Gendered Biopolitics of Public Health: Regulation and Discipline in Seafood Consumption Advisories

Abstract

‘Seafood consumption advisories’ that tell childbearing women which fish they should and should not eat are the dominant public health response to the accumulation, in otherwise healthful fish, of environmental pollutants that are harmful to developing fetuses. These advisories are not merely a rational response to an environmental health dilemma but, rather, a form of gendered biopolitics of responsibility for population security. First, because advisories encourage individuals to self-manage risk by altering their lifestyles, they are exemplary of contemporary neoliberal public health approaches that make individuals responsible not only for their own well-being but also for the well-being of the population. Second, advisories also combine elements of reproductive politics, including the medicalization of pregnancy, the production of fetal personhood, and enduring notions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers. As such, advisories are a gendered technology of biopolitics that intensifies the self-disciplining of women as mothers of potential, future children. In making these arguments, the paper draws from Foucault's lectures and from extensive feminist literature on reproduction and mothering to develop an understanding of biopolitics as an apparatus of power that integrally links liberal regulation and individualized discipline, and does so in ways that are both reflective and productive of gendered relations.