Feral Biopolitics: Animal Bodies and/as Border Technologies

Hyaesin Yoon*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

This article explores how technological interventions into animal bodies refigure the borders of political community, in assemblage with sexuality, race, nation, and species. To this end, the article reconceptualizes “feral” as a biopolitical figure that unsettles categorical divisions such as culture/nature, domestic/wild, and belonging/exclusion. Alongside the theoretical development of “feral,” I extend the discussion to two sites: the use of long-tail macaques for bio-defense research in the post-9/11 United States (in connection to the feralization of the species in Mauritius) and the transspecies intimacy and feral violence/justice in the South Korean film Howling. This article pursues two overarching questions. First, how do such biopolitical operations implicate the biomedical and biotechnological interventions into these animals? And second, what kind of feral affects and trajectories emerge from these events at the intersections of species, race, sexuality, and nation? I argue that the feral as a biopolitical concept helps us to engage with the dynamics between the capturing biopower and the escaping bodies in the contemporary biopolitical landscape.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)135-150
Number of pages16
JournalAngelaki - Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
Volume22
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017

Keywords

  • Biopolitics
  • Border technology
  • Feral
  • Immunity
  • Transspecies

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