Browsing by Subject "Biopolitics"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    (Beyond) Propaganda: Biopolitics and the Mode of Fantasy in South Korean and Japanese Film During and After the U.S. Occupation Period (1945-1979)
    (2016-05) Ahn, Minhwa
    My doctoral dissertation, titled, (Beyond) Propaganda: Biopolitics and the Mode of Fantasy in South Korean and Japanese Film During and After the U.S. Occupation Period (1945-1979), examines the generic formation of melodrama and documentary film in Korea and Japan under postwar U.S. Occupation in relation to American liberalism, capitalist modernity and neo- colonialism in East Asia. Drawing on approaches articulated in modern history and media theory, I take up the prominent theoretical issues of biopolitics, (post) coloniality and gender politics within the historical field of postwar Korea and Japan. I consider how postwar Korean and Japanese melodrama under the Motion Picture Association of Korea and Civil Information and Education in Japan controlled by U.S. Amy military government played a role in making “American-style democracy,” which was based on a dominant biopolitical fiction concerning gender. I also discuss how propagandistic documentary films censored by the United States Information Service in Korea and CIE in Japan contributed to the formation of “postwar liberalism” as a technique of governmentality. I also explore the way that contemporaneous cinematic practices were employed in Korea and Japan to counter U.S. occupation policies. I explore how these practices, such as the melodramatic mode, social realism, and “sub-realism” and “magical realism,” as well as direct cinema and cinema verité style, all transformed dominant auteurism of (neo) realism, surrealism and Griersonian documentary style. On this basis, I assert that it is possible to differentiate films of the period into self-reflexive modes of genre and modes of heterogeneous fantasy that open up visions of an alternative to the capitalist biopolitical modernity imposed under both the U.S. occupation in Japan and Japanese colonial legacies in Korea.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A desire called America: biopolitics and utopian forms of Life in American literature
    (2012-12) Haines, Christian P.
    "A Desire Called America: Biopolitics and Utopian Forms of Life in American Literature" analyzes two periods of American literature - the American Renaissance and American literature following the 1960s - in terms of how specific literary texts return to and revise the founding of the U.S. as a political experiment. Historically speaking, these two periods stand at opposite ends of the arc of U.S. global hegemony: the American Renaissance as the U.S. rises to the status of global hegemon, and American literature after the 1960s in the midst of that hegemony's unraveling. I argue that the precarious position of the U.S. in these two periods enables American literature to reactivate the utopian promise of the American Revolution. The texts I analyze treat the revolution as an archive of futures past, that is, they imagine futures that might have taken place but never did because of the betrayal of the revolutionary experiment. Put differently, my dissertation focuses on the tensions and contradictions between the U.S. - understood as a geographical and political entity - and America - understood as a utopian political desire. I show that one of the most important ways in which the reactivation of utopian political potential occurs is through figurations of the human body.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Dismantling security
    (2010-10) Calkivik, Emine Asli
    The post Cold War world witnessed the exponential growth in the range of issues and domains that became security concerns. A long list of objects--the nation, poverty, the human, health, food, the environment--is now firmly incorporated into the global security agenda. As the list of dangers expanded, security itself transmogrified into a medium through which we orient ourselves toward life, politics, and the world. In this dissertation, I argue that what is needed is not more security, but to dismantle the whole architecture of security so as to open up a space for a thought of politics that admits the fact that we can never be secure. To develop this argument, I first map out the landscape of the contemporary empire of security and then provide an overview of critical approaches to security within the discipline of International Relations, where I point out the paradoxical way in which the hegemony of security gets reproduced in these discussions despite the overarching concerns voiced about the complicity of security in the orders of power and violence. This is followed by a discussion of the meaning of dismantling security as an untimely critique. By drawing on historical materialist conceptions of time, I formulate the first sense of the untimely as a politics of time that seeks to counter the temporal structure enacted by the politics of security. Then I discuss the second sense of the untimely, which centers on the relationship between critical thinking and political time. I clarify what it means to brush against the grain of the doxa of security by being untimely in a disciplinary context and refusing to write security. I close by elaborating on three different conceptions of politics once the ground is cleared from security and formulate them as three moves that deconstruct the subject, the space, and the time of security by drawing on the works of scholars such as David Campbell, Michael Dillon, Jacques Rancière, and Jacques Derrida.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Drug Regimes: Addiction, Biopolitics, American Literature, 1820-1940
