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The literature on early modern state-building in Europe has focused on war as its main driver and therefore on states' relationships with men. Feminist scholars have critiqued the Weberian conceptions this literature relies on as being gender biased. I suggest an alternative theoretical starting point for theories of early modern state-building: the political imperatives created by the demographic fluctuations of the Malthusian trap. Harnessing Foucault's concept of biopower and its application to the construction of gender, I argue that population fluctuations incentivized demographic regulation, in particular of childbearing, in order to keep birth rates high and maternal and infant mortality low, implying that early modern European states were constituted through the construction and maintenance of gender regimes. I propose strategies for empirical investigation and argue that a more accurate account of early modern European state-building needs to incorporate demographic regulation and therefore requires gender to be at its center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Antonin Artaud's 'Theatre and the Plague' in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic and through the Ancient Greek term stasis , which describes a civil war between domestic and public spaces. Once initiated, it was believed that this conflict would spread from household to household like a contagion; city states thus implemented draconian measures in the name of preventing stasis. Giorgio Agamben argues that such measures were embedded in subsequent theories of the state, fuelling ever more oppressive policies throughout history. Artaud's 'Theatre of Cruelty' energizes a force comparable to this stasis , both in terms of its latency and its contagiousness, activating dormant conflicts in the individual that are expressed through networks of infection and create frontiers of shared resistance to institutional authority. 'Theatre and the Plague', read through the lens of stasis , can thus offer valuable contributions to current debates around biopolitics, particularly those seeking collective forms of agency during and beyond the current pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Article, I explore how nearly continuous public rhetorical challenges to abortion in the political realm first led the public and the courts to turn away from a particular abortion procedure (intact dilation and extraction, also known as partial-birth abortion) which political agitators labeled as "barbaric" and then to view physicians who performed abortions not as legitimate professionals, but simply as "abortionists," and sometimes as evil "Frankensteins." "Abortionists" use no "medical judgment" and are unworthy of deference by state legislatures, Congress, or the courts when deciding how or when to perform an abortion. The concentration on the welfare of fetuses and the actions of physicians permitted the abortion debate to bypass discussion of both the rights and welfare of pregnant patients, including their right to health, and to virtually never mention that abortion restrictions primarily affect people in poverty who cannot afford to seek reproductive health care, including an abortion, by traveling to a nonrestrictive state. Understanding the power of extreme rhetoric, including the use of social media in political campaigns and the use and misuse of concrete terms such as murder, infanticide, brutality, and dismemberment, and abstract concepts such as "human dignity," can help us plot a post-Dobbs way forward. Perhaps the demise of Roe can lead to a birth of a new rhetoric on abortion, one that concentrates on the right to health of everyone, including the right to make reproductive decisions, and requires moving abortion back into the realm of contemporary medicine, complete with a meaningful doctor-patient relationship protected by privacy and financed in a way that is accessible to all pregnant patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrants are an easy, visible Other, seeming to fall neatly into the us-versus-them framework of nationalism. Nevertheless, much of the scholarly approach to migrant identity, with the partial exception of a largely separate literature on citizenship, has eschewed overt ties to nationalism studies. When us-versus-them language is used in relation to nationalism, the focus or nodal point is the identity of the seemingly homogenous "us" of the nation. However, when migrants are othered, the focus is not always the nation, and while othering migrants always creates exclusion, it is not always exclusion from a nation or identity group. This state of the field article analyzes the literature on populism, securitization, biopolitics, and other critical scholarship related to the issue of othering migrants. In each of these bodies of work, different sets of "us" are set against migrants, some of which evoke identity and others of which do not, elucidating the links (or the lack thereof) of each approach to the study of nationalism. In each of these frameworks, the migrant Other comes up against a different frame of reference, leaving migrants themselves (or any sense of migrant identity) somewhat lost amid the analytical frameworks, at continual risk of being re-othered as victims of circumstance without agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the emergence of what I call "spectral performance" in Putin's Russia. Focusing on the Immortal Regiment initiative, I investigate the growing importance of practices that ask the living to act as surrogates for the dead. My analysis proceeds in three stages. First, applying a memory studies frame, I show how the Regiment helps preserve memory of WWII in a time of significant generational change. Second, drawing on theories of political theology and biopolitics, I show how the Regiment reaffirms the Kremlin's sovereign power to regulate the boundaries between life and death while symbolically displacing sovereignty from the "flesh" of the people to a growing ranks of "immortals." Finally, focusing on the question of representation, I show how the Regiment helps construct an oppressive distribution of the sensible that privileges the dead over the living. I conclude by examining St. Petersburg artist Maksim Evstropov's necro-activist project Party of the Dead as a cultural critique of the Regiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his photobook American Night (2003), the photographer Paul Graham evokes the passage of a walker who draws the outline of a composite and dialectic map of the American city. This article will examine how the book's structure and its division into zones is symptomatic of the explosion of the city and of its spatial, social and racial inequalities. These zones are also spaces of invisibility and visibility, of over-/perfect/under-exposure, illuminating the social/racial contrasts that underpin the urban environment and the mechanisms of their perpetuation. In this sense, American Night ultimately exposes the biopolitical struggle that underscores the American city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roger D. Masters, a prominent figure in the field of biopolitics and political philosophy, passed away on June 22, 2023. He was a Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and made significant contributions to the understanding of how biology and the natural world influence human behavior. Masters authored numerous books, edited volumes, and scholarly articles, and his work appeared in various journals. He also served in public roles, including as a Cultural Attaché and a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense. Masters' legacy includes his impactful scholarship and commitment to civic engagement. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the use of food to exert power over asylum seekers (biopower), and it mentions the nutritional and socio-cultural values of food, restrictions on asylum seeker entrepreneurs who establish food places, and the role of food in the lives of migrants. Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers in Israel are addressed, along with a detention center on the Israeli-Egyptian border and Israel's Deposit Law which an employer's obligation to offset a worker's wages.

