The Biopolitics Of Lifestyle

A growing sense of urgency over obesity at the national and international level has led to a proliferation of medical and non-medical interventions into the daily lives of individuals and populations. This work focuses on the biopolitical use of lifestyle to govern individual choice and secure population health from the threat of obesity. The characterization of obesity as a threat to society caused by the cumulative effect of individual lifestyles has led to the politicization of daily choices, habits and practices as potential threats. This book critically examines these unquestioned assumptions about obesity and lifestyle, and their relation to wider debates surrounding neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical regulation of populations, discipline of bodies, and the possibility of community resistance. The rationale for this book follows Michel Foucault’s approach of problematization, addressing the way lifestyle is problematized as a biopolitical domain in neoliberal societies. Mayes argues that in response to the threat of obesity, lifestyle has emerged as a network of disparate knowledges, relations and practices through which individuals are governed toward the security of the population’s health. Although a central focus is government health campaigns, this volume demonstrates that the network of lifestyle emanates from a variety of overlapping domains and disciplines, including public health, clinical medicine, media, entertainment, school programs, advertising, sociology and ethics. This book offers a timely critique of the continued interventions into the lives of individuals and communities by government agencies, private industries, medical and non-medical experts in the name of health and population security and will be of interests to students and scholars of critical international relations theory, health and bioethics and governmentality studies.

This book addresses the unprecedented convergence between the digital and the corporeal in the life sciences and turns to Foucault’s biopolitics in order to understand how life is being turned into a technological object. It examines a wide range of bioscientific knowledge practices that allow life to be known through codes that can be shared (copied), owned (claimed, and managed) and optimised (remade through codes based on standard language and biotech engineering visions). The book’s approach is captured in the title, which refers to 'the biopolitical'. The authors argue that through discussions of political theories of sovereignty and related geopolitical conceptions of nature and society, we can understand how crucially important it is that life is constantly unsettling and disrupting the established and familiar ordering of the material world and the related ways of thinking and acting politically. The biopolitical dynamics involved are conceptualised as the 'metacode of life', which refers to the shifting configurations of living materiality and the merging of conventional boundaries between the natural and artificial, the living and non-living. The result is a globalising world in which the need for an alternative has become a core part of its political and legal instability, and the authors identify a number of possible alternative platforms to understand life and the living as framed by the 'metacodes' of life. This book will appeal to scholars of science and technology studies, as well as scholars of the sociology, philosophy, and anthropology of science, who are seeking to understand social and technical heterogeneity as a characteristic of the life sciences.

Biopolitics and the ‘Obesity Epidemic’ is the first edited collection of critical perspectives on the 'obesity epidemic.' The volume provides a comprehensive discussion of current issues in the critical analysis of health, obesity and society, and the impact of obesity discourses on different individuals, social groups and institutions. Contributors from the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia provide original, accessible, and engaging chapters on issues such as the effects on individuals, families, youths and schools. The timely contributions offered by Biopolitics and the ‘Obesity Epidemic’ to this highly topical area will be of interest to a wide range of readers, including teachers, education professionals, community health and allied professionals, and academics in areas such as education, health, youth studies, social work and psychology.

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume’s contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

"A critique of Darwinian philosophy and scientism and an updating of the theory of biopolitics beyond Foucault in accordance with today's post-COVID times"--

In Gender and Biopolitics: The Changing Patterns of Womanhood in Post-2002 Turkey, Pınar Sarıgöl sheds new light on the life spheres of the woman as a means of uncovering neoliberal Islamic thinking with regard to individuals and the population. Informed by Michel Foucault's critical perspective, the governmental rationality of post-2002 Turkey's Islamic neoliberalism is examined in this volume. The tenets and merits of Islamic neoliberalism bring moral and religious practices into the discussion regarding ‘how’ the social order should be in general, and ‘how’ the ideal woman should be in particular. Islam and neoliberalism are well matched here because Islam takes society as a social body in which hierarchies and roles are divinely normalised. This book uniquely brings this point to the fore and draws attention to the interplay between the rational and moral values constituting Islamic neoliberal female subjects.

This volume explores the linkage of the life sciences with policy (biopolicy). It features two points of departure: the implications of the neurosciences for public policy; and the implications of evolutionary theory for policy-making. It includes several case studies of how these points of departure inform our knowledge of policy.

This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level. Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China’s belated integration into the capitalist world system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term "postsocialism" and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century.