Contemporary Authors

• The Biopolitics of Gender Oxford University Press (Oxford, United Kingdom), 2016

• Wikimannia - http://en.wikimannia.org/Jemima_Repo

  Jemima Repo
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  Jemima Repo
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  Twitter @jrepo
  Jemima Repo is a British political scientist. She is lecturer in the Politics of Gender at Newcastle University.
  Research interests
  Feminist political theory, biopolitics, theories of gender, race and class, contemporary social and political theory, violence, popular culture
  Qualifications
  PhD in Political Science (Politics) University of Helsinki, 2012
  MSc in Political Science (World Politics) University of Helsinki, 2006
  BA in Political Science (World Politics) University of Helsinki, 2006
  Previous positions
  Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki
  Research Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London
  Visiting Lecturer, University of Groningen
  Visiting Reseach Fellow, Waseda University
  Memberships
  Editorial board member of Democratic Theory
  Editorial board member of the Finnish ISA journal Kosmopolis
  American Political Science Association
  American Sociological Association
  European International Studies Association
  International Studies Association
  Finnish Women's Studies Association
  Finnish International Studies Association
  Finnish Peace Research Association
  Finnish Political Science Association[1]
  Publications
  Repo J. Thanatopolitics or biopolitics? Diagnosing the racial and sexual politics of the European far-right [Bodies in politics]. Contemporary Political Theory 2016, 15(1), 110-118.
  Repo J. Gender Equality as Bioeconomic Governmentality in a Neoliberal EU. In: Prozorov,S; Rentea,S, ed. Ashgate Research Companion to Biopolitics. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016. In Press.
  Repo J. The Biopolitics of Gender. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
  Repo J. Gender Equality as Biopolitical Governmentality in a Neoliberal European Union. Social Politics 2014, Epub ahead of print.
  Repo J, Yrjölä R. 'We’re All Princesses Now': Sex, Class and Neoliberal Governmentality in the Rise of Middle-Class Monarchy. European Journal of Cultural Studies 2015, 18(6), 741-760.
  Repo J. Herculine Barbin and the Omission of Biopolitics from Judith Butler’s Gender Genealogy. Feminist Theory 2014, 15(1), 73-88.
  Repo J. Reproduction. In: Gibbons,MT; Coole,D; Ellis,E; Ferguson,K, ed. The Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp.3222-3226.
  Repo J. The Biopolitical Birth of Gender: Social Control, Hermaphroditism, and the New Sexual Apparatus. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2013, 38(3), 228-244.
  Repo J. The Life Function: The Biopolitics of Sexuality and Race Revisited. Theory & Event 2013, 16(3).
  Repo J. The Governance of Fertility Through Gender Equality in the EU and Japan. Asia Europe Journal 2012, 10(2-3), 199-214.
  Repo J. "Gender" biopolitiikkana. Naistutkimus-Kvinnoforskning 2012, 3, 51-55.
  Kantola J, Norocel C, Repo J. Gendering violence in the school shootings in Finland. European Journal of Women’s Studies 2011, 18(2), 183-197.
  Repo J, Yrjölä R. The Gender Politics of Celebrity Humanitarianism in Africa. International Feminist Journal of Politics 2011, 13(1), 44-62.
  Repo J. Sexuality, Race and the Biopolitics of Difference. In: Kajanus,A;Meinke,M, ed. Perspectives on Difference: Makings and Workings of Power. Helsinki: Renvall Institute Publications 30, Unigrafia, 2012.
  Repo J. A Feminist Reading of Gender and National Memory at the Yasukuni Shrine. Japan Forum 2008, 20(2), 219-243.
  Repo J. Sukupuoli, toiseus ja väkivaltaisuuden rajat: Diskursseja naisterroristeistä ja naissotilaista Irakin sodassa. Naistutkimus-Kvinnoforskning 2007, 4, 4-15.[2]
  References

  ↑ Newcastle University: Dr Jemima Repo - Lecturer in the Politics of Gender - Profile
  ↑ Newcastle University: Dr Jemima Repo - Lecturer in the Politics of Gender - Publications

• Newcastle University - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/gps/staff/profile/jemimarepo.html#background

  Dr Jemima Repo

  Lecturer in the Politics of Gender

  Email: jemima.repo@ncl.ac.uk
  Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 3926
  Address: Politics Building
  Newcastle University
  40-42 Great North Road
  Newcastle Upon Tyne
  NE1 7RU

