38 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

have argued that the fingers of some Asian women cannot be read by these devices due to
their supposedly insufficient fingerprint ridges.

References
Amoore, Louise, and Alexandra Hall. 2009. ‘‘Taking People Apart: Digitised Dissection and the
Body at the Border.’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 444–64.
Department of Homeland Security. ‘‘Learn about Biometric Identification (US-VISIT).’’ www
.dhs.gov/how-do-i/learn-about-biometric-identification-us-visit (accessed August 28,
2013).
Gates, Kelly A. 2011. Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Sur-
veillance. New York: New York University Press.
Magnet, Shoshana Amielle. 2011. When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of
Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Pugliese, Joseph. 2007. ‘‘Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the Racialized Zero Degree of
Nonrepresentation.’’ Boundary 2 34, no. 2: 105–33.
———. 2010. Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics. New York: Routledge.
Spade, Dean. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of
Law. Cambridge, MA: South End.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399533

Biopolitics

SUSAN STRYKER

The term biopolitics dates to the early twentieth century (Lemke 2011), but it is
only in Michel Foucault’s work from the 1970s forward that the concept (some-
times denominated by him as biopower) begins to be considered a constitutive
aspect of governance within Eurocentric modernity (Foucault 1978, 1997, 2004).
Biopolitics, generally speaking, describes the calculus of costs and benefits
through which the biological capacities of a population are optimally managed
for state or state-like ends. In its Foucauldian formulation, the term refers spe-
cifically to the combination of disciplinary and excitatory practices aimed at each
and every body, which results in the somaticization by individuals of the bodily
norms and ideals that regulate the entire population to which they belong. In
Foucauldian biopolitics, the individualizing and collectivizing poles of biopower
are conjoined by the domain of sexuality, by which Foucault means reproductive

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capacity as well as modes of subjective identification, the expression of desire, and

the pursuit of erotic pleasure. Sexuality, in this double sense of the biological
reproduction of new bodies that make up the body politic as well as the ensemble
of techniques that produce individualized subjectivities available for aggregation,
supplies the capillary space of power’s circulation throughout the biopoliticized
populus.
To accept Foucault’s account of sexuality’s biopolitical function is to
encounter a lacuna in his theoretical oeuvre: the near-total absence of a gender
analysis. This is perhaps unsurprising given the anglophone roots of the gender
concept, which was developed by the psychologist John Money and his colleagues
at Johns Hopkins University in the 1950s during their research on intersexuality,
and which was only gradually making its way into the humanities and social
science departments of the English-speaking academy in the 1970s when Foucault
was delivering his first lectures on biopolitics in France (Germon 2009; Scott
1986). Yet as an account of how embodied subjects acquire behaviors and form
particularized identities and of how social organization relies upon the some-
times fixed, sometimes flexible categorization of bodies with differing biological
capacities, gender as an analytical concept is commensurable with a Foucauldian
perspective on biopolitics.
Gendering practices are inextricably enmeshed with sexuality. The identity
of the desiring subject and that of the object of desire are characterized by gender.
Gender difference undergirds the homo/hetero distinction. Gender conventions
code permissible and disallowed forms of erotic expression, and gender stereo-
typing is strongly linked with practices of bodily normativization. Gender sub-
jectivizes individuals in such a manner that socially constructed categories of
personhood typically come to be experienced as innate and ontologically given. It
is a system filled with habits and traditions, underpinned by ideological, religious,
and scientific supports that all conspire to give bodies the appearance of a natural
inevitability, when in fact embodiment is a highly contingent and reconfigurable
artifice that coordinates a particular material body with a particular biopolitical
apparatus. Approached biopolitically, gender does not pertain primarily to
questions of representation—that is, to forming correct or incorrect images of
the alignment of a signifying sex (male or female) with a signified social category
(man or woman) or psychical disposition (masculine or feminine). Gender,
rather, is an apparatus within which all bodies are taken up, which creates material
effects through bureaucratic tracking that begins with birth, ends with death, and
traverses all manner of state-issued or state-sanctioned documentation practices
in between. It is thus an integral part of the mechanism through which power
settles a given population onto a given territory through a given set of adminis-
trative structures and practices.

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 40 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

Transgender phenomena—anything that calls our attention to the con-

tingency and unnaturalness of gender normativity —appear at the margins of the
biopolitically operated-upon body, at those fleeting and variable points at which
particular bodies exceed or elude capture within the gender apparatus when they
defy the logic of the biopolitical calculus or present a case that confounds an
administrative rule or bureaucratic practice. Consequently, transgender phenom-
ena constantly flicker across the threshold of viability, simultaneously courting
danger and attracting death even as they promise life in new forms, along new
pathways.
Bodies that manifest such transgender phenomena have typically become
vulnerable to a panoply of structural oppressions and repressions; they are more
likely to be passed over for social investment and less likely to be cultivated as
useful for the body politic. They experience microaggressions that cumulatively
erode the quality of psychical life, and they also encounter major forms of vio-
lence, including deliberate killing. And yet, increasingly, some transgender sub-
jects who previously might have been marked for death now find themselves
hailed as legally recognized, protected, depathologized, rights-bearing minority
subjects within biopolitical strategies for the cultivation of life from which they
previously had been excluded, often to the point of death.
The criterion for this bifurcation of the population along the border of life
and death is race, which Foucault (1997: 254) describes as ‘‘the basic mechanism of
power.’’ Certainly, trans bodies of color (particularly if they are poor and femi-
nized) are disproportionately targeted by the death-dealing, ‘‘necropolitical’’
operations of biopower (Mbembe 2003), while bodies deemed white are more
likely to experience viability. However, Foucault critically disarticulates race and
color to enable a theorization of racism capable of doing more than pointing out
that people of color tend to suffer more than whites, and this theorization is
particularly useful for transgender studies.
Foucault (1997: 80) understands racism as an artificial biologization of
social, cultural, linguistic, or economic differences within a supposedly biologi-
cally monist population —that is, as a selective evolutionary process of ‘‘specia-
tion’’ through which new kinds of social entities that are considered biologically
distinct from one another emerge. The racism through which biopower operates
can be described as a ‘‘somatechnical assemblage’’ (Pugliese and Stryker 2009: 2–3)
that brings together a hierarchizing schema of values and preferences, sets of life-
affirming or death-making techniques that enact those values and preferences,
and a variety of phenotypic, morphological, or genitative qualities and charac-
teristics associated with individual bodies, upon which those techniques operate.
Race and racism are therefore broadly understood as the enmeshment of hierar-
chizing cultural values with hierarchized biological attributes to produce distinct

