GDI 07 Disease Reps K 1

Disease Representations K
INDEX (1/2)
1NC SHELL ..................................................................................................................................................................4
1NC SHELL ..................................................................................................................................................................5
1NC SHELL ..................................................................................................................................................................6
1NC SHELL ..................................................................................................................................................................7
1NC SHELL ..................................................................................................................................................................8
***LINKS*** ...............................................................................................................................................................9
LINKAIDS (1/3)......................................................................................................................................................11
LINKAIDS (2/3)......................................................................................................................................................12
LINKAIDS (3/3)......................................................................................................................................................13
AIDS I/L / IMPACT (1/1) ........................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
LINKDISEASE (1/10) ............................................................................................................................................16
LINKDISEASE (2/10) ............................................................................................................................................17
LINKDISEASE (3/10) ............................................................................................................................................18
LINKDISEASE (4/10) ............................................................................................................................................19
LINKDISEASE (5/10) ............................................................................................................................................20
LINKDISEASE (6/10) ............................................................................................................................................21
LINKDISEASE (7/10) ............................................................................................................................................22
LINKDISEASE (8/10) ............................................................................................................................................23
LINKDISEASE (9/10) ............................................................................................................................................24
LINKDISEASE (10/10)...........................................................................................................................................25
LINKSURVEILLANCE/RACISM (1/3) ................................................................................................................26
LINKMEDICINE (1/6) ...........................................................................................................................................29
LINKMEDICINE (2/6) ...........................................................................................................................................30
LINKMEDICINE (3/6) ...........................................................................................................................................31
LINKMEDICINE (4/6) ...........................................................................................................................................32
LINKMEDICINE (5/6) ...........................................................................................................................................33
LINKMEDICINE (6/6) ...........................................................................................................................................34
LINKGENETICS (1/2)............................................................................................................................................35
LINKGENETICS (2/2)............................................................................................................................................36
LINKAFRO-PESSIMISM (1/1)..............................................................................................................................37
LINK/ IMPACTRACISM (1/1) ..............................................................................................................................38
***IMPACTS***........................................................................................................................................................39
IMPACTSDEHUMANIZATION ...........................................................................................................................40
Berube 97.................................................................................................................................................................40
IMPACTSGENOCIDE (1/4)...................................................................................................................................41
IMPACTSAFRO-PESSIMISM (1/2) ......................................................................................................................45
IMPACTSAFRO-PESSIMISM (2/2) ......................................................................................................................46
IMPACTSWAR (1/3)..............................................................................................................................................47
IMPACTSWAR (2/3).............................................................................................................................................48
IMPACTSWAR (3/3)..............................................................................................................................................49
IMPACTSBIOPOWER (1/4) ..................................................................................................................................50
IMPACTSRACISM (1/3)........................................................................................................................................54
IMPACTSRACISM (2/3)........................................................................................................................................55
IMPACTSRACISM (3/3)........................................................................................................................................56
IMPACTSIMPERIALISM (1/2) ............................................................................................................................58
IMPACTS
IMPERIALISM (2/2) ............................................................................................................................5
IMPACTS- GOVERNMENTAL DENIALISM (1/4).................................................................................................6
***QUARANTINE*** ...............................................................................................................................................6
2NC MODULE (1/1)...................................................................................................................................................6
IMPACT Ext. (1/2)......................................................................................................................................................6
IMPACT Ext. (2/2)......................................................................................................................................................6
QUARANTINE BAD
STIGMA (1/1)......................................................................................................................6
QUARANTINE BAD
ECONOMY (1/1).................................................................................................................6
QUARANTINE BAD
RACISM (1/1)......................................................................................................................6
QUARANTINE
MORE DISEASE (1/1)..................................................................................................................7
***STIGMA***..........................................................................................................................................................7
2NC MODULE (1/2)...................................................................................................................................................7
2NC Module (2/2) .......................................................................................................................................................7
Berube 97.................................................................................................................................................................74 IL
Ext. (Plan = Stigma) (1/2).......................................................................................................................................75 IL
Ext. (Plan = Stigma) (2/2).......................................................................................................................................76
IMPACT Ext. (STIGMA TURNS CASE) (1/1)..........................................................................................................77
A2: REPS SOLVE STIGMA (1/1)..............................................................................................................................78
***ALTERNATIVE*** .............................................................................................................................................79
ALTSOLVENCY (1/2) ...........................................................................................................................................80
ALTSOLVENCY (2/2) ...........................................................................................................................................81
ALTDISCOURSE SOLVENCY (1/1) ....................................................................................................................83
ALTSOLVENCY PLURALISM (1/2)....................................................................................................................84
ALTSOLVENCY PLURALISM (2/2)....................................................................................................................85
REPS/REJ KEY (1/3)..................................................................................................................................................86
REPS/REJ KEY (2/3)..................................................................................................................................................87
REPS/REJ KEY (3/3)..................................................................................................................................................88
***CASE STUFF***..................................................................................................................................................89
IMPACTSSKEPTICISM (1/1)................................................................................................................................90
IMPACTSNUMBING (1/1) ....................................................................................................................................91
***Neg Answers***....................................................................................................................................................92
AT PERM (1/3) ...........................................................................................................................................................93
AT PERM (2/3) ...........................................................................................................................................................94
AT PERM (3/3) ...........................................................................................................................................................95
*** AFF ***................................................................................................................................................................96
ALT FAILSK RE-ENTRENCHES (1/1).................................................................................................................97
PHOTOGRAPH ALT FAILS (1/4).............................................................................................................................98
PHOTOGRAPH ALT FAILS (2/4).............................................................................................................................99
PHOTOGRAPH ALT FAILS (3/4)...........................................................................................................................100
PHOTOGRAPH ALT FAILS (3/4)...........................................................................................................................101
PERMSOLVENCY (1/3) ......................................................................................................................................102
PERMSOLVENCY (2/3) ......................................................................................................................................103
PERMSOLVENCY (3/3) ......................................................................................................................................104
BIOPOWER GOOD (1/1) .........................................................................................................................................109
BIOPOWER IMPACT (1/3) ..................................................................................................................................110
BIOPOWER IMPACT (2/3) ..................................................................................................................................111
BIOPOWER IMPACT (3/3) ..................................................................................................................................112
BIOPOLITICS = EMPOWERING/HEALTH (1/2)..................................................................................................113
BIOPOLITICS = EMPOWERING/HEALTH (2/2)..................................................................................................114
AT: SECURITIZING DISEASE BAD (1/2).............................................................................................................116
AT: SECURITIZING DISEASE BAD (2/2).............................................................................................................117
DISEASE NOT SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED (1/1) ..............................................................................................119
CARE GOODBASIS FOR ETHICS (1/1) ............................................................................................................120
EXAGGERATION GOODSOLVES DISEASE (1/1) ..........................................................................................121
REPS SOLVEPOLITICAL COMMITMENT KEY(1/1)......................................................................................122
REPS SOLVE STIGMA (1/3)...................................................................................................................................123
REPS SOLVE DISEASE (1/1)..................................................................................................................................12
REPS SOLVE
DELAY BAD (1/1) ........................................................................................................................12
QUARANTINE INFEASIBLE (1/2).........................................................................................................................12
QUARANTINE INFEASIBLE (2/2).........................................................................................................................12
1NC SHELL
Disease rhetoric embodies the old imperialist nightmares of Africa, with the virus as a
metaphor for the Other which must be kept at the gates. Only western medicine together
with the proper management and control of the population can protect humanity from
extinction.
Schell 97 (Heather, Outburst! A Chilling True Story about Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social
Change Configurations - Volume 5, Number 1, Winter 1997, Assistant Prof of Writing, Muse) Although I like
the implications of Haraway's and Martin's analyses, an examination of immune system discourses is
incomplete without a complementary appraisal of the immune system's most formidable non-self: the
virus. The self/non-self dichotomy has been so extensively explored by historians and mined of its last glitter of insight
by theoreticians that we might easily be tempted to dismiss its continued operation in our everyday lives as the tailings from an abandoned
excavation. Such dismissal would be a mistake. Society still deploys binarisms in blatant disregard of decades of
sound, decisive scholarship. Debates about national and personal boundaries are unfolding within our
anxious apprehensions of an approaching viral pandemic. The virus emerges as a dangerous foreign
being: a fecund, primitive yet evolving, hungry, needy, African predator unleashed by modern travel from
the last recesses of the wild. It wants to immigrate, with or without a visa. It demands attention in the form
of resistance or capitulation. While ostensibly pondering the possible overthrow of the food chain, virus
discourse imagines the overthrow of the social order. Viruses represent social change--frightening and
enormous social change--and our drastic fear of viral epidemics is in part a reactionary response to the
possibility of such change. Virus discourse has become a covert means of negotiating identity and contact
in the increasing multiculturalism of the global village. Western ideas of the non-self, the external threat,
have not kept pace with the postmodern flexible self. The Other is still that same, tired old Other, that dark,
unknowable native lurking in that dark, unknowable continent, waiting to erode our identity and leave us
degenerated or reborn. Marlow or Tarzan, the Westerner who makes contact with the indefinable essence
of Africa has always emerged a transformed soul. The only postmodern element of virus discourse is that
now the African transformative [End Page 96] being has become a global passenger with no need for a
green card. Virus discourse is retelling old imperialist nightmares that, neutralized under cover of medical
common sense, seem to justify exclusionary practices, surveillance, and general prejudice that we would
otherwise find inexcusable as well as politically untenable. Like the Soviets in the 1980s, viruses in the
1990s have become almost reliable villains. Some now credit them as the cause of an impressive array of
hitherto orphaned ailments, from cancer to dementia. 12 The most striking evidence of viruses' current sway
over some people's imagination appears in the attenuation of the perceived menace from global warming,
nuclear holocaust, starvation, disease, and so forth, and the growing perception of viral epidemics as the only
source of danger. This is a striking change
from as recently as 1977, when officials in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, brainstorming for a convincing lie to frighten all the
locals out of the Devil's Tower area, reject an apocryphal virus epidemic in favor of a chemical spill. Simultaneously, the field
of potential victims shrinks to humanity alone. This frequently occurs in virology articles, at the levels of both syntax
and concept. For the syntax, notice how Richard Krause, senior scientific advisor at the Fogarty International Center, NIH, slips
between "viruses" and "microbes": "The light of science must be focused on those forces that propel the
emergence and migration of virus diseases. These events stem from attributes of microbes." 13 There
are many types of microbes, of which viruses are only one. In the same essay, Krause uses the term
emerging viruses interchangeably with epidemics and plagues, even though much of his discussion
focuses on bacterial diseases. Stephen Morse makes the same shift: "Officials of all kinds . . . need to be aware of the
infectious-disease implications of ecological and demographic changes. These are 'signals' for viral traffic." 14 Robert
Shope and Alfred Evans, epidemiologists at Yale, similarly alternate in an unspecified manner between
"host" and "human" in their discussion of viral evolution; at some points they are clearly discussing
other animal hosts, but that use continually bleeds into a "host" that means only "human host." 15
<CONTINUES>
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007
Scholars Lab
Disease Reps K
1NC SHELL
<CONTINUES> Joshua Lederberg offers a conceptual example of the same narrowed focus: "A few vermin aside, Homo
sapiens has undisputed dominion [End Page 97] --and we could, where we choose, even eradicate rodent and insect pests" (although
he allows that we might
suffer a bit from the pesticides); "bacterial and protozoan parasites" will soon be eliminated, too- -thus, "our only real
competitors remain the viruses." 16 Lederberg has exterminated every single living threat from the global playing field. This
anticipates the eradication of all our pests more than prematurely--even assuming that such eradication were a sensible goal--and entirely
elides the hazard that our species poses to itself. More ominously, notice how Lederberg has framed the relationship
between humans and other organic beings to include only predator-prey interactions; anything that we
cannot kill is ipso facto a competitor.
1NC SHELL
Disease securitization and governmental surveillance lead to Otherization, establishing a
racist biopolitics of exclusionultimately enabling the government to eliminate those who
constitute a threat to society. Elbe 05 (Stefan, AIDS, Security, Biopolitics, Special Issue on Health,
International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 4,
2005, pp. 403-419, Lecturer on International Relations) First, if HIV/AIDS is exclusively responded to in a
security framework, there is, strictly speaking, nothing to preclude some governments from concluding that
the most effective way of meeting this biopolitical objective of ridding their populations of the problem of
HIV/AIDS is by simply letting the infected die, rather than by providing universal treatment for them in
the way many of those securitizing HIV/AIDS would want. Although this is at present only a hypothetical
possibility (there is no documented proof that such thinking is going on), there is certainly evidence that analysts
and policymakers do not shy away from pondering whether simply letting those infected with HIV/AIDS die
could also have beneficial social consequences for the surviving population. In 1999 one former UN Population
Fund (UNFPA) official reportedly joked that AIDS would be one way of controlling population growth in Africa.
Increased mortality, the official jibed, was one of three ways of controlling population growth, thereby implying
that hypothetically letting those infected with HIV die could be beneficial for those surviving the pandemic.41
The initial reaction of one official at the National Intelligence Council in the mid-1990s, responding to an early
demand for a project analysing the security implications of AIDS, was similarly: Oh, it will be good, because
Africa is overpopulated anyway.42 These are not isolated incidents. In a report by the World Bank from 1992
one can read from an economic perspective that [i]f the only effect of the AIDS epidemic were to reduce the
population growth rate, it would increase the growth rate of per capita income in any plausible economic
model.43 More recently the president of Botswana also argued publicly that providing antiretrovirals (ARVs) to
its citizens would have the undesirable effect of keeping persons living with HIV alive longer, thus increasing the
chances of further transmission of the virus which was undesirable for the population as a whole.44 What is
striking about such sentiments is not just the sobering cost-benefit analysis they bring to bear on human
life, but more importantly the biopolitical racism they evince by pitting the interests of those living without
HIV/AIDS against those affected by the illness through implying, however erroneously, that the healthy ones
would be better off without the latter. To reiterate, these kinds of arguments appeal directly to the core
principle of biopolitical racism, namely that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as
one is a member of a race or a population.45 Especially in a context of material scarcity and competing
pressure for limited funds, there is a danger with the securitization of HIV/AIDS in that some political
leaders might conclude that in the long run the health and security of their population may be best served
by simply letting the infected die. Although diametrically opposed to the intended consequences of the
securitization of HIV/AIDS, the fact that such a (hypothetical) outcome would nevertheless be consistent with a
security approach to HIV/AIDS must surely give pause for thought in terms of framing the global response to
HIV/AIDS exclusively in the language of security. Short of this more drastic outcome, the securitization of
HIV/AIDS could also bring such biopolitical racism between the population and the infected into play in a
second way by inadvertently justifying measures both to remove persons living with HIV/AIDS from the
population, and by preventing new HIV-positive persons from other countries joining the population. Calls
for quarantining people with HIV/AIDS because of their biological characteristics, subjecting them to
various forms of violence, and attempting to bar such persons from serving in state institutions, are only a
few of the examples in which persons living with HIV/AIDS have been ostracized and even persecuted by some
states for their illness. These actions have all been justified, moreover, in the name of ensuring and enhancing
the health of populations.
1NC SHELL
The
impact makes
life meaningless
and mass
extermination
inevitablediscourse
Michel Foucault
,
Alternative:
Reject
the affirmative
Opens
space to transform
-- No other
professor
of
philosophy
at
the
college
de
france,
The
History
Of
Sexuality:
An
Introduction,
Volume
1,
1978
solution escapes the political legacy of colonialism and representations of disease imposed ,on
pg. 136-137
Africa. We solve the case best. Lund 2003 (Giuliana, University of Minnesota HEALING THE NATION: MEDICOLONIAL
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of
power. Deduction has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among
APARTHEID TO TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION, Spring, 2003) Project Muse. From at least the nineteenth century onward,
others,has
working
incite,
reinforce,
monitor,
optimize,
andstate.
organize
forces under
it: a applied
power bent
medicine
been to
seen
in the
West ascontrol,
one of the
first duties
of the
Thisthe
reasoning
has been
in
on
generating
forces,
making
them
grow,
and
ordering
them,
rather
than
one
dedicated
to
impeding
them,
South Africa as well, and the provision of medical care to local populations has often been used to legitimate
making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a
colonization despite the fact that such provisions were spotty at best and hardly offset the increased mortality
tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly.
and morbidity among Africans brought on by the introduction of new diseases through European expansion as well
This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of
as the more indirect but no less deadly spread of malnutrition and diseases of poverty. Moreover, what medicine was
the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been
made available to (or sometimes imposed on) Africans was often tied to missionary activity aimed at gaining support
since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on
for Christian methods of healing at the expense of local methods, using the technologies of civilization to
their own populations. But this formidable power of deathand this is perhaps what accounts for part of its
undermine the authority of local rulers and healers (such as the sangoma). In the twentieth century, health care
force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limitsnow presents itself as the counterpart
has also become one of the primary concessions used to co-opt the emerging black middle class (Marks and
of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply
Andersson 1989, 524). In other words, medicine has often played the role in South Africa (as elsewhere) of
it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the
handmaiden to colonialism and political palliative. Since the peaceful accession to power of the ANC in 1994,
name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone;
commentators have declared a new South Africa. Yet, while the change in leadership has enabled the nation to
entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity:
accomplish a relatively smooth transition to democracy, it would be overly hasty and optimistic to claim that
massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many
the country has entirely reinvented itself. It is never so easy to shrug off centuries of oppressive doctrine.
regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn
Transforming a society must take place on many planes, including the political, legal, material, social, and
that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out
cultural. It is not enough in the long term to change the structures of government; there must also be a concurrent
destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly
alteration in the language of government, as well as the language of everyday life. The history of the continent
informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process:
stands as a warning of the ongoing hold of cultural imperialism on independent Africa: the cultural legacy as
the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an
well as the socioeconomic legacy of colonialism lives on. Moreover, the material and the cultural are inextricably
individuals continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle that one has to be capable
intertwined, so that to truly reinvent the nation, the people must also reinvent the discourse of nation building.
of killing in order to go on livinghas become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the
existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of
a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of
therejection
ancient right
to kill;
it is becausethe
power
is situated
and
at the
level preventing
of life, the species,
Only
solves
Retaining
imagery
of the
affexercised
colonizes
reality
viablethe
race,
and
the
large-scale
phenomena
of
population.
solutions Escobar, 1995 (Arturo, associate professor of anthropology at University of Mass,
DISCOURSE AND THE STATE OF EMERGENCY FROM
Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, p.53)
Even those who opposed the prevailing capitalist strategies were obliged to couch their critique in terms of
the need for development, through concepts such as another development, participatory development,
socialist development, and the like. In short, one could criticize a given approach and propose
modifications or improvements accordingly, but the fact of development itself, and the need for it, could not
be doubted. Development had achieved the status of a certainty in the social imaginary. Indeed, it seemed
impossible to conceptualize social reality in other terms. Wherever one looked, one found the repetitive
and omnipresent reality of development: governments designing and implementing ambitious development
plans, institutions carrying out development programs in city and countryside alike, experts of all kinds
studying underdevelopment and producing theories ad nauseam. The fact that most peoples conditions not
only did not improve but deteriorated with the passing of time did not seem to bother most experts.
Reality, in sum, had been colonized by the development discourse, and those who were dissatisfied with
this state of affairs had to struggle for bits and pieces of freedom within it, in the hope that in the process a
different reality could be constructed. More recently, however, the development of new tools of analysis, in
gestation since the late 1960s but the application of which became widespread only during the 1980s, has
made possible analyses of this type of colonization of reality which seek to account for this very fact:
how certain representations become dominant and shape indelibly the ways in which reality is
imagined and acted upon. Foucaults work on the dynamics of discourse and power in the
representation of social reality, in particular, has been instrumental in unveiling the mechanisms by
which a certain order of discourse produces permissible modes of being and thinking while
disqualifying and even making others impossible.
***LINKS**
LINK AIDS
The securitization of disease extends social and political control into the population, making
increased monitoring and intervention necessary to prevent the spread of disease allowing
the government to decide who will live and who will die. Elbe 05 (Stefan, AIDS, Security, Biopolitics,
Special Issue on Health, International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 4,
2005, pp. 403-419, Lecturer on International Relations)
This biopolitical axis of biopower is extremely pertinent for understanding the deeper significance of the
ongoing securitization of AIDS, for a crucial implication of the rise of European biopolitics was that
henceforth disease would be rendered an important political and economic issue needing to be collectively
resolved as a matter of overall policy.22 If one of the goals of biopolitics is to maximize the health of
populations, then disease could no longer be left to the random fluctuations of nature, but would have
to be brought under continuous political and social control, which, according to Foucault, is precisely
what happened in eighteenth-century Europe. The eighteenth century, to be sure, did not invent health
measures as such(there are many historical precedents for this), but it prescribed new rules and above all
transposed the practice onto an explicit, concerted level of analysis such as had been previously
unknown.23 From this time onwards, the social, economic, and political problems posed by disease have
occupied an expanding place in European politics. Today such biopolitical impulses can also be found
resonating beyond the borders of Europe through practices such as the securitization of HIV/AIDS. The
latter, after all, marks nothing other than a powerful international intervention targeted directly at the
level of population. With the arrival of HIV/AIDS on the international security agenda, security is no
longer confined to defending sovereignty, territorial integrity and international law; but, as the
unprecedented Security Council meeting demonstrates, population dynamics including levels ofdisease
have now become strategically significant as well. International political actors securitizing
HIV/AIDS are effectively calling upon governments around the world to make the health and longevity
of their populations a matter of highest governmental priority echoing Foucaults earlier observation
that in a biopolitical age [t]he population now appears more as the aim of government than the power of the
ruler.24 The securitization of AIDS is also biopolitical, secondly, because of the manner in which
international actors are trying to monitor and govern the health of populations. The detailed statistical
monitoring of populations that formed such an integral component of eighteenth-century European
biopolitics is today being replicated on a global level by international agencies eager to identify and
forecast the population dynamics likely to be induced around the world by HIV/AIDS. The task of
compiling these statistics has been assigned to the World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations
Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The latter prides itself on its efforts to provide strategic information
about HIV/AIDS globally, as well as [t]racking, monitoring and evaluation of the epidemic and of
responses to it.25 Indeed, it claims to be the worlds leading resource for epidemiological data on
HIV/AIDS.26 To this end, UNAIDS also provides in a manner that recalls Englands nineteenth-century
Blue Books annual updates on the global state of the AIDS pandemic, and endeavours to keep up-to-date
information on HIV prevalence amongst adult populations for every country.27 Crucially, UNAIDS does not
restrict itself to providing data for collective populations; its surveillance techniques penetrate further
and also generate new sub-populations by singling out specific risk groups that need to be targeted
another historical hallmark of biopolitics.28 The organization thus differentiates between adult and child
populations and between urban and rural populations, and pays particularly close attention to sex workers and
drug users. Where possible, UNAIDS even gathers data on sexual behaviour, such as the median age of
first sexual intercourse and the rate of condom use, as well as a variety of other knowledge indicators.
UNAIDS, in short, produces the vital knowledge about the biological characteristics of the worlds
populations and sub-populations needed to rein in the pandemic.
LINKAIDS (1/4)
AIDS securitization allows medical intervention into the population in order to ensure the
health and productivity of society. Elbe 04 (Stefan, The Futily Of Protest, Annual ISA Convention,
Lecturer in Intl Relations)
The securitization of HIV/AIDS is biopolitical, firstly, in that it marks an international intervention targeted
directly at the level of population. With the arrival of HIV/AIDS on the international security agenda, security is
no longer confined to sovereignty and territorial integrity; population dynamics have now become
strategically significant as well. By framing the AIDS pandemic not just as a health or development issue,
international actors securitizing HIV/AIDS have effectively called upon governments around the world to
make the health and longevity of their populations a matter of highest governmental priority echoing
Foucault's earlier observation that in a biopolitical age 'Mlle population now appears more as the aim of
government than the power of the ruler.'22 Surely the health of populations has not yet overtaken, much less
matched, traditional security considerations at the international level, but they have now been placed firmly on
the international security agenda in an explicit and deliberate manner. Nor was Foucault even trying to cast
his argument in such drastic terms; in his course summary 'Security, Territory, and Population' he went to
considerable lengths to emphasize that his analysis of biopolitics did not refer to a decisive transition from a
'territorial state' to a 'population state,' but rather to 'a shift of accent and the appearance of new objectives, and
hence of new problems and new techniques.'23 The contemporary securitization of AIDS provides much
evidence that such concerns about population dynamics, and hence such a shift of accent, is now also taking
place at the level of international security. In many ways this augmentation in the international deployment of
power mirrors the earlier shift in political power that occurred in eighteenth century Europe. Foucault had
observed that prior to that century political power was exercised primarily for the purposes of defending the
sovereign and ensuring his surviva1,24 to which end the sovereign possessed the 'the right to take life or let live'.
25 The wellbeing and biological characteristics of the population inhabiting his territory was not of primary
concern to the sovereign during this period. During the eighteenth century, however, a combination of economic,
demographic, and political changes in Europe meant that this sovereign's right to inflict death was
gradually being complemented by 'the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life.' 26
Sovereigns and states evolved to become more general managers of life, focusing their energies on shaping
bodies and populations. The purpose of biopower was thus no longer to instil fear and repress populations,
but on the contrary to stimulate their size, productivity and health, to actually 'invest life through and
through.'27 This biopower has become of growing importance to Western societies over the past two centuries,
but until recently has not been articulated at the level of international security. During the Cold War the
international security agenda of states still largely conformed to the classical idea of sovereignty and power, albeit
taken to its logical limit within the context of a nuclear balance of terror between the rival superpowers.28 The
ongoing securitization of AIDS, by contrast, is evidence of how such biopolitical considerations are
beginning to complement the classical conception of power even at the highest level of international security.
Who is advocating this biopoliticisation of international security? Ironically, and despite the sharp divisions that
have emerged between national and human security practitioners, both sides are increasingly agreed that
HIV/AIDS is an important international security issue, albeit for very different reasons. Human security scholars
point out that in Africa HIV/AIDS is already the single greatest cause of death, and also has a plethora of knock-on
effects for economic, political, health, and food security. For them, HIV/AIDS is thus not merely one security
issue amongst many in Africa; it is the single most important one. From a state-centric perspective, national
security scholars too have pointed to the security dimensions of HIV/AIDS because of its disproportionately high
impact on the armed forces which in some African militaries though to experience HIV prevalence rates in
excess of thirty percent and because of the pandemic's anticipated destabilizing economic, political, and
strategic impact in countries where prevalence rates are highest. Both human and national security
practitioners thus converge on the necessity of taking the collective health of populations seriously within
the context of international security, and are trying to compel states to optimize the health of its population
through medical and political interventions. In this way both camps are also driving the ongoing
biopoliticisation of international security steadily forward.
LINKAIDS (2/4)
How we construct AIDS determines how we describe the social context in which it occurs.
Securitizing it creates areas that represent a threat to the international order, justifying
intervention. Huber 98 (Jeffrey, Social Constructs and Disease, Library Trends,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1387/is_2_47/ai_54050960/pg_1, Research Information Scientist, Research
Assistant Professor)
Social constructionists posit that reality is constructed through dynamic socialization and that the sociology
of knowledge must examine the process in which this reality construction occurs (Berger & Luckmann, 1966,
p. 1). Sociology of knowledge deals not only with empirical knowledge relative to various societies but also with
the processes by which bodies of knowledge become established as social realities. In essence, reality evolves
through continued socialization, yielding outcomes that result from social interactions, negotiations, and
power. Where the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)
are concerned, social construction of reality is grounded in the spatialization and politicization of the
pathological. The body of knowledge associated with HIV/AIDS represents a complexity not present in any
other disease. Furthermore; the epidemic has altered the model of information production and consumption
and has spawned its own vernacular, one representative of a diverse population of information producers
and consumers. Further compounding this complicated communication picture, the body of information
surrounding HIV/AIDS continues to grow at an epidemic rate, often in tandem with the numbers of reported
cases. Finally, HIV infection is not only an extremely complicated disease process, but it also transcends the
boundaries of biomedicine. Various domains shape the construction of HIV/ AIDS as chronic disease,
including the political, social, economic, legal, philosophical, psychological, religious, and spiritual
ramifications associated with the illness. The societal construct within which the body of knowledge
concerning HIV/AIDS exists mirrors the complexities of the malady and the various controversies
associated with it. This diseased body of knowledge--a body of knowledge that breathes life into the
pathological by providing it visibility--exists because of HIV/AIDS. Disease, and the respective body of
knowledge, co-exist within a social reality, a social reality that binds and circumscribes. Consequently, the
organizational schema of a controlled vocabulary designed to facilitate knowledge organization relative to
HIV/AIDS must be broad in coverage yet specific in terminology so that the multidisciplinary and
interdisciplinary nature of the epidemic is reflected. In representing the dynamic nosological record of
HIV/AIDS, the controlled vocabulary captures the societal construct circumscribing the pathological.
AIDS representations become bio-political because governments frame them as a

security issue. Elbe, 2004 [Dr. Stefan, Lecturer In International Relations, University of Essex;
http://www.stefanelbe.com/resources/ElbeISA2004Final.pdf, The Futility of Protest?-Biopower and Biopolitics
in Securization of HIV/AIDS] The securitization of HIV/AIDS is biopolitical, firstly, in that it marks an
international intervention targeted directly at the level of the population. With the arrival of HIV/AIDS
on the international security agenda, security is no longer confined to sovereignty and territorial integrity;
population dynamics have now become strategically significant as well. By framing the AIDS pandemic
not just as a health or development issue, international actors securitizing HIV/AIDS have effectively
called upon governments around the world to male health and longetivity of their populations a matter of
highest governmental priority-echoing Foucaults earlier observation that in a biopolitical age [t]he
population now appears more as the aim of the government then the power of the ruler.
LINKAIDS (3/4)
First world, third world and even scholars are seeing AIDS as a security issue.
Elbe, 2004 [Dr. Stefan, Lecturer In International Relations, University of Essex;
in Securization of HIV/AIDS] Who is advocating this biopoliticisation of international security? Ironically, and
despite the sharp divisions that have emerged between national and human security practitioners, both
sides are increasingly agreed that HIV/AIDS is an important international security issue, albeit for very
different reasons. Human security scholars point out that in Africa HIV/AIDS is already the single greatest
cause of death, and also has a plethora of knock-on effects for economic, political, health, and food security. For
them,
HIV/AIDS is thus not merely one security issue amongst many in Africa; it is the single most important
one. From a state-centric perspective, national security scholars too have pointed to the security dimensions
of HIV/AIDS because of its disproportionately high impact on the armed forces-which in some African
militaries through to experience HIV prevalence rate in excess of thirty percent-and because of the
pandemics anticipated destabilizing economic, political, and strategic impact in countries where prevalence
rates are highest.
LINKAIDS (4/4)
The Securitization of AIDS threatens to create a bio-politics of exclusion, enabling the
government to decide who gets to live and who can be left to die. Elbe 05 (Stefan, AIDS,
Security, Biopolitics, Special Issue on Health, International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 4,
2005, pp. 403-419, Lecturer on International Relations) First, if HIV/AIDS is exclusively responded to in a
security framework, there is, strictly speaking, nothing to preclude some governments from concluding that
the most effective way of meeting this biopolitical objective of ridding their populations of the problem of
HIV/AIDS is by simply letting the infected die, rather than by providing universal treatment for them in
the way many of those securitizing HIV/AIDS would want. Although this is at present only a hypothetical
possibility (there is no documented proof that such thinking is going on), there is certainly evidence that
analysts and policymakers do not shy away from pondering whether simply letting those infected with
HIV/AIDS die could also have beneficial social consequences for the surviving population. In 1999 one
former UN Population Fund (UNFPA) official reportedly joked that AIDS would be one way of controlling
population growth in Africa. Increased mortality, the official jibed, was one of three ways of controlling
population growth, thereby implying that hypothetically letting those infected with HIV die could be beneficial
for those surviving the pandemic.41 The initial reaction of one official at the National Intelligence Council in the
mid-1990s, responding to an early demand for a project analysing the security implications of AIDS, was
similarly: Oh, it will be good, because Africa is overpopulated anyway.42 These are not isolated incidents.
In a report by the World Bank from 1992 one can read from an economic perspective that [i]f the only effect of
the AIDS epidemic were to reduce the population growth rate, it would increase the growth rate of per capita
income in any plausible economic model.43 More recently the president of Botswana also argued publicly that
providing antiretrovirals (ARVs) to its citizens would have the undesirable effect of keeping persons living with
HIV alive longer, thus increasing the chances of further transmission of the virus which was undesirable for the
population as a whole.44 What is striking about such sentiments is not just the sobering cost-benefit
analysis they bring to bear on human life, but more importantly the biopolitical racism they evince by
pitting the interests of those living without HIV/AIDS against those affected by the illness through
implying, however erroneously, that the healthy ones would be better off without the latter. To reiterate,
these kinds of arguments appeal directly to the core principle of biopolitical racism, namely that the death
of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population.45
Especially in a context of material scarcity and competing pressure for limited funds, there is a danger
with the securitization of HIV/AIDS in that some political leaders might conclude that in the long run the
health and security of their population may be best served by simply letting the infected die. Although
diametrically opposed to the intended consequences of the securitization of HIV/AIDS, the fact that such a
(hypothetical) outcome would nevertheless be consistent with a security approach to HIV/AIDS must surely give
pause for thought in terms of framing the global response to HIV/AIDS exclusively in the language of security.
Short of this more drastic outcome, the securitization of HIV/AIDS could also bring such biopolitical
racism between the population and the infected into play in a second way by inadvertently justifying
measures both to remove persons living with HIV/AIDS from the population, and by preventing new HIVpositive persons from other countries joining the population. Calls for quarantining people with HIV/AIDS
because of their biological characteristics, subjecting them to various forms of violence, and attempting to
bar such persons from serving in state institutions, are only a few of the examples in which persons living
with HIV/AIDS have been ostracized and even persecuted by some states for their illness. These actions
have all been justified, moreover, in the name of ensuring and enhancing the health of populations.
LINKAVIAN FLU (1/1)