    (2019-07) McGillicuddy, Brendan
    "Drug Regimes" traces the development of the disease concept of addiction from the early American Republic into the inter-war period. In this work, struggles against alcoholism, both individual and social, are used to frame and explore larger issues of national conflict occurring around race, gender, and political economy. Each chapter discusses a literary text that exemplifies a particular "drug regime" - a mode of the governance of health, both individual and public - and analyzes this text as a mode of extrapolating a political theory of drug conflict.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Feeling Healthy: Media, Affect, and the Governance of Health
    (2016-05) Butler-Wall, Karisa
    This dissertation examines the role of media technologies in the emergence of new forms of health governance over the course of the past century. Even as “feeling healthy” has become a desirable affective state associated with wholeness, fulfillment, and satisfaction, discourses and practices of health continue to serve as the basis for regulating race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. In chapters on WWI-era sex hygiene films, midcentury women’s televised fitness programs, 1980s’ safer sex videos created by gay and lesbian AIDS activists, and contemporary interactive technologies designed to confront the obesity “epidemic,” I demonstrate how media technologies have enabled the management of bodies and populations by linking new techniques of health governance to individual desires to feel better. While important historical and sociological studies of health and medicine have brought attention to the role of public health in regulating race, gender, and sexuality, this work has rarely considered the relationship between popular media in not only reflecting but actively shaping individuals and populations around practices of health. I suggest that we need to look beyond institutional histories of public health as a site of discipline to explore the role of film, television, video, and new media in the emergence of what I call the “affective governance” of health: a system of biopolitical regulation that appeals to individuals’ desires for their own well-being, producing affective investments in normative practices of “healthy living.” Intervening in a larger set of theoretical and political debates that cross disciplinary boundaries to ask what makes a “livable life,” this project questions what is at stake in the pursuit of health as a normative ideal. I argue that “health” has historically been promoted as the condition of possibility for greater freedom, happiness, and fulfillment at the same time that it justifies ever more insidious forms of surveillance and control.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Globalizing through the vernacular: gender/sexual transnationalism and the making of sexual minorities in Eastern India
    (2013-05) Dutta, Aniruddha
    The dissertation explores how the globalizing expansion of LGBT and HIV-AIDS activism into global south locations such as India relies on transregional and translocal communities of gender/sexually variant persons, and yet subordinates them and associated discourses of gender/sexual difference within the tiered hierarchies of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender; particularly GTB) organizations and transnationally-funded HIV-AIDS intervention projects. Engaging with conversations and debates across transnational sexuality studies, transnational feminism, Marxist theories of capital, and literary approaches to cross-cultural translation, I argue that the globalizing expansion of gender/sexual identity and rights based politics in India takes place through mutually transformative, yet structurally constrained, intersections and translations between institutions such as funders, non-governmental organizations and the state on one hand, and networks, communities and subcultures of socio-economically marginalized gender/sexually variant persons (such as kothis, dhuranis and hijras) on the other. Such transformative interactions both create new political possibilities, and reproduce hierarchies related to location, class, caste, gender/sexual marginality and social respectability. Even as translations with subcultural languages of gender/sexual variance enable the transnational expansion and hegemony of institutional categories of identity and representation, lower class/caste communities and discourses become positioned as `local' or `vernacular' relative to national and transnational formations of activism and discourse. On one hand, the reification of communities as `sexual minorities' and as local variants of transnational categories like transgender or `men