The Molecular Body and the Christian Secular

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 ¹, 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.” ² 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. ³ 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.” ⁴ 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. ⁵ 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.” ⁶ 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.” ⁷ 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. ⁸ 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? ⁹ 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.” ¹⁰

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.’ ¹¹

1. Rabinow (1996): 102.[↑]
2. Foucault (2003): 313.[↑]
3. K. Franke, “The Domesticated Liberty of Lawrence v. Texas,” Columbia Law Review 104:5 (2004): 1399-1426.[↑]
4. Cited in Franke (2004): 1408.[↑]
5.  L. Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).[↑]
6. S. Franklin and C. Roberts, Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006): 18.[↑]
7. Franklin and Roberts, 119.[↑]
8. Franklin and Roberts, 222-23.[↑]
9. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958): 70 and 172.[↑]
10. N. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).[↑]
11. Talcott Parsons, Action Theory and the Human Condition (NY: Free Press, 1978): chapters 1-3. [↑]