ABSTRACT
This essay employs the concept of biopolitical power to help make sense of explicit and implicit statements that “race” is not just socially constructed but has a material basis in the biological body. A biopolitical perspective, I argue, not only attends to how race is a discourse—which is to say, an apparatus of intelligibility not reducible to any one signifier—but how race is an “ideology of ascriptive value.” Recent controversies over genetic susceptibility research demonstrate how “health” is one way in which such ideologies are manifested as it is a deeply speculative concept that connotes not just longevity but also future worth. By resituating one geneticists’ recent comments about genetic diversity as the attempt to ground the genome in an ontology of race, the essay thus brings together approaches to race, racialization, and racism from fields such as science studies, historical materialism, and biopower.
