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Bashford A (2014) “Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth”
DESCRIPTION: “Concern about the size of the world’s population did not begin with the “population bomb” in 1968. It arose in the aftermath of World War I and was understood as an issue with far-reaching ecological, agricultural, economic, and geopolitical consequences. The world population problem concerned the fertility of soil as much as the fertility of women, always involving both “earth” and “life.”
Global Population traces the idea of a world population problem as it evolved from the 1920s through the 1960s. The growth and distribution of the human population over the planet’s surface came deeply to shape the characterization of “civilizations” with different standards of living. It forged the very ideas of development, demographically defined three worlds, and, for some, an aspirational “one world.”
Drawing on international conference transcripts and personal and organizational archives, this book reconstructs the twentieth-century population problem in terms of migration, colonial expansion, globalization, and world food plans. Population was a problem in which international relations and intimate relations were one. Global Population ultimately shows how a geopolitical problem about sovereignty over land morphed into a biopolitical solution, entailing sovereignty over one’s person.”
Zordo S and Marchesi M eds. (2015) “Reproduction and Biopolitics: Ethnographies of Governance” – Routledge
DESCRIPTION: “The central theme of this volume is the notion of “irrational reproduction”: the ways in which women’s and couples’ reproductive choices and practices are deemed “irrational” or “irresponsible” because they result in the “wrong number” of children. In a global context of declining fertility, population policies have shifted to a neoliberal register, which, despite local differences, includes both the deepening of economic and social inequalities and the intensification of rights discourses applied to the unborn. Inspired by Foucault’s theories on biopolitics and biopower and by a long tradition of feminist anthropological studies on reproduction, the ethnographically based papers collected in this volume address the following crucial questions: How does the notion of “irrational” reproduction emerge and play out in diverse socio-political contexts and what forms of subjectivities and resistance does it generate? How does the “threat” of too few or too many children, itself constructed through expert knowledge of statistics and political concerns over the size of different ethnic populations or classes, justify and support different biopolitical projects? And how do the increasing privatization of healthcare and the dismantling of welfare states affect reproductive practices and decisions on the ground in the global North and South?”
Reproduction and Biopolitics: Ethnographies of Governance, – Routledge.
Wade N (2014) “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History”
DESCRIPTION: “Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story. Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory.
Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well.”
- Center for Genetics and Society: “A Troublesome Inheritance has received extremely critical responses, nearly across the board, including a negative account in The New York Times. In a striking act of solidarity, 143 population geneticists wrote a letter condemning Wade’s interpretation of their work. Biopolitical Times contributor Pete Shanks has written about the book’s reception here and here. But Wade remains adamant that everyone who disagrees with him is simply too intimated by “political correctness” to say what they really think.”
- Watch a critical discussion (video) of the book at the Center for Genetics and Society.
VIDEO: Dorothy R and Jonathan M (2014) Talking Biopolitics- Center for Genetics and Society
Book Discussion
A Troublesome Inheritance, by longtime New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, was released in late spring to great fanfare. It argues that modern genetic science reveals “three major races” that are genetically distinct and diverge much as subspecies do. These genetic differences, it contends, underlie “the rise of the West.” According to Wade, in other words, race is the biologically real result of Darwinian natural selection.
A Troublesome Inheritance has received extremely critical responses, nearly across the board, including a negative account in The New York Times. In a striking act of solidarity, 143 population geneticists wrote a lettercondemning Wade’s interpretation of their work. Biopolitical Times contributor Pete Shanks has written about the book’s reception here and here. But Wade remains adamant that everyone who disagrees with him is simply too intimated by “political correctness” to say what they really think.
▶ Dorothy Roberts and Jonathan Marks Web Conversation – YouTube
Waldby C (2000) “The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine”
DESCRIPTION: “The Visible Human Project is a critical investigation of the spectacular, three-dimensional recordings of real human bodies – dissected, photographed and converted into visual data files – made by the US National Library of Medicine in Baltimore. Catherine Waldby uses new ideas from cultural studies, science studies and social studies of the computer to situate the Visible Human Project in its historical and cultural context, and to consider the meanings such an object has within a computerised culture.