The avian flu is just another example of a cultural politics of fear that makes violence
against the other inevitable George et al in 2005 (LIANNE, MACLEANS, 10/3/2005, Vol.
118 Issue 40, p46-52)
FOR NOW, though,
it all remains hypothetical. In his new book, The Politics of Fear, U.K. sociologist Frank
Furedi suggests that the more secure a society is in terms of health, wealth and political stability -the
more likely it is to fixate on theoretical menaces. In turn, the more obsessed we become with keeping
safe, "the more insecure we become," he says, "because safety becomes this elusive quest you never
achieve. Even if you never leave the house, you can always slip in the bathtub." In life, there is much to fear
(even fear itself!), and a certain amount of paranoia is necessary for survival since it compels us to
implement reasonable precautions, like condoms and bicycle helmets. But what Furedi is describing is a
culture plagued by free-floating anxiety, exacerbated by the dramatic and devastating news events of our
time: tsunamis, hurricanes, 9/11. It's not that we're more afraid now than we used to be; it's that the things we
fear are less tangible, and the fear itself more diffuse and promiscuous. It will affix itself to global terrorism
or earthquakes one day, killer bees the next. And when people feel a sense of general insecurity, says York
University sociology professor Donald Carveth, their natural response is to try to identify the source, to give
the enemy a face and a name, and exert whatever measures of control they can over it. "To feel threatened by
vague, abstract forces -- that's terrifying," he says. "When you've got an enemy, no matter how powerful he
is, once he's been identified, you can get him in the sights of your guns." Hence avian flu -- the latest menace
we can take precautions against in our efforts to feel protected.
LINKDISEASE (1/10)
metaphor for the Other which must be kept at the gates. Only western medicine together
with the proper management and control of the population can protect humanity from
extinction.
Schell 97 (Heather, Outburst! A Chilling True Story about Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social
Change Configurations - Volume 5, Number 1, Winter 1997, Assistant Prof of Writing, Muse) Although I like
the implications of Haraway's and Martin's analyses, an examination of immune system discourses is
incomplete without a complementary appraisal of the immune system's most formidable non-self: the
virus. The self/non-self dichotomy has been so extensively explored by historians and mined of its last glitter of insight
by theoreticians that we might easily be tempted to dismiss its continued operation in our everyday lives as the tailings from an abandoned
excavation. Such dismissal would be a mistake. Society still deploys binarisms in blatant disregard of decades of
sound, decisive scholarship. Debates about national and personal boundaries are unfolding within our
anxious apprehensions of an approaching viral pandemic. The virus emerges as a dangerous foreign
being: a fecund, primitive yet evolving, hungry, needy, African predator unleashed by modern travel from
the last recesses of the wild. It wants to immigrate, with or without a visa. It demands attention in the form
of resistance or capitulation. While ostensibly pondering the possible overthrow of the food chain, virus
discourse imagines the overthrow of the social order. Viruses represent social change--frightening and
enormous social change--and our drastic fear of viral epidemics is in part a reactionary response to the
possibility of such change. Virus discourse has become a covert means of negotiating identity and contact
in the increasing multiculturalism of the global village. Western ideas of the non-self, the external threat,
have not kept pace with the postmodern flexible self. The Other is still that same, tired old Other, that dark,
unknowable native lurking in that dark, unknowable continent, waiting to erode our identity and leave us
degenerated or reborn. Marlow or Tarzan, the Westerner who makes contact with the indefinable essence
of Africa has always emerged a transformed soul. The only postmodern element of virus discourse is that
now the African transformative [End Page 96] being has become a global passenger with no need for a
green card. Virus discourse is retelling old imperialist nightmares that, neutralized under cover of medical
common sense, seem to justify exclusionary practices, surveillance, and general prejudice that we would
otherwise find inexcusable as well as politically untenable. Like the Soviets in the 1980s, viruses in the
1990s have become almost reliable villains. Some now credit them as the cause of an impressive array of
hitherto orphaned ailments, from cancer to dementia. 12 The most striking evidence of viruses' current sway
over some people's imagination appears in the attenuation of the perceived menace from global warming,
nuclear holocaust, starvation, disease, and so forth, and the growing perception of viral epidemics as the only
source of danger. This is a striking change
from as recently as 1977, when officials in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, brainstorming for a convincing lie to frighten all the
locals out of the Devil's Tower area, reject an apocryphal virus epidemic in favor of a chemical spill. Simultaneously, the field
of potential victims shrinks to humanity alone. This frequently occurs in virology articles, at the levels of both syntax
and concept. For the syntax, notice how Richard Krause, senior scientific advisor at the Fogarty International Center, NIH, slips
between "viruses" and "microbes": "The light of science must be focused on those forces that propel the
emergence and migration of virus diseases. These events stem from attributes of microbes." 13 There
are many types of microbes, of which viruses are only one. In the same essay, Krause uses the term
emerging viruses interchangeably with epidemics and plagues, even though much of his discussion
focuses on bacterial diseases. Stephen Morse makes the same shift: "Officials of all kinds . . . need to be aware of the
infectious-disease implications of ecological and demographic changes. These are 'signals' for viral traffic." 14 Robert
Shope and Alfred Evans, epidemiologists at Yale, similarly alternate in an unspecified manner between
"host" and "human" in their discussion of viral evolution; at some points they are clearly discussing
other animal hosts, but that use continually bleeds into a "host" that means only "human host." 15
LINKDISEASE (2/10)
Joshua Lederberg offers a conceptual example of the same narrowed focus: "A few vermin aside, Homo
sapiens has undisputed dominion [End Page 97] --and we could, where we choose, even eradicate rodent and
insect pests" (although he allows that we might suffer a bit from the pesticides); "bacterial and protozoan
parasites" will soon be eliminated, too--thus, "our only real competitors remain the viruses." 16 Lederberg
has exterminated every single living threat from the global playing field. This anticipates the eradication of all
our pests more than prematurely--even assuming that such eradication were a sensible goal-and entirely elides
the hazard that our species poses to itself. More ominously, notice how Lederberg has framed the
relationship between humans and other organic beings to include only predator-prey interactions;
anything that we cannot kill is ipso facto a competitor.
LINKDISEASE (3/10)
Representations of disease allow the government to exert imperialist and disciplinary
power, using medicine as a means of manipulation of African people. Lund 2003 (Giuliana,
University of Minnesota HEALING THE NATION: MEDICOLONIAL DISCOURSE AND THE STATE OF
EMERGENCY FROM APARTHEID TO TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION, Spring, 2003) Project Muse. Africa
has long been associated in the imperialist imagination with disease and death. In the nineteenth century, the
continent was commonly referred to as the white mans grave. The civilizing mission was thus conceived,
from the West, as a healing mission. Among the European explorers who laid the groundwork for imperialist
expansion were numerous doctors, the most prominent of whom was Livingstone. As healers, missionaries in
Africa viewed themselves as the harbingers not only of spiritual enlightenment, but also of material progress.
Medicine was thought to serve both goals because in addition to saving lives and alleviating suffering it would
attract followers to the missions and contribute to the prestige of Western culture at the expense of local
culture. James Stewart, a typical disciple of Livingstone, used this union of medical and spiritual work to combat
indigenous healing practice, one of the mightiest and most malignant of influences in Africa.1 Eventually,
medicine became a means of controlling African bodies and minds and thus an instrument of imperialism
(Comaroff 1993). With the advent of germ theory in the latter part of the nineteenth century, hygiene became a
paramount public interest. Cleanliness of mind and body were increasingly inseparable in public discourse, and
dirt of any kind was thought to be morally as well as physically corrupting. John Ross, the son of a Scottish
missionary, exemplified the attitude that cleanliness was next to godliness when he wrote the following in a
pamphlet of 1887: People must be taught that attention to public health is a moral duty, that cleanliness,
avoidance of excess, and health preservation go hand in hand with mental and moral training, and that
morality consists as much in a hearty submission to the precepts of health as to the observations of creed
(Heyningen 1989, 457).
Disease securitization constructs the disruptive Other that threatens the stability of
civilization. Only the careful surveillance of its spread and the proper management of the
population can protect and make us safe.
Heather 97 (Schell, Outburst! A Chilling True Story about Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social Change Configurations - Volume
5, Number 1, Winter 1997, Ph.D. Candidate in Modern Thought and Literature, Muse) Being immobile pathogens, viruses need a
host to bring them inside. The hosts implicated in the virus texts I examine are invariably outsiders
themselves, usually socially disruptive elements. Llewellyn Legters, who helped organize the "hypothetical
global epidemic emergency" I mentioned earlier, creates one of the most suggestive images of a marginalized,
infected traveler: " 'We' go there, 'they' come here, increasing the risk to United States citizens of exposure
to tropical infectious diseases." 52 "We" and "they" carry strong (if unspecified) racial overtones in this
instance; in other contexts they [End Page 106] suggest membership in sexual, gendered, economic, and
most especially national categories. I will address these different implications as they rear their ugly little
heads in my examples. In the meantime, the most important element of "us" and "them" lies in their
flexible relationship, defined primarily by perceived hygiene and infection. "We" are, above all, the
readers, the ones whose survival ultimately matters. "They" are the ones who probably will not survive,
and whose infectious resistance to dying in anonymous isolation endangers the rest of us. 53 The film
Outbreak offers a good example of the perceived cause of epidemics. No accident, the fictional Ebola
epidemic was instigated by negligence, disobedience, and intentional irresponsibility, if not outright
immorality. The infected monkey would have been detained at a quarantine facility had two employees
not disobeyed regulations--in fact, the employee who first steals the monkey and later abandons it actually has
difficulty convincing the monkey to leave its cage and flee. An anti-Ebola vaccine would have been available
years before had it not been for the draconian covert decision of several military officials; the vaccine might still
have been developed speedily had these officials not attempted to conceal their past wrongdoing. Conceivably,
the virologist protagonists might have ended the epidemic sooner with teamwork, but this was hampered by
their divorce. 54 Every stage of Ebola's spread entails deliberate human action.
LINKDISEASE (4/10)
Our knowledge of disease is intricately tied to the body of knowledge that contains it. That
means that the body of knowledge is the target of the same medical intervention as the
disease itself. Huber 98 (Jeffrey, Social Constructs and Disease, Library Trends,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1387/is_2_47/ai_54050960/pg_1, Research Information Scientist, Research
Assistant Professor)
Bodies of knowledge are bound by societal norms, policies, and processes, and scientific discoveries, social
interactions, and personal beliefs are recorded within the containers of information that support those
bodies of knowledge. Information and society are indelibly linked, as are pathology-specific bodies of
knowledge and the diseases they represent. There is an integral relationship between a disease and the
body of knowledge concerning that disease. In reality, one does not occur without the other. In order for a
body of knowledge about a pathological condition to develop, the disease must exist and have been discovered.
The body of knowledge concerning a disease, then, is generated to define and describe the malady, classify
the pathological, and provide discourse regarding affected individuals. In return, this pool of knowledge
breathes life into the pathological, providing it visibility. Without a representative body of knowledge, the
disease remains invisible. Information concerning a disease, however, is bound by the life of that pathological
condition and is circumscribed by any stigma associated with that illness. The body of knowledge is riddled with
the same complexities as the malady itself, yielding a diseased body of knowledge where HIV and AIDS are
concerned. Mirroring the complex nature of the epidemic and the controversies associated with the
disease, the body of knowledge regarding the pandemic is circumscribed by the same societal construct as
the pathological itself (Huber, 1996, p. 33).
Public health care uses representations of disease and disciplinary power in order to enable the
government to organize and manipulate bodies and minds in Africa ultimately hindering
efforts to destroy epidemic and disease. Lund 2003 (Giuliana, University of Minnesota HEALING THE
NATION: MEDICOLONIAL DISCOURSE
AND THE STATE OF EMERGENCY FROM APARTHEID TO TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION, Spring,
2003) Project Muse.
Epidemic outbreaks facilitate the extension of state powers into new realms by justifying intrusive
regulations and policing of social boundaries. As Michel Foucault points out, the plague city, with its cordon
sanitaire, its institutions for the care and disposal of bodies, its control over the movement of peoples and
goods, and its seizure and destruction of property, becomes, paradoxically, the utopia of the perfectly
governed city:
This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in
which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded . . . constitutes a compact model of
the disciplinary mechanism. . . . Against the plague, which is mixture, discipline brings into play its power . . .
the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life. . . . The plague as a form, at once
real and imaginary, of disorder had its medical and political correlative discipline. (1979, 197) In South
Africa, as in Europe, plague set a precedent for an expanded state with increased power over bodies and
property, legitimated in the name of public welfare. However, while the state organized the fight against
disease, it accepted no culpability for its initial appearance or spreadindeed, such an apportionment of
blame might spark a revolution. The refusal to hold policy makers accountable hinders efforts to control
epidemics. The consequences of eschewing communal responsibility are especially dire when plague is used
as a metaphor for a crisis that is actually social rather than biological in nature.
LINKDISEASE (5/10)
Disease securitization constructs the disruptive Other that threatens the stability of
civilization. Only the careful surveillance of its spread and the proper management of the
population can protect and make us safe. Heather 97 (Schell, Outburst! A Chilling True Story about
Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social
Change Configurations -Volume 5, Number 1, Winter 1997, Ph.D. Candidate in Modern Thought and Literature,
Muse) Being immobile pathogens, viruses need a host to bring them inside. The hosts implicated in the
virus texts I examine are invariably outsiders themselves, usually socially disruptive elements. Llewellyn
Legters, who helped organize the "hypothetical global epidemic emergency" I mentioned earlier, creates one of
the most suggestive images of a marginalized, infected traveler: " 'We' go there, 'they' come here, increasing
the risk to United States citizens of exposure to tropical infectious diseases." 52 "We" and "they" carry
strong (if unspecified) racial overtones in this instance; in other contexts they [End Page 106] suggest
membership in sexual, gendered, economic, and most especially national categories. I will address these
different implications as they rear their ugly little heads in my examples. In the meantime, the most important
element of "us" and "them" lies in their flexible relationship, defined primarily by perceived hygiene and
infection. "We" are, above all, the readers, the ones whose survival ultimately matters. "They" are the
ones who probably will not survive, and whose infectious resistance to dying in anonymous isolation
endangers the rest of us. 53 The film Outbreak offers a good example of the perceived cause of epidemics.
No accident, the fictional Ebola epidemic was instigated by negligence, disobedience, and intentional
irresponsibility, if not outright immorality. The infected monkey would have been detained at a
quarantine facility had two employees not disobeyed regulations--in fact, the employee who first steals the
monkey and later abandons it actually has difficulty convincing the monkey to leave its cage and flee. An antiEbola vaccine would have been available years before had it not been for the draconian covert decision of
several military officials; the vaccine might still have been developed speedily had these officials not attempted
to conceal their past wrongdoing. Conceivably, the virologist protagonists might have ended the epidemic sooner
with teamwork, but this was hampered by their divorce. 54 Every stage of Ebola's spread entails deliberate
human action. A similar origin of intentional spread by renegade social elements appears in the film Twelve
Monkeys, Robin Cook's novel Outbreak and the NBC film version, Robin Cook's "Virus," Octavia Butler's SF
novel Clay's Ark, Greg Egan's SF story "The Moral Virologist," and Storm Constantine's SF Wraeththu series. 55
In Nicola Griffith's SF [End Page 107] novel Ammonite, we learn that the first colonists of the planet had been
"adept bioengineers," which suggests that the lethal virus was possibly the product of genetic engineering. 56
The film Outbreak resolves with the couple reunited, one dishonest military official ousted, the other repentant,
and all the disobedient employees and quarantine breakers dead. Our established protocols and science are
effective, the film suggests, and viruses can contact us only if we break the rules--and even in this event, a
return to the status quo restores our safety.
LINKDISEASE (6/10)
The term virus illustrates the way in which discourse has the potential to create the idea of
the outsiderultimately allowing the government to exclude those who are infected by the
virus. Schell, 97 [Heather, PhD, Stanford University, MA, Georgetown University, BSFS, Georgetown University,
Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University; She is currently teaching Women's Studies and
English at Miami University. Outburst! A Chilling True Story about Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic
Social Change] The United States has become infected with virus metaphors. Authors compare destructive
computer programs, non-normative sexual behaviors, illegal drug use, gangs, overpopulation,
governmental economic intervention, 5 and even unequal personal relationships 6 to viruses to convey the
idea of danger efficiently. Lethal new viruses have become a hot topic for science best-sellers, medical research,
action movies, and science fiction. The recent slew of popular science writing on viruses includes Laurie Garrett's
Coming Plague, Peter Radetsky's Invisible Invaders: Viruses and the Scientists Who Pursue Them, and Richard
Preston's Hot Zone, as well as numerous articles in both natural science and general interest magazines. 7
Virology has been a medical subspecialty for half a century, but now "emerging" viruses have attained a certain
chic among the medical set, meriting their own conferences and edited volumes in the years since the recognition
of AIDS; in addition, articles by emerging-virus specialists appear in refereed, general science journals like
Nature and Science. 8 On the big screen, virus thrillers like Outbreak and Twelve Monkeys [End Page 94] have
attracted major stars and large audiences. 9 Should the choice of topic itself not imply sufficiently that viruses
matter, the authors almost invariably assert the momentous relevance of viruses to the present time; as Ann
Giudici Fettner assures us in Viruses: Agents of Change, "Today is the day of the virus." 10 I would like to
examine the significance of our current fascination with viruses within the context of the work on immune
system discourses by feminist science studies scholars Donna Haraway and Emily Martin. Both Haraway's
"Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse" and Martin's Flexible
Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture argue that immune system discourse reflects changing ideas
about the qualities that comprise identity and selfhood. 11 In addition, they probe the depictions of the
immune system's relationship with the non-self. Critical evaluations of the criteria for self and non-self have
long been an important and necessary component of feminist analysis, not least because Western women were
frequently shunted into that non-self category. The developing global consciousness of Western feminism in the
past decades has also led feminist scholars increasingly to consider the status of others classified politically,
socially, and even biologically as outsiders on the basis of race, ethnicity, sexual practice, class, and so forth. This
growing awareness reflects not simply general humanitarian concerns but also the realization that our destinies
are intertwined in a symbiotic manner, not in a free market structure where only the "fittest" survive. Applying
natural selection to social groups turned out to be a trick to divide and conquer us, since the lucky few to succeed
turned out to be even fewer than we had been promised. Many feminist scholars have also built on the
poststructuralist insight that self/non-self distinctions are socially [End Page 95] constructed ways of making
sense of the world; while such distinctions are therefore deeply permeated by existing power relations, they are
also subject to change. Working from this historical position, Haraway and Martin carefully examine new
discourses on identity to see who or what gets targeted as outsiders, non-selves. Though they both
recognize potential danger in the practices of some scientists and journalists, whose use of military
metaphors for understanding the immune system perpetuates outdated, aggressive, Cold War mindsets,
these scholars see signs of hope in alternate interpretations of the immune system. Martin and Haraway offer
examples of some scientists, SF writers, and nonexperts who have begun to perceive the immune system-and, by
extension, our own interaction with the world--in ways that accommodate multiplicity, situated knowledges, and
multivocal communication.
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The virus discourse represents how we think of the foreigner as dirty, primitive, and these
assumptions make us more imperialist, elitist, and racist. Schell, 97 [Heather, PhD, Stanford
University, MA, Georgetown University, BSFS, Georgetown University,
Social Change]
Although I like the implications of Haraway's and Martin's analyses, an examination of immune system
discourses is incomplete without a complementary appraisal of the immune system's most
formidable non-self: the virus. The self/non-self dichotomy has been so extensively explored by
historians and mined of its last glitter of insight by theoreticians that we might easily be tempted to dismiss
its continued operation in our everyday lives as the tailings from an abandoned excavation. Such dismissal
would be a mistake. Society still deploys binarisms in blatant disregard of decades of sound, decisive
scholarship. Debates about national and personal boundaries are unfolding within our anxious
apprehensions of an approaching viral pandemic. The virus emerges as a dangerous foreign being: a
fecund, primitive yet evolving, hungry, needy, African predator unleashed by modern travel from
the last recesses of the wild. It wants to immigrate, with or without a visa. It demands attention in
the form of resistance or capitulation. While ostensibly pondering the possible overthrow of the food
chain, virus discourse imagines the overthrow of the social order. Viruses represent social change-frightening and enormous social change--and our drastic fear of viral epidemics is in part a
reactionary response to the possibility of such change. Virus discourse has become a covert means of
negotiating identity and contact in the increasing multiculturalism of the global village. Western
ideas of the non-self, the external threat, have not kept pace with the postmodern flexible self. The
Other is still that same, tired old Other, that dark, unknowable native lurking in that dark,
unknowable continent, waiting to erode our identity and leave us degenerated or reborn. Marlow or
Tarzan, the Westerner who makes contact with the indefinable essence of Africa has always emerged a
transformed soul. The only postmodern element of virus discourse is that now the African
transformative [End Page 96] being has become a global passenger with no need for a green card.
Virus discourse is retelling old imperialist nightmares that, neutralized under cover of medical
common sense, seem to justify exclusionary practices, surveillance, and general prejudice that we
would otherwise find inexcusable as well as politically untenable.
The medical discourse of viruses also symbolizes our cruel otherization of GBLT. Schell, 97
[Heather, PhD, Stanford University, MA, Georgetown University, BSFS, Georgetown University, Ph.D. in
Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University; She is currently teaching Women's Studies and English
at Miami University. Outburst! A Chilling True Story about Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social
Change]
The metaphor of social marginalization as infection is apt in several ways, particularly for gay and
lesbian communities. Homophobes have often voiced the fear that innocents will be "converted" by
contact with gay men or lesbians. Their worst nightmares come true in Storm Constantine's Wraeththu
series, where gay men metamorphose into powerful and somewhat vengeful hermaphrodites whose
touch similarly transforms or kills all the heterosexual men whom they can catch. In addition, poverty
and substandard health [End Page 124] care, not to mention the de facto segregation associated with
social inequality, can localize epidemics in particular communities. The AIDS epidemic historically supports a
third, optimistic link between infection and community: by generating a powerful grassroots political movement among gay men and
lesbians, the epidemic built a sense of cohesion and common purpose that cannot compensate for the tragedy but does help make it
slightly more bearable.
LINKDISEASE (8/10)
Debates about medical discourse are debates about human sociology and how we categorize and
otherize one another. Schell, 97 [Heather, PhD, Stanford University, MA, Georgetown University, BSFS,
Georgetown University,
Social Change] Debates about viruses are debates about human society. When virologists discuss the
dangers of "changed social conditions," they probably have specific dangerous changes in mind. The
historical social changes responsible for triggering epidemics might at first seem too contradictory to justify my
contention of bias. Krause, for example, fingers increasing urbanization (tuberculosis) as well as the move to
suburbs (Lyme disease), good hygiene (polio) as well as bad hygiene (cholera), and women's use of moreabsorbent tampons for their role in facilitating infection. 60 None of this behavior appears linked to moral
judgment. However, a clearer pattern of proscribed social behavior emerges when we consider the epidemic
used as a model for all the epidemic predictions: AIDS. According to one science writer, "the AIDS
epidemic says it all. An unknown virus gets an opportunity to infect previously unexposed human beings
and takes it." 61 According to Kaplan, "AIDS would appear to be the most devastating result of this complex of
circumstances [deforestation, increased urbanization, travel, and social change]." 62 Kaplan's AIDS epidemic
apparently does not even require a pathogen! The pattern of blame in AIDS follows two distinct paths, one
for Africa and another for the United States. The African narrative cites prostitution and increased travel
within the continent for the spread of disease; the U.S. narrative is more familiar to us.
The negative connotations of viral discourse convinces us to resist change and identity
transformations.
Schell, 97 [Heather, PhD, Stanford University, MA, Georgetown University, BSFS, Georgetown University, Ph.D.
in Modern Thought and

Literature at Stanford University; She is currently teaching Women's Studies and English at Miami University. Outburst! A Chilling True Story
about Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social Change] Other recent popular representations of viruses similarly
emphasize the careful passage from clean, uninfected space to dangerous, infectious space, as I mentioned
earlier with Outbreak and Robin Cook's "Virus." If the popular science accounts tend to start with a view of
Africa that leads to enclosed U.S. laboratories, the science fiction narratives often abandon small,
contained spaces for a larger, contaminated world. Nonetheless, Ammonite's introduction strikingly parallels
the entry into The Hot Zone. The narrative follows Marghe, the protagonist, on every step of her spaceship
journey from sealed, protected Section A through multiple airlocks and corridors to contaminated Section D,
where she removes her life-support suit. In this trip, she has crossed "the boundary between what was understood
and controlled and what was dangerous." 75 The elaborate containment procedures were established to
protect humanity from the deadly virus of the planet Jeep, which infects everyone exposed to it, killing all the
men and 20 percent of the women; the experimental vaccine that Marghe is testing might or might not improve
her odds. Marghe has embarked on a one-way journey--no one exposed to the virus is allowed back into "any
other uncontaminated Company installation" without gruesome, life-threatening decontamination procedures. 76
This discourse of contamination and boundaries of course calls to mind Mary Douglas's seminal Purity and
Danger, in which she argues that ideas of dirt spring from attempts to impose order and meaning on a
disordered world: "When something is firmly classed as anomalous, the outline of the set in which it is not
a member is clarified." 77 Disorder--whatever is left outside the boundaries of order--is [End Page 113]
invested with unlimited, undefined power. Protecting oneself from the danger of this disorder demands
careful attention to details of boundaries. The resultant "pollution-taboos" frequently work to enforce the
moral code by providing an incentive for proper behavior in activities that cannot be monitored. This
accords with the epidemic causes cited earlier: in Outbreak, for example, people who disobey rules will be
sorry even if they do not get caught, because their misdeeds will trigger an epidemic that will kill them and
possibly end human life as we know it. A crucial point is that disorder represents potential change. An
elastic moment of disorder will not necessarily catapult us into a new era, but it might also snap us back
into former shapes. Fears about an emerging viral menace thus actually offer a revamped justification for
reasserting national, racial, and sexual categories, thereby averting any long-term transformation of our
ideas about identity.
LINKDISEASE (9/10)
The negative connotations of viral discourse convinces us to resist change and identity
transformations.
Schell, 97 [Heather, PhD, Stanford University, MA, Georgetown University, BSFS, Georgetown University, Ph.D. in Modern Thought and
Literature at Stanford University; She is currently teaching Women's Studies and English at Miami University. Outburst! A Chilling True Story
aboutOther
Emerging-Virus
Narratives representations
and Pandemic Socialof
Change]
recent popular
viruses
similarly emphasize the careful passage from clean,

