Of Swans and Ugly Ducklings: Bioethics between Humans, Animals, and Machines

• Published in: Configurations (Baltimore, Md.) Vol. 15; no. 2; pp. 125 - 150
• Main Author: Zylinska, Joanna
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.04.2007
• Subjects: Animals; Auditory system; Derrida, Jacques; Ethics; Human Body; Ideology; Mass Media Images; Political Factors; Politics; Social Factors; Television
• ISSN: 1063-1801; 1080-6520; 1080-6520
• DOI: 10.1353/con.0.0028

The recently popularized genre of "extreme makeover TV" treats post-Big Brother audiences to documentaries featuring the remodeling of real people's homes, gardens, wardrobes, and-as has been the case with shows such as ABC's Extreme Makeover, MTV's I Want a Famous Face, and Fox's The Swan-bodies.2 There is, however, something unique about the way in which The Swan treats the subject of makeover by framing it in biozoological terms, and by introducing the survival of the fittest as its principle of entertainment. Neither will it help us decide in advance whether people should or should not engage in beauty transformation, or whether the correction of a bumpy nose is more justifiable morally than a boob job or an ear on one's arm.73 What it will do instead (perhaps adding to the frustration of those who already have clear expectations of the tasks that bioethics should undertake and the questions it should answer), is shift the parameters of the ethical debate: from an individualistic, problem-based moral paradigm in which rules can be rationally, strategically worked out on the basis of a previously agreed principle- for example, that it is the sum total of happiness of all beings that counts, or that I should respect the (human or even nonhuman) Other as much as I love myself-to a broader political context in which individual decisions are always involved in complex relations of power, economy, and ideology.