Biopower

Prenatal Genetic Testing: A Technology of Normalization Prenatal genetic testing is a technology made available to more accurately determine whether or not a child could have a birth ‘defect’. The most common birth defects tested for are Down syndrome, Trisomy 18, or an open neural tube defect (Government of Canada, 2013). This paper asserts first that prenatal genetic testing is a technology of normalization, which labels disability as abnormal and a feared outcome, and second that normalization creates unwarranted notions of human identity and happiness. To do this, I begin by providing background information on the work by Michel Foucault on biopower, disciplinary power, and normalization. The purpose of this section is to show first that these…

The study of the influence of society in individual’s health is not recent. To demonstrate the sociology utility, Durkheim (1897) examined the suicide rates in population and suggested that the strong social control among Catholics resulted in low rates of suicide. Nowadays, the data collected by Durkheim will not reflect the same reality. However, the mental health is likely to be related not only to genetics factor, but also to the social reality that the individual is inserted. The…

Foucault claims that the state is at the centre of modern racism, believing other conceptions of racism are more suited to earlier eras. According to Foucault, modern states exercise their power by administrating life; in contrast to previous centuries, these states are preoccupied with life itself, rather than death. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault attributes the term ‘biopower’ to this idea, meaning states now have the “the right to ‘make’ live and to ‘let’ die.” It is in opposition…

Agamben 's theory, it is a person whom one could kill with impunity (without consequences) (Agamben, 8). He compares this person to the living dead because although they are physically alive, they could be killed at anytime (theoretically) as they have been regulated by sovereign power to be outside the law (Agamben, 8). These individuals, although they can be killed because they are not a citizen, cannot be sacrifices in religious ceremonies because they are not seen as socially and politically…

society” (Reid 39). Essentially, war has emerged as a way to exert power over life. The problem of war has led to the creation of templates that work to subdue and shape life in order to maintain civil peace (Reid 39). Tying together authors Foucault, Pugliese, and Reid, several key concepts are emphasized in relation to the idea of war and drone strikes. Perhaps the most important is the biopower behind these drone strikes. Pugliese uses Foucault’s term ‘biopolitics’ to refer to the “state’s…

Make live and let die from man as body to man as species: the birth of biopower and others. Foucault wants to change some things to his yearly long conclusions on the subject of race and its factors contributing to race being socially constructed and not biological. We forward to what he calls State racism and the new factors emerging in either the second half of the eighteenth century and the 19th century. Foucault articulates that one of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what…

For without a doubt, health care inequality is evident in the United States (US). In this particular instance, it is Latino Immigrants who receive insubstantial health care access. For example, immigrant women of Mexican birth “are at increased risk for developing many preventable health conditions due in part to limited access to healthcare and benefits” (Castaneda, et al. 2014). The issue is the US healthcare system is unequitable when it comes to immigrant status. I will examine if Latino…

Ostherr also convincingly connects her evidence to her sub-claims and central argument. In Chapter One, Ostherr uses the Rockefeller Foundation’s production of Unhooking the Hookworm as an example of how biopower works—the health film had the ability to either “help viewers imagine unseen worlds and change their behavior accordingly [emphasis added], or alternatively, to reject the visualization as implausible and, therefore, irrelevant to their daily life,” in which case biopower would not have…

and subsequent colonization, is pioneering. (Huggan and Tiffin: 18) Second, the term "biocolonialism" is used by a variety of environmental and bioscientific scholars to cover "the broadly biopolitical implications of current Western technological experiments and trends" (Kimball 1996; Shiva 1997 in Huggan and Tiffin: 4). Examples here vary from biopiracy – e.g. the corporate raiding of indigenous natural-cultural property and embodied knowledge – to Western patented genetic modification (the…

growth of nationalism because it has forced a conversation about identity politics. Clarksons’s talk draws many parallels to themes we have discussed in class thus far. An interesting comparison made was the treatment of trans people to that of colonized people’s. The power asserted by the government has indefinitely and negatively shaped the lives of trans people in the United States. Furthermore I am able to see similarities between our recent reading, Orientalism (Said 1978) in regards to…