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 implications, Deadly Biocultures shows that efforts to “make live” are accompanied by the twin operation of “let die”: they validate and enhance lives seen as economically viable, self-sustaining, productive, and oriented toward the future and optimism while reinforcing inequitable distributions of life based on race, class, gender, and dis/ability. Affirming life can obscure death, create deadly conditions, and even kill.
Deadly Biocultures examines the affirmation to hope, target, thrive, secure, and green in the respective biocultures of cancer, race-based health, fatness, aging, and the afterlife. Its chapters focus on specific practices, technologies, or techniques that ostensibly affirm life and suggest life’s inextricable links to capital but that also engender a politics of death and erasure. The authors ultimately ask: what alternative social forms and individual practices might be mapped onto or intersect with biomedicine for more equitable biofutures?
Refer to the University of Minnesota Press website. The book is also OPEN ACCESS HERE on UMP’s Manifold
“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, Department of Latina/Latino Studies, University of Illinois
“Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar lead readers through an elegant and illuminating disassembling of the power and knowledge regimes that structure contemporary life in the United States. The authors’ clear explanation of Foucault’s theories and tangible real-world examples makes this critical analysis of life under neoliberalism accessible to readers . . . They skillfully deconstruct . . . how neoliberal biomedical logics structure the kinds of relationships that are made culturally and socially available to the self, others, markets, politics and the environment.”
Kristie Serota, Public Health Sciences, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto – Reviewed in Sociology of Health & Illness (2020)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13213
“Deadly Biocultures is an excellent piece of work which offers a highly original contribution to existing debates on biomedicine and biopolitics, and the more general academic interest in the ‘biosocial.’ It brings fresh insights into highly pertinent issues relating to racialized medicine, the politics of fat and contemporary dynamics of ageing.“
Kate Reed, Ethnic and Racial Studies 44.13 (2021): 2489-2491, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2020.184976
“Deadly Biocultures appeared just months before the coronavirus that leads to Covid-19 spread across the world. The refined conceptual instrumentarium Ehlers and Krupar provide for thinking about issues of life and death under these new circumstances is extremely helpful. At the same time the pandemic and the range of responses to it not only foreground but also shed new light upon the arguments in the book.“
Matthew Hannah, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, December 2020, https://antipodeonline.org/2021/01/15/deadly-biocultures
“Ehlers and Krupar provide unique examples and deep engagement with a wide array of American biocultures, or the ‘cultural spheres where biomedicine extends beyond the formal institutions of the clinic, the hospital, the lab, and so forth and is incorporated into broader social practices and rationalities.’ Their writing expertly balances theoretical engagement with grounded explanations, making it both accessible and insightful and an obvious addition to any course syllabus delving into the relationships between life, death, discourse, and power.”
Skye Naslund, Disability Studies Quarterly 41.1 (2021), https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/7934/5900
“The core ethical motivation of the book is to ‘enhance our understanding of the ways people are positioned unequally within biomedicine and its logics’ . . . far beyond providing an account of contemporary biocultures in the United States, the rich variety of case studies in Deadly Biocultures confirms a global trend.”
Vanessa Lemm, Estudios Públicos 161 (2021): 1-8, https://estudiospublicos.cl/index.php/cep/article/view/1971
“Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-Making is perhaps best characterized as an elegy for affirmation and optimism that creates openings for more expansive forms of care that cross many registers of social suffering and for the formation of creative strategies to contest dominant regimes of health that prevailed before COVID-19.”
Nancy D. Campbell, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 112.1 (2021): 208-209, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/713796
“The book’s innovative analysis consists of thinking about neoliberalism, biomedicalization, and their related practices as intimately entangled with death-making. This opens up new ways of caring for bodies, beyond those offered by current dominant biomedical rationalities. . . . The book is wonderfully written, and proposes a clear, compelling, and provocative argument.”
Myriam Durocher, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7.1 (2021): 1-5, https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/35201
“Contemporary biopower is the central topic of Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar’s Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-Making, and the book’s engagement with biopower is so lucid that could serve as an advanced introduction to the topic for readers with limited familiarity with it, at the same time that it also contributes vitally to the scholarship in that domain. . . . With a keen ethnographic sensibility, Ehlers and Krupar examine neoliberal discourses in a broad sense: campaigns to combat cancer, to promote the drug BiDil, to manage and reuse fat, to deal with ageing and with our bodies after death. . . . Throughout their examination, the neoliberal biopolitical logics of cancer, fat, ageing, and death, race emerges as a persistent explanandum. At the same time, they urge the development of an ‘abolitionist biomedicine’ as they endeavour to ‘refuse to resecure race as the problem’ and interrogate ‘the ruins of nonfuturity that are our institutions’ (p. 68).”
Anne Pollock and Vivette García Deister, “Bleak Biopolitics and Abolitionist Aspirations: Recent Books on Race,” BioSocieties 16.4 (2021): 574-581, Special Issue “Race and Biomedicine Beyond the Lab”
**Reviewed with: Ruha Benjamin, ed., Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Techno-science, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Zimitri Erasmus, Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2017); Anthony Ryan Hatch, Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: NYU Press, 2020); Lynn Thomas, Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020)
Related Talk
4S forum on “Deadly Lifemaking” – based on the book’s conceptual framework: 2021, “Race and Deadly Lifemaking in Biomedicine,” 4S Society for Social Studies of Science, Toronto/Virtual (with Vivette García Deister, Melissa Creary, Nadine Ehlers, and Anne Pollock)