STS 208
Designer Genes Spring 2022
Division II Writing Skills Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed STS 208 / AMST 206 / WGSS 208 / ENGL 208
This is not the current course catalog

In this course, we explore cultural texts that attempt to come to terms with–or exploit–the revolution in contemporary genetics with a particular focus on gender, race, class, and sexuality. The mapping of the human genome in 2001 opened incredible opportunities for medicine, law, and society, but it also, as Alice Wexler has written, “opened a vast arena for contests of power over what it means to be human, who has the power to define what is normal, [and] who has access to what resources and when.” Wexler was writing before the final sequencing of the human genome. Now we have CRISPR technology, ushering in a new, more pressing set of ethical concerns. We are currently in the midst of a “global race to genetically modify humans,” as the anthropologist Eben Kirksey has documented in his new book The Mutant Project. How will we come to define the human? Who gets to decide? Our writers and filmmakers make clear that genetic medicine cannot be thought apart from a profit-driven American health care system or family and gender dynamics. Joanna Rudnick’s documentary In the Family, for instance, explores the personal and political issues associated with hereditary breast cancer and the patenting of genes. Octavia Butler’s Afro-futurist novel Dawn explores black female sexuality, reproduction, and the survival of the species in her character’s encounter with a genetically enhanced alien species. The film Gattaca shows us a fully realized dystopian society where genetically modified humans are the norm–a society that now “has discrimination down to a science.” The transgender artist Tamara Pertamina, on the other hand, “hopes to decolonize the science of genetic engineering,” as Kirksey has written, with her performance artist projects. Our texts come from a number of different genres, including the memoir, science fiction, film, documentary, art, and non-fiction writing at the intersections of science, medicine, philosophy, anthropology, and law.