The Economization of Life

M. Murphy (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

232 Seiten

2017
Duke University Press (Verlag)
9780822363453 (ISBN)

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Michelle Murphy examines the ways in which efforts at population control since World War II have tied reproduction to neoliberal capitalism, showing how data collection practices have been used to quantify the value of a human life in terms of its ability to improve the nation-state's gross domestic product.

What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life, M. Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical logic: some must not be born so that others might live more prosperously. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United States and Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized “Invest in a Girl” campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice.

M. Murphy is Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Heath, and Technoscience and Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers, both also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Bottles and Curves 1
Arc 1. Phantasmagrams of Population and Economy
1. Economy as Atmosphere 17
2. Demographic Transitions 35
3. Averted Birth 47
4. Dreaming Technoscience 55
Arc II. Reproducing Infrastructures
5. Infrastructures of Counting and Affect 59
6. Continuous Incitement 73
7. Experimental Exuberance 78
8. Dying, Not Dying, Not Being Born 95
9. Experimental Otherwise 105
Arc III. Investable Life
10. Invest in a Girl 113
11. Exhausting Data 125
12. Unaligned Feeling 133
Coda. Distributed Reproduction 135
Notes 147
Bibliography 179
Index 211

Erscheinungsdatum	06.05.2017
Zusatzinfo	25 illustrations
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	340 g
Themenwelt	Naturwissenschaften
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Empirische Sozialforschung
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-13	9780822363453 / 9780822363453
Zustand	Neuware