This essay examines Kishwar Desai’s Origins of Love (2012) in order to foreground how the novel is complexly reflective of the biomedical technologies strategically deployed by medical practitioners and prospective parents for the purpose of reinforcing caste-based bionormative notion of family that artificial reproductive technology is assumed to have problematised. The essay also demonstrates how the use of bioenhancement facilities has led to the revival of neoliberal eugenics enmeshed with state-led biopolitics. The essay draws on the concept of renaturalisation discussed by Tamar Sharon in order to examine how the schizophrenic or deterritorialising potential of reproductive technology is reconfigured and domesticated by the medicolegal practitioners in order to reterritorialise the normative structures of kinship and family formation within a capitalist consumerist culture.
This article draws on the concept of the chronotope – spatiotemporal entanglements theorized in literary and anthropological studies – and extends the same to an engagement with and an understanding of the experiential and ontological defamiliarization, deceleration and suspension of space, time and security generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This article, thus, offers a study of COVID-19 as a connective metaphor and a crisis chronotope – denoting the un-certain space–time marked and defamiliarized by changed orders and vocabularies of presence, distance, trust, tactility and memory – characterizing a world of alienation, insecurity and fear of infection. In arguing how the globality of COVID-19 has ironically informed isolation, incomplete identification and new fiction-formations, while also foregrounding the difference between human time and planetary time, the article will re-examine the crisis chronotope through a study of sudden death and the defamiliarized public space, exemplified in the city of New Delhi during the second wave of the pandemic in April–May 2021.
The paper aims to explore Hanif Kureishi’s (2002) “The Body” and Kazuo Ishiguro’s (2005) Never Let Me Go in order to throw light on the bioethical issues related to ageing, biocitizenship, organ transplantation, wasted lives and disposable bodies by extending the discussion from a human to a dystopian posthuman world where affluent sections of society replenish their aged degenerating organic body by incorporating biomatter from non-citizens and clones. The paper draws on and extends Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas’s concept of biocitizenship, Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of wasted lives, Giorgio Agamben’s explanation of bare life and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection in the context of literary studies in order to analyze the socio-political status of the engineered lives who are classified as biomedical fodders.
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