Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Birth of Gender: Social Control, Hermaphroditism,
and the New Postwar Sexual Apparatus
Chapter 2: The Sex/Gender Split, Transsexualism, and the
Psychoanalytic Engineering of Capitalist Life
Chapter 3: Feminist Deployments of Gender
Chapter 4: The Demographic Problematization of Gender
Chapter 5: Gender Equality as Neoliberal Governmentality
Chapter 6: Feminism and Biopolitics: Complicities and
Counter-Movements
Notes
References
Index
Jemima Repo is a Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Birkbeck College, University of London.
"The Biopolitics of Gender is an illuminating and important study,
which reconfigures many taken-for-granted assumptions about the
notion of gender and its role in feminist theory as well as
politics. It is essential reading not only for feminist scholars,
but also for those engaged in the task of critiquing neoliberal
power structures." -- IBoglÃ!rka Kiss, Hungarian Journal of English
and American Studies (24.1)
"The Biopolitics of Gender offers a revolutionary overview of the
concept of gender. ... I cannot overstate the importance of such a
consideration of gender at this point in time; it is essential to
review the usefulness of gender in feminist arguments by taking
into account the background against which the term was
devised."
--Journal of Gender Studies
"[Repo's] welcome contribution offers an innovative and powerful
response to the long-standing question: 'What does Foucault have to
say to feminist theory?'"
--Feminist Review
"A work of critique as emancipatory knowledge-production, this book
carves out new openings that must be returned to, expanded upon,
deliberated, as we carry on the always precarious work of our
entanglements, strategic contingencies, the patient labor of our
diverse and unsettled inquiries in the name of unempty dreams."
--Hypatia
"Given that 'gender is not a synonym for women,' what then does it
signify? How have feminist challenges to biological determinism
become bureaucratized as capitalist biopolitics and 'state
feminisms'? In this provocative genealogical study of gender,
Jemima Repo answers these questions and challenges us to 'unlearn'
what we think we already know."
--Terrell Carver, Professor of Political Theory, University of
Bristol
"In this groundbreaking reappraisal of both Foucault and feminism,
Repo shows how gender became an apparatus for the regulation of
life processes, and gender equality policy became embedded in
governmental, bioeconomic projects to optimize population
management. Such projects have, she argues, been fortified by
feminism while also relying on disturbing differentiations between
women's reproductive worth. Boldly arguing for a provisional
suspension of 'all
theories of gender,' The Biopolitics of Gender assesses the
distribution of inequality constitutive of gender equality."
--Penelope Lisa Deutscher, Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern
University
"Gender is a useful category for feminism. However, it is also an
instrument of biopower. Gender is a double-edged sword - both
critical and normative. Jemima Repo's powerful argument elaborates
on Foucault's work to trace the genealogy of gender from the
invention of the concept in a medical context in the 1950s through
its feminist appropriation in the 1970s to contemporary neoliberal
uses of gender equality. This original and important book thus
turns the
tables around: it makes trouble in gender studies, as feminist
politics appear entangled in neoliberal biopolitics."
--Éric Fassin, Professor of Sociology, Paris 8 University
"Consistently attentive to the intersections of sexuality, race,
and class, the book will be essential reading for students of
political theory, women's studies, and queer theory."
--CHOICE
"This is a groundbreaking work. Jemima Repo has written a genealogy
of gender that upends common approaches to gender in feminism.
Throughout, Repo's arguments are scholarly and provocative, and
they left this reader unable to think about gender in the way I had
before reading the book." --Perspectives on Politics
"A genealogical approach to social science's objects and categories
helps in pushing further and partly displacing the very function of
critical discourse. In The Biopolitics of Gender, Repo fully
achieves this goal, retracing the emergence of gender theory and
showing its centrality in mechanisms of contemporary biopolitical
governmentality. Repo radically challenges the way in which gender
has been mobilized by feminists, focusing in particular on
the Anglo-American tradition, arguing that gender politics has
finally come to foster the disciplinary and normative function of
gender initiated by psychiatrists and demographers." --Society and
Space
"The importance of the questions raised, and careful attention paid
to government gender deployments, renders this book invaluable to a
vast inter-disciplinary audience. It cautions against accepting
macro-level political efforts as non-normative and "equal." More
academics, especially in the humanities and social sciences, should
consider the utility of the biopolitical framework. Repo's work may
be one of many methodological approaches, but is arguably one
of
the most robust and powerful in its theoretical breadth and
substance." - Corina Schulze, University of South Alabama
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