Biopolitics, Culture, and Social Theory Review

Practice flashcards covering nature and culture, biopolitics, sovereignty, disability, power structures, and epistemological critique based on course exam review notes.

What is the difference between nature and culture?

Nature is a way to understand phenomena that is governed by cultural forms of knowledge and engagements with the world.

What is disability?

Disability is a physical or mental condition that prevents an individual from participating fully in everyday activities occurring by environmental design.

What are the three conditions of sovereignty according to Foucault?

Territory, population, and authority over life.

What are the conditions of sovereignty according to Mbembe?

Territory, population and authority over death.

What underlies all intersectional aspects of one’s identity?

Ability.

What condition is caused by wearing heels?

Plantar calcaneal spur.

What is the minimal reading required of this course?

The reading for group presentations and at least the abstracts + conclusions of all other readings.

What did medieval forms of torture hope to accomplish among its ruling population?

To encourage submission and preserve the legitimacy of the ruling class through fear.

What was the most common method of torture and why?

Public flogging, because it provided public spectacle to demonstrate power.

What is bare life?

A condition in which individuals are subject to political authority without having access to the protection of human rights.

What is a concentration camp?

A controlled space where individuals are detained and separated from the wider population coming under the absolute power of the state.

What is the state of exception?

A suspension of democratic political institutions to restore stability during periods of national crisis.

What is eugenics?

A biopolitical technique aimed at racial purity.

What is coloniality?

Long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism but survive its administrative end.

What is Aristotle’s great chain of being?

A philosophical hierarchy that classifies living and non-living organisms according to proximity with a divine entity.

What is homo sacer?

An individual who is deprived of political participation and can be killed without any legal consequences.

What is the ‘gaze’?

A form of observation and surveillance through which power operates by monitoring, classifying and regulating individuals, encouraging them to discipline and control their own behavior.

What constitutes the normal?

An arrangement of social and political life by power which assigns acceptable or ‘normal’ ranges of interaction and appropriate behavior.

Which bodies are capable of being masculine or practicing masculinist modalities?

Everyone regardless of sex and gender.

Why is knowledge political?

It claims to objectively access facts about the world thereby instating a hierarchy of knowledge based on proximity to belief and understanding of those facts, and ignores that they may be culturally mediated by inherent assumptions in the person who produced those facts.

What signifies a masculinist system of relationality?

Conquest, adventure, capture, knowledge, territorial expansion.

What is objective truth according to the biosciences critique?

A false claim of scientific and medical knowledge, particularly found in biosciences.

What do masculinist structures of knowledge believe that organizing species reveals?

Rationality created by divine order.

What does the concept of discovering something signify?

Naming the phenomenon, preserving understanding and ordering the world.

How do exteriority and interiority relate to each other in social and cultural worlds?

Exteriority and interiority are a tautological illusion and do not exist separate from each other; rather, they help order social and cultural phenomena to give our senses a way to navigate continuous and too-large-to-scale ideas and environments- a sensory coping mechanism.