A note on this article.[1]

Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form—so familiar and important in the West—of preaching .... [W]e might wonder how it is possible that the lyricism and religiosity that have long accompanied the revolutionary project have, in Western industrial societies, been largely carried over to sex.[2]

Belief in the body is more fundamental than belief in the soul.[3]

What happens to Michel Foucault's contention that the soul is the prison of the body[4] when sexuality gets routed not through confession but through molecular biology and the so-called 'revolution in genetic medicine?'[5] How does the market in knowledge-products and services that this revolution has helped produce change expectations regarding the body and its truths? To address these questions, I will first sketch the current situation in molecular medicine and explore the ways it has made biology conditional, thereby linking body and soul in non-linear and non-reductionistic ways (Section One). I will then investigate why 'the genetic revolution'—despite this change—so relentlessly re-inscribes such conventional relations toward belonging and intimacy, sexuality and even life itself (Section Two).

Underpinning this analysis of molecular medicine and the expectations it engenders regarding the body and sexuality is my elaboration of Foucault's understanding of secularism as in-depth Christianization.[6] The idea behind talk of a "Christian secular" is that secularism in the West is "neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it ... nor a simple break from it."[7] Instead, religiosity and the secular co-constitute one another. Nowhere is this tangled co-constitution of religion and the secular more clear than in medicine, whose vocabularies and techniques helped form the very concept of secular society in the West during the eighteenth century.[8] Medicine provided crucial justification for secular governance: in the secular, the only truly moral response to pain was to strive to end it; not to inflict it (as has religion), not to justify it (religion as the opiate of the masses)—not even to palliate it (in the other sense of an opiate), but to meet pain head-on without metaphor. In this way, secular disciplines like clinical medicine framed their knowledge as motivated by this secular (because rational) desire to end cruelties.[9] Yet despite medicine's use of this legitimation narrative to assert its status as empirical science, in Section One I will also show how physicians relied on and even strengthened religious sensibilities regarding sexuality and shame.

'Sexuality,' of course, is a contested concept. Elaborating on Foucault, I understand 'sexuality' as a dispositive or apparatus that (starting roughly in the mid-nineteenth century) draws together under one name disparate experiences, which include but are not limited to: reproduction and ancestry; eroticism, romance (which differs from eroticism due to the salience of gender roles), and affective intimacy; moral/religious taboos, injunctions, and behaviors; bodily sensibilities, especially regarding time and futurity; legal forms, institutions, and codes; as well as a series of biological components involving genetics, hormones, and anatomy as well as the scientific discourses, practices, and institutions that study them.[10] Different medical paradigms foreground different dimensions of this dispositive, thereby bundling body, soul, and fate into 'sexuality' in different ways.

Today, we are witnessing a new twist in how religion and the secular co-constitute one another. As before, nowhere is this twist more clear than in molecular medicine. 'Sexuality' is still key to the molecular body—but differently, insofar as the molecular body develops logics of variation without norm that proliferate individual differences. Yet despite this freedom from traditional notions of 'norm' and thus from the shame that medical norms engender, in Section Two I will also show how molecular medicine curtails and contains these radical possibilities by foregrounding the domestic family as the primary point of access and production of this de-standardizing body. Molecular medicine realizes its dream of tapping directly into the forces of life itself by backgrounding reproduction and stigmatized forms of identity in favor of foregrounding the lyrical and allegedly liberating discourses and practices of romantic love. Thus while molecular medicine still tells sexual sermons (as did eighteenth century sexology), its preaching works not by implanting shame or stigma, but rather by inciting us to invest in the possibility of future growth, not in spite of uncertainty but because of it.

Section One
The Non-linearity of Molecular Biology: Shame and Death in the Body of the Clinic

To see how the body, sexuality and the 'soul' are being reconfigured in molecular medicine, it might help to recall an earlier moment when critics like Barbara Katz Rothman denounced the Human Genome Project (HGP) for claiming that: "Genetics is the single best explanation, the most comprehensive theory since God. Whatever the question is, genetics is the answer. Every possible issue of our time—race and racism, addictions, war, cancer, sexuality—all of it has been placed in the genetics frame."[11] While Rothman captured the lyrical excess surrounding the explanatory power of molecules, the successful sequencing of the human genome exploded any residual belief in DNA as a form of transcendent writing that could anchor "the Central Dogma" (according to which genetic information flows only one way, from DNA via RNA to a protein). As a result of this 'new' sequence information, the link between soul and body—between the sexuality 'we' moderns embrace as our deepest identity and its biological truth—can no longer be imagined through Rothman's unidirectional image of the soul moving lock, stock, and cultural baggage into the genes.

Past the initial enthusiasm over genetic information, molecular biologists found that coding sequences for protein could be as low as 20,000 (between 100,000 and 300,000 genes had been expected). This made it clear that the 'information' necessary for genes to 'build a body' depends on more than the structure/code of DNA. The 'secret of life' cannot be written with building blocks alone. At the very least it requires plotlines: regulatory mechanisms which connect genes with other genes, and which determine when and where particular genes get expressed (in the sense of giving rise to a functional product like a protein).[12] Incorporating these plotlines entails re-imagining causal relations as non-linear and non-deterministic.[13]

The birth of Dolly, the first 'cloned' sheep, deconstructed another biological absolute. Dolly was made by using the cytoplasm of an egg (from one sheep) to re-program the DNA of specialized adult somatic cells (from another sheep), so that the latter 'de-differentiated' into reproductive cells. If the modernist view saw biology as "subject to conditions, which can be deciphered and understood," the 'Dolly technique' makes biology itself conditional. "What the biological is has become inextricable from what the biological does or can be made to do."[14] Capacities presumed lost can be re-activated. Genes can be re-programmed, their meaning determined flexibly by context.[15] As Ian Wilmut (one of Dolly's creators/breeders) puts it, "Dolly has taken us into the age of biological control."[16]

So while the metaphor of the genome as transcendent writing can no longer be taken literally, problematizing genetics as a project of somatic (re)engineering still privileges relations of control. This control is situational: distributed across space (beginning with the cell) and time (re-capacitation). Causality and information are thought to emerge (rather than pre-existing the processes they 'direct' on the model of God in-forming matter).[17] Yet research still privileges molecular pathways.[18] The focus remains on heredity, even when social inequalities exert greater impact on biological processes. The reasons for such privileging are too complex to explore here. My point is simply that while the 'new' sequence information has demoted the gene from answer to tool, it has not cut off the head of this king. 'The gene' operates as an expansive cultural icon precisely because so much can be done to and with it.[19] As Sarah Franklin contends, 'biological life' and 'control' are increasingly being perceived as inextricable (2007).[20] It is this perception of inextricability that informs what (following Foucault) I will refer to as the 'sexual sermons' that today give meaning to people's everyday lives.

