For years critical theorists and Foucauldian biopolitical theorists have argued against the Aristotelian idea that life and politics inhabit two separate domains. In the context of receding social security systems and increasing economic inequality, within contemporary liberal democracies, life is necessarily political.

This collection brings together contributions from both established scholars and researchers working at the forefront of biopolitical theory, gendered and sexualised governance and the politics of race and migration, to better understand the central lines along which the body of the governed is produced, controlled or excluded.

Introduction: The Two Bodies of Biopolitics, Hannah Richter

Part I: The Politics of Life Beyond Foucault

Chapter 1: Foucault and the Two Approaches to Biopolitics, Marco Piasentier

Chapter 2: The Life Function: The Biopolitics of Sexuality and Race Revisited, Jemima Repo

Chapter 3: Measurement of Life: The Disciplinary Power of Racism,Hidefumi Nishiyama

Part II: Mapping Intersectional Geographies of the Body: Race, Gender, Sexuality, Economy

Chapter 4: Homo Sacer is Syrian: Movement-Images from the European Refugee Crisis, Hannah Richter

Chapter 5: The Biopolitical Economy of Guest Worker Programs, Greg Bird

Chapter 6: The Biopolitics of Donation: Gender, Labour and Motherhood in the Tissue Economy,Maria Fannin

Chapter 7: Mapping the Will for Otherwise: Towards an Intersectional Critique of the Biopolitical System of Neoliberal Governmentality,Charlie Yi Zhang

Part III: Embodied Life: Erasure, Contagion, Immunisation

Chapter 8: On the Government of Bisexual Bodies. Asylum Case Law and the Biopolitics of Bisexual Erasure, Christian Klesse

Chapter 9: A Death-Bound Subject: The Gravedigger of the Unmarked Mass Graves in Kashmir,Shubranshu Mishra

Chapter 10: Biopolicing the Crisis: Gendered and Racialised Health Threats and Neoliberal Governmentality in Greece and Beyond,Dimitra Kotouza

Chapter 11: Suffocation and the Logic of Immunopolitics,Benoît Dillet