ABSTRACT
In this chapter we focus on the ways in which the discourse of cloning has evolved during the period between 1997 and 2007, to produce particular versions of the future. This entails exploring and comparing recent modes of conjuring a positive vision of the scientific future and the repudiating of technoscientific dystopias. In the previous chapter we examined some of the new meanings which have accrued to cloning and how somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) and stem-cell research are currently co-constituted and linked with cloning. As we indicated, prior to the 1990s, human cloning was identifiedmainly as a trope of science-fiction films and novels. These offered dystopic versions of human reproductive cloning focused on the visual figure of the clone as multiple duplicate as in The Boys from Brazil (1978) and Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979). However, in recent years human cloning is no longer predominantly associated with this dystopic vision, instead it has been increasingly linked to a promising future of therapeutic technoscientific practice. In the previous chapter we showed how, in the context of UK techno-
scientific policy debate, cloning became linked to a ‘rhetoric of hope’ through its implication with the discursive legacy of the embryo debates of the 1980s (Mulkay 1997). In this chapter we explore the rhetoric of hope further in order to examine the emergence of specific national imaginaries about cloning. We explore how cloning is presented as offering the promise of regeneration and relief from suffering. As regenerative, cloning is re-constituted as a medical process, as well as being figured through the body of the clone. In this chapter we argue that human reproductive cloning is increasingly figured, in some instances, as a possible future. It is the specific features of the recent constructions of both the promise and fears associated with cloning that we address here. This chapter highlights how human cloning has come to be identified with
certain interwoven features – the prospects of:
1 future cures and freedom from suffering; 2 temporal contraction and imminence; 3 global subject positions.