I highlight the term 'perception' to echo Foucault's analysis of the birth of modern clinical medicine. In that analysis Foucault traced the emergence of the anatomical body—how we came to imagine the interiors of our bodies through (and as) an anatomical atlas—as a shift in the medical gaze. This epistemic shift, which arose out of the practice of autopsy, was enabled in complex ways by the French Revolution. Revolutionary dreams of freedom infused modern medical science from its inception.[21] If we want to understand the pull of the contemporary sermons that call us to steward sexuality in its somatic truth, it helps to turn to this earlier moment: there we see that clinical medicine helped shape modern secular society in no small part by virtue of enacting complex relations to religiosity.

Foucault's account of the birth of modern clinical medicine zeroes in on its professed empiricism, its claim to have released disease "from the metaphysic of evil" in favor of locating it for the first time in the messy, three-dimensional space of individual bodies. Rather than seeing disease as a foreign substance, clinical medicine saw disease as an error inherent in life, the (normal) wear and tear in tissues that degenerate by nature. Death became relativized, distributed "throughout life in the form of separate, partial, progressive deaths" in heart, lungs, brain.[22] But death was also elevated into "the absolute point of view over life"; the "opening ... on life's truth."[23] This opening was both technical (autopsy) and epistemological. Before the advent of pathological anatomy, doctors asked: "What is wrong with you?" Every symptom was a potential sign that spoke the nature of the disease; the physician's task was to "read and interpret their text."[24] In contrast, doctors in the clinic asked: "Where does it hurt?" Pathological anatomy defined the body by death as the "deeply buried point" that silently commands the existence of life and disease from below as their hidden truth.[25]

This view of disease authorized experimental techniques "to question the body in its organic density, and to bring to the surface what was only given in deep layers."[26] The deployment of death in autopsy as a technical instrument transformed the gaze of "these men who watch over men's lives" by structuring their articulations around an invisible visibility: "it is no longer that of a living eye, but the gaze of an eye that has seen death—a great white eye that unties the knot of life."[27] In the words of Bichat, the aim of anatomists "is attained when the opaque envelopes that cover our parts are no more for their practiced eyes than a transparent veil."[28]

If under the old regime, doctors saw patients in their clothing and even treated by mail[29], the clinic increased closeness. Foucault argued, "For thousands of years, after all, doctors had tested patients' urine. Later, they began to touch, tap, listen. Was this the result of the raising of moral prohibitions by the Enlightenment? To the contrary!"[30] As evidence he pointed to the forty year gap between Morgagni's development of dissection techniques and their deployment in clinical care by Bichat. Foucault contended that the "anatomical church militant and suffering" (whose superstitions physicians blamed for blocking dissection) was invented for the benefits it gave those speaking against religious taboos prohibiting the violation of a body which had been created (and was therefore ultimately owned) by God.[31] If it was immoral for a man to place his ear on a woman's breast, but a doctor must, then invoking religious sensibilities regarding sexuality authorized a deeper penetration into the body: witness the stethoscope. "The moral screen, the need for which was recognized, was to become a technical mediation. The libido sciendi, strengthened by the prohibition that it had aroused and discovered, circumvents it by making it more imperious .... [T]he prohibition of physical contact makes it possible to fix the virtual image of what is occurring well below the visible area. For the hidden, the distance of shame is a projection screen. What one cannot see is shown in the distance from what one must not see."[32] In this way, there developed a sense of bodily interiority: our 'insides' belong not to ourselves, but to our physician, who is there 'by right.'

Foucault generalized these claims in The Order of Things. There he contended that the key characteristic of the modern episteme was its attempt to see through the visible into its depth: to know something was to comprehend its genesis in time. If natural history understood living beings taxonomically through genus and species, then modern biology became possible as scientists sought to understand living beings through organic function (gills are to respiration in water as lungs are to respiration in air). In contrast to the synchronic tables of natural history which took the plant as their central image, "when characters and structures are arranged in vertical steps towards life—that sovereign vanishing point, indefinitely distant but constituent—then it is the animal that becomes the privileged form."[33]

Animalizing the tree of descent re-valued key values. Nature could no longer be good. Life could not be separated from murder, nor desires from anti-nature. In short, the world is not governed by divine providence. Hence Foucault repeatedly points to Sade as the contemporary of Cuvier: "for knowledge, the being of things is an illusion, a veil that must be torn aside in order to reveal the mute and invisible violence that is devouring them in the darkness."[34]

Acquiring such a "great white eye" authorized interventions that were not only epistemic and technical, but also social.[35] Historian Thomas Laqueur reads the scientific discourse of the clinic as one of several kinds of humanitarian narratives in circulation at this time: parliamentary committees inquiring into mining deaths; the novel; slave narratives; evangelical accounts of "hearts strangely warmed." While diverse, these genres shared an affective strategy: all amassed concrete details of particular forms of physical suffering to construct a sense of shared bodily/organic nature which they then used to authorize both the professions and their social intervention. Laqueur writes:

In sharp contrast to tragedy, in which we feel for the suffering of the protagonist precisely because it is universal and beyond hope—there is no invitation, or possibility, to do anything to prevent Macbeth's misdeeds or their consequences—the humanitarian narrative describes particular suffering and offers a model for precise social action.[36]

