The Process of Politicizing and Socializing our Biological Bodies

The readings for this week focused on the process through which human bodies, biological entities which are seen as the site of human morality and identity, are given their social and political meanings which transform across changing historical contexts. The human body and its innate biology becomes a site of power - in relation to the state, in relation to neighbors and in relation to international actors.

The two pieces we ready by Adriana Petryna for today, her article on Biological Citizenship and her 2013 Introduction, relate to her book about the aftermath of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine. In Biological Citizenship, she hones in on the way that the government reaction to the disaster and the politics and economics around the Zone of Exclusion were significant due to the fact that Ukraine gained legitimacy on an international scope. What is particularly interesting in this article is what Petryna frames in terms of the "state's capacity to produce and use scientific knowledge and non knowledge to maintain political order" (258). Essentially, the state of the country was unstable recovery, thus the state had the grounds to exercise more power over its citizens. The sick and suffering individuals gained legitimacy as people of this nation, thereby enabling them to claim welfare benefits from the state. Because the after effects of nuclear disaster was unknown, there was no way to measure or legitimize illness, thus those who made a claim of suffering were entitled to benefits from the state, becoming "the basis for social membership and for staking claims to citizenship" (261). The understandings of state functions and the relationships of individuals to the state are framed according to relationships with and aftereffects of the Chernobyl disaster. The 2013 Introduction emphasizes the point of "non knowledge", the constructed exceptionalism of Chernobyl and the ways in which technology and science can be ignorant of human experience. Petryna claims that science can be used to avoid the real issue facing our societies, holding us back instead of actually looking for solutions to these sorts of problems.

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality explores the way in which the human body becomes a site where the power of the state can be focused and exercised. He works his way through historical progressions of punishment - life and death, fostering life, disallowing death - and goes into a discussion of how the body is disciplined and the population regulated; thus sex itself becomes an integral focus. Foucault draws a distinction between sex and sexuality, and argues, "Sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexually organized power in its group on bodies and materiality, their faces, energies, sensations, and pleasures" (155).

Both authors argue that the body is a site of social and political influence and identity; our own biology is not a neutral or objective entity. It is shaped by historical forces, political powers, economics and new science itself - which is also subject to socialization and politicalization. I would love to talk more about suffering and victimhood as a vehicle for citizenship - does this create a type of second class (Casualties of Care - M. Ticktin)? Especially for something that is "unknown" how is disease framed and our inability to cure it? We can look at the way HIV/AIDS was and is talked about in the United States - domestically and in Africa. Also, can we use this framework to talk about women's health and the legislative battles going on around Planned Parenthood?