Biopolitics - Susan Stryker (TSQ)
Biopolitics - Susan Stryker (TSQ)
have argued that the fingers of some Asian women cannot be read by these devices due to
their supposedly insufficient fingerprint ridges.
References
Amoore, Louise, and Alexandra Hall. 2009. ‘‘Taking People Apart: Digitised Dissection and the
Body at the Border.’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 444–64.
Department of Homeland Security. ‘‘Learn about Biometric Identification (US-VISIT).’’ www
.dhs.gov/how-do-i/learn-about-biometric-identification-us-visit (accessed August 28,
2013).
Gates, Kelly A. 2011. Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Sur-
veillance. New York: New York University Press.
Magnet, Shoshana Amielle. 2011. When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of
Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Pugliese, Joseph. 2007. ‘‘Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the Racialized Zero Degree of
Nonrepresentation.’’ Boundary 2 34, no. 2: 105–33.
———. 2010. Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics. New York: Routledge.
Spade, Dean. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of
Law. Cambridge, MA: South End.
DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399533
Biopolitics
SUSAN STRYKER
The term biopolitics dates to the early twentieth century (Lemke 2011), but it is
only in Michel Foucault’s work from the 1970s forward that the concept (some-
times denominated by him as biopower) begins to be considered a constitutive
aspect of governance within Eurocentric modernity (Foucault 1978, 1997, 2004).
Biopolitics, generally speaking, describes the calculus of costs and benefits
through which the biological capacities of a population are optimally managed
for state or state-like ends. In its Foucauldian formulation, the term refers spe-
cifically to the combination of disciplinary and excitatory practices aimed at each
and every body, which results in the somaticization by individuals of the bodily
norms and ideals that regulate the entire population to which they belong. In
Foucauldian biopolitics, the individualizing and collectivizing poles of biopower
are conjoined by the domain of sexuality, by which Foucault means reproductive
categories of beings who are divided into those rendered vulnerable to premature
death and those nurtured to maximize their life. Race thus construed conceptually
underpins the biopolitical division not only of color from whiteness but of men
from women, of queers from straights, of abled-bodied from disabled, and of
cisgender from transgender, to the extent that a body on one side of any of these
binaries is conceptualized as biologically distinct from a body on the other side.
The caesura, or break, that race introduces into the body politic allows the
population to be segmented and selected, enhanced or eliminated, according
to biological notions of heritability, degeneracy, foreignness, differentness, or
unassimilability—all in the name of ‘‘defending’’ society and making it ‘‘pure.’’
Contemporary transgender identities, populations, and sociopolitical
movements exemplify this process of biopolitical racialization. Biopower con-
stitutes transgender as a category that it surveils, splits, and sorts in order to move
some trans bodies toward emergent possibilities for transgender normativity and
citizenship while consigning others to decreased chances for life. Recent work in
transgender studies addressing this biopolitical problematic includes Dean Spade
2011, Toby Beauchamp 2009, Aren Z. Aizura 2012, and C. Riley Snorton and Jin
Haritaworn 2013. A critical theoretical task now confronting the field is to advance
effective strategies for noncompliance and noncomplicity with the biopolitical
project itself.
Susan Stryker is associate professor of gender and women’s studies and director of the
Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona and serves as general coeditor of TSQ:
Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her most recent publication is The Transgender Studies Reader 2
(coedited with Aren Z. Aizura, 2013), winner of the 2013 Ruth Benedict Book Prize.
References
Aizura, Aren Z. 2012. ‘‘The Persistence of Transgender Travel Narratives.’’ In Transgender
Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, ed. Trystan T. Cotton, 139–56.
New York: Routledge.
Beauchamp, Toby. 2009. ‘‘Artful Concealment and Strategic Visibility: Transgender Bodies and US
State Surveillance after 9/11.’’ Surveillance and Society 6, no. 4: 356–66.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. An Introduction. Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon.
———. 1997. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. New York: St.
Martin’s.
———. 2004. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. New
York: Palgave Macmillan.
Germon, Jennifer. 2009. Gender: A Genealogy of the Concept. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. New York: New York University
Press.
DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399542
Brain Imaging
C. ARMES GAUTHIER