Megan H. Glick, Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/Personhood

Abstract

In Infrahumanisms Megan H. Glick considers how conversations surrounding nonhuman life have impacted a broad range of attitudes toward forms of human difference such as race, sexuality, and health. She examines the history of human and nonhuman subjectivity as told through twentieth-century scientific and cultural discourses that include pediatrics, primatology, eugenics, exobiology, and obesity research. Outlining how the category of the human is continuously redefined in relation to the infrahuman--a liminal position of speciation existing between the human and the nonhuman--Glick reads a number of phenomena, from early twentieth-century efforts to define children and higher order primates as liminally human and the postwar cultural fascination with extraterrestrial life to anxieties over AIDS, SARS, and other cross-species diseases. In these cases the efforts to define a universal humanity create the means with which to reinforce notions of human difference and maintain human-nonhuman hierarchies. In foregrounding how evolving definitions of the human reflect shifting attitudes about social inequality, Glick shows how the consideration of nonhuman subjectivities demands a rethinking of long-held truths about biological meaning and difference. Introduction: toward a theory of infrahumanity -- Brief histories of time: nature, culture, and the making of modern childhood -- Ocular anthropomorphisms: eugenics and primatology at the threshold of the "almost human" -- On alien ground: extraterrestrial sightings, atomic warfare, and the undoing of the human body -- Inner and outer spaces: exobiology, human genetics, and the disembodiment of corporeal difference -- Of sodomy and cannibalism: disgust, dehumanization, and the rhetorics of same-sex and cross-species contagion -- Everything except the squeal: porcine hybridity in the obesity epidemic and xenotransplantation research -- Conclusion: the plurality is near: techniques of symbiotic re-speciation.