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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Dispositif, Biopolitical Governance, And Significance Of Genealogical Approach In Navigating Refugees’ Experiences Of Camp And Community, Rabindra Chaulagain May 2023

Dispositif, Biopolitical Governance, And Significance Of Genealogical Approach In Navigating Refugees’ Experiences Of Camp And Community, Rabindra Chaulagain

Critical Humanities

Foucault’s distinction between biopolitics and biopower is significant to society, a normative body in terms of seeing biopower as the practical production of the visible and invisible poles of the dispositif through interdependent discursive and institutional practices of administration. This paper fundamentally discusses two theoretical ideas ingrained with the notion of Foucauldian biopolitics---dispositif and genealogy that Foucault brought into account for merging them into modern biopolitical administrative forces. First, it discusses the idea of dispositif as a mechanism of governance and critically examines its connection to biopower and biopolitics. Second, it analyzes the notion of genealogy as a tool to …


Biopolitics And Belief: The Impacts Of Religious Attitudes On Reproductive Rights In The U.S., Katlyn Barbaccia Nov 2022

Biopolitics And Belief: The Impacts Of Religious Attitudes On Reproductive Rights In The U.S., Katlyn Barbaccia

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973)—a groundbreaking case that legalized the right to have an abortion—which signified a deep rift in the nation between the opinions of its lawmakers and citizens in the wake of a widening partisan gap. Biopower, according to Foucault, can be defined as the governing of bodies wherein citizens are stripped of bodily autonomy and are closely regulated by the nation-state. Manifested in political consequences, this can be defined as biopolitics, or when the nation-state’s ideas are made into a reality in the political realm. …


The Carceral Death Machine: Savagery, Contamination And Sacrifice In The Contemporary Prison, Timothy Malone Jan 2022

The Carceral Death Machine: Savagery, Contamination And Sacrifice In The Contemporary Prison, Timothy Malone

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, I develop a convict epistemology that interweaves two elements: 1) a deep engagement with the works of particular philosophers and scholars investigating questions of punishment, violence, biopolitics and political philosophy 2) with some specific, publicly-reported incidents within California prisons in the late 20th and 21st centuries and my own detailed narration of events and the structural and quotidian dynamics of the prison yard as I experienced them as inmate #K73299 from 1997 to 2005. Diverging from Foucauldian theories of disciplinarity, I argue that under neoliberalism, the primary punishments that any inmate is subjected to within the carceral …


Beyond Pathology: Specters Of Suicidality In The Queer Community, Alison E. Parks Jun 2021

Beyond Pathology: Specters Of Suicidality In The Queer Community, Alison E. Parks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the psychic effects of a life haunted by proximity to suicide. Beginning with demographic data indicating that the queer community has experienced disproportionately high rates of suicide in the U.S. since nationwide data collection began in the 1960s, my dissertation’s argument is twofold. First, suicidality shapes the experience of being queer. Second, the queer community’s history of association with suicide has shaped its relationship to death and morbidity. Therefore, in order to better address the issue of suicide in the community, a new approach is required that considers this history’s entanglement with systemic power relations and the …


From Franz Kafka To Franz Kafka Award Winner, Yan Lianke: Biopolitics And The Human Dilemma Of Shenshizhuyi In Liven And Dream Of Ding Village, Melinda Pirazzoli Mar 2021

From Franz Kafka To Franz Kafka Award Winner, Yan Lianke: Biopolitics And The Human Dilemma Of Shenshizhuyi In Liven And Dream Of Ding Village, Melinda Pirazzoli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

To date, many studies have exhaustively explained how and why Yan Lianke deals with both the intimate relationship between disease and biopolitics and the relationship between utopia and dystopia. These are certainly the most important themes in Liven (2004) and Dream of Ding Village (2006). However, biopolitical discourses cannot fully account for the complexity, depth and humanity of these novels, which in addition to exploring the complex and protean meaning of life also represent shenshizhuyi, an expression coined by Yan Lianke to describe his human dilemma in representing the complex relationship between shen 神 (soul, spirit, mind and myths) …


Progress Narratives In Trans Internationalism: Surveying A Collected Archive Of The Global Trans Movement, 2008–2018, Flora P. Wolpert Checknoff Feb 2021

Progress Narratives In Trans Internationalism: Surveying A Collected Archive Of The Global Trans Movement, 2008–2018, Flora P. Wolpert Checknoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trans liberation as a global movement began to be documented in public reports in the mid-2000s. Gathered together from their first decade (2008-2018), publications produced by three trans INGOs—Transgender Europe (TGEU), the Asia Pacific Trans Network (APTN), and Global Action for Trans* Equality (GATE)—demonstrate the cultivation of a global trans imaginary and materialize records of a coalescing struggle. The publications depict tensions between an evolving global trans imaginary and the construction of a rights deserving trans population in the development sector. The seeking of international action and resources has compelled the unification of messaging through rhetoric and data aggregation across …


