The rhetoric appeal to identity on websites of companies offering non-health-related DNA testing

During the last few years a large number of companies have emergedoffering DNA testing via the Internet “direct-to-consumer”. In this paper, Ianalyse the rhetoric appeal to personal identity put forward on the websites ofsome of these consumer genomics companies. The investigation is limited tonon-health-related DNA testing and focuses on individualistic and communitarian—in a descriptive sense—visions of identity. The individualistic visionsstress that each individual is unique and suggest that this uniqueness can besupported by, for example, DNA fingerprinting. The communitarian visionsemphasise that individuals are members of communities, in this case geneticcommunities. It is suggested that these visions can be supported by, forexample, various types of tests for genetic ancestry tracing. The main part of thepaper is devoted to an analysis of these communitarian visions of identity andthe DNA tests they refer to