ABSTRACT
There is little controversy among social scientists that the rapidly evolving biosciences and biotechnologies possess the power to fundamentally transform social relations and identities, both collective and individual, within contemporary societies. Yet this consensus raises a number of questions which are being less unanimously answered in current debates on biopolitics and biopower. How are these transformations to be adequately understood, what will their likely social, political and cultural consequences be, and what regimes of governing the implementation of the new biotechnologies and their social impacts will emerge? With regard to such questions, a number of scholars have recently, and almost simultaneously, begun to conceive of the dynamic relationships between bioscience and society in terms of an emerging new kind of citizenship, namely biological citizenship (Petryna 2002; Rose and Novas 2005; Rose 2007a; Gibbon 2007; Fitzgerald 2008; Flear 2008; Lora-Wainwright 2009; Hughes 2009) or genetic citizenship (Kerr 2003; Heath, Rapp and Taussig 2004; Schaffer, Kuczynski and Skinner 2008). In a more or less systematic way, most of these conceptual developments refer to the idea of “biosociality,” which was introduced by Paul Rabinow (1996) during the 1990s in order to denote new social identities and practices referring to human nature as culturally understood and technically re-formable (see also Rabinow 1999, 2008; Gibbon and Novas 2008).Since biological or genetic citizenship is held to indicate new forms of activism and sociality as well as new relationships between lay social actors, biomedical knowledge and scientifi c experts, it is important to explore in greater detail how these new concepts might contribute to and develop our understanding of the current government of biomedicine.
