Paternity - The Elusive Quest for the Father (Hardcover)

"In this rigorous and beautifully researched volume, Milanich considers the tension between social and biological definitions of fatherhood, and shows how much we still have to learn about what constitutes a father." -Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity For most of human history, the notion that paternity was uncertain appeared to be an immutable law of nature. The unknown father provided entertaining plotlines from Shakespeare to the Victorian novelists and lay at the heart of inheritance and child support disputes. But in the 1920s new scientific advances promised to solve the mystery of paternity once and for all. The stakes were high: fatherhood has always been a public relationship as well as a private one. It confers not only patrimony and legitimacy but also a name, nationality, and identity. The new science of paternity, with methods such as blood typing, fingerprinting, and facial analysis, would bring clarity to the conundrum of fatherhood-or so it appeared. Suddenly, it would be possible to establish family relationships, expose adulterous affairs, locate errant fathers, unravel baby mix-ups, and discover one's true race and ethnicity. Tracing the scientific quest for the father up to the present, with the advent of seemingly foolproof DNA analysis, Nara Milanich shows that the effort to establish biological truth has not ended the quest for the father. Rather, scientific certainty has revealed the fundamentally social, cultural, and political nature of paternity. As Paternity shows, in the age of modern genetics the answer to the question "Who's your father?" remains as complicated as ever.

General

Imprint:	Harvard University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	June 2019
Authors:	Nara B. Milanich
Dimensions:	235 x 156 x 28mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Cloth over boards
Pages:	360
ISBN-13:	978-0-674-98068-6
Categories:	Books > Medicine > Pre-clinical medicine: basic sciences > Medical genetics Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > Philosophy of science Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gender studies > General Books > Health, Home & Family > Family & health > Family & other relationships > General Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > General Books > History > World history > From 1900 > General
LSN:	0-674-98068-9
Barcode:	9780674980686

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