Overview

Embryo adoptions, stem cells capable of transforming into any cell in the human body, intra- and inter-species organ transplantation - these and other biomedical advances have unsettled ideas of what it means to be human, of growth and aging, of when life begins and ends. Susan Squier argues that fiction - particularly science fiction - serves as a space where worries about ethically and socially charged scientific procedures are worked through; in many instances science fiction anticipates and paves the way for biomedical changes. Squier uses the anthropological concept of liminality - of physical entities or moments of time on threshold of change, not quite one thing but not yet another - to explore how, from the early twentieth century forward, fiction and science together have altered the concept of the human being. Squier explains her methodology for highlighting the connections between literature and science by providing brief histories of the development of two fields - literary criticism and feminist science studies. Drawing on archival materials of twentieth-century biology and little-known works of science fiction, she examines a number of biomedical changes as each was portrayed by scientists, social scientists, and authors of fiction and poetry. Among the scientific developments she considers are the cultured cell, the hybrid embryo, the engineered intrauterine foetus, organ transplants, and the artificially rejuvenated elderly person. Squier shows that in the midst of new entities such as these, literature plays a crucial role: It helps us explore the implications of the newly engineered human lifespan for our relations with each other, with other species, and with the earth. It allows us to reflect on the plots, possibilities, and perils of our liminal lives.

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Reviews

Susan Squier's Liminal Lives is compelling, timely, imaginative, and wonderfully provocative. Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form

Liminal Lives offers very strong and important theoretical insights into relationships between scientific knowledge and practice and literary production. Its innovative methodology creates possibilities for better communication and exchange between scientific, literary, and social scientific knowledge in a way that will be very useful to others interested in interdisciplinary science studies. -Catherine Waldby, author of AIDS and The Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference A brilliant and provocative exploration of how biomedicine and literature, particularly science fiction, are together reconfiguring the very shape of the entire life span, producing adoptable embryos, giant babies, interspecies pregnancies, and regenerated old bodies-all in the context of a new and grim bio-economy in which hearts and kidneys are for sale and earrings are fabricated out of fetal remains. -Kathleen Woodward, author of Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions Susan Merrill Squier's Liminal Lives is compelling, timely, imaginative, and wonderfully provocative. -Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form

Author Information

Susan Merrill Squier is Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English at The Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology; editor of Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (published by Duke University Press); and coeditor of Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction and Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation. She is past president and Executive Board Member of the Society for Literature and Science.

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