Governing the Nation’s Reproduction: Race as Pathology

Abstract

If liberal apparatuses are assemblages of rationalities and technologies structured according to a substantive logic, rather than transcendent ideas or sets of procedures, then what is this logic? This chapter discusses the assumptions that structure the apparatuses of health government in the United States, focusing on their strategic construction of race in relation to gender and sex. It will be argued that the apparatuses of health regulation always construct sexual identities in gendered and racialized terms; more precisely, they see reproductive events through a grid that opposes the prosperity and health of a normal population to a set a pathological, gendered, and racialized Others.