Michel Foucault identified sexuality as one of the defining biopolitical technologies of the nine... more Michel Foucault identified sexuality as one of the defining biopolitical technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Jemima Repo argues in this book, "gender" has come to be the major sexual signifier of the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first century. In fact, in this historical excavation of the biopolitical significance of the term, she argues that it could not have emerged at any other time. Repo shows that gender is not originally a feminist term, but emerged from the study of intersex and transsexual persons in the fields of sexology and psychology in the1950s and 1960s. Prior to the 1950s gender was used to refer to various types of any number of phenomena - sometimes sex, but not necessarily. Its only regular usage was in linguistics, where it was used to classify nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter. In the mid-twentieth century, gender shifted from being a nominator of types to designating the sexual order of things. As with sexuality in the Victorian period, over the last sixty years, the notion of gender has become an entire field of knowledge. Feminists famously took up the term in the 1970s to challenge biological determinism, and in government, "women" have been replaced by "gender" in policy-making processes that aim to advance equality between women and men. Gender has also become a key variable in social scientific surveys of different socio-political phenomena like voting, representation, employment, salaries, and parental leave decisions. The Biopolitcs of Gender analyzes the strategies and tactics of power involved in the use of "gender" in sexology and psychology, and subsequently its reversal and counter-deployment by feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. It critiques the emergence of gender in demographic science and the implications of this genealogy for feminist theory and politics today. Drawing on an a wide variety of historical and contemporary sources, the book makes a major theoretical argument about gender as a historically specific apparatus of biopower and calls into question the emancipatory potential of the category in feminist theory and politics.
The article examines the affective dynamics of collective survival and re- sistance under Israeli... more The article examines the affective dynamics of collective survival and re- sistance under Israeli settler colonialism in the Gaza Strip. Focusing on Gaza as an under-researched enclave of Israeli settler colonialism, it an- alyzes how young Palestinians renegotiated their affective bonds in re- sponse to two coinciding deadly events: the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 Israeli bombings. Theoretically, we extend the politics of emotions and affect to encompass experiences of settler-colonial violence. Drawing on original interviews with Palestinians in Gaza, we trace how affective bonds were impacted among families, friends, and neighbors and, from a transpersonal perspective, across the political community. We show how settler colonialism shaped responses to the pandemic, deepening existing inequalities and causing social frictions. The bombings, by contrast, trig- gered a unified response of pure terror and universal concern for collec- tive survival. The military targeting of homes was countered by practices of physical and emotional togetherness in the face of death. Overall, our study shows how (i) different kinds of mortal dangers are experienced politically by colonized people, (ii) these experiences are conditioned by collective histories of colonial violence, and that (iii) they constitute ex- pressions of collective affective life, necessary for the preservation of peo- plehood amidst colonial oppression.
This article brings women to the fore of a discussion of checkpoints in Palestine to understand b... more This article brings women to the fore of a discussion of checkpoints in Palestine to understand better the ways that Palestinian women's lives-even as they may not regularly cross checkpoints-are affected by Israeli security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork near Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, we examine women's lives in the context of a gendered system of permits and the nearby checkpoint that makes men's days of labour both long and exhausting, a fact that has profound effects on the family home in terms of restricted mobilities and the division of domestic labour. The article thus builds an account of checkpoints that: (1) situates women's everyday lives in Palestine in the context of Israel's military occupation; (2) extends the temporality of checkpoints beyond the checkpoint itself; and, therefore, (3) enables an understanding of the effects of borders beyond the immediate space of the border. In this paper we focus on the ways that checkpoints in Palestine affect the lives of women "beyond the checkpoint". Specifically, we refer to the thousands of Pales-tinian women whose husbands travel through checkpoints as labourers with an Israeli Civil Administration-issued permit that depends on the man's status as a married parent. By Israel's logic, these family ties render the men less terroristic-that is, less likely to risk death or detention-as they endure the punitive commute to provide low-wage labour for Israel's growing economy. The commute through checkpoints is characterised by restless crowds, the constant threat of violence and severe delays that mean long absences from the home. As a too often overlooked corollary, the permit requirement of "married parent" status determines that for every man who passes through the overcrowded checkpoints , there is a woman and at least one child "left home" to deal with the domestic labour on which the man's wage labour-and by extension, the Israeli economy-depends. Just as, therefore, men's mobility is restricted and regulated by the checkpoint, so too is women's participation in familial, cultural and economic life. The difference is that the effects of checkpoints on men's lives are more visible and more widely documented, while women's lives are affected in the less visible spaces "beyond the checkpoint". Our objective in this article is thus to bring women to the fore of a discussion of Israeli checkpoints in Palestine to better understand the ways that Palestinian women's lives-even as they may not regularly cross checkpoints-are affected by Israeli security infrastructure.
