Biotecnologias distópicas e a perfeição insustentável: analise sociológica dos dilemas morais da eugenia liberal no cinema

Abstract

This study analyzes the cinematographic production based on the way in which it evaluates the consequences of new scientific capacities in the genetic engineering field, inasmuch as this production imagines and presents potential benefits or risks and, within this outline, situates social and ethical questions, even in those narratives whose entertainment is the main passenger of this cultural vehicle and the accuracy can be questioned. Genetic engineering is a rich subject for the fictional exploration of the new technological imperatives and the new dystopian problems that come along, mainly what is called liberal eugenics, a framework of justifications that advocate, among other things, for the parents' power to select genetic traits of embryos for both therapeutic and enhancement purposes. This study analyzes, therefore, how the science fiction's eugenic dystopias mobilize and project the values of liberal eugenics and, more closely, how they respond to the problems of sociability and self-understanding (identity) that emerge in the process of moral justification of eugenic forms. The arrangement of moral values and ideologies available in such films is important for this study: it allows to explore the sociological significance of future projections and moral experience present in the movies. In order to do so, this study investigates the contemporary situation of aspects of liberal eugenics incorporated in some cultural products, interpreting the content of Moreau's serie (Island of the Wild Souls of 1933 and The Island of Doctor Moreau in the versions of 1977 and of 1996 ), GATTACA (1997) and Code 46 (2003). The conclusion points to these dystopian scientific fictions' critical or contentious insufficiency on the questions of liberal eugenics' biotechnologies, as they directly or indirectly reinforce ideologies ground on bourgeois individualism, meritocracy, normalization of inequalities and genetic determinism, reducing or making invisible moral and historical intricacies.