Biopolitics and Im/Possible Citizenship: Gender, Epidemiology and ‘Panoptic Citizenship’ in India

Abstract

This essay proposes to advance the discussion on the political implications of gender and its transgressive imperative, highlighting, further, the discursive and unsettled gendered positions. Proposing references with the entanglement of the epidemiological knowledge around gender(ed) politics in India, this work emphasizes the niche around claiming citizenship that is strengthened around health system paradigm. The globalisation of the identarian categories as a form of political identity as tied to the orthodoxy around the neoliberal norms of accountability. This essay thus foregrounds a subversive imagery in building theorisation around biopolitics and bio-citizenry, with a critique to the neocolonial allegory of the State, global health and International activism. Also, by bringing in the critical perspective on ‘sexuality’ and ‘equality’, this text debates the thematics of citizenship, that resides on a non-sovereign position -that is to say, the corporeal politics within biopolitical articulation. Also, the essay critically examines the biopolitics of citizenship with an analytical lens that is viable, de-medicalised as allowing the possibility to de-embrace technocratic and depoliticised sense of belonging.