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access and afford most forms of ART, the issues of biopower and misuse of power in particular come to the fore. Especially in forms of biotechnology where donor material is utilised, donors are often from vulnerable groups, while those that benefit are in positions of privilege where they can both access and afford these treatments. This also raises the issue of intersectionality in the ethical discussion on ARTs in the South African context. I examine this subject by drawing on an ethos that values vulnerability and justice in its response
Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which is a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Assembled at the intersection of thought and practice, biosocial power attempts to bring envisioned futures into the present, taking hold of life in the form of childhood, thereby bridging being and becoming while also shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. Taking up a critical perspective which is attentive to the contingency of childhoods – the ways in which particular childhoods are constituted and configured – the method used in the book is a transversal genealogy that moves between past and present while also crossing a series of discourses and practices framed by children’s rights (the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage and entrepreneurship education. The overarching analysis converges on contemporary neoliberal enterprise culture, which is approached as a conjuncture that helps to explain, and also to trouble, the growing emphasis on the agency and rights of children. It is against the backdrop of this problematic that the book makes its case for refiguring childhood. Focusing on the how, where and when of biosocial power, Refiguring childhood will appeal to researchers and students interested in examining the relationship between power and childhood through the lens of social and political theory, sociology, cultural studies, history and geography.
This book investigates drone technology from a humanities point of view by exploring how civilian and military drones are represented in visual arts and literature. It opens up a new aesthetic ‘drone imaginary’, a prism of cultural and critical knowledge, through which the complex interplay between drone technology and human communities is explored, and from which its historical, cultural and political dimensions can be assessed. The contributors to this volume offer diverse approaches to this interdisciplinary field of aesthetic drone imaginaries. Sprouting from art history, literature, photography, feminism, postcolonialism and cultural studies, the chapters provide new insights to the rapidly evolving field of drone studies. They include historical perspectives on early unmanned aviation and aerial modes of vision; they explore aesthetic configurations of drone swarming, robotics and automation; and they engage in current debates on how drone technology alters the human body, upsets available categories, and creates new political imaginaries.
and Denmark. The biopolitical concern with body weight and mental health has not only been addressed through curative approaches but also through a number of preventive approaches, which culminated with the eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Thus, preventive interventions directly intervening in the lives of individuals in the name of the population’s productivity and vigour are clearly not new. Viewed at this fairly abstract level, health promotion seems to amount to little more than a tiny permutation of the kind of biopower emerging in
In tracing the history of the term biopolitics, the editors of a recent reader on the subject, Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze ( 2013 : 1) write: No such singular moment comes to mind when charting the history of biopolitics. No defining interval offers itself as the lens able to superimpose the past and the future, allowing us to look back and say, ‘ah, yes, it was precisely then that biopolitics was born, exactly then that politics gave way to biopolitics, power to biopower
, bio-power and its derivative, bio-violence, are effective measures in place to ensure that the system benefits only the privileged. Bio-power and bio-violence Paul Farmer has argued that human suffering is ‘structured by historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces that conspire … to constrain agency’ ( 1996
neither the subject (as it is for sovereign power and pastoral power) nor the singular human body (as it is for disciplinary power), but the biological features of human beings as they are measured and aggregated on the level of populations.11 Interchangeably using the term ‘biopower’, Foucault tried to capture the emergent development of technologies of power that address the management of and control over populations. The technologies collected under the title of biopower have been superimposed on top of and around the already pervasive disciplinary technologies of
resonant marker of identity on many levels, but also as the ultimate seat of affect, provides a solid starting point for a reading of human cultures as a coherent whole, whether as part of a literary, or biological or historical approach. The body, then, is a theme which not only runs across all the human sciences,21 but also possesses longstanding legitimacy and has recently seen an upsurge in interest in light of technological developments and the emergence of the concept of biopower.22 Yet, while the body, when alive, is considered from almost every possible
discuss biosocial power in detail in chapter 2; suffice for now to sketch an initial outline of its coordinates.1 The first and perhaps most important thing to note is that biosocial power is not outside of/external to biopower. Instead, it demarcates a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics – ways of administering life that span the disciplining of individual bodies and the regulation of populations (Foucault 1998: 139–40). 2 Refiguring childhood Secondly, and borrowing from Agamben (1998), biosocial power operates
the divine social hierarchy as maintaining an unjust social inequality. The Argentine dictatorship was determined to cleanse the national body and spirit of such forces and ideas, described as cancers and viruses. Tens of thousands of people were disappeared through state terrorism, at least 10,000 of them were assassinated, others were forced into exile, while only an estimated 100 captives passed through a few rehabilitation programmes. 146 Antonius C. G. M. Robben The chapter’s main argument is that necropower and biopower were under military rule no longer