The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary e. Pearson

[lightreads]

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Huh, interesting. This book is the short first person narrative of a teenaged girl, told in a string of tiny sections, sometimes just a sentence or two, as she and the reader piece together her memory after waking from an accident. Justine Larbalestier’s Liar is the short first person narrative of a teenaged girl, told in a string of tiny sections, sometimes just a sentence or two, as she deliberately obscures the truth and jerks the reader around. And yet Jenna Fox was the book I found artificial, over-constructed, manipulative.



I dunno, it’s an issue book, and it’s subtle like a blow to the head. I wanted to like it more than I did, because there’s actually a lot of nice things going on here with a mother-daughter relationship, and even some gestures towards a nuanced treatment of the “issues.” But this is a book about science, and the people caught bleeding on its edge, and it got really far up my nose in the way discussions about “what it truly means to be human” always do. Because these narratives about how far science should or shouldn’t go are, when you scrape away everything else, just shittily disguised exercises in . . . body xenophobia. I mean look, these are books about reconstructed bodies and reconstituted physical and neurological lives, and they’re all, “but what if I’m not huuuuuuman anymore, weep wail.” It’s disability anxiety dressed up pretty. Altered body anxiety. All dependent on this notion of human as something narrow and prescriptive that you obviously should worry about losing if you ever, gasp, get hurt and need medical intervention. Wait . . . hang on . . .



I had a revelation, though. There was an author interview at the end of my audiobook in which Pearson sort of casually defined what ethics means to her. And apparently what ethics means to her is how we feel about things. Seriously, she thinks ethics is what we “feel is right.”



And I was like, holy shit, that’s what people think! It just made sense out of a decade of my life! My God!



Look, okay. Ethics isn’t about how we feeeeel. You know why? Because we feeeeel like assholes. We feel subconscious but measurable anxiety at the presence of people with darker skin than us; we feel in unarticulated but measurable ways that people always have a right to speak up for themselves unless they happen to be women; we feel in subtle but measurable ways that disabled people are upsetting to look at and should just go away. We are racists, we are sexists, we are deeply ablest – we are assholes. So the notion that we can just look into our feelings and find some clean, instinctive, right, ethical answer is utter nonsense. Ethics isn’t what you feel in your heart, and anyone who says so is giving themselves permission to be an asshole.



Which explains everything about this book. Because it is all about how people feel in their hearts – about how they are ablest assholes who ignore things like, um, consent – and not at all about ethics.





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Comments

[lightreads]

Oh God I'd managed to forget about that, thanks.

I have a ...complicated relationship with the bioethics establishment anyway. Bioethics is actually a really normative project, even though most people don't admit that. So there's been a lot of crit around the edges from people who are like, "well excuse the fuck out of me for having a non-normative medical experience you can't deal with."