In this fascinating and important book, Catherine Waldby explores how advances in medical technologies have changed the way we view and study the human body, and places the VHP within the history of technologies such as the X-ray and CT-scan, which allow us to view the human interior.
Bringing together medical conceptions of the human body with theories of visual culture from Foucault to Donna Haraway, Waldby links the VHP to a range of other biomedical projects, such as the Human Genome Project and cloning, which approach living bodies as data sources. She argues that the VHP is an example of the increasingly blurred distinction between `living’ and ‘dead’ human bodies, as the bodies it uses are digitally preserved as a resource for living bodies, and considers how computer-based biotechnologies affect both medical and non-medical meanings of the body’s life and death, its location and its limits.”
Inhorn M and Gurtin B (2011) “Cross-border reproductive care: a future research agenda”
ABSTRACT: “Cross-border reproductive care (CBRC) is a rapidly growing phenomenon of interest to governments and regulators, professionals working within the field of assisted reproductive technologies and men and women seeking to use their services. However, to date, discussions have been dominated by media debates and scholarly commentary, with only partial and fragmentary evidence from empirical research studies. This article identifies the pressing gaps in the literature, elucidates the main theoretical and methodological challenges for investigating CBRC and outlines a future research agenda.
Cross-border reproductive care (CBRC) is a rapidly growing phenomenon of interest to governments and regulators, professionals working within the field of assisted reproductive technologies and men and women seeking to use their services. However, to date, discussions have been dominated by media debates and scholarly commentary, with only partial and fragmentary evidence from empirical research studies. This article identifies the pressing gaps in the literature, elucidates the main theoretical and methodological challenges for investigating CBRC and outlines a future research agenda.”
Cross-border reproductive care: a future research agenda – Reproductive BioMedicine Online.
Petersen E (2002)”From Persons to People: Further Studies in the Politics of Population”
DESCRIPTION: “Problems associated with aggregation and classification are the underlying theme of this book. When data assembled from individuals are presented as group characteristics, this process has logical complications. Racial profiling and ethnic discrimination are obvious examples of the problem. Petersen’s book analyzes in general how information from “persons” turns into statistics about specific “people.” The book is divided into two parts covering population and ethnicity. The first two chapters in part 1, on population statistics and the age-sex structure, are the foundations for any demographic analysis. Chapter 3 is a brief review of the interminable debate over whether the subsistence of mankind is on the point of depletion. The three following chapters are on population theory as expounded by Malthus, Marx, and Communists. Chapters 7 and 8 discuss the competition between parents and the state concerning which of the two shall decide on procreation. Chapter 9 is an account of population at the frontier, using Nevada as a prototype. The last chapter in part 1 is a proposal, to moderate the endless debate about abortion. The first two chapters in the second part of the book concern methods for analyzing ethnicity that are essential for a full understanding of demography: how and by whom ethnic groups are defined. The next chapter discusses some of the many subdivisions of European nations, countering the analyses of European unity with the fact that most of its regions are not themselves homogeneous. In a number of instances American statistical agencies have used surnames to identify nationalities, with invalid results, as the author shows in the next chapter. “Jews as a Race” is an attempt to counter Nazi dogma with a rational analysis of a contentious topic. The subsequent chapters compare Japanese and Chinese Americans as small but fascinating minorities and analyze the social consequences of religion from theoretical and factual viewpoints. The last chapter summarizes the conclusions to be drawn from these topics. Demographers, sociologists, and statisticians, as well as those generally concerned with social policy, will find From Persons to People useful and courageous-the hallmark of the dean of sociological demography. William Petersen, Robert Lazarus Professor Social Demography Emeritus at Ohio State University, is widely known throughout the profession as a leading demographer.”
