Dolly’s Body: Gender, Genetics and the New Genetic Capital

Abstract

Using Dolly as a kind of shepherd, the author follows the implications of Dolly’s creation in terms of how scientific knowledge comes to be embodied, how biology is seen to be authored, and how in turn such acts of creation are protected as forms of property. Dolly’s coming into being disrupts the traditional template of genealogy: she was born from a new kind of cellular assemblage, in which donor cytoplasm effectively “reprogrammed” her nuclear DNA to “go back in time” and become newly embryonic. Dolly’s biology is as cultural as her ontology is historical, and she is part of a number of new animal kinds, or breeds, which instantiate larger changes in what Foucault denominated “the order of things” connecting life, labour and language.