  Office hours: Wed 10-12

  Research interests

  Feminist political theory, biopolitics, theories of sex, gender, race and class, contemporary social and political theory, the politics of popuation, political economy, European far right politics, violence, popular culture

  Qualifications

  Docent in Gender Studies, University of Helsinki

  PhD in Political Science (Politics), University of Helsinki

  MSc in Political Science (World Politics), University of Helsinki

  BA in Political Science (World Politics), University of Helsinki

  Previous positions

  Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki

  Research Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London

  Visiting Lecturer, University of Groningen

  Visiting Reseach Fellow, Waseda University

  Memberships

  Editorial board member of Democratic Theory

  Editorial board member of the Finnish ISA journal Kosmopolis

  American Political Science Association

  American Sociological Association

  European International Studies Association

  International Studies Association

  Finnish Women's Studies Association

  Finnish International Studies Association

  Finnish Peace Research Association

  Finnish Political Science Association

Repo, Jemima. The biopolitics of gender
H. McManus
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.10 (June 2016): p1538.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
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Repo, Jemima. The biopolitics of gender. Oxford, 2015. 218p bibl index afp ISBN 9780190256913 cloth, $49.95; ISBN 9780190256920 ebook, contact publisher for price

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This book is potentially as groundbreaking as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (CH, Oct'90, 28-1264). Repo (Newcastle Univ., UK) challenges feminists to question the critical potential of gender discourse and, ultimately, to imagine feminist theory without gender. The author documents the birth of gender (the psychological analog to biological sex) as a tool for "normalizing" intersex and trans children, adults, and their parents in the mid-20th century. Her approach is that of Michel Foucault, and she understands her task as akin to his in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (CH, Feb'79). Feminists now rely on gender to subvert deterministic approaches to biological sex and to pursue equality, but Repo argues that policy makers also deploy gender to govern economic and other behaviors. One remarkable chapter reads European policies that support working mothers as the biopolitical regulation of fertility rates. If gender so readily serves as an apparatus for governing populations, can feminists continue to invoke it for their own purposes? Consistently attentive to the intersections of sexuality, race, and class, the book will be essential reading for students of political theory, women's studies, and queer theory. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--H. McManus, George Mason University

McManus, H.

• Society + Space
  http://societyandspace.org/2016/08/30/the-biopolitics-of-gender-by-jemima-repo-reviewed-by-martina-tazzioli/
  Word count: 1541

  THE BIOPOLITICS OF GENDER BY JEMIMA REPO
  REVIEWED BY MARTINA TAZZIOLI
  HOME / REVIEWS / THE BIOPOLITICS OF GENDER BY JEMIMA REPO
  Published August 30, 2016
  repo_biopolitics of gender_500_700

  Jemima Repo, The Biopolitics of Gender, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 2016,232 pages, $49.95 hardback, ISBN 9780190256913.

  A genealogical approach to social science’s objects and categories helps in pushing further and partly displacing the very function of critical discourse: as Jemima Repo puts it, building on Foucault, “in a genealogical inquiry it is not enough to simply denaturalize and destabilize discourses […] the central stage of genealogy is to examine the condition of possibility for the emergence, expansion, intensification, transformation and destruction of discourses” (page 9). In The Biopoltics of Gender, Repo fully achieves this goal, retracing the emergence of gender theory and showing its centrality in mechanisms of contemporary biopolitical governmentality. Repo traces back to the 1950s the emergence of gender as a social, political and medical category that has been embedded from the very beginning in “logics of social control that reconfigured the sexual order of things” (page 25). Hence, her genealogical account shows that, far from originating within the feminist tradition, gender appeared firstly in the regulatory discourses of US sexological studies. Then, gender has been put to work by demographers with a purpose of social control and has functioned as a primary mechanism within contemporary biopolitics of populations. What clearly emerges from the book is that gender works through, and within, biopolitical technologies of government. Pushing this argument further, Repo shows that gender has not simply contributed to the affirmation of neoliberal biopolitics, but it also constitutes a “biopolitical apparatus” in itself, for regulating populations and governing life. By acting both upon populations and upon singular conducts, gender (similarly to dispositive of sexuality) represents a crucial hinge between the level of individuals and that of multiplicities. In fact, in The Will to Knowledge Foucault contends that sex “was at the pivot of two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life” (1998: 145). More precisely, according to Repo, “gender became invested with dangers, norms and vitalities that previously were terrain of sexuality” (page 73).

