Bio-X: Review

Abstract

Adele Clarke, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim's Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in U.S. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Aihwa Ong and Nancy N. Chen's Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Biosecurity. Bioinsecurity. Biorisks. Bioavailability. Bioresources. Biovalue. Biocapital. Bioindustry. Bioeconomy. Bioprospecting. Biopiracy. Bioparanoia. Bioresponsibility. Bioprotection. Biostrategies. Biomapping. Biomedia. Biocollectivism. Biosociality. Biocommunity. Biosovereignty. Bionation. In social studies of science, as in sector, which is one of field's current (pre) occupations, is viral. Working on became a widespread pursuit at end of twentieth century. New biotechnologies and medical technologies (some actual, some anticipatory) surfaced through a conjuncture of economic and technical events, for example: legal incentives to academic-industry partnership (e.g. Bayh-Doyle Act of 1980) and corresponding proliferation of pharmaceuticals; human genome project and general establishment of bioinformatics, a subfield itself indebted to new computing and Internet technologies; and for culturing stem cells and promise of regenerative medicine. More broadly, political-economic milieu of late liberalism has encouraged obsessive attention to individual embodiment, especially in forms of self-surveillance and self-maximization. Whether result of influence, confluence, or co-emergence, feminists and other critical theorists increasingly turned their focus from language to the during those same years. In past decade, as Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein observe in a review of recent work on biopolitics (Cracking Biopower), Foucauldians have moved on from knowledge/power, genealogy, and discourse to theory of biopolitics: 'Biopower,' a decade ago hardly on any scholar's lips, is today on almost everyone's. In part, this is because Foucault's takeup, and take, on only relatively recently came to general attention, and even more recently got translated into English. . . . The digestion of what he actually wrote on subject has only just begun - with something of a rush (2010, 109). Although he did not coin term, Michel Foucault defined biopower as the set of mechanisms through which basic biological features of human species became object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of (2009, 1). This form of power emerged in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, period that witnessed entrenchment of liberalism in Europe and United States, as well as entry of into history. New fields of knowledge - biology and human sciences - defined and characterized humans and other living things, and simultaneously participated in the administration of bodies and calculated management of life (1978, 140). Biopower, in form of anatomopolitics, became essential to development of capitalism, for instance abetting controlled insertion of bodies into machinery of production (141). In form of biopolitics (a term often used synonymously with by theorists today), it facilitated the control of populations. Foucault insisted that biopolitics, far from being centralized or totalitarian, operates through techniques of power present at every level of social body and utilized by very diverse institutions, right down to self-governance by individual. Can Foucault's biopolitics, rooted in an epistemic break around eighteenth century, be applied to what is otherwise declared to be a new break - very recent biomedical revolution, and biotech century it has purportedly midwifed? Two anthologies published in 2010 by Duke University Press suggest that biopolitics continues to operate, on a grand scale, even though what counts as bio has changed. …