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categories of beings who are divided into those rendered vulnerable to premature
death and those nurtured to maximize their life. Race thus construed conceptually
underpins the biopolitical division not only of color from whiteness but of men
from women, of queers from straights, of abled-bodied from disabled, and of
cisgender from transgender, to the extent that a body on one side of any of these
binaries is conceptualized as biologically distinct from a body on the other side.
The caesura, or break, that race introduces into the body politic allows the
population to be segmented and selected, enhanced or eliminated, according
to biological notions of heritability, degeneracy, foreignness, differentness, or
unassimilability—all in the name of ‘‘defending’’ society and making it ‘‘pure.’’
Contemporary transgender identities, populations, and sociopolitical
movements exemplify this process of biopolitical racialization. Biopower con-
stitutes transgender as a category that it surveils, splits, and sorts in order to move
some trans bodies toward emergent possibilities for transgender normativity and
citizenship while consigning others to decreased chances for life. Recent work in
transgender studies addressing this biopolitical problematic includes Dean Spade
2011, Toby Beauchamp 2009, Aren Z. Aizura 2012, and C. Riley Snorton and Jin
Haritaworn 2013. A critical theoretical task now confronting the field is to advance
effective strategies for noncompliance and noncomplicity with the biopolitical
project itself.

Susan Stryker is associate professor of gender and women’s studies and director of the
Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona and serves as general coeditor of TSQ:
Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her most recent publication is The Transgender Studies Reader 2
(coedited with Aren Z. Aizura, 2013), winner of the 2013 Ruth Benedict Book Prize.

References
Aizura, Aren Z. 2012. ‘‘The Persistence of Transgender Travel Narratives.’’ In Transgender
Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, ed. Trystan T. Cotton, 139–56.
New York: Routledge.
Beauchamp, Toby. 2009. ‘‘Artful Concealment and Strategic Visibility: Transgender Bodies and US
State Surveillance after 9/11.’’ Surveillance and Society 6, no. 4: 356–66.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. An Introduction. Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon.
———. 1997. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. New York: St.
Martin’s.
———. 2004. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. New
York: Palgave Macmillan.
Germon, Jennifer. 2009. Gender: A Genealogy of the Concept. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. New York: New York University
Press.

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Mbembe, Achille. 2003. ‘‘Necropolitics.’’ Public Culture 15, no. 1: 11–40.

Pugliese, Joseph, and Susan Stryker. 2009. ‘‘The Somatechnics of Race and Whiteness.’’ Social
Semiotics 19, no. 1: 1–8.
Scott, Joan. 1986. ‘‘Gender: A Useful Category for Historical Analysis.’’ American Historical Review
91, no. 5: 1053–75.
Snorton, C. Riley, and Jin Haritaworn. 2013. ‘‘Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on
Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife.’’ In Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed.
Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 66–76. New York: Routledge.
Spade, Dean. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of
Law. Brooklyn, NY: South End.

DOI 10.1215/23289252-2399542

Brain Imaging

C. ARMES GAUTHIER

Brain imaging technologies aid in systematic evaluation of biological, behavioral,

and environmental systems. The methods used to conduct this research attempt to
gather data representing structures, function, or activity. The visual monitor shows
structures and activation based on how the brain interacts with the environment.
Such observations illuminate how certain parts of the brain function contingently
upon specific stimuli. The ethical stakes of studies into sexual dimorphism and
gender identity in particular are quite high in the context of state policy informed
by such research (see Fleck 1979; Fine 2010; Fausto-Sterling 1985a, 1985b).
To date, no consistent evidence of brain-based sexual dimorphism exists, in
part because there are no stable criteria that distinguish sexes reliably or concretely
(Fausto-Sterling 1985a). Despite this fact, the theory of sexual dimorphism remains
entrenched within Western culture. Experiments are designed around brain orga-
nization theory, which posits that the brain is a sexually dimorphic structure prior
to birth and lends itself to the sexual differences people experience in their lives—
which is not supported by existing data (Jordan-Young 2010: 21). Rebecca Jordan-
Young’s pivotal book on brain and sex-hormone–based gender research, ‘‘Brain-
storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences’’ (2010), aptly describes various
design and methodological problems in the studies discussed. The book explains
the language barrier across fields for defining terms of gender, sex, and sexual

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