A Crisis to Think with: Mining the Biopolitics of COVID-19 in American Public Discourse

Abstract

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic put to test medical, political and social systems around the globe. It also probed into our ability to work out coherent explanations of unprecedented situations and to devise effective solutions when operating with grossly insufficient, frequently changing, and often controversial information. Using a Foucauldian lens, this study examines the American public discourse on COVID-19 to reveal the mechanisms through which the crisis was made sense of and managed. It shows that unity in spirit and action in measures against the pandemic did not emerge nor was the virus uniformly affecting the population thus suggesting that “population” as an object of governing is a discursive construction thriving on its partitioning and fracturing the moment it is put together. It concludes that overall, despite the clout of unprecedentedness, COVID-19 produced neither new relations of power nor new subjectivities but further aligned government actions with the interests of the state.