Biopolitical Governance Research Articles

Germ Growers in the Colonial Laboratory

ABSTRACT Written and set in the Australian colonies, Robert Potter’s The Germ Growers (1892) was amongst the earliest novels that engaged with the theme of extra-terrestrial invasion. It describes the discovery of aliens who breed ‘germs’ in a sophisticated laboratory hidden in the outback with the aim of conquering the human species. The novel’s introduction of these otherworldly interlopers into a setting already host to the political, social and scientific experiments of invaders, puts the colonial preoccupations with settlement and dispossession into sharp relief. Potter’s portrayal of relations between white settlers, aliens, exogenous and Indigenous others, accentuates how anxieties about invasion and contamination, insiders and outsiders, humans and nonhumans were accompanied by the application of scientific knowledge and technological expertise in the establishment and administration of social order. Highlighting the idea of colonies as sites for refining elaborate strategies of coercion and control, the novel provides a situated perspective upon the ways in which the affordances of the laboratory operated as central features of the imperial project and influenced its role in the development of biopolitical governance. In doing so, The Germ Growers brings attention to the archive of colonial fiction as a means of approaching the social and historical contexts that continue to undergird relations between science and culture.

Biopolitical platforms: the perverse virtues of digital labour

ABSTRACT By mediating everyday activities, social interactions, and economic transactions, digital platforms play an increasingly dominant role in contemporary capitalism. These platforms have excelled at extracting value from assets and labour that have been deemed un(der)productive. While the burgeoning literature on platform capitalism and digital labour has focused on these systems of value extraction, there has been much less attention on how platforms have also undertaken a project of subject formation and thereby capital development. By theorising empirical research with people who work as food delivery workers for Deliveroo, we show how platforms, specifically those that provide services in urban places, encourage, even require, workers to develop a form of human capital based on three perverse virtues that make them more productive, more desirable workers: flexibility, vitality, and legibility. We then analyse the operations and implications of biopolitical platforms—by which we mean platforms that create and administer a biopolitical governance regime in order to cultivate and accumulate capital, both human and data.

BIOPOLITICS AS AN ASPECT OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN NON-LIBERAL POLITICAL REGIMES (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE PRC)

The article focuses on the potential applicability of biopolitics to modern elements of public administration in non-liberal political regimes on the example of China. M. Foucault's biopolitics is a rather difficult concept to use for the analysis of modern countries of the East due to the initial connection of the concept to the Western intellectual tradition. Based on analysis of the various researches in biopolitics, we propose to look further into strategies for expanding the concept to determine the most suitable for the study of public administration in non-liberal political regimes on the example of the PRC. It is noted that modern China, being an example of a non-liberal political regime, has signs of biopolitical state governance. It is concluded that biopolitics as a technology of power over the population is not an exclusive part of liberal governance.

Mining liquid gold: The lively, contested terrain of human milk valuations.

As global health organizations and national governments tout “breast is best,” the value of human milk is being calculated – and profited from – in increasingly diverse forms. In this paper I chart three of the major ways in which human milk is being economically valued: calculating breastfeeding as a contribution to a country’s GDP; buying and selling human milk to hospitals for profit; and manufacturing key components of human milk and the infant gut. In exploring these bioeconomies, I draw together two approaches to biocapital not often put into conversation with one another: a focus on the micrological generative capacities of biological material, and attention to the macrological biopolitical governance of populations. I argue that juxtaposing these bioeconomies demonstrates key features of human milk biocapital: the multi-scalar workings of reproductive biopolitical valuation and governance; the human and more-than-human ecologies (and labours) on which biocapital depends; and the feminist geographical contestations that shape, and sometimes undermine, these valuations.

The Gendered Biopolitics of Sex Selection in India.

