Lens Of Biopolitics Research Articles

Dystopian Futures and Posthuman Realities

Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland is a dystopian science fiction novel set in a near-future Cape Town, South Africa, which delves into the complex interplay between posthuman biopolitics, technology, authority, and the human body. This article examined the posthuman dimension through the lens of biopolitics. The article depicts the oppressive nature of pervasive surveillance and corporate control informed by the apartheid past, wherein four characters become entrapped in a society governed by these forces. Moreover, it demonstrates how the bodily integration of the regulatory technology derives from the racial idea of Western personhood, which intensifies the subjugation by altering subjects into posthuman entities. By adopting the Foucauldian theory of biopolitics as an analytical framework, this study traces the pivotal role played by biopolitics in the transformation of individuals into posthumans. The amalgamation of surveillance technologies and bioengineered enhancements leads to the commodification and perpetual manipulation of the subject, serving to uphold social order and preserve capitalist systems. The findings of this study shed light on the intensification of the control exerted by posthuman biopolitics, thereby contributing to the reconfiguration of the place of humans in academic discourse surrounding the intersection of power, technology, and the human body. By critically analysing the novel through the lens of Foucauldian theory, this article offers insights into the consequences of biopolitical control, underscoring the need for critical examination and discourse on the ethical implications of emergent posthuman societies in the Global South.

“If You Destroy Our Children, I Will Kill You”: Biopolitical Childhood in Southeast Asia’s War on Drugs

Abstract This article explores how the war on drugs in Southeast Asia upholds the protection of the young as a key justification for extrajudicial killings carried out by the state. As many as 30,000 extrajudicial killings took place during Philippine former President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs between 2016 and 2022, echoing a similar anti-drug campaign in Thailand in 2003, which saw around 3,000 people murdered. Drawing on political speeches, this article argues that Duterte and Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra deployed biopolitical patterns of discourse to legitimize the murder of those associated with the drug trade. Both leaders framed the threat of drugs to children through the biopolitical lens of the integrity of the family, national health, and therefore the future of the nation. Further, this article demonstrates how in the Philippine drug war, children were effectively denied their childhood status and presented as “dangerous becomings.” This reveals the contingent nature of childhood, as biopolitical criteria were also used to establish which children were perceived to be dangerous in the context of the drug war. In doing so, this paper serves to nuance and problematize how children are depicted in security studies, and international relations more broadly.

An Analysis of Humanimalia in Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark

Octavia Estelle Butler can be considered a visionary writer from many perspectives. The prominent science and speculative fiction writer is known for her afrofuturistic tropes. Her novels reflect relevance in today’s scenario in myriad ways. Clay’s Ark (1984) is a part of the Patternist Series. In this novel, Butler envisioned a humanity plagued by an alien microbe from another star named Proxima Centauri. The novel traces the spread of the pandemic caused by the Clay’s Ark microbe resulting in hybrid children who mix human and animal characteristics. Butler chose the trope of the alien microbe in a very different yet believable way. The hybrid children are the next stage of evolution in Butler’s Patternists world. The aim of this paper is to explore the hybrid identities caused by the pandemic in Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark through the lens of biopolitics of difference and to reflect on the metaphorical significance of the same.

Nurses as Disciplinary Agents of the State: Ethical Practice and Mandatory Reporting in the United States.

This article reviews legislative initiatives that mandate nurses to report patients, families, and clinicians to law enforcement. Most recently, these laws target transgender and gender diverse (TGD) youth and people seeking abortion. In this article, we examine the ethics of such laws through professional ethical codes. Furthermore, through a biopolitical lens, we critically analyze examples of nurses' participation in complying with laws that harm patients. Finally, we discuss the damage these laws have on the nursing profession and assert the necessity of a resituating of professional ethics that considers the complexity of nursing care amidst increasingly blatant state-sanctioned violence.

Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition

Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition

Russian Actionism as Biopolitical Performance: Shifting Grounds and Forms of Resistance

This article traces the development of Russian actionism through a biopolitical lens. Emerging in the 1990s as a public enactment of post-Soviet society’s regression from bios to zoē, actionism became more consciously biopolitical in the twenty-first century as a succession of artists sought to challenge the biopoliticization of life under Vladimir Putin. Focusing on the actions and statements of Voina, Pussy Riot, Pyotr Pavlensky, and Katrin Nenasheva, the author identifies four main tactics of resistance, gradually leading actionism away from its roots in aestheticized violence toward the cultivation of practices of radical care. The article concludes with a brief overview of actions performed in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Across Time, Space, and Matter

