How does one inhabit the mediated body? Biopolitics and biosociality form crucial loci for exploring contemporary subjectivities, rationalities, technologies, forms of embodiment, forms of care for the “self,” and schemes of self-surveillance and self-regulation.1 Recent scholarship suggests that biopolitics and citizenship are co-constitutive: constructions of citizenship and how individuals and populations get interpellated by them shape access to health and vice versa.2 Sanitary citizenship — the ways that states read bodies and bodily practices and assess the biomedical knowledge of individuals and populations — constitutes an increasingly important site for regulating and rationalizing access to privileges of citizenship.3 Becoming a “carrier” of an infectious disease or getting designated as being “at risk” provides a sign of biopolitical pathology. Diseases that have been connected with inequality and citizenship for two centuries, such as cholera and tuberculosis, now take their place as “reemerging” maladies alongside “emerging” diseases like HIV/AIDS and “Asian bird flu.”4 Displacement of organs from poor to rich, bodies of color to white, is promoting a transnational regime of biovalue as well as transforming definitions of body, self, life, and death.5 Participation in clinical trials and access to pharmaceuticals — and biopolitical representations of pharmaceutical marketing — are now transforming categories of “risk” and biological difference into calls for inclusion, creating global markets of bodies for experimentation, and shaping practices of consumption. 6 The restructuring of Medicare around the idea of consumer choice produces a conflation of the ideas of citizen rights and consumer choice.7 In wealthy nations at least, the question is now less one of separating ill and healthy populations than the government of life itself, the intense capitalization of our efforts to maximize our corporeal existence, present and future, especially as it unfolds at the level of the molecule.8
