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4 - Navigating Legal Purgatory

The Otherness of Embryos

from Part II - Through Liminality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2021

Catriona A. W. McMillan
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

This chapter draws parallels to the gothic trope that surrounded discussions on embryos in vitro in the 1980s as a frame of analysis that has grown in counter-response to law’s tendency to place entities either within the category of a ‘liberal, individual self,’ or outwith it (rarely in between). To explain, the gothic self is characterised by disorder, chaos, and dependency. It cannot be subsumed under the traditional ‘self’ that the law presupposes of its subjects. Further, within ‘the gothic’ lies the key concept of ‘monstrosity’, at the margins of what we deem to be human: ‘we stake out the boundaries of our humanity by delineating the boundaries of the monstrous’. While the gothic trope does not explicitly centre around ‘the in between,’ it is argued that we should see gothic entities as such, because of their common placement - legally, and sometimes socially - on the boundary between liberal, individualised human, and something akin to a science-fiction-esque ‘monster.’ The controversy that causes rhetorical parallels between new research and monstrous beings and mad scientists to be drawn is a major contributor to policy-makers reluctance to revisit the legal status of embryos in vitro.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Human Embryo In Vitro
Breaking the Legal Stalemate
, pp. 99 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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