Preface  xv

Acknowledgements  xxi

Introduction. The Law of the Body  1

1. Bloodchild  25

2. Cartographies of Desire  67

3. Who's Got the Body?  101

4. Immortality in Cultures  137

Notes  173

Bibliography  199

Index  211

“In her exceptional book, Holloway turns to literature to ‘illustrate matters of ethical concern and to assist listeners in hearing a patient’s story, in order to develop a more thoughtful perspective on treatment.’ . . . Holloway offers incisive comments that relate fictional episodes to real-life events, enhancing the ability of both to reveal the deep connections that bind ethics to culture, race, and gender. Private Bodies, Public Texts invites health professionals, lawyers and ethicists to honor those connections.”—Karunesh Tuli, ForeWord Reviews

‘[Holloway] offers a cultural bioethics that may be able to help us understand and navigate the complex narratives we are co-creating.”
—Brent Winter, News and Observer

“[A] powerful meditation on how narratives of identity frame and focus how we understand the ethics of birth, life, and death. . . . Holloway’s work stands as a compelling case for why humanities research that is attentive to cultural constructions of gender and race is crucial to real-world applications of legal or bioethical analysis.”—On Campus with Women

“Private Bodies, Public Texts is a creative and complicated call to do bioethics differently. . . . Holloway's encyclopedic collection of legal and bioethical cases, melded with captivating fiction and discriminating analyses, make this book nourishing sustenance for anyone who believes that bioethics
has a way to go in understanding not only that race and gender matter but also how they matter.”—Charlene Galarneau, Women’s Review of Books

“The strength of Private Bodies, Public Texts is that it effectively demonstrates how the moral subject of bioethics is universal and impartial only insofar as it assumes the perspective of white, middle-class men.”—Stephanie Jenkins, Signs

“Holloway’s book is undoubtedly a significant achievement, especially in its deep exposition of how racial and gender constructs shape and frame attitudes, practices, and beliefs towards the value of privacy in medicine and science. Scholars using tools drawn from narrative and cultural studies in bioethical inquiry will find in Holloway’s approach a model for the potential of such frameworks to enrich and thicken bioethical analysis and a road map for important and developing modalities in second-generation American bioethics.”—Daniel S. Goldberg, Journal of Medical Humanties

“Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics is a multi-layered meditation on the field of bioethics, using historical and contemporary case studies from the US.… A mark of the uniqueness of the book is its wide-ranging, artful and diversely sourced writing…. Holloway is a master narrative interpreter and storyteller.”—Carla Lam, International Feminist Journal of Politics

“Surveying debates about futuristic biomedical technologies, Private Bodies, Public Texts soberly demands the same urgency in attending to bioethical injustices already playing out upon female and black bodies.”—Everett Hamner, Philological Quarterly

“In her exceptional book, Holloway turns to literature to ‘illustrate matters of ethical concern and to assist listeners in hearing a patient’s story, in order to develop a more thoughtful perspective on treatment.’ . . . Holloway offers incisive comments that relate fictional episodes to real-life events, enhancing the ability of both to reveal the deep connections that bind ethics to culture, race, and gender. Private Bodies, Public Texts invites health professionals, lawyers and ethicists to honor those connections.”—Karunesh Tuli, ForeWord Reviews

‘[Holloway] offers a cultural bioethics that may be able to help us understand and navigate the complex narratives we are co-creating.”
—Brent Winter, News and Observer

“[A] powerful meditation on how narratives of identity frame and focus how we understand the ethics of birth, life, and death. . . . Holloway’s work stands as a compelling case for why humanities research that is attentive to cultural constructions of gender and race is crucial to real-world applications of legal or bioethical analysis.”—On Campus with Women

“Private Bodies, Public Texts is a creative and complicated call to do bioethics differently. . . . Holloway's encyclopedic collection of legal and bioethical cases, melded with captivating fiction and discriminating analyses, make this book nourishing sustenance for anyone who believes that bioethics
has a way to go in understanding not only that race and gender matter but also how they matter.”—Charlene Galarneau, Women’s Review of Books

“The strength of Private Bodies, Public Texts is that it effectively demonstrates how the moral subject of bioethics is universal and impartial only insofar as it assumes the perspective of white, middle-class men.”—Stephanie Jenkins, Signs

“Holloway’s book is undoubtedly a significant achievement, especially in its deep exposition of how racial and gender constructs shape and frame attitudes, practices, and beliefs towards the value of privacy in medicine and science. Scholars using tools drawn from narrative and cultural studies in bioethical inquiry will find in Holloway’s approach a model for the potential of such frameworks to enrich and thicken bioethical analysis and a road map for important and developing modalities in second-generation American bioethics.”—Daniel S. Goldberg, Journal of Medical Humanties

“Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics is a multi-layered meditation on the field of bioethics, using historical and contemporary case studies from the US.… A mark of the uniqueness of the book is its wide-ranging, artful and diversely sourced writing…. Holloway is a master narrative interpreter and storyteller.”—Carla Lam, International Feminist Journal of Politics

“Surveying debates about futuristic biomedical technologies, Private Bodies, Public Texts soberly demands the same urgency in attending to bioethical injustices already playing out upon female and black bodies.”—Everett Hamner, Philological Quarterly

“Karla FC Holloway has written an important book that challenges the objectification of patients’ stories that is so common in the practice of bioethics. She persuasively argues for a cultural ethics, an ethics which gives constitutive weight to the cultural context of those stories, especially the cultural contexts of race and gender identity. Using this approach, she presents crucial new insights into issues of reproduction, clinical trials, genomics and death and dying. Her discussion of the events at Memorial Medical Center after Katrina will become a classic in the field. But most importantly, she shows us that the practice of bioethics must change if it is to successfully relate to the issues raised by the thick narratives of reality.”—Baruch A. Brody, Baylor College of Medicine

“Private Bodies/Public Texts is an illuminating meditation on the social construction of personal identity, with special focus on gender and racial categorizations in biomedical ethics. Drawing on diverse sources from medicine, law and literature, Karla FC Holloway shows how devalued gender and racial identities not only set the stage for past biomedical abuses but are ironically replicated in the paradigmatic examples that contemporary bioethics invokes in the supposed service of correcting those abuses. This is a subtle, challenging book.”—Robert A. Burt, Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Law, Yale University

“Private Bodies/Public Texts is as powerful as it is beautifully written. Karla FC Holloway’s is a very different kind of bioethics, one that challenges us to think both more broadly and more specifically about what privacy and justice mean. And she reminds us, with sometimes piercing insight, just how critical gender and race can be in making meaning out of both.”—Ruth R. Faden, Director, Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics

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