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Making Live and Letting Die in COVID-19: The Biopolitics of Race, Space and Freedom

2021; Virginia Tech University Libraries; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.21061/spectra.v8i2.178

2162-8793

Ned Randolph,

Healthcare Systems and Challenges

This article applies discussions of biopolitics and rationalities by governments to "make live" and "let die" as a heuristic for the speculative sorting of bodies and their antibodies as the United States and individual states lurch toward post-COVID life. It considers how governments rationalize the elimination of certain populations in the name of improving the vitality of the dominant group. Sociologist Michel Foucault, who popularized the idea among academics in the late 1970s, called biopolitics the application of "life-producing techniques." Biopolitics operates under the prerogative of whom to "make live" and whom to "let die." Its applications in the last century have rationalized the elimination of perceived outgroups to improve the vitality of the nation-state. This article theorizes that the prerogative to "make live" and "let die" functions as a tacit rationale for negotiating pandemic life. As a cultural agent, COVID has brought into stark relief the burdens of suffering that U.S. society places on marginalized communities, particularly African Americans and Latinx populations; as well as incarcerated and otherwise detained individuals left exposed to virus spread.