Technoregulatory Intersectionality: Benign Bodies in the Matrix of Containment

• In Event: Embodied Narratives of Health, Self, Care, and Knowledge

Abstract

Inspired by Casper and Carpenter (2009) and Takeshita (2011), this paper interrogates the recent deployment of two kinds of embodied technologies of containment. First, we look at the recent proliferation of Medicaid policies incentivizing the insertion of long acting reversible contraceptives (LARC) in low-income postpartum women. Second, we look at a set of old and newer laws that allow sex offenders to voluntarily elect to be surgically or chemically castrated in exchange for reduced jail time. LARC and castration are promoted in the media and policy statements using the language of empowerment, prevention, health and citizenship: the user makes a responsible choice, one that benefits them and the state. But what gets chosen, and in what sense? Whose agency is denied through technological fixes because of what those bodies have done and, importantly, what we imagine (fear) they will do? In this paper, I extend Bach’s notion of “regulatory intersectionality,” which reminds us that certain bodies are subjected to particular punitive measures of social control, to cast (Medicaid) LARC and state-incentivized castration as technoregulatory intersectionality. These “imposable” measures are empowering by way of denying agency insomuch as they produce an agency that lacks meaningful choice. In fact, the state’s investment in these technologies is a form of hyperregulation, because health promotion efforts literally reconstitute these subjects’ agency on the state’s terms. I ask: how has technology (e.g., drugs or devices) facilitated, engendered, and exacerbated this process? What are the consequences of this weaponized empowerment?

Author

• Jenny Brian, Arizona State University