Bees, Butterflies, and Bacteria: Biotechnology and the Politics of Nonhuman Friendship

Nick Bingham
Additional contact information
Nick Bingham: Geography Discipline, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, England

Environment and Planning A, 2006, vol. 38, issue 3, 483-498

Abstract: The author seeks to decentre some already familiar geographies of biotechnology. By asking, with respect to genetically modified (GM) crops, not ‘what is the new?’, but ‘where is the new?’, the intention is to redirect attention (at least briefly) away from the GM technique or genetically modified object and its supposed properties, to the world to which that technique or object is being added. This in turn allows the question concerning GM to be approached from new directions, for example, via the routes taken into the controversy by three specific organisms. Not fully taken into account in the calculations of the biotechnology industry, the honey bee, the Monarch butterfly, and the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis have all, in very different ways, made their presence felt as they literally and metaphorically encountered GM. In an attempt to do justice to these marginalised lifeforms, the forms of life of which they are part, and the biopolitical questions which they raise, the works of Jacques Derrida on friendship and animality, Jean-Luc Nancy on being with, and Bruno Latour on making things public, are brought into conversation. It is suggested that together what they offer is a way of thinking ourselves as collectively in the midst of things.

Date: 2006
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a38436 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:38:y:2006:i:3:p:483-498

DOI: 10.1068/a38436

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().