Primate Tales

This essay reflects on the topic of human/animal hybrids as they appear dramatized in Maureen Duffy’s Gor Saga (1981), Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love” (1987), and Charis Thompson Cussins’s short story “Confessions of a Bioterrorist: Subject Position and Reproductive Technologies” (1998). These texts also fictionalize the topic of interspecies pregnancy and the vexed question of humanizing the animal and potentially bestializing the human. Human/animal chimeras and the issue of hybridization need to be considered in terms of the ethics surrounding cross-species genetic exchanges and the question of humanism, which the crossing of species boundaries calls into question. How far can interventions into the human genome be carried out without changing a human being into a different species? Will these changes affect the moral status of that human being, raising extremely complex ethical questions? As a theoretical framework I will use recent work on chimerism and mosaicism, which defy “western heteronormative notions of kinship,” in the words of Myra J. Hird, as well as current debates on the ethics of biotechnological interventions on the human and animal genomes

Art · Biology · Geography · Pregnancy · Primate · Zoology · Ecology · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Genetics · Race, Genetics, and Society

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