Even if biopolitics aims to be genderless, its theory necessitates a centralization of women’s reproductive bodies --- biopolitics implicitly considers the female body

It is not difficult to imagine ways in which Agamben‟s framework, which does not recognize the legal categories of public and private, might speak to feminist legal perspectives, which dismantled these artificial distinctions of liberal political theory years ago. 7 But it is not the collapsed binaries per se which have attracted feminist scholars to his work, but rather his particular collapse of the political category of the citizen into the biological category of “bare life”. This category has invited feminist theorists to ponder the gender implications of a political theory of law that sees politics as the reduction of all citizens to their „bare‟ biological functions (what Foucault referred to as “the bestialization of man”8 ). In a recent edited collection of essays entitled The Agamben Effect, 9 Penelope Deutscher asks the critical question: “is it possible to open a debate with Giorgio Agamben concerning the role of women‟s bodies in the politicization of life? What different inflections of life and of politicized life would result from an intermittent insertion „born of women‟s bodies‟?”10 As one might expect, Deutscher‟s engagement with Agamben is in part intended as a corrective to a male theory that is blatantly indifferent to gender difference, and indeed other bodily markers of difference. She writes: “women‟s bodies are impressively absent from Agamben‟s writing, as are reproductive bodies”.11 Elsewhere, she points out that when Agamben speaks of “life”, he means that which has been first identified as human “and then stripped of that status or subjected to a threshold state: the overcomatose person, 12 the immigrant, the refugee, the internee, the enemy combatant, the Muselmann”.13 This makes it hard to insert into the theory forms of life that have never been accorded the status of the human in the first instance: the fetus, for example, and indeed the reproductive life of woman herself as womb-owning bearer of the fetus. Life, in an Agambenesque world, according to Deutscher, is life dissociated entirely from women‟s reproductivity. Yet, it is perhaps this very dissociation of woman from the theory that strikes Deutscher as the key to its potential for feminist theory; an “intriguing potential”, she writes, “to operate as a lens to rethink the terms life, bare life, threshold, and biopolitics”.14

If we were to intervene in order to reformulate Deutscher‟s hypothesis regarding the “potential” in Agamben‟s work for feminist theory, it would be as follows: woman is absent from the theory insofar as the body of „woman‟ (by which we mean „reproductive woman‟) is already assumed as a key political referent. The theory, as it stands, sex blind as it is, is committed to an analysis of bodies in relation to the legal thresholds between “life and death, animate and inanimate, human and inhuman, nature and culture”.15 It therefore begs for an analysis of human bodies in relation to reproduction, and as mechanisms for reproduction. „Human life‟, in such an analysis, and with it „human rights‟ and the ethical foundations of citizenship in any given biopolitical state, must inevitably turn to a set of political and legislative questions around reproduction, reproductive rights (especially abortion), sexuality, and the family. In short, biopolitical theory cannot avoid making the female body central to its analysis of human life as an undefined essence both protected and unprotected by law.