Postmodern Encounter Series -- Haraway and Genetically Modified Food

Author: (English) George Melson / Li Jianhui / Su Zhan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: This book is an excellent introductory read. The claims and soul-searching questions presented in it are not only representative of Haraway's voice but also the voice of the book's authors, George Melson. Even if you are not concerned with what Haraway has to say, as long as this book gives you a new perspective on genetically modified foods and the post-postmodern entities that follow, it has achieved its purpose. Genetically modified food is a globally debated topic. Since the mid-1990s, the crisis and fear surrounding genes have dominated media, politics, and ethics. The reasons for the rise in panic are obvious. Genetically modified foods disrupt the purity of natural zoning. Connecting the gene of money to the gene of a tomato violates the boundaries between species. And this will be a fatal step toward the eugenics project of producing hybrid Frankenstein monsters for humanity. Donna Haraway, a leading international authority in the field of science and technology studies and the author of the radical cyborg, analyzes the genetic debate ranging from the preservation tomato to the lab rats programmed with cancer—the cancerous mouse. She poses difficult questions, guiding us beyond the rigid attitudes of fervor and protest into the ambiguous and unstable territory of the cyborg—the new being stitched together that eliminates the pre-existing categories of human and non-human. George Melson takes us on a wide-ranging journey of debate, from Greenpeace and Monsanto to genetics, supercapitalism, the World Wide Web, and the dawn of the 21st-century man.