Infectious milk: issues of pathogenic certainty within ideational regimes and their biopolitical implications

Scaling Food Sovereignty: Biopolitics and the Struggle for Local Control of Farm Food in Rural Maine

“…1 Biopower extends effects across populations, in arenas such as public sanitation, the linking of smoking proscriptions to health care costs, nutrition guidelines, food regulations such as mandatory pasteurization, and many others. Recent scholarship highlights the play of biopower in and through policies and practices shaping food systems (Brooks 2005;Herring 2007;Paxson 2008;Schlosser 2008;Nally 2011;Speake 2011;Holloway and Morris 2012). This body of work highlights that the practices that constitute biopower are enacted within recognizable arenas of knowledge, authority, and power (Rabinow and Rose 2006) but says little about resistance to biopower.…”

“…Drawing on Foucault, biopolitics is understood here as struggle over the exercise of biopower, a form of power concerned centrally with population health as an object of political calculation and contestation. Foucault traced the emergence of biopower in the eighteenth century to the newfound ability to use vital statistics to document and manage human population health and, by extension, human productivity (Smart 2002;Brooks 2005;Foucault 2008;Speake 2011). Significantly, both state and nonstate actors exercise biopower, which can be traced in various institutions that "coordinate medical care, centralize information, normalize knowledge .…”

“…Thus, the regulation of food is a rich vein for the exercise of biopower and biopolitical contestation over its effects. Diverse political and economic apparatuses serve as vehicles for biopower in relation to food; recent scholarship traces the play of biopower through, for example, mandatory dairy pasteurization regimes (Paxson 2008;Speake 2011;Kurtz, Trauger, and Passidomo 2013), agricultural biotechnology (Brooks 2005;Herring 2007;Schlosser 2008;Nally 2011), and livestock breeding Morris and Holloway 2009;Holloway and Morris 2012).…”