However, the scientific rejection of religious resignation in favor of the salvation offered by empirical facts was not, in fact, born as an escape from authoritarian forms of religious "tutelage."[37] Foucault presents the birth of modern empirical knowledge as part of a multi-layered set of historical processes of intensification, which he dubbed "Christianization in depth."[38][39] Unique relations of pastoral power emerged in Catholicism (confession and spiritual direction), and later in Protestantism (testimony and autobiography). As ecclesiastical institutions declined, these religious technologies mutated and "spread out into the whole social body."[40] Foucault analyzed their spread and intensification along two lines: first, as a technology of examination featuring an individualizing tactic common to medicine, psychiatry, education, and employers[41]; and second as technologies of governmentality that became increasingly concerned with population.[42]

Linking these two lines was a strategy of knowledge-power whose truth value—in the twinned sense of scientificity and social legitimation—entailed overtly rejecting religion while strengthening religious and moral sensibilities. Sometimes these sensibilities were explicitly evoked. Other times their evocation was indirect (as when religious sensibilities were strengthened to obtain the benefit of speaking against them). The human body was a privileged site for enacting this twofold gesture of rejecting, while reproducing, religious sensibilities. Thus the human body has become enrolled in producing 'the secular' as a Christian secularism.[43]

The co-constitution of religion and the scientific secular goes well beyond logical indebtedness. It entangles us in a history that we have by no means left in the past; it continues to affect the reconfiguration of the body, sexuality, and soul that is currently at play in neo-liberal reforms of governance and economy. While the body in question for neoliberalism is no longer that of pathological anatomy, the human body nevertheless remains a privileged site for 'secular' re-workings of material relations. "[H]ealth has become a site of experimentation for the 'new capitalism' and its fascination with the promissory value that speculation generates" (according to pharmaceutical industry insider Philippe Pignarre).[44] As Melinda Cooper explains: "If we recall that the peculiarity of the welfare state was to guarantee both the productive life of the nation and its 'unproductive' phases (childhood and old age, the beginning and end of life), in an effort to underwrite the entire life cycle, it becomes clear that the neo-liberal state demarcates itself precisely by withdrawing from the extremes of childhood (education, child care, child protection) and old age."[45] The rationale for state withdrawal from these extremes of life is to render these non-productive stages of life productive by entrusting them to the free creativity of the private sphere—both private business and the private family. Consider how managed care opened up the non-profit sector of health care to private companies. Or consider how Reagan shifted old age insurance away from defined benefit plans to defined contribution, individual plans that speculated in the stock market. Writes Cooper:

The so-called new economic growth of the late 1990s—characterized by a spectacular rise of digital and life science technologies in the U.S.—would not have been possible without th[is] speculative investment .... It is no coincidence that these funds were attracted to the emerging field of regenerative medicine ....[46]

The growth of biotech was also enabled by legal instruments that re-defined intellectual property to allow for the private ownership of natural entities (formerly excluded from patent law). While 'the human person' has remained uncommodifiable, and in that sense sacrosanct, biotech focuses on capturing the generative capacities of the body before they take on determinate form and thereby fall into the domain of the uncommodifiable potential person. In this way, 'life itself' became enterprised up as "a source of speculative surplus value."[47] These legal reforms facilitated the opening of a new space of production, one that seeks to re-enliven that which had formerly been perceived as waste. Yet as biotech start-ups demonstrate, what matters most to this process of enlivening is less the tangible goods produced and more the speculative promise of future profit (based on present-day intellectual property rights to biological processes and methods that might one day generate actual goods and services).[48]

In keeping with neoliberalism's attempt to render productive life's capacity for future capacity, the molecular body is no longer perceived in terms of the amoral violence of nature or the lyrical interiority of death and shame. Rather than being held together by linear logics of identity and history that foreground shame and death, new ways of bundling body/soul/fate into sexuality are being made and folded back into the biological body and the humanitarian narratives that proliferate around it. Memory is still key, but molecular memories are not backward looking but forward pulling. It is to these new ways of bundling body, soul, and fate that I will now turn.

Section Two
Molecular Shifts of Fate and the Romance of Gender: Desire and Duty in the Molecular Body

It can at first seem counter-intuitive to claim that genetics positions us vis-à-vis the biological body through different relations than the shame and death that characterized the modern clinic. Physicians speak of genetic errors as 'lesions,' much as doctors in the modern clinic looked for lesions on tissues. The gene has been stubbornly imagined in scriptural terms (although scientists disconfirmed the accuracy of images like 'information,' 'language,' 'code,' and 'text' in the 1950s).[49][50] The dream of mapping the dark continent of the body's submicroscopic interiors was crucial to enabling the massive computer sequencing required for the HGP to be cast as the next step in American Manifest Destiny and thus to be funded by Congress.[51]

Yet these lines of continuity unfold within a different horizon. The project of molecular biology was never imagined as tearing aside the visible body to uncover the mute violence devouring us in our inner darkness. Idealizing molecular biology as the science of life that could resurrect something good out of WWII helped crystallize a new origin story for a genetics anxious to reject eugenics. Explicitly distinguished from nuclear physics (epitomized by Oppenheimer quoting Krishna: "I have become death, the destroyer of worlds"), molecular biology was promoted as an essential tool in the Cold War arsenal that could provide solutions to the dangers spawned by atomic radiation and later by the population bomb.[52]

More generally, this dream of life and its boundless productivity also animated the post-Fordist economy more generally. The thought was that unleashing the creativity of scientific minds could enable Western societies to escape death and waste—the very limits of industrial production. Cooper points to economists in the 1970s who began to argue that Fordist economies would necessarily decline due to finite resources and aging populations. At the same time, big pharma began to face the end of its patents on the miracle drugs of the mid-century, while chemical industries began to face the eclipse of the Green Revolution in agriculture. In response to this conjuncture, Post-Fordist regimes emerged. Tracing a "tight institutional alliance" between "epistemic, experimental, and commercial modes of speculation," Cooper contends that the model for these new or post-Fordist modes of accumulation is the generation of surplus value from life's capacity for future capacity.[53] She writes: "the biotechnological solution to economic limits seems to encapsulate the speculative euphoria of revalorization at the most intimate of material levels."[54] Such regimes promise to render even debt productive, both the colossal debt of the United States as well as the expanded sense of debt to life that characterizes much public discourse around the genome.[55]

