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Context: The ballet institution is known for its aesthetic and performative standards. In professional dancers' everyday lives, self-improvement and body awareness entwine with striving for artistic excellence. In this context, 'health' has primarily been explored in relation to eating disorders, pain, and injuries. Aim: This paper explores dancers' health practices, namely how they are shaped by the ballet institution and how they relate to broader health discourses. Methodology: A reflexive thematic analysis was conducted upon interviews with nine dancers (each interviewed twice) using a theoretical framework based on the concepts of greedy institutions and biopedagogies. Analyses: Two themes were developed: What it takes to be an 'insider' of the ballet institution and Learning to develop an acute embodied self-awareness. Dancers described ballet as a 'lifestyle' rather than a 'job'; practices of self-care defined by continuous self and body work were framed as necessary to meet the demands of this lifestyle. Participants 'played with' institutional and societal norms, often resisting docile bodies promoted within the ballet institution. Conclusion: Dancers' constructions of health and the art of ballet as not fitting neatly into 'good' nor 'bad' make room to consider the tensions between adopting and resisting dominant health discourses in this institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Beginning in 2007, the Chinese state used liberalising policy and funding to encourage the expansion of large‐scale grain farming. Despite this support, many of the new farms have struggled financially and folded. Drawing on Foucauldian biopolitics and resource security literature, I argue that, with modernised agriculture, the state primarily sought to create not commercial farms, but the redundant farming infrastructure needed to buffer its growing reliance on food imports, abide by global trade regulations, and sustain its urban export manufacturing economy. These balancing efforts harmed commercial farmers: land commodification and policy funding incentivised urban government officials to intervene in rural land‐use planning, but low global market aligned grain prices disincentivised them from considering the place‐particular viability of their plans for producers. This article contributes to critical agrarian change literature by highlighting how modernist states become beholden to rational scientific techniques and sacrifice rural areas for increasingly vulnerable urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Western context of delayed motherhood and declining fertility, an array of fertility enhancements have emerged. While bioethical debates and literature on the technological prowess of these enhancements proliferate, it is useful to explore the lived experience of women undergoing them. This article uses Tabitha Moses' artwork Investment, a series of embroidered hospital gowns, as a vehicle to explore lived experience of women engaging with fertility enhancements, including in vitro fertilisation. This analysis challenges dominant biomedical and corporate discourses framing fertility enhancements as benign. Using constructs of patriarchy, biopower, biopolitics (Foucault), and technobiopower (Haraway), we identify how power over women's bodies is extended through fertility enhancements. Haraway's notion of figuration supports the analysis. Understood as a tropic melding of semiotic and material, the figuration of The Infertile Woman offers a way to explore discursive operations of power and amid them the creation of a new form of reproductive labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to the genocidal actions taking place in Gaza, the Israeli military also conducts large-scale assaults in the West Bank that destroy individuals' homes and communities, and invades Palestinian homes one home and garden at a time. While there are 250 of these invasions per month, they receive little scrutiny. Most of these invasions occur across the 19 refugee camps in the occupied Palestinian territories, where home is viewed as a gendered and temporal space: transient, penetrable, and violable. To analyze home invasion through a feminist lens, interviews were conducted with ten women-identifying refugees who described it as one of many forms of collective punishment that Palestinians experience that determines ability or debility as well as who may live and who may/must die. Interview participants saw home invasion as a type of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence that affects neighbors, kin, and communities and is mitigated through the collective support of women. Work on this article started well before the devastating and horrific events that unfolded after October 7, 2023. The article's scrutiny of the militarized infrastructure across the West Bank brings important context to the state violence in Gaza, and lays bare the vulnerabilities of the West Bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Al-Adab / Al-ādāb is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The pandemic revealed the workings of biopower in relation to people with disabilities. In focusing on lives worth living, decisions were made based on metrics about the quality of life of various groups. Ultimately, the pandemic revealed the power structure lurking behind a rhetoric of "care and compassion." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Antiquity, starting with Plato’s proposition for an ideal state, a series of philosophers, political thinkers and policymakers have fostered a model of the State in which the government is able to control both the will and the bodies of the citizens. This project, as Michel Foucault has shown, has been endorsed and developed in modern times. Contemporary governments have sought a way of organising the complete control of life: from birth to death, throughout one's lifetime. This is how politics have evolved into “Biopolitics” and “Biopower”. With the recent pandemic of COViD 19, this tendency has reached its peak, leading to the emergence of a global transhumanist civilization.

