Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-making

Description

A trenchant analysis of the dark side of regulatory life-making today In their seemingly relentless pursuit of life, do contemporary U.S. "biocultures"-where biomedicine extends beyond the formal institutions of the clinic, hospital, and lab to everyday cultural practices-also engage in a deadly endeavor? Challenging us to question their impl

Nadine Ehlers teaches sociology at the University of Sydney. She is author of Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection and coeditor of Subprime Health: Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine (Minnesota, 2017). Shiloh Krupar is Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where she chairs the Culture and Politics Program. She is author of Hot Spotter's Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (Minnesota, 2013).

"Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar have written a brilliant book about the Janus-faced nature of neoliberal biopolitics. Focusing on a diverse range of topics, from race-based medicine to the 'war on cancer,' they superbly show how practices and technologies aimed at fostering life in liberal democratic regimes perversely produce vulnerability, death-in-life, and even death itself."-Jonathan Xavier Inda, author of Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life "Deadly Biocultures is a highly original and innovative text which aims to shed light on the dual nature of neoliberal biopolitics."-Ethnic and Racial Studies "Deadly Biocultures offers a timely and provocative contribution to the rich literature on biopolitics from which it draws. Ehlers and Krupar provide unique examples and deep engagement with a wide array of American biocultures."-Disability Studies Quarterly