How are marketing strategies of genetic material used as a mechanism for biopolitical governmentality?

ABSTRACT

The article critically examines the marketing strategy employed by Israeli sperm banks as sites for biopolitical governmentality of sperm consumers. The dataset comprise multiple sources which converge to provide evidence for the transfusion of militaristic Zionist ideology into sperm. The biopolitics of sperm marketing involves the naturalization of militaristic Zionism as a dogmatic basis for a “dividing practice” for the inclusion and exclusion of particular types of personified gametes in the symbolically constructed collective gene pool. The image of the military man is the idealized type of hegemonic masculinity in the Israeli nation-in-arms. The warrior-donor is both the supplier of the product and the core product itself, and his semen constitutes the materialistic carrier of his spiritual essence. Using Foucault's notion of biopolitical governmentality suggests why militaristic Zionism discourse has such potency in sperm marketing, and raises questions about contemporary “technologies of the self” as consumerist practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Governmentality
• ideology
• masculinity
• militarism
• panopticon
• politicized marketing
• sperm

Acknowledgements

The author expresses her upmost gratitude to the editor of Consumption, Markets & Culture and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.