In the nineteenth century, industrial planning discourse conveyed the challenge of paternalistic industrialists to provide a biopolitical agenda that was aimed at controlling and disciplining the daily lives of the workers. Paternalistic industrialists used sports-related spaces as a tool to enable their biopolitical goals. Accordingly, they made certain efforts to insert sports-related spaces into the industrial landscape. In this paper, physical culture and sports as biopolitical initiatives of paternalism are explored in industrial planning discourse. Exploring history through the perspective of sports reveals that industrial planning provided a spatialized approach to regulating working-class life socially and culturally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microbes are increasingly central to visions of sustainable and healthy futures, including in farming movements such as regenerative agriculture. In social science and environmental humanities scholarship, (re)connecting with microbes is seen as a way to challenge, conceptually and practically, the very ontology of human-nature separation which underpins the destruction and violence in human relations with other living beings and with environments. The crux of this onto-ethical potential is a shift towards relational modes of knowing microbes, rooted in localised, proximate, and sensuous practice, and expressed in embodied expertise. This paper engages critically with this promise by calling attention to persistence of calculability to people's self-governance within current microbiopolitics. Through a case study of regenerative agriculture in the United Kingdom, I argue that while embodied expertise of soil microbes is seen as crucial to soil health-oriented farming, it is also dismissed as an insufficient in guiding farmers and shaping future practice, including by farmers themselves. Regenerative agriculture continues to function within "farming by numbers", an agri-biopolitical regime in which farmers' and advisors' subjectivity is that of calculating managers situated in calculable environments. As a result, calculability acts as a 'break' on the development of alternative microbial onto-ethics, and regenerative agriculture practitioners look for ways to bring soil microbes into the realm of calculability (e.g., through metagenomics). Consequently, the way microbes are being incorporated into future agri-environmental relations reinforces rather than threatens existing structures of biopolitical power. Overall, I argue that human-microbe research, potentially due to its empirical focus on alternative practices, has underplayed the importance of calculability to people's self-governance in relations with microbes. The struggle for a new microbiopolitics, especially in agriculture and environmental management, will require addressing the continued importance of calculability, and a creative and socially relevant experimentation with alternative forms of expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is now a major health concern among US cervid populations, including white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). Texas is home to the greatest number of deer breeding facilities and most bred deer in the United States. The vast majority of the state's CWD cases occur at deer breeding facilities. CWD risk on deer breeding facilities is largely owed to the close proximity of deer pens. To reduce the risk of CWD transmission, state authorities use strict management strategies including culling of infected and potentially infected deer populations. State wildlife biologists provide recommendations that inform the CWD containment strategies. However, there is contention between deer breeders and state wildlife authorities over CWD. Property contradictions—whereby the state must manage the public trust deer herd on privately owned land—complicates the state's biopower and provides breeders the opportunity to reconfigure biopolitics. We draw on qualitative research data to demonstrate how CWD science becomes entangled among trophy antler genetics, physical abnormalities, ranching science, conspiracy narratives, hunting culture, and public trust property. We show how both the state and private entrepreneurs manipulate scientific knowledge toward the regulation of bodies: hunters, ranchers, and deer breeders on one hand, and the animals themselves, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early Republican period of Turkey (1923–1945), the newly established state provided a biopolitical agenda for developing modern and secular life in order to break the Ottoman heritage religious-traditional social structure. Thereupon, sports, as an indicator of modernization, took an important place in the biopolitics of the regime. Sports spaces were instrumentalized as a medium where biopower infiltrated to build a modern life. In order to effectively accomplish the modern life-building project, the Republican Regime invited international modernist architects to insert sports spaces into the social realm in urban, rural, and industrial areas. Accordingly, this paper explores sports-related spaces as a biopolitical agenda of the Republican Regime in the discourse of planning the city of Ankara and rural and industrial areas. Exploring history through the lens of sports reveals how the city of Ankara and rural and industrial areas formed a spatialized approach to the Republican Regime as a biopower to develop modern life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indian Playwright Mahesh Dattani has made a name for himself dealing with discriminated and neglected social groups. Born in 1958, Dattani developed a passion for theatre from a young age. He has won the esteemed Sahitya Academy Award making him one of the most prominent names in Indian literature. He has achieved international success being one of the leading figures in Indian English Theatre. Through his 1990 play Tara, Dattani treats the issues of the constriction and social discrimination associated with disability. Through this paper, disability will be dissected in light of Michel Foucault’s theories of power and normalization. The paper will highlight the resulting identity crisis associated with the disabled failure to fit into a social role and the social system’s failure towards disabled individuals. The study will also discuss the effects of the media on the dehumanization felt by the disabled. It uncovers the media’s contribution to the public’s dehumanizing gaze of curiosity; it also influences the disabled twins’ feeling of exhibitionism associated with public scrutiny. Such gaze in addition to the Foucauldian medical gaze will be judged in terms of power relations, revealing their role in further limiting the disabled agency. The study will touch upon related issues like discriminatory attitudes and stigma toward patients with disabilities and mental illness.