After China, India has the most skewed sex ratio at birth. These two Asian countries account for about 90 to 95% of the estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million missing female births annually, worldwide, due to gender-biased (prenatal) sex selection. To understand this extreme discrimination against girls, this article examines the gendered biopolitics embedded in population policies, new sex selection technologies, and in the social reproduction of patriarchal society. The ethical consequences of advanced reproductive technologies, which remove the moral turpitude around gender-based sex selection by reformulating it into a "modern", "scientific" endeavour, facilitating the rise of "missing girls", make this an issue of gender justice, as noted by the World Population Report 2020. This article argues that unpacking gendered biopolitics within the household is crucial to understanding the reproduction of son preference and daughter aversion since it is here that reproduction and parenthood are subjected to biopolitical governance. We discuss how "biosocial" strategies of the household aimed at producing the "desired" and "right" family of more sons at the cost of daughters are operationalized through women's bodies with a view to family mobility. While women and girls continue to bear the burden and costs of social reproduction that lie at the heart of the patriarchal capitalist system of accumulation, a perusal of more recent studies suggests the beginning of an equalizing trend of parental investments, especially in the health and education of daughters who are "allowed" to be born. We suggest that familial enhancement of girls' human capital can help as a means of developing girls' capabilities and agency, enhancing their power in the biopolitics of the family and increasing their "bio-value" in parents' eyes.

Cultivating membership abroad: Analyzing German pre-integration courses for Turkish marriage migrants

ABSTRACT Addressing research on migration governance, this article examines German pre-integration courses offered to Turkish marriage migrants in Istanbul. The courses were implemented in response to growing concern about the perceived poor integration of Muslim migrants and a high number of forced marriages. I argue that these courses are a micro form of biopolitical governance. Specifically, they are an attempt to generate internalized ways of being and knowing that are desired by the state, which I call ‘membership cultivation.’ As such, the courses are not precisely aimed at restricting migration as in other pre-integration measures, nor are they mainly reinforcing symbolic boundaries and teaching liberalism as in post-migration German civic integration courses. Rather, the courses attempt to re-make migrants with regards to morality, culture and gender. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews, this research examines the disciplinary mechanisms targeting migrants’ transformation to enhance our understanding of the biopolitics of pre-integration governance.

Birthing across borders: ‘Contracting’ reproductive geographies

Within a context of intensifying global displacement, the experience of birthing across borders is becoming a reality for many. We catch incomplete glimpses of these realities through countless media snapshots of pregnant bodies in dinghies crossing seas or slung with metallic emergency-blankets. Despite their prevalence, these birthing experiences have not been adequately accounted for in the scholarship on reproductive geographies. In this article, we argue that this relative absence is not a mishap but reflects a deeper geographical bias. The present article seeks to address this gap and has three main aims: first, to provide a deeper understanding of heterogenous reproductive lives, especially as they relate to questions of displacement and precarious citizenship. Second, to offer new participatory and creative methods for understanding these reproductive lives in contexts of acute but also protracted violence. Third, to develop a conceptual language of ‘contraction’ to help grapple with some of the inequities but also mobilities and solidarities across diverse geographies. Finally, foregrounding questions of displacement, this article brings into sharp relief the geopolitics of reproduction and how biopolitical governance is being both experienced and resisted through what Katz calls the ‘messy fleshy stuff of everyday life’ in too-often invisibilised liminal spaces.

Concrete stories, decomposing fictions: Body parts and body politics in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

This essay reads the English translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s novel Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018) to explore the “concrete stories” and “infrastructural narratives” devised by the US military in support of its occupation of Baghdad. By stitching together a city and society littered with composing and decomposing fictions, Saadawi’s novel reveals how biopolitical governance produces, contra the hegemonic US war story of security consolidation and societal stabilization, pervasive insecurity instead. Saadawi’s “decomposing fictions”, as I call them, operate on three homologous terrains: the (de)composition of the city; the (de)composition of the body; and the (de)composition of the narrative itself. Through this three-tired conflation, Saadawi shows how body parts are biopolitical, and how narratives actively and materially reshape human bodies and urban infrastructures. The essay therefore argues that the novel aligns with a critical posthumanist perspective, one that allows for a more rigorous consideration of narrative systems (including fictions) as constitutive of and impactful upon human and non-human bodies and urban infrastructures than other concepts, such as “planned violence”, have so far allowed. By theorizing a more complex relationship between narrative form and the built environment in the contexts of militarized colonial and biopolitical urban governance, the essay shows how Saadawi’s novel not only challenges the “imaginative geographies” of the colonial present, but its material infrastructures as well.

Biogeopolitics of COVID-19: Asylum-Related Migrants at the European Union Borderlands.

