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Contextualizing Family Planning

Truth, Subject, and the Other in the U.S. Government

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  • © 2009

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Authors:
  1. Mihnea Panu
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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-vii
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  2. Government, Truth, and Subjectivity in a “Post-substance” Reality

    • Mihnea Panu
    Pages 1-27

  3. The Other in Liberal Governmentality

    • Mihnea Panu
    Pages 29-54

  4. Governing the Nation’s Reproduction: Race as Pathology

    • Mihnea Panu
    Pages 55-85

  5. Governing the Nation’s Reproduction: Culture, Poverty, and Eugenics

    • Mihnea Panu
    Pages 87-120

  6. Patriarchal Orders of Reality in the Apparatuses of Sexuality Regulation

    • Mihnea Panu
    Pages 121-150

  7. Strategies of Truth and the Formation of Governmental Reality

    • Mihnea Panu
    Pages 151-185

  8. Liberal Governing and the Contemporary Political Imagination

    • Mihnea Panu
    Pages 187-215

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 217-244
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Keywords

About this book

This book is a critical analysis of the technologies of identity-formation in governmental family planning policy. Panu argues that in order for contemporary liberalism to govern legitimately, governmental discourses have to create and subsequently alienate certain identities as "other" that is, as the polar opposite of the good, normal citizen. These identities usually center on the poor, the racialised, and the gendered. These arguably discriminatory practices are illustrated through the investigation of the U.S. bio- and anatomo-politics of reproduction in the national family planning strategy, in an analytical framework that relates them to the welfare benefit policies in the same country. Panu argues that as long as neo-liberal governmental apparatuses map and rule society using this combination of "othering" and foundational assumptions, each governmental intervention reinforces the systems that make domination, inequality, and exclusion possible.

Reviews

"This project aims to raise a series of issues and concerns regarding contemporary heath politics in the national U.S. context. Focusing on welfare and family planning policies Panu critically addresses the discursive effects of such policies, particularly in relation to contemporary formations of race, gender and class . . .This is a timely project which could find a wide audience in the social sciences, particularly in the disciplines of political science, sociology, social policy, public health, as well as the interdisciplinary fields of cultural studies and women and gender studies. The book provides an important historical account of contemporary health policy in the U.S. and should therefore remain a significant text." - Nicole Vitellone, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Liverpool

About the author

MIHNEA PANU is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.

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