This article aims to understand the impacts that structural and historically institutionalized racism has on the life and death of black children. We start from a methodological approach based on discourse analysis based on the studies of Foucault and Mbembe, as these theorists present themselves as a rupture and transgression in thinking about black children, their childhood, life and death. We will address the concepts of biopower, biopolitics, necropower and necropolitics and the relationship with black children and their childhood. We hope that this work contributes to a more critical and open look at the genocide of black children in communities considered to be peripheral, as well as promoting public policies that review these impacts of racism on society and on the lives of black children.

Introduction: The naming of intensive care units (ICUs) has varied over time. From intensive surveillance units, intensive care units, intensive medicine units to critical care units. In practice these denominations seem to overlap to such an extent that surveillance seems to prevail over care. Methodology: reflexive article with a hermeneutic phenomenological approach that addresses the phenomenon of daily life in the ICU in relation to spatial design, power relations and time lived in order to problematize the denomination Intensive Care Unit as opposed to Intensive Surveillance Unit. Results: the daily life of the ICU is a regulated and highly controlled space, in which the life of professionals and patients is conducted through different mechanisms to such an extent that it has characteristics of what authors such as Goffman consider total institutions. In which, through depersonalization mechanisms, the characteristic heterogeneity of the human being is homogenized. Conclusion: Caring implies to watch, to be attentive, to be on guard and to control in some cases. However, it is not reduced to this; caring also implies recognizing oneself as a finite and vulnerable being, that is, as an eminently compassionate being. Care cannot be authoritarian, nor can it undermine the capacity of agency of the subjects of care; on the contrary, it is a possibility that allows us to resist the structures and devices that control life. Caring as an instinctive and reflexive act at the same time, supposes a double nature between pathos and logos, this same nature cannot be blurred inside the ICU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the politics of the Covid-19 vaccination drive in Zimbabwe. It interrogates questions of individual agency and institutional power in the administration of the vaccine. It is framed within Foucauldian scholarship, particularly that concerning the role of biopower, subjects and governmentality in the politics of vaccination. The article uses virtual ethnography to understand the politics of vaccination and contends that the vaccination drive highlights how power is played out within the Zimbabwean context. Individuals perceive their agency as constrained through explicit and implicit coercion, since vaccination is exercised through a form of governmentality that uses biopower. The article argues that the vaccination initiative presents a new form of governmentality that is premised on policing individual agency by other individuals as opposed to the dominant notions of governmentality that are shaped by political institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities for facial recognition technology and other forms of biometric monitoring to expand into new markets. One anticipated result is the wholesale reconfiguration of shared and public space enabled by the automated identification and tracking of individuals in real time. Drawing on data from several industry trade shows, this article considers the forms of 'environmental' governance envisioned by those developing and deploying the technology for the purposes of security, risk management, and profit. We argue that the 'contactless culture' that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic anticipates the normalization of a form of mass-customized biopolitics: the ability to operate on the population and the individual simultaneously through automated forms of passive identification. This form of governance relies not just on machinic recognition, but on the real-time reconfiguration of physical space through automated access controls and the channelling of both people and information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Washington Irving's short story 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow', animals are everywhere and almost seem interchangeable with humans. Nevertheless, the story's pervasive animal imagery has received scant critical attention. In this paper, I consider the blurring human/animal binary in the story as a proxy for blurred lines between different 'races' of humans coexisting in Early America. Washington Irving uses his satirical Dutch narrator Dietrich Knickerbocker's engagement with the Count de Buffon's Natural History to question categorization based on the interrelated concepts of species and race, which were becoming important in an increasingly biopolitical early United States. I place Irving's engagement with natural history in context before considering the 'racial' tension between the Dutch and the Yankees that Knickerbocker constructs in 'Sleepy Hollow'. Irving marks this tension as satire in part through Knickerbocker's deployment of bears and lions, two animal metaphors with special significance in Buffonian natural history. Close attention to the implications of these metaphors complicates our understanding of Brom Bones, a central but understudied character. I also discuss how this satirical use of race could deepen our understanding of 'Sleepy Hollow's' actual racialized characters. Focusing on the animals in 'Sleepy Hollow' reveals Irving's