Charlotte’s Biohacking Series Featuring Marina Levina

The University of North Carolina Charlotte Center for Professional and Applied Ethics presents Marina Levina, Ph.D. as part of the Bioethics Resource Network's biohacking series.

Levina is associate professor of Media Studies at the University of Memphis. Her current research interests are focused on cultural studies of monstrosity, critical rhetoric of science, medicine, and technology, critical surveillance studies, and affect theory. Her most recent publications include an edited collection, Biocitizenship: The Politics of Bodies, Governance, and Power (NYU Press, 2018).

Abstract:

A lot of theoretical and applied discussion of biohacking has focused on either making an argument for its revolutionary potential to democratize access to biotechnologies or warn of the possible destructive and dangerous potential of the practice. This talk aims to move the conversation beyond these two binaries. Instead of making an argument about whether biohacking is “good” or “bad” for society, I want to look at how the practice discursively and effectively constructs bodies, communities, and politics. I argue that biohacking aims to disrupt bodily memory – or those affects and practices which help us understand the body as an always historical and material entity tied to the memories, affects, and traumas of its past. And while it is tempting to embrace this path out of history, it is also important to consider what is at stake in the attempt to hack the body forward in time.