What is special about the human body?
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What is special about the human body? / Fox, Marie.
In: Law, Innovation and Technology, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2015, p. 206-230.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - What is special about the human body?
AU - Fox, Marie
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - UK health law has recently become more attentive to corporeality and embodiment, with implications for how legal subjectivity is understood. Yet, the body of health law remains a distinctively human body. Non-human bodies figure only at its margins, in its response to technologies such as xenotransplantation which expose the fault-lines surrounding human bodies. I aim to further trouble this boundary by exploring the liminal, queer and posthuman figure of the ‘trans-embryo’. I argue that these extracorporeal embryos carry significant potential to disrupt our understandings of the human and of the legal subject. Eschewing personhood arguments, I aim to recast trans-embryos as embodied and relational products of human and animal reproductive labour. I conclude that, so viewed, they facilitate a new understanding of the corporeality and vulnerability we share with animals, thereby challenging human exceptionalism and the perceived distinctiveness of human bodies. Consequently, new forms of legal subjectivity which reflect an inter-species ethics are required.
AB - UK health law has recently become more attentive to corporeality and embodiment, with implications for how legal subjectivity is understood. Yet, the body of health law remains a distinctively human body. Non-human bodies figure only at its margins, in its response to technologies such as xenotransplantation which expose the fault-lines surrounding human bodies. I aim to further trouble this boundary by exploring the liminal, queer and posthuman figure of the ‘trans-embryo’. I argue that these extracorporeal embryos carry significant potential to disrupt our understandings of the human and of the legal subject. Eschewing personhood arguments, I aim to recast trans-embryos as embodied and relational products of human and animal reproductive labour. I conclude that, so viewed, they facilitate a new understanding of the corporeality and vulnerability we share with animals, thereby challenging human exceptionalism and the perceived distinctiveness of human bodies. Consequently, new forms of legal subjectivity which reflect an inter-species ethics are required.
KW - Trans-embryos
KW - human admixed embryos
KW - human/non-human boundary
KW - the human body
KW - corporeality
KW - vulnerability
KW - legal subjectivity
U2 - 10.1080/17579961.2015.1106106
DO - 10.1080/17579961.2015.1106106
M3 - Article
VL - 7
SP - 206
EP - 230
JO - Law, Innovation and Technology
JF - Law, Innovation and Technology
SN - 1757-9961
IS - 2
ER -