Manufacturing biocitizens: The quantification of bodies as method for incorporating a new ethics

Abstract

The quantification of bodies serves an ambivalent purpose in the political economy of promise of new biomedicine. On the one hand, it includes individuals in a new biopolitical norm, making them co-producers of new healthcare-related sociotechnical imaginaries; on the other, it urges them to explore and to overcome the deepest natural norms, distinguishing them as apparently free self-enhancers and creative developers of what Donna Haraway (2003) called naturecultures. By monitoring, recording, and supplying biometric data, individuals are included in a process for incorporating a new biomedical ethos, gradually taking on a new kind of citizenship: biocitizenship. In this chapter, I reflect on the power such incorporation has for transforming both individuals and society and advocate the need for making a critical analysis of the practices of quantification of bodies, considering these as elements of a biopolitical technology aimed at manufacturing biocitizens.