In biogeopolitics, the key state stakeholders develop and aim to accomplish their geopolitical goals by (mis)management and biopolitical governance of vulnerable population. In this paper, this population refers to asylum‐related migrants who use or aim to use an asylum request as their entry mechanism to the European Union. This paper explores the emergence of biogeopolitics at the EU borderland between Turkey and Greece during the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2020. Statistics about irregular migration from Turkey to Greece, field observations in Lesvos (Greece) as well as media and social media discussions about COVID‐19 in Lesvos are analysed. In the biogeopolitics of COVID‐19, the governance and (mis)management of asylum‐related migrants include policies and practices to let these migrants to live or die, including regulating illegal border‐crossings, everyday living conditions at the reception centres, and actions regarding the pandemic. The COVID‐19 pandemic was used as an additional tool to foster biogeopolitics.

Haiti, MINUSTAH e democracia: a técnica de governo biopolítico na operação da Organização das Nações Unidas

Resumo: Este trabalho tem por objetivo analisar a Missão das Nações Unidas para a Estabilização do Haiti (MINUSTAH) como um mecanismo de governo biopolítico e continuidade da prática, por parte das nações tidas como grandes potências ocidentais, de intervenção nos processos políticos haitianos desde sua Independência, em 1804. Para isto, realizamos análise bibliográfica acerca do tema, bem como análises de documentos da Organização das Nações Unidas, de instituições envolvidas na operação e do governo brasileiro. Abordando os conceitos elaborados por Michel Foucault, o trabalho apresenta as diferentes técnicas de governo – como racismo de Estado, dispositivo de polícia e disciplina – utilizadas pelos países estrangeiros nas intervenções no Haiti, ao longo dos séculos XIX, XX e início do XXI, para impor valores democráticos liberais, prescrever condutas ao Estado haitiano e aos indivíduos. Ademais, apontamos os interesses do Brasil em comandar a face militar da MINUSTAH.
 Palavras-chave: MINUSTAH. Biopolítica. Racismo de Estado.

Introduction

In this special issue, the contributors argue that plasticity, the capacity of living systems to generate and take on new forms, is a central axis of biopolitical governance. While plasticity has a specific meaning in the life sciences, conceptually it has infused a broad range of theoretical, material, and scientific idioms for describing the malleability of a given body or system. Each of these conceptions of plasticity provides an account of malleability that, seemingly inexhaustible in its disorganizing qualities, has sometimes been framed as a resource for the disruption of normalizing systems of power. The articles in this special issue show that, by contrast, plasticity does not resist but is actually enlisted by state power through biopolitics. “The Biopolitics of Plasticity” investigates how race and state power actually depend on and enlist malleability and formlessness to govern living populations and individuals. By unevenly distributing the capacity of corporeal malleability, plasticity functions as a key logic underpinning the modern notion of racial difference. The issue’s introduction proposes a critical reckoning with the racial politics of this important concept to ask new questions about how to understand the organic malleability of the body and such categories as race, sex, gender, and sexuality.

The story of Wānanalua: Stranded whales and contested marine sovereignties in Hawai‘i

This paper considers how systems of interspecies knowing and care in Hawai'i push against state-supported frameworks of liberal biopolitical governance. In 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a citation two Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) women under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, for unlawfully “tak[ing] and/or or transporting” a stranded melon-headed whale (“Wānanalua”). In the lawsuit, prosecutors deliberated on the legality of the traditional sea burial situating it within a broader context of cultural accommodations granted by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. From our examination of the lawsuit, we develop the argument that marine mammal care operates in Hawaiʻi as a regulatory device for ordering interspecies relations and for pacifying Indigenous demands for greater marine political authority. To combine these claims, we consider the relation between two governance logics: liberal “recognition,” wherein accommodations regarding culture are extended to previously disenfranchised social groups, and biopolitics, pertaining in the present case to care practices governing more-than-human actors and environments. Our arguments are supported by detailed case files and interviews with local informants, including the Kanaka women accused of mishandling Wānanalua. The “ruptures” marking the Wānanalua case suggest a liberal recognition framework whose failures are connected to the biopolitics it embraces, but with an added detail: The present story reflects on how an interspecies biopolitics—an attempted management of Kānaka-whale care practices—structures strategies of liberal recognition.

Molecular Politics, Wearables, and the Aretaic Shift in Biopolitical Governance

Since the publication of Nikolas Rose’s ‘The Politics of Life Itself’ (2001) there has been vivid discussion about how biopolitical governance has changed over the last decades. This article uses what Rose terms ‘molecular politics’, a new socio-technical grip on the human body, as a contrasting background to ask anew his question ‘What, then, of biopolitics today?’ – albeit focusing not on advances in genetics, microbiology, and pharmaceutics, as he does, but on the rapid proliferation of wearables and other sensor-software gadgets. In both cases, new technologies providing information about the individual body are the common ground for governance and optimization, yet for the latter, the target is habits of moving, eating and drinking, sleeping, working and relaxing. The resulting profound differences are carved out along four lines: ‘somatic identities’ and a modified understanding of the body; the role of ‘expert knowledge’ compared to that of networks of peers and self-experimentation; the ‘types of intervention’ by which new technologies become effective in our everyday life; and the ‘post-discipline character’ of molecular biopolitics. It is argued that, taken together, these differences indicate a remarkable shift which could be termed aretaic: its focus is not ‘life itself’ but ‘life as it is lived’, and its modality are new everyday socio-technical entanglements and their more-than-human rationalities of (self-)governance.

Utopia and the Biopolitics of Race: Channel 4’s Utopia (2013-15)

This paper urges for further engagement with theories of biopolitics and biopower within the discipline of utopian studies. It concentrates on the ways in which theorizations of biopower expose the mechanics of utopian discourses, formations, practices, and texts. During modernity, utopianism demonstrated an increasing preoccupation with issues and concerns pertinent to biopolitical governance. The topos of utopia became less a territorial space and more a corporeal space, in a shift of focus within utopianism from outer space to inner space, from geopolitics to biopolitics. Such a shift renders biopolitical theory indispensable to utopian studies. The relations between utopianism and biopower are explored through a reading of Dennis Kelly's TV series, Utopia (Channel 4, 2013-2015) and the focus is specifically on the ways in which representations of race in the series are determined by biopolitical discourses.

On Being (Not) Old: Agency, Self-care, and Life-course Aspirations in the United States.

This article examines U.S. endeavors to eradicate old age. Drawing on research with older, mostly white, Americans across social classes, I probe how older people engage in "healthy," "successful" aging as a moral project, health identity, and way of approaching the life course. Moving beyond influential literature on biopolitics and biomedicine that tends to treat medicine, science, and biopolitical governance as overdetermined causal forces, I explore instead how a confluence of factors-including cultural ideologies of personhood and independence, medical interventions, social hierarchies, and individual experiences-together lead to the stigmatization of oldness. Social inequalities also matter, as an ethos of self-care and individual agency to ward off oldness is most pronounced among the able-bodied and socioeconomic elite. The aim is to illuminate the convergence of factors that stigmatize oldness in contemporary North America, while highlighting the ways that class profoundly figures in people's varied attempts to not be old.

O tormento da humanidade: requerentes de asilo LGBT na Europa enfrentando os limites dos direitos humanos

O que é o “humano” no humano? O que faz um ser vivente ser humano? Em caso de dúvida, quem decide se um ser vivente é um ser humano? Uma cultura política liberal baseada no valor dos direitos humanos não pode evitar essas questões. Assim, este artigo usará diferentes quadros interpretativos (Thomas Hobbes, Michel Foucault, Leo Bersani, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jasbir Puar) para dar conta da permanência de uma decisão soberana sobre o humano no governo biopolítico do presente. Exemplo disso é condição de lésbicas, gays, bissexuais, transgêneros e intersexuais vindos do continente africano para requerer asilo na Europa. Perseguidos em seus países por sua orientação sexual ou identidade de gênero, em muitos casos atravessam o Mediterrâneo em barcos precários até a terra firme – reviravolta do destino – nas mesmas ilhas em que o fascismo italiano costumava confinar homens homossexuais. Lá, são “recebidos” em campos para imigrantes ilegais onde sua completa humanidade, negada por seus países de origem, será examinada por uma comissão. Apenas se reconhecidos como membros autênticos de uma minoria sexual eles se beneficiarão da totalidade dos direitos humanos no continente europeu. Caso contrário, correm o risco de serem forçados a sair da Europa – e da humanidade. Longe de ser uma viagem de esperança, com origem na barbaridade para chegar-se à modernidade, a jornada, iniciada na África e para a Europa, torna-se um arcaico tormento.

