Reproduction And Biopolitics

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? This book was originally published as a special issue of Anthropology and Medicine.

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? This book was originally published as a special issue of Anthropology and Medicine.

Issues in reproductive ethics, such as the capacity of parents to ‘choose children’, present challenges to philosophical ideas of freedom, responsibility and harm. This book responds to these challenges by proposing a new framework for thinking about the ethics of reproduction that emphasizes the ways that social norms affect decisions about who is born. The book provides clear and thorough discussions of some of the dominant problems in reproductive ethics - human enhancement and the notion of the normal, reproductive liberty and procreative beneficence, the principle of harm and discrimination against disability - while also proposing new ways of addressing these. The author draws upon the work of Michel Foucault, especially his discussions of biopolitics and norms, and later work on ethics, alongside feminist theorists of embodiment to argue for a new bioethics that is responsive to social norms, human vulnerability and the relational context of freedom and responsibility. This is done through compelling discussions of new technologies and practices, including the debate on liberal eugenics and human enhancement, the deliberate selection of disabilities, PGD and obstetric ultrasound.

Based on research by leading medical anthropologists from around the world, this book examines such issues as local practices detrimental to safe pregnancy and birth; conflicting reproductive goals between women and men; and miscommunications between pregnant women and their genetic counselors.

In Foucault's Futures, Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault's thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. She brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to challenge our understanding of the politicization of reproduction. By analyzing Foucault's contribution to the politics of maternity and its influence on the work of thinkers such as Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, Deutscher provides new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory.

This title provides a theoretically and methodologically new and distinct approach to gender through the frameworks of biopolitics and genealogy, theorising it as a historically specific apparatus of biopower. Through the use of a diverse mix of historical and contemporary documents, the book explores how the problematisation of intersex infant genitalia in 1950s psychiatry propelled the emergence of the gender apparatus in order to socialise sexed individuals into the ideal productive and reproductive subjects of White, middle-class postwar America.

In recent decades there has been an explosion in work in the social and physical sciences describing the similarities between human and nonhuman as well as human and non-animal thinking. In this work, Ruth Miller argues that these types of phenomena are also useful models for thinking about the growth, reproduction, and spread of political thought and democratic processes. By shifting her level of analysis from the politics of self-determining subjects to the realm of material environments and information systems, Miller asks what might happen if these alternative, nonhuman thought processes become the normative thought processes of democratic engagement.

The concept of biopolitics has been one of the most important and widely used in recent years in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In Biopolitics, Mills provides a wide-ranging and insightful introduction to the field of biopolitical studies. The first part of the book provides a much-needed philosophical introduction to key theoretical approaches to the concept in contemporary usage. This includes discussions of the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri. In the second part of the book, Mills discusses various topics across the categories of politics, life and subjectivity. These include questions of sovereignty and governmentality, violence, rights, technology, reproduction, race, and sexual difference. This book will be an indispensable guide for those wishing to gain an understanding of the central theories and issues in biopolitical studies. For those already working with the concept of biopolitics, it provides challenging and provocative insights and argues for a ground-breaking reorientation of the field.