Neoliberal Biopolitics and Dietary “Choice”: Mapping Fungible Subject-Food Relationships

• In Event: Rethinking Neoliberalism: Concepts and Critiques

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which neoliberal biopolitics benefits from the increasing sophistication of cartographic practices in relation to the mapping and coding of flesh. In order to do this, this paper analyzes the rhizomic connections between neoliberal subject-formation and the materiality of, as well as the ideologies surrounding, food choices and eating patterns. Thus, the research question that this paper ultimately explores is: in what ways does cartography map certain spatialized eating patterns? Though critical scholarship has emerged that centers upon unearthing how geographies of health, illness, and obesity reproduce certain subjectivities, there is a dearth of contemporary multi-scalar analyses that scrutinize how biopolitics, cartography, and embodied, visceral experiences intersect and interpenetrate each other in the production of spatialized and racialized subject-food relationships— and the bodyweight stereotypes that emerge in relation to these. By actively analyzing how mapping is fundamental to biopolitics, and more specifically, to neoliberal biopolitics, this paper will demonstrate the ways in which the construction of spatialized subject-food relationships perpetuates violent processes of erasure.

Author

• Linea Lee Cutter, Virginia Tech