  However, by reframing Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics in the light of contemporary neoliberal governmentality, we should keep in mind that Foucault situates the biopolitical rationale within—and relates it to—an overarching specific regime of truth that, according to him, underpins modern capitalist societies. Such a regime of truth is structured around the practice of confession and the related obligation for the subject to tell the truth about himself. Therefore, it is not simply a question of the production of a normative subjectivity (e.g., as Repo well illustrates, the neoliberal model of the subject as human capital), nor it is a matter of a series of epistemological-medical truths that stemmed from the normative work of gender. Rather, it is important to grasp and highlight the differences and the discrepancies between sexuality and gender as part of a biopolitical apparatus. It is a whole economy of confession and production of truth that connects biopolitics as a technology of power, sexuality as the truth about sex and a psychological knowledge about subjects that centers around the notion of desire. For this reason, and departing from Repo’s argument, I want to suggest that gender does not play the same function of sexuality as described by Foucault. Moreover, it should be considered that the misleading opposition that Repo talks about between norms, cultural and social facts on the one hand (gender), and biological ones (sexuality) on the other, has been at stake also in the dispositive of sexuality with the likewise deceptive binary opposition between sex and sexuality. Indeed, following Foucault, the former “made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity, as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere” (Foucault, 1998: 154).

  The first part of the book provides a poignant critique of gender equality policy and of mainstream gender analyses, showing how these are functional and internal to neoliberal governmentality. Repo then reconstructs in a very detailed way the emergence of gender as a mechanism of social control in the US and in Europe, focusing in particular on the government of life and of population through gender. More than fostering populations, “gender equality,” Repo contends, “was deployed in EU policy as a new modality for the reoptimization of population and productivity” (page 134). In the final chapter Jemima Repo radically challenges the way in which gender has been mobilized by feminists, focusing in particular on the Anglo-American tradition, arguing that gender politics has finally come to foster the disciplinary and normative function of gender initiated by psychiatrists and demographers. Provocatively, Repo argues that “gender never belonged to feminism” (page 198). Although she clearly admits the strategic use of gender by feminist movements in empowering forms of resistance and agency, she fundamentally questions the idea that feminists succeeded in subverting and unsettling the medical discourses of normalization that sustains gender as an apparatus of power. Nevertheless, from a Foucaultian perspective one should be careful in envisaging a pure space of politics and political action building on notions and concepts which are not entrapped from within the meshes of power. Is it on a discursive level that can we assess the leeway for twisting the effects of power and truth generated by normative technologies, or is it rather by shifting the attention to practices of subjectivation and modes of life that we can grasp that?

  What Repo calls the “politically ambiguous discourse” of gender (page 177) represents the actual character of all contested categories and discourses that have been repoliticized and strategically appropriated by subjects, becoming a battleground. It is at the level of practices that Foucault ultimately finds the room for altering and disrupting the functioning of sexual norms. In some interviews from the 1980s Foucault highlighted the forms of resistance and modes of life that emerged in the gay movement. What matters, according to Foucault, is to detach, at the level of practices, pleasure from “the normative field of sexuality and from its categories” (Foucault, 2000: 1131), with the purpose of creating a new culture and new relational forms that cannot be coded, defined, or disqualified by the dominant opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality. In 1977, in an interview with the French group Revolutionary Communist Ligue, Foucault rhetorically asks if feminist and gay movements have mobilized sexuality for flattening the stakes of their struggles into it. On the contrary, Foucault replies, these movements have built upon the specificity of sexuality in order to “claim the possibility of inter-individual relationships, social relations, forms of existence, life choices…etc. that go well beyond sexuality,” generating a “centrifugal force with respect to sexuality” (Foucault, 1977: 20-21). This seems to be the main challenge of gender-based movements as well in the face of the ongoing attempts of re-appropriation by neoliberal discourses that, Repo shows, center on gender equality for fostering and optimizing productivity in Western contemporary economies.

  Therefore, we might suggest an inverse analytical move to the one proposed by Repo, by looking at governmental uses of gender as strategies of capture of practices and forms of subjectivation that exceed the epistemic and normative codes of neoliberal biopolitics by “queering” gender. Intersectionality theory in black and Marxist feminism has historically represented a concrete of way of de-essentializing gender, positing it as inherently entangled with racial and class issues (Crenshaw, 1991). Similarly, in her seminal article “Under Western Eyes,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty cautions against a conception of “woman” as a stable category that entails a notion of gender “that can be applied universally” regardless of “class, race or ethnic locations” (Mohanty, 1993: 337). Pushing forward Mohanty’s analysis in the light of gender debates, it is a question of moving beyond gender difference as a normative yardstick for thinking power relations, building rather on the specific conditions of subjection for enacting struggles around, and through, gender-based practices that escape the model of a self-governed productive subjectivity.

