Shelley Z. Reuter's Books

Testing Fate

Tay-Sachs Disease and the Right to Be Responsible

By: Shelley Z. Reuter

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Testing Fate

Tay-Sachs Disease and the Right to Be Responsible

By: Shelley Z. Reuter

In today’s world, responsible biocitizenship has become a new way of belonging in society. Individuals are expected to make “responsible” medical choices, including the decision to be screened for genetic disease. Paradoxically, we have even come to see ourselves as having the right to be responsible vis-à-vis the proactive mitigation of genetic risk. At the same time, the concept of genetic disease has become a new and powerful way of defining the boundaries between human groups. Tay-Sachs, an autosomal recessive disorder, is a case in point—with origins in the period of Eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States and United Kingdom that spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has a long and fraught history as a marker of Jewish racial difference. In Testing Fate, Shelley Z. Reuter asks: Can the biocitizen, especially one historically defined as a racialized and pathologized Other, be said to be exercising authentic, free choice in deciding whether to undertake genetic screening? Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary examples—doctors’ medical reports of Tay-Sachs since the first case was documented in 1881, the medical field’s construction of Tay-Sachs as a disease of Jewish immigrants, YouTube videos of children with Tay-Sachs that frame the disease as tragic disability avoidable through a simple genetic test, and medical malpractice suits since the test for the disease became available—Reuter shows that true agency in genetic decision-making can be exercised only from a place of cultural inclusion. Choice in this context is in fact a kind of unfreedom—a moral duty to act that is not really agency at all.

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Page Count

341

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452951896

ISBN 13

9781452951898

Narrating Social Order

Agoraphobia and the Politics of Classification

By: Shelley Zipora Reuter

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Narrating Social Order

Agoraphobia and the Politics of Classification

By: Shelley Zipora Reuter

Policies implemented in the mid to late 1990s in Ontario by Mike Harris's Conservative government have had undeniable repercussions for the population of that province. Kate Bezanson's Gender, the State, and Social Reproduction is the first study to consider the implications of those policies for gender relations - that is, how women and men, families, and households coped with these changes, and how division of labour and standards of living were affected. Bezanson also considers implications of neo-liberalism more generally, for the lives of people living under such regimes. Beginning with an outline of the restructuring experiment which took place under the Conservative government between 1995 and 2000, Bezanson shows how this process dramatically altered the scope of the welfare state, labour market protections and conditions, and the capacity for people to manage and plan their own lives. She combines this detailed investigation of the changes introduced by Harris with data collected in in-depth interviews of selected Ontario households, in order to examine how neo-liberalism affects daily lives, particularly of low income people, and especially of women. Ultimately, Bezanson finds that the neo-liberal restructuring of Ontario in the 1990s consolidated a gender regime that was highly unsustainable for poor households, many of which were lead by women. A controversial and illuminating study, Gender, the State, and Social Reproduction crosses the disciplines of politics, history, gender studies, and sociology.

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Page Count

249

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802090885

ISBN 13

9780802090881

Testing Fate

Tay-Sachs Disease and the Right to Be Responsible

By: Shelley Z. Reuter

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Testing Fate

Tay-Sachs Disease and the Right to Be Responsible

By: Shelley Z. Reuter

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

341

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452951896

ISBN 13

9781452951898

Book's by Shelley Z. Reuter

Testing Fate

Testing Fate

Narrating Social Order

Narrating Social Order

Testing Fate

Testing Fate

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