While degeneration and disease remain a concern in molecular medicine, the wear and tear of tissues is no longer taken as the last word on organic life. Nor is in-depth knowledge of a thing's history taken to constitute what it means to know. No longer the amoral nature of animals, biological life becomes a matter of forces on whose surface effects calculated transformations can take hold, re-working even time. Hence knowledge that focuses on the hopes and risks of biological control dreams less of prevention (although fears are invoked) and more of pre-emptive optimization. Knowledge-power relations here aim less to discipline than to arouse and to facilitate, to allow natural processes to do their thing on one level of development, so as to produce a desired effect on another level of development.[56] Today 'we' dream that reading the digital Book of Life will enable us to tap the forces of life directly.

Consider how private umbilical cord banks use the fact that different parts of the body wear out at different rates to promote themselves as biological insurance: "You miss the chance if you decide to throw out the cord blood," says one lab director.[57] Here 'waste' generates value. According to Waldby and Mitchell, private cord blood accounts provide a new relation to tissues: neither gifts (blood banks) nor commodities but family property that pre-empts claims by others even as it doubles biological time. The account holder's body ages while the preserved tissue retains the capacity to recreate the blood system should need arise.[58][59]

One does not extract value from this kind of family property by learning to relate to oneself as a being "inhabited by a deep internal space shaped by biography and experience, the source of our individuality and the locus of our discontents."[60] Rather than hinging on confession, producing value out of life's capacity for future capacity hinges on manipulating the molecular memories that link soul to body through a fate that 'flattens' identity into temporal networks.[61] This flattening authorizes different expectations (than seeing through the visible body into its invisible depths). The perception that biological life and human control are inextricable generates the expectation that 'we' can touch life's nascent forces of (re)generation by means of targeted interventions so 'small' they become 'smart.' 'We' dream not merely of using biology as raw material, but of directly shaping the biological body's capacity for future capacity.

The hopes and risks of smart touch are grafted onto the flatness of molecular mechanisms most often through a rhetoric of impersonality that re-animates the scientific secular by updating Foucault's 'speaker's benefit.' Consider its articulation around race. If the twentieth century was the century of the gene[62] and the color line[63], twenty-first century science asserts the hope of 'biological control' by promising that accessing molecular pathways will free us from the social shame of racial disparities (now deemed merely cultural).[64] The hope here is that medical professionals will see sickle cell disease, for instance, as a matter of genetic mis-codings and thus resist any racial stereotypes that arise when confronted with young African-American men in an emergency room asking for narcotics. Rather than refusing to treat 'the whole patient,' evidence-based medicine claims that focusing solely on molecules can short-circuit prejudices. A similar hope undergirds support for medications like BiDil (the first heart medicine marketed to African-Americans). Supporters contend that we can circumvent the cultural causes of racial disparities in health care through protocols that use race as proxy, or (even better) that prescribe BiDil not because a patient 'looks black,' but because their blood exhibits lower levels of nitric oxide (which BiDil raises; African-Americans as a group, although not every individual African-American, have less nitric oxide in their blood).[65][66]

One might be tempted to dismiss the rhetoric surrounding the impersonality of molecules as merely the usual 'faith' that the West places in the scientific method. This dismissal—while mistaken—involves a claim that is, I think, true: contemporary medical technologies do require researchers, physicians, and consumers to inhabit different relations toward the body than the modernist relations of abnormality and pathology.[67] Take a non-molecular example: the very different way we regard surgeries which break the skin and surgeries like video endoscopy (which insert a small video camera attached to a television cable into the body). When the body is cut open, its interiors are personal; it is shaming to see it and health care professionals go to great lengths to ensure that patients do not see their own insides. In the words of surgeon Richard Seltzer, when a patient glimpses their own viscera in the surface of the operating lamp, "I quickly bend over his opened body to shield it from his view ... I am no longer a surgeon but a hierophant."[68] In contrast, when there is no (or minimal) cutting of skin, affective relations change. The patient often watches the video screen along with the doctor. According to Jose van Dijck, such surgeries are more routinely shown on European public TV. These changes lead van Dijck to suggest that, "[t]he once-private inner body" (produced through the strengthening of religio-moral sensibilities regarding sexuality and shame) is being transformed "into a public sight-seeing space" whose visibility via technology entails no shame.[69]

If van Dijck is right, this is a huge change in how we inhabit certain dimensions of our body. (I say 'certain' because the molecular body over-layers the body of pathological anatomy; it does not simply replace it). These changed dynamics are only amplified as medicine targets molecules through a touch so small it becomes 'smart.' Molecular medicine shifts away from relying on and producing affects like shame and stigma in favor of inculcating an impersonal ethics of stewardship/consumption in which we are incited to take up this flattening of the body's truth by seeking to optimize its capacity for capacity. Consider anthropologist Kaja Finkler's interviews with women with breast cancer and adoptees. Finkler notes:

One might have anticipated a degree of fatalism among the sick, but curiously the ideology becomes reinterpreted in such a way that it moves people to act on the belief that to comprehend the reasons for one's affliction is to prevent it .... In the case of adoptees, the very consciousness of genetic inheritance moves them to act by searching for their birth parents.[70]

Finkler expected her interviewees to express anger or blame at family members or ancestors who might have transmitted breast cancer to them. None did. Asserting that "they could not have known," these women were more likely to see "the ideology of genetic inheritance [as] giv[ing] meaning to the randomness inherent in genetics, to the 'luck of the draw,' by supplying a reason for suffering and thereby making it more bearable."[71]

The question remains, of course, regarding how this sense of 'meaningfulness' might change if technology develops sufficiently so that family members 'could have known.' (Think of the blame heaped upon older women who decline amniocentesis and then bear a child with Down Syndrome). That said, no parent could test for every possible genetic mis-coding—there are too many. In the molecular, differential variation is the norm. In terms of the body's genetic sequences, none of us are normal, no, not one. "Most, if not all, of us suffer from molecular errors that are potentially correctable."[72] Hence critics worry that we might all see ourselves as inhabiting a 'spoiled' identity that subjects us to lifelong medical supervision. Yet even this kind of expansion of 'the sick role' would mean that medicine could no longer inhabit the modernist horizon of pathology and normality in the same way. Because genetics focuses not on deviant individuals but on molecular anomalies that are found in each one of us (at least in theory)[73], Nikolas Rose argues that clinical medicine is developing logics of variation without norm, anomaly without abnormality.[74] Such logics enable different expectations regarding the human body and its truth, and thus make possible different formations of 'personhood.'