critique of using science to categorize humans into distinct racial groupings for political convenience and complicates our understanding of how early Americans grappled with the interplay between shifting scientific and political paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a digital ethnography on the imageboard platform 4chan/pol, this article traces the biopolitical compression of Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories into memes, which have populated far-right boards in the last decade. The article makes an argument for the relevance of studying the relation between the intellectual elaboration of Conspiracy Theories and their compression into concise and easily consumable memes, by fleshing out the functionality of memes in the argumentative economy of Conspiracy theories, (a) as encoding and compressing their core components; (b) by filling in the (unspoken) gaps in the logic of Conspiracy theories; and (c) by advancing a biopolitical understanding of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies was a product of the 9/11 era. In this article, I consider the ways the COVID-19 pandemic displaced 9/11 as the defining event of our time and, in the process, fundamentally altered the intellectual landscape for producing scholarship. The so-called culture wars provide a compelling case study for assessing this contextual transformation. Building on the writings of Paul Preciado, I engage the new-found emphasis on pharmaceutics and their role in the culture wars. I focus on three topoi cultivated from works published in CC/CS to explore these changes: those related to biopower, bureaucracy, and coalitional politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Afterword to the special issue on 'Aesthetic Citizenship, Beauty Politics, and the State' seeks to conceptualise further some key themes raised by its authors. The editors (Kukuczka and Liebelt, this volume) forward an understanding of citizenship as a complex aesthetic formation that combines embodiment practices, affective solidarities, and state power as a form of (neoliberal) governmentality that citizens internalise. In exploring the significance of aesthetic citizenship, I utilise Mbembe's idea of necropolitics to understand aesthetic labour, affective solidarity, and biopower from the embodied perspectives of marginal citizens and noncitizens discussed in these articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Antiquity, starting with Plato's proposition for an ideal state, a series of philosophers, political thinkers and policymakers have fostered a model of the State in which the government is able to control both the will and the bodies of the citizens. This project, as Michel Foucault has shown, has been endorsed and developed in modern times. Contemporary governments have sought a way of organising the complete control of life: from birth to death, throughout one's lifetime. This is how politics have evolved into "Biopolitics" and "Biopower". With the recent pandemic of COViD 19, this tendency has reached its peak, leading to the emergence of a global transhumanist civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The aim of this article is to demonstrate that even if Popper's and Patočka's interpretations of Plato originate in philosophical and intellectual traditions that have nothing or very little to do with each other, they share a common target, that is, modern biopower, which culminated in twentieth-century totalitarianism. If we examine Popper's and Patočka's interpretations of Plato from a biopolitical angle, it is possible to view them in a new light, that is, as two different, even opposing, intellectual and philosophical approaches to the very same tragic events that European culture and politics experienced in the twentieth century. Despite the radically divergent results of their readings, Popper and Patočka share a starting point, that is, the effort to outline a genealogy of European cultural and intellectual history in the light of Plato. The first section of this article explains why and to what extent Popper's and Patočka's interpretations can be considered genealogical readings. The second section elaborates on their different approaches to the relationship between justice and power in Plato. The third section concentrates on the relationship between Plato and twentieth-century biopower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the legitimization process of the public health preventive measures implemented in many Western countries following the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Through concepts such as governmentality, disciplinarization and security mechanisms proposed by Foucault, we trace some of the basic principles and implications of the relationship between biopower and medicine, as well as the media dissemination of an official narrative on scientific truth. These reflections are complemented by the contributions of Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Lyotard reflects on the relationship between science and a "performative game", whose own staging is the core of its criteria of truth. Baudrillard shows the relevance of a "hyperreality" in which the signs presented by the media take precedence over the experience of the subjects. We argue that a mediatized version of science, defined through a strong disciplinarization of knowledge and the censorship of dissident voices, played a key role in the establishment of consensus and the legitimization of policies that granted extraordinary power to governments and transnational elites. Although the work of Foucault in this demonstration is essential, the contributions of Lyotard and Baudrillard provide additional elements to understand a fundamental problem: the public acceptance of "truth" as an instrument of governmentality on a global scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of Michel Foucault's work focusses on an archeological and genealogical analysis of certain aspects of the medical episteme, such as 'Madness and Civilization' (1964/2001), 'The Birth of the Clinic' (1973) and 'The History of Sexuality' (1978/2020a). These and other Foucauldian works have often been invoked to characterize, but also to normatively interpret mechanisms of the currently existing medical episteme. Writers conclude that processes of patient objectification, power, medicalization, observation and discipline are widespread in various areas where the medical specialty operates and that these aspects have certain normative implications for how our society operates or should operate. The Foucauldian concepts used to describe the medical episteme and the normative statements surrounding these concepts will be critically analyzed in this paper. By using Foucault's work and several of his interpreters, I will focus on the balance between processes of subjectification and objectification and the normative implications of these processes by relating Foucault's work and the work of his interpreters to the current medical discipline. Additionally, by focusing on the discussion of death and biopower, the role of physicians in the negation and stigmatization of death is being discussed, mainly through the concept of biopower. Lastly, based on the discussion of panopticism in the medical discipline, this paper treats negative and positive forms power, and a focus will be laid upon forms of resistance against power. The discussed aspects will hopefully shed a different and critical light on the relationship between Foucault's work and medicine, something that eventually can also be deduced from Foucault's later work itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociologia Italiana is the property of EGEA S.p.A and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Globalisation has made it necessary to review modernity’s paradigms. One such paradigm that may no longer be an accurate descriptor (if it ever was) of international society is that of the sovereign nation-state. Through an exploration of both the western nation-state and the space collectively referred to as ‘postcolony’, two different experiences of globalisation are exhibited, each with different power manifestations. For the former, globalisation has challenged both internal and external legitimacy, which as in turn led to perceptions of a loss of sovereignty. However, the loss of sovereignty does not imply the loss of power; sovereign power has morphed into biopower, with power remaining within that space. In contrast, the postcolony’s historical relationship with sovereignty is one of negation- the denial of it. Globalisation thus threatens not the specific manifestation of power in sovereignty, but rather the continued subordination to western sovereignty. This has occurred due to a continuation of the ‘state of exception’ and socioeconomic hegemony. The piece does not, however, claim to be a definitive analysis of power, sovereign or otherwise, under globalisation. Such an inquiry would be a much greater project that went beyond the two broad categories west/postcolony, looking at specific national contexts: ‘realities’ rather than ‘reality’, accounting for the heterogeneity of both the forms and experiences of colonialism. It is a map of the terrain, and like any map is pitched at the level of generalisation.

This essay critically examines the biopoliticization of suicide, challenging its framing as a public health issue which obscures its cultural and philosophical significance. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s theories of biopower, this essay argues that suicide is externalized, massified, and medicalized under the discourse of public health, leading to its subjugation to biopower’s rhetoric. At the core of this narrative is a powerful presupposition that suicide is separable from the individual who commits the act. Drawing from Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved and Judith Butler’s essay Violence, Politics, and Mourning, this essay conceives suicide as an intentional act of agency, occurring under particular conditions of emotional duress which are created by a historical relay of societal violence. This essay seeks to dismantle the prevailing narrative of suicide, free suicide from its biopolitical rhetoric, and argues that suicide ought to be understood as a radical act which bears witness against the violence of the biopolitical state.

This article focuses on the notion of bio-surveillance in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) from the perspectives of Ajana and Foucault. It tries to discuss why postcolonial journeying, despite its reputation for upsetting the old colonial paradigms of cultural demarcations, has ended up in the invisible biocitizenship of diasporic figures. To this end, the article elaborates on the biometric measures, ranging from the classic model of Anthropometry to the most advanced biometric technologies, and their deployment at the service of securitization in the center of empire. It is argued that these measures, by keeping the colonial paradigm of otherization intact, have divided society into friends / enemies and, later, reduced the latter into the bare life of invisible biocitizenship. Hence, it can be remarked that postcolonial journeying, despite its apparent dissolution of meta-narratives of identity or cultural geography, underpins the ‘us-versus-them’ binary and proves immobilizing. This means that the open-gate policy cannot wipe out the racist blemish from the West’s reputation since the racism which roots in bodily features (including skin) conducts identity, citizenship, and immigration policies. Hence, racial minorities are always the other, even though their bodies are subject to change.