who have sex with men' results in identitarian distinctions such as the homosexual/transgender divide that selectively enable certain political possibilities, but constrain many contextually flexible lived practices and fluid subject positions that become unintelligible in terms of emerging cartographies of identity. On the other hand, liberal discourses that valorize individual choice and gender/sexual fluidity may also elide mobile negotiations with privilege and power (such as locally variable distinctions between feminine insiders and masculine outsiders) in kothi, dhurani and hijra communities. Further, dominant forms of activism based on discourses of equal rights and the private/public divide often cast lower class/caste persons and related practices as uncivil and/or criminal. Drawing upon five years of ethnographic research in eastern India, the dissertation critiques how hegemonic forms of identity and rights based politics produces lower class/caste groups as a victimized minorities and exploitable labor pools, rather than as active and full participants in the transnational movement for LGBT rights.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Les frontières de l'exil: figures et territoires de l'étranger
    (2019-08) Rauer, Selim
    My doctoral dissertation entitled The Borders of Exile: Figures and Territories of Foreignness, reinterprets the notion of the border as an expanding territory of estrangement and seclusion in the aftermath of colonialism and the Shoah, in an era characterized by global market economies. While allegedly situated beyond racial and sexual hegemonic claims, I show how this globalized economy in fact recreates or intensifies a concept of “zone(s)” --as defined by Frantz Fanon in Les damnés de la terre, 1961--that draws centers and margins, and establishes sites of domination structured by a historical and political unconscious. At the core of this unconscious lies the figure of the enemy or the adversary. The latter is an essential biopolitical and theological representation of otherness and foreignness through which a specific border definition can be established as limit rather than hyphen. Thus, in my project, I scrutinize a multidimensional literary corpus comprised of works by figures such as Jean Genet (1910-1986), Patrick Modiano (1945), Bernard-Marie Koltès (1948-1989), Koffi Kwahulé (1956), Marie NDiaye (1967), Wajdi Mouawad (1968), and Léonora Miano (1973), each of whose works investigate a certain definition and practice of power and sovereignty as part of an ethical and moral reflection on “evil,” or as Rüdiger Safranski defined it, as the moral and ethical burden that accompanies the practice of freedom (Evil, or the Drama of Freedom, 1997).
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Muscular maternity: progressive era physical culture, biopolitics, and performance.
    (2011-08) Walsh, Shannon Leigh
    This dissertation examines the emergence of women's physical culture (sports, fitness regimes, grooming, dieting) as a performance practice in the US Progressive Era and as the invisible biopolitical foundation of our modern habitus. In other words, biopolitics (the seemingly mundane ways in which we govern ourselves, and are governed by others through bodily conducts related to health) lies at the root of how we operate in our (post)modern world. I investigate three forgotten figures of physical culture - Harvard physical director Dudley Allen Sargent, Minneapolis Y.W.C.A. physical director Abby Mayhew, and magazine tycoon Bernarr Macfadden - revealing the problematic connections of the bodily conducts they espoused to eugenics and its promotion of white reproductivity. Their customized physical exercises shaped populations of women over time through discourses and performances of biological and social maternity that incited individuals to adopt certain physical conducts over others. These conducts achieved their racialized, gendered, and classed attributes through the performative work of surrogating and mobilizing the physical practices of marginalized populations, especially the rural lower classes and distant and/or disappearing "primitives." Ultimately, the private acts of self-management (sit-ups, fasting, cold baths, etc.) they promoted through handbooks, anthropometry, exhibitions and demonstrations, and other forms of visual culture (including photography, popular magazines, and film), facilitated the categorization and organization of subjectivities by race, class, and gender within the socio-economic sphere. In examining these written and visual texts, this study insists on a closer scrutiny of the "culture" of physical culture, which in its various forms (physical, intellectual, moral self-cultivation) operated as a mode of biopolitics enabling liberal governmentality (the management of populations through cultivating particular forms of subjectivity and productivity in individuals) to function. In approaching liberal governmentality as a performance I demonstrate how individual acts of self-cultivation travelled from one body to the next through witness and repetition, eventually spreading to the entire population. Hence, I forward physical culture as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of governance.