Browsing by Subject "Biopower"

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    The body of International Relations
    (2011-11) Wilcox, Lauren Beth
    International Relations, in both theory and practice, has been increasingly concerned with a proliferation of modes of violence that use, target, and construct bodies in complex ways that challenge notions of security. The body has become the focal point to practices of security and international relations, contrary to the conventional IR/security understanding of bodies as apolitical objects. One of the deep ironies of security studies is that while war is actually inflicted on bodies, the violence and vulnerability experienced by those bodies is largely ignored. Rather, bodies are implicitly understood as physical, apolitical entities among both traditional security studies scholars and feminists. This is surprising given that IR has been centrally concerned with the politics of harming bodies through warfare and other forms of political violence, as well as how to protect and secure bodies and promote life. This lacuna has limited the scope of thinking about the purposes and effects of violence. I argue that a focal shift to bodies in the practices of torture, suicide bombing, and precision warfare requires an alternative mode of knowing the human as an embodied subject of international violence and security drawing on currents of contemporary feminist theory. My project contributes to an understanding of violence that cannot be reduced to the strategic actions of rational actors or a destructive violation of community laws and norms. I argue that violence can also be understood as a creative force for shaping the limits of how we understand ourselves as political subjects, as well as forming the boundaries of our bodies and political communities. Building on the resources of IR and feminist theory, I use concrete international events to explore the embodiment of the human subject in practices of security and violence in order to interrogate concepts of sovereignty, violence, and vulnerability. I show how practices of international relations can (and should) be rethought in the discipline in terms of the production of bodies in their agency and historicity. By theorizing violence as a productive force in constituting the embodied subject, my work also contributes to feminist work on bodies in relation to international practices of violence and security. This project therefore has the potential to provide the ground for a fundamental re-thinking of core concepts associated with security and ethics in the field of IR.
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    Spectacles in transit: reading cinematic productions of biopower and transgender embodiment.
    (2011-01) Franklin, Michael David
    Spectacles in Transit: Reading Cinematic Productions of Biopower and Transgender Embodiment looks at transgender cultural production on film and video in order to theorize biopower at the intersection of medicine and mass visual culture. In the decades following World War II, the development of medical technologies like reconstructive surgery increasingly allowed for the human body’s modification and enhancement, while the commercialization of communication technologies like film cameras gave middle-class consumers greater expressive autonomy. Medicine and mass visual culture have notably influenced the U.S. popular imagination about the body, social difference, aesthetics, and identity. And the role of biopower—the power to induce or administrate all aspects of human life by state and corporate entities—has intensified in everyday life in part due to these developments. This dissertation analyzes four cases from the past sixty years in which transgender individuals articulated their social, political, and economic self-determination through their self-representation onscreen. These cases are selected from four different cinematic genres: the transatlantic travel films of Christine Jorgensen from 1953; mondo films from the 1970s that graphically document genital reconstruction surgery; transsexual pornography from the early 1980s that probes the politics of heteronormative fantasy; and experimental video art from a post-9/11 feminist DIY media conference. This dissertation illuminates how biopower shapes and inflects self-representation of transgender embodiment in each instance and argues that every cultural producer responds with a cinematic assertion of social belonging. Thus, it explains how each cinematic production engages affect, values, aesthetics, and fantasy in relation to embodied intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality. Spectacles in Transit shifts conversations about biopower away from the biopolitics of medical research, warfare, and population management and toward the cultural work of a social group defined by a medicalized mode of difference, a group that historically has signaled the sensational and the spectacular in the U.S. popular imagination.