Infrahumanisms

<div>In <i>Infrahumanisms</i> Megan H. Glick considers how conversations surrounding nonhuman life have impacted a broad range of attitudes toward forms of human difference such as race sexuality and health. She examines the history of human and nonhuman subjectivity as told through twentieth-century scientific and cultural discourses that include pediatrics primatology eugenics exobiology and obesity research. Outlining how the category of the human is continuously redefined in relation to the infrahuman-a liminal position of speciation existing between the human and the nonhuman-Glick reads a number of phenomena from early twentieth-century efforts to define children and higher order primates as liminally human and the postwar cultural fascination with extraterrestrial life to anxieties over AIDS SARS and other cross-species diseases. In these cases the efforts to define a universal humanity create the means with which to reinforce notions of human difference and maintain human-nonhuman hierarchies. In foregrounding how evolving definitions of the human reflect shifting attitudes about social inequality Glick shows how the consideration of nonhuman subjectivities demands a rethinking of long-held truths about biological meaning and difference.</div>