As Paul Rabinow has commented:

Fate it will be. It will carry no depth. It makes absolutely no sense to seek the meaning of the lack of a guanine base because it has no meaning. One's relation to one's father or mother is not shrouded in the depths of discourse here; the relationship is material even if it is environmental: Did your father smoke? Did your mother take DES? Rest assured they didn't know what they were doing.[75]

But don't rest for long. The point of knowing whether you carry genetic mutations is less to understand them than to change them (if only by intervening in their expression through avoiding lifestyle triggers). While medicine is still centrally engaged in preaching sermons about sexuality, its contemporary sermons call us to live the fate of familial inheritance—an 'identity,' to use an older term—through the practice of somatic individuality: "To be a 'somatic' individual, in this sense, is to code one's hopes and fears in terms of this biomedical body, and to try to reform, cure or improve oneself by acting on that body."[76]

Molecular medicine accelerates the scientific rejection of illness as punishment for sin in favor of seeing sickness as a disease which one is not at fault for having—but which (unlike tuberculosis in the nineteenth century) is not to be embraced as the lyrical source of one's individuality either.[77] In the molecular body, even a fatal logic is not a fatalism.[78] The force of molecular twists of fate is not backward looking but forward pulling. Echoing the revolutionary language that animated the clinic's birth and extending arguments from the 1950s, today's genetics offers itself as a way to end social oppression and biological determinism. While individuals are still called to take up particular identities in the present, these 'identities' are 'taken on' as risk factors.[79] Somatic "[i]ndividuals seek to anticipate and shape 'nature' before it actually comes to pass, based on the risk that what is presently a non-event might actually occur ...."[80] Identities serve here as differential technologies by which to shift a fate that, as somatic, is not personal. In Foucauldian terms, the 'impersonality' of molecules works less through perverse implantation via notions of instinct obscurely rooted in some secret past, and more through inciting individuals to pre-empt possible futures. In a way that can at first seem quite paradoxical, fate has become more determining—but therefore also, fate has become more open to human acts of pre-emptive selection that seek to erase certain kinds of somatic risk while maximizing others.

Despite these quite considerable changes in how molecular medicine positions us to inhabit a molecular body, I contend that medicine still narrates sexual sermons whose revolutionary lyricism calls us to take up forms of sexualized personhood. That is, molecular medicine articulates its dream of smart touch by backgrounding reproduction and identity in favor of foregrounding a different dimension of 'sexuality': the domestic romance, and through it, the everyday pleasures of conventionality.

For despite the talk of DNA as 'uniquely you,' and despite the flattening of mommy-Daddy-Oedipus that molecular memories enable[81], genetic medicine insistently embeds the individual within "the background-body, the body behind the abnormal body ... the parents' body, the ancestors' body, the body of the family, the body of heredity."[82] Genetic diagnosis applies not just to the individual who goes to the doctor, but also potentially to family members. Sometimes people cannot even be diagnosed without family members donating blood to establish genetic markers. But if the family is still power's point of access to the body, its present-day power-knowledge relations proliferate the anomalous forces of a de-standardized body, and do so in order to generate promissory value from this body's capacity for future capacity. In today's clinic, it is not death (and the stigma of 'species' identity) but the intimate, domestic family that provides the obligatory passage point to knowledge about individuals as well as to citizenship.

One can see this shift in the dispositive of 'sexuality'—a shift that backgrounds both reproduction and identity in favor of foregrounding the domestic romance—in the changing status of homosexuality. In its recent Lawrence decision, the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly argued against identifying non-procreative homosexuality with death (the argument of Bowers vs. Hardwick). But Lawrence is far from protecting sexual relations as sites of dissent for the invention of unforeseen modes of life that might proliferate amid current confusions regarding normal and pathological growth.[83] Lawrence de-criminalized sodomy only in the private space of a domestic couple for whom (to quote Justice Kennedy) sex "can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring."[84] Queer sexuality can be recognized—so long as 'sexuality' is domesticated through romantic love.

More generally, I think that the molecular body is routed through the family romance. Its plotlines are those of gender. As Lauren Berlant reminds us, gender is a genre, a convention.[85] Looking at gender as by definition involved with conventions and their pleasures, can help make sense of the fact that molecular medical technologies have become sites for the relentless reinscription of the very desire for conventionality. It is through speaking to the everyday pleasures of the conventional that the narratives of molecular medicine produce the sense of an ending (which is also a beginning: for that ambiguity is key to romance).

So while it might at first seem counter-intuitive, I contend that even artificial reproductive technologies work by backgrounding reproduction in favor of routing 'sexuality' through the gendered romance. It is a common but mistaken assumption that people use artificial reproductive technologies because they want a child who is 'just like them.' In their recent ethnography of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in Britain, Franklin and Roberts argue against this assumption of geneticization. They found that most couples who opted for PGD did so not of a desire for a 'designer baby' (in the words of media stereotypes) but rather, out of "a painful and expensive sense of obligation to act responsibly."[86] They quote: "It was different with Chloe, because we didn't know we were carriers until we had her, but now we do know, and there's no way we can have two of our babies dying in the hospital, we just can't do that."[87] Such couples often see PGD as a choice that is no choice, even though PGD makes it harder to bear a child. Why then not just adopt? The people whom Franklin and Roberts interviewed spoke not of 'geneticization' but of romance: the desire to have the child of one's partner.[88] Their interviewees spoke of desire and duty—a somatic ethics whose key is 'sexuality'—albeit not as (I have said repeatedly) in the sense of reproduction or individual identity. Instead, molecular medicine deploys the dispositive of 'sexuality' through the domain of affective intimacy and familial belonging. To my mind, it is the way that molecular medicine preaches 'the domestic family' that explains why the new technologies for artificial reproduction have not troubled traditional notions of gender and family in the ways that feminist activists and scholars once thought they would.

