Biopolitical Practices Research Articles

Tourism Platforms and the Digital Biopolitics of Nature: An Interface Analysis of TripAdvisor in Patagonia-Aysén, Chile

This article investigates how digital platforms are implicated in the neoliberalization of conservation by turning nature and protected areas into tourism commodities. We mobilize Ash et al.’s (2018) heuristic of unit, vibration, and tone to analyze TripAdvisor’s interfaces for contributing, exploring, and reviewing nature-based points of interest in Patagonia-Aysén, Chile. We contend that digital tourism platforms express what we term digital environmental biopower, which designates these platforms’ capacities to enlist digital users as agents who engage in biopolitical practices such as classifying, scoring, and raking natural areas as objects whose value is reliant on their tourism attributes. We argue that these digital modulations both sustain and are sustained by an environmental biopolitical regime in which “pristine” natural areas are “made to live” or “allowed to die” in the global digitally mediated (eco)tourism marketplace.

Biopolitics and Inscriptions: Raúl Zurita's Poetry as a <i>communitas</i> of Pain

This article analyzes part of the poetic work of Raúl Zurita, expressed both in some of his poetry books and in his "inscriptions" or material inscriptions and in his corporal self-mutilations to determine the functions that his art fulfills in the face of neoliberal biopolitical practices (Foucault, Agamben, Calveiro) and as a bet for a communitas of pain (Diéguez). It explains the meaning and function of books such as Purgatorio (1982), Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985) and zurita/in memoriam (2007), or interventions such as her verse "ni pena ni miedo" in the Atacama Desert, her presence in memorials or her intervention "El mar del dolor"; all as differentiated forms of resistance from art, against strategies of power that tried to "let die" part of the society in the context of the military dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990) and also in other contexts of human rights violations.

Biopolitics of childhood and medicalization of education in times of pandemic (covid-19) in Alagoas

Childhood has been the target of educational and social projects that are not exempt from political neutrality, constituting in them visions of the world, society, human being, especially of childhood. According to Foucault (2014), medicine was a biopolitical strategy that intervened in the lives of populations, making bodies and minds docile to ensure a useful, healthy and submissive workforce. We start from the assumption that, historically, childhood has been the yearning of political dreams, according to Kohan (2009) in which early childhood education was the target of investments for the formation of the docile subject. childhood in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and its relationships with medical discourses and biopolitical practices in the school context of Alagoas. This work is the result of the thesis entitled Biopolitics, medicalization and the Covid-19 pandemic: knowledge, discourses and powers about childhood in Brazilian Education in the 20th and 21st centuries, in which we adopted bibliographical, documentary and case study research as a methodology. We found that bio-necropolitics translated into control of the body and life of the population in a pandemic context and generated policies to exclude students from the public network, constituting the continuation of the hygienist policy in the context of the 21st century.

Disciplinary Normalisation and the Biopolitics of COVID-19 Pandemic Discourse in Ghana

Constructing normalised sociopolitical order during the COVID-19 pandemic appeared a common feature of countries across the globe, constituting identities and engendering political struggles. This study analyses the concrete discursive practices of the President of the Republic of Ghana during the pandemic. Foucault’s notions of discourse and power provide the framework for analysing the performances and realisations of disciplinary (power) normalisation and biopolitical practices during the pandemic. How do the discursive practices of the President of the republic of Ghana construct new normalcy, a normalised sociopolitical order, and managed the virus spread during the COVID-19 pandemic? The study revealed the deployment of disciplinary normalisation and the biopolitical constitution of subjects. It found out that there is a discursive link between the discursive practices of the President of Ghana and the pandemic discourse of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and funding support from the World Bank. The President’s discursive shift from disciplinary normalisation to self-discipline increased the chances of the ruling party towards winning the December 7, 2020, general election in Ghana. Also, this study provides a better understanding of the reconfiguration of the political and the similarities between Ghana’s pandemic discourse and some Global North countries.

Maximizing the “disposable enemies” through the health crisis of covid-19: the (selective) control of borders and the disposable life of migrants as biopolitical practices of the brazilian state

Resumo Os deslocamentos humanos foram diretamente impactados pelas medidas necropolíticas adotadas pelos Estados para conter a pandemia da COVID-19. O Brasil, especialmente, adotou medidas seletivas, excludentes típicas de um (permanente e generalizado) estado de exceção, que impactaram de forma severa e desproporcional em especial os migrantes de nacionalidade venezuelana. Como metodologia, utiliza-se o método dedutivo, partindo-se do estudo do controle seletivo de fronteiras como prática do estado de exceção e a compreensão do migrante internacional como um refugo humano, para, a partir disso, estudar a (des)proporcionalidade das medidas (necropolíticas) adotadas pelo Estado brasileiro para conter a expansão do novo coronavírus, em especial, a destinada aos fluxos venezuelanos ao país. Como método de procedimento, o histórico, e a técnica de pesquisa, a documentação indireta. Assim, evidenciou-se que por meio do controle seletivo de fronteiras o estado brasileiro buscou, como respostas à crise sanitária da COVID-19, oportunamente, impedir o acesso daqueles desinteressantes ao país e, em nome do controle e proteção de algumas “vidas superiores”, discriminou e promoveu a descartabilidade daquelas “inferiores”, como as de nacionalidade venezuelana.

Biopolitical media discourse in France in the COVID-19 pandemics

The publication activities of the French media during the COVID-19 pandemic in a biopolitical way are analyzed. The theoretical frame of the study is set by Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, as well as the propaganda model of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. To collect and analyze empirical data, the methods of computational linguistics and the method of identifying contextual ideologemes were applied. The research materials were the texts of independent media (Le Figaro, Le Monde, Le Parisien), identified using the keywords “pandemic” and “COVID-19” during the four waves of the pandemic (from January 2020 to March 2022). A total of 29,584 Le Figaro articles, 22,446 Le Monde articles, and 6,402 Le Parisien articles were used in the research. The purpose of the research is to analyze the strategies for including the French media in the biopolitical practices of propaganda and public education on the example of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of the research, it turned out that the studied media during the pandemic were integrated both into general information campaigns and into biopolitical education and propaganda campaigns. Two scenarios for organizing media discourse during the pandemic of COVID-19 were identified, determined by target groups and media tasks. The first scenario actively involves educational and propaganda tools to promote state biopolitical goals. The second scenario integrates informing readers about the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures used by the authorities for biopolitical control, with the presentation of the hierarchies of responsible persons/ institutions (within the state biopolitics). It is concluded that the participation of French independent media in the active promotion of biopolitical programs indicates their close connection with the actors and subjects of biopolitics - the state or business representatives.

The Biblical Metaphor of “Governing as Shepherding” and Catholic Biopolitics in Medieval Icelandic Contexts

This paper studies the Old Icelandic use of the Biblical conceptual metaphor of “governing as shepherding”, based on projecting patterns of the practices of shepherding on the notion of governing. It examines the transfer of this conceptual metaphor to Old Icelandic literature through the reception of Christian literature, the frequency and chronology of occurrences of the linguistic realizations of this conceptual metaphor in different textual genres and periods of Old Icelandic literature, and the possible lineages of texts’ transmission that might have enabled the cultural transfer of this conceptual metaphor from Latin to Old Icelandic. On the theoretical basis of Michel Foucault’s governmentality theory, the emergence of the discourse of pastoral power over human life in Old Icelandic literature is correlated with the development of specific biopolitical practices of governance regarding the protection of human life applied by the Catholic Church in medieval Iceland.

