Form Of Biopower Research Articles

Informal Surrogacy in China

Rather than being a form of explicitly commodified reproduction, informal surrogacy is practiced (and interpreted) in a working-class community in Beijing as part of local affective life, viewed in terms of gifting, favors, filial piety, and family concerns. Through this practice a particular form of biopower, articulated in affective terms, limits some women to serving as instruments of reproduction. Unlike the common western assumption of a physical body as separate from the experiencing subject, the Chinese body has a subjective, experiential dimension. This subjective body harbors an agency with the potential to transform the power exercised on it and to impact the circumstances of the surrogate’s life. I contextualize such agency in the analysis of the ambivalence of these women toward surrogacy and the violence of local kinship systems. Through analyzing how surrogates use their bodies to transform codes, forces and reform the self, the article suggests that informal surrogacy interacts and shapes local affective and political economies.

The Discourse of the Scalpel and the Limbo of Non-identity: Doing Justice to Herculine Barbin

In this essay I will make a comparative analysis of Butlers reading of Herculin Barbin in Gender Trouble and David Reimer in Undoing Gender. My reading of Undoing Gender will illustrate reflective moments in which Butler herself describes spaces outside of intelligibility. First, my analysis will consist of in reading Butlers earlier work against her more recent writings on gender. Utilizing the same critical lens that Butler incorporated to compare Foucault’s later work against his earlier writing will bring to the fore important tensions in Bulter’s gender theory and her relationship with Foucault. Second, I will describe the discourse of the scalpel that is found in the narratives of both Barbin and David. I find that Barbin’s framework foreshadows the discourse of the scalpel that Judith Bulter identifies within the life story of David Reimer. Then I will give an account of the discourse of the scalpel as a form of biopower. I will supplement my analysis of Bulter with Jemima Repo’s essay, Herculine Barbin and the Omission of Biopolitics from Judith Butler’s Gender Genealogy. Taken together my analysis will elucidate a lineage between Herculine Barbin and David Reimer that calls for a reexamination of Butler’s relationship with Foucault.

Adapt or Die? The Biopolitics of Indigeneity—From the Civilising Mission to the Need for Adaptation

Indigenous peoples and indigenous lives have historically been the targets of colonial practices. In current politics, the brutal actions these entailed have changed into more subtle forms of governing. Drawing on the context of international politics (the Arctic Council and the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues), we argue that the demand/need for adaptation is one of the rationalities by which power is exercised over indigenous peoples and indigeneity today. We view this as a form of biopower that fosters and steers indigenous life. The paper highlights three concurrent and overlapping strands of the vocabulary of adaptation: a call for agency, a sustaining of authenticity and a politics of placation. Together, these signal what the adaptive indigenous subject should be like, an unceasing demand for adaptation that is subtler but no less colonial than exercises of power past.

The Biopolitics of Masturbation: Masculinity, Complexity, and Security

Masturbation is a neglected topic in debates around biopower and biopolitics. This article takes Michel Foucault’s recasting of the idea of a regulatory, population-level form of biopower in terms of ‘mechanisms of security’ as its starting point for an investigation into the ways in which bodies enter into and are reshaped by biopolitical discourses on masturbation. While the notion of security faded from view in favour of Foucault’s better known focus on governmentality, this article argues that there is value in recovering the concept of security in the context of a genealogy of modern bodies. Specifically, it explores the possibility that a biopolitical perspective on security operates not only above, but also below the disciplining of individual masturbating bodies. The article proceeds, initially, via an examination of contemporary studies of masturbation, arguing that they largely neglect the material dynamism of bodies. The main focus, however, is on rereading some of the key works in the historical anti-masturbation literature from a complexity perspective. It is shown that these texts engage with a ‘population’ of vital forces and affects that must be regulated if life is to remain secure, and which circulate below the level of individual bodies in relation to a complex milieu. Finally, the article claims that men’s bodies appear as crucial sites of biopolitics, and that normative forms of masculinity can be regarded as interventions into embodiment that are designed to nullify or regulate complexity.

Biosociality, biocitizenship and the new regime of hope and despair: interpreting “Portraits of Hope” and the “Mehmet Case”

The concepts of biocitizenship and biosociality, in many ways developed as a reaction to the former critique of genetification and fears of a return of eugenics, have gained a stronghold in much of the current debates on the social effects of modern-day genetics. In contrast to claims of a return to eugenics, the literature on biocitizenship highlights the new choice-enhancing possibilities involved in present-day biomedicine, underlining the break with past forms of biopower. In this analysis, hope becomes a life-inducing and vitalizing force, opening new avenues of civic participation and engagement. Most critics of this analysis have attacked the claims to novelty attributed to these concepts, arguing that more traditional forms of biopower remain as important as ever. In contrast, we argue that the biocitizenship literature underestimates the radical nature of this break with the past, ending up with a too narrow and one-sided interpretation of the ramifications of the new discourse of hope. On the basis of two different case stories, the “Portraits of Hope” campaign from California, USA and the “Mehmet Case” from Norway, we indicate an alternative “darker” reading of the new discourse of hope, arguing that its driving force is not so much future possibilities as present despair.

Mapping the biopolitics of school dropout and youth resistance

This article will put forth an introductory argument and evidence for school non-completion as a form of biopower, and school dropout to be considered a form of biopolitical youth resistance in the United States (US). Beginning with a brief overview of the empirical relationship of education to health and current graduation rates in the United States, the first section then intertwines these data to elucidate a framework of education as a form of biopower. Using focus groups (n = 6) and a cognitive mapping method called X-ray maps, this qualitative, youth participatory action research (YPAR) study of twenty-two (22) youth ages 14–19 in New York City investigated the ways in which schooling is embodied. Its findings reveal what education policy is doing to the body, how and in what ways youth resist these forces. The last section puts forth a theory for considering dropout as a form of biopolitical youth resistance.

