Transformed States

“Martin Halliwell steers an eloquent, critical path through the utopian and dystopian extremes of biotechnology history. He gives us a highly interdisciplinary account of the relations between the US state, biotechnological innovation, and cultural politics, from the early post–Cold War era to the present. In the process, he draws out crucial implications for bioethics, biopolitics, and the ways we can shape the future.”
  - Catherine Waldby (director of the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University) “This is a hugely ambitious, impressively researched, transdisciplinary analysis linking the political, intellectual, and cultural debates over a range of biotechnologies and constantly addressing key conceptual and ethical questions about how we might understand the ways new human technologies are reshaping our bodies and our selves in our ‘posthuman’ age.”

  - Nikolas Rose (author of The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Cent) “In conceiving technology not as an extraneous component to biological life but an integral condition of its real-world enactment, Martin Halliwell’s Transformed States is an invaluable contribution to contemporary scholarship that seeks to go beyond old Cartesian binaries of mind and body, mental, and physical health. Halliwell presents an image of the plastic body as being inseparable from the collective forces of social inequity, state legislation, and cultural politics which shape its simultaneously virtual and organic life.”

  - Nicholas Manning (professor of American literature, Université Grenoble Alpes) “Transformed States is a measured, thorough, and absorbing account of the dangers and opportunities offered by biotech in addressing US healthcare challenges since the 1990s. Halliwell is imaginative and capacious in envisaging healthcare challenges, running from the micro level of organisms in the gut to the macro level of planetary precarity.” - Paul Williams (author of Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics)