This study shows how the official death-declaring of bodies in 20th century Sweden became inextricably linked to the modulation of a population’s health through transplantations. In its critical examination of the terms of possibility to declare a body as dead in the latter half of 20th century Sweden the study not only relates to medicinal humanities and studies in contemporary biopolitics but, more broadly, the diverse field of Queer Death Studies. With its interdisciplinarity, the study approaches Swedish official governmental material in a genealogical manner and aims not only to show how bodies historically became declared as dead but, more importantly, to shed light on hidden points of intersections within western biopolitics. While the study reveals several distinctive trajectories—e.g. death-entry from self-evident to dissolved to eventualized—it also highlights biopolitical tactics in attempts to reach desirable outcomes and circumvent obstacles such as the public. Among these, it exposes an ambiguous right to declare bodies as dead with its possibility to produce exceptions from the judicial system—exceptions brought forth through a truth-telling of bodies bare life in tandem with an extraction of previously unattainable organs. Thus, the study suggests that to further understand contemporary governing, and not risking an intensification of it, Agamben’s approach towards hidden intersections between juridico-institutional and biopolitical needs to be extended to encompass a third vector of truth-telling.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-178407 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Jönsson, Johan |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för kultur och estetik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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