Punitiveness and the Criminalisation of the Other: State Wards, Unlawful Non-citizens and Indigenous Youth

This paper explores the genealogies of bio-power that cut across punitive state interventions aimed at regulating or normalising several distinctive ‘problem’ or ‘suspect’ deviant populations, such as state wards, non-lawful citizens and Indigenous youth. It begins by making some general comments about the theoretical approach to bio-power taken in this paper. It then outlines the distinctive features of bio-power in Australia and how these intersected with the emergence of penal welfarism to govern the unruly, unchaste, unlawful, and the primitive. The paper draws on three examples to illustrate the argument – the gargantuan criminalisation rates of Aboriginal youth, the history of incarcerating state wards in state institutions, and the mandatory detention of unlawful non-citizens and their children. The construction of Indigenous people as a dangerous presence, alongside the construction of the unruly neglected children of the colony — the larrikin descendants of convicts as necessitating special regimes of internal controls and institutions, found a counterpart in the racial and other exclusionary criteria operating through immigration controls for much of the twentieth century. In each case the problem child or population was expelled from the social body through forms of bio-power, rationalised as strengthening, protecting or purifying the Australian population.

Foucault and creative resistance in organisations

PurposeThere is a common misperception that Michel Foucault either had nothing constructive to contribute to the relationship between the subject and the other, or that at best he portrayed intersubjective relations as riddled with power that tends to domination and subjection. This paper aims to counter such a fallacy.Design/methodology/approachThe argument first highlights Foucault's concern with the status of the other, initially as a form of biopower that disciplines and regulates and, subsequent to the development of critical history, as a form of biopower that also constitutes the subject. It is then shown why this conception of the other in terms of relations of power/technoscience through which the subject is constructed is both an ethical and political question.FindingsFor organisations seeking to balance control with creativity for the purposes of fostering innovation, it is demonstrated how reflection upon Foucault's as yet unexplored work on the other, which proffers a notion of a subject who practices freedom in the context of disciplinary and regulatory power, might serve as a toolkit for managers who exercise control but who also seek to foster creativity from those subject to them.Originality/valueA subject‐other relationship is put forth in terms of an account of how freedom that is agonistically articulated in the face of control is tantamount to creative resistance, which in turn is translated into a value to be fostered by organisations that pursue creative destruction.

Imaginary cartographies: race and new world borders

Mobile technologies and networks facilitate the delocalization of traditional power structures within an economic frame. This shift usually incorporates the discourse of the body creation as well. Our bodies are constructs in which individuals as well as and social perceptions and projections, reality and fiction fuse together. In a similar way, we doubt about the representation of reality and highly editable and generative images. Nonetheless, some forms of bio-power can be identified in contemporary constructed mental images such as race or ethnicity usually linked to religious or linguistic differences that are traditionally used as borderline zones. Many examples can be traced back to representations of both fauna and populations of the new world in colonial America. This phenomenon has also emerged in representations of cyberspace even though Internet is advertised as a place in which traditional distinctions and imbalances in power between individuals have been effaced. If Zizek's statement is true that in order to capture the spirit of an age you should not look to explicit social structures but rather to the ghosts that haunt us, and live in a region of nonexistent entities, the topic of globalization should not put aside issues of immigration and multiple representations of race. This situation is inherent to the present and future construction of both cyberspace and public physical space. Media imaginaries create a myriad of information that also includes artificial savages. This fact constitutes what some artists provocatively call a rather explosive universe of cultural misunderstanding under a new world border.

Biopower Today

In this article we undertake some conceptual clarification of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics, and argue for their utility in contemporary analysis. We consider Foucault's development of these concepts, and differentiate his view, which is close to ours, from the philosophical take-up of the terms by Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri. Biopower, we suggest, entails one or more truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings; an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth; strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health; and modes of subjectification, in which individuals work on themselves in the name of individual or collective life or health. We argue that, while exceptional forms of biopower, especially in conditions of absolutist dictatorship, and when combined with certain technical resources, can lead to a murderous ‘thanatopolitics’—a politics of death—biopower in contemporary states takes a different form. It characteristically entails a relation between ‘letting die’ (laissez mourir) and making live (faire vivre)—that is to say strategies for the governing of life. Using examples from our own current research, we consider recent developments in biopower around three themes: race, population and reproduction, and genomic medicine.

Technics over life: risk, ethics and the existential condition in high-tech antenatal care

The subject of this paper is the problem of selective abortion brought about by advanced techniques of foetal diagnosis. The issue of abortion today is analysed as an outcome and illustration of the emerging ‘vital politics’. The paper explores the technicality of this new form of bio-power, and the ethical practice and forms of subjectivity it imposes. Two main points are raised. First, it is argued that the implementation of state-of-the-art foetal diagnosis in clinical practice and maternity care is underlain by the rationales of control and experimentation. The ideas of risk and the dividual are introduced as the epistemic cornerstones of this practice of high-tech reproductive medicine according to the above rationales. Second, the paper argues that foetal diagnosis in antenatal care is characterised by an ethical split. This emerges when the machinery of reproductive health care withdraws into a position of technical responsibility and leaves the choice, and the ethical responsibility, concerning medical operations (selective abortion, in particular) to the pregnant woman. This suggests that high-tech biomedicine tends to individualise risks and to impose a form of ethical individuality characterised by the demand for reflexivity through personal risk assessment, producing the anxiety generated by existential responsibility.