If so, then Nikolas Rose's characterization of the ethics emerging around molecular medicine as "somatic individuality" misses a crucial dimension of how people engage with (and are engaged by) molecular medicine. Rose develops his notion of "somatic individuality" by drawing on Max Weber's argument that early modern capitalism depended on the Protestant invention of worldly asceticism. Without such a 'spirit,' what sense did continuous work that eschewed enjoyment make?[89] Arguing analogously, Rose suggests that we in today's wealthy West are enjoined to work on the vital processes of our body and minds as ends in themselves. What saves this task from being "derided as obsessive or narcissistic self-absorption," Rose contends, are forms of somatic individuality in which people take up ethical practices of somatic stewardship. Just as worldly asceticism provided the crucial 'spirit' by which people could inhabit the socio-economic relations of capitalism, so these forms of "somatic individuality" enable neoliberal societies to "accord a particular moral virtue to the search for profit through the management of life."[90]

But as I have been trying to show, the care for the 'self' that is emerging across the various sub-disciplines of molecular medicine is always already care of familial others. The key marker in this emerging somatic ethics is the dream of pre-emptive optimization of "the body behind the abnormal body, the body of the family." In short, molecular medicine is crafting a new sick role, whose contours are not well captured in Rose's notion of 'somatic individuality.'[91]

To understand the significance of this changing sick role, I want to return to Rose's model: Max Weber's analysis of early capitalism as entailing the emergence of a new spirit. The worldly asceticism that Weber thinks emerged at this time also hinged on a sexual politics. As Janet Jakobsen has written: "Luther and Calvin do not encourage those with a religious vocation to leave the monastery and convent and live alone as pure autonomous individuals. Luther and Calvin encourage them to get married, and this is because, as feminists have long pointed out, autonomous individuals do not actually exist autonomously."[92] It was sexuality disciplined through "marriage, devotion to a family, and to a calling" that freed the reformed individual "from greed, ambition, and other lusts of the flesh," putting the asceticism into this worldliness and making it as an ethic.[93] Jakobsen notes that while monks took vows of poverty and communal obedience as well as celibacy, when Calvin attacked monasticism he did not even mention the first two vows. In the re-working of material relations that was underway in the sixteenth century, "sex comes to stand in for right relation to the material world and right relation between God and community." This is the moment in the West when "undisciplined sex replaces gluttony as the sin extraordinaire."[94]

Today, sex still stands in for material relations. Its disciplines still provide support for lyrical forms of preaching and promise. In a world that dreams of rendering even waste productive, medicine's sexual sermons authorize specific expectations regarding what makes life worth living and dying for. "The problem, as I see it," remarks Veena Das, "is that once the idea of God as author of nature and time is displaced and the political body is seen as subject to death and decay, secular means have to be crafted to ensure that the sovereign receives life beyond the lifetime of individual members. Thus the state has to re-imagine its relation to the family in more complex ways than simply assigning the family to the realm of the private."[95] Contemporary molecular medicine is one site where sovereignty's relations to 'the family' are being re-imagined. Hence the importance of sexual sermons, which preach the pleasures and responsibilities of the family romance. Anthony Giddens argued this point long ago: romance is about controlling and speculating on the future.[96] Routing sexuality through 'the family' is a primary way in which Americans recognize themselves as free. Thus we see in recent political discourse the claim that Western 'tolerance' of homosexuality proves that Western civilization offers greater freedom than 'Islamic civilization.'[97] "Americans understand ourselves to be a free people," writes Jakobsen, "and part of the proof of that freedom lies in the way we pursue our sexuality."[98]

When medical science takes as its project the task of touching life itself through a touch whose intervention is so small it can become 'smart,' forms of sexualized personhood re-emerge as a privileged locus for the conduct of our conduct.[99] In an economy which aims to make everything productive—debt, waste, our capacity for future capacity—the scientific secular focuses relentlessly on the family as it engenders complex desires for ordinary life and thereby, for the pleasures and everyday intimacies of conventionality itself. Molecular medicine acts as (what Lauren Berlant calls) an intimate public: juxtaposed to the political without necessarily going there, medical discourses deploy 'sexuality' in ways that promise us freedom—especially vis-à-vis our bodily fate(s)—even as these same sexual sermons re-structure the conjunction of experiences that we call 'sexuality.' To call these discourses 'sexual sermons' is not to argue that that sexuality 'functions like' a religion.[100] It is, rather, to pinpoint particular practices through which secular expectations surrounding the body and its vitality draw force from long-standing religious sensibilities in which sexuality stands in for ethical relation to the material world. We respond to their force, believe in the body (as Nietzsche put it), whether or not we profess or practice Christianity. These historically specific forms of belief in the body constitute a crucial matrix of everyday life and experience that joins knowledge, normative actions, and technologies of self into an apparatus by which we are both governed and govern ourselves.

