Browsing by Subject "Biopolitics"
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Item Open Access Disposable Life: The Literary Imagination and the Contemporary Novel(2015) Ciobanu, CalinaThis dissertation explores how the contemporary Anglophone novel asks its readers to imagine and respond to disposable life as it emerges in our present-day biopolitical landscape. As the project frames it, disposable life is not just life that is disposed of; it is life whose disposal is routine and unremarkable, even socially and legally sanctioned for such purposes as human consumption, scientific knowledge-production, and economic and political gain. In the novels considered, disposability is tied to excess--to the "too many" who cannot be counted, much less individuated on a case-by-case basis.
This project argues that the contemporary novel forces a global readership to confront the mechanisms of devaluing life that are part of everyday existence. And while the factory-farmed animal serves as the example of disposable life par excellence, this project frames disposability as a form of normalized violence that has the power to operate across species lines to affect the human as well. Accordingly, each chapter examines the contemporary condition of disposability via a different figure of disposable life: the nonhuman (the animal in J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace), the replicated human (the clone in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go), the woman (in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy), and the postcolonial subject (the victim of industrial disaster in Indra Sinha's Animal's People and political violence in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost). Chapter by chapter, the dissertation demonstrates how the contemporary novel both exposes the logic and operations of disposability, and, by mobilizing literary techniques like intertextual play and uncanny narration, offers up a set of distinctively literary solutions to it.
The dissertation argues that the contemporary novel disrupts the workings of disposability by teaching its audience to read differently--whether, for instance, by destabilizing the reader's sense of mastery over the text or by effecting paradigm shifts in the ethical frameworks the reader brings to bear on the encounter with the literary work. Taken together, the novels discussed in this dissertation move their readership away from a sympathetic imagination based on the potential substitutability of the self for the other and toward a form of readerly engagement that insists on preserving the other's irreducible difference. Ultimately, this project argues, these modes of reading bring those so-called disposable lives, which are abjected by dominant social, economic, and political frameworks, squarely back into the realm of ethical consideration.
Item Open Access The Saviorism of Melinda Gates: Eugenics, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Perils of ‘Western’ Feminisms(2023-04-20) Alexander, AudreyIn this thesis, I aim to historically analyze and explicate long-lasting issues with philanthropic programs, specifically their health programs, by using Melinda Gates and her family planning programs at the Gates Foundation as a case study for the harms of philanthrocapitalism. Philanthrocapitslism was initially defined by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green in their book Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World (2008) as a form of philanthropy conducted through a capitalist business-model by entrepreneurs. In addition to looking at the dangers of Melinda Gates’ philanthrocapitalism, this thesis also focuses on the specific history of family planning programs and outlines its history with eugenics to show how this history continues to shape Gates’ family planning programs. I analyze examples from the Population Council, a population control organization founded by eugenicists and funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations among others. Comparing the Population Council’s eugenic research and programs to Melinda Gates’ work in the Gates Foundation, I show the throughlines between past eugenic movements and her work today. Finally, I do a close reading of Melinda Gates’ word choices in her book The Moment of Lift (2019), TedTalk, and the Gates Discovery Center, a public museum in Seattle, to dissect the saviorism underlying her philanthropic work. I connect the saviorism in her work to past and current philanthropy foundations as well as contextualizing her language choices as examples of Western feminist frameworks. Overall, this thesis shows the issues underlying Melinda Gates’ family planning programs by connecting them to past racist, imperialist programs of a similar nature.