Becoming patriots in Russia: biopolitics,fashion, and nostalgia

The article seeks to explore the common ground between biopolitics, fashion, patriotism and nostalgia. Taking off from the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics as a control apparatus exerted over a population, I provide an insight into the modern construction of the Russian nation, where personal and collective sacrifice, traditional femininity and masculinity, orthodox religion, and the Great Patriotic War become the basis for patriotism. On carefully chosen case studies, I will show how the state directly and indirectly regulates people’s lives by producing narratives, which are translated (in some cases designers act as mouthpieces for the state demographic or military politics) into fashionable discourses and, with a core of time, create specific gender norms – women are seen as fertile mothers giving birth to new soldiers, while men are shown as fighters and defenders of their nation. In the constructed discourses, conservative ideals become a ground for the creation of an idea of a nation as one biological body, where brothers and sisters are united together. In these fashionable narratives, people’s bodies become a battlefield of domestic politics. Fashion produces a narrative of a healthy nation to ensure the healthy work- and military force.     

Gender, citizenship and human reproduction in contemporary Italy

This article examines how the recently introduced law on assisted reproduction in Italy, which gives symbolic legal recognition to the embryo, came about, and how a referendum, which would have repealed large sections of it, failed. The occupation of the legal space by the embryo is the outcome of a crusade by a well-organised alliance of theo-conservatives. These groups see in reproductive medicine an uncontrolled interference with their notion of the natural order of things. Such a worldview requires a total ban on stem cell research, limitation of access to reproductive technologies and repressive laws to govern the area. This conservative dream scenario has come closer to being realised by the introduction of a law doing all of these things in the name of the protection of “Life”. In the case of this law, the “life” to be protected is the embryo. In the name of “Life”, scientific advances and individual liberty have been curbed. The politics of embryo citizenship is a politics which values the yet to come over the here and now, purgation over pleasure, and the transcendent over the material.     

Reframing Political Freedom In The Analytics Of Governmentality

What distinguishes studies of government (gouvernamentalité) from histories of administration, historical sociologies of state formation and sociologies of governance is their power to open space for critical thought. According to Michel Foucault, studies on government are studies of a particular stratum of knowing and acting, of the emergence of particular ‘regimes of truth’ concerning the conduct of conduct, ways of speaking truths and the costs of so doing, and of the inventing and assemblage of particular apparatuses and devices for exercising power and intervening in particular problems. The key point of this paper is that in the analytics of governmentality political freedom no longer depends on the systemic logic of the balance between government and governed, but on subjects’ obstinate and wild desire to live freely and on the ethos of those who intend to govern themselves and their like autonomously, which obstructs that logic even with extreme consequences. This capacity of resistance comes from life, from the sum of its functions that are useful in resisting death and no longer from a core of subjective rights, or from the will of individuals who oppose the state or the market.

Biometric citizenship

The article considers the issue of citizenship in light of the recent developments in biometric identification techniques. It aims to answer the question as to what kind of citizenship is the ‘biometric citizenship’. Drawing on several empirical examples including the Iris Recognition Immigration System scheme, identity cards and current citizenship reform plans in the UK, I argue that biometric citizenship is at once a ‘neoliberal citizenship’ and a ‘biological citizenship’. The neoliberal aspect of biometric citizenship is demonstrated through the rearrangement of the experience of border crossing in terms of the neoliberal ethos of choice, freedom, active entrepreneurialism and transnational expedited mobility. At the same time, these are enacted alongside the exclusionary and violent measures directed at those who are considered as risky categories illustrating the constitutive relationship between the ‘biometric citizen’ and its ‘other’. As regards its biological aspect, biometric citizenship is embedded within rationalities and practices that deploy the body not only as a means of identification but also as a way of sorting through different forms of life according to their degree of utility and legitimacy in relation to market economy. This aspect also carries a racial and national dimension exemplified in both the national identity card scheme and the very technical infrastructure of biometric technology. Overall, what these two features have in common is the reduction of the principle of citizenship to processes of identity management and technical procedures without, however, purging it altogether from its all too familiar national and race-based components.     

