Discoveries in biomedicine and biotechnology, especially in diagnostics, have made prevention and (self)surveillance increasingly important in the context of health practices. Frederike Offizier offers a cultural critique of the intersection between health, security and identity, and explores how the focus on risk and security changes our understanding of health and transforms our relationship to our bodies. Analyzing a wide variety of texts, from life writing to fiction, she offers a critical intervention on how this shift in the medical gaze produces new paradigms of difference and new biomedically facilitated identities: biosecurity individuals.
Price: $60.00
Pages: 294
Publisher: transcript publishing
Imprint: transcript publishing
Series: American Culture Studies
Publication Date:
23 April 2024
Trim Size: 9.45 X 6.10 in
ISBN: 9783837671452
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory, MEDICAL / General
Frederike Offizier works as a lecturer and researcher in the American studies department at Universität Potsdam, where she also completed her PhD with the project »Help Yourself, So Help You Science«. Part of her research was conducted as a fulbright scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her MA thesis »DeComposing the Self« was awarded the Hans-Jürgen-Bachorski-Preis. Her research focuses on biocultural studies, affect theory, performance studies, ecocriticism, and disaster narratives.
Frontmatter 1
Contents 7
Acknowledgements 9
Introduction: Health, Security, and Identity 11
Introduction 21
1. "We hold these truths to be self-evident": Performativity and Security in the U.S. American Cultural Archive 25
2. Science as the Arbiter of Security: The Rise of Prevention and Pre-emption 39
3. Reading the Signs: The Biosecurity Individual, Biomedicalization, and Biomedical Salvation 67
4. The Biosecurity Individual and the Drama of Biosecurity: Performance, Performativity, and Affect 79
Introduction 97
5. Writing Life - Writing Security: Alice Wexler's Mapping Faith and the Emerging Biosecurity Individual 103
6. Performing Futures: Breast Cancer, Pre-emption, and the Biosecurity Individual 139
7. Escaping Biosecurity? The Question of Security in Dying and the Possibility of Doing it Otherwise 175
8. Failed Futures: Biomedical Security and the Biosecurity Individual in Fiction 207
"Know Thyself": Self-Surveillance and Securing the Self in an Age of Digital Biocapitalism 241
Works Cited 257