The objective of this article is to bring Palestinian women to the centre of a discussion about t... more The objective of this article is to bring Palestinian women to the centre of a discussion about the gendered dimensions of Israel's convoluted permit system and checkpoint security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork close to one of the largest checkpoint terminals in the West Bank, Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the article develops knowledge about checkpoints in three important ways: i) as gendered spaces that regulate women's mobility differently from that of men; ii) as spaces that produce particular embodied experiences for women; and iii) as security mechanisms that disrupt and regulate relations of care. This knowledge builds towards the main argument of the article: Palestinian women's lives are profoundly affected by Israel's imposition of permit systems and checkpoints in terms of highly gendered impositions of (im)mobility, embodied experience and relations of care. The research presented here thus makes two wider contributions to research on security to do with how the checkpoint brings the politics of gender and occupation to the fore, and how security infrastructure connects to the politics of care under military occupation.
This article theorizes the commodification of the recent resurgence of feminist activism through ... more This article theorizes the commodification of the recent resurgence of feminist activism through the concept of "feminist commodity activism." The focus is on the mass popularization of feminist-themed commodities, with T-shirts as a particular focus. First, I discuss how the mass marketing of feminist goods ties in with: (a) commodity feminism, by refetishizing commodities and consumption as empowering for women; (b) neoliberal feminism, through the construction of the feminist as an economic and choice-making subject; and (c) commodity activism, by entangling femi-nism with the discourses and practices of ethical consumption. Building on these concepts, I propose "feminist commodity activism" as a way to capture and further analyze the current commodification of feminism ac-tivism occurring at their intersection. I argue that feminist commodity activism instigates three further shifts: the commodification of the aesthetic experience of feminist street protest; the transfer of feminist activist agency to companies, charities, and entrepreneurs; and the branding of the feminist as a subject of value. Finally, the article considers the challenges that these shifts pose for feminist critique and politics.
In many countries, compulsory sterilization is still a precondition for amending juridical sex. D... more In many countries, compulsory sterilization is still a precondition for amending juridical sex. Drawing on feminist and queer debates on the entanglement of recognition with governmentalization, this article moves beyond a human rights frame to examine how struggles for legal gender recognition are bound up with the production and discipline of trans subjectivities, bodies, and relationships. It argues that rights and recognition may not only reinscribe regulation, but also they are a means of rendering trans subjects governable. By theorizing gender identity as a biopolitical discourse that produces trans subjects, the article genealogically examines the problematization of " gender identity " in Finnish welfare population governance practices leading up to the 2003 Finnish gender recognition law. The analysis demonstrates how the discourse of " equality " was key for producing a clearly defined trans population that could be identified, assessed, and, hence, governed. While the sterilization requirement was justified as a replacement for former castration laws which had been used by male-to-female transsexuals to access genital surgery, it also acted as a disciplinary technology to neutralize the alleged threats to normative forms of kinship that could be produced through gender recognition. Finally, the article considers points of resistance and avenues for further research.
This article argues that the work of Chicago School economist Gary Becker’s theory of fertility u... more This article argues that the work of Chicago School economist Gary Becker’s theory of fertility underpins contemporary rationalities of global population governance. Drawing on feminist critiques of biopolitics, the article proposes reproduction as a missing link that ties Becker’s homo economicus to the aggregate question of population. It argues that Becker’s work challenged macroeconomic theories of fertility by figuring reproduction, and hence population patterns, as governed by the personal utility-maximising decisions of individuals. It further examines how his approach to fertility inaugurated reproductive decision-making as a regulatory node of population quality, one also tied to a particular sex, race, and class politics. Finally, the article briefly analyses the relationship between Becker’s contribution and today’s focus on women’s reproductive and productive decision-making in population governance in the context of development.
Checkpoint 300 serves a large amount of Palestinian labourers as they make their way to places of... more Checkpoint 300 serves a large amount of Palestinian labourers as they make their way to places of employment in East Jerusalem and Israel. The Checkpoint is a large complex of corridors, turnstiles, metal detectors and security desks that control the movement and mobility of these workers every day, subjecting them to enforced waiting, stress and absence from the home. In this article we examine the Checkpoint as a regulatory site of Israeli state biopolitics that, by distributing bodies and affects is productive of particular subjects and practices. We articulate our approach to biopolitics through a focus on bodies, discipline and affect before drawing on research visits to give an account of how the space of Checkpoint 300 enacts corporeal and affective discipline. We discuss the Checkpoint as a complex space that is functional, hierarchical and subjectivising and propose that the Checkpoint produces and governs a heteronormative sexual division of labour that is conducive to Israeli state biopolitics by a) upholding patriarchal relations and b) producing a docile male Palestinian labour force to build settlements for the Israeli population. We thus argue that the subject-making processes at Checkpoint 300 work to differentiate and govern Palestinian bodies in ways that are tied to the broader biopolitical objectives of the Israeli state. We close with reflections on the contributions of such an understanding of checkpoints in Palestine and draw attention to the important future lines of inquiry indicated by the research.
This article examines the idea of ‘middle-class monarchy’ emerging in Europe from the internation... more This article examines the idea of ‘middle-class monarchy’ emerging in Europe from the internationally publicized marriages of Kate Middleton to Prince William in the UK and Charlene Wittstock to Prince Albert in Monaco. Through a careful analysis of sexuality, class and race in three major British newspapers, we demonstrate how the media discourses surrounding the marriages deploy European monarchies as sites of neoliberal governmentality. Deployed as transmitters of instrumental happiness, conceptualized as an individual choice and project achievable through the control of the body and realization of one’s desires, Kate embodies the white postfeminist vision of a highly educated, post-liberation woman able to combine the roles of consumer, homemaker and dutiful wife. This contrasts to the foreign Charlene, whose apparent domestication in an old-fashioned marriage of convenience was pitied widely. Finally, the article examines the Closer topless photo scandal as an incident that both challenged and re-sedimented the sexed, raced, and classed neoliberal obligations of individual happiness and self-control.
This article argues that European Union (EU) gender equality policy operates as a technology of b... more This article argues that European Union (EU) gender equality policy operates as a technology of biopolitical and neoliberal governmentality. Through a genealogical examination of EU policy documents and relevant demographic research, I examine how EU gender equality policy emerged as a means to reorganise women's work and personal lives in order to optimise biological reproduction and capitalist productivity by simultaneously increasing women's fertility and their labour market participation. Gender is argued to be an extension of the apparatus of sexuality as analysed by Foucault, enabling a more complex, expansive, and effective form of biopolitical regulation by promising to simultaneously reproduce life and economy. Moreover, gender is inseparable from the neoliberal context in which it is deployed as an “invisible hand” targeted at empowering sexed subjects to self-manage and self-govern by making reproductive choices based on cost–benefit analyses of their personal and working lives.
Michel Foucault identified sexuality as one of the defining biopolitical technologies of the nine... more Michel Foucault identified sexuality as one of the defining biopolitical technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Jemima Repo argues in this book, "gender" has come to be the major sexual signifier of the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first century. In fact, in this historical excavation of the biopolitical significance of the term, she argues that it could not have emerged at any other time. Repo shows that gender is not originally a feminist term, but emerged from the study of intersex and transsexual persons in the fields of sexology and psychology in the1950s and 1960s. Prior to the 1950s gender was used to refer to various types of any number of phenomena - sometimes sex, but not necessarily. Its only regular usage was in linguistics, where it was used to classify nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter. In the mid-twentieth century, gender shifted from being a nominator of types to designating the sexual order of things. As with sexuality in the Victorian period, over the last sixty years, the notion of gender has become an entire field of knowledge. Feminists famously took up the term in the 1970s to challenge biological determinism, and in government, "women" have been replaced by "gender" in policy-making processes that aim to advance equality between women and men. Gender has also become a key variable in social scientific surveys of different socio-political phenomena like voting, representation, employment, salaries, and parental leave decisions. The Biopolitcs of Gender analyzes the strategies and tactics of power involved in the use of "gender" in sexology and psychology, and subsequently its reversal and counter-deployment by feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. It critiques the emergence of gender in demographic science and the implications of this genealogy for feminist theory and politics today. Drawing on an a wide variety of historical and contemporary sources, the book makes a major theoretical argument about gender as a historically specific apparatus of biopower and calls into question the emancipatory potential of the category in feminist theory and politics.