Across Time, Space, and Matter

Biopolitics of COVID-19: Capitalist Continuities and Democratic Openings

"Biopolitics" has become a popular concept for interpreting the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the term is often used vaguely, as a buzzword, and therefore loses its specificity and relevance. This article systematically explains what the biopolitical lens offers for analyzing and normatively criticizing the politics of the coronavirus. I argue that biopolitics are politics of differentiated vulnerability that are intrinsic to capitalist modernity. The situation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is, therefore, less of a state of exception than it might appear; COVID-19 is a continuation and intensification of the capitalist biopolitics of differentiated vulnerability. In order to critically evaluate this situation, the article proposes the concept of "democratic biopolitics" and shows how it can be used, among others, for a queer critique of the differentiated vulnerabilities that are produced by the coronavirus and its capitalist governance. In contrast to widespread interpretations of democratic biopolitics that focus on collective care in communities, this article highlights the role of the state and of the redistribution of political power and economic resources as key for biopolitical democratization.

On the Political Biology of Eating and Performing (with) Food

Performance research involving food frequently focuses the ‘political economy of food sovereignty' where political action involves providing visibility to power differentials in righting injustices and/or celebrating differences. Alimentary and gustatory processes of eating are often assumed as ‘naturally' given and rarely put under a critical biopolitical lens. This essay, which zigzags between three food performances and three interdisciplinary concepts, attempts to reconfigure normative conceptions of the biopolitical; by interrogating instead the politics of biology away from transcendental conditions and anthropogenic definitions that lead to a radical insufficiency of justice to cater for difference. Firstly, Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life in his biopolitics is argued to be itself ontologically political, through performances of eating that decentre the human in definitions of biological life. This reveals and complicates biology's implicit technicity as that which demarcates what is human life from what is not. Secondly, food performances conjure the ‘enteric imagination' that bring into focus the entanglements of instinctual and ethical life. These performances, with concrete coordinative connections between eating and hearing make porous the epistemological domains between individuality and communality, organic and inorganic, life and death, towards a richer idea of biopolitics as ‘lived-intuition.' Lastly, the essay outlines Gilles Deleuze's ‘becoming-minor’ as a creative and affirmative politics, arriving not as the result of majoritarian agreement nor counter-hegemonic movements, but rather the aggregation of a myriad of molecular, minor events where inventions and conjugations of specific, unforeseen and autonomous modes of becoming exist. Focusing on the politics of biology in this way provides alternatives to idealistic definitions of life whose exigencies can be seen not only in relation in their binary opposition to death, but moves towards a positive one, immanent to multiple modalities of being. The biopolitics of eating does not oppose but stays with the inarticulable but nevertheless real sensoria, providing a surface for experimentation that produces abstractions, concepts, disciplines, gestures and alimentary processes, towards a biopolitics of food that acknowledges that the biological is in itself already political.

Between Abstraction and Insufficiency: Some Reflections on Necropolitics and the Ethics of Design Philosophy

This essay is a critical meditation on what design can do in times unprecedented of global uncertainty. In particular, the article interrogates not only how design can respond to crisis but also how it is at the root of interconnected crises. What design can do cannot be disconnected from the political philosophical question of what design is in the COVID and post-COVID era. Drawing on critical discourses in design theory and the theoretical humanities, the essay conceptualizes the material and political complexity of designing through the lens of biopolitics and necropolitics, and then interrogates what an ethics of theorizing design means in an era when design is at the intersection of multiple crises.

Beyond biopolitics: the importance of the later work of Foucault to understand care practices of healthcare workers caring for undocumented migrants

BackgroundUndocumented migrants experience multiple institutional and legal barriers when trying to access healthcare services. Due to such limitations, healthcare workers often experience ethical dilemmas when caring for undocumented migrants. This article aims to understand how individual healthcare workers who regularly take care of undocumented migrants deal with these dilemmas in practice. So far, the role of healthcare workers in this context has mainly been theorized through the lens of biopolitics, conceiving of healthcare workers as merely obedient instruments of humanitarian government or gatekeeping.MethodsBased on semi-structured, in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations with healthcare workers in Belgium, we explore how they ascribe meaning, reflect upon and give shape to care practices in relation to undocumented migrants. We use Foucault’s later work on care of the self to interpret the accounts given by the healthcare workers.ResultsHealthcare workers in clinical roles exercise a certain degree of freedom in relation to the existing limitations to healthcare access of undocumented migrants. They developed techniques such as purposefully being inattentive to the undocumented status of the migrants. They also try to master their affective responses and transform their bodily attitude towards undocumented patients. They perform practical mental exercises to remind themselves of their role or position in the wider healthcare system and about their commitment to treat all patients equally. These techniques and exercises are inspired by colleagues who function as role models, inspiring them to relate in an ethical way to limitations in healthcare access. The developed care practices sometimes reproduce, sometimes transform the legal and institutional limitations to care for undocumented migrants.ConclusionsThe findings nuance the biopolitical analysis regarding the role of healthcare workers in healthcare delivery to undocumented migrants that has been dominant so far. Theoretically this article provides a reconceptualization of healthcare ethics as care of the self, an ethical practice that is somewhat independent of the traditional professional ethics.Trial Registration Medical ethics committee UZ Jette, Brussels, Belgium – Registration date: 18/05/2016 – Registration number: B.U.N. 143201628279.