In this article, we address geopolitics and biopower as two different yet mutually correlative discursive strategies of sovereign power in Russia. We challenge the dominant realist approaches to Russia’s neighborhood policy by introducing the concept of biopolitics as its key element, which makes analysis of political relations in the post-Soviet area more nuanced and variegated. More specifically, we address an important distinction between geopolitical control over territories and management of population as two of Russia’s strategies in its “near abroad.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the intertwined relations between eugenics and medical genetics from a Swedish perspective in the 1940s and 1950s. The Swedish case shows that a rudimentary form of genetic counseling emerged within eugenic practices in the applications of the Swedish Sterilization Act of 1941, here analyzed from the phenomenon of “heredophobia” (ärftlighetsskräck). At the same time genetic counseling also existed outside eugenic practices, within the discipline of medical genetics. The paper argues that a demand for genetic counseling increased in the 1940s and 1950s in response to a sense of reproductive responsibility engendered by earlier eugenic discourse. The paper also questions the claim made by theoreticians of biopolitics that biological citizens have emerged only during the last decades, especially in neoliberal societies. From the Swedish case it is possible to argue that this had already happened earlier in relation to the proliferation of various aspects of eugenics to the public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sai Baba of Shirdi, who died in 1918, was raised as a Muslim but is today revered as a Hindu saint. One of his most important perceived qualities was his ability to provide miraculous cures for his devotees, and this has continued after his death. I argue here that the emphasis in the Hindu tradition on saintly figures healing the sick is a relatively modern phenomenon. Earlier, though such figures were renowned for their miracles, healing played a very minor part in this. Their miracles were generally designed to worst religious rivals and to enable them to speak truth to power. In the modern era, however, such saintly figures can gain a reputation through healing in a way that is presented as beyond the comprehension of modern medical science. Such people are seen to provide living evidence of the superiority of Indian civilization and its religious beliefs. This move became entangled with nationalist sentiments, so that getting the better of the “English” doctor became a means to reveal the limited scope of Western science and culture. Although this appears to suggest that many Indians have rejected the biopolitics associated with Western modernity (as defined by Foucault), I argue that certain elements of such biopolitics are central to this process, and illustrate this through a study of Sai Baba, a village holy man taken up by the Indian middle classes and made into a pan-Indian figure, with a now global presence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To argue that the future was (re-)invented in the 1970s and the 1980s might seem especially puzzling in light of arguments that the optimism associated with utilitarian, modernization, and socialist theories withered at the time amidst widespread debate over a variety of “crises.” Nonetheless, it was in this peculiar constellation that ideas of the future became fundamentally renegotiated. “New risks” were juxtaposed with prevailing older ideas of social security that were predicated on individual and collective risk management. Focusing on West Germany, this article examines the various technical and political debates over “gaps” in terms of the finances, demographics, and trust in the system of social policy, which helped to put technical and political diagnoses of “new risks” squarely on the political agenda. This demographic argument is of particular interest, as it dramatized the unintended side effects of older social policy and created new, dystopian future scenarios of total systemic breakdown. At times, however, these discussions about managing the risks associated with Germany's demographic future verged on the utopian. New concepts of governmentality and biopolitics prevailed in this context. Moreover, pragmatic and sometimes technocratic concepts of new “governance” (and thus risk management) were proposed by social scientists and politicians as a means to address anxieties about the demographic future, and new models of risk-taking and risk-managing individuals also flourished at the time. With their descriptive but also prescriptive features, these theories contributed to ongoing academic efforts to explain the present and the future in terms of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social historians have argued that the reason the 1918–19 ‘Spanish’ influenza left so few traces in public memory is that it was ‘overshadowed’ by the First World War, hence its historiographical characterisation as the ‘forgotten’ pandemic. This paper argues that such an approach tends to overlook the crucial role played by wartime propaganda. Instead, I put emotion words, emotives and metaphors at the heart of my analysis in an attempt to understand the interplay between propaganda and biopolitical discourses that aimed to regulate civilian responses to the pandemic. Drawing on the letters of Wilfred Owen, the diaries of the cultural historian Caroline Playne and the reporting in the Northcliffe press, I argue that the stoicism exhibited by Owen and amplified in the columns of The Times and the Daily Mail is best viewed as a performance, an emotional style that reflected the politicisation of ‘dread’ in war as an emotion with the potential to undermine civilian morale. This was especially the case during the final year of the conflict when war-weariness set in, leading to the stricter policing of negative emotions. As a protean disease that could present as alternately benign and plague-like, the Spanish flu both drew on these discourses and subverted them, disrupting medical efforts to use the dread of foreign pathogens as an instrument of biopower. The result was that, as dread increasingly became attached to influenza, it destabilised medical attempts to regulate the civilian response to the pandemic, undermining Owen’s and the Northcliffe press’s emotives of stoicism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]