Luibheid E (2006) “Sexual regimes and migration controls: reproducing the Irish nation-state in transnational contexts”
ABSTRACT: “This article examines the ways that state sexual regimes intersect with migration controls to re-make exclusionary nation-states and geopolitical hierarchies among women. I focus on two important Irish Supreme Court rulings: the X case (1992) and the O case (2002), respectively. X was a raped, pregnant, 14-year-old who sought an abortion in Britain. While the Supreme Court ultimately permitted her to procure an abortion, women’s right to travel across international borders without government inquiry into their reproductive status came into question. The O case concerned a Nigerian asylum seeker who invoked the fact that she was pregnant in an effort to avoid deportation. The Supreme Court, however, affirmed that she could be deported, despite the Irish Constitution’s pledge to protect the ‘right to life of the unborn.’ Considered together, these cases reveal how overlapping sexual/migration control regimes both reinscribe hierarchies among women based on geopolitical location, and rebound the exclusionary nation-state despite growing transnationalism.”
Fletcher R (2005) “Reproducing Irishness: Race, Gender, and Abortion Law”
ABSTRACT: “This article draws on Nira Yuval-Davis’s theory of gender and nation and on Etienne Balibar’s theory of race and nationalism to develop the argument that race is one significant means by which the legal regime of the nation-state differentiates, values, and organizes women’s reproductive contributions. I show how Irishness is a racial as well as a gendered national concept, and I trace the ways in which race has been legally mobilized to stigmatize and regulate certain kinds of abortion decisions in the Republic of Ireland. In doing so, I draw in particular on the cases of C (1997) and “Baby” O (2002), and on three interviews with crisis pregnancy counsellors and their discussion of the state’s treatment of abortion-seeking migrant women. Although race is now being signified increasingly in terms of skin colour and used to exclude certain migrants from Irishness, race has also been mobilized as a supplement to nationalism in the abortion politics of the 1980s and 1990s. Irishness has been gendered and racialized in different ways through abortion law as it has shifted from an opposition with post-colonial Britishness, through internal hierarchies that celebrate the reproduction of some Irish women over others, to an emerging opposition with migrant Blackness. These shifts reveal that post-1983 Irish abortion law has always been racialized but that the concept of race has changed as the nation-state moves to value the reproduction of some women over others.”
Reproducing Irishness: Race, Gender, and Abortion Law by Ruth Fletcher :: SSRN.
Engeli I (2009) “La problématisation de la procréation médicalement assistée en France et en Suisse”
ABSTRACT: “Dans la controverse publique relative à la régulation du secteur de la procréation médicalement assistée, les féministes jouèrent un rôle contrasté. Malgré un discours critique très similaire, la problématisation féministe connut une trajectoire très différente en France et en Suisse. En France, elle se heurta à une controverse publique centrée sur la légitimité du désir d’enfant, ce qui mit le mouvement féministe face à ses contradictions internes quant à la maternité et l’a rapidement exclu du débat. En Suisse, en revanche, le discours féministe sur la procréation médicalement assistée s’intégra dans une plus large contestation de la légitimité de la procréation médicalement assistée menée à la fois par la gauche et par les acteurs pro-life. Cette résonance du discours permit aux féministes en Suisse d’influencer de manière plus efficace la problématisation de la question des nouvelles technologies reproductives.”
La problématisation de la procréation médicalement assistée en France et en Suisse – Cairn.info.
Berstein L ed. (2008) “(M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body”
DESCRIPTION: “(M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body explores how cultural narratives represent the mother as nation in ways that both reinforce and challenge traditional, normative roles and create new forms of social identity for women. The anthology examines ways in which the representation of motherhood as national allegory has constricted womens social, economic, and political roles in different geographic and historical contexts. It also shows how this cultural use of the mother-figure can provide alternative models of women’s lives as mothers and non-mothers. Encompassing literature from Canada, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Mexico, Romania, Sierra Leone, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Spain, and the United States, the essays attempt to give women a voice about their own diverse lives and experiences. Section One, Authentic Mothers, examines how notions of pure, moral motherhood have been enlisted to promote nationalist projects and to create and maintain the illusion of a cohesive nation-state. Section Two, Transforming Mothers, focuses on texts that both challenge national stereotypes and contest the roles of women in society. The essays in this chapter address problems raised in the first part of the book by questioning notions of chaste, authentic mothers and by attempting to create new, inclusive and multi-cultural versions of the national imaginary. The third section, Transgressing Mothers, presents concepts of anti-mothering, embodied by ‘deviant’ or ‘unnatural’ mothers, to question the representation of mother as national allegory on the eve of and into the twenty-first century. In showing the relationship of particular womens situations to ongoing discourses of mother-as-nation, this collection is significant to contemporary women’s lives, and thus to society as a whole.”
