BIOPOLITICS AMONG THE DISCIPLINES

A new wave of publications attempts to bring together theory and history in order to reconsider the past, present, and future in light of a looming catastrophe. Whether in political theory, sociology, anthropology, or intellectual history, scholars are attempting to reflect about the present beyond the old boundaries that separate left and right, inner and outer, civilian and solider, friend and enemy. Three recent publications, by Catherine Mills, Didier Fassin, and an anthology edited by Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard Wetzel, do so by considering the growth of biopolitical critique in their respective disciplines.     

Governing a Liminal Land Deal: The Biopolitics and Necropolitics of Gender

Over the past decade, there has been a surge in large-scale land acquisitions around the world. Yet, increasing evidence suggests that many of the prominent land deals signed during the global land rush are struggling to materialise. This emergent pattern of liminality has important implications for understanding the everyday, contingent, and gendered processes of land deal governance and subject formation. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines the gendered governance of a “liminal” land deal in coastal Tanzania, through a case of the EcoEnergy Sugar Project. It shows how the project's prolonged delay has given rise, over time, to two contradistinctive sets of actors and mechanisms of control: biopolitical interventions of international development consultants focused on livelihood improvements, and necropolitical interventions of district paramilitary forces focused on surveillance and violence. While seemingly contradictory, I argue that both enactments of power fundamentally relied on and reproduced normative gender in rural Tanzania.     

Disciplined Mobility and the Emotional Subject in Royal Dutch Lloyd's Early Twentieth Century Passenger Shipping Network

This paper examines the disciplined mobility and emotional geographies of “between‐deck” passengers in Royal Dutch Lloyd's early Twentieth Century passenger shipping network. Specifically, it is concerned with the ways in which the network was established and with the efforts made to maintain it. It is found that such a disciplinary network furthers the firm's goal of shipping healthy and productive bodies for corporate profits and that transhipment facility Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam was integral to the performance and maintenance of such a transnational disciplinary network. The key consequence of such disciplined mobility was the creation of an emotional passenger‐migrant subject shaped in relation to the power of corporate, cultural and other authorities in maritime travel and migration. In identifying this historic network of disciplined mobility and its emotional subject, this paper seeks to reveal the emotional geographies relating to mobile subjectivities and the power relations associated with their historically significant travels.     

Saving the Girls: Medical Colonialism and the HPV Programme

ABSTRACT

Mass immunisation is a central aspiration of global health programmes, such as in the 2000 Millennium Development Goals (MDG), as a means of addressing the glaring inequalities in life expectancy that separate the Global North and South. A recent initiative, the Human Papillomaviruses (HPV) vaccine, is being rolled out in so-called developing countries to prevent a number of sexually transmitted diseases, including one of the rarer forms of cervical cancer. Despite its apparent good intentions, resistance to the vaccine has occurred, in developed as well as in developing countries, not least because it constitutes a largely gendered form of medical intervention which is promoted according to Western concepts of risk, biomedical knowledge and normative understandings of female sexual behaviour. As a major component of the MDG health strategy aimed at developing countries, the HPV vaccine initiative carries implicit tendencies towards ‘medical colonialism’ underpinned as it is by hegemonic scientific masculinity, in which gendered forms of structural violence are legitimised through the discursive affiliations of progress and global health. This paper will examine the intersecting themes of political economy, gendered structural violence and hegemonic medical masculinity underpinning HPV immunisation programmes within the context of development. It interrogates how masculine scientific narratives of disease prevention, which legitimises the state-endorsed (and increasingly mandated) pharmaceuticalised protection of young women as objects of patriarchal care and control, have become the new missionary voices, saving bodies rather than souls.     

What Use Are Units? Critical Geographies of Alcohol Policy

Abstract: This paper interrogates the multiple spatialities bound up with the consumption of units as the dominant means of diagnosing “health‐related” alcohol problems and measuring “drunkenness” in international alcohol policy and research. In order to question the power afforded to units, we work at the intersection of theoretical debates concerning biopower and governmentality; emotional, embodied and affective geographies and actor network theory. Presenting empirical research from the UK we contribute to geographical agendas that seek to consider the ontological and epistemological understandings of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. The paper concludes by calling for dialogue between social, health and medical scientists in order to develop more pertinent ways of understanding and representing the risks and benefits of alcohol consumption.     