  References:

  Crenshaw K (1991) Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford law review: 1241-1299.

  Foucault M (2001) Le triomphe social du plaisir sexuel: une conversation avec Michel Foucault. In: Foucault M Dits et Ecrits. Paris: Gallimard, pp.1127-1133.

  Foucault M (1998) The Will to Knowledge: The history of sexuality, volume I. Hurley R (trans) London: Penguin.

  Foucault M (1977) Entretien inédit entre Michel Foucault et quatre militants de la LCR.

  Mohanty CT (2003) Feminist Without Borders. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

  Repo J (2015) The Biopolitics of Gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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  Martina Tazzioli is Lecturer in Geography at Swansea University and Visiting Lecturer at City University of London. She is the author of Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) and co-author, with Glenda Garelli, of Tunisia as a Revolutionized Space of Migration (Palgrave, 2016). She is co-editor of Foucault and the Making of Subjects (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and Foucault and the History of Our Present (Palgrave, 2015).

• London School of Economics Review of Books
  http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/03/10/iwd2016-book-review-the-biopolitics-of-gender-by-jemima-repo/
  Word count: 1504

  #IWD2016 Book Review: The Biopolitics of Gender by Jemima Repo

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  In The Biopolitics of Gender, Jemima Repo traces a genealogy of ‘gender’, arguing that it is not an inherently feminist term, but rather emerged historically from the study of intersex and transgender people in the fields of sexology and psychology in the 1950s and 1960s. Positioning gender as a historically located biopolitical apparatus, Repo therefore questions its utility for contemporary feminist theory and politics. Ankit Kumar finds this a highly useful book for those interested in feminist thought as well as biopower, and hopes for future dialogue with works from the Global South that can contribute to forging a wider genealogy of ‘gender’.

  The Biopolitics of Gender. Jemima Repo. Oxford University Press. 2015.

  Biopolitics of GenderThe Biopolitics of Gender has emerged as a compilation of Jemima Repo’s previous articles in the Alternatives: Global, Local, Political and Social Politics journals. A Lecturer in the Politics of Gender at Newcastle University in the UK, Repo has been conducting research on, and writing about, feminist political theory, biopolitics and gender and popular culture. She has two key goals in this book: first, to continue Michel Foucault’s biopolitical genealogy of sexuality; and second, to make a ‘critical intervention in feminist gender theory’. As a larger aim, Repo wants to ‘track and analyse the biopolitical deployments of gender across the west from the second half of the twentieth century to the present’.

  In this review, I will pick two chapters focusing on these two issues. Chapter One traces the emergence of gender discourse, arguing that ‘gender originated as a new life-administering technology that did not replace but operated alongside the apparatus of sexuality’. Chapter Six offers a biopolitical critique of feminist theories, contending that ‘feminism and liberalism are entangled in a common genealogy of biopower’. This must be kept in mind for feminist politics to create new ideas and ‘challenge the conditions of sex and power in neoliberal modernity’.

  Chapter One starts by explaining that gender as a ‘new apparatus of sexuality’ emerged as a result of an idea brought forward by Johns Hopkins University professor John Money (1921-2006): namely that ‘a person’s psychological sex was learned and did not necessarily arise from biological factors’. From here gender emerged as an apparatus that responded in moments of urgency to maintain ‘social and sexual order in post war America’. But how did this happen? In this first chapter Repo follows and critically analyses Money’s work to explain the emergence of gender as an apparatus.

  The work of Money and his colleague John Hampson ‘radically changed the location of the truth of sex from residing in the genitals to being an outcome of a behavioural control system’. According to their argument, in case of a contradiction in biological sex variables, the ‘gender role […] almost always corresponded with […] reared sex’ – the gender role. Their renewed focus on the ‘hermaphrodite child’ led to the reproblematisation of the discourse of sexuality/sex, resulting in the emergence of gender as an instrument of management for the socialisation of children and the post-war nuclear family.