Peru, like other states in the Amerindian5 (Latin American) region, is a product of modernity whose main concern was and is the constitution of political autonomy. This process is particularly problematic in its relation to the consequences of colonialism and the new forms of biopower that generate internal tensions, on the one hand, with the descendants of the original peoples, left aside by the independence movement from viceregal power and, on the other hand, on the other hand, with the struggle for equal rights and opportunities for women, who demand, from the margins of decoloniality, the recognition of political autonomy over their own subalternized bodies.Contemporary Peru has a history marked by the internal armed conflict (1980-2000), the autocratic government of the former president – today imprisoned for crimes against humanity – Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) and a social dynamic where racism, corruption, exclusion and gender violence have consolidated with serious repercussions in the Andean and Amazonian cultures. It is therefore, in the context of the late twentieth century, that the National Program for Reproductive Health and Family Planning 1996-2000 (PNSRPF, for its acronym in Spanish) was presented to the national and international community under the ruse of being a modern medium – in apparent dialogue with the feminist discourse of the right to decide (pro-choice) – to reduce poverty in the urban-marginal neighborhoods and rural areas of Peru.This study will seek to elucidate the links between the PNSRPF and political-military and economic corruption in one of the most cruel and devastating periods of political violence. The central hypothesis states that the national public health program was anti-natalist and neo-Malthusian, and that it corresponded with the military ideology and guidelines of the Green Plan6. This resulted in an ethnic cleansing strategy under the double cloak of counterinsurgency and pacification. Thus, we will argue that the PNSRPF was a clear example of the coloniality of contemporary power. A eugenic and anatomopolitical program, where the control of the indigenous uterus through forced sterilization was a war weapon of biopower.

This article examines the legitimization process of the public health preventive measures implemented in many Western countries following the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Through concepts such as governmentality, disciplinarization and security mechanisms proposed by Foucault, we trace some of the basic principles and implications of the relationship between biopower and medicine, as well as the media dissemination of an official narrative on scientific truth. These reflections are complemented by the contributions of Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Lyotard reflects on the relationship between science and a “performative game”, whose own staging is the core of its criteria of truth. Baudrillard shows the relevance of a “hyperreality” in which the signs presented by the media take precedence over the experience of the subjects. We argue that a mediatized version of science, defined through a strong disciplinarization of knowledge and the censorship of dissident voices, played a key role in the establishment of consensus and the legitimization of policies that granted extraordinary power to governments and transnational elites. Although the work of Foucault in this demonstration is essential, the contributions of Lyotard and Baudrillard provide additional elements to understand a fundamental problem: the public acceptance of “truth” as an instrument of governmentality on a global scale.

This article offers an alternative genealogy for disability accounts of normalcy by analyzing American poet Thylias Moss’s 2004 neo-slave narrative in verse, Slave Moth. While disability scholars have historically understood normalcy and able-bodiedness as synonymous, ability is not always normative for Black women. Although Slave Moth’s narrator Varl is putatively able-minded, her enslaver positions her as abnormal because she is literate. Drawing on Black feminist thought, I argue that normalcy describes multiple, seemingly contradictory, measures that operate through racialized standards of proper capacity. Moss illuminates how Black women and girls might inhabit a position of abnormality-ability because she situates abnormality within chattel slavery, making freak shows peripheral to the narrative. The anti-black formation of abnormality-ability mediates the boundaries of ability/disability and normal/abnormal. I address how this occurs in disability scholarship. Research on normalcy and the freak show has argued for the importance of disability as an analytic by relying on blackness as a fungible site of meaning. Ultimately, able-bodiedness becomes normative for white subjects, and disability abnormal, through their frictional relationship to and reliance on Black women’s abnormality-ability. However, Varl illuminates, critiques, and refuses this weaponization of abnormality. Through her embroidery, Varl develops technologies for living in the fissures of both abnormality and able-bodiedness.

