66 RüdigerKunow
sphere" (Female Complaint12), designates a crucial area where such
questions come up for debate and also for decision. In her view, this
simultaneously intimate and public domain is sustained not so much by
Frankfurt School-type rational deliberation but by voluntary or coerced
practices of familiarity, closeness, even secrecy—all of them put to
public political use. Such reflections allow us to map ways in which
human biology (as an intimate idiosyncrasy) fulfills public functions in
re-fashioning human identity around biological data. Starting inThe
AnatomyofNationalFantasy(1994)andmorecentrallyinTheQueenof
America Goes to Washington City(1997), Berlant has consistently
demonstratedhowissuesconcerningtheprivate,biologicalself,suchas
assisted reproduction, abortion, or genetic dysfunctions, have ceased to
be "merely" intimate individual concerns. Rather, the line between the
public and the private is being progressively redrawn in favor of a
"world of public intimacy" (Berlant,Queen of America1), a world
where it is the most intimate affairs of the citizens which paradoxically
are making them public, part of the "national symbolic" and "key to
debatesaboutwhat'America'standsfor"(Berlant,QueenofAmerica1).
The biological composition of individual bodies and the bio-company
theykeep(oraremadetokeep)isthusbecomingapoliticalissue.
Thismigrationofthebiologicallypersonalintothepublicdomainis
furthermore complemented by a shift in discursive registers so that
importantpolicyconcerns,especiallyaboutdistributivejusticearebeing
(re-)formulatedinbiologisticterms:
intimacyrhetorichasbeenemployedtomanagetheeconomiccrisisthat
separates the wealthy few from everyone else in the contemporary
UnitedStates....[It]becomestherhetoricalmeansbywhichthecauses
of U.S. income inequality and job instability in all sectors of the
economycanbepersonalized,rephrasedintermsofindividuals'capacity
to respond flexibly to the new "opportunities" presented to them within
anincreasinglyvolatileglobaleconomy.(Berlant,QueenofAmerica8)These new "opportunities" include the various possibilities offered
by advances in biotechnology to intervene in or at least to manipulate
themanifold tiesin whichtheirbiologyinvolveshumanbeings(seethe
discussions below on hemispheric connectivities). Abstracting for a
moment from Berlant's concerns with heteronormativity and