uninfected space to dangerous, infectious space, as I mentioned earlier with Outbreak and Robin Cook's
"Virus." If the popular science accounts tend to start with a view of Africa that leads to enclosed U.S.
laboratories, the science fiction narratives often abandon small, contained spaces for a larger,
contaminated world. Nonetheless, Ammonite's introduction strikingly parallels the entry into The Hot Zone.
The narrative follows Marghe, the protagonist, on every step of her spaceship journey from sealed, protected
Section A through multiple airlocks and corridors to contaminated Section D, where she removes her lifesupport suit. In this trip, she has crossed "the boundary between what was understood and controlled and what
was dangerous." 75 The elaborate containment procedures were established to protect humanity from
the deadly virus of the planet Jeep, which infects everyone exposed to it, killing all the men and 20 percent
of the women; the experimental vaccine that Marghe is testing might or might not improve her odds. Marghe
has embarked on a one-way journey--no one exposed to the virus is allowed back into "any other
uncontaminated Company installation" without gruesome, life-threatening decontamination procedures. 76
This discourse of contamination and boundaries of course calls to mind Mary Douglas's seminal Purity
and Danger, in which she argues that ideas of dirt spring from attempts to impose order and meaning on
a disordered world: "When something is firmly classed as anomalous, the outline of the set in which it
is not a member is clarified." 77 Disorder--whatever is left outside the boundaries of order--is [End Page
113] invested with unlimited, undefined power. Protecting oneself from the danger of this disorder
demands careful attention to details of boundaries. The resultant "pollution-taboos" frequently work to
enforce the moral code by providing an incentive for proper behavior in activities that cannot be
monitored. This accords with the epidemic causes cited earlier: in Outbreak, for example, people who
disobey rules will be sorry even if they do not get caught, because their misdeeds will trigger an
epidemic that will kill them and possibly end human life as we know it. A crucial point is that disorder
represents potential change. An elastic moment of disorder will not necessarily catapult us into a new
era, but it might also snap us back into former shapes. Fears about an emerging viral menace thus
actually offer a revamped justification for reasserting national, racial, and sexual categories, thereby
averting any long-term transformation of our ideas about identity.
LINKDISEASE (10/10)
Viruses, and thus foreigners are seen as the replicative pathogens.
Schell, 97 [Heather, PhD, Stanford University, MA, Georgetown University, BSFS, Georgetown University,
Social Change] As I have already discussed, our ideas about contamination are complexly mediated by
medical as well as cultural discourse. Barrier nursing makes good medical sense with hemorrhagic fevers;
this practical component is not enough, however, to account for the proliferation of depictions of barriers.
Photos accompanying popular articles on viruses frequently portray biocontainment suits, images that graphically
reiterate the need for protection. The inaccessibility of viruses to our senses might partially account for the
proliferation of barrier images. Biocontainment suits compete only with esoteric electron microscope images as
visual indicators of the presence of viruses, and a rent in such a suit offers one of the only ways to depict
infection graphically. Almost invariably, barrier methods are represented as tenuous. The much-vaunted
biocontainment capability of USAMRIID and the CDC offers scant guarantee to the researchers, whose
protective gear is occasionally breached by animal teeth, scissors, or malfunction. 79 The precautions taken by
virus hunters in the wild consist of elements even a layperson can recognize as vulnerable: paper masks, plastic
garbage bags, and "sticky tape" provide a mere patchwork barrier between self and the "replicative Other."
An Associated Press photo from the 1995 Ebola epidemic in Kitwit illustrates the ineffectual gestures of
containment that Westerners tend [End Page 114] to expect in foreign lands: it shows two boys with T-shirts
pulled over their mouths and noses in makeshift masks; the journalist describes their action (somewhat
patronizingly) as motivated by the hope that "this would somehow protect them from the deadly virus." 80 Yet
Preston's ubiquitous "sticky tape" seems less an effective, sophisticated Western barrier method than an
apotropaic charm against infection.
The killer virus narrative reduces the body to an abject that is only properly situated
against the normalized conception of the clean and proper body of the socialized
individual DOUGHERTY IN 2001 (STEPHEN, assistant professor in English at Elizabethtown
Community College,
The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel, CULTURAL CRITIQUE, SPRING)
As we discover, the body is subjected to so much violation in contemporary killer virus novels that it
ceases to be a body, strictly speaking. Rather, it is what is left over from itself after the virus has had its
way, the irreducible residue of its own organic functioning. One more revolting description will
sufficiently prove the point. In The Blood Artists, Chuck Hogan describes a doomed victim whose skin "rot[s]
off his body in a fetid stink, marble-sized boils and violet tumorous ulcerations marking the dark map of his
flesh. It was less than flesh, a fungus that had grown up over a skeleton" (23). Flesh yet less than flesh, the
body becomes alien to itself in Hogan's novel. In its viscous reduction to ungovernable flows and seepages, it
is transformed in its totality into what Julia Kristeva calls the abject, those elements of the body that are
susceptible in our culture to being symbolized as impure, and whose symbolic refusal helps to constitute "the
clean and proper body" of the socialized individual. 8 But at the same time, the killer virus novel threatens to
negate the logic of the abject, as well as the psychological register within which the abject functions, because
there is no proper body for the social subject left to be split off from that which does not properly belong to it.
[End Page 7] The body in the killer virus novel attests to its own permeability, a hallmark feature of
literatures of bodily anxiety. But more rad-ically, the virally infected body attests to its susceptibility to
total collapse into an "outside" that no longer functions to demarcate the condition of possibility for the
"inside." The killer virus genre thus presents a world where the boundary between the human as a
biological entity and what lies outside it is profoundly unstable, so that man as a subject threatens to
fall back into the object world-- and more specifically, as we shall see, the animal world--that surrounds
him.
LINKSURVEILLANCE/RACISM (1/3)
Medicine studies the body and creates norms of what society and the individual looks like.
Increasing knowledge of the population allows us to identify groups that do not fit
established medical norms. Thus, threats have become endemic to the population, which
only proper management can protect us from.
Feder 07 (Ellen, The Dangerous Individual(s) Mother, Hypatia v22 n2 Spring, Teacher of Philosophy at American
University) Biopower creates the distinctionsthe "biological" distinctionswithin the population that
form the hierarchy whereby "certain races are described as good and . . . others, by contrast, are
described as inferior" (255). This standard is that on which a new conception of "normalization," or what
Foucault here called "regularization," is established. In this way, biopowerlike the disciplinary power from
which it developedis founded upon a gathering of knowledge; it is a power that is grounded upon, made
possible by, this knowledge; at the same time, this accumulated knowledge is made to count as knowledge,
in virtue [End Page 63] of power. Among the generalized mechanisms of which the biopolitical state makes
use is the measurement of biological processes of the populacerates of birth, death, and fertility. These
are, Foucault said, biopolitics' "first objects of knowledge and the targets it seeks to control" through natalist
policy, for example, but also through efforts to contain disease (243). The Middle Ages were centrally
concerned with "epidemics," diseases that would wipe out a portion of the population and which required
"disqualification, exile, rejection, deprivation, refusal, and incomprehensionthat is to say, an entire arsenal of
negative concepts or mechanisms of exclusion" (Foucault 1999/2003, 44). Foucault believed that the morbidity
problem starting in the mid-eighteenth century, however, was more precisely defined in terms of the
"endemic" which may be managed by attending to "the form, nature, extension, duration and intensity of
the illnesses prevalent in a population" (1997/2003, 243). Here Foucault extended his discussion from the
Collge course of the previous year (Abnormal) of plague and the "positive technologies of power" that
accompanied it. Foucault noted early in the course that there was a whole literature devoted to the "kind of
orgiastic dream" of lawlessness permitted by the outbreak of plague. But, Foucault wrote, the onset of plague
made possible "a marvelous moment when political power is exercised to the full. Plague is the moment when
the spatial partitioning and subdivision (quadrillage) of a population is taken to its extreme point, where
dangerous communications, disorderly communities, and forbidden contacts can no longer appear"
(1999/2003, 47). According to Foucault, plague created the conditions that justified state regulation of the
lives of its residents, "the capillary ramifications of which constantly reach[ed] into the grain of individuals
themselves, their time, habitat, localization, and bodies" (1999/2003, 47). This is what Foucault termed the
power of "normalization," an idea he drew from Georges Canguilhem's 1943 The Normal and Pathological
(Canguilhem 1968/1989). Normalization refers to a variety of techniques that draw for their founding and
legitimization on the concept of "the norm" (Foucault 1999/2003, 50). Beginning in the eighteenth century,
normalization took as its privileged object the "dangerous" or "delinquent individual" (25). Foucault's aim
in these lectures was to trace the genealogy of this power and the change that had occurred in the "medicojuridical body" such that its charge was no longer the "control of crime or illness" but rather the "control
of the abnormal, of the abnormal individual" (42) who was, according to Foucault, "conceptualized in racist
terms" (Foucault 1997/2003, 258). At the end of the twentieth century, "violence" was often framed in precisely
the terms Foucault outlined. It is posed as an individual pathology that will be passed on, and necessitates
the identification and elimination of "degeneracy" that will be regarded as "endemic": violence cannot be
understood as a temporary danger but is a "permanent factor" that acts upon the population from [End
Page 64] multiple directions.
<CONTINUES>
<CONTINUES>
Medicine
allows us to identify the heredity behind threats to society, justifying a racism
that screens society for abnormality and deviance from the norm.
The first identification of endemics, Foucault recounted, provoked the formation of public health programs
that by the end of the eighteenth century culminated in the U.S. establishment of the National Institutes of
Feder
07 (NIH)
(Ellen,and
TheCenters
Dangerous
Individual(s)
Mother,
v22twentieth
n2 Spring,century,
Teacherproponents
of Philosophy
American
Health
for Disease
Control
(CDC).Hypatia
In the late
of theatfederal
University)
Violence Initiative promised to do for the problem of violent crime what proponents of public health in the
nineteenth century did for problems associated with poor hygiene. Increasing knowledge of the
The
ill-fated announcement
of the Violence
Initiative
marked
a period
in which the specter
of the
biochemical
processes associated
with violence
would
permit
the identification
of violence-prone
"dangerous
individual"
came
to
occupy
a
prominent
place
in
public
discussion.
Investigation
of
youngsters, who would, in turn, provide increasing understanding of these processes. As in public
individuals'
"violent
tendencies"
necessitated
detailed
attention
to thethe
body
and its from
hygiene programs,
the
"enemy" of
the people increasingly
is not a "foreign
body,"
threatening
population
operations.
while this
attention
can resemble
the "in
detailed
scrutiny Foucault
ascribed
to theput
"disciplinary
without but But
is located
within
the population
itself,
the biological
threats,"
as Foucault
it, "posed
operation,"
particular
investigation
of the body differs in important ways from that of the
by the otherthis
race"
(1997/2003,
61).
disciplinary gaze: the attention directed at the violent body is aimed not at the "internalization" of an
authoritative gaze by the individual him or herself, but rather, at the individualizing of a group against
whom the population needs protection. Rather than a diffused gaze that "anyone" can employ, the
authority of the regulatory gaze is consolidated for the state's use. If it seems clear that a governmentfunded initiative that targets a population of racially marked others who would be most "vulnerable"
to violent behaviors in an effort to protect those who would be, in turn, "vulnerable" to these
individuals, would provoke public controversy, it is because the specific expression of racism in the
twentieth century (and evidently of the twenty-first, as well) differs from the old racism of the nineteenth
century. In Abnormal, Foucault characterized this new racism as one "whose function is not so much the
prejudice or defense of one group against another as the detection of all those within a group who may
be the carriers of a danger to it. It is an internal racism that permits the screening of every individual
within a given society" (Foucault 1999/2003, 31617). Yet to understand the specific operation of [End Page
66] this power, we must remember that detailed attention to the individualthe object of disciplinary power
is not the final target. The power that emerges at this time "uses" disciplinary mechanisms to get to
what Foucault loosely termed the "background-body" (313), a body "behind the abnormal body" that is
responsible for the appearance of the delinquent or abnormal "condition" (312). Foucault asked, "What
is this background-body, this body behind the abnormal body? It is the parents' body . . . the body of the
family, the body of heredity" (313).
Through statistical surveillance and monitoring, governments are able to manage the
health of entire populations in the name of securitizing Elbe, 2004 [Dr. Stefan, Lecturer In
International Relations, University of Essex;
in Securization of HIV/AIDS] The securitization of AIDS is biopolitical, secondly, because of the manner in
which international actors are trying to manage the health of populations. The detailed statistical
monitoring of populations that formed such an integral component of the eighteenth century biopolitics in
Europe is today being replicated by the international agencies eager to identify and forecast the
population dynamics likely to be induced by HIV/AIDS in the years ahead. The task of compling these
statistics has been assigned to the World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Programme on
HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The latter characteristically prides itself in its efforts to provide strategic
information about HIV/AIDS worldwide, as well as [t]racking, monitoring, and evaluation of the
epidemic and of responses to it. Its web pages even boast that UNAIDS is, the worlds leading resource
for epidemiological data on HIV/AIDS. To this end UNAIDS provides-in a manner that echoes Englands
nineteenth century Blue Books-annual updates on the global states of the AIDS pandemic and endeavors to
keep up-to-date information of HIV-prevalence rate amongst adult populations for every country.
Scholars Lab
Disease Reps K
LINKMEDICINE (1/6)
Modern Medicine constitutes the individual through scientific knowledge of the functions of
the body. The body becomes yet another site of control for the ordering and calculation of
populations. The power to let live and make die is instead the power to make live and let die.
Tierney 98 (Thomas, Anatomy and Governmentality, John Hopkins University Press, Associate Prof of Phil. And
Pol. Sci at Concord College, muse) Relying almost exclusively on examples
medicine
of thefound
eighteenth
fromthe
France,
Foucault
that century was overwhelmingly concerned with specifying and
classifying disease. 7
This "nosological" medicine
organized disease by families, genera, and species, rather like the botanical taxonomies of Linnaeus, but Foucault emphasized that the
cause or source of the disease was not the foundation for this system of classification. Rather, the organizing principle of this
linguistic grid was the resemblance and difference among visible symptoms of disease; for "[t]he
distance that separates one disease from another can be measured only by the degree of their
resemblance, . . . vicinity is not defined by measurable distances but by formal similarities." 8 The
promise offered by the careful and complete construction of this classificatory system was that it would
reveal the nature of disease itself. By paying close attention to the ordering of symptoms, doctors could
hope to "communicate with the ontological order - which organizes from the inside, prior to all
manifestation - the world of disease." 9 Because this medicine organized diseases according to formal similarities and
differences among symptoms, the manifestation of a disease in any particular body was not an essential element in understanding that
disease. In fact, Foucault claimed, the body posed "a subsidiary problem" 10 for early-modern medicine: For classificatory
medicine, presence in an organ is never absolutely necessary to define a disease: this disease may travel
from one point of localization to another, reach other bodily surfaces, while remaining identical in
nature. The space of the body and the space of the disease possess enough latitude to slide away from
one another. 11 The problem posed by the body, therefore, was that the particular circumstances of any
given body might interfere with the proper identification and ordering of symptoms, and consequently
undermine the pursuit of the nature or essence of the disease. "To the pure nosological essence," Foucault
emphasized, " . . . the patient adds, in the form of so many disturbances, his predispositions, his age, his way of life, and a whole series of
events that, in relation to the essential nucleus, appear as accidents. In order to know the truth of the pathological fact, the doctor must
abstract the patient." 12 Beyond its purely formal conception of disease and its abstraction from the body of the
patient, the most important feature of the classificatory medicine of early modernity was its traditional
relation to death. As Foucault described this tradition: "An immemorial slope as old as men's fear turned the
eyes of doctors towards the elimination of disease, towards cure, towards life: it could only be a matter of
restoring it. Behind the doctor's back, death remained the great dark threat in which his knowledge
and skill were abolished." 13 Although this description of medicine's relation to death sounds very much like the self-image
portrayed by some contemporary medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association, in their hostile response to the
popular assertion of the right to physician assisted suicide, Foucault's claim is that this life-affirming, death-avoiding
description applies to the medicine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but does not hold true for
modern medicine. For the classificatory medicine of early modernity, death was indeed "the end of life and . . . also the end of
disease; . . . in death, disease reached the end of its course, fell silent, and became a thing of memory." 14 All this would change in
the nineteenth century, however, when death was illuminated through the emergence of the uniquely
modern form of medicine, pathological anatomy. Foucault identified the anatomical writings of one particular individual
- Marie-Francois-Xavier Bichat - as the point at which medicine shifted from a classificatory model, which turned
away from death and the body, to a more aggressive "medical gaze [that] pivots on itself and demands of
death an account of life and disease." 15 Bichat encouraged physicians to abandon the grid of
symptoms with which they had been concerned since the mid-seventeenth century, when Sydenham first urged physicians to establish a
"'natural history of every disease.'" 16 Instead, Bichat claimed that physicians should focus on the body itself and the course which
disease followed throughout it. For only the examination of corpses could provide "an objective, real, and at last unquestionable
foundation for the description of diseases." 17 Bichat admonished his colleagues as follows:
<CONTINUES>
Scholars Lab
Disease Reps K
LINKMEDICINE (2/6)
<CONTINUES>
'for twenty years, from morning to night, you have taken notes at patients' bedsides on affections of the heart, the lungs, and the gastric
viscera, and all is confusion for you in the symptoms which refusing to yield up their meaning, offer you a succession of incoherent
phenomena. Open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that observation alone could not dissipate.' 18 Of course,
Bichat was not the first to advocate that dissections and the study of anatomy should play a central role in medical education. As we will
see, dissections figured prominently in the education of physicians well before the nineteenth century. What Foucault
stressed about Bichat's approach to anatomy was the epistemological difference that separated it from its predecessors. Prior to the
nineteenth century, anatomists such as Vesalius and Harvey had focused on the structure of the body and
mapped out its various systems, as well as the location and relation of organs. Although one of Bichat's
greatest contributions to anatomy was his identification of twenty-one basic tissues that comprised the
systems and organs of the body, 19 in identifying these constitutive tissues Bichat's primary concern
was not to provide a better explanation of how the body was organized. Rather, he was concerned with
the manner in which disease affected these tissues and spread throughout the body by way of them.
What Bichat advocated, therefore, was not an improvement in Galenic, structural anatomy, but something altogether different, a
pathological anatomy that studied the presence of disease in the body. And as Foucault emphasized, "[a]natomy could become
pathological only insofar as the pathological spontaneously anatomizes." For Bichat, disease was not a linguistic model,
but
"an autopsy in the darkness of the body, dissection alive." 20 In this pathological approach to medicine,
the particular circumstances of the diseased body no longer posed an epistemological problem; on the
contrary, the presence of disease in the body became the ultimate criterion of truth about disease, and
the symptoms written on the surface of the body, which had been the basis for eighteenth-century
nosologies, became a secondary phenomenon. Foucault emphasized the extent of this epistemological
reevaluation of the body in the following description of the proof demanded by modern medicine: In other
words, medical experience will substitute the localization of the fixed point for the recording of frequencies. The symptoms of
pulmonary phthisis include coughing, difficulty in breathing, marasmus, hectic fever, and sometimes purulent expectoration; but none of
these visible modifications is absolutely indispensable . . . and the order of their appearance is not strict . . . . There is only one constant
phenomenon, the necessary and sufficient condition for the presence of phthisis: lesion of the pulmonary parenchyma, which, at autopsy,
'is shown to be dotted to a greater or lesser extent with purulent areas ... .' 21 Beneath these changes in the conception of
disease and the status of the body lies the most important distinction of modern medicine - its
revaluation of the status of life and death. While death had traditionally been the limit of medical knowledge, once
physicians began routinely examining corpses to determine the cause and manner of death, it now became the point at which
physicians would begin their pursuit of the truth. No longer the great dark other of medicine, death was instead
"turned for the first time into a technical instrument that provides a grasp on the truth of life and the
nature of its illness. Death is the great analyst that shows the connexions by unfolding them, and bursts
open the wonders of genesis in the rigour of decomposition ... ." 22 Of course, this inversion of the status of
death also involved a transformation in medicine's relation to life. As part of that "immemorial slope,"
classificatory medicine was based on life and living, but once pathological anatomy became the standard of medical education and
explanation, life suddenly became an obstacle in the pursuit of the truth of disease. As long as a person was alive the claims of medicine
were open to doubt; only a post-mortem examination of the body could provide certain knowledge about the disease in question.
Although Foucault followed a fairly narrow historical path throughout most of The Birth of the Clinic, he used broad, sweeping terms to
"That
which
hides andreversal:
envelops, the curtain of night over truth, is, paradoxically, life; and death, on
describe this
epistemological
the contrary, opens up to the light of day the black coffer of the body: obscure life, limpid death, the
oldest imaginary values of the Western world are crossed here in a strange misconstruction that is the
very meaning of pathological anatomy ... ." 23
In the conclusion of The
Birth of the Clinic Foucault noted that the impact of this transformation of the role of death went well beyond the narrow confines of
medical history. Indeed, Foucault claimed that the modern concept of individuality was grounded precisely in the
anatomically illuminated corpse: It will no doubt remain a decisive fact about our culture that its first
scientific discourse concerning the individual had to pass through this stage of death. Western man
could constitute himself in his own eyes as an object of science, he grasped himself within his language,
and gave himself, in himself and by himself, a discursive existence, only in the opening created by his
own elimination: . . . from the integration of death into medical thought is born a medicine that is given
as a science of the individual. And, generally speaking, the experience of individuality in modern
culture is bound up with that of death. 24 Because medicine provided the foundation for the objective,
measurable, predictable identities of modern individuals, Foucault also recognized in this early text "the
fundamental place of medicine in the over-all architecture of the human sciences . . . . [I]n this culture,"
Foucault claimed, "medical thought is fully engaged in the philosophical status of man." 25
LINKMEDICINE (3/6)
Medicine produces and regulates populations in order to optimize the health and
productivity of society. Combined with this the racist problematization of individuals in
order to protect the population.
Ranibow and Rose 03 (Paul/Nikolas, Thoughts On The Concept of Biopower Today, The Molecular Science
Institute, Professor of Anthropology at University of Chicago, Professor of Sociology at James Martin White)
It might be useful here to remind ourselves that when Foucault introduced the term in the last of his Collge
de France lectures of 1975- 6, Society Must be Defended, he is precise about the historical phenomena
which he is seeking to grasp (Foucault, 2003). He enumerates them there: issues of the birth rate, and the
beginnings of policies to intervene upon it; issues of morbidity, not so much epidemics but the illnesses that
are routinely prevalent in a particular population and sap its strength requiring interventions in the
name of public hygiene and new measures to co-ordinate medical care; the problems of old age and
accidents to be addressed through insurantial mechanisms; the problem of the race and the impact
upon it of geographic, climatic and environmental conditions, notably in the town. The concept of
biopower, then, is a crystallization after ten years of collective and individual research on the genealogy of
disciplinary power in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.4 Foucault himself had lectured on the politics of
health in the eighteenth century in Japan and in Brazil; his seminar members were producing detailed
historical studies of the role of medicine, town planning, royal shipyards, and a host of other sites in which
experiments about how to produce and regulate ways to maximise the capacities of both the population
and the individual as a target of power are being carried out. As for discipline so for biopower: these
concepts are not trans-historical or metaphoric, but are precisely grounded in historical, or genealogical,
analysis. Whilst initially linking biopolitics to the regulatory endeavours of developing States (2003: 250) he
recognises that the great overall regulations that proliferated throughout the nineteenth century are
also found at the sub-State level, in a whole series of sub-State institutes such as medical institutions,
welfare funds, insurance, and so on. (1003: 250). But this analysis in terms of biopower is not to be taken in
any simple way, as a critique, if by critique one means the unveiling of hidden strategic modes of domination.
It is true that in this lecture he suggests that it is the emergence of biopower that inscribes [racism] in the
mechanisms of the State as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States. (2003:
254). This is a point to which we will return. But at the same time, this is the point at which
Foucault begins to develop his concept of governmentality to encompass the variety of ways of
problematizing and acting on individual and collective conduct in the name of certain objectives which
do not have the State as their origin or point of reference. And as he develops this line of thought, he
distances himself from the suggestion that this power over life is unambiguously nefarious. 5 This is also the
turning point that leads him, in what turned out to be the last period of his life, to a fascination with ancient
modes of subjectification and the possibilities of freedom. And it is worth remembering that medicine is
perhaps the oldest site where one can observe the play of truth, power and ethics in multiple relations
to the subject, to the household, to the city, to nature, and to the possibilities of a good, or as the Greeks
would have it, a flourishing, life.
LINKMEDICINE (4/6)
Medicine constitutes the body as the subject of biopolitics and opens it as a new site for the
management of the health of populations. Turner 06 (Bryan, Body, Theory, Culture & Society v23, Prof
of Sociology at National Univ of Singapore, Sage)
In contemporary society, the body is in one sense disappearing; it is being converted into an information
system whose genetic code can be manipulated and sold as a commercial product in the new biotech
economy. In global terms, the disorders and diseases of the human body have become productive in a
post-industrial economy. In terms of media debate, the new reproductive technologies, cloning and genetic
screening are important illustrations of public concern about the social consequences of the new genetics.
Improvements in scientific understanding of genetics have already had major consequences for the
circumstances under which people reproduce, and genetic surveillance and forensic genetics may also
transform criminal investigation and the policing of societies. The code of the body becomes a major tool
of criminal investigations. These changes in biomedicine illustrate Foucaults perspective in terms of a
division between the study of the individual body and the study of populations (Foucault, 1979). In the
first distinction he referred to an anatomo-politics of the human body, consisting of disciplines of the
body. In the second distinction, he discussed a bio-politics of the population, which are the regulatory
controls over populations. Anatomo-politics constitute the micropolitics of identity. The clinical
examination of individuals is part of the anatomo-politics of society. The bio-politics of populations
used demography, epidemiology and public health sciences to examine and manage whole populations.
The anatomo-politics of medicine involves the discipline of individuals; the bio-politics of society
achieves a surveillance and regulation of populations. Foucaults study of the body was thus organized
around the notions of discipline and regulatory controls or governmentality (Foucault, 1991). The new
genetics provide enhanced opportunities for governmentality as a strategy of political surveillance and
economic production. The government of the body, as a consequence, remains a critical issue in the
management and regulation of individuals and populations in contemporary society.
Medicine establishes risk values for individuals subjecting bodies to surveillance and
control. The creating of the body-at-risk opens the individual to medical and social
intervention to maximize the health of the population.
Wheatley 05 (Elizabeth, Disciplining Bodies at Risk, Journal of Sport and Social Issues v29, PhD Prof of
Sociology at Smith College, Sage) Indeed, under Surveillance Medicine, the body is construed as a constellation
of predictive risk factors (Armstrong, 1995). Risk factors point to a probability of illness that can be
calculated as future illness potential. Symptoms, signs, and diseases become an infinite chain of risks, and
each risk can be read as a risk for something else. Risk discourse transforms the body into an object of
practices for screening, predicting, and reducing risk and anticipating its future illness potential. Disease is
identified in advance of bodily felt symptoms vis--vis technologies of risk detection. People are discursively
constituted as bodies at risk, subjected to medical scrutiny, and objects of medical discipline, surveillance, and
control. Our individual and collective at-risk status creates infinite possibilities for the expansion of medical
categories and interventions.
LINKMEDICINE (5/6)
Medical examination exposes the body to disciplinary power that creates a hierarchy of
deviance and allows for the management of life that holds individuals to the judgment of
normality. Rendell 04 (Joanne, A Testimony to Muzil, Journal of Medical Humanities v25n1 March 2004)
Foucault argues that the introduction of pathological anatomy and the reorganization of the "clinic" into a
place of observation and learning (as well as a place of healing) replaced classifactory medicine, and led to the
ascendency and "sovereignty of the gaze" in modem medical experience (1972, p. 89). He is careful to clarify
that this shift was not some sort of epiphany where doctors, "free at last of theories and chimeras, suddenly agreed
"to approach the object of their experience with the purity of the unprejudiced gaze" (1972, p. 195). He argues
instead, that the shift was "nothing more than a syntactical reorganization of disease in which the limits of the
visible and the invisible follow a new pattern" (1972, p. 195).The medical gaze in this new "syntactical
reorganization," according to Foucault, is understood to be "pure of all intervention" and is seen to generate
"only the syntax of the language spoken by things themselves in an original silence" (1972, pp. 107-109). It is a
gaze which, in this supposed "purity," can "bring truth" about the body "to light" (1972, p. xiii). Medical
discourse is simply the description of what this "pure" gaze perceives in its observations of the body. Owing to
this governance of the gaze, Foucault argues that the modem "clinical experience" increasingly becomes "a
simple, unconceptualized confrontation of a gaze and a face, or a glance and a silent body; a sort of contact
prior to all discourse, free of the burdens of language, by which two living individuals are 'trapped' in a
common, but non-reciprocal situation" (1972, pp. xiv-xv). Under the scrutiny of the gaze, in other words, under
the observation of the "eye that knows and decides," the "eye that governs" and the "eye" that dissects, "isolate[s]"
Foucault
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p. 89).
rights of a clinic understood as a special contract, a tacit pact" made between doctor and patient (1972, p.
xiv), Guibert's depictions of encounters with the medical gaze demonstrate that a subordinating, silencing and
non-reciprocal gaze is still far from extinct. In The Compassion Protocol, for example, the narrator This
episode depicts both the repressive power of the gaze and also its silencing power which not only renders
the narrator mute during the procedure, but leaves him "speechless" after he leaves the hospital (CP, p.
48). This episode is an extreme example, but throughout all of Guibert's AIDS works there is a continual
depiction of an intruding and disempowering medical gaze. The narrator of To a Friend, for example,
when awaiting his test results, talks about his "blood" being "stripped naked and laid bare" (TF, p. 6). The
narrator of Cytomegalovirus feels his body is continually exposed when he realizes that the "window" between his
hospital room and the corridor "permits permanent viewing" (C, p. 5). In Paradise, the narrator describes the horror of having to "crawl"
through "sterile" and "isolating chambers" in order to have his brain scanned and gazed at by, what he depicts as, a monstrous and
"famished" machine (P, p. 51). It is also no coincidence that not long after describing a rather grisly operation in which doctors remove
part of a ganglion from his neck in order to have it observed under the microscope, the narrator of The Man in the Red Hat more than
once describes the intrusive antics of the flies in Greece: "the probes of flies clinging to my skin to pump out its secretions tickled it
disagreeably, they were exploring my nostrils, copulating with a great buzzing in my ears, trying to force their way between my eyelids
to suck the jelly of my corneas" (RH,
p. 47). This passage not only alludes to those doctors who "injected," "slit," and took samples from the narrator's throat in his earlier
operation (RI-I, pp. 23-24); it also provides images of flies "copulating" and sucking "jelly" from the narrator's eyes, powerfully alluding
to sexual assault. The passage, like the fibroscopy episode in The Compassion Protocol with its allusions to oral rape, hints at a notion of
the medical gaze as not only intrusive and silencing but also as sexually violating.
In fact, these passages appear to hint at not only a sexually violating gaze but also a gaze which punishes
and represses, paradoxically in a sexual way, the sexuality of Guibert's narrators who are all gay men with
AIDS.
<CONTINUED>
LINKMEDICINE (6/6)
<CONTINUED>
Foucault's notion of the medical gaze is explicated and developed further amid his more general discussions
in Discipline and Punish (1975/1991). This text, which has an overall aim to investigate the "scientifico-legal
complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules," moves from an
"archaeological" investigation of changes in penal practices, to a more general exploration of, what Foucault
calls "disciplinary power" (199 1, p. 23). Focusing again on the end of the eighteenth century, Foucault
argues that this period saw a rise in the productivity of power and, in particular, a rise in a particular kind of
power exercised on bodies in "disciplines" such as the army, hospitals, schools and prisons (1991, p. 137).
Replacing a model of "sovereign" power, this "new" disciplinary power, he argues, works at multiple sites
and meticulously controls, invests in and subjects bodies through the techniques of surveillance,
normalization and examination. The medical gaze becomes, in Discipline and Punish, a crucial
instrument of this disciplinary power and a central feature in the "disciplinary society" (1991, p. 209).
Like other surveillance techniques in respective disciplines, the medical gaze observes, normalizes,
examines and ultimately makes "docile" the bodies in its sights/sites (1991, p. 138). Once again Guibert's
depiction of the medical gaze echoes this more refined Foucauldian depiction. Early in To a Friend, for
example, Guibert's narrator reflects on his doctor's repetitive way of examining him: "Dr. Chandi . . . performed the same procedures in the same order each time he examined me: after the usual taking of blood
pressure, he would check the soles of my feet, the skin between my toes, delicately inspect the opening of the
ever-so-sensitive urethra" (TF, pp. 10-11). The examination, according to Foucault is a key component of
the gaze (and more widely of disciplinary power), as it "combines the techniques of an observing
hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment," and also "establishes over individuals a visibility
through which one differentiates them and judges them" (Foucault, 1991, p. 184).
LINKGENETICS (1/2)
Genetics is the ultimate interrogation of the body. DNA analysis allows us to see where
abnormalities and deficiencies exist in the human strain reinforcing bio-political racism and
the maximization of the health of the population. Ranibow and Rose 03 (Paul/Nikolas, Thoughts
On The Concept of Biopower Today, The Molecular Science
Race, together with health, and in variable relations with it, has been one of the central poles in the genealogy
of biopower. We can enumerate some moments. The so-called war of nations in the eighteenth century (the
topic of several lectures by Foucault in Society Must be Defended),. The massive biologization of race in the
nineteenth century, linked to pre- and post- Darwinist evolutionary thinking and applied both within states and in
their colonial dominations. The later nineteenth century obsession with degeneracy and race suicide and the
strategies of eugenics that spread from the United States to Japan and elsewhere in the first half of the twentieth
century. In all these instances and others, conceptions of race formed a prism not just for the imagination of
the nation, but also for the political management of national health and vitality, and of international
competitiveness. After the Second World War, official racialist discourses were discredited: by 1963, for
example, the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination took as one of
its premises that any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable,
socially unjust and dangerous, and that there is no justification for racial discrimination either in theory or in
practice (United Nations 1963: Preamble). Of course, racialist practices hardly subsided, but a biological
understanding of racial categories no longer was in the truth in political or policy discourse. In part due
to the persistent interventions of radical critics, the link between biological understandings of distinctions
amongst population groups and their socio-political implications seemed broken or at least de-naturalised.
Of course, biologists still believed they encountered such differences, not least in examining the prevalence of
particular diseases in different regions or the efficacy of medicines in different national populations. And some
individuals and groups persisted in claiming a politically pertinent correlation between human qualities capacities
and racially differentiated biological capacities in a whole number of controversies from education to criminality.
Moreover, in the United States for example, race as a socio-economic category, a mark of discrimination and
a mode of identification remained extremely salient socially and politically, from the allocation of federal
funds to the manifestations of identity politics. Notably, although race functioned as a marker of belonging
and the basis of a claim as to disadvantage, but even when groups or individuals sought to trace their
roots, they seldom related this genealogy to a biological substrate. The same is true of the murderous racist
wars that spread across Europe in the wake of the demise of the Soviet empire, from Armenia to the Balkans, and
across Africa, notably in Rwanda and the Congo. Appeals to racial identities, here, needed no justification in the
truth discourse of biology. At the turn of the new century, however, race is once again reentering the domain
of biological truth. At a certain moment, when it became clear that humans shared over 98 percent of their
genome with chimpanzees, and that inter-group variations in DNA sequences were greater than intra-group
variations, it appeared that genomics itself would mark the terminal point of biological racism (perhaps
even species-ism). But this humanitarian dream proved to be short-lived. A new molecular deployment of race
has emerged seemingly almost inevitably out of genomic thinking. Critics denounced the model of a single
genome that underpinned the Human Genome Project, fearing that it would establish a white male norm. The
first move here was cast as ethical: as the initial proposer of this work, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza put it to explore the
full range of genome diversity within the human family and to help combat the widespread popular fear and
ignorance of human genetics and make a significant contribution to the elimination of racism (Mcharek
2000: 5-6). Despite the critics, this effort to ensure the recognition of diversity in the framing of scientific truth as
an essential dimension of genomic
LINKGENETICS (2/2)
<CONTINUES>
knowledge was later adopted by the Human Genome Project (HUGO) and funded by the European
Community (from 1992) and later the United States Federal government National Institute for Health. And
subsequently the NIH and the British philanthropic Wellcome Trust have given considerable funds to
research into the establishment of genomic differences at the SNP level. This funding has been justified
precisely in bio-political terms, as leading towards and ensuring the equal health of the population in
all or some of its diversity. The science itself and the recognition of the variability of the human
genome at the level of the single nucleotide SNP mapping immediately opened up and legitimated a
new way of conceptualising racial difference at the molecular level. In addition to the ethical humanism
of the state projects, additional pressure to proceed in this direction came in some areas from the demands
of patient groups for genomic self-knowledge, and in others from the commercial aspirations of
pharmaceutical companies and the biomedical industry for a genomic strategy for diagnosis, drug
development and marketing. In the year 2003 multiple projects are underway to map diversity at the level
of the SNP. The 0.1 percent of the three billion base pairs of the human genome seems to provide ample
space for racial differentiations. This contemporary programme to identify biological differences is
justified no in terms of national well-being but largely in the name of health, of differences in disease
susceptibility and responses to therapeutic molecules. It would be tempting to say that this highly
sophisticated genomics has produced new complexity into the figure of humanity. But it is striking and
disturbing that the core racial typology of the nineteenth century -- white (Caucasian), black (African),
yellow (Asian), red (Native American) -- still provide a dominant mould through which this new genetic
knowledge of human difference is taking shape, as medical researches and gene mappers specify their
populations and their samples in such terms, and drug companies seek to target specific pharmaceuticals to
groups designated, for example, as African Americans. It is undoubtedly the case that SNP mapping
will produce typologies of difference between population groups and almost inevitable that these
population groups, in the name of health, will be coded in terms of broad cultural conceptions of race.
In nations like the United States, and trans-national unities like the European Union especially as it enlarges
from its initial heartland, and in organizations such as the WHO, where race is a central feature of political
contestation, the interplay between political and genomic classifications of race, identity politics,
racism, health inequities, and SNP mapping must take a prominent place on the agenda of critical
thinking. To address this new formation requires us not to deny its validity in advance, nor to hold up dire
warnings that it must lead to segregation, genocide and eugenics, but to be attentive to its specific
complexities and contingencies. That is to say, one needs to try to identify the points and lines of tension
where, because the future is not written, critical judgement, diagnosing specific new hopes and dangers,
might play a part in the direction it takes.
LINKAFRO-PESSIMISM
LINKRACISM (1/1) (1/1)
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reinforce such colonial stereotypes, creating what David Campbell, in a series of innovative and
weaves together historical accounts of the Black Death in France, the contemporary journey of a South African
convincing essays, calls an iconography of anonymous victimhood (see Campbell, 2003a: 69, 70-71, 84;
researcher to the eponymous plague wall in Provence, and her memories of life under apartheid. Brinks use of
2003b: 67; 2004: 62, 69).
plague as a figure for totalitarianism draws direct inspiration from Albert Camuss The Plague (1948), an
allegory for the Nazi occupation, published just as France was struggling to come to terms with collaboration and the
competing urges to punish offenders and rehabilitate the nation. Whereas Dr. Rieux, the main protagonist, works
tirelessly to save lives, he also precipitates the quarantining of the city and the concentration of the sick in a stadium
where they await death and transportation by train for cremation outside the citythe virulence of the plague seems
to allow the authorities no alternative. However reluctantly, Dr. Rieux advocates invasive state practices to
combat the total threat of the Black Death, and thus suggests an unintentional rapprochement with the
insidious totalitarian rhetoric of the Nazis (who used the threat of disease as justification for segregation,
concentration, deportation, and murder). Set in North Africa by its Algerian-born author, The Plague follows the
colonial tradition of depicting Africa as the exemplary site of death and disease. And yet, in the following years,
the struggle by the French to possess this land brought on a state of emergency characterized by drastic police and
military interventions, running the gamut from the cordoning off of the Arab quarter of Algiers and the institution of
pass laws to the practice of torture. By depicting the evils of totalitarianism in terms of natural disaster, Camus
obscures human responsibility, and thus, however unwittingly, participates in a sleight of hand by which the blame
for violence and death falls on the land itself, rather than imperialist policy or individual agency. The universalizing
discourse of the plague runs the risk of duplicating the destructive effects of actual epidemics, namely erasing
difference, undermining agency, and making accountability impossible.
The bubonic plague proves that disease discourse carries out metaphoric role of social
control, establishing white race prejudice and racism. Lund 2003 (Giuliana, University of
Minnesota HEALING THE NATION: MEDICOLONIAL DISCOURSE
2003) Project Muse. The diagnosis of bubonic plague, which raised the specter of the Black Death,
provided colonists with a specific rationale for segregation. African slums were sometimes razed within
hours, despite the fact that they were not actually the source of the epidemic. Furthermore, as Swanson
points out, It was the merest step of logic to proceed from the isolation of plague victims to the creation of a
permanent location for the black labouring class (1977, 393). The expansion and development of such locations
were authorized by public health laws, which thereby provided a legal as well as an imaginative foundation for
apartheid. Over the course of the twentieth century, medicolonial discourse equating black settlements in South
Africa with threats to public health and security, became fixed in the mind, buttressed a desire to achieve
positive social controls, and confirmed or rationalized white race prejudice with a popular imagery of medical
menace (410). In 1917, a typhus epidemic caused great alarm among the settler population and triggered state
expansion [T]yphus was pre-eminently Wtted to play a metaphoric role because of its concentration amongst blacks from the
reserves and the degree of social control which it enabled the state to exercise in the name of prevention. The fear that the disease
would spread from the increasingly impoverished rural areas, both amongst mine workers and in the densely populated towns, led to
drastic and highly discriminatory deverminisation procedures. (Marks and Andersson 1984, 33)
***IMPACTS**
IMPACTSDEHUMANIZATION
Dehumanization outweighs nuclear war, environmental destruction and genocide makes
them all inevitable
Berube 97 David, Comm@South Carolina, Nanotechnology Magazine, "Nanotechnological Prolongevity: The

Down Side," June/July http://www.cla.sc.edu/ENGL/faculty/berube/prolong.htm Assuming we are able to predict
who or what are optimized humans, this entire resultant worldview smacks of eugenics and Nazi racial science. This
would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there would always be a superhuman more super than the
current ones, humans would never be able to escape their treatment as means to an always further and distant end.
This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization of humanity.
They warn: "its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on
record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation.
For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind
the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in
the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it
may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude
the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual
losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently
use to measure it. Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide.
When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity
can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is
evil's most powerful weapon.
IMPACTSGENOCIDE (1/4)
Biopolitics necessitates genocidal violence in the name of the population.
Elden 02 (Prof Pol Sci at the University of Warwick) A break or cut (coupure) is fundamental to racism: a
division or incision between those who must live and those who must die. The "biological continuum of the
human species" is fragmented by the apparition of races, which are seen as distinguished, hierarchized, qualified
as good or inferior, and so forth. The species is subdivided into subgroups that are thought of as races. In a sense,
then, just as the continuum of geometry becomes divisible in Descartes, 39 the human continuum is divided,
that is, made calculable and orderable, two centuries later. As Anderson has persuasively argued, to suggest that
racism has its roots in nationalism is a mistake. He suggests that "the dreams of racism actually have their origin
in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to blue' or
white' blood and breeding among aristocracies." 40 As Stoler has noted, for Foucault, it is the other way around:
"A discourse of class derives from an earlier discourse of races." 41 But it is a more subtle distinction than [End
Page 147] that. What Foucault suggests is that discourses of class have their roots in the war of races, but so, too,
does modern racism; what is different is the biological spin put on the concepts. 42 But as well as emphasizing
the biological, modern racism puts this another way: to survive, to live, one must be prepared to massacre
one's enemies, a relation of war. As a relation of war, this is no different from the earlier war of races that
Foucault has spent so much of the course explaining. But when coupled with the mechanisms of mathematics and
medicine in biopower, this can be conceived of in entirely different ways. Bio-power is able to establish,
between my life and the death of the other, a relation that is not warlike or confrontational but biological:
"The more inferior species tend to disappear, the more abnormal individuals can be eliminated, the less the
species will be degenerated, the more Inot as an individual but as a specieswill live, will be strong, will
be vigorous, will be able to proliferate." The death of the other does not just make me safer personally, but
the death of the other, of the bad, inferior race or the degenerate or abnormal, makes life in general
healthier and purer (FDS, 22728). "The existence in question is no longer of sovereignty, juridical; but that of
the population, biological. If genocide is truly the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a return today
of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the
race, and the large-scale phenomena of population" (VS, 180; WK, 136). "If the power of normalization
wishes to exercise the ancient sovereign right of killing, it must pass through racism. And if, inversely, a
sovereign power, that is to say a power with the right of life and death, wishes to function with the instruments,
mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it must also pass through racism" (FDS, 228). This holds for
indirect deaththe exposure to deathas much as for direct killing. While not Darwinism, this biological sense
of power is based on evolutionism and enables a thinking of colonial relations, the necessity of wars, criminality,
phenomena of madness and mental illness, class divisions, and so forth. The link to colonialism is central: This
form of modern state racism develops first with colonial genocide. The theme of the political enemy is
extrapolated biologically. But what is important in the shift at the end of the nineteenth century is that war is no
longer simply a way of securing one race by eliminating the other but of regenerating that race (FDS, 22830).
As Foucault puts it in La volont de savoir: [End Page 148]
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on
behalf of the existence of all; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale
slaughter in the name of life necessity. Massacres have become vital [vitauxunderstood in a dual
sense, both as essential and biological]. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race,
that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. (VS,
180; WK, 136)
Biopolitics normalizes people through the securitization of disease and lets the
government choose who will live and who will die. Elbe, 2004 [Dr. Stefan, Lecturer In
International Relations, University of Essex;
in Securization of HIV/AIDS] A second ethical drawback Foucault historically associated with the rise of
biopolitical strategies in Europe is that they have had normalizing effects which stifle autonomy and
creativity. Biopower, he pointed out, uses continously regulatory and corrective mechanisms to achieve its
goals, and it achieves them not by threatening death, but by identifiying a norm and then measuring and
appraising people in terms of the extent to which they deviate from this norm. For this reason Foucault
famously argued that [a] normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on
life. The securitization of AIDS, too, is replete with such normalizing practices, not least because it
constitutes a way of prescribing norms of good governance for states by compelling them to strive towards
having healthy populations. More specifically, however, such normalizing practices can also be found
operating within states. In early days of AIDS, for example, for example, people were cautioned against that
four abnormal Hs that were publicly presented as deviating from the preferred HIV-negative norm:
homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts and Haitians. Later this was expanded to African more generally
(both domestically and internationally) and to sex workers. The securitization of AIDS adds further dimension
to this strategy by identifying the armed forces as yet another subpopulation deviating from the healthy
norm. Soldiers are now treated as a high risk group because they are thought to deviate from normal and
stable sexual relationships, because they are mobile and stationed away from home for long periods of time, and
because they have many opportunities for casual sexual relations. They have consequently been increasing
targeted by international organizations, the media, and nongovernmental organizations in an effort to
alter their behavior in a way that is closer to the desired norm, even though the epidemiological data in this
regard is still not well corroborated. In this way, the problem of normalization undoubtably accompanies
the ongoing securitization of AIDS and this, too, must give pause for thought.
Attempts to maximize the health of populations results in the extermination of those who are
deemed unhealthy. Elbe 05 (Stefan, AIDS, Security, Biopolitics, Special Issue on Health, International
Relations, Vol. 19, No. 4,
2005, pp. 403-419, Lecturer on International Relations) One of these dangers is that the biopolitical
imperative of optimizing the health of populations effectively constitutes disease and by extension the
diseased as a social and political problem that needs to be addressed, but without specifying exactly how
this problem should be dealt with. Unfortunately the creation of universal healthcare programmes to treat
the ill is just as compatible with a biopolitical logic as is the purging of populations of the diseased by more
sinister means, such as killing them or letting them gradually die. As counterintuitive and ironic as it may
seem, a biopolitical society based on the enhancement of life and health can still sanction and justify
instances of mass death. The European era of biopower, after all, coincided with twentieth-century political
projects demanding the deaths of millions. Foucault later came to understand this bizarre confluence only on the
basis of a new racism that biopolitical orders can give rise to.36 Racism, he contended from a biopolitical
perspective, is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under powers control: the
break between what must live and what must die.37 The reason biopolitical orders can still sanction mass death
is because they can generate a powerful new form of racism that pits the healthy members of the population
against the unhealthy who are deemed to sap the strength and vitality of the population as a whole. The
underlying principle of this new biopolitical racism is thus not the primacy of cultural difference, as with
many more traditional forms of racism, but rather the more subtle idea that the death of others makes
one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population.38 The insistence on
maximizing the health of populations can thus be dangerous for those who are deemed to be unhealthy.
The inevitable outcome of the intersection of medicine and biopolitics is thanatopoliticsa
politics of death that is best exemplified by the Holocaust Enoch 2004 (Simon, Ryerson
university. http://www.foucault-studies.com/no1/enoch.pdf)
Finally, what is perhaps the most disconcerting and destabilizing aspect of Foucaults conception of
thanato-politics is his insistence that this murderous potential always remains latent within the
management and regulation of life processes that constitute modern bio-politics. Thus, to dismiss the
actions of Nazi doctors as an aberration or as a lethal outbreak of anachronistic barbarism, is to
view these events as a singular anomaly in the otherwise progressive trajectory of modernity, rather
than a potential inherent within modernity itself.80 However, Foucaults analysis cautions against such an
interpretation. The surfacing of a thanato-politics from a regime of bio-politics should not be construed
as uniquely peculiar to Nazism, rather it should be viewed as a potential latent in any bio-political
regime, regardless of its outward political appearance.81 Thanato-politics is the counterpart of a
power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it,
subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.82 While Nazism perhaps represents
the most grotesque manifestation of the thanato-politics latent within the regulatory and disciplinary
techniques of modern bio-power, Foucault reminds us that; They used and extended mechanisms
already present in most other societies. More than that: in spite of their own internal madness, they
used to a largeextent the ideas and devices of our political rationality.83 Similarly, Nazi medicine should
not be viewed as a perversion of mainstream scientific canons, but as extending the underlying rationality of
modern science itself. As Mario Biagioli observes, much of the scholarship on Nazi medicine tends to
present Nazi scientific practices as a major anomaly in the history of science or as a deviation from
proper medical practice.84 However, Biagioli argues that such a view constitutes a dangerous naivety
that prevents us from viewing normal medical science as implicated in the Final Solution.85 Indeed,
as Lerner has shown, The biologizing of prejudice, discrimination, and ultimately the call for genocide
was invented and promoted by normal scientists, and indeed by leaders within their professions. Not
only can these scientists, in hindsight, be regarded as among the top professionals in their fields at the time of
their work: they also saw themselves with some justification as having the same status as such people as
Pasteur, Koch, and Lister.86 Similarly, Liftons interviews with the assistants of Dr. Josef Mengele illustrates
the degree to which practices that we now consider irrational were once regarded as scientifically legitimate.
As Lifton explains, Mengeles assistant considered the scientific method employed at the camps, [M]ore or
less standard for the time, the norm for anthropological work. She recognized it as the same approach she had
been trained in at her Polish university under a distinguished anthropologist with German, pre-Nazi academic
connections.87 Furthermore, as Milchman and Rosenberg demonstrate, the myth of modern medicine with
its utopian designs towards the engineering of the healthy society through the eradication of disease and death
pervades the Nazi biomedical vision.88 Rather than constituting a radical break with the modern tenets
of medical science, Nazi medicine extended the same methods and rationality of mainstream medicine,
albeit to a terrifying degree. To label such practices as bad science, fraudulent, or methodologically
incompetent in hindsight is to disregard Foucaults emphasis on the historically contingent nature of all
forms of knowledge, medical science included. Indeed, that such practices were viewed as rational and
legitimate at the time, employed by eminent scientific professionals, calls into question the very
legitimacy and rationality of scientific practices conducted in our own present. Thus, Foucault exposes
what Milchman and Rosenberg deem the dark side of modernity, revealing the potential for genocidal
practices not as a result of deviations from the values of reason and rationality that constitute
modernity, but inherent within modernity itself. Foucault thereby alerts us to the dangers within the
purported rational and progressive practices and techniques that characterize modernity.89
While the surfacing of this murderous potential ensconced within modernity is neither inevitable or
inescapable, Foucaults insistence that we recognize and interrogate this potential forces us to realize
that modernity is not a one-way trip to freedom, and that we must maintain a vigilant pessimism in
regards to the truth claims of modernity in order to forestall potential future holocausts.
Biopolitics normalizes people, shun creativity, and lets the government choose who will live
and who will die. Elbe, 2004 [Dr. Stefan, Lecturer In International Relations, University of Essex;
in Securization of HIV/AIDS] A second ethical drawback Foucault historically associated with the rise of
biopolitical strategies in Europe is that they have had normalizing effects which stifle autonomy and
creativity. Biopower, he pointed out, uses continously regulatory and corrective mechanisms to achieve its
goals, and it achieves them not by threatening death, but by identifiying a norm and then measuring and
appraising people in terms of the extent to which they deviate from this norm. For this reason Foucault
famously argued that [a] normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on
life. The securitization of AIDS, too, is replete with such normalizing practices, not least because it
constitutes a way of prescribing norms of good governance for states by compelling them to strive towards
having healthy populations. More specifically, however, such normalizing practices can also be found
operating within states. In early days of AIDS, for example, for example, people were cautioned against that
four abnormal Hs that were publicly presented as deviating from the preferred HIV-negative norm:
homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts and Haitians. Later this was expanded to African more generally
(both domestically and internationally) and to sex workers. The securitization of AIDS adds further dimension
to this strategy by identifying the armed forces as yet another subpopulation deviating from the healthy
norm. Soldiers are now treated as a high risk group because they are thought to deviate from normal and
stable sexual relationships, because they are mobile and stationed away from home for long periods of time, and
because they have many opportunities for casual sexual relations. They have consequently been increasing
targeted by international organizations, the media, and nongovernmental organizations in an effort to
alter their behavior in a way that is closer to the desired norm, even though the epidemiological data in this
regard is still not well corroborated. In this way, the problem of normalization undoubtably accompanies
the ongoing securitization of AIDS and this, too, must give pause for thought.
Biopolitical governments hold a disregard for human life, resulting in mass killings
Caduff, 2007 [Carlo, doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley. He graduated
from the University of Zurich in 2002, http://anthropos-lab.net/bpc/2007/01/life/] In his chapter on The Right of
Death and the Power over Life, Foucault argues that power is now situated and exercised at the level of life.
However, there seems to be a certain ambiguity in Foucaults use of the category of life. In his chapter,
Foucault seems to mean by life primarily human life. Concepts such as anatomo-politics of the human
body and biopolitics of the population as well as the power to foster life and to disallow it to the point of
death all refer to human life. Conversely, however, the force of biopower is clearly based on a certain
disregard for the distinction between human life and other forms of life. Biopower implies the envisioning
of human life primarily in terms of its vital aspects. It seems to be clear what this means for human life,
and almost all work on biopower and biopolitics has focused on this and led to insights of fundamental
importance. Assuming that the distinction between human life and other forms of life is more in question today
than ever, we might ask: What does this mean for the concept of biopower? My sense is that we need to focus on
the other side of the equation. Hannah Landecker points into this direction when she writes: Biological matter
derived from human bodies is a subset of all the biological matter that is out there in the world it is, in
the logic of the life sciences, not endowed with any particularly special qualities other than the usual
species variations. Thus the more we develop ways to use insects, the more we develop approaches to
human materiality that are continuous with the way we use insects, and this goes for all kinds of obscure
organisms: when we change insects, we change what it is to be biological. I remember a veterinarian who
once told me that now with the increasing attention to zoonotic diseases veterinarian practice is increasingly seen
as a contribution to public health. Animals have become model organisms of a new sort. Mapping what life
means today in contrast to what life meant for nineteenth century biology seems key to me if we want to reinvent the concept of biopower.
IMPACTSAFRO-PESSIMISM (1/2)
The impact of disease representation combined with afro-pessimism is the total lack of
ability to actually solve for diseases. Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland, author, Griffith University in
Australia; Amy, Psychology Professor at
Missouri Southern State University, Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and Local
Empowerment; International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163]
The result is a fatalistic apathy in the western viewer, leading to the impression that whatever crisis
occurs is simply part of a pattern of misery and gloom that is so deeply entrenched that it cannot
possibly be reversed. Cindy Patton (1990: 83) points out how images of Africans suffering and dying
from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses perfectly fit into such stereotypical images of a wasting continent
peopled by victim-bodies of illness, poverty, famine. Patton stresses how this pre-conceived image
neglects to recognize the many instances where development has actually taken place: moments, for
instance, when local communities managed to thrive, when personal and societal achievements
prevailed over doom and gloom.
Another impact to disease representation is that it actually causes afro-pessimism, and

