Biocultures: a critical approach to mundane biomedical governance

ABSTRACT

How are we to understand and navigate the ways that biomedicine extends beyond the formal institutions of the clinic, the hospital, and lab, and is incorporated into broader social practices, from intimate embodied knowledges of the self to biosecurity rationales? We propose a return to Lennard Davis’s call (2006. ‘Life, Death, and Biocultural Literacy’. The Chronicle of Higher Education 52:18, B9) for biocultural studies, but with sharpened focus on the way biomedical logics circulate in everyday life under late liberalism. In this essay, we lay out the arena of biocultural studies as particular terrains where health and life are biopolitically governed through the lens of biomedicine and public health. We consider how this governance is inextricable from neoliberal rationalities and imperatives that demand, produce, and affirm only certain forms of subjectivity and life. Additionally, drawing on concrete illustrations from our recent work, we explore the methodology of biocultural studies that involves intertextual analysis of various kinds of cultural products, knowledges and practices; advances collaborative cross-disciplinary approaches that attend to the stratified and mundane layers of biomedical governance; promotes scalar thinking about health policies and practices, from the individual to population-level administration; and, finally, scrutinises the structural violence of biomedicine and deadly inequities produced through life-making practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Biocultures
• life
• death
• biomedicine
• neoliberalism
• biopolitics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This can range from discussions on the racial biopolitics of health focused on humans and the devaluing and biopiracy/theft of black bodies in the biomedical pursuit of fostering white life, to discussion about trans-biopolitics and the sacrifice of whole species or populations of nonhumans as biomonitoring mechanisms of human health.

2 For instance, people now track their steps, sleep patterns, and caloric intake; they survey and monitor themselves for the smallest signs of illness or bodily anomaly, anticipate potential futures of disease, and take on broader health directives as personal pursuits. Many of us share and compare our health status, and this status has become a key mode through which we understand ourselves and our relationships.

3 Foucault (2003: 254–55) discusses racism in terms of ‘cuts’ made in the population. As Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal (2008: 168) have argued, race functions as a marker that biopolitically adjudicates: race ‘does not only specify life’s eligibilities for this or that good – it ultimately specifies whether or not a life is to be considered eligible for life as such.’

4 For extensions of these ideas, refer to, for example, Christina Sharpe’s (2016) examination of the ‘killability’ of black life, Talal Asad’s (2015) discussion of whose killings are sanctioned/made acceptable, and Judith Butler’s (2009) work on the determination of whose lives are grievable.

5 The term late liberalism refers to shifts in state responsibility and broader governmentality that ensure the market operates through law and order. This era entails the shrinkage of the government’s social functions under the auspices of freeing the economy and a new set of government rationalities and practices – commonly referred to as ‘neoliberal’ – that aim to produce subjects that are self-enterprising, productive, autonomous individuals. These neoliberal rationalities do not so much roll back the state as they create widespread institutional/policy, cultural, and legal conditions that optimize (and securitize) the economy through the entrepreneurship of individuals, families, firms, materials, and so on.

6 In other words, neoliberal affirmations have disciplinary effects and only affirm qualified life.

7 ‘Affirming life’ is not simply the idea that we would affirm that we want to live. Rather, to affirm life is to accept or adopt the governing logics that structure a particular way of living: as productive, enterprising, efficient, optimistic, and compliant to dominant knowledges, regardless of how these might delimit possibilities for imagining life otherwise.

8 There is a rich field of research literature on biomedicine and the integration of the biological body with social, political, and economic relations that uses conceptual frameworks tied to vocabulary with the bio- prefix: Biocitizenship (Rose and Novas 2004; Petryna 2002), biosociality (Rabinow 1996), biovalue (Waldby 2002; Rose 2007), biocapital (Rajan 2006; Cooper 2008), etc.

9 Pete Shanks (2020) has noted that in relation to COVID-19, ‘the most obvious victims are people with disabilities, minority communities, and the elderly.’ Here we need to question resource allocation to protect these communities, how ‘decision to treat’ is assessed, the deathly dimensions of notions of ‘herd immunity’ that have been suggested in some sectors (which would sacrifice ‘weaker’ individuals and communities), and the very relations of power that make these people ‘obvious victims.’

10 We advocate for biocultural studies of the ways that death is folded into life through intimate and often mundane forms of governing – the contingent operations of vulnerability, death-in-life, and death effects that regularly accompany insistent life-making in liberal democratic regimes. This effort resonates with research on the racializing dimensions and politics of difference within liberal governance, neoliberal capitalism, and/or biomedicine, such as the uneven incorporation of marginalized subjects into neoliberal reproductive imperatives. Exemplary of this is Grace Kyungwon Hong’s work (2015), which focuses on how select modes of minoritized life are invited into neoliberal reproductive respectability, precisely to disavow the ongoing and exacerbated production of premature death for others. Other crucial key ideas/studies include Orlando Patterson’s seminal work (1982) on ‘social death’; Ruthie Gilmore’s theorization of racism (2007: 28) as ‘the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies’; Lisa Marie Cacho’s examination (2012) of the ways personhood and rights-based politics normalize social and literal death; Lauren Berlant’s formulation of ‘slow death’ (2007) as the destruction of bodies, environments, and imaginaries under contemporary capitalist regimes; Henry Giroux’s discussion (2006) of the ‘biopolitics of disposability’; Matthew Sparke’s diagnostic of ‘biological subcitizenship’ (2017) and the embodiment of ill health under austerity conditions; and Ben Anderson et al. (2020) on ‘slow emergencies’ and the racialized biopolitics of emergency governance.

11 Distinct from efforts to theorize life and death as an ontology and state of being, our methodological attention to biomedical rationalities and modes of governance accounts for the ways different practices of life-making and affirmations of life often produce deathly conditions and obscure death and diverse forms of ‘letting die.’ Thus, we follow the more Foucauldian line to focus on death as the contingent underside to the very means of pursuing and maximizing life, where the powers of death are exercised in the ‘exigencies of a life-administering power’ (Foucault 1990: 136).

12 The idea of the marketplace as a neutral/level playing field is a deceptively violent ideological construction that disavows historical relationships of oppression, inequality, and uneven development – inherited across generations – that produce embodied vulnerabilities and advantages from the start. The ‘cut’ of racism, for instance, has meant that different segments of the population have been administered in distinct ways and, importantly, that white lives have been affirmed and made to live in ways that other lives have not.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shiloh Krupar

Shiloh Krupar is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where she chairs the Culture and Politics Program. Her research examines the biopolitical administration of asymmetrical life, geographies of waste and vulnerability, neoliberal biomedicine, and queer approaches to bureaucracy and ecology. She is author of Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), co-author of Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-making (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and co-author of Territories of Exaction: Austerity, Bias, Dross (SAGE forthcoming).

Nadine Ehlers

Nadine Ehlers teaches in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Sydney, Australia. Ehlers’ research broadly focuses on the socio-cultural study of the body, law, and biomedicine to examine the racial and gendered governance of individuals and populations. She is the author of Racial Imperatives Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection (Indiana University Press, 2012), co-editor of Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), and co-author of Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-making (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).