  Biopolitics of Gender imageImage Credit: (amboo who)

  The idea of the ‘gender role’ made ‘cognition, stimuli, and the behavioural environment […] new tactical fields of gender’. These new fields reinforced the apparatus of sex and ‘began the process of intervention by ‘‘specialists’’ – psychologists, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, urologists, plastic surgeons and gynaecologists – to “control sex’’’. Through the treatment of the hermaphroditic child, the normalisation of the child’s sexuality and, ultimately, the reproduction of life was to be achieved. This control extended to parents through the threat of being declared ‘bad parents’ or insane if they did not help the ‘experts’ in the proper deployment of treatment. In addition, parents were advised to not show negative feelings about their genitals and gender roles so that the child did not ‘develop a discordant gender role’. Thus, along with the child, the sexuality of the parents was also disciplined because ‘it was their behaviour that conditioned the child’s mind’. Parents were therefore also the ‘guards’ of this new panopticon, having to survey and scrutinise the child’s gender role and submit it to the ‘invisible apparatus of gender’.

  Parents were also encouraged and taught to believe in the ‘objectivity’ of scientific opinion. The knowledge given to parents was designed to empower them to counter social ‘gossip’ and ‘silly conversations’ about the child. Thus, ‘by employing powerful authoritative concepts, doctors exercised biopower beyond the clinic and family, effecting control over the hermaphrodite infant through an array of social relations, intensifying the grip of biopower through the child’s body and mind’. Through this process of controlling minds and behaviours and ‘cutting up and reordering ambiguous genitals’, Repo argues that gender was born to extend the logics of social control in the post-war west.

  Repo begins Chapter Six by arguing that Anglo-American feminists ‘borrowed’ gender as a conceptual apparatus directly from its scientific context to ‘contest biologically determinist accounts of sex while failing to recognise the disciplinary uses for which it was originally created and applied in the clinic’. Here, Repo wants to question whether gender is actually an ‘indispensable discourse for feminist theory and politics’, claiming – with reference to Nancy Fraser – that ‘there is something about feminist theory that has lent itself to being so compatible with neoliberal strategies’. Repo argues that ‘the abandonment of the feminist critique of political economy […] impoverishes feminist theory’ and reduces its ability to pose serious challenges to ‘the neoliberal practices and policies in which the reproduction of the sexual order today is so deeply entrenched’. Her key argument is that ‘feminism has a long and complicated history of entanglement with liberal governmentality’. This can only be ‘strategically undermined and manipulated’, rather than overcome or escaped. The link between feminism and neoliberalism comes to fore when feminism accepts the liberal governmental premise that sees life as ‘constantly exposed to danger’ (Foucault 2008, 67). Accordingly, ‘life can only be secured through the management and limitation of freedom’.

  To delink feminism and neoliberalism needs a ‘strategic reversal’ of the relationships of power. To discuss one instance of a strategic reversal, Repo brings in the example of the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto by Valerie Solanas. The manifesto, Repo argues, ‘mounts an attack on biopolitical modernity itself’. This is because Solanas’s arguments centre on ‘the politics of reproduction’ which is embedded in the modes through which the ‘state, law, family, and capitalism’ operate. This reflect Foucault’s idea that ‘the modern mode of power preoccupied with maintaining life requires a succession of violent and deadly exclusions’. This radical feminism ‘divorces itself from the tactics of liberal feminism’, because it does not want to affirm ‘the always unfulfilled promise of liberty on which the legitimacy and very functionality of bourgeois capitalist patriarchy is dependent’.

  Finally, Repo concludes by attempting to delink gender and feminism by arguing that gender is not an essential concept for the latter. Gender, she contests:

  cannot be taken as progressive at face value because it is always a strategic assemblage, constituted by tactical elements invested with the potentiality of politics, that is, the possibility to turn on itself and speak back to the apparatus of discipline and biopower, even the ones that underpin its emergence.
  Although gender has been helpful in feminist struggles against biological essentialism, it needs to be delinked from feminism because ‘it was always already entangled in medical and psychological discourses of normalisation’.

  Needless to say, this is a very useful book for feminist scholars and those interested in biopolitics. Beyond this, The Biopolitics of Gender will also be of interest to human geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists. Repo accepts that this book is limited in its Anglo-American analysis. It will therefore be of interest to see if such works emerge from the Global South to add to the wider genealogy of gender.

  Ankit Kumar is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology. He has a PhD in Geography from Durham University. His research interests revolve around energy access and equity, development, gender, governance and politics. He blogs at www.ideatingenergy.com and tweets at @ideatingenergy. Read more reviews by Ankit Kumar.

  Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.