Intrusions into the Human Body: Quarantining Disease, Restraining Bodies, and Mapping the Affective in State Discourses (original) (raw)
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Adam Academy Social Sciences Journal, 2024
The advent of the COVİD-19 pandemic saw the declaration of a state of national disaster in many countries globally, which meant that the countries were shut down with several restrictions on socioeconomic and with it some human bodily activities. The situation has brought to the fore a revived interest in the interrogation of the nexus between state power and control of the freedom of citizens. As such, the issue has also brought into focus Foucault's analysis of power in modern and postmodern societies centring on the concept of biopower/biopolitics. Considering the centrality of citizen's constitutional right to several civil liberties including the right to bodily integrity, there is a need to explore the limits of state power in the idea of biopolitics. This essay utilises desktop methods to interrogate state's power and control of citizens' bodies during and after COVİD-19 era. Ultimately, the article is an attempt to contribute to the discourse on how political theorising incorporates human embodiment.
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Yale Journal of Health Policy Law and Ethics, 2013
A book review should not use clich& like tour de force, but I can't think of another phrase that does justice to the magnificent achievement of Lawrence Gostin in these two volumes. They belong on the shelf of every reader of this Journal and indeed of everyone whose work or interests touch on the law, ethics, healthcare, and public health policy and practice. When Public Health Law' was published in 2000, it instantly became the standard-setting, comprehensive treatise on the subject. The appearance last year of Public Health Law and Ethics, 2 a companion reader designed to facilitate teaching as well as scholarship, provides a good occasion to consider this body of work as a whole and the broad significance it holds for the philosophical foundations and future directions of public health as
BEYOND THE VIRUS: There cannot be a pandemic without the State
Ambiente & Sociedade, 2020
Abstract: This paper starts with the acknowledgment of the importance of the State as an order-ing principle for the experience of the pandemic. Such a statement implies two complementary movements - although these will not be exhausted in the following pages. Firstly, it means that the notion of pandemic itself has a genealogy. It means that its emergence is the result of a histor-ical process and of specific political configurations, which are strongly associated with the con-solidation of the modern State. Second, if the treatment of the notion of a pandemic needs to be considered on the basis of its relationship with the state, an analysis of “pandemic” processes is undoubtedly a political debate. I finish by suggesting benefits of a possible approximation be-tween the notion of environmental justice and the critical principles for the analysis of the pan-demic that we are facing.
2022
Biopolitics occupies a central role in contemporary debates over new political and governance strategies around the world. Based on the Hobbesian assumption of a “mutual relation between protection and obedience” the sovereign power of modern states seems to be founded with the purpose of the preservation and protection of life. But what happens if we look at the present pandemic, whereby governments are struggling against an “invisible enemy” to pursue this end, facing at the same time the problem of keeping up with the growth that sustains the wealth of our economies? Through the discussion of four contemporary, and often antagonistic, takes on biopolitics – Foucault’s understanding of biopower; Agamben’s critique of the logic of sovereignty; Esposito’s concept of immunitas; and Mbembe’s necropolitics – the aim of my paper will be to shed light on the theoretical implications of the pandemic for the foundations of political authority and the definition of modern sovereignty.
Editor's Introduction - Pandemic Politics and Phenomenology
Puncta Special Issue, 2022
I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.-bell hooks, "Theory as Liberatory Practice" 1 I. MOTIVATIONS AND CONCERNS As the lived realities of the COVID-19 pandemic set in, academics in the humanities and social sciences quickly began interpreting and making sense of this period of transition, uncertainty, and cascading crises (Baraitser and Salisbury 2020; Bambra, Lynch, and Smith 2021; Bratton 2021). However, since the very early days of the pandemic, some commentators sought, and indeed continue to seek, pathways to our so-called "normal" pre-pandemic lives. Much of this commentary has failed to acknowledge the burden of the pre-pandemic status quo for many marginalized people, as well as foreclosing space
Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19
Open Anthropological Research, 2021
The neologism 'necrosecurity' describes the cultural idea that mass death among less grievable subjects plays an essential role in maintaining social welfare and public order. In the early months of the novel coronavirus pandemic in the United States, this perspective on the social value of death emerged in diverse contexts, particularly in claims that deaths were a necessary consequence of returning economies to normal. Necrosecurity discourse encourages audiences to perceive coronavirus fatalities as neither preventable nor exceptional, and to perceive themselves as facing little risk of infection or death. Overlooking the realities of infectious disease epidemiology, these accounts portrayed COVID-19 as a mild disease and imagined a population of robust and physically normative individuals who would survive an epidemic unscathed and ready to return to work. These appeals articulate with powerful cultural tropes of survivorship, in which statistical calculations of relative risk and life chances-ostensibly cited to inspire hope for an individual outcome-conceal a zero-sum calculus in which ill or susceptible individuals are pitted against one another. In contrast to the construct of biosecurity-the securing of collective life against risk-necrosecurity paradoxically imagines the deaths of vulnerable others as a means of managing shared existential dangers.
2020
In April 2020, thousands of protesters assembled in front of state capital buildings and governors' homes, often in violation of state stay-athome orders, calling for the end of state emergency orders put in place to combat the spread of COVID-19. 1 Much of the messaging at these protests centered on the devastating economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread use of non-essential business closures and stay-at-home orders to curtail disease transmission. In a reversal of the traditional call for states' rights, some of the protestors called into question the constitutional authority of governors enacting emergency orders in response to COVID-19, calling the action overreaching and violative of federal and state constitutions. 2 State powers to quarantine, isolate, and take other measures to protect the public health and welfare, however, are well-established. The police powers, reserved for states in the Tenth Amendment 3 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 4 give states and their governors extremely broad powers to enact "reasonable regulations"
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