Event Title
From blood to genes: The role of metaphor in understandings of kinship, heredity and race
Start Date
26-6-2010 9:00 AM
End Date
26-6-2010 10:30 AM
Description
This presentation is part of the Constructing Race and Sexuality track.
In “Blood is Thicker than Water: Policing Donor Insemination and the Reproduction of Whiteness,” Seline Szkupinski Quiroga explores the deployment of race in biomedical solutions to infertility. To set the context for this exploration, she attempts to describe the role of race in the American kinship model. According to Quiroga: “Heredity is usually understood simply as the transmission of characteristics and traits from parent to offspring, where the difference between physical expression of genes (phenotype) and the actual inherited genes of the parents (genotype) is obscured.” One likely source of this obscuring is the way in which biological heredity and kinship have traditionally been viewed through the metaphor of blood. Metaphors serve as narratives of meaning and help to frame our understanding of the world, but they often bring together a number of ideas and carry with them a number of connotations that we might do well to try to sort out. For instance, the metaphor of blood combines at least two issues that ought to be distinguished – the mechanisms for transmission of genetic variation and the ‘substance’ of hereditary characteristics or traits. In the metaphor, blood is both the carrier and the substance of biological inheritance.
The issue is further complicated by at least two other historical features of hereditary thinking in terms of blood. First is the great power and importance frequently attributed to blood/heredity – that is, a persistent tendency toward biological determinism. As Quiroga writes: “Popular aphorisms such as ‘blood will tell’ because ‘like begets like’ reflect the belief that what one inherits from one’s parents is more significant and essential than one’s social environment” (145). Second is the historically strong association between heredity and race, also expressed through blood metaphors. “The metaphor of blood was, and still is, code for race,” Quiroga writes, “with connotations regarding the ‘sanctity of blood, mixing blood, white blood, black blood, and pure versus tainted blood’” (145). The linking of race and heredity is foundational to the American racial hierarchy, which “relies on the idea that intrinsic to whiteness are so-called superior traits that are linked to success” and that those traits are heritable – in other words that “whiteness itself is heritable” (Quiroga 145).
In fact, however, “both whiteness and race are social constructions and therefore not heritable” (Quiroga 146). While those phenotypic traits popularly used (typically idiosyncratically) to “discern” a person’s so-called race (e.g. eye shape, facial structure, hair texture, stature, and skin color) are, in fact, heritable, their distributions among world populations do not allow for any genuinely scientific demarcation of the groups any given culture considers to be “racial.” In other words, while the latest work in genetics can use genetic variation to mark out populations in terms of patterns of migration, ancestry and descent, this work cannot give us scientifically the “races” whose existence has been assumed, constructed and reified socio-historically.
Why is it, then, that “the folk idea that race is reducible to biological features remains prevalent” (Quiroga 146)? Even, one could argue, in the very formulation and execution of so-called scientific inquiry into genetics and heredity? If, as Quiroga asserts, “[t]wenty-first-century hereditarianism substitutes the idea of blood for genes” (146), then one answer may lie in the fact that, rather than taking new scientific information on its own terms (to whatever extent that would be possible), we have to some degree simply pasted updated scientific terminology (genes) onto our old metaphorical understanding of blood, with all its limitations, prejudices and idiosyncrasies. We do not question our biological determinism; we simply make it genetic determinism. We abandon the idea of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ blood only to replace it with ‘good’ or ‘bad’ genes, without interrogating our sense of which ‘groups’ carry and transmit these ‘good’ or ‘bad’ qualities or attempting to complicate our understanding of heredity itself. Today, “genes rather than blood will tell” (Quiroga 146).
In this paper, I explore these ideas that (1) the way we talk about genes today is related to the way that we used to talk about blood and that (2) the way we used to talk about blood had not simply to do with ideas of kinship and heredity, but crucially with ideas about race. In an effort both to elaborate upon and fill in Quiroga’s claims, I argue that these three concepts – race, kinship and heredity – were connected and conjoined through the metaphor of blood, forming a messy knot of meaning in which our ‘new’ thinking about genes often remains entangled. To that end, I will begin by discussing blood as a metaphor for heredity, kinship and race. With the aim of illuminating these blood metaphors in the American context, where the idea of blood as a ‘natural substance’ is a primary feature, I will introduce some information about the origin of the terms ‘race’ and ‘heredity’ in the English language before discussing the use of the blood metaphor in race thinking after the end of American chattel slavery. I will then turn to a brief discussion of the role of metaphor in current popular understandings of genetics and consider how the persistence of old metaphors can enable the persistence of certain notions of race in spite of scientific evidence that ought to dismantle them. In the course of these explorations, I also hope to make clear both how prevalent metaphor is in our language and our understanding of the world and how deeply intertwined race thinking and politics have been and remain with our understandings of heredity and kinship in general.
