Representing the human body ??? science as social meaning adopts and develops systemic functional social semiotics to analyse the popular science texts, The Human Body, Superhuman, Human Instinct, Brain Story, The Secret Life of Twins and How to Build a Human. These are predominantly produced through the resources of the Wellcome Trust and/or the BBC/TLC (The Learning Channel), and feature celebrity doctors (Robert Winston) or scientists (Susan Greenfield) as presenters. Adopting a modified and expanded systemic functional semiotics derived from Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001), it is argued that these texts share a logic that displaces social/historical time (including broader historical and social struggles) by constructing the apparent timelessness of middle-class families, by metaphor and abstraction. Central to the temporalities of these programmes is the notion of ???going back??? to the familial in which conscious (patriarchal) time is seen as ???male??? and the unconscious timeless is seen as ???female???. Second, the penetrative digital modes of the programmes imagine different, if conventional, genders, emphasising the interior and inertial female. The popular medical science discourses highlighted in the analysis constitute an unconscious set of taken-for-granted socio-political contexts in which medical and bioscientific knowledge is paraded and celebrated. Narrative resolution of the contradictions inherent in the contextual refrain of contemporary global capitalism is largely achieved through time by the semiotic realisation of ???going back??? to evolutionary, genetic, and (hence to) essential time and to abstracted spatial metaphors. The production origins (British, multi-national) of the factual science documentary prefigure or pre-structure the genre???s conservative colonising discourse around gender, ???race??? and evolution that are developed as social, political or even military metaphors.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/241946 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Daly, Tricia, School of Media, Film & Theatre, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Media, Film and Theatre |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Tricia Daly, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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