ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which both geneticisation and integration are being resisted in some parts of the beef and sheep sectors, on the basis that genetic techniques are inappropriate for breeding animals whose meat is intended for some of the more specialist, niche marketing strategies. Discourses of progress, modernisation and rationalisation in relation to food production have become significant, and are similarly important in the case of the advancement of genetic knowledge-practices in livestock breeding. Rabinow and Rose provide a schema for understanding the functioning of relations of biopower in any particular situation. Foucault argues that, in this way, biopower accounts for humans at two different scales: as both individuals and as populations. It consists of an anatamopolitics, which focuses on the individual, their body and their subjectivity, and a biopolitics, which focuses on the dynamics of populations.