Retirantes flagelados no Ceará-da-seca:

Com base na noção de Ceará-da-seca, este artigo descreve o surgimento e a consolidação, desde 1877, de um poder soberano sobre a vida implementado por meio de políticas populacionais destinadas a administrar os efeitos sociais da seca na região. Assim, observam-se práticas biopolíticas de governo que caracterizam a institucionalização do Estado moderno atrelada aos dispositivos de exceção (os abarracamentos, os lazaretos, os campos de concentração e as frentes de trabalho), direcionados à proteção de uma forma de vida (urbana e industrial) a ser garantida diante da cíclica invasão dos retirantes do sertão, levando ao litoral, a cada grande seca, o abrupto espetáculo da barbárie da fome, da miséria, da peste.

Making a difference? Applying Vitellone’s Social Science of the Syringe to performance and image enhancing drug injecting

Vitellone’s Social Science of the Syringe investigates epistemologies of injecting drug use. She argues for a methodology that can be simultaneously sensitive to biopolitical power regimes; the trajectories of social stratification; and the resistance, creativity and dignity of human agency. She proposes a methodological focus on the syringe-in-use as an active participant in these dynamics. Harm reduction policy and service provision frameworks have paid little attention to the phenomena of performance and image enhancing drug (PIEDs) injection. One way of assessing the merit of Vitellone’s proposal is to use it to investigate these phenomena. I argue that Vitellone’s method can be used to articulate a range of significant differences between people who inject PIEDs and other people who inject drugs, and that these differences can inform harm reduction initiatives. When compared to the heroin syringe, the PIED syringe participates in different socio-economic and material contexts, gendered identities, and biopolitical governance regimes. These differences materialise in different rates of syringe sharing and blood-borne virus transmission; and different experiences of needle exchange services. I offer a thought experiment demonstrating how a different syringe might alter the structural dynamics, biopolitical governance, and the agentic choices of people who inject PIEDs. Judging by the productive effects of diffracting Vitellone’s analysis through an empirical concern with PIED injecting, I concur with Vitellone’s proposition that ‘something objective may be gained from an empirical investigation of the syringe-in-use’ (p. 33).

Affirmative biopolitics: Social and vocational education for Quechua girls in the postcolonial “affectsphere” of Cusco, Peru

This paper draws on an affirmative biopolitical framework to analyze the governing of young lives in education and social spaces in Cusco, Peru. We engage with Berlant’s theorization of affect and spatialization of biopolitics in order to discuss youth’s embodied experiences of alternative forms of biopolitical governance. With a case study of a grassroots, non-profit center for residential care and social and educational programs for Quechua-speaking girls, we investigate how the girls sense and respond to the center’s mediation of rural-to-urban projects of “getting ahead,” domestic work, and the tourism and hospitality sector. We reveal the center’s biopoliticization of their lives in an affective manner within the processes of postcolonial educational marginalization, precarity in urban economies, professionalization, and tourism in and beyond Cusco. Our study intends to contribute to an expanded understanding of the production of education, aid, social care, and protection spaces, and to highlight the utility of affective inquiry in examining the contested terrains of (alternative) childhoods/youth.

Introduction: Integrated Mega-Casinos and Speculative Urbanism in Southeast Asia

In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, luxurious megacasino resorts have become spectacles of economic growth across diverse destinations in Asia. With its emphasis on large-scale integrated resorts (IR), the casino and leisure industry is a site of economic rejuvenation even as it offers spaces of moral corruption. Integrated mega-casinos are ambiguous projects of development, driving the speculative processes of place-making for accumulation, social control, and global competition. This editorial introduction focuses on three main themes. First, mega-IR projects show the historical and complicated relations between state power and the gambling economy. Second, Southeast Asia’s new mega-casinos are emblematic of speculative urbanism and its experiments. Third, casino-asdevelopment consolidates the differentiated treatment of citizen subjects and gives legitimacy to the biopolitical governance of citizen practices, claims, and urban participation.