Psychophysiology in the Study of Political Communication: An Expository Study of Individual-Level Variation in Negativity Biases

The use of psychophysiological measures has been relatively common in the study of communication; there has been a recent increase in interest among political behavioralists as well. There has nevertheless been a limited body of work that uses psychophysiological measures to better understand the impact of political mass media content. This article presents the case for using psychophysiological measures to study political communication. Focusing on skin conductance, it outlines the advantages of this measure for capturing subconscious responses to media over time, second-to-second. It then presents results from recent experimental work in the United States that highlights individual-level variation in responsiveness to negative versus positive news content—variation that is correlated with measures of psychophysiological reactions to non-news content, suggesting the relevance of deep-seated predispositions in psychophysiological research on media effects.     

Gary Becker’s economics of population: reproduction and neoliberal biopolitics

This paper argues that Chicago School economist Gary Becker’s theory of fertility underpins contemporary rationalities of global population governance. Drawing on feminist critiques of biopolitics, the paper 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-maximizing 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 paper 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.     

Biopolitics,borders, and refugee camps: exercising sovereign power over nonmembers of the state†

This article addresses the relationship between the concepts of national identity and biopolitics by examining a border-transit camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers in Germany. Current studies of detention spaces for migrants have drawn heavily on Agamben’s reflection on the “camp” and “homo sacer,” where the camp is analyzed as a space in a permanent state of exception, in which the government exercises sovereign power over the refugee as the ultimate biopolitical subject. But what groups of people can end up at a camp, and does the government treat all groups in the same way? This article examines the German camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers as a space where the state’s borders are demarcated and controlled through practices of bureaucratic and narrative differentiation among various groups of people. The author uses the concept of detention space to draw a theoretical link between national identity and biopolitics, and demonstrates how the sovereign’s practices of control and differentiation at the camp construct German national identity through defining “nonmembers” of the state. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork at the Friedland border transit camp and on a discourse analysis of texts produced at the camp or for the camp.     

Biopower and geopolitics as Russia’s neighborhood strategies: reconnecting people or reaggregating lands?

In this article, we address geopolitics and biopower as two different yet mutually correlative discursive strategies of sovereign power in Russia. We challenge the dominant realist approaches to Russia’s neighborhood policy by introducing the concept of biopolitics as its key element, which makes analysis of political relations in the post-Soviet area more nuanced and variegated. More specifically, we address an important distinction between geopolitical control over territories and management of population as two of Russia’s strategies in its “near abroad.”     

(Non)-lethality and war: tear gas as a weapon of governmental intervention

This article attempts to think through the relationship between lethality and war through the object of tear gas from its invention to contemporary uses. First, I examine the way in which tear gas migrates from a zone of lethal/non-lethal conceptual indistinction, to one where the same rationalities operate but the intent of their use is opposed in relation to life and death. Second, from this biopolitical distinction, I trace its use in the governing of colonial populations and populations under occupation, and its recent weaponisation in “domestic” spaces. These contemporary uses of tear gas, I argue, can be seen as what Sloterdijk would call “atmosterror” which contribute to blurring the lines between war and peace.     

What a girl's gotta do: the labor of the biopolitical celebrity in austerity Britain

This article debunks the widespread view that young female celebrities, especially those who rise to fame through reality shows and other forms of media-orchestrated self-exposure, dodge “real” work out of laziness, fatalism, and a misguided sense of entitlement. Instead, the authors argue that becoming a celebrity in a neoliberal economy such as that of the United Kingdom, where austerity measures disproportionately disadvantage the young, women, and the poor, is not as irregular or exceptional a choice as previously thought, especially since the precariousness of celebrity earning power adheres to the current demands of the neoliberal economy on its workforce. What is more, becoming a celebrity involves different forms of labor that are best described as biopolitical, since such labor fully involves and consumes the human body and its capacities as a living organism. Weight gain and weight loss, pregnancy, physical transformation through plastic surgery, physical symptoms of emotional distress, and even illness and death are all photographically documented and supplemented by extended textual commentary, usually with direct input from the celebrity, reinforcing and expanding on the visual content. As well as casting celebrity work as labor, the authors also maintain that the workings of celebrity should always be examined in the context of wider cultural, social and real economies.