The article examines the affective dynamics of collective survival and re- sistance under Israeli... more The article examines the affective dynamics of collective survival and re- sistance under Israeli settler colonialism in the Gaza Strip. Focusing on Gaza as an under-researched enclave of Israeli settler colonialism, it an- alyzes how young Palestinians renegotiated their affective bonds in re- sponse to two coinciding deadly events: the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 Israeli bombings. Theoretically, we extend the politics of emotions and affect to encompass experiences of settler-colonial violence. Drawing on original interviews with Palestinians in Gaza, we trace how affective bonds were impacted among families, friends, and neighbors and, from a transpersonal perspective, across the political community. We show how settler colonialism shaped responses to the pandemic, deepening existing inequalities and causing social frictions. The bombings, by contrast, trig- gered a unified response of pure terror and universal concern for collec- tive survival. The military targeting of homes was countered by practices of physical and emotional togetherness in the face of death. Overall, our study shows how (i) different kinds of mortal dangers are experienced politically by colonized people, (ii) these experiences are conditioned by collective histories of colonial violence, and that (iii) they constitute ex- pressions of collective affective life, necessary for the preservation of peo- plehood amidst colonial oppression.
This article brings women to the fore of a discussion of checkpoints in Palestine to understand b... more This article brings women to the fore of a discussion of checkpoints in Palestine to understand better the ways that Palestinian women's lives-even as they may not regularly cross checkpoints-are affected by Israeli security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork near Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, we examine women's lives in the context of a gendered system of permits and the nearby checkpoint that makes men's days of labour both long and exhausting, a fact that has profound effects on the family home in terms of restricted mobilities and the division of domestic labour. The article thus builds an account of checkpoints that: (1) situates women's everyday lives in Palestine in the context of Israel's military occupation; (2) extends the temporality of checkpoints beyond the checkpoint itself; and, therefore, (3) enables an understanding of the effects of borders beyond the immediate space of the border. In this paper we focus on the ways that checkpoints in Palestine affect the lives of women "beyond the checkpoint". Specifically, we refer to the thousands of Pales-tinian women whose husbands travel through checkpoints as labourers with an Israeli Civil Administration-issued permit that depends on the man's status as a married parent. By Israel's logic, these family ties render the men less terroristic-that is, less likely to risk death or detention-as they endure the punitive commute to provide low-wage labour for Israel's growing economy. The commute through checkpoints is characterised by restless crowds, the constant threat of violence and severe delays that mean long absences from the home. As a too often overlooked corollary, the permit requirement of "married parent" status determines that for every man who passes through the overcrowded checkpoints , there is a woman and at least one child "left home" to deal with the domestic labour on which the man's wage labour-and by extension, the Israeli economy-depends. Just as, therefore, men's mobility is restricted and regulated by the checkpoint, so too is women's participation in familial, cultural and economic life. The difference is that the effects of checkpoints on men's lives are more visible and more widely documented, while women's lives are affected in the less visible spaces "beyond the checkpoint". Our objective in this article is thus to bring women to the fore of a discussion of Israeli checkpoints in Palestine to better understand the ways that Palestinian women's lives-even as they may not regularly cross checkpoints-are affected by Israeli security infrastructure.
The objective of this article is to bring Palestinian women to the centre of a discussion about t... more The objective of this article is to bring Palestinian women to the centre of a discussion about the gendered dimensions of Israel's convoluted permit system and checkpoint security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork close to one of the largest checkpoint terminals in the West Bank, Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the article develops knowledge about checkpoints in three important ways: i) as gendered spaces that regulate women's mobility differently from that of men; ii) as spaces that produce particular embodied experiences for women; and iii) as security mechanisms that disrupt and regulate relations of care. This knowledge builds towards the main argument of the article: Palestinian women's lives are profoundly affected by Israel's imposition of permit systems and checkpoints in terms of highly gendered impositions of (im)mobility, embodied experience and relations of care. The research presented here thus makes two wider contributions to research on security to do with how the checkpoint brings the politics of gender and occupation to the fore, and how security infrastructure connects to the politics of care under military occupation.
This article theorizes the commodification of the recent resurgence of feminist activism through ... more This article theorizes the commodification of the recent resurgence of feminist activism through the concept of "feminist commodity activism." The focus is on the mass popularization of feminist-themed commodities, with T-shirts as a particular focus. First, I discuss how the mass marketing of feminist goods ties in with: (a) commodity feminism, by refetishizing commodities and consumption as empowering for women; (b) neoliberal feminism, through the construction of the feminist as an economic and choice-making subject; and (c) commodity activism, by entangling femi-nism with the discourses and practices of ethical consumption. Building on these concepts, I propose "feminist commodity activism" as a way to capture and further analyze the current commodification of feminism ac-tivism occurring at their intersection. I argue that feminist commodity activism instigates three further shifts: the commodification of the aesthetic experience of feminist street protest; the transfer of feminist activist agency to companies, charities, and entrepreneurs; and the branding of the feminist as a subject of value. Finally, the article considers the challenges that these shifts pose for feminist critique and politics.
In many countries, compulsory sterilization is still a precondition for amending juridical sex. D... more In many countries, compulsory sterilization is still a precondition for amending juridical sex. Drawing on feminist and queer debates on the entanglement of recognition with governmentalization, this article moves beyond a human rights frame to examine how struggles for legal gender recognition are bound up with the production and discipline of trans subjectivities, bodies, and relationships. It argues that rights and recognition may not only reinscribe regulation, but also they are a means of rendering trans subjects governable. By theorizing gender identity as a biopolitical discourse that produces trans subjects, the article genealogically examines the problematization of " gender identity " in Finnish welfare population governance practices leading up to the 2003 Finnish gender recognition law. The analysis demonstrates how the discourse of " equality " was key for producing a clearly defined trans population that could be identified, assessed, and, hence, governed. While the sterilization requirement was justified as a replacement for former castration laws which had been used by male-to-female transsexuals to access genital surgery, it also acted as a disciplinary technology to neutralize the alleged threats to normative forms of kinship that could be produced through gender recognition. Finally, the article considers points of resistance and avenues for further research.
This article argues that the work of Chicago School economist Gary Becker’s theory of fertility u... more This article argues that the work of Chicago School economist Gary Becker’s theory of fertility underpins contemporary rationalities of global population governance. Drawing on feminist critiques of biopolitics, the article proposes reproduction as a missing link that ties Becker’s homo economicus to the aggregate question of population. It argues that Becker’s work challenged macroeconomic theories of fertility by figuring reproduction, and hence population patterns, as governed by the personal utility-maximising decisions of individuals. It further examines how his approach to fertility inaugurated reproductive decision-making as a regulatory node of population quality, one also tied to a particular sex, race, and class politics. Finally, the article briefly analyses the relationship between Becker’s contribution and today’s focus on women’s reproductive and productive decision-making in population governance in the context of development.
Checkpoint 300 serves a large amount of Palestinian labourers as they make their way to places of... more Checkpoint 300 serves a large amount of Palestinian labourers as they make their way to places of employment in East Jerusalem and Israel. The Checkpoint is a large complex of corridors, turnstiles, metal detectors and security desks that control the movement and mobility of these workers every day, subjecting them to enforced waiting, stress and absence from the home. In this article we examine the Checkpoint as a regulatory site of Israeli state biopolitics that, by distributing bodies and affects is productive of particular subjects and practices. We articulate our approach to biopolitics through a focus on bodies, discipline and affect before drawing on research visits to give an account of how the space of Checkpoint 300 enacts corporeal and affective discipline. We discuss the Checkpoint as a complex space that is functional, hierarchical and subjectivising and propose that the Checkpoint produces and governs a heteronormative sexual division of labour that is conducive to Israeli state biopolitics by a) upholding patriarchal relations and b) producing a docile male Palestinian labour force to build settlements for the Israeli population. We thus argue that the subject-making processes at Checkpoint 300 work to differentiate and govern Palestinian bodies in ways that are tied to the broader biopolitical objectives of the Israeli state. We close with reflections on the contributions of such an understanding of checkpoints in Palestine and draw attention to the important future lines of inquiry indicated by the research.
