George Estreich, Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019) 240 pp. $27.95 Hb. ISBN: 9780262039567
Across ten chapters of Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves, George Estreich applies a rhetorical lens to expose the tactics of persuasion and exclusion employed by narratives about biotechnologies designed to analyse and alter DNA, such as the gene-editing CRISPR-Cas9 system, screening and diagnostic pre-natal tests, and artificial nucleotides. Throughout, he shows how neoliberalism intertwines with narratives of eugenics to promote an ostensibly new age of human potential in which Disability, and specifically genetic conditions like Down Syndrome, are consigned to the past.
Often, the vehicle for such textual effects is metaphor, which remains core to how biotechnologies are framed and understood: ‘[w]e imagine DNA as words, sentences, chapters, and books. We harvest data, imagining farms’ (41). Estreich reflects that, in texts on biotechnology and its ostensible application and potential, Disability is not simply the subject of metaphor but also the source – these authors think with Disability, using it to render something as faulty or otherwise dismissible. Disability as lived experience is muted in biotechnological discourse, for interiority is secondary to the rhetorical power that the conception of disability as deficit imbues.
Estreich provides a novel application of metaphorical exegesis to biotechnology, and the exploration of covert eugenicist thought contained therein is significant; however, the broader points made about metaphor often present as restatements of the plentiful body of Disability Studies literature dealing with the device, through works by the likes of Lennard J. Davis and Stuart Murray.
This book’s greatest strength is its endeavour to foreground the experiences of people with Down Syndrome. Estreich’s daughter with Down Syndrome appears consistently throughout the text, establishing the everyday lives that biotechnological discourse fails to imagine. We learn about her passion for showcasing rabbits at state fairs – the same sites where eugenics was often promoted in the early twentieth century – or for board games like Monopoly, in contrast to neoliberal arguments that admit Disabled people only insofar as they contribute to economic increase. Such moments serve their own rhetorical function, juxtaposing lived experience with the unfeeling, ostensibly objective logic presented in biotechnological discourse. Estreich is candid about this function, implying that it is necessary for the humanisation of figures who are otherwise amorphous in narratives surrounding biotechnology. He also provides a potted history of life writing about and by people with Down Syndrome, though only a single autobiography is cited. Unfortunately, this means that, elsewhere, Estreich’s invocation of people with Down Syndrome as types, even if unusual and lesser-seen ones – ‘emerging from a voting booth, a brewpub, or a bookstore’ – has a similar imaginary tenor to the very discourse he critiques (68). He could have made this point more strongly by incorporating direct quotations from people with Down Syndrome more extensively.
This book will appeal to readers who value cogent, rhetorically-informed close readings of discourses surrounding biotechnology specifically and Disability generally. Disability Studies scholars seeking to expand their knowledge and understanding of such discourses as they pertain to intellectual Disability will also find value here.
Dougie Morgan