Infrastructure as biopolitics: Fencing, categorizing and valuing animals for wolf conservation in Germany

This paper takes a critical look at biopolitical practices under the current regime for wolf conservation in Germany. One profound difference between human and more-than-human biopolitics is that it concerns multiple, more-than-human bodies, demanding a close examination of governance practices aimed at enabling conservation. My core argument is twofold: first, I argue that conservation policies in Germany attempt to frame wolves as collectivities and apply a population perspective on these animals. However, the very technologies that aim to monitor wolves as population, namely genetic analyses, also produce individual wolves that complicate conservation efforts due to their affective force (Lorimer, 2015). Second, as active wolf management in the form of population control is rare due to legal regulations, there is a strong focus on livestock protection measures. These infrastructuring practices (Barua, 2021) continue to fail because they rest on the idea that convivial coexistence can be quantified and ignore that technologies such as fences can alter animals’ atmospheres (Lorimer et al., 2019) profoundly. As a result, infrastructuring practices aimed at enabling coexistence may run counter to their initial purpose. With fences becoming habitats, lively and discursive multispecies relations are renegotiated.

Bodies in Transit: Speculation and the Biopolitical Imaginary

This essay explores the Bodies in Transit archive, an artifact of mid-nineteenth-century public health administration in New York City. The ledgers, which tracked the transit of every corpse that moved through the island of Manhattan between 1859 and 1894 and categorized entrants by their cause of death, nationality, and occupation, present a unique lens through which I explore the intersections of speculation, biopolitics, and urban space. I first establish a conceptual framework of "speculation" by dissecting its etymological genealogy, the roots of which share a preoccupation with vision and sight. I note that in practice, the abstracting and rationalizing tendencies of speculation operate by envisioning, calculating, and coercing specific outcomes into realization. I apply this framework to Bodies in Transit to historicize the ways in which biopolitics, the means through which the state forms, represents, and manages populations, are indexed to speculative economic practices. I read Bodies in Transit through the framework of speculation to articulate a field of meaning that illuminates the complex material and epistemic conditions surrounding its implementation and utility. As I argue, the ledgers were a response to the acceleration of real estate speculation in Manhattan, a trend that incentivized property owners to disinter burial grounds to relocate corpses to rural areas, and thereby connected the speculative logics of real estate to those of public health, spatial order, and surveillance. By thinking across and through the layered meanings of "speculation," this essay illuminates how the state's economy of knowledge is intimately related to biopolitical practices of surveillance and abstract representations of financial value in the modern city.

Immigration Detention, the Patriarchal State and the Politics of Disgust in the Hands of Street-level Bureaucrats

This article presents the results of ethnographic research conducted in the southern border of Mexico from 2017 to 2019, specifically at the Estación Migratoria Siglo XXI [XXI Century Immigration Station], which is one of the biggest and most important detention centres in the country. It analyses the functioning of an immigration detention centre as a ‘total institution’ where street-level bureaucrats enforce practices of biopolitics through daily deprivation of access to vital resources and the protection of the law. The article depicts how women are treated within a detention centre and provides an explanation focusing on observing gendered power relations and practices of disgust and contempt by the Instituto Nacional de Migración, a State-organised institution in the hands of street-level local bureaucrats who work in precarious conditions. Finally, the article demonstrates the dehumanisation practices in immigration detention that are deployed as a deterrence policy through operational strategies in Estación Migratoria Siglo XXI, located in Tapachula, Chiapas.

The Sound of Silence: Unspoken Meaning in the Discourse of Pregnant and Breastfeeding Women on Environmental Risks and Food Safety in Spain

(1) Background: In recent years, a growing number of qualitative health research studies have performed discourse analysis of data from participants’ narratives. However, little attention has been paid to the gaps and silences within these narratives. The aim of the present study is to interpret the silences detected in the discourse of pregnant and breastfeeding women concerning environmental risks and food safety. (2) Methods: This descriptive, interpretive, observational study was conducted according to a qualitative research paradigm and from a phenomenological and ethnographic perspective. The study sample was composed of 88 intentionally selected women, among whom fifty interviews, three ethnographies and five focus groups were conducted. Data coding and analysis were performed using N-Vivo 12 software. (3) Results: The results obtained show that the women’s discourse presented silences that reflected their minimisation of perceived environmental and food risks. However, these women were wary of food produced in the proximity of contaminated areas. Nevertheless, the participants believed they were powerless to overcome environmental pollution and the potential contamination of their own bodies. (4) Conclusions: The participants’ minimisation of the environmental risks faced and their inaction in this respect are sustained by the biopolitical practices of public institutions, which have propelled these women into a situation of learned helplessness and social injustice.