From blood to genes: The role of metaphor in understandings of kinship, heredity and race
This presentation is part of the Constructing Race and Sexuality track.
In “Blood is Thicker than Water: Policing Donor Insemination and the Reproduction of Whiteness,” Seline Szkupinski Quiroga explores the deployment of race in biomedical solutions to infertility. To set the context for this exploration, she attempts to describe the role of race in the American kinship model. According to Quiroga: “Heredity is usually understood simply as the transmission of characteristics and traits from parent to offspring, where the difference between physical expression of genes (phenotype) and the actual inherited genes of the parents (genotype) is obscured.” One likely source of this obscuring is the way in which biological heredity and kinship have traditionally been viewed through the metaphor of blood. Metaphors serve as narratives of meaning and help to frame our understanding of the world, but they often bring together a number of ideas and carry with them a number of connotations that we might do well to try to sort out. For instance, the metaphor of blood combines at least two issues that ought to be distinguished – the mechanisms for transmission of genetic variation and the ‘substance’ of hereditary characteristics or traits. In the metaphor, blood is both the carrier and the substance of biological inheritance.
The issue is further complicated by at least two other historical features of hereditary thinking in terms of blood. First is the great power and importance frequently attributed to blood/heredity – that is, a persistent tendency toward biological determinism. As Quiroga writes: “Popular aphorisms such as ‘blood will tell’ because ‘like begets like’ reflect the belief that what one inherits from one’s parents is more significant and essential than one’s social environment” (145). Second is the historically strong association between heredity and race, also expressed through blood metaphors. “The metaphor of blood was, and still is, code for race,” Quiroga writes, “with connotations regarding the ‘sanctity of blood, mixing blood, white blood, black blood, and pure versus tainted blood’” (145). The linking of race and heredity is foundational to the American racial hierarchy, which “relies on the idea that intrinsic to whiteness are so-called superior traits that are linked to success” and that those traits are heritable – in other words that “whiteness itself is heritable” (Quiroga 145).
In fact, however, “both whiteness and race are social constructions and therefore not heritable” (Quiroga 146). While those phenotypic traits popularly used (typically idiosyncratically) to “discern” a person’s so-called race (e.g. eye shape, facial structure, hair texture, stature, and skin color) are, in fact, heritable, their distributions among world populations do not allow for any genuinely scientific demarcation of the groups any given culture considers to be “racial.” In other words, while the latest work in genetics can use genetic variation to mark out populations in terms of patterns of migration, ancestry and descent, this work cannot give us scientifically the “races” whose existence has been assumed, constructed and reified socio-historically.
Why is it, then, that “the folk idea that race is reducible to biological features remains prevalent” (Quiroga 146)? Even, one could argue, in the very formulation and execution of so-called scientific inquiry into genetics and heredity? If, as Quiroga asserts, “[t]wenty-first-century hereditarianism substitutes the idea of blood for genes” (146), then one answer may lie in the fact that, rather than taking new scientific information on its own terms (to whatever extent that would be possible), we have to some degree simply pasted updated scientific terminology (genes) onto our old metaphorical understanding of blood, with all its limitations, prejudices and idiosyncrasies. We do not question our biological determinism; we simply make it genetic determinism. We abandon the idea of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ blood only to replace it with ‘good’ or ‘bad’ genes, without interrogating our sense of which ‘groups’ carry and transmit these ‘good’ or ‘bad’ qualities or attempting to complicate our understanding of heredity itself. Today, “genes rather than blood will tell” (Quiroga 146).
In this paper, I explore these ideas that (1) the way we talk about genes today is related to the way that we used to talk about blood and that (2) the way we used to talk about blood had not simply to do with ideas of kinship and heredity, but crucially with ideas about race. In an effort both to elaborate upon and fill in Quiroga’s claims, I argue that these three concepts – race, kinship and heredity – were connected and conjoined through the metaphor of blood, forming a messy knot of meaning in which our ‘new’ thinking about genes often remains entangled. To that end, I will begin by discussing blood as a metaphor for heredity, kinship and race. With the aim of illuminating these blood metaphors in the American context, where the idea of blood as a ‘natural substance’ is a primary feature, I will introduce some information about the origin of the terms ‘race’ and ‘heredity’ in the English language before discussing the use of the blood metaphor in race thinking after the end of American chattel slavery. I will then turn to a brief discussion of the role of metaphor in current popular understandings of genetics and consider how the persistence of old metaphors can enable the persistence of certain notions of race in spite of scientific evidence that ought to dismantle them. In the course of these explorations, I also hope to make clear both how prevalent metaphor is in our language and our understanding of the world and how deeply intertwined race thinking and politics have been and remain with our understandings of heredity and kinship in general.