The Poetics of DNA (Posthumanities)

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The Poetics of DNA (Posthumanities)
By Judith Roof
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Number Of Pages: 248
Publication Date: 2007-06-12
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0816649987
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780816649983
Binding: Paperback

How has DNA come to be seen as a cosmic truth, representative of all life, potential for all cures, repository for all identity, and end to all stories? In The Poetics of DNA, Judith Roof examines the rise of this powerful symbol and the implications of its ascendancy for the ways we think—about ourselves, about one another, and about the universe.
Descriptions of DNA, Roof argues, have distorted ideas and transformed nucleic acid into the answer to all questions of life. This hyperbolized notion of DNA, inevitably confused or conflated with the “gene,” has become a vector through which older ways of thinking can merge with the new, advancing long-discredited and insidious ideas about such things as eugenics and racial selection and influencing contemporary debates, particularly the popular press obsession with the “gay gene.” Through metaphors of DNA, she contends, racist and homophobic ideology is masked as progressive science.
Grappling with twentieth-century intellectual movements as well as contemporary societal anxieties, The Poetics of DNA reveals how descriptions of DNA and genes typify a larger set of epistemological battles that play out not only through the assumptions associated with DNA but also through less evident methods of magical thinking, reductionism, and pseudoscience.
For the first time, Roof exposes the ideology and cultural consequences of DNA and gene metaphors to uncover how, ultimately, they are paradigms used to recreate prejudices.
Judith Roof is professor of English and film studies at Michigan State University. She is the author of several books, including All about Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels.


Summary: she tirelessly demonstrates the problematic logic that undergirds today's assumptions about DNA
Rating: 5
In The Poetics of DNA, literary scholar Judith Roof questions both why and how DNA has come to symbolize \"a cosmic truth, representative of all life, residence of all answers, potential for all cures, [and] repository for all identity.\" DNA has been regarded as an unquestionable truth, but, as Roof rightly observes, this particular discourse about the infallibility DNA is far from objective. Like all discourse, the linguistic representation of DNA is equally dependent upon and limited by language, which is, in turn, structured by the various cultures and ideologies that use it.
This book is a study not only of the poetics of DNA, but of the implications of its poetics -- its linguistic representations -- and of its appropriations. Cultural and ideological appropriations of DNA occur linguistically through the use of tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, and analogy. Roof analyzes these misappropriations in her chapter \"The Homunculus and Saturating Tales.\" She convincingly argues that conservative ideologies concerning gender, sexuality and race have preserved themselves by utilizing current scientific research on DNA and the gene in particular. Roof describes how the harnessing of this \"scientific evidence\" effectively reinforces cultural stereotypes.
On gender, for instance, Roof states that \"What the scientists observe may well be true, but the ways it is characterized are all about ideology -- an ideology seemingly naturalized by science -- but which deploys gender stereotypes as a starting point. These stereotypes, however, are also comforting, since they provide a familiar cultural logic for the \"behaviors\" of genes, which reinforces older notions of gender that have recently come into question. If we are worried that women are too much like men as a result of successful feminist movements and the reform of laws, then what better way to reassert a more conservative, patriarchal notion of the \"proper woman's place\" than to claim that male and female genes behave according to older patterns?\"
Roof's juxtaposes this discussion about gender to ones about sexuality and race. Her section on the controversy surrounding the possible existence of a \"gay gene,\" while quite brief, is smart and provocative. Throughout her study she tirelessly demonstrates the problematic logic that undergirds today's assumptions about DNA and the power afforded to the sciences as a result. The Poetics of DNA is a testament of the value of the humanities in today's science - and technology-driven world. While the humanities are overlooked -- and underfunded -- in favor of the sciences, Roof reminds us of their worth.



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