Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the Covid-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post-Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century.
 
The book draws on original research spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden to show how the politics of science and technology shape the medical uses of biotechnology. Some of these technologies reveal fierce ideological conflicts in the arenas of cloning, reproduction, artificial intelligence, longevity, gender affirmation, vaccination and environmental health. Interweaving politics and culture, the book illustrates how these health issues are reflected in and challenged by literary and cinematic texts, from Oryx and Crake to Annihilation, and from Gattaca to Avatar.
 
By assessing the complex relationship between federal politics and the biomedical industry, Transformed States develops an ecological approach to public health that moves beyond tensions between state governance and private enterprise. To that end, Martin Halliwell analyses thirty years that radically transformed American science, medicine, and policy, positioning biotechnology in dialogue with fears and fantasies about an emerging future in which health is ever more contested.
 
Along with the two earlier books, Therapeutic Revolutions (2013) and Voices of Mental Health (2017), Transformed States is the final volume of a landmark cultural and intellectual history of mental health in the United States, journeying from the combat zones of World War II to the global emergency of Covid-19.
 

MARTIN HALLIWELL is Professor of American Thought and Culture at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. He is the author and editor of fifteen books, including Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945–1970 and Voices of Mental Health: Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970–2000 (both Rutgers University Press).

“This is a hugely ambitious, impressively researched, transdisciplinary analysis linking the political, intellectual, and cultural debates over a range of biotechnologies and constantly addressing key conceptual and ethical questions about how we might understand the ways new human technologies are reshaping our bodies and our selves in our ‘posthuman’ age.”

 — Nikolas Rose, author of The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Cent

“Martin Halliwell steers an eloquent, critical path through the utopian and dystopian extremes of biotechnology history. He gives us a highly interdisciplinary account of the relations between the US state, biotechnological innovation, and cultural politics, from the early post-cold war era to the present. In the process, he draws out crucial implications for bioethics, biopolitics, and the ways we can shape the future.”
 — Catherine Waldby, director of the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University

“In conceiving technology not as an extraneous component to biological life but an integral condition of its real-world enactment, Martin Halliwell’s Transformed States is an invaluable contribution to contemporary scholarship that seeks to go beyond old Cartesian binaries of mind and body, mental, and physical health. Halliwell presents an image of the plastic body as being inseparable from the collective forces of social inequity, state legislation and cultural politics which shape its simultaneously virtual and organic life.”

 — Nicholas Manning, professor of American literature, Université Grenoble Alpes

“Transformed States is a measured, thorough, and absorbing account of the dangers and opportunities offered by biotech in addressing US healthcare challenges since the 1990s. Halliwell is imaginative and capacious in envisaging healthcare challenges, running from the micro level of organisms in the gut to the macro level of planetary precarity.”— Paul Williams, author of Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics