...Phil Chu AMS/WMS 139 11/2/11 Reading Response #2–Biopolitics: Population, Intersectionality and Reproductive Justice In 1996, the Personal Responsibility Act “reformed welfare” when it created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (Mink 196). The most significant aspect of these reforms was the fact that welfare was now designed not only to help impoverished families, specifically children, but also to “promote marriage, reduce out-of-wedlock births, and to ‘encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families’”(196). The Adoption Promotion Act, passed in the same year, called for “the removal of barriers to interethnic adoption,” which Ana Teresa Ortiz and Laura Briggs argue was meant to “put the children of welfare mothers . . . into white adoptive homes” (203). These two changes in welfare policy marked a significant increase in the amount of biopower wielded by the state. The importance of the health and development of children within a society had been recognized early in the 20th century when particular emphasis began to be placed on “the value of a healthy and numerous population as a national resource”(Davin 161). However, the changes in welfare policy that were enacted in the 90’s went a step beyond mere protection of children, but in order to understand this significance it is necessary to look at it within the context of American biopolitics as a whole. The term “biopolitics”–which evolved from 18th century discourses about the idea...
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...living in a time where the sketched epistemes of political rationality for which ‘life’ is the organizing object of politics (i.e., biopolitics) is being challenged. During the 1970s and beginning of 1980s theorists such as Foucault argued that the sovereign right to kill was increasingly displaced by the administrative compulsion to make live. That is, instead of ending violence or killing especially in the context of Europe and North America lethal conflict was redistributed through out the population turning politics into war by other means such as the withdrawal of the state from the household (i.e., oikos) and national life and hence with a more focus on biopolitics. In the Global South though theorists like Mbembe challenge Foucauldian biopolitics to argue that outside Europe and North America this governing of life (zoe) took a different form: necropolitics resulting from the histories of power relations such as slavery and colonization. Yet, theorists in the Global North such as Foucault insisted that the 1970s the life of power mutated increasing the neoliberal turn in government leaving our times and more concretely “the future as yet unthought.” This class begins with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and Mbembe’s idea of necropolitics and asks: what are the stakes in thinking and practicing power today through the locus of biopolitics and/or necropolitics? What are the stakes in reading these tensions with respect to yesterday—and to tomorrow for the art of governing...
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...| | | A Historical Critique of Homosexual Exclusions from the Armed Forces using the concepts of Michel Foucault From 1989 to 1999, the time period of the Clinton Administration, a homosexual force entered the American consciousness. Court cases and rhetoric of the 80s incited a discourse in which homosexuality was "re-articulated, re-negotiated, and unmistakably re-repressed" (Davis 3). Supreme Court judgment and actions taken by Congress with the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy exemplify theories of sexuality and power expressed in the philosophies of Michel Foucault. Foucault was a French-born philosopher historian. He examined social institutions such as medicine, psychiatry, the prison system, and the human sciences in general. Specifically he focused on how these institutions relate to power interactions. For a time he was associated with structuralism, which is an intellectual movement in which the culture of humanity is semiotically analyzed. However he distanced himself from the structuralism movement after the 60s. He wrote on a wide array of topics from knowledge to power and discourse. He considered himself "Nietzschean" (Fox 169). In viewing his own system of philosophy this way, he rejected the postmodernist label attributed to him. In fact, he held that his work was in line with the modernity of the philosophies of...
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...the US healthcare system II. Thesis Statement: I will examine if Hispanic immigrants coming to the US receive limited health care access due to biopower (Foucault 1984). • This topic is important because I want to examine the role race may play in determining immigrants’ health care access. By doing so, I hope to find hidden prejudices that still exist in the US health care system. • Questions I want to answer in my paper: o With what historical context do the current laws governing health care access for immigrants come from? o Is there valid proof, reasoning, statistics to support the limitation of health care access to immigrants? III. Theory utilized: Biopower • Biopower is defined as the practice of modern nation-states utilizing biopolitics by regulating their subjects, subjugating their bodies, and controlling populations. The basic principle is that modern nations can control their population by using much more “sophisticated methods” of doing so. o Biopower plays a role in race and medicine. That is to say, populations of a certain race are targeted. Moreover, medicine is manipulated to subject those populations to experience that form of population control. IV. Application • The theory of Biopower explains my biomedical topic, Limited Health Care Access for Certain US Immigrants, by elucidating the motives and reasoning behind the policies put in place by the US government. To explain, racial discrimination and inequity in the US healthcare system are both mechanisms...
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...examine the codification of an Italian work-related illness caused by mobbing, a type of psychological harassment that emerged at the moment neoliberal policies transformed Italy’s historically protectionist labor market. I trace how the medicalization of mobbing has expanded workers’ access to compensation, resources, and discursive tools for criticizing neoliberal labor conditions, even as it has produced new structures of surveillance. I unravel the neoliberal politics of a state that protects workers’ health yet governs worker–citizens through an apparatus of medical experts. I find that workers’ labor problems are experienced and managed as bodily problems in ways important to remaking Italian citizenship. [neoliberalism, state, labor, biopolitics, citizenship, bodies, Italy] An institution, even an economy, is complete and fully viable only if it is durably objectified . . . in bodies. —Pierre Bourdieu1 It was the spirit of capitalism made flesh. —Upton Sinclair2 n 2003, a new psychophysical disturbance, organizational coercion pathology (disturbi psichici e fisici da costrittivit` organizzativa sul a lavoro), or OCP, became a work-related illness that was insurable by an Italian state public-health institution (Istituto Nazionale per l’Assicurazione contro gli Infortuni sul Lavoro [INAIL] 2003).3 Telltale symptoms, often likened to those of posttraumatic stress disorder (disturbo post traumatico del stress), include anxiety and depression. According to medical experts, its cause...
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...is composed from some subfields that are usually defined by their specific subject matter, rather than by their mode of analysis. The four subfields of political knowledge are: 1. Comparative politics : Focuses on similarities and difference in political processes and structures. 2. International relations : Focuses on the political relations between countries, the behavior of transnational actors, and the dynamics happenting in the world-wide system of states. 3. Political theory : Focuses on the ideas and debates around political issues. 4. Boundary-spanning subfields : Politics as a field often links with other fields including political anthropology, political economy, political psychology, political sociology, and biopolitics. But not all individuals agrees that politics is one field of knowledge....
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...CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY, POLITICS 3 Department of Politics and International Studies, Rhodes University, 2013 “Words wreak havoc...when they find a name for what had...been lived namelessly.” - Jean Paul Sartre (cited in Ananya Roy’s City Requiem, Calcutta: gender & the Politics of Poverty, 2003 (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis) In this course we will engage, immediately and without mediation, with some of the most influential theory at the centre of some of the most urgent debates in contemporary political thought. Each lecture will be based around a specific text and it will be assumed that the students have read that text before the lecture. The compulsory readings are listed here. The optional readings, along with various other resources, are listed on RU Connected. Week 1 – The Meaning of Haiti A glimpse into some of the hidden history at the heart of the origins of the modern world. • Peter Hallward ‘Haitian Inspiration’, Radical Philosophy, No. 123, 2004. 3-10 • Michel-Rolph Trouillot ‘An Unthinkable History’ from Silencing the Past, 1995 (Boston: Beacon Press) • Nick Nesbit ‘Turning the Tide: The Problem of Popular Insurgency in Haitian Revolutionary Historiography’, Small Axe, October 2008 • Peter Hallward ‘An Interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide’, London Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 4, 2007 Week 2 – Contemporary Thinking from the Underside of Modernity Shifting the geography of reason today. • Lewis Gordon ‘African-American...
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...Biblical Worldview Carolyn Hopkins Liberty University Biblical Worldview The Bible, God’s word, gives mankind stories of creation and the history of the world. It is a guide book in which we are to lives our lives. Without God’s word we would not know how to gauge right and wrong. The Bible also identifies who we are and shows us that God created us from the love for us. What does Genesis 1-11 teach regarding the natural world? In Genesis, God describes man as good. This notion of creation being good is different than other worldwide mythologies, which begin life from chaos and violence (Bruckner, 2014). On the first day of creation God said “Let there be light” and there was light, He saw that the light was good (Genesis 1:3). Then God formed the earth in the midst of the waters on the second day and he saw that it was good. The third day God created the plants and saw that it was good. The fourth day He created the Sun. moon and stars, and it was good. On the fifth day He create the birds and the livestock, and it was good. Then finally on the sixth day, God created mankind, and it was good. Everything that God created in the beginning was good. What does Genesis 1-11 teach regarding human identity? On the sixth day God created man (Genesis 1:27). He created man in his own image and likeness and He saw what he made and said it was very good. Man’s creation in the beginning was very good. After Adam and Eve partook in the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good...
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...In the ocean exists an ancient god Cthulhu, sleeping in his stone house in R’yleh under the sea. He sleeps and telepathically invades our dreams, turning them into nightmares. There is a cult that follows the ancient god, and they relate the details of this ancient being and his intentions: The HP Lovecraft Wiki 2014 [“Cthulhu,” at http://lovecraft.wikia.com/wiki/Cthulhu] The most detailed descriptions of Cthulhu in "The Tale of Cthulhu" are based on statues of the creature. One, constructed by an artist after a series of baleful dreams, is said to have "yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature [...] A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings."[6] Another, recovered by police from a raid on a murderous cult, "represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind."[7] When the creature finally appears, the story says that the "thing cannot be described," but it is called "the green, sticky spawn of the stars", with "flabby claws" and an "awful squid-head with writhing feelers." Johansen's phrase "a mountain walked or stumbled" gives a sense of the creature's scale[8] (this is corroborated by Wilcox's dreams, which "touched wildly on a gigantic thing 'miles high' which walked or lumbered about"). Cthulhu is depicted as having a worldwide...
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...being dominate. In the movies they have a lot of trick in order to express the dominant charters versus the submissive ones. A lot of that has to do with camera angles and where the characters are placed in the shot. For example a lower camera expressed dominance and if the character was higher up in the shot too. And the opposite is used to express some one is less dominate. These of course are artificial ways to express dominance to the audience. And sometimes we have to express artificially our dominance to get some things in life and these articles are very good at telling you subtle cues to help you appear more dominate. Mazur, Allan & Mueller, Ulrich (1996). Facial Dominance. A. Somit and S. Peterson (Eds.), Research in Biopolitics, Vol 4 (London: JAI Press) pp 99-111 A great...
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...Outline + References Sociology 210 Research Paper Draft Conflict Theory and the Evolution of Eugenics in America during the 20th Century. I intend to present a purely informative paper on the sociological perspective of eugenics during the past century in the United States through Conflict Theory. A linear history of causality, implementation, and significance. 1. Conflict Theory Perspective a. Margaret Sanger b. Plato’s Republic c. Negative Eugenics d. Sterilization e. Planned Parenthood Federation of America f. Legislation g. Economic Implications Early 1900’s American political movement under Margaret Sanger 1. advocate the control over individual rights to reproduction 2. purpose of societal advantage 3. rights governed by the state and supported by a public majority 4. originally designed as a method of public oppression and controlled persecution. 5. Sanger an outspoken advocate for Eugenics a. racial dominance, class restraint, and a member of the American Eugenic Political Party, opened a family planning and birth control clinic. 6. Established first Abortion Clinics in NY b. On October 16, 1916, a member of the Eugenic party movement opened a then privately funded business, now partly funded by the public, in New York City. 7. clinic’s policy on providing pregnancy termination to the impoverished and uneducated. 8. The Birth Control Review and Birth Control...
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...Euthanasia and Ethical Implications Thereof Euthanasia according to the medical dictionary is the act or practice of killing hopelessly sick or injured individuals in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy and/or allowing said person to die by taking less than complete medical measures to prolong life. This type of act is also known as mercy killing or assisted suicide. Individuals who have reached the point when they feel they have no other options have often chosen to look into euthanasia as a way out. Families who see their loved one suffering have approached heath care professionals to act on their behalf and end the pain by euthanizing them. Each instance creates an ethical dilemma for the individual, the health care provider, the family, and other loved ones. Nursing Obligations According to the American Nurses Association (ANA), Nurses are not expected to participate in active euthanasia, as this violates the nurses’ code of ethics. As nurses we have the obligation to provide timely, humane, comprehensive, and compassionate end-of-life care (ANA, 1985). The code for nurses affirms that respect for persons “extends to all who require the services of the nurse for the promotion of health, the prevention of illness, the restoration of health, the alleviation of suffering and provision of supportive care of the dying. The nurse does not act deliberately to terminate life of any person” (ANA, 1985). However, ANA recognizes the patients’ right to self-determination...
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...Humanitarian intervention is a label that has been employed to describe economic to military intervention. The main types of intervention include military, diplomatic, developmental and economic sanction. Mill’s (1859) stated that "There seems to be no little need that the whole doctrine of non-interference with foreign nations should be reconsidered, if it can be said to have as yet been considered as a really moral question at all... To go to war for an idea, if the war is aggressive, not defensive, is as criminal as to go to war for territory or revenue; for it is as little justifiable to force our ideas on other people, as to compel them to submit to our will in any other respect”. This essay will demonstrate how humanitarian intervention efforts are not reaching the goals that are needed to properly aid the disadvantaged nations in developing nations. Economic humanitarian intervention emerged at the end of the Second World War. Historically, it is apparent that foreign aid was used explicitly to prevent the expansion of communism during the Cold War, and not solely to help those in need. It can be argued that humanitarian intervention has done more harm than good to the nations. Northern/ Western countries have enriched themselves from their unequal relation with Southern either under colonialism or under the trading system, which has the Southern nations paying more towards their ongoing debt and receiving an irrelevant amount of foreign aid to help assist these nations...
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...China’s One Child Policy; Impacts on the Society, the Economy, and the People. By David Goheen Due: December 14, 2007 Executive Summary During the years before the implementation of the One Child Policy, the leaders of China were involved in wars, a great leap forward, and an industrial revolution. In the last twenty five years China’s One Child Policy has affected the country in every way one can imagine. This paper will attempt to explore the major ways the policy has affected the people of China socially, and how the economy has reacted with the change. A brief history on the traditional views of Chinese families, before the policy’s implementation, is outlined ahead of the policy’s background. This is to illustrate where the people of China are coming from, socially and culturally. I hope to convey that this policy has forcefully stolen the Chinese citizens’ basic human right to reproduce and has hurt them physically and emotionally. However, statistically and economically the policy has been a success up to this point. The early psychological status of China’s children with no siblings is looked at to try to understand their mental capabilities of dealing with the pressure of having to be successful. Major flaws that were overlooked could spell disaster for this aging population in the future. The policy has created prosperity for the country, but has also left its citizens suffering. China is now looked at as having a low birth rate, a low death...
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...Broj 2 / Književnost i kultura / Tania Lewis - The Ethical Turn in Commodity Culture: Consumption, Care and the Other Tania Lewis - The Ethical Turn in Commodity Culture: Consumption, Care and the Other In a small courty ard at the Univ ersity of Melbourne, there is an unprepossessing, somewhat makeshift looking outdoor café called KereKere. The coffee on offer is organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest alliance-branded and sustainable: a list of options we'v e increasingly come to ex pect ev en in corporate café chains such as Starbucks. But at this café, customers are also asked to decide how the profits from that sale are distributed ev ery time they buy a coffee. As customers are handed their order, they are also presented with play ing cards that allow them to choose from a list of causes where the café's profits will go. The café thus operates in the spirit of ‘kerekere', a Fijian custom in which a relativ e or neighbour can request something that is needed and it must be willingly giv en with no ex pectation of repay ment. The café's y oung ethically minded owner sees this process as fostering ‘a culture that promotes community wellbeing'. At this café, the traditional economic ex change associated with the purchase of a cup of coffee has been subtly mov ed into other territories through the introduction of questions of gift giv ing, and of responsibility , care and ev en lov e (as we see here, the café's logo is a coffee cup with a series of hearts rising from...
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