A groundbreaking exploration of biocitizenship Citizenship has a long, complex relationship with the body. In recent years, developments in biomedicine and biotechnology, as well as a number of political initiatives, grassroots efforts, and public policies have given rise to new ways in which bodies shape the idea and practices of citizenship, or what has been called “biocitizenship.� This book, the first collection of essays on the topic of biocitizenship, aims to examine biocitizenship as a mode of political action and expand readers’ understanding of biopolitics. Organized into four distinct sections covering topics including AIDS, drug testing on the mentally ill, and force-feeding prisoners, Biocitizenship delves deep into the relationship between private and public identity, politics, and power. Composed of pieces by leading scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, Biocitizenship offers a clear and comprehensive discussion on biocitizenship, biopolitics, and groups that may be affected by this ever-growing dialogue. Authors address issues familiar to biopolitics scholarship such as gender, sexuality, class, race, and immigration, but also consider unique objects of study, such as incubators, dead bodies, and corporations. Biocitizenship seeks to question who may count as a biological citizen and for what reasons, an essential topic in an age in which the body and its health provide the conditions necessary for political recognition and agency.

This book examines the question of what we mean when we talk about life, revealing new insights into what life is, what it does, and why it matters. Jenell Johnson studies arguments on behalf of life—not just of the human or animal variety, but all life. She considers, for example, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s fight for water, deep ecologists’ Earth First! activism, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and astrophysicists’ positions on Martian microbes. What she reveals is that this advocacy—vital advocacy—expands our view of what counts as life and shows us what it would mean for the moral standing of human life to be extended to life itself. Including short interviews with celebrated ecological writer Dorion Sagan, former NASA Planetary Protection Officer Catharine Conley, and leading figure in Indigenous and environmental studies Kyle Whyte, Every Living Thing provides a capacious view of life in the natural world. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in biodiversity, bioethics, and the environment.

A groundbreaking exploration of biocitizenship Citizenship has a long, complex relationship with the body. In recent years, developments in biomedicine and biotechnology, as well as a number of political initiatives, grassroots efforts, and public policies have given rise to new ways in which bodies shape the idea and practices of citizenship, or what has been called "biocitizenship." This book, the first collection of essays on the topic of biocitizenship, aims to examine biocitizenship as a mode of political action and expand readers' understanding of biopolitics. Organized into four distinct sections covering topics including AIDS, drug testing on the mentally ill, and force-feeding prisoners, Biocitizenship delves deep into the relationship between private and public identity, politics, and power. Composed of pieces by leading scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, Biocitizenship offers a clear and comprehensive discussion on biocitizenship, biopolitics, and groups that may be affected by this ever-growing dialogue. Authors address issues familiar to biopolitics scholarship such as gender, sexuality, class, race, and immigration, but also consider unique objects of study, such as incubators, dead bodies, and corporations. Biocitizenship seeks to question who may count as a biological citizen and for what reasons, an essential topic in an age in which the body and its health provide the conditions necessary for political recognition and agency.

This comics anthology delves deeply into the messy and often taboo subject of human reproduction. Featuring work by luminaries such as Carol Tyler, Alison Bechdel, and Joyce Farmer, Graphic Reproduction is an illustrated challenge to dominant cultural narratives about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. The comics here expose the contradictions, complexities, and confluences around diverse individual experiences of the entire reproductive process, from trying to conceive to child loss and childbirth. Jenell Johnson's introduction situates comics about reproduction within the growing field of graphic medicine and reveals how they provide a discursive forum in which concepts can be explored and presented as uncertainties rather than as part of a prescribed or expected narrative. Through comics such as Lyn Chevley's groundbreaking "Abortion Eve," Bethany Doane's "Pushing Back: A Home Birth Story," Leah Hayes's "Not Funny Ha-Ha," and "Losing Thomas & Ella: A Father's Story," by Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower, the collection explores a myriad of reproductive experiences and perspectives. The result is a provocative, multifaceted portrait of one of the most basic and complicated of all human experiences, one that can be hilarious and heartbreaking. Featuring work by well-known comics artists as well as exciting new voices, this incisive collection is an important and timely resource for understanding how reproduction intersects with sociocultural issues. The afterword and a section of discussion exercises and questions make it a perfect teaching tool.

This book examines the question of what we mean when we talk about life, revealing new insights into what life is, what it does, and why it matters. Jenell Johnson studies arguments on behalf of life-not just of the human or animal variety, but all life. She considers, for example, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's fight for water, deep ecologists' Earth First! activism, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and astrophysicists' positions on Martian microbes. What she reveals is that this advocacy-vital advocacy-expands our view of what counts as life and shows us what it would mean for the moral standing of human life to be extended to life itself. Including short interviews with celebrated ecological writer Dorion Sagan, former NASA Planetary Protection Officer Catharine Conley, and leading figure in Indigenous and environmental studies Kyle Whyte, Every Living Thing provides a capacious view of life in the natural world. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in biodiversity, bioethics, and the environment.

In 1935, lobotomy, one of the most infamous procedures in the history of medicine, was heralded as a "miracle cure" by newspapers and magazines, as they hoped that this "soul surgery" would empty the nation's perennially blighted asylums. But the practice soon fell from favor, as the operation became characterized as a cruel practice with suspiciously authoritarian overtones. Only twenty years after the first operation, lobotomists once praised for "therapeutic courage" were condemned for their barbarity. American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History studies representations of lobotomy in a wide variety of cultural texts to offer a rhetorical and cultural history of the infamous procedure and its continued effect on American medicine. Author Jenell Johnson has uncovered previously discarded texts including science fiction, horror films, political polemics, and conspiracy theories that illustrate lobotomy's entanglement with social and political narratives and how they contributed to a powerful image of the operation that persists to this day. In a provocative challenge to the history of medicine, American Lobotomy argues that lobotomy's rhetorical history is crucial to understanding lobotomy's medical history, offering a case study of how medicine accumulates meaning as it circulates in public culture, and it stands as an argument for the need to understand biomedicine as a culturally situated practice.