This title provides a theoretically and methodologically new and distinct approach to gender through the frameworks of biopolitics and genealogy, theorising it as a historically specific apparatus of biopower. Through the use of a diverse mix of historical and contemporary documents, the book explores how the problematisation of intersex infant genitalia in 1950s psychiatry propelled the emergence of the gender apparatus in order to socialise sexed individuals into the ideal productive and reproductive subjects of White, middle-class postwar America.
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AbstractThis article theorizes the commodification of the recent resurgence of feminist activism through the concept of "feminist commodity activism." The focus is on the mass popularization of feminist-themed commodities, with T-shirts as a particular focus. First, I discuss how the mass marketing of feminist goods ties in with: (a) commodity feminism, by refetishizing commodities and consumption as empowering for women; (b) neoliberal feminism, through the construction of the feminist as an economic and choice-making subject; and (c) commodity activism, by entangling feminism with the discourses and practices of ethical consumption. Building on these concepts, I propose "feminist commodity activism" as a way to capture and further analyze the current commodification of feminism activism occurring at their intersection. I argue that feminist commodity activism instigates three further shifts: the commodification of the aesthetic experience of feminist street protest; the transfer of feminist activist agency to companies, charities, and entrepreneurs; and the branding of the feminist as a subject of value. Finally, the article considers the challenges that these shifts pose for feminist critique and politics.
AbstractIn many countries, compulsory sterilization is still a precondition for amending juridical sex. Drawing on feminist and queer debates on the entanglement of recognition with governmentalization, this article moves beyond a human rights frame to examine how struggles for legal gender recognition are bound up with the production and discipline of trans subjectivities, bodies, and relationships. It argues that rights and recognition may not only reinscribe regulation, but also they are a means of rendering trans subjects governable. By theorizing gender identity as a biopolitical discourse that produces trans subjects, the article genealogically examines the problematization of "gender identity" in Finnish welfare population governance practices leading up to the 2003 Finnish gender recognition law. The analysis demonstrates how the discourse of "equality" was key for producing a clearly defined trans population that could be identified, assessed, and, hence, governed. While the sterilization requirement was justified as a replacement for former castration laws which had been used by male-to-female transsexuals to access genital surgery, it also acted as a disciplinary technology to neutralize the alleged threats to normative forms of kinship that could be produced through gender recognition. Finally, the article considers points of resistance and avenues for further research.
This article argues that Judith Butler's neglect of biopolitics in her reading of Michel Foucault's work on sexuality leads her to propose a genealogy of gender ontology rather than conduct a genealogy of gender itself. Sex was not an effect of a cultural system for Foucault, but an apparatus of biopower that emerged in the eighteenth century for the administration of life. Butler, however, is interested in uncovering how something we call or identify as gender manifests itself in different times and contexts, rather than asking what relations of power made necessary the emergence of gender as a discourse. After examining the theoretical configurations underpinning Butler's engagement with Foucault's Herculine Barbin, I suggest a more biopolitically informed reading of how the material body becomes captured by the discourses of sexuality and sex. Finally, the article sets out preliminary questions with which a more strictly Foucauldian genealogy of gender might be conducted.
This article argues that gender was invented in the 1950s as a new sexual apparatus of biopower. Through a reading of mid-century sexological studies against the background of structural–functionalist and behaviorist theories of social order, it shows how gender was born in the clinic to discipline the reproduction of life in new ways. The truth of sex was no longer found in the genitals or mind, but in the contingent cognitive processes of a behavioral control system. The gender apparatus produced systematized protocols for sex reassignment surgeries for infants with ambiguous genitalia and rendered the family a panoptic institution, all to ensure that children were socialized into normative gender roles guaranteeing the continued reproduction of the life of the species. The violence of this new life-administering technology was crystallized in the pedagogical techniques employed by physicians designed to persuade their child patients to submit themselves to the normalizing care of surgeons and psychiatrists.