creates/increases stigmatization not only towards individuals, but toward entire reigions and
governments. Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland, author, Griffith University in Australia; Amy, Psychology
Professor at
Stereotypical portrayals of Africa are epitomized by assumptions surrounding the sexual transmission
of HIV/AIDS. Rather than relying on scientific data or pragmatic policy deliberations, western
perceptions of HIV/AIDS in Africa have been dominated by moral judgments and prejudices (see
Sabatier, 1988:1). This is, as Susan Sontag (1988: 27) stresses, not necessarily new or surprising. She points
out that many diseases that are said to be linked to sexual fault (such as syphilis) which tend to inspire
fears of easy contagion and bizarre fantasies of transmission by non-venereal means in public places.
But such tendencies have been particularly pronounced with regard to representations of HIV/AIDS in
Africa. Sexual practices have been moralized and demonized by western doctors and other experts. As with
previous epidemics, such as cholera, the disease is being interpreted as a sign of moral laxity or political
decline (Sontag, 1988: 142). Representative of this practice is an American doctor, who stressed in a
press interview that there is a profound promiscuity in Uganda, and a virus which takes advantage of
it (cited in Hooper 1990: 28). The ensuing HIV/AIDS discourse mingles medical and moral
assumptions, making it difficult to prevent the production and diffusion of stigmatizing ideas (Patton
1990: 105). The result is a public discourse based on an entrenched suspicion about the disease and,
more importantly, about the people who are infected with it.
IMPACTSAFRO-PESSIMISM (2/2)
Western, afro-pessimist representations of Africa allow the government to take complete
control and authority over infected people. Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland, author, Griffith
University in Australia; Amy, Psychology Professor at
Practices of representation are among the most influential elements in encounters between the North and
the South (see Doty, 1996: 2). This is particularly the case with western representations of Africa, which
correspond to what Edward Said (1979: 2-3) termed orientalism: a style of thought and a corresponding
mode of governance that draws clear value distinctions between the orient and the occident. These
distinctions are characterized by the juxtaposition of fundamental opposites, which are presented as
essential cultural traits. The West is characterized by values such as reason, progress, activity, optimism
and order, while Africa is associated with emotion, stagnation, passivity, pessimism and chaos (see
Mitchell, 1998: 293; Bancroft, 2001: 96). The practices of authority and domination that issue from such
representations have insinuated themselves into all domains of life, from philosophy, science, history
and tourism to governmental regulations, economic structures, artistic traditions and scientific
methods. Early practices of photography are as much part of these colonial power relations (see Higgins:
2001: 22-36) as are contemporary perceptions of HIV/AIDS. Representations of HIV/AIDS do, indeed, fit
into established patterns of orientalism. Consider, for instance, how some of the first media accounts of
HIV/AIDS revolved around theories that traced the origin of the disease in Africa. One particular theory
was based on the assumption that the HIV virus had actually been present in Africans for years but simply
remained undiagnosed. That is, until they passed it out to the world as civilization reached them (Hilts
1988: 2). Another theory stipulated that HIV evolved from a parent virus discovered in wild African green
monkeys. The disease was then said to have crossed species barriers and found a human host in Africans, who
later passed it on to the rest of the unknowing world. Although debated by the medical community (see
Bancroft, 2001: 92-4; McNeill, 1998: 11-17, Smith, 2001: 330-333),
theories based on the origins of HIV/AIDS can often lead to a problematic practices of blaming others
and generating racist stereotypes (Sabatier, 1988). In this particular case, HIV/AIDS is represented as
emerging in far away places, from bodies of others that then contaminate the rest of the world.
The result is an emphasis on questions of possible origins, rather than an engagement with the
underlying causes of infection. It would be far more productive to emphasize how certain behaviors
and practices put all people at increased risk for HIV infection. Equally important are efforts to
understand factors that contribute to a persons vulnerability, such as power relations and societal norms that
limit womens choices to protect themselves against infection (see DeSantis, 2003, Roudi-Fahimi 2003,
Sarin, 2002 and UNIFEM 2005).
IMPACTSWAR (1/3)
Their representations of disease mobilize populations for war.
Eugene Thacker, March 2005[ 'Nomos, Nosos and Bios' ;Assistant Professor in the School of Literature,
Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology; author of two books: Biomedia and The
Global Genome] In programs such as these, we see several themes coming together which characterize the
post-9-11 era of national and homeland security. One of these is the emphasis on bioscience research,
especially in the areas of genetic engineering, immunology, and the possible linkages to the emerging fields
of genomics, proteomics, and genetic diagnostics.3 The ability to sequence the genomes of pathogens is seen
by many scientists as the important first step to understanding how those pathogens are able to mutate and infect
healthy cells. But alongside this there is also an equal emphasis on the technological infrastructure that
enables federal, state, and local health officials to communicate and make decisions in response to possible
health crises (U.S. DHS, 2004). This infrastructure includes computer databases and networks (e.g. hospital
informatics, up-to-date diagnostic technologies, emergency communications systems), as well as drug production
and distribution systems, and the training of health care personnel. In the broadest sense, information plays a
key role in enabling the communication of health-related data, be it via teleconferencing, via patient-specific data
being uploaded to a server, or via the rapid distribution of drugs from the U.S. Strategic National Pharmaceutical
Stockpile. Yet, from the U.S. perspective, an emphasis on biology and information is only part of the equation.
At all levels, the ability of government to respond to an emergency is crucial for the biological and
informatic components of biodefense to operate in an effective manner. This is where the particular
philosophy of war adopted by the U.S. has come into play, and it is a philosophy in the sense that, at the
same time that familiar Cold War concepts are deployed (a pharmaceutical stockpile or scenarios
involving a dirty bomb), U.S. policy has ontologically redefined war along the lines of terrorism; that is,
terrorism as precisely a series of non-catastrophic but highly threatening events. In this sense not only is
all terrorism bioterrorism, but we may be witnessing a new definition of life itself in which terror exists
virtually in relation to life. What might this mean, for terror to exist virtually in relation to life? For one thing, it
means that the use of the metaphor of war to talk about disease has ceased to be a metaphor, and that the
biological affair of intentionally causing or of fighting disease is literally, in bioterrorism, a form of war. A
2003 NIAID progress report outlines some of the results of its research, which has had an added benefit for
diseases not related to bioterrorism. It notes that the increased breadth and depth of biodefense research not only
is helping us become better prepared to protect citizens against a deliberately introduced pathogen, it also is
helping us tackle the continuous tide of naturally occurring emerging infections such as SARS and West Nile
virus (U.S. NIAID, 2003)
IMPACTSWAR (2/3)
Disease representation leads to perpetual warfare against all and any form of humanity.
Global Genome] No one will deny the real threats posed by emerging infectious disease, and the limited but
demonstrated effectiveness of bioterrorism; that is, obviously, not what is at issue here. What is at stake is the
manner in which U.S. biodefense policy has created an atmosphere in which it is impossible to distinguish
national security from public health, war from medicine, terror from biological life. The inordinate amount of
funding and emphasis given to biodefense nearly suggests that public health can only be improved
through the condition of permanent exception that is war, that the health of the population can only be
improved by continually targeting the population as biologically vulnerable. In the case of U.S. biodefense
policy, the perspective of necrology shows us that the current biopolitical state of emergency is maintained
by constantly producing the virtual dissolution of the body politic. Here, security, defense, and medicine
fold in to a single problem: how to identify any and all threats to the life of the population, such that
prevention and preemption will coincide perfectly. The threat to the body politic is also the threat to the
collective body natural, and thus the threat to life itself is also life itself; the threat to the medico-political
conception of the state is, at some basic level, biology. The very concept of biological warfare implies this
biology is the weapon, the means, and the target all at once. U.S. biodefense policy is actually a
philosophical, even existential statement: that, be it an intentional bioterrorist attack or an unintentional
epidemic, the common threat to the population is life itself. By definition, this undeclared war on
biology is without end, precisely because life itself is constantly threatened with its own end.
Biopolitics makes it impossible to distinguish war from epidemic: both are legitimate reasons to
engage in wholesale monitoring of the population because of supposed threats to life itself
Thacker in 2005 ( Eugene, Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and
Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology , Nomos, nosos and bios in the body politic,
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Articles/thacker.htm)
No one will deny the real threats posed by emerging infectious disease, and the limited but demonstrated
effectiveness of bioterrorism; that is, obviously, not what is at issue here. What is at stake is the manner in
which U.S. biodefense policy has created an atmosphere in which it is impossible to distinguish national
security from public health, war from medicine, terror from biological life. The inordinate amount of
funding and emphasis given to biodefense nearly suggests that public health can only be improved
through the condition of permanent exception that is war, that the health of the population can only be
improved by continually targeting the population as biologically vulnerable. In the case of U.S.
biodefense policy, the perspective of necrology shows us that the current biopolitical state of emergency is
maintained by constantly producing the virtual dissolution of the body politic. Here, security, defense,
and medicine fold in to a single problem: how to identify any and all threats to the life of the
population, such that prevention and preemption will coincide perfectly. The threat to the body politic is
also the threat to the collective body natural, and thus the threat to life itself is also life itself; the
threat to the medico-political conception of the state is, at some basic level, biology. The very concept of
biological warfare implies this biology is the weapon, the means, and the target all at once. U.S. biodefense
policy is actually a philosophical, even existential statement: that, be it an intentional bioterrorist attack or
an unintentional epidemic, the common threat to the population is life itself. By definition, this
undeclared war on biology is without end, precisely because life itself is constantly threatened with
its own end.
IMPACTSWAR (3/3)
Health discourse allows contemporary governmental biopolitical control to deploy
mechanisms of intervention, waging wars in an attempt to normalize society.
Bell in 2005(colleen, Biopolitical Strategies of Security:Considerations on Canadas New National Security
Policy, http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP34-Bell.pdf)
Contemporary biopolitics, in contrast to biopolitics in the first half of the twentieth century, is also
instructive in its sensitivity to liberalist conceptions of multiculturalism and notions of citizen
responsibility. The notion of society as composed of a single national culture, with a specific national destiny
tied to a national territory, argues Rose, has entered a crisis which has seen the pluralizing of culture to
cultures, and community to communities. Not only is this crisis reflected in Canadas multicultural policy
102 generally, but it has informed the creation of the Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security to supplement
the development of the national security policy. Rose argues that, among other transformations, this crisis has
led to a responsiblization of citizens. In the quest for health, citizens are encouraged to become active partners
who are accountable for securing their own well-being. The enterprises involved in this will 103 to
health involve wide ranging aspirations for health in which the conduct of individuals is governed at
a distance, by shaping the ways in which they understand and enact their own freedom. The
invitation 104 for diverse communities to participate in Canadas national security endeavours is such a
case in point. Technological innovations in surveillance as seen in the new security policy enable security
measures to be cast as a will to health as national security does not only involve prohibitive or coercive
mechanisms imposed against the will of its targets. Rather, it may also operate as a productive power that
produces the wills of individuals, particularly through discourses of rights and responsibilities in a
political context that is increasingly characterized by a range of calculated risks. The normalization of
elaborate security operations can be seen by how increasingly, notes Rose, surveillance is designed in
to the flows ofeveryday existence. As Lyon notes, the post September 11 panic regime shows that
anxious publics 105 that are willing to put up with many more intrusions, interceptions, delays, and
questions than was the case before September 11. The deployment of mechanisms of state intervention to
securitize biological, economic 106 and social processes that concern a population, in conjunction with
rationalities of responsibilizaton that treat constituents as facilitators of security, posits security as a
condition of liberty. This is a process of 107 subjectification, which Michael Dillon defines as, [A]n
order of knowledgeable practices, norms of conduct, and elaborate protocols of behavior. Its object is to
produce calculable subjects operating in calculable spaces, formidably empowered by their very
subscription to, indeed inscription into force by, technologies of calculation. The defining and
distinguishing paradox of power/knowledge is therefore that it is that very subjectification to power
that is empowering. 108 Consequently, risk as a category of existence rationalizes freedom not as
constrained by mechanisms of security, but as protected by them. In a society of security, such forms of
regularized freedom are normalized into the paradoxical and everyday conditions of freedom and subjection.
In short, security tells people how 109 to be good citizens.
IMPACTSBIOPOWER (1/4)
Biopolitics is predicated upon the calculation of the health of the population Bell in
2005(colleen, Biopolitical Strategies of Security: Considerations on Canadas New National
Security Policy, http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP34-Bell.pdf)
While not replacing, but rather penetrating and operating alongside sovereign power, biopower characterizes
liberal practices of government. According to Foucault, the era of biopower gave rise to the practice of
government in which the disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the
two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed. Indeed, notes Colin Gordon,
16 Foucault saw it as a characteristic (and troubling) property of the development of the practice of
government in Western societies to tend towards a form of political sovereignty which would be a
government of all and each, and whose concerns would be at once to totalize and to individualize.
The individualizing aspect of biopower, signifies disciplinary techniques of power first developed and
institutionalized in the seventeenth century, and theorized by Foucault in relation to the prison, the asylum,
and the clinic. Disciplinary techniques focus at the level of individual bodies and often involve panoptic
forms of institutional surveillance. The totalizing character of biopolitics, on the other hand, involves
calculations from which the wealth, health, or illness of the population (of a state) can be measured
by addressing human beings as a global mass.
Disease representation makes sovereigns wage wars for, with and against entire
populations.
Global Genome]
But it is in this last element that Foucaults points about biopolitics have the most resonance for our current
context of bioterrorism and emerging infectious disease. In his Collge lectures, Foucault says more about
the governmentality specific to biopolitics. He asks, How can a power such as this kill, if it is true that its
basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to
compensate for failings? (2003: 254). In other words, what is the relation between older forms of
sovereignty and the emerging, modern biopolitical practices of public health policy, hospital reform, the
professionalization of medicine, and the methods of statistics and demographics? Foucault offers one
response, which is that the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being, that the
biological came under State control, that there was at least a certain tendency that leads to what might
be termed State control of the biological (2003: 239-40). But how is the exceptional character of sovereign
power instantiated in such decentralized systems, in which the bureaucratic management of numbers and
bodies takes hold? There must be some set of principles for allowing, in exceptional circumstances, the
introduction of sovereign power. In other words, there must be some set of conditions that can be identified
as a threat, such that a corresponding state of emergency can be claimed, in which the formerly decentralized
apparatus of biopolitics suddenly constricts into the exception of sovereignty. It is at this moment that
racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States (2003: 254). But I
would argue that Foucault means racism here in a specific, medical and biological sense. Racism in this
sense is a biologically-inflected political relation in which war is rendered as fundamentally biological:
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf
of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in
the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital the existence in question is no longer the
juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. (1978: 137) In a
curious turn of phrase, Foucault later calls this a democratization of sovereignty, a condition in which the
sovereign state of emergency emerges through a widespread and generalized threat to the population (2003:
37). In such conditions, both a medical-biological view of the population, and a statisticalinformatic
means of accounting for the population, converge in the identification of potential threats and possible
measures of security. In a sense, it is war that acts as the hinge between population and information,
but a war that always puts at stake the biological existence of the population (and thus nation). The
body natural, even as it serves as an analogy for the body politic, is always what is fundamentally at
stake in the body politic.
Health care enables contemporary politics to govern every aspect of individual conduct in
society.
Bell in 2005(colleen, Biopolitical Strategies of Security:Considerations on Canadas New National Security
Policy, http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP34-Bell.pdf)
Contemporary biopolitics, in contrast to biopolitics in the first half of the twentieth century, is also
instructive in its sensitivity to liberalist conceptions of multiculturalism and notions of citizen
responsibility. The notion of society as composed of a single national culture, with a specific national destiny
tied to a national territory, argues Rose, has entered a crisis which has seen the pluralizing of culture to
cultures, and community to communities. Not only is this crisis reflected in Canadas multicultural policy
102 generally, but it has informed the creation of the Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security to supplement
the development of the national security policy. Rose argues that, among other transformations, this crisis has
led to a responsiblization of citizens. In the quest for health, citizens are encouraged to become active partners
who are accountable for securing their own well-being. The enterprises involved in this will 103 to
health involve wide ranging aspirations for health in which the conduct of individuals is governed at
a distance, by shaping the ways in which they understand and enact their own freedom. The
invitation 104 for diverse communities to participate in Canadas national security endeavours is such a
case in point. Technological innovations in surveillance as seen in the new security policy enable security
measures to be cast as a will to health as national security does not only involve prohibitive or coercive
mechanisms imposed against the will of its targets. Rather, it may also operate as a productive power that
produces the wills of individuals, particularly through discourses of rights and responsibilities in a
political context that is increasingly characterized by a range of calculated risks. The normalization of
elaborate security operations can be seen by how increasingly, notes Rose, surveillance is designed in
to the flows ofeveryday existence. As Lyon notes, the post September 11 panic regime shows that
anxious publics 105 that are willing to put up with many more intrusions, interceptions, delays, and
questions than was the case before September 11. The deployment of mechanisms of state intervention to
securitize biological, economic 106 and social processes that concern a population, in conjunction with
rationalities of responsibilizaton that treat constituents as facilitators of security, posits security as a
condition of liberty. This is a process of 107 subjectification, which Michael Dillon defines as, [A]n
order of knowledgeable practices, norms of conduct, and elaborate protocols of behavior. Its object is to
produce calculable subjects operating in calculable spaces, formidably empowered by their very
subscription to, indeed inscription into force by, technologies of calculation. The defining and
distinguishing paradox of power/knowledge is therefore that it is that very subjectification to power
that is empowering. 108 Consequently, risk as a category of existence rationalizes freedom not as
constrained by mechanisms of security, but as protected by them. In a society of security, such forms of
regularized freedom are normalized into the paradoxical and everyday conditions of freedom and subjection.
In short, security tells people how 109 to be good citizens.
Biopolitics necessitates genocidal slaughters of entire groups of people in the name of the
survival of humanity writ-large Rey Chow, Professor of the Humanities at Brown, 2002, The Protestant
Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 9
Let me attempt to reformulate Foucaults argument in a somewhat different manner. When life becomes the
overarching imperative, his argument implies, all social relations become subordinate to the discursive
network that has been generated to keep it going, so much so that even a negative, discriminatory fact
such as racism is legitimated in the name of the living. Rather than straightforwardly assuming the form of
a callous willingness to kill, therefore, racist genocide partakes of the organization, calculation, control,
and surveillance characteristic of powerin other words, of all the civil or civilized procedures that
are in place primarily to ensure the continuance of life. Killing off certain groups of people en masse is
now transformed (by the process of epistemic abstraction) into a productive, generative activity
undertaken for the life of the entire human species. Massacres are, literally, vital events.6 If Foucault
thereby shows how murder (a negative act) can be legitimated by a valorization of life (a positive idea), his
logic may, I think, also be turned around to demonstrate that the valorization of life itself, by the necessity of
practice, can give rise to processes of discrimination, hatred, and, in some extreme cases, extermination.
In other words, if the notion of legitimation shows how murder can, indeed, make sense as part of a positive
idea, the reversal of Foucaults logic shows that the material process of enforcing a positive idea inevitably
derails it into something destructive and unjust. It is, of course, always possible to explain this derailment
economically: since an infinite valorization of life cannot possibly be sustained on the basis of finite
resources, various forms of disciplinary and regulatory controls must be introduced in order to handle
population increases, thereby resulting in a hierarchical situation in which resources are assigned to the
privileged few rather than distributed equally among all, etc. Yet this type of explanationwhich sees
unequal economic distribution as the primary source of social injusticedoes not seem adequate to account
for the persistence of racism, especially in places where there is actually sufficient wealth, where the
democratization of resources seems to some degree to have been achieved. How, in other words, is one to
account for an environment in which one may be allowed to stay alive, may be told that all is equal, may be
given access to many things, only then to realize that an insidious pattern of discrimination continues
systematically to reduce one to a marginal position vis--vis mainstream society? Such an environment,
which is characterized by a schism between the positively proclaimed values of life, on the one hand, and
an affective dis-ease felt by those who sense they are nonetheless the targets of discrimination, on the
other, cannot be addressed purely on economic grounds. The schism in question is not simply a matter
of lies versus truths, or false ideology versus lived reality. It is rather, if we follow Foucaults thinking,
symptomatic of the generative functioning of biopower itself. To illustrate this, some examples may be
useful.
The ability to administer life also allows the government to control individuals continued
existence. James Bernauer, Professor of Philosophy, Boston College, Michel Foucaults Force of Flight, 1990,
p. 141-142
This capacity of power to conceal itself cannot cloak the tragedy of the implications contained in Foucault's
examination of its functioning. While liberals have fought to extend rights and Marxists have denounced the
injustice of capitalism, a political technology, acting in the interests of a better administration of life, has
produced a politics that places man's existence as a living being in question. The very period that
proclaimed pride in having overthrown the tyranny of monarchy, that engaged in an endless clamor for
reform, that is confident in the virtues of its humanistic faith-this period's politics created a landscape
dominated by history's bloodiest wars. What comparison is possible between a sovereign's authority to
take a life and a power that, in the interest of protecting a society's quality of life, can plan, as well as
develop the means for its implementation, a policy of mutually assured destruction? Such a policy is
neither an aberration of the fundamental principles of modern politics nor an abandonment of our age's
humanism in favor of a more primitive right to kill; it is but the other side of a Power that is "situated and
exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." The biopolitical project of administering and optimizing life closes its circle with the production of the Bomb.
"The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to
death is the underside of a power to guarantee an individual's continued existence." The solace that
might have been expected from being able to gaze at scaffolds empty of the victims of a tyrant's vengeance
has been stolen from us by the noose that has tightened around each of our own necks.
( ) Biopolitics causes the creation of super-viruses that cause extinction

Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France 1975-1976,2003, p. 253-4 We
are, then, in a power that has taken control of both the body and life or that has, if you like, taken control of life
in general~with the body as one pole and the population as the other. We can therefore immediately identify
the paradoxes that appear at the points where the exercise of this biopower reaches its limits. The paradoxes
become apparent if we look, on the one hand, at atomic power, which is not simply the power to kill, in
accordance with the rights that are granted to any sovereign, millions and hundreds of millions of people (after
all, that is traditional). The workings of contemporary political power are such that atomic power represents a
paradox that is difficult, if not impossible, to get around. The power to manufacture and use the atom bomb
represents the deployment of a sovereign power that kills, but it is also the power to kill life itself. So the
power that is being exercised in this atomic power is exercised in such a way that it is capable of suppressing
life itself. And, therefore, to suppress itself insofar as it is the power that guarantees life. Either it is sovereign
and uses the atom bomb, and therefore cannot be power, biopower, or the power to guarantee life, as it has
been ever since the nineteenth century. Or, at the opposite extreme, you no longer have a sovereign right that
is in excess of biopower, but a biopower that is in excess of sovereign right. This excess of biopower appears
when it becomes technologically and politically possible for man not only to manage life but to make it
proliferate, to create living matter, to build the monster, and, ultimately, to build viruses that cannot be
controlled and that are universally destructive. This formidable extension of biopower, unlike what I was
just saying about atomic power, will put it beyond all human sovereignty.
IMPACTSRACISM (1/3)
Fascination with epidemics is due to our own anxieties about our increasingly complex
worldthese tropes are more often than not used to bolster racist prejudices Schell in 1997
(Heather, phd candidate, literature, Stanford, Outburst! A Chilling True Story about EmergingVirus Narratives and Pandemic Social Change Configurations 5.1, p. 93-133) Our current fascination with
viruses springs from our worries about the future. Ultimately, the the triumph of multiculturalism and the
global community; the ecosystem's anger at and vengeance for our meddling; the loss of [End Page 131]
the unknown; or the escape of the unknown into our society, where everything familiar will be destroyed in
its path. We might indeed be coming to see the world as an integrated system, but such integration jeopardizes
boundaries many had believed to be real. Viral discourse raises the possibility of a type of global busing, bringing
the foreign into our neighborhoods through infection. At the same time, fear of such change (especially change
conceptualized as disease) could successfully stall it. Boundary thinking might seem stale to theorists, but it is not
static. People who crave boundaries can make boundaries real. Therefore, we must not rely on the current cultural
vulnerability to questions of identity as the onset of some automatic process that will ultimately dismantle
traditional inequities. An epidemic future might mean that we have to pay attention to peoples, cultures,
economies, and ecologies outside our own national borders. Unfortunately, an insistence on perceiving
international relationships in terms of infiltrating viral infections limits the effectiveness of our response .
D. A. Henderson of Johns Hopkins has recommended the development of a "network of international centers to
detect the emergence of dangerous diseases and, if possible, to contain them." 144 Morse further suggests that
"development agencies should be educated to include emerging-virus considerations when evaluating major
changes in land use or when making decisions that will alter ecological equilibria or population densities. It may
even be possible to develop regular 'viral impact assessments.'" 145 While this proposal has some value, it targets
only one factor of our experience of disease. According to the World Health Organization, "it becomes more and
more clear that morbidity and mortality due to these infectious diseases are as much a function of the state of
human development than they are of the virulence of the microorganisms which are their biological cause";
populations living in poverty suffer from a disproportionate share of epidemic diseases. 146 Insisting on some
[End Page 132] inherently foreign viral geography might serve to prod us out of our myopic nationalism, but it
can also be too easily marshaled as spurious proof to bolster preexisting prejudices. Disease surveillance thus
offers only a partial, problematic solution to a quandary that will remain unresolved until we are ready to
perceive our complex engagement with the world through a different metaphor.
IMPACTSRACISM (3/3)
IMPACTSRACISM (2/3)
The notion that Africans carry HIV/AIDS enables discrimination and justifies racism against
The
virusMandisa
narrative
reinforces
notions
otherness
DOUGHERTY
INthe
thosekiller
infected.
Mbali,
2004 racist/colonial
[majored in History
andof
English
in undergrad.
degree at
2001
(STEPHEN,
assistant
professor
in
English
at
Elizabethtown
Community
College,
The
Biopolitics
of
the
University of KwaZulu-Natal, has an Honors and Masters degrees in History. AIDS Discourses
Killer
Virus
Novel,
CULTURAL
CRITIQUE, SPRING)
and the
South
African
State: Government
denialism and post-apartheid AIDS policy-making]
Maryk's dilemma, his capture by the double bind wherein his ministrations on behalf of man assure the
destruction of the environment that sustains man, is the dilemma of The Blood Artists. Indeed, as I shall
Real
discrimination
against
Africanscontradiction
and those ofin
African
descent
did arise
inbroadly.
Europe At
and
in
consider
in conclusion,
it is a defining
the killer
virus novel
more
theAmerica
same time
the
oftexts
the notion
that Africans
were AIDS
carriers/victims.
Africans
African
that 1980s
killer out
virus
pay homage
to a progressive,
environmentalist
agenda,
and atand
the those
same of
time
that they
descent,
especially Haitians
were turned
down for apartments,
forced selfhood
to have AIDS
before being
tacitly acknowledge
the fragmentation
and multiplicities
of a postmodern
that istests
commensurate
with
accepted
for
certain
academic
scholarships
and
people
with
HIV
or
AIDS
were
not
allowed
the environmentalist ethos, they reinforce an integral and paranoid model of subjectivity thatentrance
harkens
into
(Chirimuuta
and Chirimuuta
1989:71-134).
Thisofformed
partnecessity,
of a larger
battery
of proposed
backAmerica
to the high
era of Western
imperialism.
Out of a kind
historical
they
also reinscribe
discriminatory
measures
in
the
West
in
the
1980s
against
gays,
blacks,
prostitutes,
drug
users
the complex of racist attitudes that nurtured this paranoid subjectivity. In terms of political
(people
deemed
to be
.high failure
risk. Ofof
contracting
positive
people.
In America,
imagination,
then,
theatgreat
the killer HIV)
virus and
textsHIV
is that
the only
alternative
to the posthuman
institutionalized
and
legal
discrimination
against
HIV
positive
people
on
the
basis
of their HIV
status,
condition they are capable of imagining is a return to man on the imperial model--the
white
manand
hell .high
risk.
groups became
in and
the 1980s
and discrimination
also
bent on
subjugating
bothcommon
"nature"
other (Brandt
peoples 1987:192).
whose less Prejudice
technologically
advanced social
informed
policyhis
responses
in late
apartheid
South
Africa
in medical/cultural
the 1980s. In South
Africa in the
conditionsearly
threaten
fantasyto
ofAIDS
human
dominion
over
nature.
Like
discourse
regulations
were
proposed to killer
force foreign
mine workers
to brutal
have HIV
tests andagainst
deport them
if theyas
were
colonial era,
contemporary
virus novels
represent
aggression
nonwhites
found positive (Jochelson 2001). Government denialism can therefore
19 be read as a local response to the
epidemiological
defense
in the name
of an endangered
humanity. around
Indeed,
justpolicy-making.
as Donna Haraway
history
of local and
international
prejudice
and racist discourses
AIDS
warns
thatanti-discrimination
"[t]he residue of thehas
history
tropical
medicine
andpolicy-making
natural historycircles
in lateinternationally
twentieth
However,
been of
an colonial
important
principle
in AIDS
century
immune
discourse
should
not
be
underestimated"
(223),
neither
can
the
lingering
presence
of colonial
for quite some time now. Jonathan Mann.s assertion, as head of the World Health Organisation.s Global
racist
discourse
in
killer
virus
texts
(the
trade
paperback
version
of
immune
discourse)
be
underestimated
Programme on AIDS, that AIDS policy internationally must protect rather than infringe the rights of HIV or
written
as a merely
idiosyncrasy.
AsAIDS
with Zero's
weinternational
can avail ourselves
positiveoff
individuals,
hasunfortunate
meant thatgeneric
rights-based
notions of
policylesson,
have had
currencyofforthe
unpleasant
lessons
that
this
racist
presence
speaks,
but
only
if
we
confront
it
head
on.
quite some time (Schneider and Stein 2001:10; Garrett 1995: 67). Various agents in South Africa in the
1980s and early 1990s managed to force a shift in the way that AIDS and family planning policy would
be framed: coercive
practices of
outside
to formracial
a legitimate
of
Governmentalism
denialism
AIDSa human
leads torights
falseframework
beliefs of ceased
inherent
traits.part
Mbali,
discourse produced by government, medical and public health quite some time ago in the country
2004
[Mandisa,
majored
in History
and
English obsolete.
in undergrad. degree at the University of KwaZulu(Mbali
2001), which
renders
denialism
historically
Natal, has an Honors and Masters degrees in History. AIDS Discourses and the South African
State: Government denialism and post-apartheid AIDS policy-making]
It is this central, yet largely unresolved, question that this article will attempt to answer. The central claim of
this paper is that government AIDS denialism is a response to a history of racist understandings of
African sexuality as inherently pathological in AIDS science and linked discriminatory public health
policy responses to the epidemic by the last apartheid government and internationally. As will be
demonstrated later in this article, unlike AIDS dissidence internationally, the South African version of
denialism espoused by Mbeki and other high profile government officials has been obsessed with
colonial and late apartheid discourses of race, sexuality and disease in Africa.
IMPACTS
IMPERIALISM (1/3
Bacteriology serves imperialist ideolog
DOUGHERTY IN 2001
(STEPHEN, assistant professor in English at Elizabethtown Community College
The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel, CULTURAL CRITIQUE, SPRING) The casualness with which
Preston registers his nostalgia for the colonialist past and with which he expresses colonialist/imperialist
assumptions about, for example, the relative desirability of the English way and the hierarchical relation between
the province and the metropole, is striking. But it is not uncommon in the killer virus genre. Indeed, the image
that Preston conjures of the hot-waxed British Empire rolling into the twenty-first century on automatic pilot
serves as an appropriate figure for how our "postcolonial" moment is perceived, and valued, in the genre per se.
In effect, killer virus novels ignore that we have emerged from the colonial era and that the developing
world is politically (if not economically) independent from the old imperial metropoles. We witness instead a
situation wherein, as Laura Otis puts it, "[b]acteriology serve[s] . . . imperialist ideology" (5). The American
scientists cum adventure heroes who boldly go forth to do battle with evil viruses are the late twentiethcentury version of the "microbe-hunters," the epidemiologists,[End Page 19] bacteriologists, and related
medical personnel who, Otis explains, were instrumental in nineteenth-century imperial expansion (5). 20
They stand as ready reminders of the West's continued hegemony, and they also help to cultivate a
properly fascinated loathing of the Southern Hemisphere and its dispensable, disease-prone peoples. The
virtuous Dr. Pearse, ever obsessed with health and cleanliness, explains to a group of international reporters that
One of the lessons of what we now call the "antibiotic era" of the previous century was that as weaker microbes
fall away, more resilient ones survive and emerge, and sometimes with a vengeance. We will never eradicate
viruses or bacteria from the earth, nor should we. What we as a people must do is to seek to control viruses. (59)
In the context of the genocidal events that immediately precede Pearse's lecture to the press, however, it is not
clear whether the doctor is referring to the dark, infected people who suffer the brunt of the pain and the
suffering in the novel's representational world or if at the same time he is referring to the deadly microbes
themselves. "America is no longer the world's policeman," Pearse concurs with a British reporter; "it is its
doctor" (59). But it's a fine line indeed between a good doctor and a bad cop in The Blood Artists. At the
beginning of the novel, Pearse and Maryk are directed by the CDC to investigate a mysterious viral outbreak in
central Africa. What they discover when they get there is a womb-like cave that "is simply too hot to preserve"
(42). Therefore both the cave and its surrounding ecological system must be destroyed. They also find indigenous
tribal people who, infected and uninfected alike, must be sacrificed for the sake of a greater, white humanity. "If
we don't stop it here, cauterize it, now," Maryk explains, "it's going to slip out of the jungle and march across the
continent and the planet" (43). But Pearse's kindness to a young African girl whom he allows to escape subverts
Maryk's brutal vigilance. The specter of pandemic disease that killer virus novels conjure as their stock-in-trade is
certainly horrifying. But what is equally horrifying is their recuperation of an imperialist model of Western
selfhood in response to the dehumanizing threat of the virus. In The Blood Artists, for example, Peter Maryk is
the fantasy of the imperial self as a defended "Christian" stronghold. Due to his [End Page 20] enhanced immune
system, or what Pearse dubiously refers to as "the monstrous aberrance of [his] genetic superiority" (49), Maryk
is incapable of even catching a cold, let alone an exotic viral disease. In the body of Peter Maryk, or "Dr. Peter
Christian," the pseudonym he uses in an article that he and Pearse coauthor about his strange immunity, self
versus non-self recognition is perfect; the white Christian warrior is impregnable.
IMPACTSIMPERIALISM (1/2)
The discourse of disease marks bodies as dysfunctional to prop up imperial tropes of
masculinity and racism Kirsten Osther in 2002 (rreceived her Ph.D. in American Civilization
at Brown University, Contagion and the Boundaries of the Visible: The Cinema of World Health
Camera Obscura
17.2 (2002) 1-38) Within the audiovisual discourse of world health, the racial and sexual features of these
transparently legible bodies perform the crucial function of linking bodily otherness with implied
contaminations that are nationally specific in origin. In the postwar period, racial difference is collapsed
onto national difference, and the threat of physical and geopolitical "penetration" by invisible contagions
is conceived as a sexualized attack. The films that utilize marked bodies as vectors of contagion
emphatically draw attention to the infectious difference between the diseased bodies and their imperial
others (often distinguished by their whiteness, masculinity, and wealth ). The body captured on film is
essentially coextensive with the profilmic body; image and object are indistinguishable in their materiality. Thus
these films partake of a Bazinian conception of realism, in which "the photographic image is the object itself, the
object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it." 5 While this passage [End Page 3] focuses
explicitly on the indexical quality of mechanical reproduction through photography, it also implicitly claims that,
within photographic representation, the relationship between signifier and signified is fundamentally
unambiguous. It is precisely through their reliance on this form of indexical realism that the public health films
that conflate bodily difference with disease assert their own objectivity. By maintaining that racial and sexual
difference transparently correlate to contagion, these films establish their own ideological structures of
signification as universal truths and, thus, as authentic documents of realism.
IMPACTSIMPERIALISM (2/2)
Killer virus narratives stabilize the western conception of the self by juxtaposing it off of
colonialist stereotypes of the unclean, disease-ridden other Schell in 1997 (Heather, phd
candidate, literature, Stanford, Outburst! A Chilling True Story about EmergingVirus Narratives and Pandemic Social Change Configurations 5.1, p. 93-133) The virus narratives react to the
suddenly friable self with several different strategies. They frequently fantasize about the supposedly clear-cut
days of high imperialism. Occasionally, they panic about the lived death of the subject. More rarely, they
dream about a world of achieved, utopian multiculturalism. The first and last response are relatively
incompatible; however, some notion of the primitive is common to all. As the ultimate non-self, the
primitive plays a powerful role in virus narratives. Marianna Torgovnick dissects the concept in a very useful
way in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. The primitive as Other helps ground "the Western sense
of self"; it is usually defined "as different from (usually opposite to) the present. After that, reactions to the
present take over." 81 Whatever "primitive" means in different contexts, it says much more about Westerners and
the Western world than about any other people or place. For virus writers, the primitive represents the last bastion
of the biological unknown, where iconoclastic viruses practice on local populations in preparation for pandemics.
Viruses living there are unhampered by our human rights regulations. The primitive thus functions as the location
of what Douglas calls "disorder," because creatures and possibilities develop there in a way that the virus writers
see as impossible back home. Those writers who seek solutions or at least comfort in colonial fantasies have
chosen the one era when the West felt it had attained some authority in the world of the primitive. White men
were confident then, at least through the tinge of nostalgia. They strode alone, confidently, through the bush,
bagging man-eaters that had been terrorizing villages, earning the perpetual gratitude of the natives with gifts of
Christianity, hygiene, and lighters. They knew who was who. Though they might venture into regions of
ambiguity, ambiguity stayed put when they went home. Disorder did not travel in those days. [End Page 115]
Popular science texts on viruses particularly seem to treasure imperialist imagery and forget its metaphoric
origins. 82 The virus experts in their writing are coded as the 1990s, postcolonial equivalent of big-game hunters.
Rob Webster, for example, "has been tracking flu viruses" for half a century; "he hopes to catch a pandemic flu in
the act of emerging." 83 This phrase nicely captures the predatory connotations of "emerging," the newly coined
expression for recently discovered viruses. 84 Dennis Burkitt, a Scottish surgeon in Uganda who ultimately
discovers a viral cause for a particular type of lymphoma, undertakes "the Long Safari" to perform his
"geographical biopsy." 85 Preston frequently refers to "virus hunters"--virile, driven Western men who are
nearly indistinguishable from the fictional characters in several centuries of colonial fantasy . Consider this
portrayal: [Gene Johnson] spent years traveling across central Africa in search of the reservoirs of Ebola and
Marburg viruses. He had virtually ransacked Africa looking for these life forms, but despite his searches he had
never found them in their natural hiding places. No one knew where any of the filoviruses came from; no one
knew where they lived in nature. . . . To find the hidden reservoir of Ebola was one of Johnson's great ambitions.
86
This imagery employs the tropes of exploration, adventure, and treasure hunting. By playing on these
tropes, the author encourages readers to imagine viruses as they would an elephant graveyard or the
source of the Nile. Hunting metaphors associate virology and virus hunting with manly political activity on
the world sphere, instead of high-tech but possibly nerdy fussing with electron microscopes and computer
analysis.
IMPACTS- GOVERNMENTAL DENIALISM (1/2)

