Abstract
This review essay critically examines Catherine Mills’s Biopolitics (2018) and Camisha Russell’s The Assisted Reproduction of Race (2018). Although distinct works, the centrality of race and reproduction provides a point of connection and an opening into reframing contemporary debates within bioethics and biopolitics. In reviewing these books together I hope to show how biopolitical theory and critical philosophy of race can be useful in looking at bioethical problems from a new perspective that open up different kinds of analyses, especially around historically embedded problems like institutional racism and the legacies of colonialism in healthcare.
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Notes
These dates mark the period between the English publication of The Will to Knowledge (1977), where Foucault initially discusses biopolitics, and the English publication of Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76 (2003) where he further elaborates on the role of biopolitics in his thought.
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I receive funding from the Australian Research Council (DE170100550)
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Mayes, C. Race, Reproduction, and Biopolitics: A Review Essay. Bioethical Inquiry 18, 99–107 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-020-10071-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-020-10071-2