Pregnancy And The Apocalypse: The Enlistment Of Reproductive Futurism In Aid Of Nationalism, Emily E. Horger May 2020

Pregnancy And The Apocalypse: The Enlistment Of Reproductive Futurism In Aid Of Nationalism, Emily E. Horger

University Honors Theses

While America has long held a fascination for the end of the world, the apocalypse has enjoyed a surge in popularity over the past twenty years, rising the ranks from cult classic to mainstream media - many examples of which include representations of pregnancy. Reproductive futurism is exemplified in such varied recent sources as A Quiet Place, Bird Box, Train to Busan, The Walking Dead, and more through their representations of pregnant women in apocalyptic settings. The prevalence of this trope, in addition to specific messages found within the contexts of each example, coincide with recent …


Tracing Biometric Assemblages In India’S Surveillance State: Reproducing Colonial Logics, Reifying Caste Purity, And Quelling Dissent Through Aadhaar, Priya Prabhakar Jan 2020

Tracing Biometric Assemblages In India’S Surveillance State: Reproducing Colonial Logics, Reifying Caste Purity, And Quelling Dissent Through Aadhaar, Priya Prabhakar

Scripps Senior Theses

Tracing Biometric Assemblages in India’s Surveillance State seeks to understand the historical conditions that rendered the nation-state of India as having the world’s largest biometric surveillance system: Aadhaar. Surveillance practices used by the British Raj mirrors the current social order of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as they use surveillance to similar ends in today’s political economy, through the intersecting forces of neoliberalism and ethnonationalism. This thesis is an exploration into how India’s current surveillance regimes cultivate biometric surveillant assemblages through Aadhaar. Contrary to claims that Aadhaar was created to empower the poor, I argue that these surveillance regimes …


The Prison-Televisual Complex, Allison Page, Laurie Ouellette Sep 2019

The Prison-Televisual Complex, Allison Page, Laurie Ouellette

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and …


Alegal: Biopolitics And The Unintelligibility Of Okinawan Life, Annmaria M. Shimabuku Dec 2018

Alegal: Biopolitics And The Unintelligibility Of Okinawan Life, Annmaria M. Shimabuku

Sociology

Okinawan life, at the crossroads of American militarism and Japanese capitalism, embodies a fundamental contradiction to the myth of the monoethnic state. Suspended in a state of exception, Okinawa has never been an official colony of the Japanese empire or the United States, nor has it ever been treated as an equal part of Japan. As a result, Okinawans live amid one of the densest concentrations of U.S. military bases in the world. By bringing Foucauldian biopolitics into conversation with Japanese Marxian theory, Alegal uncovers Japan’s determination to protect its middle class from the racialized sexual contact around its mainland …


Biopolitics, Risk, And Reproductive Justice: The Governing Of Maternal Health In Canada's Muskoka Initiative, Jacqueline Potvin Dec 2018

Biopolitics, Risk, And Reproductive Justice: The Governing Of Maternal Health In Canada's Muskoka Initiative, Jacqueline Potvin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I examine how Canada’s Muskoka Initiative discursively constructs and addresses maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH) as a global development problem. I evaluate how the Muskoka Initiative aligns with, and departs from feminist articulations of sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice. I do this by analyzing how the Muskoka Initiative drew on and reinforced dominant norms of motherhood, and aligned with neoliberal development frameworks. I also examine how the reproductive bodies and lives of women in the Global South were configured as sites of both development intervention and biopolitical governance. My findings are based on a …


A Life Absolutely Bare? A Reflection On Resistance By Irregular Refugees Against Fingerprinting As State Biopolitical Control In The European Union, Ziang Zhou Oct 2018

A Life Absolutely Bare? A Reflection On Resistance By Irregular Refugees Against Fingerprinting As State Biopolitical Control In The European Union, Ziang Zhou

Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

In a legally transitory category, irregular refugees- experience a double precariousness. They risk their lives to travel across treacherous seas to Europe for a better life. However, upon the long-awaited embarkation on the European land, they are exposed once again to the precariousness of the asylum application. They are “powerless”, “with no rights” and “to be sacrificed” as Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt suggested in their respective understanding of a “bare life”, la nuda vita. In light of the administrative difficulties in managing asylum application, the European Union introduced the “Dublin Agreement”, which stipulates mandatory biometric data collection for …


Ecological Crisis, Or “Intersex Panic,” As Answer Of The Real?, Stephanie Hsu Sep 2018

Ecological Crisis, Or “Intersex Panic,” As Answer Of The Real?, Stephanie Hsu

The Goose

Drawing upon Cal’s eventual metamorphosis into “The [white] Man” in Middlesex, and an examination of the Real of ecological crisis, Hsu explores the intersection of environmental racism, climate change denial, and intersex discrimination in order to advocate for a renewed awareness of ecological interdependency and the need for self-determination of people of colour in ecological and environmental justice discourses.


