List of Illustrations xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Networking Liminality 1

1. The Uses of Literature for Feminist Science Studies: Tracing Liminal Lives 25

2. The Cultured Cell: Life and Death at Strangeways 58

3. The Hybrid Embryo and Xenogenic Desire 89

4. Giant Babies: Graphing Growth in the Early Twentieth Century 112

5. Incubabies and Rejuvenates: The Traffic between Technologies of Reproduction and Age Extension 146

6. Transplant Medicine and Transformative Narrative 168

7. Liminal Performances of Aging: From Replacement to Regeneration 214

Coda: The Pluripotent Discourse of Stem Cells: Liminality, Reflexivity, and Literature 253

Notes 281

Works Cited 315

Index 335

“[T]his book will be a revelation for many and a guide for those who already know. It is a work that the emerging field of biocultures needs to consider and the world of politics needs to absorb.” — Leonard J. Davis, Literature and Medicine

“Squier delineates convincingly throughout Liminal Lives . . . the juxtaposition and investigation of science and literature as imaginative practices that come to structure the world, not separately but in tandem. In order to understand how this structuring happens we must create a methodology that juxtaposes the scientific and the literary, and in Liminal Lives Susan Squier has done just that.” — Lisa Diedrich, Journal of the History of Sexuality

"For someone who is working on biotechnology and SF and employing a theoretically advanced and interdisciplinary methodology, Liminal Lives is a very important text." — Mark Decker, SFRA Review

"Offering a far-ranging and provocative analysis, Squier moves effortlessly among science fiction, government reports, and scientific writing in a diverse range of fields as she focuses on the culture's grappling with various types of 'liminal lives.' . . . Highly recommended." — R. D. Morrison, Choice

"Squier’s approach is welcome because it asks us to carefully not distinguish between 'narrative' as a practice exclusive to literature or film. Liminal Lives prompts us to consider the ways in which 'science fiction' is a verb, and not simply a literary or film genre." — Eugene Thacker, Leonardo

“[T]his book will be a revelation for many and a guide for those who already know. It is a work that the emerging field of biocultures needs to consider and the world of politics needs to absorb.” —Leonard J. Davis, Literature and Medicine

“Squier delineates convincingly throughout Liminal Lives . . . the juxtaposition and investigation of science and literature as imaginative practices that come to structure the world, not separately but in tandem. In order to understand how this structuring happens we must create a methodology that juxtaposes the scientific and the literary, and in Liminal Lives Susan Squier has done just that.” —Lisa Diedrich, Journal of the History of Sexuality

"For someone who is working on biotechnology and SF and employing a theoretically advanced and interdisciplinary methodology, Liminal Lives is a very important text." —Mark Decker, SFRA Review

"Offering a far-ranging and provocative analysis, Squier moves effortlessly among science fiction, government reports, and scientific writing in a diverse range of fields as she focuses on the culture's grappling with various types of 'liminal lives.' . . . Highly recommended." —R. D. Morrison, Choice

"Squier’s approach is welcome because it asks us to carefully not distinguish between 'narrative' as a practice exclusive to literature or film. Liminal Lives prompts us to consider the ways in which 'science fiction' is a verb, and not simply a literary or film genre." —Eugene Thacker, Leonardo

“Liminal Lives offers very strong and important theoretical insights into relationships between scientific knowledge and practice and literary production. Its innovative methodology creates possibilities for better communication and exchange between scientific, literary, and social scientific knowledge in a way that will be very useful to others interested in interdisciplinary science studies.” — Catherine Waldby, author of, AIDS and The Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference

“A brilliant and provocative exploration of how biomedicine and literature, particularly science fiction, are together reconfiguring the very shape of the entire life span, producing adoptable embryos, giant babies, interspecies pregnancies, and regenerated old bodies—all in the context of a new and grim bio-economy in which hearts and kidneys are for sale and earrings are fabricated out of fetal remains.” — Kathleen Woodward, author of, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions

“Susan Merrill Squier’s Liminal Lives is compelling, timely, imaginative, and wonderfully provocative.” — Priscilla Wald, author of, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form

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