Biopolitika XXI veka i politički realizam

In this paper we will consider the concept of biopolitics as neoliberalism, i.e., the reflections of the fundamentals of Foucault's theory and its structurally post-political character. The primary goal is to understand how this specific "regime of truth" turns out to be the foundation of the twenty-first century Realpolitik, from which Western government techniques derive. Biopolitics relevantly emerges as a process of fragmentation and dissolution of political sovereignty and subjectivity, and, as such, it is exacted through various postmodern and neoliberal forms. They defy a substantial portion of philosophical and legal traditions through politicization of life, the theory, and practices of biopolitics. In the second part of the paper - along with an overview of the contemporary phenomena of biopolitics - we articulate Foucault's position of political realism as a potential answer to political-philosophical challenges on a global scale.

State Biopolitics, Illicit Regimes and Security in the Guatemala–Mexico Cross-border Region

ABSTRACT The article examines the way in which the State was replaced in the municipalities that are drug trafficking routes on the border between Guatemala and Mexico, by an illicit regime that represents a particular type of narco-governmentality, which implements bio-political practices that have repercussions on the border security. Due to the institutional and financial weakness of the Guatemalan government, it has little presence on its borders. This is taken advantage of by local and transnational organized crime dedicated to cocaine trafficking, which has replaced the State and replicated its hierarchical form of control and power over the territory and its population, in order to generate a situation of narco-governmentality. In order to maintain power, they use biopolitical practices such as the use of extreme violence against other criminal groups and government security forces, which seek to put the sovereignty of their territory at risk. In addition, they apply a state of siege in their controlled territories, all in order to avoid arrest, ensure their survival, and maintain high levels of profit. As a result, the security of some border municipalities that are routes is very fragile. In this context, improving border security requires to move from a national security approach to one of citizen security.

Biopolitical Practices in Beijing

The Covid-19 pandemic reminds people of the 1918 influenza pandemic which lasted for two years and which is estimated to have taken between 17 million to 50 million lives. The current Covid-19 pandemic, a force majeure, causing tension between states and the distancing of people physically, is steering the world into an unknown future. This article attempts to delineate the biopolitical practices in Beijing, from spring to summer, in the dimensions of the disciplinary supervision of government work, the allocation of medical resources, and the implementation of social control. Therein lies the mingling of sovereign power and biopower, conceptualized as a mutated pattern of ‘governmentality’. The public obedience to strict social control, an expression of the ‘general will’, originates from the conception of nationalism, underpinning the official narrative of ‘China’s experience’. Finally, a new pattern to handle the second outbreak, which started at Xinfadi market, has shed a new light on the thinking about ‘China’s path’.

Biopolitical Violence and Waiting: Hotspot as a Biopolitical Borderzone

AbstractThis paper conceptualises Lesvos hotspot as a biopolitical borderzone where migrants experience concentrated violent practices of borders, including legal exclusion, presence of exclusionary surveillance and absence of surveillance for safety, degrading living conditions, and waiting. The paper also discusses the biopolitical consequences of these practices for migrants such as physical illnesses and injuries, and psychological disorders. The paper contributes to the scholarship on biopolitical borders in two main ways. First, through conceptualising hotspot as a form of biopolitical borderzone and demonstrating the specific biopolitical practices in the Lesvos hotspot and their effects on migrants. Second, through highlighting the key role of waiting in the operations of the biopolitical border. The paper demonstrates how waiting is entangled in a complex way with other biopolitical practices and how it both creates and amplifies biopolitical effects for migrants.