Trans-Pacific Imaginaries And Queer Intimacies In The Ruins Of Middlesex, Dai Kojima Sep 2018

Trans-Pacific Imaginaries And Queer Intimacies In The Ruins Of Middlesex, Dai Kojima

The Goose

Taking up Roland Barthes’s concept of the “third meaning,” Kojima analyzes the character of Julie Kikuchi, the Japanese American love interest of the grown-up Cal. Taking Julie seriously as a character beyond mere plot contrivance and cultural reference, Kojima invites us to consider the intertwined histories of economic rise and fall, trans-Pacific wars, and other intimacies that Middlesex remains entangled in yet fails to fully acknowledge.


Materialism’S Affective Appeal, Elizabeth Mazzolini Sep 2018

Materialism’S Affective Appeal, Elizabeth Mazzolini

The Goose

Citing the pronounced lack of academic engagement with Middlesex since its publication and riffing on the novel’s recounting of the demise of the auto industry in Detroit, Mazzolini examines how cycles of obsolescence and currency work within academic discourse and ultimately advocates for the novel’s potential for examining the material and affective nature of relevance itself.


On Being Intimate With Ruin: Reading Decay In Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard Sep 2018

On Being Intimate With Ruin: Reading Decay In Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard

The Goose

Blanchard argues for an intimate attention to the ruin in Middlesex and Detroit as a means of exploring the geo-bio-politics of decay as a problem of our socio-ecological present.


From Rusty Genetics To Octopussy’S Garden, Stacy Alaimo Sep 2018

From Rusty Genetics To Octopussy’S Garden, Stacy Alaimo

The Goose

Alaimo critiques the “rusty” understanding of genetics, gender, and sex in Middlesex, advocating instead for queer ecological futurism.


Mulberiddlesex, Catriona Sandilands Sep 2018

Mulberiddlesex, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

Through a careful tracing of the botanical presence of mulberry trees in Middlesex, Sandilands argues for a reading practice that takes plants seriously. Thinking with plants interrupts the tendency to consider literary plants primarily as motifs, metaphors or agents of crude naturalization. Sandilands insists on involving plants in reading Middlesex in order to take the novel in less anthropocentric directions: even as Cal enlists mulberries to signal inevitability, their own stories overflow the novel’s deterministic views of race, species, territory, and gender identity.


Border Crossings, Watery Spaces, And The (Un)Verified Self In Middlesex, Jenny Kerber Sep 2018

Border Crossings, Watery Spaces, And The (Un)Verified Self In Middlesex, Jenny Kerber

The Goose

Kerber traces the ways in which water liberates and transforms various characters in Middlesex in order to critique and complicate water’s taken-for-granted liberatory powers. Kerber invites us to consider the majority of those for whom water is as deadly as it is (possibly) emancipating, especially those most vulnerable to climate change and other ecological and violent upheavals.


Dehumanism And Disposability, Julietta Singh Sep 2018

Dehumanism And Disposability, Julietta Singh

The Goose

Singh draws our attention to the “mute objects” of Middlesex, particularly The Obscure Object’s silent Black maid, Beulah, who quietly supports the unfolding romance between Cal and The Object. Through careful attention to histories of people silenced by slavery, dehumanization, and violence, Singh demands that we consider where and through what means some get to be fully human while others are made and sustained as objects for their comfort and play.


Beyond The Biography Of A Gene, Laura J. Collins Sep 2018

Beyond The Biography Of A Gene, Laura J. Collins

The Goose

Collins approaches the ethical nuances of Cal’s intersex narrative in Middlesex, drawing comparisons with current debates in North Carolina concerning gender-normative bathroom use and trans rights, in order to advocate for more ethical practices of relation and responsibility outside of mere knowledge creation and policy.


Middlesex And The Biopolitics Of Modernist Architecture, Nicole Seymour Sep 2018

Middlesex And The Biopolitics Of Modernist Architecture, Nicole Seymour

The Goose

Highlighting the architecture of the Middlesex house of Eugenides’ novel as a major technology of modernity, Seymour argues for the biopolitical understanding of such modernist architecture and for the ways in which it often works against the exploitative effects of automation and sexology, yet constitutes a complex and even contradictory force in processes of modernization, and in the novel itself.


