Speaker Series: Guest Lecturer on Tuesday November 16, 2021 2:30-3:30 pm EST

 

Please join the Department of Religious Studies for our speaker series, featuring Jenny Huberman.  

OLD MEN, YOUNG BLOOD: TRANSHUMANISM AND THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF IMMORTALITY

When: Tuesday, November 16, 2021 – 2:30 p.m.

Where:  Online - Zoom, click here to register
*Zoom link sent 24-hrs in advance of event.

 

Talk Abstract:

This presentation uses the 2016 controversy and media coverage surrounding Peter Thiel’s interest in parabiosis to explore larger questions about transhumanism and the politics of life and death in the contemporary United States. I argue that the vampiristic imagery surrounding Peter Thiel’s reported interest in parabiosis evoked so much outrage and concern precisely because it tapped into larger anxieties that were rippling through American society. Concerns about increasing inequality, white male privilege, the preponderance of gerontocratic power, and the exploitative nature of a biotech industry that views immortality as the latest frontier for the expansion and expropriation of capital, all came to be voiced in and through the coverage of Thiel’s interest in this purportedly age-reversing procedure.