Biocultures: a critical approach to mundane biomedical governance

Abstract

ABSTRACT How are we to understand and navigate the ways that biomedicine extends beyond the formal institutions of the clinic, the hospital, and lab, and is incorporated into broader social practices, from intimate embodied knowledges of the self to biosecurity rationales? We propose a return to Lennard Davis’s call (2006. ‘Life, Death, and Biocultural Literacy’. The Chronicle of Higher Education 52:18, B9) for biocultural studies, but with sharpened focus on the way biomedical logics circulate in everyday life under late liberalism. In this essay, we lay out the arena of biocultural studies as particular terrains where health and life are biopolitically governed through the lens of biomedicine and public health. We consider how this governance is inextricable from neoliberal rationalities and imperatives that demand, produce, and affirm only certain forms of subjectivity and life. Additionally, drawing on concrete illustrations from our recent work, we explore the methodology of biocultural studies that involves intertextual analysis of various kinds of cultural products, knowledges and practices; advances collaborative cross-disciplinary approaches that attend to the stratified and mundane layers of biomedical governance; promotes scalar thinking about health policies and practices, from the individual to population-level administration; and, finally, scrutinises the structural violence of biomedicine and deadly inequities produced through life-making practices.