NotNormativelyHuman 195
travel. Within such an imaginary, forms of "peripheral embodiment"
(MitchellandSnyder,BiopoliticsofDisability31,180-81)paradoxically
have acentralizingfunction: they are—in dialectical fashion to be
sure—necessary for the continuous reproduction of the normative, hale
and male, American body, asserting the power of social and cultural
oughtnessbystigmatizingbodilyormoregenerallybiologicalotherness.
From an American Cultural Studies perspective, biological
normativities,whatevertheirparticularshapeorcontent,poseimportant
questions for scholars of race, gender, sexuality, age, or the body in
general and especially for a materialist cultural critique that is not
content with exposing these norms as "culturally constructed." Rather,
for such an analysis it is becoming increasingly important to note that
biological(non-)normativitiesdoproduceapoliticsofdifferenceoftheir
own, this time not organized around those cultural "group differences
that have claimed public voice in many democratic societies in the last
years"(I.M.Young,"RulingNorms"415)andhavedulycaptivatedthe
attention of American Cultural Studies. What a materialist critique can
instead bring to the forefront is how the rule of norms provides the
scaffolding on which diminished opportunities in personal and
collective, material and cultural life can develop, as I will show in the
followingparagraphs.
Norms, as Habermas suggested, are communicatively realized, by
entering the circuits of communication, in iconic images or in
conversation. The degree to which the emerging brave new biotech
world and its underlying norms have already now entered these circuits
can be measured in their steadily growing popularity in the pop culture.
Ofcourse,fascinationwiththelatesttechnologicalgadgethaslongbeen
a characteristic of U.S.-American culture; what is new is that recent
technological developments, especially in molecular genetics, look like
science fiction but are not, really. The proleptic outreach one usually
attests to science fiction has been much diminished by the fast pace of
biotechnologicalresearch.Agoodexampleoftheholdthisresearchhas
on popular culture would be the proliferation of texts and films in the