Rothstein M et al (2005) “Genetic Ties and the Family: The Impact of Paternity Testing on Parents and Children”
DESCRIPTION: “Genetic Ties and the Family brings together experts in history, law, ethics, philosophy, psychology, social work, and sociology to explore the tension between biological and social conceptions of parentage. The contributors consider the effect of DNA-based paternity testing on family relationships and discuss the ethical, legal, and social implications.
These essays reflect the changing concepts of parenthood, along with social factors that heighten conflict, such as single-parent adoption, gay and lesbian parents, child support laws, and new reproductive technologies. Building on scholarship of the last quarter century—including the latest developments in law and social science research—this volume will inform the development of legislation regulating genetic testing and the use of test results in establishing parental rights.
Contributors: Lori B. Andrews, J.D., Chicago-Kent College of Law; Elizabeth Bartholet, J.D., Harvard Law School; Jeffrey Blustein, Ph.D., Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Nancy E. Dowd, J.D., Levin College of Law, University of Florida; Michael Grossberg, Ph.D., Indiana University; Dorothy Nelkin, B.A., New York University; Jeffrey Parness, J.D., North Illinois University College of Law; Dianne Scott-Jones, Ph.D., Boston College; Daniel Wulff, Ph.D., Raymond A. Kent School of Social Work, University of Louisville.“
Genetic Ties and the Family: The Impact of Paternity Testing on Parents and … – Google Books.
Hopkins T (2014) “Social reproduction in France: Religious dress laws and laïcité”
ABSTRACT: “France is the first country in Europe to ban face veils from public space. As of April 11, 2011, any woman who wears a face veil is subject to a fine of 150 euros or a course on French citizenship. This was not the first time that the French government legislated against religious dress; in 2004 it prohibited religious symbols from public school spaces. While there is a growing literature on these bans in France, few scholars bring together the literatures on social reproduction and religious dress. I argue that the anti-veiling laws increase the socially reproductive labor of religious-dress wearing Muslim women in France. This increase takes the form of unpaid and paid caring labor, spatial exclusions that push Muslim women into the home, and violence toward biological reproduction. This paper unfolds in three parts: (1) French laïcité and sexist Islamophobia; (2) social reproduction; and (3) exclusion from public space.”
- “Islamophobic violence in France has increased since 2011 and is disproportionately impacted Muslim women.
- The result of French anti-veiling laws, even if unintentional, has increased the paid and unpaid socially reproductive labour, exclusions from public spaces, and violence toward unpaid caring labour and biological reproduction of religious-dress wearing French Muslim women.
- The religious dress laws further exacerbate the discrimination that French Muslim women experience in the French labour market and by French society.”
Social reproduction in France: Religious dress laws and laïcité.
Rose N and Novas C (2008) “Biological Citizenship – Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems”
ABSTRACT: “A new kind of citizenship is taking shape in the age of biomedicine, biotechnology and genomics. We term this ‘biological citizenship’. Since Marshall’s (1950) classic essay it is conventional to think of a kind of evolution of citizenship since the eighteenth century in Europe, North America and Australia: the civil rights granted in the eighteenth century necessitated the extension of political citizenship in the nineteenth century and of social citizenship in the twentieth century…”
Petryna A (2013) “Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl”
DESCRIPTION: “On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, are still suffering the effects. Life Exposed is the first book to comprehensively examine the vexed political, scientific, and social circumstances that followed the disaster. Tracing the story from an initial lack of disclosure to post-Soviet democratizing attempts to compensate sufferers, Adriana Petryna uses anthropological tools to take us into a world whose social realities are far more immediate and stark than those described by policymakers and scientists. She asks: What happens to politics when state officials fail to inform their fellow citizens of real threats to life? What are the moral and political consequences of remedies available in the wake of technological disasters?
