The newest edition of the Scholar & Feminist Online is entitled Life (Un)Ltd: Feminism, Bioscience, Race and “is devoted to new scholarship at the intersection of science and technology studies (hereafter STS), race/postcolonial studies, and feminist and queer theory” (Rachel C. Lee, “Introduction”). In reading the articles in this issue, however, I noticed another critical concept that is central to these intersections: the concept of morality.
In many ways, morality is an important concept to explore in a series of articles that largely aims to problematize our conception of science and technology as impartial and infallible—as objective “fact.” Yet the interweaving of morality within this edition of the journal was still unsettling, perhaps because the morality described by the articles was not a morality developed and maintained by bioscience based on the power it is given in society. Rather, many articles discussed a shirked responsibility to morality on the part of bioscience and an externalization and imposition of this morality to the individuals upon which the science is being acted.
The title of this issue addresses most directly this shirking of moral responsibilities on the part of science and technology that is increasingly commercialized through large corporations. The use of “Ltd.” calls to mind LLCs–limited liability corporations–that shield their investors from legal responsibilities while allowing them to reap financial gains. “Life LTD” recalls the human costs of these gains that are externalized to marginalized, laboring communities. This suspension of morality is taken up by Michelle Murphy in “Distributed Reproduction, Chemical Violence, and Latency,” and Diane Nelson’s “Yes to Life = No to Mining:’ Counting as Biotechnology in Life (Ltd) Guatemala.” In both pieces, the authors problematize moral responsibility by adding a long-term temporal lens to corporate morality. In the case of river pollution and mining in Guatemala, respectively, the health risks of corporate behavior have yet to be realized, although it is well known they will appear later, and therefore allows corporate behavior to play risk games on the health and lives of others. How can we hold these corporations accountable before evidence of their moral disinterest develops? These discussions of the externalization and privatization of risk to the individual level–and carried most heavily by marginalized communities–provide an extension and science-based focus of much of the thinking of the last Scholar & Feminist edition, Gender, Justice, and Neoliberal Transformations.