IMPACTS- GOVERNMENTAL DENIALISM (2/2)
Governmental denailism of AIDS leads to racism, perpetuating the disease, increases poverty,
and ineffective use of the foreign aid. Mbali, 2004 [Mandisa, majored in History and English in
Governmental
denialism
stigmatizes
individuals. Mandisa
[majored
in History
undergrad. degree
at the University
of KwaZulu-Natal,
has an Mbali,
Honors 2004
and Masters
degrees
in
and
English
in
undergrad.
degree
at
the
University
of
KwaZulu-Natal,
has
an
Honors
and
History. AIDS Discourses and the South African State: Government denialism and post-apartheid
Masters
degrees in History. AIDS Discourses and the South African State: Government
AIDS policy-making]
denialism
and
post-apartheid
AIDS can
policy-making]
This paper
argues
that AIDS denialism
be understood as driven by five main factors: . The medical
findings of certain dissident scientists, which have been appropriated by government officials in South
Africa; The extent of the crisis brought about by the epidemic, which has prompted denialism because
Government
AIDS denialism
beapowerfully
in terms
its being haunted
the ghosts
of
government cannot
deal with can
it; As
strategy toexplained
avoid conflict
overof
intellectual
propertyby
rights
of
colonial
andThe
Western
and on
their
of Africans
as diseased.
will now
essentialmedicine
medicines;.
impactculture,
of poverty
thecharacterisation
course of the epidemic,
which
has led toIgovernment
turn
to thispositing
largely extinct
racist
itself , whichtohas
government
denialism.
Colonial
denialists
poverty
as adiscourse
counter explanation
theinfluenced
virological
cause of AIDS.
Simultaneously,
medical
discourse
Africans was
highly
sexualised, adoption
perhaps, nowhere
more
so than when
it was
denialism
may bearound
a smokescreen
for the
government.s
of poverty
sustaining
neoliberal
attached
STD management
was constructed
in colonial
economictopolicies,
which mayprogrammes.
be blockingAfrican
furthersexuality
public spending
on AIDS;
and. Themedical
historydiscourse
of
as
primitive, uncontrolled
and excessive,
and as representative
of AIDS
Discourses
the South
African
constructions
of .the African.
as the inherently
diseased racial
and sexual
otherand
in both
colonial
and
State
the darkness
of the continent itself (Vaughan 1991:129). On the other hand, other colonial actors saw
post-colonial
times.
colonisation.s social and economic transformations as causing the .degeneration. of an .innocent. African
(Vaughan 1991:129).
The influence
of these
views is traceable in government denialism. In
Thesexuality
affs representation
of disease
leads of
to both
AIDS
denialism
so
far
as
it
posits
that
the
Western
biomedicine
attached
to
AIDS at
aims
to stigmatise
African sexuality
Mbali, 2004 [Mandisa, majored in History and English in undergrad. degree
the University
of KwaZulu-Natal,
has an
and
in
its
frequent
appeals
to
unspecified
.African.
solutions
to
the
problem,
it
relies
on an imagined,
Honors and Masters degrees in History. AIDS Discourses and the South African State: Government denialism
and postpristine
and
essentialisedThe
notion
of African
culture.
Controversially
enough
for African
feminists,
apartheid
AIDS
policy-making]
epidemic
patterns
of AIDS
demonstrate the
influence
of poverty
and inequality.
.African.
solutions
to
AIDS
proposed
by
government
officials
have
included
virginity
testing
forcomplements
adolescent
There is a further development of arguments linking AIDS and poverty that denialism neatly
girls,
and
in
Swaziland
the
mandatory
wearing
of
tassels
by
adolescents
and
teenagers
to
indicate
the government.s adoption of poverty-entrenching neoliberal economic policies. It can, therefore,virginity.7
be seen as,
This senses,
tends toapoint
to an
ahistorical
Africa
vision ofpolicy.
Africas
past, where
therea were
no promiscuous,
in some
position
produced
by .Merrie
government
economic
According
to such
position
government
corrupted,
African
women,clause
and alltoAfrican
avoided
sex before
marriage
and did
notwould
denialism
canWesternised
be said to be
a convenient
avoid women
the drastic
increases
in public
spending
that
spread STDs
andout
AIDS.
be required
to roll
combination HIV treatment. The governments adoption of policies of fiscal
discipline and neoliberal macro-economics, evinced in the Growth Employment and Redistribution
strategy (GEAR) (Bond 2001) also indirectly affects the formulation of AIDS policy in the following ways:
privatising essential basic and social services; reducing social spending (including spending on health); and
liberalising trade relations, thus making developing countries. economies attractive to foreign investment. These
policies have hindered the formulation of macroeconomic policy more favourable to addressing poverty
and inequality in the country (Bond 2001; Habib and Padayachee 2000:3). This means that they can be said to
have affected the shape of the impact of the AIDS epidemic in ways suggested by the links between poverty and
the epidemic suggested above.
AIDS denial allows governments to continue neoliberal economic policies

Mbali, 2004 [Mandisa, majored in History and English in undergrad. degree at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, has an
Honors and Masters degrees in History. AIDS Discourses and the South African State: Government denialism and postapartheid AIDS policy-making] Government AIDS denialism can be powerfully explained in terms of its being
haunted by the ghosts of colonial medicine and Western culture, and their characterisation of Africans as
diseased. I will now turn to this largely extinct racist discourse itself , which has influenced government
denialism. Colonial medical discourse around Africans was highly sexualised, perhaps, nowhere more so than
when it was attached to STD management programmes. African sexuality was constructed in colonial medical
discourse as primitive, uncontrolled and excessive, and as representative of AIDS Discourses and the South
African State the darkness of the continent itself (Vaughan 1991:129). On the other hand, other colonial actors
saw colonisation.s social and economic transformations as causing the .degeneration. of an .innocent. African
sexuality (Vaughan 1991:129). The influence of both of these views is traceable in government denialism. In so
far as it posits that the Western biomedicine attached to AIDS aims to stigmatise African sexuality and in
its frequent appeals to unspecified .African. solutions to the problem, it relies on an imagined, pristine and
essentialised notion of African culture. Controversially enough for African feminists, .African. solutions to
AIDS proposed by government officials have included virginity testing for adolescent girls, and in Swaziland the
mandatory wearing of tassels by adolescents and teenagers to indicate virginity.7
***QUARANTINE**
2NC MODULE (1/1)

A) INTERNAL LINK: The biopolitical control of public health leads to quarantine.
Rabinow and Rose, Jan 2003 [Paul and Nikolas, THOUGHTS ON THE CONCEPT OF BIOPOWER TODAY, page 19-21,
http://www.molsci.org/research/publications_pdf/Rose_Rabinow_Biopower_Today.pdf] The
first biopolitical strategies, in the

eighteenth century, concerned the management of illness and health, and from that moment, these issues have
been repeatedly problematized and intervened upon by a whole range of authorities. They have a peculiar
saliency in liberal societies because they establish links among and between multiple levels of society, from the
aspiration of the individual to be cured, to the management of the health status of the population as a whole. The
issue of illness has, of course, also been the exemplary field for a whole series of other modes of individual and
collective problematizations operating in terms of the division of the normal and the pathological. Several
decades of scholarship has made this much self-evident. Understood in this sense, it is clear that the poles of this
bio-political field extend from the management of collective health by means of pure water, to annual health
check-ups and insurance, through preventive medicine that operates in large domains between collectivities and
individuals, to the field of clinical interventions onto the body of the sick person in the name of health. And, as
many have pointed out, action on the collective pole has been the main motor of increases in longevity and
quality of life. Variations in the applications and financing of the technologies applied to this collective pole
are the key factors determining the scandalous variations in life expectancy and life chances that we can
observe today around the globe. In the vast majority of these instances, the causes and the remedies are
known, and require no further scientific advance or technological innovation only political will. Even in
apparently novel disorders, such as SARS, whose outbreak rapidly called forth the whole panoply of modern
biological medicine including the rapid identification and sequencing of the pathogen, the preventive modes of
intervention required were archaic. They were basically those of quarantine first applied to epidemic
outbreaks such as plague at least since medieval times, merely updated to take account of contemporary
mechanisms of mobility and communication. And they proved highly effective without any significant
contribution from genomic medicine. It will have become clear that our diagnosis as to whether or not a
new regime of biopower will take shape that is to say, will pass a qualitative new configuration of
knowledge, power and subjectivity - depends on many factors. Many of these factors depend on contingencies,
others depend upon the uncertain outcome of genomic research itself. As we write, in August 2003, the most
central unknown is whether the new forms of knowledge liked to molecular biology in general, and to genomics
in particular, can actually generate the kinds of diagnostic and therapeutic tools that its advocates hope for. The
stakes here are high, economically, medically and ethically. They lie in the presumed capacity of genomics to
identify precisely some central processes involved in illness that control the manufacture of proteins, and in doing
so, open these to precise intervention in order to produce therapeutic effect.
B) IMPACTFALSE SENSE OF SECURITY Testing and subsequent segregation leads to a

false sense of security, false negatives lessen incentives to be precautious, turning case. Field 90
(Martha, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; B.A. 1965, Radcliffe College; J.D. 1968, University of Chicago, Boston
University School of Law, American Journal of Law & Medicine, 16 Am. J. L. and Med. 34) LexisNexis Dangerous
reactions to
testing can occur in some people who test negative as well as some who test positive. Clinical experience reveals
that persons who test negative often experience a false sense of security and a sense of invulnerability. Especially
if they have engaged in risky behavior in the past, they are less likely to use precautions than if they had never
been tested. 118 To the extent that such a response exists, it detracts from the utility of testing. Some of those who
test negative will be false negatives and will spread the disease if they do not use precautions; some who were
truly negative will become infected because the high risk behavior that did not infect them in the past will do so
in the future .Even if the result of testing were not to be limited to informing the person tested of his status,
the false sense of security and reduced precautions that testing can breed pose a serious difficulty with a
testing program. Even under a system of universal testing and segregation of all who test positive, false
negatives would remain in the general population -- both those due to test error and also those who were in
their latency period when the testing occurred. Among those who tested negative, it seems likely that the
sense that the infected had been removed from their midst would lessen incentives to use precautions, by
the false negative persons and by others, and the infection would continue to spread in the general
population.
I/L Ext. (1/1)
The unreasonable fear that emerges from the representation of disease leads to stigma and
quarantine. Moy, 2003 [Patsy, Sars stigma puts control of disease at risk; More than half of
survey respondents say they are scared of recovered patients and many want them quarantined;
South China Morning Post] One in three people believe Sars patients should remain in quarantine for
up to four months after recovery, and half admit that they fear ex-patients, according to a survey by the
Chinese University. Doctors and the Equal Opportunities Commission said misunderstandings about the
disease could seriously hamper infection control by encouraging sufferers to conceal their infection to
avoid social stigma. The survey showed 51.3 per cent of respondents said they remained scared of ex-Sars
patients. Forty-one per cent said ex-Sars patients should continue wearing face masks in public places and
32.7 per cent said they should remain quarantined for between 15 and 120 days, with about two-thirds of
those saying the quarantine should last at least 30 days. Lee Sing, head of the research team and a
psychiatry professor at the Chinese University, said such "unnecessary fears" mainly stemmed from
ignorance. Dr Lee said the social stigma attached to Sars patients was similar to that suffered by patients
with Aids or leprosy."The findings remind me of leprosy patients and their families who were rejected and
stoned by healthy people during ancient times," Dr Lee said. The psychiatry professor said there was an urgent
need for accurate medical knowledge about Sars in the community. His view was shared by colleague Paul Chan
Kay-sheung, a microbiologist, who said no ex-patients had so far been found to have infected other people. Dr
Chan said patients who were discharged from hospital were nevertheless advised to keep wearing masks and stay
at home, mainly to avoid being infected with diseases themselves. The telephone poll of 1,023 people, aged
between 15 and 65, was carried out between July 3 and 8. One-sixth of people interviewed said they would
distance themselves from colleagues who lived in previously infected buildings or whose family members
had contracted Sars. More than one-quarter (27 per cent) said they would avoid meeting friends whose
family members had contracted Sars. Anna Wu Hung-yuk, the outspoken chairwoman of the Equal
Opportunities Commission, said: "A new Sars outbreak may reappear in two months. The community should
hold a more rational attitude and avoid unnecessary panic. Unreasonable fears would only hamper infectioncontrol measures by making people reluctant to report cases." Dr Lee agreed that infection control could
suffer as a result of such misconceptions. The findings showed 71.3 per cent of people said their anxiety
mainly stemmed from insufficient information about Sars from the government, while 68.9 per cent blamed
medical professionals for frequently changing their views about the disease, such as infection periods and routes
of transmission. Nearly half said the government's guidelines on Sars for employers and their workers were
unclear. Since the end of March the Equal Opportunities Commission has received 79 Sars -related complaints,
including at least 13 from residents of Amoy Gardens, the estate worst hit by the outbreak. Of the complaints, 55
were related to employment. They included those from workers who were fired after catching Sars, or because
they lived in infected buildings or had infected family members.
IMPACT Ext. (1/2)
Universal testing drains resources and personnel, it requires large administrative costs.
Additionally, false negatives mean it would be counter-productive in containing AIDS. Field 90
(Martha, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; B.A. 1965, Radcliffe College; J.D. 1968, University of
Chicago, Boston University School of Law, American Journal of Law & Medicine, 16 Am. J. L. and Med. 34)
LexisNexis Even if universal testing could be carried out, it could not contain the AIDS virus. False negatives
would not be detected, and persons still in the latency period when testing was performed also would go
undetected. Repeat testing would be necessary to remedy those errors, and in the meantime the carriers in the
"uninfected" population might continue to spread the disease. One danger is that the "uninfected" population
would feel a sense of security, and not pursue precautions against infection, even though that population could
not be entirely secure from infectious persons. Despite these problems, an enthusiast for quarantine might argue
that the number of seropositive persons in the general population would be drastically reduced by generalized
testing, repeated at six [*55] month intervals, with the resulting segregation of those who tested seropositive;
the fact that it does not work perfectly is not a reason to reject the proposal if it substantially reduces the risks.
But even if one were willing to follow that course, a universal or widespread testing program does not represent
a practicable approach to the AIDS crisis, because of the costs it would entail. 92 The costs include the use of
vast amounts of vital health care resources, such as trained personnel to administer the test, laboratory
equipment and technicians to process results and professionals to provide health care information and
counseling. 93 Such programs would also involve large administrative costs in establishing testing
facilities and then taking responsibility for maintaining test results. 94
False testing leads to a false sense of security since antibodies develop slowly, false negatives
make transmission inevitable. Oberman 96 (Michelle, Associate Professor at DePaul University College
of Law, Genetics and the Law: The
Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Genetic Technology and Biomedical Ethics: Test Wars: Mandatory HIV
Testing, Women, and Their Children, University of Chicago, The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable 3
U Chi L Sch Roundtable 615 The anti-coercionary coalition countered the test zealots with a variety of
arguments. First, there were arguments based upon the validity of the HIV test itself. Even assuming that
every individual could be tested--an assumption that is wholly untenable given that public health workers
have never achieved universal compliance when testing for any disease--even when they had free treatment
rather than stigma to offer those who were infected 6 --it was far from obvious that the public would be fully
protected by the dissemination of these test results. The nature of an antibody test was to identify those who had
been exposed to the virus at some time in the past, and whose bodies had developed antibodies against the virus.
Because antibodies develop slowly, 7 some individuals who test negative for HIV antibodies are in fact
infected with, and capable of transmitting, the virus. Moreover, the validity of even a truly negative HIV test
is of limited duration, because an individual who tests negative for HIV but continues to engage in any of the
behaviors associated with transmission (such as sexual intercourse) might subsequently acquire the virus at any
time. Finally, the HIV antibody test's accuracy, particularly in populations otherwise at low-risk for HIV, is
problematic at the opposite end of the spectrum in that it yields a disturbing number of false positive results. 8
Thus, any form of mandatory testing risks conveying a false sense of security, while at the same time
stigmatizing perfectly healthy members of the public.
IMPACT Ext. (2/2)
Turns case-- False negatives are destructivepeople assume they have a free license for unsafe
sex. Field 90 (Martha, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; B.A. 1965, Radcliffe College; J.D. 1968,
University of
Chicago, Boston University School of Law, American Journal of Law & Medicine, 16 Am. J. L. and Med. 34)
LexisNexis The rate of false positives and false negatives in a testing program depends not only on the
quality of the test in terms of sensitivity and specificity but also on the particular population being tested.
For example, a low risk population will show a higher proportion of false positives than a high risk
population, even if the same lab performs the exact same test procedure on both populations. This seems
paradoxical, but some extreme examples help clarify the point. Suppose that Population X consists entirely of
people uninfected with HIV. Some of their test results will nonetheless be positive (false positives), because the
test is not 100% specific (that is, it always returns some false positives). In this population, there will be few
positives but all will be false positives because by hypothesis no one is actually infected. Even if the specificity
of the test is quite high, a small imperfection (for example, the difference between 99.8% and 100%) is magnified
when applied to a sample with so many people who are actually uninfected and so few (here, none) who are
infected. Now imagine Population Y in which everyone is actually infected. All of the positive test results are true
positives, so the false positive rate, which was 100% of positive test results in the above example, is now zero.
Although the identical test was performed on Populations X and Y, the false positive rates are entirely different. A
similar effect occurs with false negative results. All of the negatives in Population X are true, because no one in
that population is infected, yielding a false negative rate of zero. In Population Y, some results will be negative,
but these negatives are necessarily false because everyone in the population is by hypothesis actually infected and
the test is not 100% sensitive. Therefore, the false negative rate in Population Y is 100% of negative test results.
Of course, in reality most large populations are neither entirely infected nor entirely uninfected. However, the
variations in prevalence of HIV infection can be quite extreme, from a small fraction of 1% to 50%. 21 Just as in
the hypothetical examples above, false positive rates [*41] are much greater in low risk, or low prevalence,
populations. 22 To the extent that a testing program produces either true negatives or false results, the funds
devoted to testing would be better spent on AIDS education, prevention or treatment. The value of an expensive
testing program is much more obvious when it produces a substantial number of "true positive" results. Testing a
low prevalence population is economically wasteful because money is spent producing so many negative results
in relation to positive ones. 23 It is also destructive. Needless anguish, disruption and discrimination are
caused when false positive results are transmitted to people who have been tested, 24 and low prevalence
populations have high false positive rates. 25 Negative test results -- both false and true -- can have their
dangers as well. Some people, for example, may foolishly assume that a negative test result is a license for
unsafe sex, especially if that had been their practice before and they have emerged uninfected. 26
QUARANTINE BADSTIGMA (1/1)

Quarantine leads to segregation, isolation, stigma and powerlessness amongst those
affected. Ries 95 (Nola M, Quarantine and Law: The 2003 SARS experience in Canada (A New Disease
Calls on Old
Public Health Tools, The Alberta Law Review, 43 Alberta L. Rev. 529, October) Lexis-Nexis. In regard to the
specific impact of quarantine, an editorial in a Canadian nursing journal comments: The procedure of
quarantine, from its beginnings, seems to have been imposed from the outside, as a law or interdict, and
resulted in, or at the very least represented, segregation, social and psychological isolation, stigma, reduced
social status, and the potential powerlessness of those affected. 59One nurse expresses her views as follows:
"I am ordered into quarantine and feel as though such a restriction could apply only to some plague-threatened
inhabitant of the Middle Ages." 60Health care workers in quarantine reported feeling disconnected and at a
disadvantage when they returned to work because they were not up to date on key information, including the
latest infection control protocols. This reaction demonstrates the need for ongoing communication with workers
who are in quarantine so that if they do not become ill, they can return to work feeling ready to do so. 61
Physicians in quarantine who were interviewed at the height of the outbreak "described anxiety about the
wellbeing of ill colleagues and their frustration in not being able to elicit details about their condition." 62 While
patient confidentiality must be respected, health care facilities ought to be aware that "for those quarantined,
knowledge of how their colleagues were faring may have alleviated some of their stress." 63
108 At the turn of the century, however, at least one federal court did so. In Wong Wai v. Williamson, 109 the court invalidated
QUARANTINE BADECONOMY (1/1)

QUARANTINE BADRACISM (1/1)
a
quarantine ordinance under
Quarantines hurt
the economy,
they take
away
thousandslead
of jobs.
the Quarantines,
as instruments
of public
health
regulation,
to exclusion and racism. Ries
Ries
95 (Nola
M, Quarantine
and The
Law:2003
The SARS
2003 SARS
experience
in Canada
(ADisease
New Disease
Calls
Old
95 (Nola
M, Quarantine
and Law:
experience
in Canada
(A New
Calls on
OldonPublic
Public
Health
Tools,
The
Alberta
Law
Review,
43
Alberta
L.
Rev.
529,
October)
Lexis-Nexis.
In
addition
to
its
Health Tools, The Alberta Law Review, 43 Alberta L. Rev. 529, October) Lexis-Nexis.
impact
in
the
health
care
system,
quarantine
had
significant
economic
consequences.
Thousands
of
The application of quarantine to prostitutes illustrates how quarantine can be used to harass, isolate
employees lost income while they stayed home
to observe quarantine or provide care for others who were
and exclude socially disfavored groups. 103 This use --or misuse --of quarantine is significant, not only
quarantined. It has been argued that the ethical value of reciprocity demands that the state compensate
because the quarantine power is so broad, but also because fear often brings out the worst in a
69
those
whom it asks
to stay
home
work
to comply
with quarantine.
in imminent
practical terms:
community.
During
World
Warfrom
II, the
federal
government,
claiming to face Expressed
"the gravest
danger to
[*541] [A] person potentially
missing a mortgage or car payment may face a strong temptation to break
104
the public safety,"
evacuated all Japanese-Americans on the west coast to relocation camps. That wartime
quarantine in order not to lose earnings. By promising compensation, the government creates incentives to stay
105 Disease is similar
quarantine
is now
generally
unnecessary
andreducing
groundedthe
ineconomic
racial hatred.
home,
and thereby
limits
the riskrecognized
that SARSasmay
spread, thus
dislocation
caused by the
106
70
to war,Some
in thatpeople
it often
exacerbates
latenttime
[*70]orprejudices
andleave
hostilities.
thequarantine.
state of
disease.
had
to use vacation
take unpaid
in order to Thus,
observe
It has
in a"the
timeinitial
of epidemic,
its quarantine
power the
to exclude
all income
Southern
European
beenLouisiana,
observed that
refusal ofused
governments
to recognize
lack of an
cushion
for and West
107The courts
Torontonians
obeying quarantine
orders clearly
contributed
to reluctance
of the
some
to stay away from
work, of
further
Indian immigrants.
have seldom
explicitly
addressed
discriminatory
potential
71
quarantine.
spreading SARS." This view is echoed by legal counsel for the City of Toronto who was involved in
drafting mandatory quarantine orders when individuals failed to accede to voluntary requests: People
were cooperative, but among other things, the voluntary isolation presented financial hardships for
families with one income earner who was suddenly placed under home isolation. The situation became
extraordinarily difficult, and public health authorities found that a few circumstances required legal
intervention. 72
equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. The plaintiff was a Chinese resident of San Francisco who challenged a
city ordinance that required all Chinese residents of the city to be innoculated against bubonic plague prior to leaving the city.
110 The innoculation, which could cause death, was justified by the city on the grounds that there was plague in the city and
Asians as a race were highly susceptible to the disease. The court, however, noted that the regulation discriminated against
Asians and could not be justified since the evidence did not support the city's claims. 111 Moreover, the ordinance could not
accomplish its stated purpose because the innoculation was only effective if given prior to exposure. 112 The innoculation, in
this case, was only administered to Chinese or Asian individuals leaving the city and, therefore, could not possibly stop the
spread of disease. The court struck down the regulation, reminding the city that even the police power is subordinate to the
Constitution.1 The city of San Francisco responded to the decision in Wong Wai by passing a resolution stating that nine
people in the city had died from bubonic plague, and quarantining the area in the city [*71] where most of the Asian
community lived. 114 The resolution further exempted from the quarantine certain specific houses within the quarantine area
that belonged to non-Asians. 115 In Jew Ho v. Williamson, 116 the court, obviously angered by the city's actions, found the
quarantine completely unjustified. 117 The court found that the evidence failed to support the city's claim that the bubonic
plague had caused deaths 118 and that no sound rationale existed for the quarantine. The court noted that because people
could circulate freely within the large area quarantined, any plague that existed could still be spread. 119 Moreover, the
exemptions for non-Asians suggested that the ordinance was merely a subterfuge for discrimination. 120 The court, therefore,
invalidated the quarantine, but held that the city could order a limited quarantine if bubonic plague were shown to exist. 121
In order to avoid discriminatory administration by the city, the court ordered that physicians for the Chinese association could
attend the autopsy of any Chinese resident suspected of dying from the plague. 122Jew Ho illustrates how quarantine can
become the tool of racism and discrimination, and how courts can protect against that abuse by applying a strict review
under the equal protection clause. 123 It is a precedent that should not be forgotten if quarantine is once again used as
an instrument of public health regulation.
QUARANTINEMORE DISEASE (1/1)

Managing the health of the population always results in cleansing of impurity and the
exclusion of segments of the population Bell in 2005(colleen, Biopolitical Strategies of
Security: Considerations on Canadas New National Security Policy,
http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP34-Bell.pdf)
This coincides with both Giorgio Agamben's and Zygmut Baumans argument that the project of biopolitics
contains a form of thanatopolitics of population purification because to manage the health of the
body politic inescapably requires the control and elimination of foreign bodies. The biopolitical 35
strategies intended to manage the political problem of the population, to protect the inside from
internal discord or disunity, intersect with various forms of national policy/power that present the
collusion of modern power with sovereign and juridical power, and population with territory. Indeed,
the problem of 36 the population was first signified by a shift in focus from epidemics characterized by
fleeting disasters causing mass death, to endemics involving difficult to eradicate and often permanent
illnesses rife in a population that led to the introduction of national standards and centralized institutions for
the management of the health of the population. Canadas national security policy is designed to respond to
fleeting natural 37 or technological disasters, as well as long-term pandemic disease outbreaks and
terrorism as objects of security. As a thanopolitical governmental tactic, however, the policy does not
merely encapsulate issues from disease to terrorism, but functions as a cleansing strategy that
constitutes these issues as indeterminate security risks that require continual monitoring and
intervention. As Foucault contended that since the eighteenth century rationalities of government have
been filtered through security, modern society, he concluded, is a society of security. 38
Quarantines contribute to the highest HIV infection rate in the world.

