26.09.2024

Biocitizenship

The term "biological citizenship" or "biocitizenship" first appeared in Life Exposed, Polish anthropologist Adriana Petryna's 2002 study of political action in Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster. In this groundbreaking work, Petryna investigates how the harmful health effects of radiation exposure led citizens to demand state reparations and also served as "the basis for social belonging and the basis for claiming citizenship." Biocitizenship, as Petryna defines it, is a "massive but selective demand for access to a form of social welfare based on medical, scientific, and legal criteria that both recognizes biological harm and compensates for it."

Since the Chernobyl disaster occurred just three years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the biological citizen went hand in glove with the emergence of democracy. Therefore, the "biological" and citizenship are dosed equally in Petrynia's analysis.

As her terminology suggests, Petryna's biological citizen is situated in a democratic society in which the citizen is bound to the state in a web of rights and obligations. The political impetus that drives her study is thus found in the failure of this relationship, especially when it results in harm to the human organism itself.

According to Marina Levina, another example where this kind of citizen-biological subject might be found is the 2014 situation in the 57 percent African-American community of Flint, Michigan, when African-Americans discovered that their drinking water supplies were contaminated with lead. After a decision by the state of Michigan requiring the community to draw its water supply from the Flint River instead of the city of Detroit's municipal water system, which proved disastrous after toxic water affected - sometimes fatally - the community's citizens, enraged Flint residents took action, and petitioned their grievances, speaking in the language of democracy.

Petryna's biological citizenry emerges out of an aggrieved citizenry wounded by collective political action. In other words, Petryna's biological citizen is not a passive individual challenged by modes of governance, but part of an active citizenry that emerges from the very biological wounds inflicted by state action.

In 2004, a more generalized theory of biological citizenship emerged in the work of sociologists Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, who have become the scholars most closely associated with the term. As the two emphasize, biological citizenship is not necessarily a new idea or practice. At the turn of the century, for example, the screening of migrants to the United States for signs of physical or mental disability - features inextricably linked to assumptions about norms of race, ethnicity, and sexuality - was motivated by rationales about their ability to work, rationales that sprang from and were supported by eugenic visions of the nation's present and future body from the dual perspectives of the biological and the social. Here biocitizenship could be seen as a direct consequence of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics articulated by Michel Foucault. If 'biopower' describes 'the number and diversity of techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations' and 'biopolitics' denotes the expansion and intensification of biopower through 'a set of mechanisms by which the basic biology - the specific characteristics of the human species become the object of a political strategy, then biocitizenship could be described as the instrumentalization of biopower, authorized by the force of biopolitics to legitimize certain actions of the state. One could thus classify actions such as mandatory vaccination programs, quarantines, and school fitness programs as examples of state-enforced biocitizenship practices aimed at constructing a normalized national body.

Following on Foucault's work on biopower, Rose and Novas argue that biocitizenship projects and practices have extended far beyond state programs and policies that discipline and govern subjects. In part, this expansion is related to a particular way of thinking about the relationship between the body and the self that they call the 'somatic individual'.

The somatic individuality designates a way of thinking about people as 'beings whose individuality is at least in part related to our interior, bodily existence and who thus experience, articulate, judge and act in the language of biomedicine. This individuality describes the rise of a biomedical understanding of the body and its role in shaping identity, both personal and political. As somatic individuals, people think of themselves as a collection of genes, tables of health risks and probabilities, habits of neural impulses, and body fat percentages. This approach to the self extends beyond personal understanding into the public sphere and political arena. Being overweight nowadays, for example, involves not only the personal relationship to body desires, to the pleasure of eating, to the needs for food and the presence of that food in space. It also implies the politicization of that relationship to the extent that that body, or rather, that imagined body within the collective social organism, is seen as a 'burden' to be borne by the taxpayer, by abstracting the expenses that the possible illnesses of the citizen would entail for the state, arising from obesity.

As Foucault repeated again and again, where there is power, there is resistance, which gives power legibility, authority and force. And so where there is biopower, there is what we might think of as bioresistance. Doctrinarians identify such examples in critiques of the "obesity epidemic" discourse that challenge the assumption that a fat body is unhealthy and use scientific and medical research to do so, in anti-vaccination movements and many such similar situations.

These examples reflect an enactment of biocitizenship through resistance to the biomedicality of the state, in which state policy risks/harms or has harmed physical bodies and citizens coalesce into anti-program movements with biomedical substrates.

Biocitizenship is a way of thinking about political belonging, recognition of agency and progress mediated by biomedicine, a new concept, but one that will become a "home" in many political and social concepts in the coming decades.

An article by Veronica Dobozi (vdobozi@stoica-asociatii.ro), Partner, STOICA & ASSOCIATES.

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