The aim of this paper is a study on Covid-19 pandemic and restrictions that came along. With restrictions, violations. The principle of legality, the basic historical construction of the rule of law, had been solemnly and repeatedly vilified and carried with it many constitutional rights and principles, which, more than indispensable for us, are so on a universal level, such as the restless go and come and exercise economic activity. Under the auspices of teratological decrees, of congenital malformation, our rights were restricted. But what is worse: often under the parsimonious eye of those who should be keeping the Constitution. Is it deference to the political propaganda pieces, based on biopower, that invade the everyday? Is it a fear of contributing to health discouragement, justifying non-legality? In this paper, more than addressing the unconstitutionality of restrictions, we propose to discuss the reasons for this passivity and acceptance. Methodologically, we use inductive guidance, choosing some characteristics as a starting point to build a broader conclusion, using a wide bibliographic and jurisprudential review.

Copyright of Mediterranean Journal of Gender & Women's Studies (KTC) / Akdeniz Kadın Çalışmaları ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet Dergisi is the property of Mediterranean Journal of Gender & Women's Studies (KTC) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Global commodity capitalism necessitates the fast and efficient movement of all manner of entities across the globe. Importantly, this commercial flow needs to be secured against the undocumented and unregulated flow of illegitimate people, finance and information, counterfeits, drugs, terror and other undesirables. The organizational practices of business logistics are central for achieving this objective. Yet they have received little attention in management and organization studies to date. We suggest a fruitful avenue is via Foucault's notion of 'biopower' – particularly his less discussed concept (in management studies, at least) of an apparatus of security. This is useful for understanding the emergent organizational/management practices of security in the border spaces in which business logistics operate. If 'Society Must Be Defended', as Foucault ironically notes in his famous lecture series that introduces biopower, then so too must contemporary organizations and their net-like activities within the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on studies on journalism and reports, the article intends to recognize Nellie Bly's performance as one of the pioneers of investigative journalism and a promoter of subjective journalism by staying 10 days in a psychiatric hospital to report abuse against women to the newspaper that she has worked in 19th century. The reports bring subjectivities in their structure, but also present a wealth of details that, in this case, denounce biopower activities in isolation institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the genesis and consolidation of the "statistical argument" (Desrosières 2008) of mortality during the pandemic. Public health data are approached from the perspective of "biopower" which can be read as a statization of life, combining the power of both science and the state. The authors explore the social conditions of the production and dissemination of mortality data in French nursing homes in a period of strong uncertainty. The web of interactions between agencies of public health generates vagueness and uncertainty, but also weak and fragile data, in a period nevertheless marked by the centralization of power. The fragility of mortality data is mirrored by the fragility of the nursing home as institution — an expression of numerous fallibilities, in particular economic (lack of resources), symbolic (out‐of‐sight situations) and institutional (tension between health and social care). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the new understanding of power that emerges in the late works of Leo Tolstoy, as an early premonition of ideas subsequently elaborated by Michel Foucault, particularly his seminal conception of bio-politics. In works such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and particularly the novel Resurrection (1899), Tolstoy undertakes precisely the kind of "struggle against power" which Foucault identifies as a fundamental task of the modern intellectual: "a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious". In confronting the manifold manifestations of a new logic of power – a logic that he never manages to grasp fully – Tolstoy continues to rely on analytical perspectives he ostensibly denounces. Yet no one went further than Tolstoy in acknowledging and combating his own complicity with the system of power, both as a landowner and an intellectual. From this perspective Tolstoy heralds the transformation of the intellectual and conscience subsequently called for by Foucault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the development of Russian actionism through a biopolitical lens. Emerging in the 1990s as a public enactment of post-Soviet society's regression from bios to zoē , actionism became more consciously biopolitical in the twenty-first century as a succession of artists sought to challenge the biopoliticization of life under Vladimir Putin. Focusing on the actions and statements of Voina, Pussy Riot, Pyotr Pavlensky, and Katrin Nenasheva, the author identifies four main tactics of resistance, gradually leading actionism away from its roots in aestheticized violence toward the cultivation of practices of radical care. The article concludes with a brief overview of actions performed in the wake of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Purpose: The aim of the article is to analyse, interpret and evaluate the accounting regulations of enterprises under trust management in the General Government.Methodology/approach: The article uses the historical method, which comprises researching archival sources. The research approach used in the article uses the social theories of Foucault (the concept of biopower) and Agamben (the concept of the state of emergency).Findings: As a result of the study, the accounting functions in enterprises under trust management are identified: masking, segregation, legitimization, control, elimination and expropriation.Research limitations/implications: The basic research limitation is the small number of preserved archival materials concerning the accounting regulations in enterprises under trust management.Practical implications: The results of research on the accounting of enterprises under trust management may be useful in the process of estimating Polish war losses.Originality/value: The article is the first presentation of enterprises accounting issues under trust management in the General Government.

