feminist politics, a key dimension of which is the necessary reworking of feminist thought in the wake of a radically altered biomedical and biotechnological landscape. Under the rubric of Estranged Bodies, the collection considers themes of dissolution and the fragility of the body/subject read through bodily catastrophe, radical body modification and extreme medical intervention. Also considered is the notion of assemblage – the provisional coming together of disparate parts – which encourages a rethinking of questions of reconstituted, displaced and re-placed bodies.

All Het up! Rescuing Heterosexuality on the Oprah Winfrey Show

The Oprah Winfrey Show provides an interesting set of contradictions. On the one hand, it appears to challenge common-sense assumptions about relationships, specifically heterosexual relationships (for example, by consistently raising issues of sexual violence within a heterosexual context). Yet, at the same time, Oprahs presentation often works to reinforce precisely the norms she seeks to challenge. Through a close analysis of a selection of programme clips from one particular programme among many about relationships, sexuality and families, this article will consider the ways in which the Oprah Winfrey Show both problematizes and yet normalizes the boundaries of heterosexuality. Here we shall discuss both the resolute exposure and exploration of what could be termed the casualities of normative (and compulsory) heterosexuality and, paradoxically, its recuperation as a ‘rational’ ideal. In exploring the ways in which this recuperation takes place, we shall begin with a brief consideration of two of the key discourses which shape the show: the discourse of therapy and that of kinship. Our analysis of the sexual politics of the Oprah Winfrey Show in these terms will focus on the programme, ‘How to Make Love Last’ (18 January 1993). Like so many other programmes, ‘How to Make Love Last’ intends to highlight and deal with problems within heterosexual relationships as distressing but solvable (through the medium of therapeutic self-help). At another level, however, the programme also (unwittingly) reveals a different order of problems which, ironically, can only be reinforced by the mode of rescue proposed and staged.

Research in progress: A report on policies of access to aid as a medical treatment in the U.K.

Abstract This paper is the first research report of a comprehensive study of AID as a medical treatment in the U.K. It examines the policies that determine who is able to receive AID when it is administered by doctors in medical clinics. Findings from the survey upon which this report is based indicate that AID treatment is administered under highly discriminatory policies. Womens access to treatment is restricted according to marital status, sexual preference, disability and costs. By operating under restrictive policies, doctors discretion and medical jurisdiction extends beyond the immediate concerns of the health of patients and into the realm of social control.