ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I argued that reproduction played, and continues to play, a central role in biopolitics. This claim can be understood in a number of ways. First, it may be understood to mean that as a site or locus of the biopolitical management of life, reproduction is and has been especially important. I think this is probably right, but making this point is not meant to discount other significant areas of biopolitical power that may have little to do with reproduction per se. The claim may also be taken to mean that the concept of reproduction is significantly related to the emergence of the modern episteme that provided the conditions of possibility for a new form of power, and was also integrally related to the formation of that power. This rendition of the claim is made by historians of philosophy and of the life sciences such as Susanne Lettow, Ludmilla Jordanova and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, among others. As these scholars show, the concept of reproduction was first used in the modern sense by Buffon, in 1749. Interestingly, Lettow (2014) makes the further claim that the concept of reproduction was also deeply connected to the development of ideas of race and sexual difference. Further, she argues that the emergence of these concepts was intricately related to the emergence of biopolitics as a modern phenomenon. As she writes, the ‘concern with reproduction, genealogy, and the belonging of individuals to supra-individual entities like the species, the sex or the race also contributed to the emergence of a biopolitical gaze that addressed humans as subjugated to these new biosocial entities and to a new understanding of kinship relations’ (Lettow 2014, 23). Following the broad direction of this argument, in this chapter I investigate questions to do with the biopolitical significance of race and sexual difference.
