Oldal 181 [181]
OCR
GENDER AS RITUAL AND ‘POETIC RITUALITY’ IN CONTEMPORARY ‘BIOSCIENCE DRAMA’ and reflects these ideas.”’ For this reason the interrelation between biomedical inventions on the one hand and gendered, ritualized cultural routines on the other hand is particularly noticeable in the theatrical adaptation of human biomedical technologies. Hereinafter, plays reflecting the ritualistic and mythological background of aesthetic drama while making human biotechnology their subject matter will be addressed as “bioscience drama.” The term “bioscience drama” is a heuristic neologism coined within the framework of a larger research project on biomedical issues in contemporary literary drama.® WHAT IS ‘BIOSCIENCE DRAMA’? Drama, plays, and theater, are cultural practices that structure the order of knowledge while being linked to other cultural and historical discourses. Following Erika Fischer-Lichte, theater in general can be considered an “anthropological laboratory” and a cultural mirror through which society repeats its own behavior and observes itself while different possibilities of personhood and human life are played through.® Drama and theatrical performances are thus ritualized components of cultural life and specific sites of ritualized human self-reflection and self-assurance. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that test-tube babies and human clones are being seen in drama and on stage, while the public debates issues such as artificial fertilization, social freezing, surrogacy, genetics, and bioethics. Due to the “incredible power that emerges when current technologies in reproductive biology and genetics are brought together in the form of reprogenetics,”'° human biomedical technologies, reproductive medicine, and related bioethical discussion are key issues in current everyday culture and thought. While the issue first arose in 1978, when Louise Joy Brown (the world’s first test-tube baby) was born, the ongoing reprogenetics debate was triggered in the United States in the mid-eighties, when for the first time ever a child was born of a woman who was not the genetic mother; and the famous legal case of Baby M. circulated around the globe.!! As a consequence, the issues of 7 Lehmann: Postdramatic Theatre, 162. I wish to express my gratitude to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the generous support for this research. The term ‘bioscience drama’ was firstly coined in Birte Giesler: Zur Performativitat des Materials: Biomedizin und Identitat in aktuellen Theaterstiicken, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik 78 (2010), 141-159. Erika Fischer-Lichte: Geschichte des Dramas, 2 Vols., revised and enlarged edition, Tübingen/ Basel, Francke, 1999; Erika Fischer-Lichte (ed.): Theatralität und die Krisen der Repräsentation, Stuttgart/Weimar, Metzler, 2001, 1. Lee. M. Silver: Remaking Eden. Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World, New York, Avon Books, 1997, 8. H. Patricia Hynes: Reconstructing Babylon. Essays on Women and Technology, London, Earthscan, 1989, 103-113. 8 + 179 +