This article examines the idea of ‘middle-class monarchy’ emerging in Europe from the internation... more This article examines the idea of ‘middle-class monarchy’ emerging in Europe from the internationally publicized marriages of Kate Middleton to Prince William in the UK and Charlene Wittstock to Prince Albert in Monaco. Through a careful analysis of sexuality, class and race in three major British newspapers, we demonstrate how the media discourses surrounding the marriages deploy European monarchies as sites of neoliberal governmentality. Deployed as transmitters of instrumental happiness, conceptualized as an individual choice and project achievable through the control of the body and realization of one’s desires, Kate embodies the white postfeminist vision of a highly educated, post-liberation woman able to combine the roles of consumer, homemaker and dutiful wife. This contrasts to the foreign Charlene, whose apparent domestication in an old-fashioned marriage of convenience was pitied widely. Finally, the article examines the Closer topless photo scandal as an incident that both challenged and re-sedimented the sexed, raced, and classed neoliberal obligations of individual happiness and self-control.
This article argues that European Union (EU) gender equality policy operates as a technology of b... more This article argues that European Union (EU) gender equality policy operates as a technology of biopolitical and neoliberal governmentality. Through a genealogical examination of EU policy documents and relevant demographic research, I examine how EU gender equality policy emerged as a means to reorganise women's work and personal lives in order to optimise biological reproduction and capitalist productivity by simultaneously increasing women's fertility and their labour market participation. Gender is argued to be an extension of the apparatus of sexuality as analysed by Foucault, enabling a more complex, expansive, and effective form of biopolitical regulation by promising to simultaneously reproduce life and economy. Moreover, gender is inseparable from the neoliberal context in which it is deployed as an “invisible hand” targeted at empowering sexed subjects to self-manage and self-govern by making reproductive choices based on cost–benefit analyses of their personal and working lives.
in 'Encyclopedia of Political Thought' edited by Michael T. Gibbons, Diana Coole, Elisabeth Ellis... more in 'Encyclopedia of Political Thought' edited by Michael T. Gibbons, Diana Coole, Elisabeth Ellis and Kennan Ferguson. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
International Feminist Journal of Politics, Jan 1, 2012
has sought to tell a story of feminist successes by reclaiming various activities as feminist. Cl... more has sought to tell a story of feminist successes by reclaiming various activities as feminist. Clare Hemmings' book asks the timely question of 'what might be at stake in feminist storytelling'(p. 1). The book carefully examines academic feminist narratives over the past ...
... Japanese Women Working Edited by Janet Hunter. JEMIMA REPO. Article first published online:... more ... Japanese Women Working Edited by Janet Hunter. JEMIMA REPO. Article first published online: 19 AUG 2009. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0432.2009.00475_2.x. ... More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: JEMIMA REPO. ...
... Articles: Jemima Repo. Book Review: Frühstück, S. (2007). Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, an... more ... Articles: Jemima Repo. Book Review: Frühstück, S. (2007). Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. Berkeley: University of California Press Armed Forces & Society Summer 2008 34: 724 ...
This dissertation inquires into the relationship between gender and biopolitics. Biopolitics, acc... more This dissertation inquires into the relationship between gender and biopolitics. Biopolitics, according to Michel Foucault, is the mode of politics that is situated and exercised at the level of life. The dissertation claims that gender is a technology of biopower specific to the ...
As COVID-19 swept the world it also became the subject of a quickly growing body of theoretical s... more As COVID-19 swept the world it also became the subject of a quickly growing body of theoretical scholarship aimed at understanding the social, political and economic implications of the ‘pandemic event’. Taking a step back, this paper draws on Deleuze and Foucault to interrogate whether, and in what way, the COVID-19 pandemic can and should in fact be understood as an event. We first offer a structured overview of existing ‘pandemic theory’ where we highlight that the productivity unfolded by the pandemic event is here either politically or ontologically fixed. Against this background, we show that, in distinct ways, Deleuze’s and Foucault’s concepts of the event caution against reifying a pandemic event. Any political force the pandemic can unfold is always made after the fact, and is contingent on what is (counter-)effectuated from the pandemic, or which discursive dispersions intersect with and unfold from it. We argue for considering the pandemic as evental rather than an event – it is made up of events, and holds the potential to produce events. For critical theory, the significance of the pandemic event is thus in the first place methodological: it gives insight to how (post-)pandemic societies are produced, and where openings for the actualization of alternatives might lie.
Published in Contemporary Political Theory, this critical exchange on "Feminist Reconstructions, ... more Published in Contemporary Political Theory, this critical exchange on "Feminist Reconstructions, Critical Race Interventions: The Presence of the Past and the future of Political Theories of Race and Gender." See my essay on page 98.
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