Through extensive research in state institutions, clinics, laboratories, and with affected families and workers of the so-called Zone, Petryna illustrates how the event and its aftermath have not only shaped the course of an independent nation but have made health a negotiated realm of entitlement. She tracks the emergence of a “biological citizenship” in which assaults on health become the coinage through which sufferers stake claims for biomedical resources, social equity, and human rights. Life Exposed provides an anthropological framework for understanding the politics of emergent democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and everyday forms of survival as they are interwoven with the profound changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl: Adriana Petryna: 9780691151663: Amazon.com: Books.
Roberts E (1998) “Killing the Black Body” Random House
DESCRIPTION: “This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years–using a black feminist lens and the issue of the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare “reform” on black women’s–especially poor black women’s–control over their bodies’ autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives. It gives its readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new , and socially transformative, definition of “liberty” and “equality” for the American polity from a black feminist perspective.
The author is able to combine the most innovative and radical thinking on several fronts–racial theory, feminist, and legal–to produce a work that is at once history and political treatise. By using the history of how American law–beginning with slavery–has treated the issue of the state’s right to interfere with the black woman’s body, the author explosively and effectively makes the case for the legal redress to the racist implications of current policy with regards to 1) access to and coercive dispensing of birth control to poor black women 2) the criminalization of parenting by poor black women who have used drugs 3) the stigmatization and devaluation of poor black mothers under the new welfare provisions, and 4) the differential access to and disproportionate spending of social resources on the new reproductive technologies used by wealthy white couples to insure genetically related offspring.
The legal redress of the racism inherent in current American law and policy in these matters, the author argues in her last chapter, demands and should lead us to adopt a new standard and definition of the liberal theory of “liberty” and “equality” based on the need for, and the positive role of government in fostering, social as well as individual justice.”
Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts – Book – eBook – Random House.
Foucault M (1963) “The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception”
DESCRIPTION: “In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.
In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitudes — in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death.”
Rose N. (2007) “The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the
DESCRIPTION: “For centuries, medicine aimed to treat abnormalities. But today normality itself is open to medical modification. Equipped with a new molecular understanding of bodies and minds, and new techniques for manipulating basic life processes at the level of molecules, cells, and genes, medicine now seeks to manage human vital processes. The Politics of Life Itself offers a much-needed examination of recent developments in the life sciences and biomedicine that have led to the widespread politicization of medicine, human life, and biotechnology.
Avoiding the hype of popular science and the pessimism of most social science, Nikolas Rose analyzes contemporary molecular biopolitics, examining developments in genomics, neuroscience, pharmacology, and psychopharmacology and the ways they have affected racial politics, crime control, and psychiatry. Rose analyzes the transformation of biomedicine from the practice of healing to the government of life; the new emphasis on treating disease susceptibilities rather than disease; the shift in our understanding of the patient; the emergence of new forms of medical activism; the rise of biocapital; and the mutations in biopower. He concludes that these developments have profound consequences for who we think we are, and who we want to be.”
Altıok O. (2013) “Reproducing the Nation”
ABSTRACT: “Sociologist Özlem Altıok discusses the recent efforts to further restrict abortion in Turkey. She argues that these efforts are part of an effort to manage the population by disciplining women’s fertility under a new “reproductive governmentality.”
Reproducing the Nation– Contexts.
