ICare Capitalism? The Biopolitics of Choice in a Neoliberal Economy of Hope

Abstract

International relations and global development just got a whole lot easier. Through the conscious choice and purchase of the “right” kind of coffee, bottled water, or t-shirt, now available at one's local supermarket, the caring relationalities of development of the “fair trade” kind can quite easily be put into practice. For some, these practices provide the space for people's “everyday” moralities let loose through their ordinary choices that then works to globalize a form of responsibility toward poor Others (Barnett, Cloke, Clarke and Malpass ). Here, the weekly grocery shopping has morphed into the first line of defense of poor farmers’ livelihoods, clean water, women's empowerment, and international development. With Brand Aid (Richey and Ponte ), with its celebrity- and corporate-brand-drenched marketing campaigns, this “causumerism” has been taken to the extreme. Now, through the purchase of Product (RED)-labeled commodities, it is instead the very real case that saving the very lives of poor, Aids-stricken Africans just got a whole lot easier. Put in rather stark, and exceedingly un-ironic and unproblematic terms, in buying a Product (RED) iPod, “you have a new iPod and you helped save a person's life.” Over time, however, the Product (RED) campaign has morphed slightly and narrowed the advertised scope of whom it saves. Now, RED provides its drugs predominantly to pregnant HIV-infected mothers in Africa in order to halt the spread of HIV to newborn children designed to usher in an “Aids-free generation” by 2015 (Joinred.org ). Thus, in the contemporary incarnation of Product (RED), “a person's life” has taken on more specific meanings and materialities in the even more stable forms of pregnant mothers and children, while the mechanisms of how they are “saved” have remained the same.