Introduction: Sex And The (Motor) City: Ecologies Of Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard, Catriona Sandilands Sep 2018

Introduction: Sex And The (Motor) City: Ecologies Of Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

This special cluster consists of twelve short essays, originally presented in two linked roundtables at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference in Detroit in June 2017, examining Jeffrey Eugenides' 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex. Through the novel, these papers explore the historical, intersectional, and ecological understandings of Detroit, exposing an exceptional—indeed, epic—range of social ecologies, concerned with everything from intersex and multispecies bio/geopolitics to transnational economies, to the aesthetics of architecture and decay. Focused on a very particular novel, written about a very particular city and experience of it, these papers bring to light and …


Embodied Ecologies And Metafictional Musings: The Limits Of Writing Intersex In Middlesex, Christopher Breu Sep 2018

Embodied Ecologies And Metafictional Musings: The Limits Of Writing Intersex In Middlesex, Christopher Breu

The Goose

Breu critiques the limits of the intersex narrative of Middlesex and advocates for a non-reductive, materialist, and “muddled” approach to understanding sex and gender.


The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash Aug 2018

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …


Manifestly Haraway By Donna J. Haraway, Andrew Gordon Jeffrey Feb 2017

Manifestly Haraway By Donna J. Haraway, Andrew Gordon Jeffrey

The Goose

Review of Donna J. Haraway's Manifestly Haraway.


Governmentality/Animacy/Mythology: A Biopolitical And Rhetorical Mosaic Of Hiv Stigma In A Time Of Prep-Aration, Brendan Geoffrey Aaron Hughes Jan 2017

Governmentality/Animacy/Mythology: A Biopolitical And Rhetorical Mosaic Of Hiv Stigma In A Time Of Prep-Aration, Brendan Geoffrey Aaron Hughes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since 1981, roughly 35 million people have died from the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the end stages of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), and an estimated 39 million are living with HIV today. While various factors such as poverty, lack of education, and poor access to treatment and healthcare compound the epidemic across the world, the endemic in the industrialized west faces specific communication-based challenges to slowing the spread of HIV. Now classified as a "chronic manageable condition", an HIV diagnosis is no longer the death sentence of the early outbreak in the 1980's. A major factor in the …


The Biopolitical Critique Of The Notion Of Being Human And An Affirmation Of Lives, Ramanpreet Bahra Oct 2016

The Biopolitical Critique Of The Notion Of Being Human And An Affirmation Of Lives, Ramanpreet Bahra

Sociology Major Research Papers

This major research paper (MRP) interrogates the discourse of ableism and disableism and its impact on disabled and fat bodies. The general theme of this MRP is the division of life through the dichotomy of human and non-human, and nondisabled and disabled. Humanism, overall is the benchmark from which other life forms, the animate and non-animate, are disaffirmed and looked at as being a deficit. With the use of DisCrit and Fat studies, in particular, an autoethnographic methodology will be used to situate how the writer embodies racism, ableism and sizeism and the ways theory is carried through the body. …


The Anxious Shadow Of A Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance In Fiction & Culture In The Period Of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001, Kate Adler Sep 2016

The Anxious Shadow Of A Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance In Fiction & Culture In The Period Of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001, Kate Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld stands as the framing text for this study of fiction, cultural affect, and resistance in the later part of the 1980’s – the exhausted, waning years of the Cold War – and the 1990’s, the period immediately following its collapse. DeLillo’s book is situated in the 1990’s, a period of what I term “intra-anxiety” following the Cold War and prior to the attacks of September 11th and the ensuing “War on Terror.” The Cold War had provided an organizing myth for America and American culture, absorbing and structuring anxieties and governing affect. “The Cold …


Afroreggae And Grupo Cultural Afro Reggae: A Study Of The Early Years, Sarah S. Ohmer Jan 2016

Afroreggae And Grupo Cultural Afro Reggae: A Study Of The Early Years, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

The following study of AfroReggae and Grupo Cultural Afro Reggae (GCAR) calls attention to Brazilian presence and community organizing in the field of Hip Hop studies with a long memory framework: placing AfroReggae and GCAR in a long history of Africana resistance through music in Latin America. !990s GCAR group arises when reggae and Hip Hop music had become new global forms of solidarity among urban marginalized youths worldwide, making use of old and new strategies of social healing (Fernandes 2011). A close look at lyrics from the Hip Hop fusion band and the associated nonprofit organization shape the concepts …