Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2021 Mar;18(1):99-107.
doi: 10.1007/s11673-020-10071-2. Epub 2021 Jan 6.

Race, Reproduction, and Biopolitics: A Review Essay

Christopher Mayes  1
Affiliations
Review

Race, Reproduction, and Biopolitics: A Review Essay

Christopher Mayes. J Bioeth Inq. 2021 Mar.

Abstract

This review essay critically examines Catherine Mills's Biopolitics (2018) and Camisha Russell's The Assisted Reproduction of Race (2018). Although distinct works, the centrality of race and reproduction provides a point of connection and an opening into reframing contemporary debates within bioethics and biopolitics. In reviewing these books together I hope to show how biopolitical theory and critical philosophy of race can be useful in looking at bioethical problems from a new perspective that open up different kinds of analyses, especially around historically embedded problems like institutional racism and the legacies of colonialism in healthcare.

Keywords: Biopolitics; Colonialism; Critical bioethics; Eugenics; Race; Reproduction.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
    1. Anderson, W. 2002. The cultivation of whiteness: science, health and racial destiny in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
    1. Anderson, W. 2009. "From subjugated knowledge to conjugated subjects: science and globalisation, or postcolonial studies of science?" Postcolonial Studies 12 (4):389–400. - DOI
    1. Bashford, A. 2014. Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth: Columbia University Press.
    1. Bishop, J. P., and F. Jotterand. 2006. "Bioethics as biopolitics." Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (3):205–212. - DOI

LinkOut - more resources