Anti-biopolitics of Security (Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics)

Anti-biopolitics of Security: Gender-based Violence in Mexico concerns a politics of life and security in contemporary Mexico. It plots the formation of a violent event, how its deadly circulations strike the body and how the subject emerges amid these connectivities at once corporeal and material.

The book maintains that a politics of life and security takes a wrong turn when concerned only with how government extracts meaning from an event, with how it locates bodies in security technologies and with how it evaluates subjects against the requirements of rule. An anti-biopolitics of security reworks these connections. The violent event is not the basis from which to define a population, through which acceptable levels of violence and crime are deciphered. No. It is lived. Focusing on gender-based violence, Anti-biopolitics of Security maintains that the materiality of an event is what strikes the feminized body. It moves thought in a particular direction and forces a feeling into self and surroundings. The subject is the result of this liveliness. It does not emerge from official form or function, but through how it connects with the material of a violent event. An account of the formation of events, bodies and subjects: this is an anti-biopolitics of security.

Anti-biopolitics of Security: Gender-based Violence in Mexico will be of great interest to students and scholars of gender politics, biopolitical and critical security studies, and North America in particular.

R. Guy Emerson is Professor at the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla. His research focuses on violence in Latin America and the politics of life and death. He is the author of Necropolitics: Living Death in Mexico (2019).