Biopolitics in the ‘Psychic Realm’: Han, Foucault and neoliberal psychopolitics

This article explores German Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s notion of psychopolitics and his concept of the neoliberal subject. For Han, mental processes are now the primary target of power. This means that, according to Han, biopower must give way to what he calls psychopower since perspectives that critically seek to understand neoliberalism through a biopolitical lens are no longer adequate to contemporary regimes of neoliberal achievement. This article examines and evaluates Han’s argument that Foucauldian biopolitics is obsolete in today’s neoliberal age because of biopolitics’ primary focus on the body over mental processes. We suggest that, instead of emphasizing the need to move beyond biopolitics, Han’s theorization of psychopolitics could benefit from paying closer attention to some of Foucault’s insights on biopower and from identifying key connections between biopolitics and psychopolitics. By highlighting some important continuities between Foucault’s biopolitics and Han’s psychopolitics (instead of emphasizing the discontinuities between both theorists’ perspectives, as Han tends to privilege), this article seeks to move towards improved theorizations of concepts like achievement, subjectivity, otherness or optimization, concepts that are key to Han’s understanding of contemporary neoliberal practices.

Temporal bordering in the space of the camp: Producing and contesting abandonment in Skaramagas and Elaionas camps in Athens

This paper focuses on the temporalities of camps and the ways in which abandonment is produced within them through the deployment of temporal bordering practices. It presents empirical ethnographic evidence, gathered between January and June 2017, from Skaramagas and Elaionas camps in Athens. Although intended as temporary humanitarian solutions, many migrants have remained in them for long periods, stuck in a state of temporariness. Camps have been studied extensively through the lens of biopolitics as spaces of abandonment and abjectification. More recently, a growing body of literature is highlighting the everyday micro-politics and tactics of belonging that take place within them. Drawing on the latter, I shed light on the temporal aspects of border control involved in camps, arguing that camps provide a temporal, rather than only spatial, technology that governs encamped migrants through the administration of their time. Thus, the camp governs the critical moment between reception and in/exclusion from the polity. Yet, as I show, within this condition of semi-permanence and semi-presence, camp residents, through the practice of everyday life, being present and visible, create places and give new meanings to existing ones. If the border is enacted through the imposed temporalities of the camp, then its subversion can be found in these everyday place-making tactics. Looking into these micro-practices, this paper contributes to the above debates by exploring camps as temporal technologies of control.

"Biohaus": The Bauhaus and the Biopolitics of Global Space

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, art historians and urban studies scholars have been pleading for a more nuanced analysis of the Bauhaus in order to divorce from the one-sided affirmative reading of the iconic German art school. Yet, within the prevailing heroic narrative that still dominates contemporary public discourse after the 100-year anniversary of the school, the Bauhaus is praised for its affordable as well as working class-oriented design and it is thus depicted as intrinsically antithetical to today’s neoliberal housing market and bourgeois planning practices. To complicate this somewhat lopsided account, this paper draws on Henri Lefebvre’s critique of functionalist architecture and Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower to examine the late Bauhaus through a biopolitical lens. It first presents the Törten working-class housing estate in Dessau, Germany to scrutinize how biopolitical socio-spatial practices crystalize in Bauhaus urban planning and architecture. The second part of the paper turns to the film screen to discuss how the Weimar-era narrative of bio-functional modernism materializes in Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy’s late 20s, early 30s filmic works on urban life, the so-called “city symphonies.” Considering the postwar afterlives of the Bauhäusler, the Conclusion places these findings in a broader historical perspective and reflects on the contemporary implications of a Foucauldo-Lefebvrian rereading of the Bauhaus. It is within this final contextualization that the paper inquires into the possibilities of people-centered urban dwelling in the age of biopower.