Lund 2003 (Giuliana, University of Minnesota HEALING THE NATION: MEDICOLONIAL DISCOURSE
2003) Project Muse. Compulsory disinfection and quarantine continued into the 1930s, despite repeated protests
from workers unions. Such discriminatory practices, focused though they were on black workers, did little to
improve the health of that population: draconian measures were often unsuccessful (not least because they
encouraged evasion); moreover, they ignored all problems remote from white health and labor concerns. The
prejudicial medical policies of the South African state have therefore encouraged chronic outbreaks of polio,
cholera, and typhoid in rural areas (Marks and Andersson 1989). In tandem with the migrant labor system, they
have also contributed to a raging tuberculosis epidemic (Packard 1990) and, more recently, an HIV infection
rate among the highest in the world (Schoofs 2000). Epidemic outbreaks facilitate the extension of state
powers into new realms by justifying intrusive regulations and policing of social boundaries. As Michel
Foucault points out, the plague city, with its cordon sanitaire, its institutions for the care and disposal of bodies, its
control over the movement of peoples and goods, and its seizure and destruction of property, becomes, paradoxically,
the utopia of the perfectly governed city:
***STIGMA**
2NC MODULE (1/2)

A) Disease discourse inspires fears and prejudices, causing stigma
Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland, author, Griffith University in Australia; Amy, Psychology Professor at Missouri Southern State University,
Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and Local Empowerment; International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163]
Stereotypical portrayals of Africa are epitomized by assumptions surrounding the sexual transmission
of HIV/AIDS. Rather than relying on scientific data or pragmatic policy deliberations, western
perceptions of HIV/AIDS in Africa have been dominated by moral judgments and prejudices (see
Sabatier, 1988:1). This is, as Susan Sontag (1988: 27) stresses, not necessarily new or surprising. She points
out that many diseases that are said to be linked to sexual fault (such as syphilis) which tend to inspire
fears of easy contagion and bizarre fantasies of transmission by non-venereal means in public places.
But such tendencies have been particularly pronounced with regard to representations of HIV/AIDS in
Africa. Sexual practices have been moralized and demonized by western doctors and other experts. As with
previous epidemics, such as cholera, the disease is being interpreted as a sign of moral laxity or political
decline (Sontag, 1988: 142). Representative of this practice is an American doctor, who stressed in a
press interview that there is a profound promiscuity in Uganda, and a virus which takes advantage of
it (cited in Hooper 1990: 28). The ensuing HIV/AIDS discourse mingles medical and moral
assumptions, making it difficult to prevent the production and diffusion of stigmatizing ideas (Patton
1990: 105). The result is a public discourse based on an entrenched suspicion about the disease and,
more importantly, about the people who are infected with it.
B) Stigma turns the case by causing a false sense of security amongst stigmatizers and a dehumanizing
sense of isolation in those stigmatized
Rankin 5 (William, Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance, PhD, http://www.thegaia.org/resources/combined_stigma.pdf)
Stigma is of urgent concern because it is both the cause and effect of secrecy and denial, which in turn
are the primary preconditions for rapid HIV transmission. Moreover, it adversely affects care for
people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), who frequently become isolated in their communities. Stigma
is emblematic of, and reinforces, attitudes and social structures that set people against each other and
so undermines social cohesion. The un-stigmatized or not-yet-stigmatized believe themselves to be
superior to the people who are targeted. Stigmatizers blame victims for their behavior, and so may feel
reassured about their own invulnerability to disease, due to their righteous attitudes or behaviors. An
interesting illustration of stigma is the ominous associations we can have with the word nyambizi
(submarine,) a term used in Tanzania to refer to a person living with HIV. 4 In this usage, the
PLWHA is stealthy, menacing, deadly. The rest of us, the putatively innocent, are advised to be wary.
The impact of stigma upon the targeted individual is particularly debilitating. Even without stigma an
enormous and painful struggle may already be taking place within someone who is seriously ill, and it
is important to pause a moment to acknowledge this. The harm of internalized stigma (selfstigmatization) adds further misery to a difficult struggle.5 Even without externally enacted stigma
against a person who is ill, the onset of serious illness means essential identity can come under serious
attack. A person may cease to be who one was, instead becoming a person-with-an-illness, or more
devastatingly, an ill-person, a thing in which personhood and illness have fused at the most basic
human level and the self is profoundly changed. The French philosopher Simone Weil characterized
the assault of illness upon the self in terms of the classical Greek notion of the soul.6 Terrible selfloathing (she used the term malheur) may seep into the depths of someone living with serious illness.
Deep disgust may be felt against ourselves as ill people and this can destroy our very souls or we
might say destroy the humane and humanizing self that we believe ourselves most essentially to be. It
is upon this already serious oppression that illness-related stigma adds its heavy burden. When a
person is targeted by stigma, then perceives it, feels it, and finally internalizes it, self-stigma is the
result. The individuals outward behaviors may project a debased inner frame of mind. She or he may
isolate or quarantine her/himself and altogether give up hope. This is a condition of terrible emotional
oppression. The loss to society is considerable. By immobilizing the very people who could credibly
speak out and educate for HIV prevention and who could care for other PLWHA, stigma strengthens
the likelihood that HIV incidence will increase and that many more people will die in despair and as
outcasts.
2NC Module (2/2)
C) Dehumanization outweighs nuclear war, environmental destruction and genocide

makes them all inevitable
Berube 97 (David, Comm@South Carolina, Nanotechnology Magazine, "Nanotechnological Prolongevity:

The Down Side," June/July http://www.cla.sc.edu/ENGL/faculty/berube/prolong.htm) Assuming we are able to
predict who or what are optimized humans, this entire resultant worldview smacks of eugenics and Nazi racial
science. This would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there would always be a superhuman more
super than the current ones, humans would never be able to escape their treatment as means to an always further
and distant end.
This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization of
humanity. They warn: "its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine,
or natural calamity on record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of
civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called
the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized
thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized
image of man... (Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it may never be possible to quantify the impact
dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great
opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a
nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently use to measure it. Dehumanization is
nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people become things,
they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified.
Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is evil's most
powerful weapon.
IL Ext. (Plan = Stigma) (1/2)
The plan leads to stigma

Cox, April 2003 [CHRISTOPHER; Deadly secrets; Hub group helps African immigrants with
HIV-AIDS overcome bias, fear, ARTS & LIFE; Pg. 041; the Boston Herald] "Most people think
AIDS is for others, not for them," said Illuminata, who learned of her HIV-positive status 18 months ago.
"That is the biggest problem affecting sub-Saharan Africans here. As long as they don't know their status,
it has nothing to do with them. . . They don't even want to talk about it. To them (treatment) is for somebody
who has already started showing the signs."That reluctance worries McGuire: "By and large, people were coming
into care very late in the course of their disease, so their prognoses were very bad." Women are more open to
testing, said Serwanga, but HIV-positive women will be far more ostracized than infected men, who are
often considered unwitting victims. "There are women who are positive, but men are never positive,"
Illuminata related. "Once you get a boyfriend, people will run to the boyfriend and say, 'That girl? She's positive.'
But they will never say, 'You have that boy? He's positive.' Fingers are mostly pointed toward the women." A
positive test may provoke a backlash among friends or housemates, said Agnes, 37, an HIV-positive widow
who has overstayed her visa because the medications she requires to keep the AIDS virus in check aren't
available in her native Uganda. "It's difficult to share (an apartment) with someone and you have all those
pills," Agnes said. "You don't want someone else to know. She may not like it. . . You can be thrown out of
the house." Many African immigrants worry that a positive HIV test would invite government retribution,
including deportation. "People don't want to be identified," said Serwanga, who learned her younger brother
had died of AIDS in Uganda the day she began work for MAC. "They don't want to use any services that are
government-related." Suspicion of the health-care system runs deep. A Ugandan woman who works as office
coordinator for Cambridge Cares About AIDS said many HIV-positive Ugandans never return to the agency once
they pick up her accent. They know I'm from Uganda," she said. "They don't come back because they're worried I
might disclose their status to others."The cultural diversity of sub-Saharan Africa - the region encompasses more
than 50 countries, each with an array of distinct tribal groups - and the immigrants' dispersal throughout the
Their
Boston reps
regionpromote
can hinderstigma
outreach efforts by health workers.
Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland, author, Griffith University in Australia; Amy, Psychology Professor at
Empowerment; International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163] In the twenty years since the recognition of
HIV/AIDS as an epidemic, the disease has become a global challenge. This challenge is not only of a medical nature,
but also involves various political, social and psychological factors. The lives of those who are infected or affected
by HIV/AIDS have come to be decisively shaped by how we represent what it means to live with the disease. This is
particularly the case in acutely affected African communities, where HIV/AIDS has taken its greatest toll. More so
perhaps than in any other part of the world, people here live with an illness that is shrouded in silence, taboos
and stigma. The resulting practices of representation not only marginalize and oppress people affected, but
also fuel the spread of the disease. In this essay we have examined how photographic representations either
contribute to or break with stereotypical portrayals of HIV/AIDS. We began by discussing realist positions, which
view photographs as authentic representations of external realities. Various problems emerge from such assumptions.
When photographs are accepted as unquestioned factual representations, then our eyes become passive instruments,
rather than tools for broadening vision and understanding. We forget that the photograph was framed by a particular
person, who made a range of aesthetic and inherently subjective choices in this process. We have thus explored two
approaches that use photography as an active catalyst for social change. Both approaches acknowledge that
photographs cannot portray the world as it is, that they always involve both facts and feelings. Humanist
engagements seek to employ iconic photographs as a way of visualizing the terrifying aspects that can be a
part of the reality of HIV/AIDS, hoping that the so generated sentiments in western viewers would serve as a
catalyst for social and political change. Pluralist photography, by contrast, is more concerned with finding ways
through which people can express the multiple and often local manifestations of what it means to live with
HIV/AIDS. Such forms of representation can open up possibilities for a democratic and constructive public dialogue.
IL Ext. (Plan = Stigma) (2/2)
The viral metaphor leads us to connect medical pathogens with cultural stigma.
Schell, 97 [Heather, PhD, Stanford University, MA, Georgetown University, BSFS, Georgetown University,
Social Change] Viral metaphors garner their power and persuasive force by complementing our
understanding of viral truth. As anthropologist Mary Douglas aptly noted, Western definitions of dirt and
contagion are now mediated by hygiene: "It is difficult to think of dirt except in the context of
pathogenicity." 42 The cultural meaning behind our ideas of contagion can easily be dismissed by
reference to the medical aim. In the context of this essay, I want to emphasize that the conception of viral
contagion as traffic is only one of the available metaphors based on the common scientific understanding of
epidemics. For example, some recent explanations of the origin of AIDS suggest the importation of African
monkeys into the United States for medical research concurrent with vaccination programs in Africa as the means
by which it spread so rapidly to both continents. 43 Hemorrhagic fevers have historically gained epidemic
strength only when amplified by hospital practices. Medical staff frequently misdiagnose hemorrhagic fevers,
which at first resemble more innocuous, endemic fevers like malaria; the lack of barrier techniques and the reuse
of needles and bedding that these rural hospitals' poverty requires [End Page 104] quickly transmit this bloodborne illness to the staff as well as other patients. 44 The outbreak of a hemorrhagic fever in Marburg, Germany,
took place in a laboratory experimenting on infected monkeys. 45 Therefore, one could argue that Western
medicine is one of the social practices most likely to cause epidemics. Viral injection might just as well have
been the term chosen to express the introduction of viruses into new populations.
IMPACT Ext. (STIGMA TURNS CASE) (1/1)
A2: REPS SOLVE STIGMA (1/1)

Stigma stops effective response. It needs to be solved first. Lisa Forman, 2004 [ Doctoral
Communication
doesof
nothing
to Faculty
stop theofstigma
of AIDS.
Candidate, University
Toronto,
Law; Both
Medium and Message: HIV/AIDS,
Lisa
Forman,
2004
[
Doctoral
Candidate,
University
of Toronto,
Faculty
Law; Both
Information and Communication in Africa; Journal of Law
and Policy
for theofInformation
Medium and Message: HIV/AIDS, Information and Communication in Africa; Journal of
Society]
Law and Policy for the Information Society] In all regions and at all times, HIV/AIDS has been
characterized
pervasive obstacles
prejudicetoand
stigma. People
infected
- orresources,
thought tostigmatization
be so - have routinely
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and
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discrimination of PLWHA, a lack of information to enable appropriate behavioral
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to take
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for PLWHA,
36 thereHIV/AIDS
is ongoingmedicines.
discrimination against PLWHA, including in health care and employment. 37
provide essential
This stigma and discrimination has complex and multiple causes. UNAIDS reports that the stigma is: triggered
by many forces, including lack of understanding of the disease, myths about how HIV is transmitted, prejudice,
lack of treatment, irresponsible media reporting on the epidemic, the fact [*181] that AIDS is incurable, social
fears about sexuality, fears relating to illness and death, and fears about illicit drugs and injecting drug use. 38
The stigma attached to the disease, and the direct negative consequences attached to being HIV positive,
perpetuate a persistent social and often political silence about and denial of HIV/AIDS. In high-prevalence
developing countries, silence and denial are deepened by the fear of being ill without accessible and effective
health care. In this atmosphere, people are unlikely to be receptive to prevention messages, and have little
incentive to be tested. Silence and denial considerably limit effective availability of communication and
information about the disease amongst the individuals and communities most at risk. This is exacerbated
when national, community, and religious leaders and policymakers collude with social silence and denial, and
deny both the existence of the problem and the fact that it requires urgent action. 39 The silencing effect is such
that those infected "feel guilty and ashamed, unable to express their views[,] and fearful that they will not be
taken seriously." 40 Fear of being openly HIV positive is particularly damaging to efforts to normalize the
consequences of infection, and significantly limits the participation of PLWHA in AIDS programs. In these
and other ways, silence and denial pose tremendous obstacles to mounting an effective response to the
epidemic by limiting prevention, treatment, and impact alleviation, and increasing vulnerability to
infection. In addition to legal protections and strong leadership, the free flow of information and communication
is critical to overcoming the constrictive vise which silence, denial, and discrimination place on appropriate
responses to the epidemic.
***ALTERNATIVE**
ALTSOLVENCY (1/2)
An alteration in the discourse of medicine and nation-building is a pre-requisite to solving for
diseasethere is no other way to escape the socioeconomic legacy that colonialism and
representations of disease imposed on Africa. Lund 2003 (Giuliana, University of Minnesota
HEALING THE NATION: MEDICOLONIAL DISCOURSE
2003) Project Muse.
From at least the nineteenth century onward, medicine has been seen in the West as one of the first duties of
the state. This reasoning has been applied in South Africa as well, and the provision of medical care to local
populations has often been used to legitimate colonization despite the fact that such provisions were spotty at
best and hardly offset the increased mortality and morbidity among Africans brought on by the introduction of
new diseases through European expansion as well as the more indirect but no less deadly spread of malnutrition and
diseases of poverty. Moreover, what medicine was made available to (or sometimes imposed on) Africans was often
tied to missionary activity aimed at gaining support for Christian methods of healing at the expense of local
methods, using the technologies of civilization to undermine the authority of local rulers and healers (such as the
sangoma). In the twentieth century, health care has also become one of the primary concessions used to co opt the emerging black middle class (Marks and Andersson 1989, 524). In other words, medicine has often played
the role in South Africa (as elsewhere) of handmaiden to colonialism and political palliative. Since the peaceful
accession to power of the ANC in 1994, commentators have declared a new South Africa. Yet, while the change
in leadership has enabled the nation to accomplish a relatively smooth transition to democracy, it would be
overly hasty and optimistic to claim that the country has entirely reinvented itself. It is never so easy to shrug
off centuries of oppressive doctrine. Transforming a society must take place on many planes, including the
political, legal, material, social, and cultural. It is not enough in the long term to change the structures of
government; there must also be a concurrent alteration in the language of government, as well as the language
of everyday life. The history of the continent stands as a warning of the ongoing hold of cultural imperialism
on independent Africa: the cultural legacy as well as the socioeconomic legacy of colonialism lives on.
Moreover, the material and the cultural are inextricably intertwined, so that to truly reinvent the nation, the
people must also reinvent the discourse of nation building
ALTSOLVENCY (2/2)
Processes of de-contextualized representation are used as shocking, mobilizing tools
recognizing that representation uses added baggage leads to better, more truthful
representations. Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland, author, Griffith University in Australia; Amy,
Psychology Professor at
Empowerment; International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163] In these photographs, Tenanesh seeks to
capture the agonizing nature of living with HIV/AIDS. To do so she engages in a process of abstraction, just as
humanist photography does. But the nature of Tenaneshs abstraction is fundamentally different form that of
Hoopers. The humanist photographs of the latter contained elements of realism insofar as they sought to capture
an authentic external reality: the real face HIV/AIDS as epitomized by a representative single person living with
HIV/AIDS. A very particular image is frozen to then produce generalities from it. The process of
representation and abstraction is masked by the shocking reality of the image. Tenaneshs portrayal of
suffering, by contrast, makes representation its central theme. She does not try to produce a photograph
that resembles some authentic external image of suffering. Her photographs are much more metaphorical. She
seeks to capture the emotional dimensions of living with HIV/AIDS. And she does so by explicitly recognizing
that photographs can never give us an authentic representation of the realities she lives in. We, as viewers
of the photograph, are confronted with the process of representation as well: we are asked to imagine what
it means for her to face HIV/AIDS. As a result, representation becomes a site of politics, open to
interpretation and debate. The second type of photograph that Tenanesh took is illustrated in figures 4 to
6. Here her task was not directed towards representing suffering, but towards placing her existence in
a larger personal and social context. As opposed to the Hooper photograph, these pictures do not
portray a decontextualized world of darkness and gloom. Instead, Tenanesh wants to capture the
dailyness of her life, its ups and downs, her determination to lead a relatively normal childhood. Perhaps she
does so precisely because she was confined by her disease, unable to attend school or go outside for long.
We cannot know that from the photographs alone. But we see a certain defiance, a playful defiance, and a
way of demonstrating that she has not lost her agency. Tenanesh is not a passive victim in the way
Hooper portrays Florence and Ssengabi. She has control of the camera, and with it she show that she has
some control over her surroundings too. As opposed to Florence and Ssengabi, Tenaneshs identity is not
reduced to that of a sufferer. She is also a child, a Christian, a member of a family, part of a social
community. We are inevitably confronted with the fate of a single person, rather than an abstract
image of a disease.
ALTSOLVENCY
Our alternative opens a discussion that solves imperialism and colonialism. Dillon 05 (Michael,
Cared to Death, Foucault Studies v2, http://www.foucault-studies.com/no2/dillon.pdf, prof. of politics at Lancaster
University)
Contra Ojakangas, then, biopolitics does reclaim the death function, for a number of reasons and in a variety
of changing ways. It must do so. Reclaiming the death function is integral to its logic. It also reflects the
changing operational dynamics of biopolitics. In relation to biopolitical logic: In the biopower system killing, or
the imperative to kill, is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the
elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race.18 It is acceptable and
biopolitically necessary to kill, if not necessarily in the nomological sense of being exposed to death formulated
in Agambens thesis of bare life. In relation to the operationalisation of biopolitics: if biopolitics is to promote,
protect and invest life, it must engage in a continuous assay of life. This continuous biopolitical assaying of life
proceeds through the epistemically driven and continuously changing interrogation of the worth and
eligibility of the living across a terrain of value that is constantly changing. It is changing now, for example, in
response to what the life sciences are teaching about what it is to be a living thing. It is changing as biopolitical
investment analysts (politicians, risk analysts, governmental technologisers) also interrogate where the best returns
on life investment happen to be located in the manifold circulation and transformation of life locally and globally.
Life itself mutates in and through these very circuits, not least in relation to molecular biology and electronic
communication. We can broadly interpret life science now to range from molecularised biology, through
digitalization, to the new social and managerial sciences of development now prominent in the fields of global
governmentality, global development policies, human security and even military strategic discourse including, for
example, Operations Other than War.19 One might say in Heideggerian fashion that life is the stuff of
biopolitics. In the process of reducing life to stuff, biopolitics must determine the quality of the stuff so that
investment in its extraction, promotion and refinement may itself be continuously assessed. It follows that
some life will be found to be worth investment, some life less worth investment, while other life may prove
intractable to the powers of investment and the demands it makes on life. Here, assaying morphs into evaluating
the eligibility and not simply the expected utility of life forms. Ultimately, some life may turn out to be positively
inimical to the circulation of life in which this investment driven process of biopolitics continuously trades, and have
to be removed from life if its antipathy to biopoliticised life cannot otherwise be adapted, correctedor contained.
Behind the life-charged rhetoric of biopolitics, lies the biologisation of life to which biopolitics is committed,
the violence of that biologisation and the reduction of the classical political question concerning the good life
(and the good death) to that of the endlessly extendable, fit and adaptable life.20 The good life Agamben
refigures in terms of the pure he also says profane but note that there is no profanity without sanctity immanence of happy life.21
ALTDISCOURSE SOLVENCY (1/1)
Changing discourse about disease solves for the criticism. Mbali, 2004 [Mandisa, majored in
History and English in undergrad. degree at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, has Honors and
Masters degrees in History. AIDS Discourses and the South African State: Government denialism
and post-apartheid AIDS policy-making]
If Western nationhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was defined in Europe, against the
negative of .native. sexuality and its diseased-ness, should we see Mbeki.s misguided attempt to rehabilitate
African sexuality as an attempt to redefine South Africa nationhood and the body politic, in terms of his
misty concept of the .African Renaissance? Can government denialism.s attempt to re-mould images of
African sexuality, by denying the veracity of mainstream Western biomedicines model of AIDS, be
seen as a nationalistic one to defend the nation against ideas that it is degenerate? Certainly metaphors
and technologies of power based around notions of contaminated/pure blood, protecting the health of
the racially-defined nations children formed part of the legitimisation of institutionalised control of
sexuality by the power/knowledge regime, both in colonies and the metropole and in late apartheid
South Africa (Jochelson 2001). Government AIDS denialists have reverted to the past to argue against
discourse, which for the most part had been massively surpassed in the .AIDS world. by rights-based,
anti-discrimination discourse and a shift to a medical, technical, non-.moralistic./stigmatising
approach. The key question is whether key governmental actors, who still appear influenced by AIDS
denialism, such as the Health Minister will be able to get out of the constraints of discourse defined by the
boundaries of nationalism and colonialism?
ALTSOLVENCY PLURALISM (1/2)

The alternatives pluralistic nature empowers people living with disease, allowing affected
people themselves to change the global image of AIDS. Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland, author,
Griffith University in Australia; Amy, Psychology Professor at
There are alternatives to iconic humanist photography. These alternatives are of a more pluralist nature,
consisting of attempts to open up spaces for people living with HIV/AIDS to decide for themselves
how they would like to be represented, and how these representations should be employed. Trying to
understand the potential and limits of such approaches, we have examined Eric Gottesmans collaborative
approach with HIV/AIDS-affected children in a community of Addis Ababa. Here we see very different
images of what it means to live with HIV/AIDS. We do not see victims stripped of voice and
representational authority. Instead, each child finds her or his own way of representing life with a
stigmatized disease. In the photographs we analyzed, for instance, we saw a twelve year old girl,
Tenanesh, trying to capture her unique struggle and her normal daily routine of living with
HIV/AIDS. The Addis Ababa project alone will not change the global image of HIV/AIDS, but it has
empowered those who participated in it, giving them the opportunity to express their own visions of
what HIV/AIDS means, using collaborative and dialogical means to do so. And, perhaps more
importantly, it is part of a broader, long-term and much needed process of finding more diverse and
appropriate ways of representing what it means to live with HIV/AIDS.
ALTSOLVENCY PLURALISM (2/2)

The alternative is a pre-requisite to the affirmative - it can disrupt hierarchies and power
relations by allowing those who are affected to decide how they wish to represent themselves
this would open spaces for people to directly confront the problems that affect them. Lund 2003
(Giuliana, University of Minnesota HEALING THE NATION: MEDICOLONIAL DISCOURSE
2003) Project Muse. To scrutinize this potential we now examine what we call pluralist photography. Just as
humanist approaches do, pluralist ones oppose the realist belief that photographs are authentic and value-free
representations of the world. Photography is seen in the context of socio-political practices. And it is endowed with
the explicit mission to actively shape these practices. But as opposed to humanist photography, pluralist approaches
do not aim to capture a generic and universal notion of suffering. Photography is, instead, seen as a method to
validate multiple local knowledges and practices, thereby disrupting existing hierarchies and power relationships
as for instance the ability of western photographers and media representations to frame the suffering of
others. The basic idea behind this approach is to provide people affected by HIV/AIDS with the power to
decide for themselves what kind of information and representation is most appropriate to capture the social,
political, ethics and psychological challenges they face. The ideal result of this practice is a form of dialogue
that opens up spaces for communities to work through the problems that confront them. Photography would
then facilitate what Francois Debrix and Cynthia Weber (Debrisx, 2003: ix) called a ritual of pluralization: a practice
of mediation whereby the represented person takes an active role in the process of inscribing social meaning,
but does so without attaching to it an exclusive claim that silences other positions and experiences.
Refusing to universalize stigmas associated with disease opens the possibility to gain better
political attitudes and practices, solving the HIV/AIDS impact. Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland,
author, Griffith University in Australia; Amy, Psychology Professor at
Empowerment; International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163] Pluralist approaches offer a viable
alternative to realist and humanist photography. This is not to say that they are without problems. As any other
form of photographic engagement, pluralist approaches too are always open to political interpretation and
appropriation, for better or worse. But because pluralist photography refuses to universalize suffering it is
less likely to lead to stereotypical representations. Particularly when embedded in community projects that
promote dialogue, pluralist photography more so than any other photographic practice has the potential to
challenge some of the deeply entrenched and highly problematic taboos and stigmas that are associated
with HIV/AIDS. Or so suggests the type of interpretative research and analysis we have conducted for this
essay. Whether or not our results can be confirmed by empirical evidence remains to be seen. Doing so is no easy
task, for, as Stanley Cohen and Bruna Seu (2002: 188) stress, far more is known about the space between the
pristine object the tortured body, the massacred corpses, the homeless refugee- and its public representation that
the space between the resultant image and its public perception. The exact impact of pluralist photography on
sociopolitical discourses remains to be investigated, and it can be done only through carefully designed empirical
case studies. But such studies are only possible once we have more systematic insight into the
representative practices that characterize our knowledge of and political attitudes towards HIV/AIDS.
Contributing to this process has been the main objective of our paper, and we hope that by doing so we have
taken a modest step towards dismantling some of the stigma and discrimination that continue to shape the
impact of HIV/AIDS.
REPS/REJ KEY (1/3)

Discourse empowered development from mere theory; we must challenge it Escobar, 1995
(Arturo, associate professor of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and
Unmaking of the Third World, p.53) It has often been said that classical political economy was the rationalization
of certain hegemonic class interests: those of a capitalist world economy centered in England and its bourgeoisie.
The same can be said of development economics in relation to the project of capitalist modernization launched by
the core nations after the Second World War. Indeed, the set of imperatives the United States faced after the warthe five imperatives mentioned earlier: to consolidate the core, find higher rates of profit abroad, secure control of
raw materials, expand overseas markets for American products, and deploy a system of military tutelage-shaped
the constitution of development economics. Yet development economics should not be seen as the ideological or
superstructural reflection of this set of imperatives. This interpretation would only relate a certain descriptive
discourse (a set of assertions about a given economy: the five imperatives) to another discourse enunciated in the
form of theoretical propositions (namely, development economics). That is, one should avoid falling back into the
division between the "ideal" (the theory) and the "real" (the economy); instead one should investigate the
epistemological and cultural conditions of the production of discourses that command the power of truth, and the
specific mode of articulation of these discourses upon a given historical situation. From this perspective, the
emergence of development economics was not due to theoretical, institutional, or methodological advances.
It was due to the fact that a certain historical conjuncture transformed the mode of existence of economic
discourse, thus making possible the elaboration of new objects, concepts, and methodologies. Economics was
called upon to reform societies perceived as underdeveloped, based on a new grid for theoretical interpretation
(Keynesian and growth economics) and new technologies for social management (planning and programming).
Said differently, the fact that the economic, political, and institutional changes of the period shaped the
consciousness and perceptions of the economists was true in a number of ways-for instance, the need for economic
expansion influenced the (continued) economists' concern with growth; the rising tide of multinational
corporations influenced the economists' attention to capital accumulation via industrialization; and so on. Those
changes, however, exerted their effect on economic discourse through other mechanisms as well: by opening new
fields for the construction of economic objects; by conferring a new status on economists and their science; and by
multiplying the sites from which the discourse could be produced and from which its associated practices could be
set into motion.
REPS/REJ KEY (3/3)

REPS/REJ KEY (2/3)
Representing or rescuing the voices of others is conceited; the discourse in the affirmative
Their attempt
produces
such to
images
represent
for the has
purposes
ideological
of symbolic
implicationscentralized
cannibalism
organizations are
always biased
relation
to those
in power.
The winners
write the
histories.
Escobar,
1995
Escobar,
1995 in
(Arturo,
associate
professor
of anthropology
at University
of Mass,
Encountering
Development:
(Arturo,
associate
professor of the
anthropology
at University
of Mass,Taussig
Encountering
The
Making
and Unmaking
Third World,
p.53) As Michael
(1987, Development:
135) said, From the
represented
come that which
the p.53)
representation. He continues, commenting on the absence of
The Makingshall
and Unmaking
of the overturns
Third World,
the narratives of South American indigenous peoples from most representations about them, It is the ultimate
anthropological
its highest,organizations
indeed redemptive,
rescuing the
voicegroups,
of
Because often conceit,
decisionsanthropology
are made by in
centralized
headed moment,
by representatives
of ruling
thethe
Indian
of pain
and time
(135).This
is to in
say
that asOur
muchrelation
as the plain
exclusion
wholefrom
workthe
of obscurity
organizations
is biased
in relation
to those
power.
to others
in ourof
thesociety
peasants
in is
rural
development
discourse,
this conceit
toruling.
speak Our
for the
others, perhaps
even to
and voice
beyond
mediated
by the social
organization
of its
knowledge
is thus ideological
rescuer
their
voice,
as
Taussig
says,
must
be
avoided.
The
fact
that
violence
is
a
cultural
manifestation
of the
in the sense that this social organization preserves conceptions and means of description which represent
hunger
applies
not
only
to
hungers
physical
aspects
but
to
the
violence
of
representation.
The
world as it is for those who rule it, rather than as it is for those who are ruled . (Smith 1974, 267) This has
development
has turned
representations
of hunger and
intoactive
an actinofthis
consumption
ofhow
images
far-reachingdiscourse
consequences,
becauseitswe
are constantly implicated
process. But
doesand
the
feelings
by theproduction
well nourished,
anreality
act of work?
cannibalism,
Cinema
artists would
it. This
institutional
of social
A basicasfeature
of Novo
this operation
is its have
reliance
on textual and
consumption
is aforms
feature
modernity,
we are reminded
by Foucault
(1975,
84) (It
is just that
theare
illness
documentary
as of
a means
of representing
and preserving
a given
reality.
Inevitably,
texts
detached
of from
somethe
should
transformed
intoofthe
others).
But the
regimes For
of representation
localbe
historical
context
theexperience
reality thatofthey
supposedly
represent.
bureaucracythat
is par
produce
this that
violence
easily neutralized,
as the
chapter will
excellence
modeare
of not
governing
that separates
thenext
performance
ofshow.
ruling from particular individuals, and
makes organization independent of particular persons and local settings Today, large-scale organization
inscribes its processes into documentary modes as a continuous feature of its functioning This [produces] a
form of social consciousness that is the property of organizations rather than of the meeting of individuals in
Rhetoric
is key settings.
to the critique:
the affs
local historical
(Smith 1984,
62) representation of the West and its others is key to
its hegemonic success

Escobar, 1995 (Arturo, associate professor of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development:
The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, p.53) The coherence of effects that the development discourse
achieved is the key to its success as a hegemonic form of representation: the construction of the poor and
underdeveloped as universal, preconstituted subjects, based on the privilege of the representers; the
exercise of power over the Third World made possible by this discursive homogenization (which entails the
erasure of the complexity and diversity of Third World peoples, so that a squatter in Mexico City, a Nepalese
peasant, and a Tuareg nomad become equivalent to each other as poor and underdeveloped); and the colonization
and domination of the natural and human ecologies and economies of the Third World.
***CASE STUFF**
IMPACTSSKEPTICISM
IMPACTSNUMBING (1/1)
(1/1)
Their
To
Africa,
representations
disease language
cause isnumbing
a meanswhich
of expanding
preventsracism
solvency
and imperialism. Extending
health care
to nations
perceived
as anofimposition
ofatthe
true science.
The rhetoric in the
Escobar,
1995,
(Arturo,is
Associate
professor
Anthropology
University
of Mass, Encountering
Development:
The Making
Unmaking of
the Third
World, p.85within
To be blunt,
one could
say that thewhich
body of
affirmative only
servesand
to engender
disease
skepticism
African
governments
the
malnourishedthe starving
AfricanUniversity
portrayed of
on Minnesota
so many covers
of Western
the lethargic
turns
the aff Lund
2003 (Giuliana,
HEALING
THEmagazines,
NATION: or
MEDICOLONIAL
South
American child to be adopted for $16 a month portrayed in the advertisements of the same magazines- is
DISCOURSE
the most striking symbol of the power of the First World over the Third. A whole economy of discourse and
AND
THE
STATE
OF EMERGENCY
FROM
APARTHEID
TRUTHTeresa
AND de
RECONCILIATION,
unequal
power
relations
is encoded in that
body.
We may say,TO
following
Lauretis (1987), that Spring,
there is a
2003)
Project
Muse.
Unfortunately,
the
predominant
language
of
plague
persists
seemingly
regardlessofof actual
violence of representation at play here. This violence, moreover, is extreme; scientific
representations
medical
crises
and does not appear
contribute
positively
to combating
illness.
of laying
the all,
hunger and
overpopulation
(they to
often
go together)
are most
dehumanizing
andInstead
objectifying.
After
preoccupation
with
plague
to
rest,
the
fall
of
apartheid
has
only
brought
the
fear
of
contagion
back
center
what we are talking about when we refer to hunger or overpopulation is people, human life itself; to
but
it all
stage
as
populations
begin
to
mingle
freely
again
and
the
nation
as
a
whole
pays
an
increasing
price
for
years of
becomes, for Western science and media, helpless and formless (dark) masses, items to be counted and
poor
conditions
and medical neglect
of the majority,
factors that
encouraged
the spread
diseases
measured
by demographers
and nutritionists,
or systems
withhave
feedback
mechanisms
in of
thecontagious
model of the
like
tuberculosis
and
AIDS,
which
have
reached
epidemic
proportions
in
South
Africa.
13 Moreover, the history of
body espoused by physiologists and biochemists. The language of hunger and the hunger of language join
medicine
Africa
and its association
with order
brutally
colonial
expansion
has made
black
forces not in
only
to maintain
a certain social
butexploitative
to exert a kind
of symbolic
violence
that many
sanitizes
the
Africans
skeptical
of
its
value.
Unallayed,
such
skepticism
can
have
disastrous
effects.
The
policy
decision
discussion of the hungry and the malnourished. It is thus that we come to consume hunger in the West; inof
President
Thabo
Mbeki and to
hissuffering
health ministry
not becomes
to supplynumbed
AZT to pregnant
women infected
HIVlanguage
has caused
the process
our sensitivity
and pain
by the distancing
effect with
that the
and
international
scandal,
as
has
his
willingness
to
listen
to
so-called
AIDS
dissidents
who
maintain,
against
vast
of academics and experts achieved. To restore vividness and political efficacy to the language becomes almost
scientific
evidence
to
the
contrary,
that
HIV
is
not
the
cause
of
AIDS.
With
approximately
sixty
thousand
babies
an impossible task (Scheper-Hughes 1992).
born infected each year in South Africa, Mbeki has been accused of irresponsibility that borders on
criminality (Schoofs 2000). While the stakes are very high indeed, the controversy itself is counterproductive,
escalating in tone while the parties continue to overlook [the] cultural and economic/political differences behind it
(James 2000). Accusing Mbeki of practicing voodoo science relegates the black man once again to the
position of an ignorant tribesman steeped in magical traditions and paints the West as the bearer of
rationality and enlightenment: true science. Such loaded language is unlikely to prevail on Mbeki to change
his policy; more likely, it will confirm to him the racism of the West and provide him with an excuse for
further skepticism and tragic inaction.
***Neg Answers**
AT PERM (1/3)
The aff cant access the alternative biopower is totalizing. Bell in 2005(colleen,
Biopolitical Strategies of Security: Considerations on Canadas New National Security Policy,
http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP34-Bell.pdf)
This coincides with both Giorgio Agamben's and Zygmut Baumans argument that the project of biopolitics
contains a form of thanatopolitics of population purification because to manage the health of the
body politic inescapably requires the control and elimination of foreign bodies. The biopolitical 35
strategies intended to manage the political problem of the population, to protect the inside from
internal discord or disunity, intersect with various forms of national policy/power that present the
collusion of modern power with sovereign and juridical power, and population with territory. Indeed,
the problem of 36 the population was first signified by a shift in focus from epidemics characterized by
fleeting disasters causing mass death, to endemics involving difficult to eradicate and often permanent
illnesses rife in a population that led to the introduction of national standards and centralized institutions for
the management of the health of the population. Canadas national security policy is designed to respond to
fleeting natural 37 or technological disasters, as well as long-term pandemic disease outbreaks and
terrorism as objects of security. As a thanopolitical governmental tactic, however, the policy does not
merely encapsulate issues from disease to terrorism, but functions as a cleansing strategy that
constitutes these issues as indeterminate security risks that require continual monitoring and
intervention. As Foucault contended that since the eighteenth century rationalities of government have
been filtered through security, modern society, he concluded, is a society of security. 38
Using the government makes is impossible to question notions of power theyre mutually
exclusive. Mitchell Dean, Professor, Sociology, Macquarie University, GOVERNMENTALITY: POWER
AND RULE IN
MODERN SOCIETY, London: Sage, 1999, p. 47.
The elaboration of a notion of government marks the definitive rejection of a certain type of radical
declamatory rhetoric of power and the beginning of a project to think about the problem of
regulation outside earlier models of power. The focus on government seeks to displace both the
notion of power as repression or interdiction that Foucault had traced to the `juridical-political
theory of sovereignty' and his own earlier attempts to rethink power in terms of `the discourse of war
and domination'. `Power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the
other than a question of government . . . [which] did not refer only to political structures or to the
management of states; rather it designated the way in which the con-duct of individuals or groups might
be directed' (Foucault, 1982: 221). Importantly, then, the notion of government stands as an attempt
to pose the question of the epistemological and technical conditions of existence of the political, to
analyse the historical a priori by which we construct politics as a domain of thought and action, and
to analyse the instrumentation, vocabulary and forms of reason by which this is done. If, for Kant,
`critique' is the study of the conditions of true knowledge, the study of governmentality is a kind of
critique of political reason, in as much as it seeks to investigate some of the hitherto silent conditions
under which we can think and act politically. Perhaps, as we have suggested before, given the association
of critique with the universal foundations of truth and right, it is better to refer to Foucault's task as a
criticism of political reason, as he does in the English title of his lectures at Stanford (Foucault, 1981).
AT PERM (2/3)
AT PERM (3/3)
Using the state perpetuates the logic that continues oppression at the basic level.
Using
the state to, reject
representations
allows POWER
disciplinary
power to SELECTED
go unnoticed.
Michel Foucault
philosopher,
On Popular Justice,
KNOWLEDGE:
JohnINTERVIEWS
S. RansomAND
, Associate
Professor,
Political
Science,19
Dickinson
OTHER
WRITINGS
1972-1977,
80, ed. C.College
GordonFOUCAULTS
p. 26-27
DISCIPLINE:
THE
POLITICS
19is97
, p. 118-119.
FOUCAULT:
Fine.
But you OF
willSUBJECTIVITY,
grant me that what
thought
by the mass of the French
proletariatcharacterizes
is not the thought
of Mao Tse-Tung
it is not necessarily
a revolutionary
ideology.
Foucault
the exercise
of powerand
associated
with discipline
as dangerous.
One
Moreover,
that there
be a revolutionary
state
apparatusofinsovereignty,
order to regulate
new
sources
of you
this say
danger
is thatmust
in comparison
with the
operations
theirthis
operations
unitymuch
between
thedispersed
proletariatand
andanonymous.
the marginalised
Agreed,
buttheory,
you will
alsoisgrant
metothat
are
more
In thepeople.
classic
juridical
power
taken
be a
right,
whichofone
is apparatus
able to possess
likewe
a commodity,
one can
in consequence
or
the forms
state
which
inherit fromand
thewhich
bourgeois
apparatus
cannottransfer
in any way
alienate,
partially.
The
theory concentrates
ondragging
that concrete
every of
serve as aeither
modelwholly
for theornew
forms of
organisation.
The court,
along power
with it which
the ideology
individual
holds and
partialoforrelations
total cession
enables
political
powerbetween
or sovereignty
to be
bourgeois justice
andwhose
those forms
between
judge
and judged,
judge and
the
established.
functioning
of power
the sovereignty
model
is relatively
clear
and to
simple.
parties to the The
action,
between judge
andin
litigant,
which typify
bourgeois
justice,
seems
me to have
The
functioning
of disciplinary
power,
on the of
other
hand, is notoriously
to courts
follow.we're
For
played
a very significant
role in the
domination
the bourgeoisie.
When wedifficult
talk about
instance,
to extract
of increasing
from the human
the body
is subjected to
talking about
a placelabor
wherepower
the struggle
betweenvalue
the contending
forces isbody,
willy-nilly
suspended:
awhere
political
technology,
really abroad
grid
of disciplinary
This technology
diffuse, rarely
in every
case the decision
arrived at
is not
the outcome powers.
of this struggle
but of the is
intervention
formulated
in continuous,
systematic
discourse;
it isisoften
made
up of
bits and pieces;
of an authority
which necessarily
stands
above and
foreign
to the
contending
forces,itanimplements
authority a
disparate
seta of
tools or
spite ofthem
the coherence
of its results,
it ismust.in
generally
no more
than a
which is in
position
ofmethods.
neutralityInbetween
and consequently
can and
every
case decide
multiform
Moreover,
it its
cannot
localized
in a particular
institution
or state
which partyinstrumentation.
to the dispute has
justice on
side. be
The
court implies,
therefore,type
thatof
there
are
apparatus
In
its
mechanisms
and
its
effects,
it
is
situated
at
a
quite
different
level.
What
the
categories which are common to the parties present (penal categories such as theft, fraud; moral
apparatuses
and
is, inand
a sense,
between
these
functionings
and to
the
bodies
categories such
as institutions
honesty and operate
dishonesty)
that the
parties to
the great
dispute
agree to submit
them.
themselves
materiality
and
theirtoforces.
Difficultintorelation
localize,
to formulate,
andAll
pulled
Now, it is allwith
this their
that the
bourgeoisie
wants
have believed
to hard
justice,
to its justice.
together
from
bitswhich
and pieces,
such exercises
oftopower
a result,
to analysis
these ideas
arediverse
weapons
the bourgeoisie
has put
use inare,
its as
exercise
of resistant
power. This
is why and
I
focused
opposition.
This very
weaccept,
have in
conceiving
the exercisemust
of power
in roles
termsofother
find the idea
of a people's
courtdifficulty
difficult to
especially
if intellectuals
play the
than
those or
of judge
the sovereignty
model
allows thethe
exercise
of disciplinary
power
go undetected.
prosecutor
in it, because
it is precisely
intellectuals
who have been
thetointermediaries
in
the bourgeoisie's spreading and imposing of the ideological themes that I'm talking about.
The representations of the affirmative are part of the authoritative and biopolitical forms of
governmental power. Mitchell Dean, Professor, Sociology, Macquarie University, GOVERNMENTALITY:
POWER AND RULE IN
MODERN SOCIETY, London: Sage, 1999, p. 204. It would be a mistake to think that liberal forms of rule are
succeeded in the twentieth century by social forms on the one hand, and authoritarian governmentality on the
other. Since the liberal art of government concerns the constant struggle to achieve an equilibrium between
economic government and a government of the processes of life, between a political economy and a
biopolitics of the population, it must situate itself in relation to knowledges of the social, biological,
economic and cultural processes found within populations. As a critique of `too much government' which is
at the same time compelled to govern on behalf of the welfare of the population, liberalism's processes of
self-review invariably entail a dialogical relation with a knowledge of life, of health and of the relations
between humans as individuals and groups. The social may not be reducible to liberal arts of government, but
is one possible structure in which the liberal ethos of review can be brought into a dialogue with the various
forms of knowledge of those processes that are external and necessary to the exercise of formal political
authority. Moreover, the development of the social as a domain of struggle and contestation is fostered by
the emergence of liberal democratic forms of sovereignty with their civil and political freedoms and
representative institutions.
*** AFF **
ALT FAILSK RE-ENTRENCHES (1/1)

