Writing Value in a Neoliberal World: Necropolitics and Affective Rhetoric

Abstract

A human-interest story tells about a woman from Kakamega Forest, Kenya, who enters the global and regional marketplace by selling butterflies, vastly improving her livelihood. In Nakuru County, Kenya, women who raise bees are able to send their children to school. At the same moment, a news story tells about how women who live on the margins of New York City find refuge in a shelter. In a short human-interest story that appeared in a university newspaper in Washington, DC, a subcontracted construction worker is killed in a tragic and regrettable accident at an urban university. He is briefly mourned, demonstrating the capacity for recognition and sympathy in the community, and then quickly forgotten. In Isiolo, Kenya, women from a third-world city try to help other women leave the sex industry with government support. Efforts to convince female sex workers who have children to leave sex work fail. Another story documents how a woman struggles to feed herself and her family in Cape Town, South Africa. Agents of the local government provide assistance.