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- Title
Animal Studies in the Era of Biopower.
- Authors
Vint, Sherryl
- Abstract
This paper considers Joan Slonczewski's "A Door into Ocean" (1986) in the light of biopolitical theory, which identifies the site of governance as the operation of power on bodies. Using Foucault's reformulation of sovereignty as shifting from the power to "let live" or "put to death" to the power to "make live" and "let die," as well as Derrida's interrogation of the common place of the animal and the sovereign outside the social contract, I argue that biopolitical theory enables us to read the ecofeminist ethics in the novel as a new kind of politics that might be called a political biology. In this way, the novel provides a model for the new configurations of subjectivity and ethics that Derrida calls for in his late work. Further, the inclusion of non-human subjects within the community imagined by the novel offers us a way to think about regimes of biopolitical governance in which we do not have to choose between animal and human welfare, but instead can conceptualize strategies of resistance that recognize their common situation as bodies subject to sovereign power.
- Subjects
DOOR Into Ocean, A (Book); SLONCZEWSKI, Joan; BIOPOLITICS (Sociobiology); ECOFEMINISM in literature
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 2010, Vol 37, Issue 3, p444
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Literary Criticism