Even critiques of disease representations fail to escape the medical metaphors used to prop up
the same scientific establishment they attempt to get rid of. Lund 2003 (Giuliana, University of
Minnesota HEALING THE NATION: MEDICOLONIAL DISCOURSE
2003) Project Muse. In contrast to Camus, liberal South African fiction eliminates heroic medicine
altogether. Where doctors do appear, they are implicated in the apartheid system, a reflection of class
divisions and of the connections between medicine and imperialism in the region. In J. M. Coetzees Waiting
for the Barbarians (1980), an indigene seeking medical aid encounters instead the devices of the empires
doctor of interrogation and dies in custody. In Age of Iron, doctors are likened to policemen and hospitals to
prisons (1990, 67, 70). In Brinks The Wall of the Plague ([1984] 1995), as in Nadine Gordimers short story
City Lovers (1982), the primary function of South African doctors is to perform forced gynecological
examinations to detect miscegenation. The doctor forcing his speculum into the body of the prone woman in
Gordimers story offers a striking image of the collusion of medicine with state power in the name of physical
purity and moral cleanliness. However, even when writers like Brink, Coetzee, and Gordimer critique the
medical establishment for propping up the institutions of apartheid, their reliance on medical metaphors
may inadvertently shore up the scientific authority and practices of that same establishment.
PHOTOGRAPH ALT FAILS (1/4)

Photographs are subject to the details that the author CHOOSES to include or not include,
and thus this form of representation is not better than the current form of representation.
Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland and Amy, Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist
Photography and Local Empowerment; International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163]
Realist approaches portray photographs as neutral and value free, as reflecting an objective reality
captured through the lens (see Hall, 1997: 98). Realism here does not refer to the complex theoretical
approach that has shaped foreign policy and international relations theory (see Williams, 2005. We employ
the term more as it is used in everyday language. It refers to the idea that photographs have a truth value,
allowing the viewer realistic and authentic insight into the events and people they depict. In its pure form
such a position is, we believe, not tenable. Photographs cannot portray the world as it is. A photograph is no
different from any other form of representation, even though the seemingly realistic reproduction of
external realities may deceive us initially. A photograph is taken at a certain time of the day, with a certain
focus and from a certain angle. These choices make up the very essence of the photograph: its aesthetic
quality. But they result from artistic and inevitably subjective decisions taken by the photographer decisions that have nothing to do with the actual object that is photographed.
Photography as a means of representation shows colonial influence and perpetrates the

stigma that is attached to HIV/AIDS.
Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland and Amy, Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and Local
Empowerment; International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163] Humanist photography is the first of two
non-realist approaches we examine in detail. We do so by focusing on a meanwhile iconic HIV/AIDS
photograph taken by photojournalist Ed Hooper. It depicts a Ugandan mother and her baby, both in the last
stages of fatal, AIDS related illness. We examine the Hooper photograph as a type of image that symbolizes
broader western practices of representing HIV/AIDS in Africa. Taken in 1986, during the relatively early
years of western recognition of the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a major crisis, the Hooper photograph reveals
how HIV/AIDS was first visualized in the press, and how such early visualizations of suffering and
victimization have had implications that still shape the HIV/AIDS discourse today (Bhattacharya et. al,
2005: 8). It also symbolizes how very specific, humanist forms of representations continue to influence our
understanding of HIV/AIDS in Africa (for a recent example see Annan, Gordimer and Kennedy, 2003). The
political assumption behind such humanist approaches is that images of suffering can invoke compassion in
viewers, and that this compassion can become a catalyst for positive change. Although accepting the basic
premise underlying this position, we inquire further into the values involved in these practices, and the type of
change that issues from them. We show that humanist photographic engagements, well meant as they are,
contain residues of colonial values. They are more likely to invoke pity, rather than compassion. They
reflect how western and thus very often universalized - accounts of HIV/AIDS in Africa are based on
very specific assumptions, even stigma, revolving around the portrayal of people affected by HIV/AIDS as
passive victims removed from the everyday realities of the western world.

Photographs are not a better representation of reality than our disease representation.
They are less open to contestation
Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland and Amy, Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist
Photography and Local Empowerment; International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163]
Photographs deceive. They seem to give us a glimpse of the real. They provide us with the seductive belief
that what we see in a photograph is an authentic representation of the world: a slice of life that reveals
exactly what was happening at a particular moment. This is the case because a photograph is, as Roland
Barthes (1977: 17) stresses, a message without a code. As opposed to a linguistic representation, for instance,
or a painting, a photograph is a perfect analogon. Indeed, its very nature, as Barthes continues, is defined by
this analogical perfection. In the realm of documentary photography, for instance, it was for long commonly
assumed that a photographer, observing the world from a distance, is an objective witness to political
phenomena, providing authentic representations of, say, war or poverty (see Strauss, 2003: 45). Theoretically
such realist positions hinge on the belief that a photograph can represent its object in a neutral and valuefree way, transferring meaning from one site to another without affecting the objects nature and
signification in the process. Debrix (2003, xxiv, xxvii-xxx) stresses that this belief is part of a long western
search for transcendental knowledge, be it of a spiritual or secular nature. While most scholars who work on
photography acknowledge that photographs mimic vision in one way or another, few if any claim that such
representations, even if they are pictorial simulacra, are authentic representations of the world as it is (see
Friday, 2000: 356-75). We agree. But rather than critiquing realist understandings of photography in detail we
find it more productive to explore how alternative approaches recognize that photographs are practices of
representations and thus of an inherently political nature. Two aspects make such alternatives to realism
convincing. First, and as already mentioned: a photographic representation reflects certain aesthetic choices.
It cannot be neutral because it always is an image chosen and composed by a particular person. It is taken
form a particular angle, and then produced and reproduced in a certain manner, thereby excluding a
range of alternative ways of capturing the object in question (see, for instance, Sontag, 2003: 46, Barthes,
1977: 19).
Second, and more importantly: a photograph cannot speak for itself. It needs to be viewed and
interpreted. This is why Barthes (1977: 17-19) stresses that there are always two aspects to a
photograph. There is the denoted message, which is the above-mentioned analogically perfect
representation of a visual image. But there is also a conoted message, which includes how a
photograph is read and interpreted, how it fits into existing practices of knowledge and
communication. Some refer to this process more specifically as secondary image construction, which
takes place when photographs are selected out from their original ordering and narrative context, to be
placed alongside textual information and reports in a publication (Hall 1997: 86). It is not our intention to
engage this complex and rather diverse literature on photography, except to stress that there is wide-spread
scholarly agreement that a conoted message cannot take the form of an unmediated representation of
reality. John Berger (1980: 55), for instance, points out that photographs only preserve instant appearances.
When we look at a photograph we never just look at a photograph alone. We actually look at a complex
relationship between a photograph and ourselves (Berger, 1977: 9). Our viewing experience is thus
intertwined not only with previous experiences, such as our memory of other photographs we have seen in
the past, but also with the values and visual traditions that are accepted as common sense by established
societal norms. Guy Debord (1992: 4), likewise, stresses how everything directly lived becomes distanced
through representation. It becomes part of a spectacle, which he defines as social relationship
between people that is mediated by images. For David Levi Strauss (2003: 45) the important aspect of
this process is that there are always relations of power at stake, that there is always an attempt to tell a
story, and that this story is always told form a particular, politically charged angle.

Photographs give the false sense of reality, and that means that photographs in the media
are politically charged, and not an effective means of neutral representation. Bleiker
and Kay, 2007 [Roland and Amy, Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and Local
What makes photographs unusually powerful and at times problematic - is that their analogically
perfect representation of a visual image masks the political values that such representations embody.
The assumption that photographs are neutral, value free and evidential, is reinforced because
photography captures memorable faces and events. We forget, as photojournalist David Pearlmutter
(1998: 28) puts it, that the lens is focused by a hand directed by a human eye. Add to this that the public
rarely sees the news media as purveyors of commercially profitable stories and images. Instead, the
news is perceived as a reflection of the actual, as a neutral mediator between a subject and, in the case
of most international news, an object usually located in another part of the world.
Photographs are more susceptible to exaggeration and make our current views about
HIV/AIDS fixed, making stigma more unchangeable Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland and Amy,
Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and Local Empowerment; International Studies
Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163] The fusion of information and entertainment, and the commercial need for
recognizable headlines and simple stories, inevitably favors stereotypical representations over more
complex ways of representing socio-political issues, such as HIV/AIDS. Barthes (1977: 22) even goes as far
as arguing that a photograph only achieves meaning because of the existence of a store of stereotyped
attitudes which form ready-made elements of signification. This tendency is exacerbated when a news
item refers to events in the developing world. In such cases western media sources tend to fall back on the
scripts of global news agencies circulated in wire services. Once the parameters of a news story have been
set, coverage can lapse into a standard formula. Photography can thus give a pandemic such as HIV/AIDS
the meaning of familiar crisis by cueing an audience to formulaic events via particular images. Such
practices can, for instance, revolve around a micrograph picture of the virus or an image of a person dying
of AIDS-related illnesses. They reinforce static pictures of HIV/AIDS and make it difficult to generate
change (Watney, 1990). Photographs can thus strengthen the perception that the disease is not part of daily
life, but a more remote death event (Wyschogrod 1973), to be feared by the public and managed by a
mix of medicine and fate. By viewing a such pictures we strengthen a preconceived perspective, but fail to
recognize the actual context and the complex social forces that helped create the event portrayed in the
image (Strauss 2003: 169).
Photographs are political tools. Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland and Amy, Representing HIV/AIDS in
Africa: Pluralist Photography and Local Empowerment; International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163]
Humanist photography has a mission: it aims to employ photography in the service of a human cause. Such
photographic engagements emerged as a direct reaction against early realist tendencies to consider
photographs as pieces of evidence, as authentic records that reflected a true image of the world. Humanist
approaches, by contrast, stress that documentary photography can provide access to both facts and feelings.
Lewis Hine, one of the early proponents of this position, stressed that he wanted to show things that had to be
corrected (quoted in Stott 1973: 21). Photography can thus be used as a specific political tool, as a way of
rallying public opinion in favor of a particular issue. We term this approach humanist because it contains key
traits associated with humanism as it is broadly understood: a modern attempt to replace God with man, that
is, to reject the notion of a divine will in favor of a world where people take charge (Caroll, 1993: 2). But
humanism also created a specific understanding of agency and order, one that revolves around the search for
certitude, one that sees humanity in absolute and often universal terms (see Edkins, 2005: 379; Doty, 1996: 24,
125)

Photographs clash with cultural values and re-entrench the problems the aff tries to solve
Also, countries shut themselves off to western media, forcing the media to regurgitate the
false views of Africans
Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland and Amy, Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and
Local Empowerment; International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163 The reaction of some local African
governments to the crisis often exacerbated the effect of the stereotypical images that prevail in the western
public discourse. Particularly fateful, Treichler (1999: 109) believes, is the combination of doomsday
predictions by the western media and official denials by Third World governments. The latter not only
increases fear, stigmatization and the spread of the disease, but paradoxically reinforces stereotypes. When
western reporters seek to deal with HIV/AIDS in Africa their representations often clash with the
institutionalization of silence imposed by local public policies. As a result, African ministries have often
banned researchers and physicians from talking to the press. Various arguments are presented for such
silencing, including fears that representations of HIV/AIDS could damage thriving industries, such as
tourism, on which many African countries depend (Sabatier, 1988: 96 and Fleury, 2004: 1). The result is
an entrenchment of the problematic practices described above: foreign reporters rely more heavily on
available foreign sources, thus reinforcing pre-existing narratives of Africa and silencing the far more
complex and intertwined local stories that characterize the epidemics spread and socio-political
consequences. The so-produced dehumanizing images of Africa are not just reflective of media
representations, but permeate most western engagements with the continent. Raymond Apthorpe (2001:
112), drawing on decades of experience with humanitarian work, emphasizes the deeply entrenched tendency
of western development workers and aid agencies to rely on stereotypical, reproducible, recognizable and
self-affirming views of Africa, thus reproducing a virtual reality that contains only token roots in the actual,
domestic reality of the land beneath.
Photographs re-entrench the power relations between the photographer and the subject,
further regulating the representation of true disease. Bleiker and Kay, 2007 [Roland and
Amy, Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and Local Empowerment; International
Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 139163]
One of the most obvious problems associated with the Hooper photograph is the unequal power
relationship between the photographer and his object. Any western photographer, no matter how well
meant and sensitive his or her artistic and political engagement are, operates at a certain distance from
poverty, conflict and disaster. And there is, of course, an even greater distance between the viewers of
the photographs and the content they convey. Hoopers subsequent reflections reveal that he was aware of
this dilemma, oscillating between his humanist desire to draw attention to the AIDS crisis and an acute
awareness of the privileged positions he occupied as a western photographer:
PERMSOLVENCY (1/3)
Disease representations empower an all-encompassing security state.
Global Genome] But it is in this last element that Foucaults points about biopolitics have the most resonance for
our current context of bioterrorism and emerging infectious disease. In his Collge lectures, Foucault says more
about the governmentality specific to biopolitics. He asks, How can a power such as this kill, if it is true that its
basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to
compensate for failings? (2003: 254). In other words, what is the relation between older forms of sovereignty
and the emerging, modern biopolitical practices of public health policy, hospital reform, the professionalization
of medicine, and the methods of statistics and demographics? Foucault offers one response, which is that the
acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being, that the biological came under State
control, that there was at least a certain tendency that leads to what might be termed State control of the
biological (2003: 239-40). But how is the exceptional character of sovereign power instantiated in such
decentralized systems, in which the bureaucratic management of numbers and bodies takes hold? There must be
some set of principles for allowing, in exceptional circumstances, the introduction of sovereign power. In other
words, there must be some set of conditions that can be identified as a threat, such that a corresponding state of
emergency can be claimed, in which the formerly decentralized apparatus of biopolitics suddenly constricts into
the exception of sovereignty. It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it
is exercised in modern States (2003: 254). But I would argue that Foucault means racism here in a specific,
medical and biological sense. Racism in this sense is a biologically-inflected political relation in which war is
rendered as fundamentally biological: Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be
defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the
purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital the existence
in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a
population. (1978: 137) In a curious turn of phrase, Foucault later calls this a democratization of sovereignty, a
condition in which the sovereign state of emergency emerges through a widespread and generalized threat to the
population (2003: 37). In such conditions, both a medical-biological view of the population, and a statisticalinformatic means of accounting for the population, converge in the identification of potential threats and
possible measures of security. In a sense, it is war that acts as the hinge between population and
information, but a war that always puts at stake the biological existence of the population (and thus
nation). The body natural, even as it serves as an analogy for the body politic, is always what is
fundamentally at stake in the body politic.
PERMSOLVENCY (2/3)
Solely focusing on the negative aspects of medicine and disease representations does nothing.
Concentrating on the positive aspects of development is essential to critical historical
analysis without it, the alternative fails. Lund 2003 (Giuliana, University of Minnesota HEALING
THE NATION: MEDICOLONIAL DISCOURSE
2003) Project Muse.
In the quest for cultural growth, it is important to recognize that the language of liberalism is
implicated in the conceptual framework that enabled apartheidthe rhetoric of healing, the desire for
separate development, and the implementation of segregation were not purely right-wing or Afrikaner
affairs. Quite to the contrary, segregation was often supported by British liberals who felt that by
separating Africans from those of European descent they could protect the Africans from the
destructive influences of urban life. In this respect, political debates over segregation paralleled the
ideological confrontation around imperialism: racism and the idea of separate development were not
solely the ideological terrain of enthusiastic imperialists, but also of paternalistic liberals who veiled their
economic interests and disease with the African environment and peoples as concern for the welfare of
the downtrodden. Whether the goal was healing, evangelizing, or civilizing, the result was decidedly
prejudicial to the well-being of the colonized. This does not mean that all Western medicine, religion,
and culture should be dispensed with wholesale, but rather that the ways in which fields like medicine
are manipulated by different political ideologies must be taken into consideration. The tremendous
moral and scientific authority of medicine makes the necessity for critical historical analysis all the
more essential. If the focus here is on the negative aspects of biological analogies rather than their
positive contributions to development, that is because this work is intended as a corrective to the
pervasive romanticization of medical discourse that has prevailed for so long in South Africa.
PERMSOLVENCY (3/3)
Permutation is the best vehicle for solvency disease discourse should be open to critical
reflection in order to avoid the negative aspects of biomedical rhetoric while simultaneously
embracing the beneficial, non-inflated representations through a revision of rhetoric in order to
counter oppressive ideologies.
Lund 2003 (Giuliana, University of Minnesota HEALING THE NATION: MEDICOLONIAL DISCOURSE
2003) Project Muse.
In light of the central place of plague in the imaginary of colonial and apartheid South Africa, it is crucial to
appraise the ongoing discourse of healing in the region in order to evaluate its degree of continuity with
or disjunction from earlier forms of biomedical rhetoric. Medical discourses must be opened up to critical
reflection so that informed decisions can be reached about which ideas and words to embrace and which
to avoid due to a historical baggage that outweighs their potential benefits. The key question that remains
to be answered is to what extent the language of healing in South Africa is still mired in a medicolonial
discourse associated with evangelism, imperialist expansion, uneven development, and apartheid. The flip
side of this query is how successful South Africa will be in revising the rhetoric of plague so as to counter
its political pitfalls and take into account indigenous conceptions of communal suffering and well-being.
PERM
PERM-- SOLVENCY
SOLVENCY
The securitization
Solely
focusing on the
of disease
negative
opens
aspects
spaces
of medicine
for resistance
and disease
againstrepresentations
such forms of bio-politics
does nothing.
by
Concentrating
exposing
us to the
on the
conflicts
positive
present
aspects
in Africa.
of development
The perm
is solves
essential
both
to case
critical
andhistorical
the alternative.
analysis
Elbe
05 (Stefan,
without
AIDS,
it, Security,
the alternative
Biopolitics,
fails.
Special
Lund
Issue
2003
on Health,
(Giuliana,
International
UniversityRelations,
of Minnesota
Vol. 19,
HEALING
No. 4,
THE NATION: MEDICOLONIAL DISCOURSE
AND THE
STATE OF
EMERGENCY
FROMRelations)
APARTHEID TO TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION, Spring,
2005,
pp. 403-419,
Lecturer
on International
2003) Project Muse.
Resistance
really
always relies
upon
situationto
against
which
it struggles.
Forof
instance,
in the
In the quest
for cultural
growth,
it isthe
important
recognize
that
the language
liberalism
is gay
community
medical
definition
of homosexuality
was
a very important
tool against
the oppression
of
implicated the
in the
conceptual
framework
that enabled
apartheidthe
rhetoric
of healing,
the desire for
homosexuality
in the lastand
part
the nineteenth century
and in were
the early
twentieth
century.or
This
separate development,
theofimplementation
of segregation
not purely
right-wing
Afrikaner
medicalization,
was a means
of oppression,
always by
been
a means
of resistance
well
affairs. Quite towhich
the contrary,
segregation
was oftenhas
supported
British
liberals
who felt as
that
by since
you
could say,
'If we are
sick,
then
do youdescent
condemn
why protect
do you despise
us?' And
on.' Of
separating
Africans
from
those
of why
European
theyus,could
the Africans
fromsothe
course,
this discourse
sounds
rather
to us,
but atdebates
the time
it was
very important.96
The
destructive
influencesnow
of urban
life.
In thisnave
respect,
political
over
segregation
paralleled the
securitization
of AIDS mayaround
be a similar
case in racism
point. Itand
is something
by development
virtue of its biopolitical
ideological confrontation
imperialism:
the idea ofwhich
separate
were not
dimensions
is partially
oppressive
and undesirable,
but it but
alsoalso
forms
source of resistance
solely the ideological
terrain
of enthusiastic
imperialists,
of apaternalistic
liberalsthat
whomight
veiledbetheir
useful
to those
living and
withdisease
HIV/AIDS.
HIV/AIDS
is a security issue,
then it becomes
possible
forwelfare
activistsof
economic
interests
with If
the
African environment
and peoples
as concern
for the
tothe
argue,
well why are
you notthe
doing
to address
this issue, and
why are you
making
resources
downtrodden.
Whether
goalmore
was healing,
evangelizing,
or civilizing,
thenot
result
wasmore
decidedly
available?
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course, one
wish to address
the not
AIDS
pandemic
outside
of amedicine,
biopolitical
context,
prejudicial
to theofwell-being
ofwould
the colonized.
This does
mean
that all
Western
religion,
ifand
thisculture
were even
possible.
But the securitization
of but
AIDS
may that
be anthe
urgent
necessary
in
should
be dispensed
with wholesale,
rather
ways and
in which
fieldsfirst
like step
medicine
moving
Africa away
its current
of domination
into
theconsideration.
realm of power
relations
where
are manipulated
by from
different
politicalstate
ideologies
must beand
taken
into
The
tremendous
more
resistance
to biopower
could
subsequently
articulated;
then
perhaps
moralmeaningful
and scientiforms
fic authority
of medicine
makes
thebe
necessity
for critical
historical
analysis
allone
the day
the
securitization
AIDS
may
nave in aspects
retrospect.
In either case,
Foucault's
own
political
more
essential. Ifof
the
focustoo
here
is appear
on the negative
of biological
analogies
rather
than
their
engagements
certainly mirror
such pragmatism
that he always
triedistointended
respond as
to the
present moment
positive contributions
to development,
that isinbecause
this work
a corrective
to the with
whatever
resources
were available
to himdiscourse
within thethat
context
of specificfor
political
confrontations.
In the end,
pervasive
romanticization
of medical
has prevailed
so long
in South Africa.
then, perhaps a Foucauldian form of resistance if it is possible to speak of such a thing might not consist
of an outright rejection of the securitization of AIDS; it might well consist instead of an attempt to use the
political opportunities
offers for
resisting
the global
marginalization
of HIV/AIDS.
FortoFoucault
Permutation
is the bestitvehicle
for
solvency
disease
discourse should
be open
criticalthere
clearly were
instances
where the
of 'torture
andofexecution
whichrhetoric
preclude any
resistance'
outweigh
reflection
in order
to avoid
thedangers
negative
aspects
biomedical
while
simultaneously
the
dangers
of
racism
and
normalization.97
Every
day
thousands
of
persons
are
not
being
tortured
embracing the beneficial, non-inflated representations through a revision of rhetoricorinexecuted
order to
because of HIV/AIDS, but they are nevertheless being allowed to die despite the availability of lifecounter
oppressive ideologies. Lund 2003 (Giuliana, University of Minnesota HEALING THE NATION:
prolonging medicines which is a situation not so different from the one described by Foucault. Hence, if we
MEDICOLONIAL DISCOURSE
ask today, what is more dangerous securitizing or not securitizing AIDS the case for the latter can
AND
OFofEMERGENCY
FROM
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AND RECONCILIATION,
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madeSTATE
in light
the immense daily
death
toll causedTO
byTRUTH
AIDS-related
illnesses and because Spring,
of the
2003)
Project
Muse. In light
the central
place of plague
in the imaginary
of colonial
and apartheid
state
of domination
that of
Africans
in particular
are experiencing
in this
regard. This,
of course,South
is Africa,
it isprecisely
crucial tohow
appraise
thespreads
ongoing discourse
of healing
in the
region
to evaluate
its degree
biopower
by appealing
to life and
health
butinitorder
is arguably
nonetheless
theoflesser
continuity
with or
forms
of biomedical
rhetoric.
Medical
discourses
must be
of two evils;
fordisjunction
in order to from
resist,earlier
one has
to first
of all be alive.
Whereas
the first
question about
theopened
up to
critical renature
flection
informed
decisionsofcan
be could
reached
which ideas
words tothe
embrace
biopolitical
of so
thethat
ongoing
securitization
AIDS
thusabout
be answered
in theand
affirmative,
andsecond
which question
to avoidregarding
due to a historical
baggage
that outweighs
their
potential
beneactivity
fits. Thecannot.
key question
the necessity
of resisting
and rejecting
such
biopolitical
It does that
not
remains
to
be
answered
is
to
what
extent
the
language
of
healing
in
South
Africa
is
still
mired
in
a
follow from the fact that the securitization of AIDS is biopolitical that such a strategy is futile and must
medicolonial
associated
with evangelism,
imperialist
expansion, uneven development, and
be resisteddiscourse
at all costs
by grass-roots
activists and
critical scholars.
apartheid. The flip side of this query is how successful South Africa will be in revising the rhetoric of plague
so as to counter its political pitfalls and take into account indigenous conceptions of communal suffering and
well-being.
Perm solves back all their securitization and racism claims pragmatic and policy-
oriented goals are key to spur initiatives that solely focus on the overall betterment of
people. The perm is the only shot at actually solving the affirmative while avoiding the
representations they critique.
Elbe 05 (Stefan, AIDS, Security, Biopolitics, Special Issue on Health, International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 4,
2005, pp. 403-419, Lecturer on International Relations) How can these dangers of racism and normalization
inherent in the securitization of HIV/AIDS be minimized? The racist danger can be mediated in at least three
ways. First, those presenting the AIDS pandemic as a security issue could ensure that they insist that it is
not exclusively a security issue, but rather a security issue in addition to being a health issue, a
development issue, an economic issue, a social issue, a political issue, a human rights issue, a gender
issue, etc. In this way, highlighting the security implications of HIV/AIDS does not unreflectively reify
the privileged status of the security
sector and elites in terms of access to treatment, and makes it more difficult to simply write off the lives
of ordinary civilians living with HIV/AIDS.
This outcome could also be achieved, secondly, not just by using a national security framework when
securitizing AIDS, but by complementing such an analysis with a human security framework as well.
Although it has shortcomings of its own, the human security framework is by nature more
comprehensive and better equipped to capture the importance of addressing the illness for the lives of
ordinary individuals, and makes a stronger claim for addressing the needs of the latter than just letting
them perish.
Thirdly, the danger of racism could also be minimized by insisting that policy responses within the civilian
and security sectors not violate human rights, and by framing the issue of HIV/AIDS as an important
international security
issue
, or as an international issue with a security
dimension
, rather than as an overwhelming security
threat
. In so doing, the normative benefits that could accrue from adopting a security framework, such as increasing
the level of attention and available resources for addressing HIV/AIDS, would not necessarily have to be
sacrificed,
while the less threatening language used would result in a lower risk of those living with HIV/AIDS
being subjected to harsh measures in the name of security. The normalizing dangers accompanying the
securitization of AIDS, in turn, might best be addressed by insisting that international AIDS policies do
not privilege prevention and the prescription of specific norms of sexual behaviour at the expense of
treatment. Averting the security implications of HIV/AIDS can only be achieved in the long run by also
scaling up treatment programmes, which are less concerned with how persons became infected than
with helping those already infected survive. International and bi-lateral AIDS initiatives launched
through the securitization of HIV/AIDS thus need to be less moralistic and judgmental in tone, and
need to focus more on providing treatment to those who want it. In this way addressing the pandemic
would not necessarily have to involve heavily prescriptive practices about how and when people should
engage in sexual behaviour, but could focus instead on procuring medicines and enhancing the
infrastructure for their effective dispersal.
Even if these precautions are taken, however, the securitization of HIV/AIDS nevertheless remains in the end
a risky gamble on the ability of those presenting HIV/AIDS as a security issue to maintain control over the
uses to which this language will be put
albeit a gamble that has perhaps become necessary due to the particular vicissitudes of contemporary world
politics. Foucault once insisted that
the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger
.60 In the case of the securitization of HIV/AIDS, this means deciding whether the potential dangers that
derive from its biopolitical nature outweigh the dangers of not drawing upon whatever discursive and material
resources are available today for addressing the global AIDS pandemic
including the dangerous language of security.
BIOPOWER GOOD
Biopolitics doesnt culminate in the thantapolitical slaughter of the holocaust, but is an
ethic of care best embodied by the current welfare state. Its goal is to maximize the health
of each individual.
Ojakangas 05 (Mika, Impossible Dialogue on Biopower, Foucault Studies, Doctorate in Social Science) For
all these reasons, Agambens thesis, according to which the concentration camp is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West, has to be corrected.113 The bio-political paradigm of the West is not the
concentration camp, but, rather, the presentday welfare society and, instead of homo sacer , the
paradigmatic figure of the biopolitical society can be seen, for example, in the middleclass Swedish
socialdemocrat. Although this figure is an object and a product of the huge biopolitical machinery, it does
not mean that he is permitted to kill without committing homicide. Actually, the fact that he eventually
dies, seems to be his greatest crime against the machinery. (In biopolitical societies, death is not only
something to be hidden away, but, also, as Foucault stresses, the most shameful thing of all.114) Therefore,
he is not exposed to an unconditional threat of death, but rather to an unconditional retreat of all dying. In
fact, the biopolitical machinery does not want to threaten him, but to encourage him, with all its material
and spiritual capacities, to live healthily, to live long and to live happily even when, in biological terms, he
should have been dead long ago.115 This is because biopower is not bloody power over bare life for its
own sake but pure power over all life for the sake of the living. It is not power but the living, the condition of
all life individual as well as collective that is the measure of the success of bio power.
BIOPOWER GOOD (1/1)

The endpoint of biopower is not the creation of bare-life but the fostering and production of
forms-of-life. Biopower seeks to optimize the individual and produce extra-life. Ojakangas
05 (Mika, Impossible Dialogue on Biopower, Foucault Studies, Doctorate in Social Science)
Moreover, life as the object and the subject of biopower given that life is everywhere, it becomes
everywhere is in no way bare, but is as the synthetic notion of life implies, the multiplicity of the forms of life,
from the nutritive life to the intellectual life, from the biological levels of life to the political existence of
man.43 Instead of bare life, the life of biopower is a plenitude of life, as Foucault puts it.44 Agamben is
certainly right in saying that the production of bare life is, and has been since Aristotle, a main strategy of the
sovereign power to establish itself to the same degree that sovereignty has been the main fiction of
juridicoinstitutional thinking from Jean Bodin to Carl Schmitt. The sovereign power is, indeed, based on
bare life because it is capable of confronting life merely when stripped off and isolated from all forms of
life, when the entire existence of a man is reduced to a bare life and exposed to an unconditional threat of death.
Life is undoubtedly sacred for the sovereign power in the sense that Agamben defines it. It can be taken
away without a homicide being committed. In the case of biopower, however, this does not hold true. In
order to function properly, biopower cannot reduce life to the level of bare life, because bare life is life
that can only be taken away or allowed to persist which also makes understandable the vast critique of
sovereignty in the era of biopower. Biopower needs a notion of life that corresponds to its aims. What
then is the aim of biopower? Its aim is not to produce bare life but, as Foucault emphasizes, to multiply
life,45 to produce extralife.46 Biopower needs, in other words, a notion of life which enables it to
accomplish this task. The modern synthetic notion of life endows it with such a notion. It enables biopower
to invest life through and through, to optimize forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the
same time making them more difficult to govern.
It could be argued, of course, that instead of bare life (zoe) the form of life (bios) functions as the foundation of
biopower. However, there is no room either for a bios in the modern biopolitical order because every
bios has always been, as Agamben emphasizes, the result of the exclusion of zoe from the political realm. The
modern biopolitical order does not exclude anything not even in the form of inclusive exclusion. As a
matter of fact, in the era of biopolitics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe. It has already moved
into the site that Agamben suggests as the remedy of the political pathologies of modernity, that is to say, into
the site where politics is freed from every ban and a form of life is wholly exhausted in bare life.48 At the
end of Homo Sacer, Agamben gives this life the name formoflife, signifying always and above all
possibilities of life, always and above all power, understood as potentiality (potenza).49 According to
Agamben, there would be no power that could have any hold over mens existence if life were understood as a
formoflife. However, it is precisely this life, life as untamed power and potentiality, that biopower
invests and optimizes. If biopower multiplies and optimizes life, it does so, above all, by multiplying
and optimizing potentialities of life, by fostering and generating formsof life.50
BIOPOWER IMPACT (1/3)

Totalitarianism and Ethnic Racism caused the Holocaust, NOT biopolitics. Dickinson 04
(Edward, Biopolitics, Facism, Democracy, Central European History v37 n1, Ass. Prof. Hist. at University of
Cincinnati)
In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the fact that Foucaults ideas have
fundamentally directed attention away from institutionally centered conceptions of government and
the state . . . and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power and its microphysics.48 The
broader, deeper, and less visible ideological consensus on technocratic reason and the ethical
unboundedness of science was the focus of his interest.49 But the power-producing effects in Foucaults
microphysical sense (Eley) of the construction of social bureaucracies and social knowledge, of an
entire institutional apparatus and system of practice ( Jean Quataert), simply do not explain Nazi
policy.50 The destructive dynamic of Nazism was a product not so much of a particular modern set of
ideas as of a particular modern political structure, one that could realize the disastrous potential of those
ideas. What was critical was not the expansion of the instruments and disciplines of biopolitics, which
occurred everywhere in Europe. Instead, it was the principles that guided how those instruments and
disciplines were organized and used, and the external constraints on them. In National Socialism,
biopolitics was shaped by a totalitarian conception of social management focused on the power and
ubiquity of the vlkisch state. In democratic societies, biopolitics has historically been constrained by a
rights-based strategy of social management. This is a point to which I will return shortly. For now, the
point is that what was decisive was actually politics at the level of the state. A comparative framework can
help us to clarify this point. Other states passed compulsory sterilization laws in the 1930s indeed,
individual states in the United States had already begun doing so in 1907. Yet they did not proceed to the
next steps adopted by National Socialism mass sterilization, mass eugenic abortion and murder of the
defective. Individual . gures in, for example, the U.S. did make such suggestions. But neither the political
structures of democratic states nor their legal and political principles permitted such policies actually
being enacted. Nor did the scale of forcible sterilization in other countries match that of the Nazi
program. I do not mean to suggest that such programs were not horrible; but in a democratic political
context they did not develop the dynamic of constant radicalization and escalation that characterized
Nazi policies. The radicalizing dynamic of the Nazi regime was determined, however, not only by its
structure but also by its ideology. The attentive reader will have noticed a degree of conceptual slippage in
many of the quotations used in the foregoing pages between ethnic racialism and eugenics, between
eugenic murder and the Final Solution. This slippage between racialism and racism is not entirely
justified. After the rigors of the Goldhagen debate, it takes some sangfroid to address the topic of antiSemitism in Germany at all.But it appears from the current literature that there was no direct connection
between anti- Semitism and eugenic ideas. Some German eugenicists were explicitly racist; some of those
racist eugenicists were anti-Semites; but anti-Semitism was not an essential part of eugenic thought. As
Peter Fritzsche among many others has pointed out, racism really is at the heart of the Nazi
discourse of segregation, and the fantastic vision of all-out racial war that motivated the Nazis is
not explained merely by the logic of enlightened rationalism, technocracy, and scientism.51 Eugenics
did not pave the way for the murder of millions of Jews. Ethnic racism and particularly antiSemitism did.

