Manali Karmakar 1 and Avishek Parui 2
1Assistant Professor of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, Chennai 600127. ORCID: 0000-0002-9256-6081. Email: manali.karmakar@vit.ac.in
2Assistant Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, Chennai, 600036. Associate Fellow, UK Higher Education Academy. ORCID: 0000-0001-8008-9241. Email: avishekparui@iitm.ac.in
Volume 12, Number 6, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n6.04
Abstract
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.
Keywords: biocitizenship, organ transplantation, disposable bodies, wasted lives