Turner, J (2014) “The Family Migration Visa in the History of Marriage Restrictions: Postcolonial Relations and the UK Border”- The British Journal of Politics & International Relations – Wiley Online Library
Research Highlights and Abstract
“This article:
- Provides a necessary critical reflection on the changes to the UK family migration visa 2012;
- Responds to the recent call made by Nick Vaughan-Williams and Victoria M. Basham in BJPIR for Critical Border Studies to better appreciate the interlocking elements of race, gender, class in border practices. It does this by also paying attention to sex;
- Challenges the presentism in the recent literature on border practices/immigration by situating the family migration visa in a broader history;
- Makes a strong contribution to the cross-over debates which are taking place in International Relations and governmentality literature regarding the postcolonial. It offers a Foucauldian analysis of government which takes colonial and postcolonial relations seriously.
This article explores the changes to the family migration visa (2012) through a history of postcolonial government. It explores how the visa shares a familiar function to previous forms of rule which targeted the household and family as a site of regulation. Under Empire, ‘marriage restrictions’ were used to manage the ‘intimate’ connections between coloniser and colonised. Over the course of the 20th century UK border regimes also targeted the intimate and the familial to regulate racial proximity. In tracing this history, I argue that the family migration visa works as a similar technique. The visa manages the intimate space of the couple, family and household through an ideal domesticity; in line with certain raced, gendered and class norms. It highlights how government techniques make claims over whom can live with, raise a family with, be intimate with whom in Britain.”
Without Borders? Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime – Shamir – 2005 – Sociological Theory – Wiley Online Library
ABSTRACT: “While globalization is largely theorized in terms of trans-border flows, this article suggests an exploratory sociological framework for analyzing globalization as consisting of systemic processes of closure and containment. The suggested framework points at the emergence of a global mobility regime that actively seeks to contain social movement both within and across borders. The mobility regime is theorized as premised upon a pervasive “paradigm of suspicion” that conflates the perceived threats of crime, immigration, and terrorism, thus constituting a conceptual blueprint for the organization of global risk-management strategies. The article draws on multiple examples, singling out some elementary forms of the mobility regime, emphasizing the sociological affinity between guarded borders on the one hand and gated communities on the other. In particular, the article aims at theorizing the translation of the paradigm of suspicion into actual technologies of social screening designed to police the mobility of those social elements that are deemed to belong to suspect social categories. Specifically, the article points at biosocial profiling as an increasingly dominant technology of intervention. Biosocial profiling, in turn, is theorized in juxtaposition to other modalities of power, namely, legal and disciplinary measures.”
Biopolitics: The Politics of the Body, Race and Nature – Google Books
DESCRIPTION: “The presest volume is a collection of papers given at a conference on “Biopolitics. The Politics of the Body, Race and Nature”, held in Vienna in May 1994. The conference was based on the book Biopolitics by Ferenc Feher and Agnes Heller published by the European Centre in Spring 1994. The authors of this volume from various standpoints discuss and evaluate the central thesis of the book stating that after the defeat of the grand narrative, the idea of difference promised freedom, tolerance and free play. Instead, new dangers emerged. The politics of difference became used as a new brand of identity politics; race-thinking, biofeminism, and ethnic strife occupied the space that has been abandoned by the grand old ideas. New kinds of intolerance, new practices of violence appeared. Thus the main question resulting from this latest trend is: What are its implications for modern liberal democracy based on universal human rights?”
Biopolitics: The Politics of the Body, Race and Nature – Google Books.
Tyler I (2009) “Designed to fail: A biopolitics of British citizenship” – Citizenship Studies – Volume 14, Issue 1
ABSTRACT: “Tracing a route through the recent ‘ugly history’ of British citizenship, this article advances two central claims. Firstly, British citizenship has been designed to fail specific groups and populations. Failure, it argues, is a design principle of British citizenship, in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out, to indicate, to designate. Secondly, British citizenship is a biopolitics – a field of techniques and practices (legal, social, moral) through which populations are controlled and fashioned. This article begins with the 1981 Nationality Act and the violent conflicts between the police and black communities in Brixton that accompanied the passage of the Act through the British parliament. Employing Michel Foucault’s concept of state racism, it argues that the 1981 Nationality Act marked a pivotal moment in the design of British citizenship and has operated as the template for a glut of subsequent nationality legislation that has shaped who can achieve citizenship. The central argument is that the existence of populations of failed citizens within Britain is not an accident of flawed design, but is foundational to British citizenship. For many ‘national minorities’ the lived realities of biopolitical citizenship stand in stark contradistinction to contemporary governmental accounts of citizenship that stress community cohesion, political participation, social responsibility, rights and pride in shared national belonging.”
