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

[ecaterin]

Seriously, she thinks ethics is what we “feel is right.”

MY GOD. IT'S TRUTHINESS-AS-ETHICS. I may puke.

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.

Light, you fucking rock. Punches: you do not pull them.

Parenting children, and teaching other parents to parent children, you realize just HOW fucked up your "gut reaction" is to...well, just about every-fucking-thing. Our culture brainwashes us to see everything through the lens of power. Every last thing. And if power is your only reference, everything looks like a nail. Er, everything looks like either a victory-via-conquest, or defeat-via-conquest. You don't realize this until you are put in a position where you have complete power (parents are bigger & stronger than the small offspring), but feel powerless (kids will never stop being themselves, no matter how horrid one is to them) - it makes people lose their minds. Perfectly rational, sane people act like the worst kind of assholes as parents, because their world-view as having control [power, in disguise] is being destroyed. They act on what they feel, but their feelings are totally out of whack - they feel like they're under ACTUAL PHYSICAL THREAT, flight or fight kicks in, and stupid ensues.

Seriously, walking parents through the power-labyrinth in their heads is like dancing with an elephant in a minefield. Teaching them to check every automatic reaction to their kids and question its motivations is like asking someone to eliminate every sexist, racist, abelist, homophobic and every other oppressive subconscious template from their world view. Doing that myself plus teaching it to other people has made me realize you'll NEVER rid yourself of hierarchical thinking - you just get better at stopping it before it leaves your lips and deconstructing it so it is less likely to ambush you again.

I'm ready for the Oankali now, who's with me? :D

[vito_excalibur]

Look, okay. Ethics isn’t about how we feeeeel. You know why? Because we feeeeel like assholes.

And this is why we love you. ^_____^

[readerjane]

Huh. *ponders*

So is this what urban fantasy is about, too? The kind that angsts about whether a character gets turned into something alien like a vampire or a werewolf or a ghost?

[livingbyfiction.livejournal.com]

feeelings.

Didn't Leon Kass (W's bioethicist) publish a whole book on the "wisdom of repugnance"?

Sorry, did I just make you throw up?

[livingbyfiction.livejournal.com]

To get rid of the aftertaste, I recommend Nation. The inverse of Lord of the Flies. It just might be Terry Pratchett's magnum opus, a coffin-to-lifeboat love letter to the world.

[cahn]

Heh. Apparently (judging from my LJ) I mildly liked it, but also apparently I had written the entry long enough after actually reading it to forget how whiny it was (and, yeah, right there with you about What It Means to Be Human... gah, now that you mention that I remember wanting to break something over her head whenever she started in on that).

And, wow, ethics is what people feel is right? Ugh.

[lightreads]

MY GOD. IT'S TRUTHINESS-AS-ETHICS.

*loltakes*

Wow, okay, that makes perfect sense re parenting and power, though of course I hadn't thought about it in that way. This book is actually dealing with a lot of that, but in a scary way. You might find it interesting for that reason. Spoilers -- teenage girl is in a terrible car accident, biotech elite parents essentially build her a new body and reupload what they could salvage of her brain. Because they just cannot let go. Except they also do some other things while they're at it to try and keep her controlled, and also to make sure they can start again and build another if they need to. But they're not actually villains, which is one of the ways the book does dig into its nuance. It just totally validates a separate set of parents who do something similar against their daughter's openly and repeatedly expressed wishes. Among other icky things.

[lightreads]

It doesn't often hit me that way, though some has. Mostly I think because the metaphors just don't work. E.g. Buffy's vampires are literally inhabited by a separate nonhuman entity. Which is a completely different conversation. And it's not...drawing on the same lexical bakcground that, say, this book was in its discourse on medicine and treatment and what we "should" and "shouldn't" do to people's bodies.

[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."

[readerjane]

Yeah, but I think most vampire narratives don't take the possession route: those turned are still the same mind, but changed -- infected, alien. And then the stories often make their personhood hinge upon what has been done to them rather than on what they choose to do.