Endnotes

1. I want to thank Patricia Clough and Ed St Clair for their unstinting support. I also thank Angela Zito and Faye Ginsberg, directors of NYU's Center for Religion and Media, where this work first began. [Return to text]

2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. One, tr. Robert Hurley (NY: Vintage, 1978): 7-9. [Return to text]

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufman, tr. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale (New York, NY: Vintage, 1967): 271. [Return to text]

4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, tr. Alan Sheridan (NY: Vintage, 1977): 30. [Return to text]

5. This privileging of the somatic does not mean that discourse is discounted. In her analysis of websites for anti-depressants, for example, Emily Martin shows that pharmaceutical companies, which clearly privilege molecular mechanisms, also advocate traditionally discursive practices like journaling. See: Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). [Return to text]

6. Michel Foucault, Abnormal, tr. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador. 2003): 177. [Return to text]

7. "Christian secularism" reference in: Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, "World Secularisms at the Millennium," Social Text 64 18:3 (2000): 1-27. See: T. Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2003): 25. [Return to text]

8. N. Rose, "Medicine, History, and the Present," in Re-Assessing Foucault, J. Jones and R. Porter (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 1994): 54-55. [Return to text]

9. Foucault (1977): 10, 304. [Return to text]

10. As compared to: Foucault (1978), 154; See also: Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, tr. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). [Return to text]

11. B.K. Rothman, The Book of Life (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1998, 2001): 18-19 and 13. [Return to text]

12. E.F. Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000): 100. [Return to text]

13. S. Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and L. Parisi, "Biotech: Life by Contagion," Theory, Culture, & Society 24:6 (2007): 29-52. [Return to text]

14. S. Franklin, Dolly Mixtures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007): 33. [Return to text]

15. Franklin, 43-44. [Return to text]

16. Cited in: Franklin, 32. [Return to text]

17. Oyama, 1. [Return to text]

18. M. Lock, "The Eclipse of the Gene and the Return of Divination," Current Anthropology 46 (2005): 547-70. [Return to text]

19. Books analyzing the gene as cultural icon include: D. Nelkin and L. Tancredi, Dangerous Diagnostics: The Social Power of Biological Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); J. van Dijck, Imagenation (New York: New York University Press, 1989); D. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium (New York: Routledge, 1997); and J. Roof, The Poetics of DNA (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). [Return to text]

20. Wilmut seems to be thinking predominantly of human control. For an analysis that theorizes matter as congealed agency and includes non-human bodies, see: K. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke, 2007). [Return to text]

21. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1973): 199. [Return to text]

22. Foucault (1973): 144 and 142. [Return to text]

23. Foucault (1973): 155. [Return to text]

24. Foucault (1973): 162. [Return to text]

25. Foucault (1973): 158. [Return to text]

26. Foucault (1973):162. Also, compare acupuncture, which does not see the body as bounded within the skin and does not extensively theorize death. See: J. Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002): 300 and Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994). I suspect this difference is not unrelated to the way that Chinese 'religion' does not narrate the 'birth of the world/life' as a creation narrative. [Return to text]

27. Foucault (1973): 165-66 and 144. [Return to text]

28. Quoted in Foucault (1973): 166. [Return to text]

29. B. Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth Century Germany, tr. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1991). [Return to text]

30. Medievalists concur. Katharine Park's work on saints' cults demonstrates the centrality of religious practices to the development of dissection. She, too, notes that "a long historiographic tradition" wrongly presents the Church as opposed to dissection. "Like the familiar story associated with Christopher Columbus, whose courageous voyage of 1492 purportedly proved to a doubting public that the earth was round, this story has been debunked repeatedly by medievalists to no avail"—for representing the Church as hostile to dissection performs important cultural work in segregating science from religion. See K. Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone, 2006): 21. [Return to text]

31. Foucault (1973): 126. [Return to text]

32. Foucault (1973): 163, 164 and 197. [Return to text]

33. M. Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970): 277. [Return to text]

34. Foucault (1970): 278. [Return to text]

35. Foucault (1973): 144. [Return to text]

36. T. Laqueur, "Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative," in The New Cultural History, L. Hunt, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989): 178. [Return to text]

37. I. Kant, What is Enlightenment?, tr. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959): 85. [Return to text]

38. Foucault (2003): 177. [Return to text]

39. I am disputing a common reading of Foucault, which identifies his account of secularization with Weberian disenchantment. Despite the shared relation to Nietzsche that underlies the analysis of science in both thinkers, this reading misses too much. For the claim that Foucauldian history is best thought as intensification, see: J. Nealon Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007): 24-53. [Return to text]

40. M. Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1997): 335. [Return to text]

41. Ibid. [Return to text]

42. Foucault (2007). [Return to text]

43. For more on the notion of the "Christian Secular," in addition to the piece by Jakobsen and Pellegrini (2000) that I already cited, see: B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Foucault (2007): 76-9; Asad (2003); and W. D. Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). [Return to text]

44. Quoted in: M. Cooper, "Resuscitations: Stem Cells and the Crisis of Old Age," Body and Society 12:1 (2006): 19. [Return to text]

45. Cooper, 17. [Return to text]

46. Cooper, 5. [Return to text]

47. Cooper, 11 and 13. [Return to text]

48. Donna Haraway has summarized this process as one in which natural types or kinds become brands (1997). Drawing on Haraway, Lisa Adkins argues that this branding process extends to workers. Things that were once perceived as simply what women (for example) did by nature are now increasingly perceived by employees and employers as services and stratagems to be flexibly deployed vis-à-vis specific audiences. See: L. Adkins, "The New Economy, Property, and Personhood," Theory, Culture & Society 22:1 (2005): 111-130. [Return to text]

49. L.E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000): 226. [Return to text]

50. While the gene is still invoked as 'the book of life,' I read such insistent recourse to biblical images as signifying discontinuity. Imagining the gene in scriptural terms reaches back "beyond" the modern way of understanding the body in terms of its depth in favor of taking up older, usually Renaissance [Haraway (1997): 166-61], forms of textualizing nature. Paradoxically, then, taking recourse in biblical images signals the 'newness' of genetic medicine by casting the gene within a different frame and a different promise than the austere authority of a 'great white eye' strong enough to see the invisible death governing the body's life from deep within. [Return to text]

51. A. Dreger, "Metaphors of Morality in the HGP," Controlling our Destinies, P.R. Sloan, ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000). [Return to text]

52. van Dijck (1989): 34. [Return to text]

53. M. Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008): 142. [Return to text]

54. Cooper (2006): 7. [Return to text]

55. Cooper (2008): 15-50. [Return to text]

56. Foucault (2007): 235-239. [Return to text]

57. Quoted in: C. Waldby and R. Mitchell, Tissue Economies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006): 127. [Return to text]

