Human exceptionalism in "Gattaca"

I say "more" thoughts because I have been thinking about and discussing Gattaca for years now, and it's certainly one of my favorite films. The persecuted underdog story, coupled with Michael Nyman's beautiful score, always gets to me. I have, of course, also detected in it the Romantic notion that being sick in a sick society is actually being healthy. As such, Gattaca is also a powerful defense of the Romantic idea of the visionary individual who, swimming against the tide - as it were -, is somehow above the law. That, together with the "no gene for the human spirit" BS seems to make for a deeply humanist film (and I use that adjective as an insult). But right now I'm interested in the cues the film presents to warrant a post-humanist reading.

Temple Grandin's ableism

As an autistic animal scientist who seemed to problematize even further the connections between the disability critique and posthumanist thinking, Temple Grandin had always been a very interesting and intriguing character and author for me for a long time, when I finally found a reason to buy one of her books from Amazon. One of my Literature teachers in my undergrad program, Eliana Ávila, who was also in my BA dissertation committee, has recently become deeply interested in Disability Studies to the point that she founded a research group focused on the interconnections between post-colonialism and disability. She invited some of her students to present something in a future conference on Gender Studies about disability-related othering. And my publication-greedy self thought that that was exactly what I needed to finally start reading Temple Grandin, to analyze what she brought of interest to the posthuman/disability 'conflict', and to present her to the Brazilian academia.

September 1, 1939

On September 1st, which was last Tuesday, I was watching Katyń by Andrzej Wajda and I realized during it that that Tuesday marked the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland, and of the Second World War. I was really intrigued that no one had mentioned anything during that day (but not so much, since I hadn't turned on the TV or opened up a newspaper). I had to check afterwards to see if it had been really September 1st, but yes, it had. Because I came of age in the 90s, I got used to the idea that WWII had happened 50 years ago, because my mind always made the math based on 1945. But realizing that such event happened exactly 70 years ago kind of disturbed me. Seventy years felt like a long time ago, and I felt a pang of fear that it might some day be forgotten.