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"From Blood to Genes?: Rethinking Consanguinity in the Context of Geneticisation”
| In the context of 'new kinship studies', the question of the extent to which kinship is reconfigured both socially and biologically in relation to bioscientific innovation is one of several topics that has been evaluated from a range of conflicting perspectives over the past decade. Finkler (2001) has suggested the 'kin in the gene' enjoy a heightened explicitness in the context of genetic testing, while Rapp (1999) presents a more fluid picture of 'adjustable' kinship, in which the 'concreteness' of genetic information is resisted by patients. Konrad (2004) similarly documents the inverse relationship between increasingly explicit ('factual') genetic information and kin ties that correspond to other logics entirely (e.g. secrecy). Drawing on my research into preimplantation genetic diagnosis, in which offspring, embryos, and reproductive substance take on a surprisingly wide range of contradictory meanings in the context of state-of-the-art genetic science, the question of the extent to which ideas of blood relatedness have been superseded by a more explicitly genetic idiom is critically revisited and challenged.
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