Embodied Narratives

Increasing quantities of information about our health, bodies, and biological relationships are being generated by health technologies, research, and surveillance. This escalation presents challenges to us all when it comes to deciding how to manage this information and what should be disclosed to the very people it describes. This book establishes the ethical imperative to take seriously the potential impacts on our identities of encountering bioinformation about ourselves. Emily Postan argues that identity interests in accessing personal bioinformation are currently under-protected in law and often linked to problematic bio-essentialist assumptions. Drawing on a picture of identity constructed through embodied self-narratives, and examples of people's encounters with diverse kinds of information, Postan addresses these gaps. This book provides a robust account of the source, scope, and ethical significance of our identity-related interests in accessing – and not accessing – bioinformation about ourselves, and the need for disclosure practices to respond appropriately. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

• Offers a conceptually and ethically robust picture of the impacts on our identities of accessing bioinformation about ourselves, without claiming that identity is determined by biology
• Adopts an interdisciplinary approach to investigating and characterising the nature of identity-interests, providing an evidence-based account that is accessible to readers from diverse disciplines
• Provides account of identity-interests that is not limited to one kind of health or biological information, developing a theory that can be applied to different categories of bioinformation
• This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core