Fassin E (2010) “National Identities and Transnational Intimacies: Sexual Democracy and the Politics of Immigration in Europe”
ABSTRACT: “The so-called sexual clash of civilizations takes on a different meaning in today’s Europe: it is about immigrants rather than terrorists—about contention, not expansion. As a consequence, Europe now draws the boundaries between “us” and “them” through sexual politics. Sexual democracy thus defines the borders of Europe while embodying national identities in France, in the Netherlands, and elsewhere.”
Harris L. (2014) “Stratified reproduction, family planning care and the double” Current Opinion in Obstetrics and Gynecology
ABSTRACT: “Purpose of review: There is a growing clinical consensus that Medicaid sterilization consent protections should be revisited because they impede desired care for many women. Here, we consider the broad social and ideological contexts for past sterilization abuses, beyond informed consent.
Recent findings: Throughout the US history, the fertility and childbearing of poor women and women of color were not valued equally to those of affluent white women. This is evident in a range of practices and policies, including black women’s treatment during slavery, removal of Native children to off-reservation boarding schools and coercive sterilizations of poor white women and women of color. Thus, reproductive experiences throughout the US history were stratified. This ideology of stratified reproduction persists today in social welfare programs, drug policy and programs promoting long-acting reversible contraception.
Summary: At their core, sterilization abuses reflected an ideology of stratified reproduction, in which some women’s fertility was devalued compared to other women’s fertility. Revisiting Medicaid sterilization regulations must therefore put issues of race, ethnicity, class, power and resources – not just informed consent – at the center of analyses.”
Pusseseti C. (2014) “The Fallopian Dilemma: African Bodies, Citizenship and Family Planning”
ABSTRACT: “In the recent context of the European Union governmental activity—in particular in this time of crisis—immigration-related issues became of pivotal importance. Social healthcare programmes targeting deprived immigrant popula- tions equate reducing social problems with guiding their con- duct towards more responsible, healthier habits and life pro- jects. Building upon a set of debates on governing the body and health under advanced liberalism, this paper, focusing on the Portuguese context and on family planning, suggests ideas towards a new research agenda on immigration and public health, claiming that social care interventions are inherently racialized. The insecurities, threats and overall concerns in a time of global crisis create a state of exception, which justifies the deployment of illiberal practices in order to secure collective well-being. In particular, I am interested in how the dominant discourses of the health and social care sectors influence [1] the ways in which “the right thing to do” is constructed and debated and the material effects of these decisions on immigrants lives; [2] the ongoing strategies, micronegotiations of power and truth between different actors; [3] the fading borders of the subject of medical knowledge, which becomes no longer to govern the body merely accord- ing to a medical logic, but rather to seek social well-being.”
The Fallopian Dilemma: African Bodies, Citizenship and Family Planning – Online First – Springer.
Margaret J. and Kalpana R. (2001) “Borders of Being Citizenship, Fertility, and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific” Michigan University
Many have written about the way in which a “family romance” connects embodied daily life with the imagined community of the nation, and naturalizes the nation so that it appears not as a novel, fragile contingent creation, but as something ancient, robust and real. This book goes beyond such metaphoric associations of families and nations by looking at the central significance of planning families to promoting state development. It also considers the way that state power is accommodated and resisted, complicit with and contested by other powers grounded in relations of kinship, ethnicity, religion, and class. Through an exploration of richly varied national histories, the authors highlight the common recurring intimacies between marking the borders of states and remolding the bodies of women as reproductive citizens. The tensions between past and present, between local, national and international concerns, and between men and women’s interests in reproduction are all graphically revealed.
Reproducing the Nation 