ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the development, practice, and applications of biocriticism for critical health communication (CHC) scholars and practitioners. After provisionally defining biocriticism as an act of critical invention that seeks to analyze the relations among biology, culture, and politics, the chapter begins by outlining two interrelated strains of biocriticism. It then offers examples of biocriticism, focusing on how scholars use biocriticism to unpack the dynamics and implications of biological discourses, contexts, artifacts, symbols, images, and assemblages with attention to power relations and subjectivities. In this way, biocriticism offers opportunities to extend CHC’s concepts, theories, audiences, and collaborators. Ultimately, the chapter maintains that biocriticism becomes particularly salient in a time of global precarity, because it can illuminate alternative ways of thinking, understanding, and being in the “age of biology.”
