The Economization of Life
Michelle 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.
Reproducing Infrastructures
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Published:April 2017
Arc II traces the experimental exuberance of data-collecting practices within U.S.-encouraged family planning projects of the 1960s through 1980s, focusing on Bangladesh as a crucial site of global neoliberal invention. This explosion of social science techniques for governing fertility became a widespread form of experimentality, that is, an experimental infrastructure for the governing of life. This experimentality strove to rearrange birth rates not only through the disbursement of contraceptives but also through practices of motivation and the rearrangement of affects and imaginaries. The exuberant infrastructures built for averting birth stood in contrast to those for averting death from diarrhea and...
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