One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal - Hardcover

Dreger, Alice Domurai

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674012941 ISBN 13: 9780674012943

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Must children born with socially challenging anatomies have their bodies changed because others cannot be expected to change their minds? One of Us views conjoined twinning and other "abnormalities" from the point of view of people living with such anatomies, and considers these issues within the larger historical context of anatomical politics. Anatomy matters, Alice Domurat Dreger tells us, because the senses we possess, the muscles we control, and the resources we require to keep our bodies alive limit and guide what we experience in any given context. Her deeply thought-provoking and compassionate work exposes the breadth and depth of that context - the extent of the social frame upon which we construct the "normal." In doing so, the book calls into question assumptions about anatomy and normality, and transforms our understanding of how we are all intricately and inextricably joined.

About this title

Review:

"Are we singletons simpletons? It may be so. The evidence Alice Dreger marshalls in this impressively argued, immensely readable book, suggests that conjoined twins are often perfectly at home in their shared skin, a fact that stretches, if anything, only our assumptions about their double lives. In articulating the rights of the individual in the most intimate of corporations, Dreger makes a persuasive argument for changing society rather than people. Given the recent deaths of the Bijani sisters following separation surgery, Dreger's contribution to the debate has become even more important." - Jeffrey Eugenides, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Middlesex"

About the Author:

Alice Domurat Dreger is Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies in the Lyman Briggs School of Science at Michigan State University and Faculty Associate at the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences. She is the author of Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex from Harvard University Press.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0674012941
• ISBN 13: 9780674012943
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224