The Bioeconomy of Sahel Borders: Informal Practices of Revenue and Data Extraction

ABSTRACT As recent work in border studies has argued, EU-border externalisation is often achieved by exporting technocratic management templates and advanced surveillance technologies, prompting scholars to adopt the lens of biopolitics in studying borderwork. Outside of Europe, however, the paucity of resources and vastness of spaces mean that indigenous forms of agency continue to be a key factor of border governance. Focusing on everyday practices illuminated by ethnographic fieldwork, this article investigates EU border externalisation’s encounter with the Sahelian context. It argues that state and non-state actors form, deform and perform borders by extracting and capturing the material (economic) and immaterial (cognitive) resources that pass through liminal spaces. These dynamics shape a biopolitical economy of border control in which features of exceptionality, sovereignty and politics seem less compelling that those pertaining to the sphere of ordinary, hybridity and economy.

Story of a Mother: a Biopolitical Reading of Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother

ABSTRACT Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother, a fictional rendition of Amy Biehl’s murder, has been analyzed as a text that challenges the TRC’s reconciliatory philosophy, generates an empathetic dialogue across the color line, and reclaims the subdued maternal identity and voice. However, Mandisa’s narrative throws light on the condition of motherhood in apartheid South Africa. Examining Mandisa’s position as a girl, woman, and mother through a Foucauldian biopolitical lens, this paper argues that Mandisa’s story reveals the biopolitical construction of motherhood at a crucial historical juncture of South Africa. This analysis reveals that the novel is not a mere maternal testimony; rather, the narrative elucidates the creation of the docile bodies of black women under structural oppression and discursive regulation.

Reducing Women to Bare Life: Sexual Violence in South Africa

This article investigates rape through the lens of biopolitics, using Agamben’s notion of a state of exception and bare life. I will argue that there needs to be a closer look at the neglected sexual and gender dimensions of biopolitics in settler colonial societies, and specifically at the continuities of sexual violence of the settler colony with high levels sexual violence in present day South Africa. Women in post-colonial South Africa are included in a state of exception giving rise to bare life through the abandonment by the law and state agencies that have to implement the law. I end by considering the possibilities of resistance against bare life.

Place, Labor, and (Im)mobilities: Tourism and Biopolitics

Contemporary tourism is omnipresent in development discourses and policies, functioning as a "worldmaking" force in which tourism activities provide a representation and storyline that influence the tourist and their behavior, thus becoming a form of social production. Justifying the inclusion of biopolitics as a response to the questions raised by the worldmaking tenet, this article aims to set the concept of biopolitics as the articulation between dominant structures and agency. As contemporary social life and the reproduction of society are integrated into the scope of market capitalism, and the state exerts its role as protector of the "free" market, biopolitics functions through the internalization of the rules of conduct by individuals, as well as through the economic integration of previously noneconomic spheres. Conducting a systematic literature review to expose the presence of the biopolitical lens in tourism research reveals the relevance of pursuing critical and unconventional research strategies. A diverse yet limited corpus of texts has developed in the context of the persistence and pervasiveness of both biopolitics and tourism in complex and uneven global social, political, and spatiotemporal systems and networks, highlighting new theoretical constellations rooted primarily in Foucauldian biopolitics. This essay uncovers a powerful entanglement of nonlinear and multiscalar tourism elements, and calls for ambitiously undertaking tourism research to address tourism discourses, structures, and practices in place and society.

Without the blanket of the land: agrarian change and biopolitics in post–Apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACTThis paper connects Marxist approaches to the agrarian political economy of South Africa with post-Marshallian and Foucauldian analyses of distributional regimes and late capitalist governmentality. Looking at South Africa's stalled agrarian transition through the lens of biopolitics as well as class analysis can make visible otherwise disregarded connections between processes of agrarian change and broader contests about the terms of social and economic incorporation into the South African social and political order before, during and after Apartheid. This can bring a fresh sense of the broader political implications of the course of agrarian change in South Africa, and helps contextualise the enduring salience of land as a flashpoint within South Africa's unresolved democratic transition.

Microaccountability and biopolitics: Microfinance in a Sri Lankan village

Based on a micro-level study of microfinance, this paper explores how basic accounting technologies and interpersonal accountability are used to make lending to poor village women profitable and low risk. We argue that “microaccountability,” our term for the structuring and formalization of convivial relationships into a capillary system of accountability, must be recognized as a central tool of social governance under neoliberalism. Our field research in Sri Lanka allows us to analyse how microaccountability is employed by for-profit banks to create from poor villagers a legion of bankable individual entrepreneurs, trained to invigilate each other's savings and credit behaviours. Using the theoretical lens of biopolitics, we show how microaccountability enables the extension of the finance industry into untapped sectors of the global population.