Wild Globalization: The Biopolitics of Climate Change and Global Capitalism on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast

Abstract: This article explores the value of Deleuzoguattarian approaches for understanding the entangled relationships between globalization, climate change, capitalism and indigenous peoples. Drawing on Brett Neilson's concept of wild globalization, it analyzes the biopolitics of climate change and capitalism as they are experienced on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast. A focus on the heterogeneous economies and ecologies of the Miskito Keys and their destruction by Hurricane Felix reveals the destabilizing forces immanent to capitalism itself. Thinking about climate change not as a transcendent teleological megahazard, but as a Body without Organs, might enable us to be schizophrenic rather than paranoid about climate change.     

TOWARDS A BIOPOLITICS OF THE VICTIMIZED BODY

This article discusses the creation of assault as a crime against health and life as this discursive process is expressed through Swedish laws, legislative discussions, and legal practice from 1945 to 1965. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s theoretical reflections on biopolitics and sociologist Thomas Lemke’s outline to a analytics of biopolitics, the article argues that a most central component in the genealogy of assault as a crime against health and life was a shift in the first post-war decades, from a predominant legal idealistic paradigm within Swedish jurisprudence, by which assault was defined as a crime against bodily integrity, to a legal realistic epistemology, imbued with the scientific knowledge and empirical ‘truth’-producing practices of modern medicine. As an effect, new discourses around the victimized body emerged, through which prevailing knowledges and ‘truths’ around violent crime and its effects were challenged and marginalized. In this discursive process, the 19th-century legal-moral category of violent crimes finally collapsed into the overarching legal category prescribed by Brottsbalken (1965) as ‘crimes against health and life’. Consequently, the victimized body was deprived of all meaning but ‘life’ and thus created as a biopolitical space, available to series of life-governing interventions and regulatory practices.     

Wilderness and tolerance in Flora MacDonald Denison: towards a biopolitics of whiteness

Building on recent argumentation concerning the relationship between wilderness and multiculturalism and whiteness in Canada, this essay argues that the relationship between wilderness and tolerance, one of multiculturalism's operative terms, offers a potentially rich vein for researching and theorizing liberal biopolitics and whiteness in Canada. To formulate this argument the essay historicizes the pairing of tolerance and wilderness in Edwardian Canada through the figure of Flora MacDonald Denison, an important early twentieth-century Canadian feminist and labour activist, a wilderness enthusiast, Theosophist/spiritualist and Walt Whitman devotee.     

The burden of choosing wisely: biopolitics at the beginning of life

Recent transformations in French maternal health care demonstrate how the government of the beginning of life encompasses an individual woman's desires and aspirations for the uses of her own body. Women are increasingly solicited by the French health care system to express their feelings, their wishes, and their distress to a medical professional for whom the solicitation of such narratives has become a professional specificity. This essay focuses on transformations of governmental power in the realm of reproduction articulated within French maternal health care policy, professional midwifery journals, and women's health activist literature. Crucially, the regulation of reproduction in France no longer takes place primarily through sanction or prohibition, but rather through what sociologist Dominique Memmi claims is the solicitation of narratives about one's own desires and hopes for the fate of one's body, a ‘delegated biopolitics’ of reproductive control. This essay suggests that the contemporary government of reproduction entrusts individuals with little more and no less than the imperative to ‘choose wisely.’     

The Globalization of Labor and the Limits of Sovereignty: Immigration and the Politics of Forgiveness

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the phenomenon of ever-growing global migration of people with a following set of questions: (1) What are the main causes of this global phenomenon?; (2) What are the possible ethical and political issues of the rising global migration of people?; (3) What should be the theological response to these issues, and how should the church engage them? In answering these questions, this paper is specifically focused on the case of undocumented migrants: their social predicament, political impasse, and religious (theological) ethical engagement.