ABSTRACT
Biopolitics is a wide-ranging field of study that encompasses many different disciplines, but its common thread is understanding the connection between scientific/social interests in life and political/economic interests. This chapter examines how biopolitics explains that our current state is not only a continuation of existential human concerns, but rather a new way of policing bodies. It discusses how people are normalized and why they do not reject normalization as oppressive. Using the example of campaigns against childhood obesity, the chapter explores how norms of responsible parenting require the good health imperative as part of proper parental behavior. Visible responsible parenting takes ideological precedence over invisible reproductive labor. While desiring the health and well-being of one’s children is not necessarily culturally or historically located, the current model of responsible parenting passes over the racial disparities in parenting, health, and reproductive labor. Vogelmann uses a largely Foucauldian perspective to argue that one’s development of self increasingly occurs as a set of practices.