Biopolítica, precariedade e educação

Este ensaio teórico busca apresentar as noções de biopolítica e precariedade mobilizadas pelos teóricos pós-estruturalistas Michel Foucault e Judith Butler. Foucault constrói sua noção de biopolítica pensando-a como a transformação das formas de poder desde o século XVIII, produzindo formas específicas de subjetividades instadas cada vez mais a uma racionalidade neoliberal. Judith Butler apresenta sua noção de precariedade - ou de vidas precárias - partindo da problematização do luto e da violência, percebendo-os como operadores de poder, produzindo formas de vidas danificadas, não passíveis de luto. Ambas as noções pensadas junto ao campo da educação evidenciam como práticas biopolíticas em tempos neoliberais produzem, inclusive na educação, formas diversas de precariedade, corpos que não importam. As contribuições desses teóricos neste ensaio, pensadas junto à educação, podem articular novos problemas ao pensamento, mobilizando, a partir de suas noções, contra-produções que incitam novas possibilidades de habitar o presente e viver uma vida vivível.

Entering the Archive: “Il faut défendre la société” and Michel Foucault’s Critical Archeological Inquiry into the History and Method of Genealogy

ABSTRACT In “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault attempted to historicize and criticize Nietzsche’s equating of the social with struggle. In order to do so, Foucault produced a descriptive discursive history of his genealogical project by deploying the method of the critical archaeology. Foucault realized thereinafter that his archaeological exposition of the genealogical discourse in fact laid bare a close historical and conceptual bond between genealogy and modern racial discourses. In the first lectures, Foucault, unearthed the genealogical discourse hidden in the literature written by the nobility as they attempted to resist the centralisation of royal power. In the latter part of his lectures, he described a discursive interplay between genealogy-as-struggle and the biopolitical practices of the modern state. As such, he gave a tentatively description how the modern state inherited and extensively applied the notion of struggle in its biopolitical control on its populations. The immoral and historical consequences of this affinity, resulting in the biopolitics of genocide, warranted Foucault to distance himself from Nietzsche’s concept, which in effect resulted in rethinking the social within the framework of gouvernmentalité, in which struggle was a modality rather than the prime mover of society.

The Biopolitics of Social Distancing.

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, new technologies are being leveraged to enforce social distancing requirements. I explore social distancing through the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, with an emphasis on recognizing unauthorized movement and controlling circulation. Although reporting and widely shared data visualizations about COVID-19 have made many people newly aware that their movements are being tracked and surveilled, governments are already implementing new measures such as geofencing and artificial intelligence (AI)–based facial recognition to facilitate the enforcement of social distancing. The tracking of COVID-19 spread and social distancing behaviors of the public has made more visible the practices of biopolitics but also generated new opportunities for even greater surveillance and control. The current moment offers an opportunity to shift public perceptions about data surveillance, technological control, and the racial disparities of biopower, much in the same way that public perceptions around social media shifted during and after the Arab Spring. How we collectively respond to these biopolitical processes will, in part, determine how such power relations are articulated in the future.

Party-n-Play and online information and communication technologies: A socio-linguistic perspective

This study examined the discourses of gay and bisexual men who seek Party-n-Play (PNP; sex that occurs under the influence of drugs) on mobile apps and websites. In-depth interviews were conducted with 44 gay and bisexual men who lived in Toronto, and who used drugs before or during sex in the previous month. Data were analysed using critical discourse analysis. The study findings presented evidence for subcultural discourses of gay and bisexual men who seek PNP online, and revealed how these discourses were implicated in recasting the practices of biopolitics, as well as enacting risk subjectivities of these men.

Medical Ersatz Liturgies of Death: Anatomical Dissection and Organ Donation as Biopolitical Practices

Medical <i>Ersatz</i> Liturgies of Death: Anatomical Dissection and Organ Donation as Biopolitical Practices