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Vol. 36 No. 3 (2021) Colloquy

Necropolitics versus Biopolitics: Spatialization, White Privilege, and Visibility during a Pandemic

By Carolyn M. Rouse

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Cite As:
Rouse, Carolyn M. 2021. “Necropolitics versus Biopolitics: Spatialization, White Privilege, and Visibility during a Pandemic.” Cultural Anthropology 36, no. 3: 360–367. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.03.
https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.03

Abstract

Anthropologists have used Michel Foucault’s thesis on biopolitics to critique modern institutions. Yet while useful, biopolitics is often misapplied. The arrests, killings of unarmed Blacks by police, COVID-19 racial health inequities, and the January 6 white nationalist act of sedition made visible fault lines between a biopolitical system set up to care for whites and a necropolitical system that treats Black bodies as expendable. By critiquing the facile overuse of biopolitics and biopower, this article also speaks to what COVID-19 uncovered within the academy.

Keywords

biopolitics; necropolitics; pandemic; protests; race; United States

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