58. Waldy and Mitchell, 123-5. [Return to text]

59. While what private cord banks promise is at present clinically dubious [Waldby and Mitchell (2006): 121-2], imagining molecular mechanisms as endlessly regenerative pressures existing technologies. Without enough citizens willing to donate tissues, "[s]pare kidneys thus join the other flows of living, profitable matter (genetically or agriculturally available materials, human ova) that move from South to North to feed the demand for new forms of vitality and biovalue created by new biotechnologies"[Waldby and Mitchell (2006): 180]. Epstein makes a similar argument regarding the transnationalization of clinical trials: S. Epstein, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007): 197-201. Cooper's work provides a theoretical basis for generalizing these claims [(2008): 15-50]. [Return to text]

60. N. Rose, "Neurochemical Selves," Society Nov/Dec (2003a): 54. [Return to text]

61. Ibid. [Return to text]

62. Keller (2000). [Return to text]

63. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1969). [Return to text]

64. Nash makes the same argument regarding direct access for genetic tests in genealogy: C. Nash, "Genetic Kinship," Cultural Studies 18:1 (2004): 11 and 20. [Return to text]

65. N. Zack, "Why BiDil is Not the Answer: The Real Disconnection between Race and Medicine," Paper presented at the Center for Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 19 March 2007. [Return to text]

66. For entree into medical profiling debates, see Epstein (2007): 203-32. [Return to text]

67. Carolyn Rouse's work on sickle cell questions whether "molecular compassion" actually reduces racial disparities in health care. In one hospital Rouse studied, the director of sickle cell care explicitly sought to help health care practitioners un-learn their bias through appealing to the molecular level. Yet practitioners still required sick people to 'be' the kind of patient that they could recognize as deserving of compassion. This meant that adolescent males still tended to be moved to an adult treatment program at a much earlier age than their white compatriots. See C.M. Rouse, "Paradigms and Politics: Shaping Health Care Access for Sickle Cell Patients," Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 28:3 (2004): 369-399; and "Suffering and Sickle Cell," Presentation at Center for Religion and Media, New York University, 14 October 2005. Briggs develops a similar analysis for infectious disease with the notion of sanitary citizenship. See C. Briggs and C. Mantini-Briggs, Stories in the Time of Cholera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). [Return to text]

68. Quoted in Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995): 12-13. [Return to text]

69. J. van Dijck, The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005): 73. [Return to text]

70. K. Finkler, Experiencing the New Genetics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000): 199-200. [Return to text]

71. Finkler (2000): 184-85 and 207. [Return to text]

72. N. Rose, "The Neurochemical Self and its Anomalies," in Risk and Morality, R. Ericson and A. Doyle, eds. (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2003b): 411-12. [Return to text]

73. While genetic counselors strive to be non-directional, we rarely test for conditions valued as 'normal.' See: A. Clarke, "Is Non-Directive Genetic Counseling Possible? The Lancet 338:8773 (1991): 998-1002. [Return to text]

74. Rose (2003b): 422, 431-32. [Return to text]

75. Paul Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996): 102). [Return to text]

76. N. Rose, "Neurochemical Selves," Society Nov/Dec (2003a): 54. [Return to text]

77. Foucault (1973): 172; David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California, Press, 1995). [Return to text]

78. Rose (2003b): 424. [Return to text]

79. Wrote Rabinow: "[I]t is not hard to imagine groups formed around chromosome 17, locus 16,256, site 654,376 allele variant with a guanine substitution. Such groups will have medical specialists, laboratories, narratives, traditions, and a whole panoply of pastoral keepers to help them experience, share, intervene in, and 'understand' their fate" [(1996): 102]. [Return to text]

80. Bledsoe analyzes maternity, not genetics. Her work indicates that these dynamics did not 'originate' in neurogenetics: C. Bledsoe and R. Scherer, "Professionalizing the Natural, Naturalizing the Professions: Paradoxes in American Obstetrics," Paper delivered at the Reproductions Disruptions Conference, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, May 2005. [Return to text]

81. Rabinow (1996): 102. [Return to text]

82. Foucault (2003): 313.

83. K. Franke, "The Domesticated Liberty of Lawrence v. Texas," Columbia Law Review 104:5 (2004): 1399-1426. [Return to text]

84. Cited in Franke (2004): 1408. [Return to text]

85. L. Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). [Return to text]

86. S. Franklin and C. Roberts, Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006): 18. [Return to text]

87. Franklin and Roberts, 119. [Return to text]

88. Franklin and Roberts, 222-23. [Return to text]

89. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner's, 1958): 70 and 172. [Return to text]

90. N. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). [Return to text]

91. Talcott Parsons, Action Theory and the Human Condition (NY: Free Press, 1978): chapters 1-3. [Return to text]

92. J. Jakobsen, "Sex + Freedom = Regulation: Why?" Social Text 84:85 (2005): 297. [Return to text]

93. Jakobsen, 290 and 295. [Return to text]

94. J. Jakobsen, "Sex, Secularism, and the 'War on Terrorism," in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, M. McGarry and G. Haggerty, eds. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007): 24. [Return to text]

95. V. Das, "Secularism and the Argument from Nature," in Powers of the Secular Modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006): 94. [Return to text]

96. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1992): 57. [Return to text]

97. J. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). [Return to text]

98. Jakobsen (2007): 19. [Return to text]

99. Foucault (2007). [Return to text]

100. In elaborating on Foucault's analysis of secularization as 'in-depth Christianization,' I am arguing against the usual way that medical anthropology attends to religion: as a Geertzian 'calculus of meaning.' For this approach, see the volume of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry devoted to exploring the reception of assisted reproductive technologies among various 'world religions' [R. Rapp, "Reason to Believe," Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 30 (2006): 420]. While important, limiting the exploration of religion and biomedicine to an identification of religion with tradition misses much of religion's power in the modern world. What study of the body contributes to sociological accounts of secularization is an ability to see how religiosity and its lyricism inflect 'our bodies, ourselves': as a form of cultural memory, religion happens without anyone needing to believe, profess, or practice. [Return to text]