Using the frameworks of biopower and uses and gratification theory, this article examines the treatment of pets in China during the COVID-19 outbreak and the role of social media in fulfilling users’ social needs by facilitating discussions on associated animal welfare issues and mobilizing animal advocates to take action. The analysis focuses on how social media comments on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, have influenced public discourse surrounding the biopolitical governance of animals emphasized by the zero-COVID policy, which has helped maintain a strong sense of national consciousness in post-socialist China. The study centres on an isolated case of the killing of a corgi by a health worker in Shanghai and how it was perceived on social media. The findings suggest that much of the animosity demonstrated on Weibo towards the killing is centred around biopower, or the biopolitical governance of humans and animals that has more broadly prioritized human life over animal welfare in China’s approach to COVID-19. In this way, social media has played a crucial role in mobilizing animal advocates to take a more prominent role in the emergency management of pets. The study concludes that China should consider adopting a standard operating procedure for pet care and rescue that includes pets in its humans-first disaster response and relief measures to develop a better and healthier national consciousness, fulfil the social needs of its citizens who value animal welfare, and strengthen its sense of national consciousness.

Stormwater management has recently begun a paradigm shift away from traditional top-down approaches in response to climatic changes, urbanization, and regulatory pressures. This paradigm shift is characterized by two key developments: the implementation of additional decentralized green infrastructure, and the practice of individuals managing stormwater from their privately-owned property. This transition involves redefining who is responsible for managing stormwater and the infrastructure used within stormwater management. Using insights from two urban watersheds, Watershed 263, Baltimore, MD and Watts Branch, Prince George's County, MD and Washington, DC, where this shift is underway, we assess changes in the hydrosocial relationships underpinning this paradigm shift including the emergence of stormwater hydrocitizenship. We investigate stormwater hydrocitizenship as the role and responsibilities of individuals within stormwater management. We focus on the role of government at several levels, drawing insights from the concept of biopower. Our findings suggest that this paradigm shift and the emergence of a stormwater hydrocitizenship remains embedded in top-down governance, which in turn creates significant tension among different stakeholders. Arising from this critical analysis, we seek to promote a reimagining of how, where, and who manages stormwater towards more sustainable, resilient, and equitable outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Hobbes's name often comes up as scholars debate the history of biopower, which regulates the biological life of individual bodies and entire populations. This article examines whether and to what extent Hobbes may be regarded as the first biopolitical philosopher. I investigate this question by performing a close reading of Hobbes's political texts and by comparing them to some of the most influential theories on biopolitics proposed by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and others. Hobbes is indeed the first great thinker to assert the supreme political importance of safeguarding life. Furthermore, this prominence of non-contemplative life is not limited to mere survival but also seeks to allow for the people's happiness. This may indeed allow us to consider him as the first biopolitical philosopher, at least in some limited capacity. However, the Englishman's biopolitical stance lacks the practical aspects seen in examples of 'properly modern' biopolitics. Moreover, peoples' lives were already governed radically in antiquity. I argue that Hobbes's biopolitical system was, therefore, minimal in the sense of a 'biopolitical nightwatchman state'. However, he acted as an undeniable catalyst to the 'properly biopolitical era of modernity', when mundane life and happiness became the explicit main objects of virtually all politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following recent research in cultural studies that has observed "the emergence of biopolitics in the Americas," this article proposes a new aspect to the early modern experience of eating. Rather than simply a vehicle for pollution, eating appears in the 1555 captivity of the Hessian adventurer and autobiographer Hans Staden by Tupinambá in Brazil as a flashpoint for techniques of coercive self-governance. Working as an arquebusier on early Portuguese sugar plantations, Staden witnessed the dangerous sweetness of early modern capitalism. Yet Staden's keen sensitivity to the political economy of cassava root flour, a commodity on which he himself depended, also suggests he witnessed his own unhappy conscription into a regime that required him to discipline himself in order to survive. Staden's frustrated memories showcase biopower's surprisingly intimate, personal, reach, revising our understanding of modernity as altogether distinct from the feudal past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]