Private Bodies, Public Texts

In Private Bodies, Public Texts, Karla FC Holloway reflects on those bodies made hyper-visible as private medical matters are thrust into the public sphere, and on that which is rendered invisible or not knowable by the professional cultures of law and medicine. Maintaining that the bodies of women and African Americans are accorded less privacy than those of white men, Holloway considers the intersection of medicine, law, ethics, race, and gender in reproductive medicine, genomics and DNA testing, the conduct of clinical trials, and death and dying. She looks at these issues in light of literary texts such as Octavia Butler's Bloodchild, Margaret Edson's play Wit, and Ernest Gaines's A Lesson before Dying, highlighting the capacity of literature to grasp cultural and historical complexities elided by law and medicine. Holloway contends that bioethics is always a cultural inquiry. Ultimately, in Private Bodies, Public Texts she argues for a cultural ethics that recognizes cultural complexity as the origin of subjectivity. Such an ethics would involve reflexive analysis of the discourses and practices that constitute the medical and legal professions. It would also entail accountability for which subjects particular professional cultures construct or bring into view and which they obscure. Holloway advocates an ethics that acknowledges that professional cultures produce their subjects.