The Subject as Objective

The fear of ‘designer babies,’ cloning, and the alterations of bodies by way of genetic enhancements is both a fascinating and scary topic. The notion begins to remind one of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, through themes that infer science is becoming too advanced. In my Dairy Herd Management class, we also discussed the anxiety in regard to genetics and genomic innovations in the early ‘90’s, beginning with the first genomic sequencing of the human gene in the mid 1970’s. Dairy cattle have extensive records on milk production, and thus are perfect models for genome sequencing, because as scientists ‘map’ DNA and RNA sequences, they can compare them to milk yields and try to determine what gene does what. The idea in genomics is that we could eventually predetermine genes to ‘create’ humans, or animals with traits that we deem important. The idea of idealizing humans is an old trope, but as Wells points out, a pressing topic in modern photography; the themes of disgust, homoerotic desire, objectivism, voyeurism, and fetishism are all tied to ideals of ‘normalcy,’ and they work to either represent humans as idealized, or as un-idealized in the efforts of displaying social difference.