The final solution was the byproduct of a unique understanding of the relationship between
Jews and Germans. Biopolitics does NOT necessitate extermination of the Other. Dickinson 04
(Edward, Biopolitics, Facism, Democracy, Central European History v37 n1, Ass. Prof. Hist. at
University of Cincinnati)
And yet, it is clear that anti-Semitism and eugenics did not imply, presuppose, or necessitate each other.
The Nazi variant of biopolitical modernity was in fact quite idiosyncratic. It is very difficult to assess the
place of explicitly ethnic racist thinking in the development of eugenics; but despite a resurgence of interest in
the differing character and fate of ethnic groups after about 1927, on the whole ethnic racism appears to
have become gradually less interesting to eugenicists from the late imperial period forward. The Nazis
shifted the balance quite suddenly and forcibly in favor of ethnic racial thought after 1933. It may be
that the growing in uence of eugenics made National Socialist thinking more plausible for many people in
the early 1930s; but it seems equally likely that the moderation of eugenics in the 1920s may have increased
the appeal of the Social Democratic Party (as the strongest advocate, among the non-Nazi political parties, of
eugenic policies) while actually discrediting the Nazis more dated ideas.53 In fact, it may be useful to
consider not only what eugenic ideas and euthanasia policy contributed to the implementation of the
Final Solution, but also how momentum toward the Final Solution shaped Nazi eugenics. The context
for Nazi eugenic policies was shaped fundamentally by the Nazis sense that Germany was in a
permanent racial war with the Jews (or communists and democrats, which in the Nazi worldview
amounted to the same thing). The urgency of Nazi eugenic policy the scope of forcible sterilization, the
murder of tens of thousands of defective people derived not just from the normal fear of
degeneration typical of eugenics since its inception, but also from a quite extraordinary understanding
of the immediacy of racial confrontation.

The holocaust was the result of a series of unique conditions, not the endpoint of all
biopolitical regimes.
Ranibow and Rose 03 (Paul/Nikolas, Thoughts On The Concept of Biopower Today, The Molecular Science
Holocaust is undoubtedly one configuration that modern biopower can take. This, as we have already
implied, was also Foucaults view in 1976: racisms allows power to sub-divide a population into subspecies
known as races, to fragment it, and to allow a relationship in which the death of the other, of the inferior race,
can be seen as something that will make life in general healthier and purer: racism justifies the
deathfunction in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes
one biologically stronger insofar as ones is a member of a race or a population (2003: 258). The Nazi
regime was, however, exceptional a paroxysmal development: We have, then, in Nazi society
something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized biopower in an
absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill to kill anyone, meaning not
only other people but also its own people a coincidence between a generalized biopower and a
dictatorship that was at once absolute and retransmitted throughout the entire social body (2003:
260). Schmitt argued, erroneously in our view, that the state of exception was the guarantee of modern
constitutional power. But the articulation of biopower in the form it took under National Socialism was
dependent upon a host of other historical, moral, political and technical conditions. Holocaust is neither
exemplary of thanato-politics, nor is it in some way the hidden dark truth of biopower.
BIOPOLITICS = EMPOWERING/HEALTH (1/2)

The Nazis were a uniquely violent variation of biopolitics. Biopower generally seeks to create
a healthy, pluralistic society, not the totalitarian state. Dickinson 04 (Edward, Biopolitics, Facism,
Democracy, Central European History v37 n1, Ass. Prof. Hist. at
University of Cincinnati) Why was Europes twentieth century, in addition to being the age of biopolitics
and totalitarianism, also the age of biopolitics and democracy? How should we theorize this relationship? I
would like to offer . ve propositions as food for thought. First, again, the concept of the essential legitimacy
and social value of individual needs, and hence the imperative of individual rights as the political
mechanism for getting them met, has historically been a cornerstone of some strategies of social
management. To borrow a phrase from Detlev Peukert, this does not mean that democracy was the absolutely
inevitable outcome of the development of biopolitics; but it does mean that it was one among other possible
outcomes of the crisis of modern civilization.112 Second, I would argue that there is also a causal fit between
cultures of expertise, or scientism, and democracy. Of course, scientism subverted the real, historical
ideological underpinnings of authoritarian polities in Europe in the nineteenth century. It also in a sense replaced
them. Democratic citizens have the freedom to ask why; and in a democratic system there is therefore a
bias toward pragmatic, objective or naturalized answers since values are often regarded as matters of
opinion, with which any citizen has a right to differ. Scientific fact is democracys substitute for revealed
truth, expertise its substitute for authority. The age of democracy is the age of professionalization, of technocracy;
there is a deeper connection between the two, this is not merely a matter of historical coincidence. Third, the
vulnerability of explicitly moral values in democratic societies creates a problem of legitimation. Of course
there are moral values that all democratic societies must in some degree uphold (individual autonomy and
freedom, human dignity, fairness, the rule of law), and those values are part of their strength. But as peoples
states, democratic social and political orders are also implicitly and often explicitly expected to do
something positive and tangible to enhance the well-being of their citizens. One of those things, of course, is
simply to provide a rising standard of living; and the visible and astonishing success of that project has
been crucial to all Western democracies since 1945. Another is the provision of a rising standard of health; and
here again, the democratic welfare state has delivered the goods in concrete, measurable, and extraordinary
ways. In this sense, it may not be so simpleminded, after all, to insist on considering the fact that modern
biopolitics has worked phenomenally well. Fourth, it was precisely the democratizing dynamic of modern
societies that made the question of the quality of the mass of the population seem and not only in the
eyes of the dominant classes increasingly important. Again, in the course of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries the expected level of the average citizens active participation in European political, social,
cultural, and economic life rose steadily, as did the expected level of her effective influence in all these spheres.
This made it a matter of increasing importance whether the average person was more or less educated and
informed, more or less moral and self-disciplined,more or less healthy and physically capable,more or less
socially competent. And modern social reform biopolitics defined very broadlyseemed to offer the
possibility of creating the human foundation for a society ordered by autonomous participation, rather
than by obedience. This too was part of the Machbarkeitswahn of modernity; but this was potentially a
democratic Wahn, not only an authoritarian one. Fifth, historically there has been a clear connection
between the concept of political citizenship and the idea of moral autonomy. The political subject (or
citizen as opposed to the political subject,who is an object of state action) is also a moral subject. The
citizens capacity for moral reasoning is the legitimating postulate of all democratic politics. The regulation
of sexual and reproductive life has long been understood in European societies to be among the most
fundamental issues of morality. There is, therefore, a connection between political citizenship on the one
hand, and the sexual and reproductive autonomy implied in the individual control that is a central element
of the modern biopolitical complex, on the other.
<CONTINUES>
BIOPOLITICS = EMPOWERING/HEALTH (2/2)
<CONTINUES>
The association in the minds of conservatives in the late imperial period between democracy and declining
fertility was not a panicky delusion; panicky it certainly was, but it was also a genuine insight into a deeper
ideological connection.113 Perhaps it should not be surprising, therefore, that the first great homeland of
eugenic legislation was the United States the first great homeland of modern democracy. In fact the
United States served both as a kind of promised land for racial and eugenic progressives in Germany, and
as a worst-case scenario of regression into barbarism for those opposed to coercive eugenic measures. 114
Nor should it be surprising that, apart from Nazi Germany, the other great land of eugenic sterilization in
Europe in the 1930s was Scandinavia, where democratic governments heavily in uenced by social
democratic parties were busily constructing the most ambitious and extensive welfare states in the world.115
The lesson is not that modern democracy is dangerous or destructive, much less that it is crypto-fascist
that, as Jacques Donzelot put it, the 1930s was the age of social fascism and our own age that of social
sector fascism. 116 The relevant message is, rather, that it is time to place the less familiar history of
modern democratic biopolitics alongside the more familiar history of modern totalitarian biopolitics. The
dream of perfectibility Machbarkeitswahn is central to modernity. But social engineering, the
management of society, can be organized in different ways. Historically, totalitarian biopolitics was a
self-destructive failure. Democratic biopolitics has, in contrast, been not in any moral sense, but
politically a howling success. For the historian interested in modernity, that story is no less interesting or
important than the story of the implosion of the Nazi racial state.
AT: SECURITIZING DISEASE BAD (1/2)

Broadening the concept of security to include health concerns transforms security, allowing for
the recognition that we are all vulnerable ANASTASION, Population Action International, IN
2004 (SAIS Review 24.2 (2004) 175179)
Health threats defy the political boundaries that have historically defined national security pursuits. In
order to adequately address the increasingly complex security challenges presented by health risks,
security must acquire a broader meaning beyond the defense of national borders. To this end, the
concept of "human security" was first advanced in the 1990s as an alternative to the narrowly defined,
traditional notion of national security. Human [End Page 175] security is rooted in the idea that the
insecurities experienced by all people, including the world's marginalized poor, are universally
threatening in an increasingly interconnected world.
The concept of human security has valueit creates the conditions that ameliorate the
worst problems of globalization CARMODY IN 2005 (Africa Today 52.1 (2005) 97-120)
It is at the level of legitimation that the internationalization of the United States is at its weakest. Humanity
faces multiple interlinked threats of hunger, disease, terrorism, and war. These all result from power
asymmetries and contestation over these (Sen 1999; on AIDS and power, see Campbell 2003). The cardinal
"problem for the future might be said to involve the creation of a peaceful and tolerant" state of coexistence
among the world's cultures, "in ways that provide material and political conditions of high quality" (Gill
2003:142). This solution can be achieved through the "operationalization" of human security, which the
United Nations Development Program defines as referring "to two mutually reinforcing concepts: (i) safety
from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression, and (ii) protection from sudden and hurtful
disruptions in the patterns of daily life" (Salih 2001:68). There is thus a need for a new holistic
international-security regime to rebalance the different "legs" of globalization. The transformations needed
in U.S. relations with Africa depend on a reconceptualization of power to achieve human security, which
"becomes possible if its four pillarsorder, justice, peace and economicscoexist in a condition of
dynamic equilibrium" (Zacarias 2003:43).
Securitizing the discourse of disease mobilizes global support for health issues
ANASTASION, Population Action International, IN 2004 (SAIS Review 24.2 (2004) 175179)
While policy prescriptions are scattered and often buried throughout the 300-page volume, many of the essays
do offer some practical guidance. In the final section, Mely Caballero-Anthony writes that the human security
discourse risks losing its relevance unless it is translated into action; she then suggests that generating a
constituency for health in the security community could help mobilize political and financial support for
global health efforts. While the twin goals of human security and global health may be worldwide in scope,
the authors understand that the incentive must be driven ultimately by self-interest. As Simon Szreter points
out, "when the public health movement is able to ally its arguments with profound concerns for national
security, great progress can be made in mobilizing resources and creating new institutions to promote health
and human security."14 Despite its shortcomings, this volume ultimately succeeds in laying the groundwork
for such an alliance.
AT: SECURITIZING DISEASE BAD (2/2)

Proponents of a broader definition of security do not have to endorse traditional, violent,
state-centric models of security Dabelko and Simmons in 1997 (sais review 17.1 (1997) 127146)
Proponents linking environmental problems to non-traditional security concerns tend to reject the
state-centric and militarized definitions of security that dominated security studies during the Cold
War. They support more holistic or "redefined" conceptions of security that extend beyond protecting the
state from external aggression and argue that global, regional, and local environmental problems seriously
5
threaten the health and well-being of individuals or the economic security of countries. According to this
view, it is in the common interest of all actors, not just states, to guard against environmental degradation for
the same reason they guard against organized violence. Both kinds of threats have the potential to harm
6
human, material, and natural resources on a large and disruptive scale. Proponents argue, for example, that
ozone layer depletion will lead to a marked increase in the occurrence of certain types of cancer as a result of
increased exposure to ultraviolet radiation. Similarly, global warming may create conditions more [End Page
7
129] conducive to the spread of infectious diseases. As temperatures and weather patterns change, certain
species that carry disease may multiply or migrate-spreading tropical diseases like dengue fever and malaria
to currently unaffected areas. Similarly, local environmental problems, such as the scarcity of arable land or
fresh water, the destruction of forests, and the spread of pollution, can lead to higher incidences of sickness,
8
malnutrition, and mortality. Even the loss of biological diversity is cited as a threat that will gradually
erode the health and well-being of individuals and national economies. As the world loses species, it
also loses part of the important genetic library available for scientific research, which in turn precludes
potential discoveries of lifesaving drugs, new agricultural crops, and antidotes for human-induced
ecological changes.
AT STIGMA
NU Stigma high now. Dr. Gregory Herek, Dec 2006 [Fight AIDS, not people with AIDS; Professor of
Psychology at the University of California at Davis (UCD). He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from
UCD in 1983, then was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University] AIDS-related stigma (or, more simply, AIDS
stigma) refers to prejudice, discounting, discrediting, and discrimination directed at people perceived to have
AIDS or HIV, and the individuals, groups, and communities with which they are associated. AIDS stigma is
expressed around the world in a variety of ways, including: ostracism, rejection, and avoidance of people
with AIDS (PWAs) discrimination against PWAs compulsory HIV testing without prior consent or
protection of confidentiality violence against persons who are perceived to have AIDS or to be infected
with HIV quarantine of persons with HIV. AIDS stigma is effectively universal, but its form varies from
one country to another, and the specific groups targeted for AIDS stigma vary considerably. Whatever its
form, AIDS stigma inflicts suffering on people and interferes with attempts to fight the AIDS epidemic. Indeed,
a 1988 Institute of Medicine panel observed that "the fear of discrimination is a major constraint to the wide
acceptance of many potentially effective public health measures" in the United States.
DISEASE NOT SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED (1/1)

Despite cultural reactions to disease being socially constructed, it does exist, and should be
addressed HUMPHREYS, DUKE PUBLIC HEALTH, IN 2002 (American Literary History
14.4 (2002) 845-857)
A further point about the reality of these epidemics needs to be made. Yellow fever, anthrax, smallpox,
leprosy, or malaria are not bogeymen useful for scaring the naive but in reality not all that bad. Fear of
acquiring such afflictions is rational, for the pain and suffering they engender is all too real. The
diseases may take on meanings for individuals (such as Gregory Tomso finds for leprosy and
homosexuality) or cultures (i.e., yellow fever and malaria as a punishment for the evil of slavery), but their
underlying physicality will evoke somewhat similar responses across culture and time. Consider, for
example, the following account of tending a yellow fever victim: "The poor girl's screams might be heard for
half a square and at times I had to exert my utmost strength to hold her in bed. Jaundice was marked, the skin
being a bright yellow hue: tongue and lips dark, cracked and blood oozing from the mouth and nose." These
symptoms were ugly enough, but then the terrible "black vomit" followed: "By Tuesday evening it was as
black as ink and would be ejected with terrific force. I had my face and hands spattered with it but had to
stand by and hold her. Well it is too terrible to write any more about it." 1 Such symptoms were specific to the
particular organism that caused yellow fever and created an unavoidable set of responsesdisgust, fear,
horror, and perhaps compassion. There was a time when one had to defend talking about malaria as a specific
entity to an audience so imbued with the social construction of disease that specific syndromes caused by
specific pathogens had lost meaning as real entities. The pendulum has swung back, however, if I read the
field correctly. We have come to agree that the basic biology of specific diseases offers an underlying reality
to the historical experience of them, while at the same time understanding that different cultures attach
different meanings to epidemic outbreaks.
CARE GOODBASIS FOR ETHICS (1/1)

THE NOTION OF CARE IS CENTRAL TO ANY ETHICAL THEORY OF ACTION.
REICH, GEORGETOWN BIOETHICS, IN 2001 (The American Journal of Bioethics 1.1
(2001) 64-74)
The Nazi tragedy of care can generate the conviction that we need to give more attention to care as the
originary element of all ethics. Because radical human apathy negates morality, it is important to pay
17
philosophical attention to the antithesis of apathy, which is concern or care (Sorge) (May 1969, 288).
Care is the starting point for morality in the moral-psychological sense that if we do not care about
others (and ourselves), or about human tasks or human ideals and goals, we are incapable of any
moral knowledge, judgment, or action. One [End Page 70] pays moral-philosophical attention to care in
this sense by responding to the question: What person, what thing, what value do I care about? If neither
sickness nor suffering matters to anyoneif people don't have a worried care, i.e., a concern (the Latin
cura; the German Sorge) about people and their needsthen no moral principles, like beneficence or
mercy or justice or autonomy will make any difference. The moral force of principles relies on the
prior reality of care in this sense.
EXAGGERATION GOODSOLVES DISEASE (1/1)

Exagerration is good solves diseases and diseases are bad Hamburg, M.D., October 17. 2001
[Margaret A. Vice President of Biological Programs, Nuclear Threat Initiative; Senate Committee on
Governmental Affairs, Subcommittee of International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services]
In this time of heightened anxiety and concern, our nation has a real opportunityand obligationto make
sure that we have in place the programs and policies necessary to better protect ourselves against this threat,
and perhaps to prevent such an attack from occurring in the first place. While there are many challenges
before us, we do know a great deal about what needs to be done and how to do it. I will address these issues
in more detail later in my testimony, but I want to emphasize at the outset that improving the national
response to bioterrorism must include several broad elements, such as: Prevention. Every effort must be
made to reduce the likelihood that dangerous pathogens will be acquired or used by those that want to
do harm. This must include improving intelligence, limiting inappropriate access to certain biological
agents and efforts to establish standards that will help prevent the development and spread of
biological agents as weapons; Strengthening public health. Rapid detection and response will depend on a
well-trained cadre of trained public health professionals to enhance disease surveillance and outbreak
investigation, educated and alert health care providers, upgraded laboratories to support diagnosis, and
improved communications across all levels of government, across agencies and across the public and
private sector.
Enhancing medical care capacity. We must improve treatment for victims of an attack by enhancing local and
federal emergency medical response teams, training health professionals to diagnose and treat these diseases,
developing strategies to improve the ability of hospitals to rapidly increase emergency capacity, and providing
necessary drugs or vaccines where they are needed through a national pharmaceutical stockpile. Research. A
comprehensive research agenda will serve as the foundation of future preparedness. Perhaps most urgently,
we need improved detectors/diagnostics, along with better vaccines and new medications. Some of these
activities are already underway, but need to be strengthened and extended; other programs and policies still
need to be developed and implemented. This hearing represents an important forum to better define the
agenda we must pursue to be a nation prepared.
Political leadership and the media is key to solving HIV/AIDS.

Tomes 2002 [Nancy, Epidemic Entertainments: Disease and Popular Culture in Early
Twentieth-Century America; American Literary History - Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2002,
pp. 625-652] A large measure of Senegals success is attributable to strong political leadership and
the countrys high level of social cohesion. The government worked quickly with civil society and the
religious structures to address HIV/AIDS from the mid-1980s onward. Further, a long tradition of
community involvement in health and development issues was mobilized around AIDS prevention
issues. The emphasis on treating sexually transmitted diseases also contributed to the success of the
Senegalese campaign. In essence, Senegal has managed to contain HIV/AIDS to incredibly low levels,
despite high poverty levels, as a result of an organized and committed response by all sectors of society to
the issue.
REPS SOLVEPOLITICAL COMMITMENT KEY(1/1)

Political commitment is necessary to solve Tomes, 2002 [Nancy, Epidemic Entertainments: Disease
and Popular Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century America; American Literary History - Volume 14, Number 4,
Winter 2002, pp. 625-652] Lessons from successful responses to HIV/AIDS like those in Senegal and Uganda
include the need to (1) mobilize widespread community support in the fight against HIV/AIDS; (2) overcome
stigma, denial, and silence to make progress; (3) change sexual behavior to embrace safer-sex practices; (4)
showcase examples of sustained actions at the national level; (5) develop committed leadership at all levels; (6)
develop partnerships at different levels; (7) mobilize resources, set priorities, and adequately finance initiatives;
and
(8) use local institutions, communities, and the public and private sectors efficiently. There is no quick, easy,
straightforward answer to overcoming the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Senegal and Uganda
have been successful in reducing prevalence rates mainly by changing individual behavior. To what extent
the political process and politicians achieved this is debatable. However, it is clear that without top-level
political commitment and the mobilization of resources, HIV prevalence will not decline. Political will
is a necessary condition for the epidemics growth to be capped or, better still, reversed.
REPS SOLVE STIGMA (1/3)

Political representation of AIDS is key to stopping denial and stigma. Tomes 2002 [ Nancy,
Epidemic Entertainments: Disease and Popular Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century America; American
Literary History - Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2002, pp. 625-652]
Denial, stigma, and discrimination lie behind African political leaders silence. This is still the norm in the
majority of African countries. As long as HIV is not discussed openly, denial will continue to exist. It is
critically important for leaders to overcome silence and stigma in addressingHIV.Without political
dialogue, the problems that arise from HIV and AIDS will continue to be surrounded by ignorance,
myths, and, of course, denial that the epidemic exists in the first place.
Clear representation solves stigma

Forman, 2004 [ Lisa, Doctoral Candidate, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law; Both Medium and
Message: HIV/AIDS, Information and Communication in Africa; Journal of Law and Policy for the Information
Society] There is now considerable consensus that an effective response to the epidemic should be a
comprehensive one, requiring prevention, treatment, and the protection of human rights. These elements
are part of a continuum, with prevention enhanced by the availability of treatment, which in turn reduces
the stigma of an illness perceived to be a death sentence. Effective prevention also relies on the reduction
of vulnerability to infection, in high-risk groups like women and youth, through the protection of human
rights and other means. Information and communication are central threads running [*173] throughout
this response, providing both form and content to prevention, treatment, and vulnerability reduction.
While resource limitations and infrastructural gaps hamper both extensive ICT connectivity and significant
scaling up of a comprehensive response to HIV/AIDS, the African continent is rich in the human resources
and initiative necessary to enable an effective response to HIV/AIDS. This is evidenced by successes in
countries with falling infection rates like Uganda, Senegal, and Zambia, and in the multitude of civil society
and community projects that are having tremendous local impact throughout the continent. These examples
illustrate that in countries with massive infection rates and limited financial resources, strong leadership and
the participation and involvement of all social and economic sectors - especially affected communities - are
critical elements of an effective response to HIV/AIDS. This participation is largely dependent on the free
flow of information and communication.

Communication through the media is key to avoiding AIDS stigma. Forman, 2004 [ Lisa,
Doctoral Candidate, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law; Both Medium and Message:
HIV/AIDS, Information and Communication in Africa; Journal of Law and Policy for the
Information Society]
The African AIDS epidemic continues to pose severe public health and developmental problems for
many African nations. A primary impediment in the fight against AIDS is a lack of information and
communication about the disease. Information and communication, as well as information and
communication technologies (ICT) hold vast potential to hinder the spread of the disease, as key
elements of all aspects of HIV/AIDS strategies, including prevention, treatment and care and
protection of human rights. They offer potential solutions to misinformation and myths, silence and
denial, and stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA). They are
also key to a civil society response to the epidemic, enabling advocacy, mobilization, empowerment,
participation and facilitating greater accountability. The non-technological and human enablers of
communication and information offer comparatively abundant resources, and the participation of
PLWHA and communities are critical to the success of AIDS strategies, depending on effective information
and communication. This paper broadly examines the role of information and communication in the fight
against AIDS on the African continent. Part One describes the nature and scale of, and responses to, the
AIDS epidemic. Part Two describes the current status of ICT across the continent. Part Three explores the
use of information and communication in the fight against HIV/AIDS, describes both national and
international HIV/AIDS and ICT initiatives being conducted in various African countries, and identifies
challenges and opportunities for civil society. Finally, the paper identifies guiding principles and
recommendations for the future.
Representations make collaboration and mobilization possible which are critical to

solutions to AIDS and stigma. Forman, 2004 [ Lisa, Doctoral Candidate, University of Toronto,
Faculty of Law; Both Medium and
Message: HIV/AIDS, Information and Communication in Africa; Journal of Law and Policy for the Information
Society]
During the eighties, American AIDS advocates co-opted the phrase "silence equals death" from the
environmental movement to describe the danger of a lack of information and communication around
HIV/AIDS. On a continent where generalized epidemics are the norm and infection rates continue to climb,
the African AIDS epidemic embodies and amplifies the continuing truth of this statement. Here, a lack of
information and a lack of voice continue to be primary causes of infection among the worst affected
groups of women and youth. More effective communication about the disease and greater flow of
information are central to the success of AIDS strategies and to reducing vulnerability to HIV infection.
Information and communication are sources of power in an epidemic characterized by a lack thereof:
they confer the power to protect against infection, to influence decision makers, and to live lives of
dignity and equality once infected. In a region often characterized by resource limitations and fragmented
infrastructures, information and communication are two of the most critical and abundant resources available
in the fight against HIV/AIDS. They are both the prerequisites and enablers of an effective response.

Communication solves stigma and discrimination. Forman, 2004 [Lisa, Doctoral Candidate,
University of Toronto, Faculty of Law; Both Medium and Message: HIV/AIDS, Information and
Communication in Africa; Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society]
Effective communication of valid and appropriate information is the specific remedy for infection rates
attributable to a lack of information, and for many of the social ills associated with misinformation and
myths about the epidemic. 82 Information can confer the capacity to act appropriately, whether by
protecting oneself from infection or taking steps to influence decision makers. Information is the source of
considerable personal and social power, with the capacity to shift some of the power differentials at the
heart of the epidemic. This brings to mind Marshall McLuhan's famous observation in relation to mass
media, that "the medium is the message." 83 McLuhan suggested that use of new technologies to disseminate
information (the message) could lead to social change, and that we should also see the medium (mass media)
as a force capable of exerting social change irrespective of its content. 84 While communication is the
medium for conveying important HIV/AIDS-related information, as an activity that negates the silence
that surrounds HIV/AIDS, it is also the message itself.
Information and communication, technologically-enabled or not, are clearly at the heart of effective AIDS
programs. While information is the basic component of safer sex messages, effective prevention relies
critically on overcoming obstacles posed by: misinformation and myths about the disease, silence and denial,
stigma and discrimination, and limited knowledge about HIV/AIDS prevention services, including voluntary
counseling and testing (VCT) and measures to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV (PMTCT).
Information and communication facilitate the empowerment and reduction of vulnerability of PLWHA,
women, and other susceptible groups that form fundamental parts of the fight against AIDS. Reducing
vulnerability includes providing an enabling and protective legal environment, which protects people's (and
especially women's) rights to equality and non-discrimination.
Imagery solves for stigma from AIDS Frank Beadle de Palomo, 2006 [Confronting HIV/AIDS
Stigma: A Q &A With Frank Beadle de Palomo; Academy for Educational Development; senior vice
president and director of the AED Center on AIDS & Community Health, is an expert on HIV/AIDS
prevention, treatment, and the social stigma associated with the virus.]
Another approach has been to create very visible imagery and commentary of people living with
HIV/AIDSshowing them as who they are: everyday people doing everything things with families, without
families, at work, in social situation. This helps to normalize the fact that PLWHA are just like everyone
else. Moreover, it also helps demonstrate that if we can increase access for treatments, PLWHA can live
healthy and productive lives. I think that is a strong message: you diminish the stigma of HIV/AIDS and
raise the real understanding of what it is by making PLWHA more visible. This has to be done through
social marketing and communications programs, behavior change, changing policy, and all kinds of
visibility activities.
REPS SOLVE DISEASE (1/1)

Representation of disease is critical to the mass mobilization of resources necessary to solve Dr.
Anthony S. Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 2000 [An Electronic
Journal of the U.S. Department of State - July 2000 Volume 5, Number 2; AIDS, The threat to world security]
AIDS has become the number one killer in Africa, taking more lives10 times morethan the wars on
that continent in 1998. Since the pandemic began, more than 16 million people have died worldwide
and 13.7 million of them have been Africans, according to a global survey on the disease conducted by
UNAIDS and the World Health Organization (WHO) at the end of 1999. These staggering statistics
mean that AIDS stands to reverse the developmental progress Africans have made over the last two
decades in health care, education, life expectancy, economic growth, and human security. AIDS in
Africa has become a full-blown development catastrophe. The facts emerged starkly from a survey
conducted by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in late 1999. African nations suffered
downward changes this year in the Human Development Index, a ranking based on levels of health, wealth,
and education. Almost all of the major changes in rank could be attributed to declining life expectancy as a
result of AIDS: Average life expectancy at birth in southern Africa, which climbed from 44 in the early
1950s to 59 in the early 1990s, is expected to drop back to 45 sometime between 2005 and 2010. The United
Nations Development Program estimates that fewer than 50 percent of South Africans currently alive can
expect to reach the age of 60, compared with an average of 70 percent for all developing countries and 90
percent for industrialized countries. Yet even amidst these grim figures I am optimistic. I believe we are
now at a turning point in the 20-year history of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Everywhere I go, I hear
top African leaders speaking out about AIDS as the major threat to the continents development. In
Ghana two months ago, for example, First Lady Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings participated in the
launch of a new female condom program, calling th introduction of these prophylactics a long-awaited
global dream come true for Ghanaians.I believe an historic line has been crossed in our battle against
this disease as political leaders speak out and new domestic resources are directed to prevention and
care programs and new international resources are being mobilized. When governments begin to focus
on AIDS as a national priority, tough decisions can be made to create more favorable conditions for
those affected by the epidemic, and establish better protections for the poorest and the most vulnerable.
REPS SOLVEDELAY BAD (1/1)

Only clear representations of the disease threat can prevent the kind of over-reaction they
say turns the case Delay makes it worse Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D., October 17. 2001 [Vice
President of Biological Programs, Nuclear Threat Initiative; Senate Committee on
Governmental Affairs, Subcommittee of International Security, Proliferation and Federal
Services] Anyone who has ever dealt with disaster response knows that how the needs of the public are
handled from the very beginning is critical to the overall response. In the context of a biological event, this will
no doubt be even more crucial. Managing the worried well may interfere with the ability to manage those truly
sick or exposed. In fact, implementation of disease control measures may well depend on the constructive
recruitment of the public to behave in certain ways, such as avoiding congregate settings or following isolation
orders. In the final analysis, clear communication and appropriate engagement of the public will be the key to
preventing mass chaos and enabling disease control as well as critical infrastructure operations to move
forward. Correspondingly, the needs and concerns of response personnel, including health care workers, must also
be addressed. Again, prior experience with serious infectious disease outbreaks tells us that when this does not occur,
essential frontline responders and key workers are just as likely as the public to panic, if not flee. The mass exodus of
health care workers following onset of the Ebola epidemic in Kikwit, Zaire in the mid 1990s serves witness to this
point.
QUARANTINE INFEASIBLE
QUARANTINE
(1/2) INFEASIBLE (2/2)
A quarantine is
would
unfeasible
not happen
in thecurrent
its too political
expensive.
climate.
Field01
Fein
90(Clinton,
(Martha, author
Professor
and of
political
Law, Harvard
activist, Law
Terror
School;
and Quarantine
B.A. 1965,On
Radcliffe
the Streets
College;
of San
J.D.
Francisco,
1968, University of
http://www.annoy.com/editorials/doc.html?DocumentID=100222)
Chicago,
Boston University School of Law, American Journal of Law
Dr. &
Jeffrey
Medicine,
Klausner,
16 Am.
director
J. L. and
of Sexually
Med. 34)
LexisNexis This
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and Control
screening
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in theinhealth
San Francisco,
care settinghas
and
suggested
supports athe
number
necessity
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for universal
some
coercive,which
119 Evenhe
wouldpopulation,
slow the increase
new
HIV infections
men. Among
them:
precautions.
inthinks
the general
it wouldofbe
desirable
for all to among
practicegay
precautions
(such
as not
closing
sex
clubs
and
adult
bookstores;
enforcing
no-sex
ordinances
in
bars
and
clubs;
enforcing
no-drug
policies
sharing needles, avoiding anal intercourse, using reliable condoms and not sharing blood or other bodily fluids).
in
barsdid
andpractice
clubs; and
Internet-based
outreach
and education,
particularly
in chat rooms
where
many gay men
If all
precautions,
testing
and segregation
would
not be necessary.
In sum,
universal
meet
new
sexual
partners.
Putting
aside
political
realities
when
brainstorming
on
this
subject,
Klausner
also
mandatory testing does not seem a feasible [*61] or a wise one to pursue, partly because it is not
clear that
raised
the
possibility
of
quarantining
those
who
cannot
control
their
infectivity
e.g.,
those
barebackers
its results could be put to any good use and partly because its costs would be prohibitive. The funds that
who've
infected
20 different
and still refuse
toput
usetocondoms.
Many
measures
would
widespread
mandatory
testing people
would consume
could be
much better
useof
bythese
educating
people
generally to
probably
be behavior
infeasibleinin
the that
current
climate.
Still, this
doesn't mean they shouldn't be discussed.
modify their
ways
will political
guard against
the spread
of AIDS.
After all, in an environment where there are no consequences for actions that threaten the public health, it may
be necessary to create some.
Quarantine over AIDS wont happen although modern doctors advocate it as an option, it is
not under the quarantinable communicable diseases. Fallone 88 (Edward A, Trustees of Boston
University 1988, Boston University Law Review, March, 68 B.U.L.
Rev. 441) Under current law in most states, health authorities have statutory authority to maintain a list of
communicable diseases and to implement a quarantine should a patient with a listed disease threaten the
public health. 95 Typically, the department cannot order a quarantine unless the disease in question is on the
official list. 96 The length of any quarantine is discretionary, [*462] but it cannot last longer than necessary to
prevent the spread of the disease. 97 So long as reasonable grounds exist to believe that the quarantined individual
presents a danger to the community, health officials may issue consecutive quarantine orders. 98Despite medical
advances such as the development of vaccines and antibodies, medical experts still consider quarantine an option in
certain instances. 99 In recent decades, however, states have rarely used their quarantine powers and some
commentators argue that modern medical science has rendered quarantine obsolete. 100 Although no state has
added AIDS to the list of quarantinable communicable diseases, quarantine should remain an option available to
the individual states to curtail the spread of the disease until medical researchers develop a vaccine for the AIDS
virus. 101
Quarantine is extremely unlikelythere is a strict distinction between quarantine and

isolation. Grey and Spaeth 2006 (Michael and Kenneth, The Bioterrorism Sourcebook, McGraw-Hill
Publication)
Quarantine and isolation are used loosely and interchangeably, but this is inappropriate. Clinicians
should be clear on the distinction between the two. Quarantine refers to compulsory physical separation
of nonsick individuals who have been exposed to a contagious disease. The term itself comes from the
Latin quarante denoting the forty days used traditionally by medieval Italian port cities to keep trading ships
anchored in the harbor to prevent the spread of bubonic plague. Isolation, in contrast, refers to the separation
or confinement of individuals who are known to be infectedor presumed to be infectedin order to protect
those not yet infected. Quarantine, a highly restrictive public health measure, is rarely imposed; whereas
isolation is an infection control practice familiar to clinicians and implemented commonly in hospitals.
In the setting of an imposed quarantine, however, sick individuals may be isolated from the rest of the
quarantined population. Further, public health measures short of quarantine may include such things as
bidirectional travel restrictions (no one comes in and no one leaves) as well as restrictions on public.

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Disease Representations K

IMPERIALISM (2/2) ............................................................................................................................5

IMPACTS- GOVERNMENTAL DENIALISM (1/4).................................................................................................6

2NC MODULE (1/1)...................................................................................................................................................6

IMPACT Ext. (1/2)......................................................................................................................................................6

IMPACT Ext. (2/2)......................................................................................................................................................6

MORE DISEASE (1/1)..................................................................................................................7

2NC MODULE (1/2)...................................................................................................................................................7

2NC Module (2/2) .......................................................................................................................................................7

REPS SOLVE DISEASE (1/1)..................................................................................................................................12

DELAY BAD (1/1) ........................................................................................................................12

QUARANTINE INFEASIBLE (1/2).........................................................................................................................12

QUARANTINE INFEASIBLE (2/2).........................................................................................................................12

Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007

AIDS representations become bio-political because governments frame them as a

LINKAVIAN FLU (1/1)

in Modern Thought and

similarly emphasize the careful passage from clean,

Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007

Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007

Berube 97 David, Comm@South Carolina, Nanotechnology Magazine, "Nanotechnological Prolongevity: The

Another impact to disease representation is that it actually causes afro-pessimism, and

( ) Biopolitics causes the creation of super-viruses that cause extinction

Bacteriology serves imperialist ideolog

(STEPHEN, assistant professor in English at Elizabethtown Community College

IMPACTS- GOVERNMENTAL DENIALISM (1/2)

AIDS denial allows governments to continue neoliberal economic policies

2NC MODULE (1/1)

first biopolitical strategies, in the

B) IMPACTFALSE SENSE OF SECURITY Testing and subsequent segregation leads to a

I/L Ext. (1/1)

IMPACT Ext. (1/2)

IMPACT Ext. (2/2)

QUARANTINE BADSTIGMA (1/1)

QUARANTINE BADECONOMY (1/1)

QUARANTINEMORE DISEASE (1/1)

Quarantines contribute to the highest HIV infection rate in the world.

2NC MODULE (1/2)

2NC Module (2/2)

C) Dehumanization outweighs nuclear war, environmental destruction and genocide

Berube 97 (David, Comm@South Carolina, Nanotechnology Magazine, "Nanotechnological Prolongevity:

IL Ext. (Plan = Stigma) (1/2)

The plan leads to stigma

IL Ext. (Plan = Stigma) (2/2)

IMPACT Ext. (STIGMA TURNS CASE) (1/1)

A2: REPS SOLVE STIGMA (1/1)

ALTDISCOURSE SOLVENCY (1/1)

ALTSOLVENCY PLURALISM (1/2)

ALTSOLVENCY PLURALISM (2/2)

REPS/REJ KEY (1/3)

REPS/REJ KEY (3/3)

its hegemonic success

ALT FAILSK RE-ENTRENCHES (1/1)

PHOTOGRAPH ALT FAILS (1/4)

Photography as a means of representation shows colonial influence and perpetrates the

PHOTOGRAPH ALT FAILS (2/4)

PHOTOGRAPH ALT FAILS (3/4)

PHOTOGRAPH ALT FAILS (3/4)

, or as an international issue with a security

, rather than as an overwhelming security

including the dangerous language of security.

BIOPOWER GOOD (1/1)

BIOPOWER IMPACT (1/3)