Women and Gender Studies InstituteWomen and Gender Studies Institute
Please join us to celebrate the publication of Michelle Murphy’s book, The Economization of Life (Duke University Press 2017). This is Michelle’s third single-authored book but only her first launch! To kick-off the TRU’s 2017-18 events, many of her peers and collaborators want to celebrate her latest achievement, and to honor her as a colleague, co-conspirator, mentor and friend. We’ll have a cash bar, light refreshments, and, of course, copies of the book for sale. We hope you can make it!
Up-to-date information and RSVP here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1722923654676992/
Book description: What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life, Michelle Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical logic: some must not be born so that others might live more prosperously. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United States and Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized “Invest in a Girl” campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice.