Ce travail se fonde sur la littérature critique existante sur les drones militaires, des études de cas et le travail de Michel Foucault sur le biopouvoir pour mettre en évidence les ressorts du pouvoir immunitaire. Nous cherchons à définir la logique immunitaire et à montrer ses ramifications en utilisant une de ses incarnations : les avions sans pilote utilisés à des fins militaires pour la surveillance et le bombardement par les États-Unis notamment. Ce travail analyse principalement les relations de pouvoir auxquelles sont soumis les corps dans l’assemblage. Si les travaux actuels ont insisté sur la place du corps du pilote de drone, ou opérateur, dans l’assemblage disciplinaire, notre étude des corps au sol comme partie intégrante du dispositif homme-machine met en évidence une logique constitutive du nous et du eux. La souveraineté est en effet le mécanisme qui fonde un groupe sur le commun, en excluant les autres, et qui trace ses frontières sur le principe de préservation de ce groupe. Ces frontières peuvent être celles d’un État, du monde occidental, mais aussi de certains quartiers, dans les villes, plus rentables que d’autres. Ce souci de préservation d’une communauté va aller de pair avec le développement d’un racisme institutionnalisé servant à organiser les vies à protéger et celles qu’on peut abandonner et même, et c’est pour cela que le pouvoir immunitaire superpose biopouvoir et pouvoir souverain, à éliminer si l’on estime qu’elles posent une menace. / This work draws on the existing critical literature on drone warfare, case studies and Michel Foucault’s work on biopower to highlight how immunity unfolds. I seek to define immunity by using one of its embodiments: pilotless devices used in contemporary conflicts for surveillance and bombing, mostly by the United States. This work mainly analyses the power relations to which the bodies that form the drone assemblage are subjected. If current analyses have insisted on the position of the drone pilot, or drone operator, in the disciplinary assemblage, my focus on the bodies on the ground as an essential part of the man-machine apparatus shows a way of constituting us and them. Sovereignty is indeed the mechanism by which a group constitutes itself on what they have in common, excluding others, and which confuses its borders with the principle of preservation. These borders can be those of a State, of the western world, but also of some city neighbourhoods. This obsession with community preservation is going to develop in parallel with institutionalised racism, which serves to organise lives which must be protected and those which can be abandoned and even killed if considered a threat. This is why I argue that biopower and sovereign power overlap in immune power.

A presente tese se propõe a traçar uma genealogia da Vigilância Ambiental no Brasil. Partindo de um conjunto de chaves interpretativas da obra do filósofo Michel Foucault, congregamos um amplo leque de fontes documentais para compreender os primeiros sinais de uma incipiente medicina preventiva e sua agenda eminentemente ambiental, ainda em um Brasil pré-imperial, e observamos suas transformações em paridade com o desenvolvimento de nossa sociedade - buscando aí encontrar o mote biopolítico, dado que a construção da nação exigia medidas sanitárias que garantissem a saúde da população, ainda que não necessariamente por questões humanitárias. Acompanhamos a transição da agenda ambiental na saúde pública, que leva em conta os impactos do meio ambiente na existência humana para o movimento reverso, quando nos damos conta de que a humanidade está provocando danos possivelmente irreversíveis ao planeta - e como essa nova fase tem afetado nossa saúde. De maneira crítica e reflexiva, discutimos a formação e a dimensão biopolítica da Vigilância Ambiental na atualidade, dispondo de maiores e melhores recursos tecnológicos, mas atuando em uma governamentalidade neoliberal de redução de direitos - que afetam, inclusive, o direito à saúde. / This thesis aims to trace the genealogy of Enviromental Surveillance in Brazil. From the standpoint a set of interpretative concepts of the philosopher Michel Foucault, we convey a vast array of documental sources to comprehend the first signs of an incipient preventive care and its respectable environmental agenda, still in a pre-imperial Brazil, and we observe its transformations parallel to the development of our society - aiming to find the biopolitical mote, given that the creation of the nation required sanitation methods that could guarantee the health of the population, even though not by strictly humanitarian reasons. We follow the transtition of the environmental agenda in our public health, which takes into consideration the impact of the environment in the human existence to the reverse movement, when we come to the realization that humanity has been causing possibly irreversible damage to the environment - and due to this also affecting our health. In a critic and self-reflecting way, we discuss the formation and the dimension of biopolitics of the Enviromental Surveillance in current day society, having access to a vast array of newer and better technological resources, but acting in a neoliberal governmentality of deprivation of rights, that also affect the right to health.

This thesis analyzes examples of current female circumcision discourse within U.S. feminist contexts and western-based anti-circumcision projects operating in Kenya. This analysis reveals that, despite recent critiques from postcolonial scholars and activists, the knowledge produced around female circumcision perpetuates discursive and material violence against Kenyan Maasai communities. I explore how this violence has persisted in neo/colonial eras as part of the white western feminist ‘care of self’ technique of displacing female abjection through the pleasure of whiteness. I trace how these formations of race and gender have become attached to understandings of genitalia through colonial-era race science, Freudian psychoanalysis and some feminist texts from 1949-1970. I suggest that these western feminist constructions of sexual liberation rely on depicting racialized women as primitive and degenerate. Finally, I argue that these racial and gendered constructions now inform concepts of ‘developed’ versus ‘underdeveloped’ bodies and nations in contemporary international development work.

This thesis analyzes examples of current female circumcision discourse within U.S. feminist contexts and western-based anti-circumcision projects operating in Kenya. This analysis reveals that, despite recent critiques from postcolonial scholars and activists, the knowledge produced around female circumcision perpetuates discursive and material violence against Kenyan Maasai communities. I explore how this violence has persisted in neo/colonial eras as part of the white western feminist ‘care of self’ technique of displacing female abjection through the pleasure of whiteness. I trace how these formations of race and gender have become attached to understandings of genitalia through colonial-era race science, Freudian psychoanalysis and some feminist texts from 1949-1970. I suggest that these western feminist constructions of sexual liberation rely on depicting racialized women as primitive and degenerate. Finally, I argue that these racial and gendered constructions now inform concepts of ‘developed’ versus ‘underdeveloped’ bodies and nations in contemporary international development work.

Den här studien är en kritisk diskursanalys av ämnet kroppslig hälsa i skriftlig media. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur fenomenet kroppslig hälsa framställs i skriftlig media genom språket och dess användning. Analysmodellen vi använt oss av är formulerad av Norman Fairclough och det datamaterial vi använt oss av är av empirisk karaktär och insamlat från svensk skriven media i form av både rikstäckande press och lokalpress. I studien finns även ett avsnitt där vi presenterar tidigare forskning inom ämnet hälsa och diskursanalys. Forskningen presenteras genom fem teman: biopolitik, livsstil, individens ansvar, klass och könsskillnad utifrån ett hälsoperspektiv samt experthjälp. Den teori vi utgått ifrån för studien är främst den för den kritiska diskursanalysen, vi har även använt oss av Foucaults biopolitik vilken främst ges uttryck i diskussionsdelen.  Resultatet för studien presenteras i två delar utifrån Fairclouchs analysmodell; text samt diskursiv praktik. Resultatet redogör vi för med en rad olika teman vi formulerat utifrån den analys som gjorts. De teman som vi formulerat är: hotspråk, den stratifierade hälsan, anvisningar & imperativ, superlativ, vetenskapligt språk och den reella exemplifieringen (del ett). De huvudsakliga diskurser vi funnit i materialet är: den ohälsosamma diskursen, den hälsosamma diskursen, den vetenskapliga diskursen samt den utbildande diskursen (del två).

The purpose of this study is to explore how different discourses about risk linked to HIV prevention is likely to affect the decisions on the distribution of state funding for preventive activities aimed at 'men who have sex with men' (MSM). This by making qualitative interviews with principals that have an impact on this decision. Using a discourse analytic approach, based on both theoretical and methodological foundations, I investigate the discursive constructions of risk of HIV linked to certain groups and behaviors. MSM is found in the material placed into two different formations of groups, on one hand by the behavior on the other hand on the basis of identity. The identity position is organized discursively from a “victim” position while MSM provides an "operator" position. MSM is thus incompatible with the victim's position needed to be taken into account in the allocation of HIV prevention funds. On this basis I argue that the impact of heteronormativity, combined with an unwillingness to stigmatize, threatens to make HIV prevention ineffective when it is distributed on a different premise than epidemiological trends.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

The following paper explores the rise of global biopolitics by focusing on the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) as pivot points around which an international system transitioned into a global system. The central thesis of the paper is that the LNHO served as the first true site of deployment for global discourses on health and hygiene, not as recent scholarship has suggested, the WHO. The purpose of the paper, however, is to provide an overview of the larger transformation of public health in the twentieth century, beginning with the proliferation of nineteenth-­‐century international health organizations and culminating in the WHO. Central to this argument is the belief that population control is the ultimate end of the modern state, firmly placing discourses on health and hygiene at the nexus of modern politics. At its heart, this paper is about the nature of the modern state in relation to an increasingly global world.

Peace bonds are a legal tool of governance dating back to 13th c. England. In Canada, a significant change in the application of peace bonds took place in the mid-1990s, shifting their purpose from governing minor disputes between individuals to allowing for persons who have not been charged with a crime to be governed as if they had. Given the legal test for a peace bond has always been the determination of ‘reasonable fear’, the advent of these ‘specialized’ peace bonds suggests that the object of reasonable fear has changed. Despite their lengthy history, peace bonds have limited coverage in academic literature, a weakness compounded by a predominant doctrinal approach based in a liberal framework. The central inquiry of this thesis moves beyond this predominant perspective of ‘peace bonds as crime prevention’ by developing a governmental criminology, which deepens our understanding of the role of specialized peace bond law in contemporary society. Specifically, governmental criminology takes a Foucaultian critical legal studies approach, which acknowledges legal pluralism and sets out the historical context required for analysis. Ultimately, by unearthing underlying social, economic, and political power relations it is possible to critique the accompanying modes of calculation of fear and risk, thus challenging the regimes of practices that make specialized peace bonds possible. Specialized peace bonds merely manage the consequences of a criminal justice system limited by social, political, and economic circumstances, in a broader biopolitical project of integrating risky populations.

This work looks at the 2009 Iranian show-trials through modern discourses of biopolitics, sovereignty, and history. I argue that, understood as a theatrical phenomenon, the show trials are situated within the Foucauldian mode of biopower. The latter entails a shift from a politics of death to the preservation of the bios. The show-trials also perform a particularly modern narrative of state sovereignty and teleological history. To consider them in this way requires a rethinking of Michel Foucault’s theory so as to include juridico-philosophical discourse within a biopolitical framework. I propose that, as a performative act, the confessions transform the very thing they are confessing. Through the work of Jean Baudrillard and Jacque Derrida, I argue that the confessions make possible a reconceptualization of the political space of sovereignty as simulacrum and that of the political time of history as hauntology. / Graduate