Abstract
As I have attempted to demonstrate, the problematic ethics featured in black women’s speculative writing often hinge upon the ways in which groups fail to relate humanely across perceived differences. The power differential between a black girl or woman trying to survive and her persecutors is rarely equal. Thus, in both Fledgling and Who Fears Death, the capacity to survive and enact change comes through the will and actions of women reconfiguring their relationship with the dominant establishment. Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring shifts the focus to intracultural gender politics and how these dynamics affect intercultural exploitation through the knotty medical ethics of organ donation.
I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
—Audre Lorde
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Notes
Nancy Johnston, “Happy That It’s Here: An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson,” in Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, ed. Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 208.
Natasha Trethewey, “Miracle of the Black Leg,” in Thrall (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 12.
Howard W. Haggard, Mystery, Magic, and Medicine: The Rise of Medicine from Superstition to Science (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1933), 5.
Francis Delmonico, Robert Arnold, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Larua A. Siminoff Jeffrey Kahn, and Stuart J. Youngner, Sounding Board, “Ethical Incentives-Not Payment-for Organ Donation,” in New England Journal of Medicine 346.25 (2002), 2002–2005.
Carmen Fracchia, “Spanish Depictions of the Miracle of the Black Leg,” in One Leg in the Grave Revisited, ed. Kees Zimmerman (Eelde, The Netherlands: Barkhuis 2013), 81–82.
James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” in William and Mary Quarterly 54.1 (1997): 152.
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Anchor, 2006), 15.
Janet K. Shim, Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 192.
Scott Carney, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers (New York: William Morrow, 2011), 6.
Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring (New York: Grand Central, 1998), 3.
Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), xii.
Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures, vol. 40 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Cambridge University Press Archive, 1970), 256.
Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 2011), 26.
Karla F. C. Holloway, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 94.
Michel Foucault, “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (New York: Random House, 1981), 177.
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998), 112.
Valerie Lee, Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings (New York: Routledge, 1996), 23.
See also Monica Green’s, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Samuel Thielson, “Spirituality and the Care of Madness: Historical Considerations,” in Religion and Spirituality in Psychiatry, ed. Philippe Huguelet and Harold Koenig (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 6.
Isabel Clarke, Psychosis and Spirituality: Consolidating the New Paradigm (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), 4.
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© 2015 Esther L. Jones
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Jones, E.L. (2015). Organ Donation, Mythic Medicine and Madness in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring . In: Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137514691_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137514691_4
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