Economization of Life

M. Murphy is Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Heath, and Technoscience and Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers, both also published by Duke University Press.

"Though this book be concise, it is fierce. It can be read, and reread, with profit by undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers. Highly recommended." - T. E. Sullivan (Choice) "The Economization of Life convincingly links experimentality to what has been one of the most popular developmental trends of the past two decades. . . . M. Murphy’s bold and sharp book opens many new lines of inquiries." - Stephen Macekura (Diplomatic History) "This is a valuable book that should be read by anyone who is interested in the mid-twentieth-century population control movement, including its history and socioeconomic context, or anyone who still adheres to the neoliberal view that population growth (or 'overpopulation,' as it is often called) has been and continues to be one of the greatest problems facing human society." - Garland E. Allen (Isis) "Murphy weaves helpful threads of history, literature, and economics, guides the reader through complicated ideas, and leaves enough notes so research can continue beyond the book’s borders. . . . The Economization of Life is a useful and an instructive tool for policy makers and researchers on population and reproductive health, and for scholars and students in gender, women, and sexuality studies, or anyone who may be concerned with matters of reproductive rights." - Kira Frank (Wagadu) "It takes a study as rigorous as Murphy’s to expose the double-edged nature of human capital: galvanizing self-improvement of, and popular support for, underprivileged populations, even as it does so according to metrics that have investor interests-rather than general well-being-as their goal." - Hadas Weiss (Public Books) "The Economization of Life is a book that sticks. Author M. Murphy delicately surfaces the history and persistence of racist and eugenicist logics as they comprise global economies and state governance practices, and, in a bold and self-reflexive gesture, describes how these same logics operate in feminist organizations and academic research. Murphy's work forced me to grapple with unresolvable tensions, particularly between long term liberation and short term survival, which were simultaneously troubling and eye-opening. I can see these now in places where they used to be hidden." - Lourdes Vera (Somatosphere) "The Economization of Life gives us important tools to bring the work of reproductive justice from the world of feminist social justice organizing to the world of feminist scholarship. It shows us that the economy is an effect that materializes its own causes, supported by a structure of belief that holds together otherwise disparate data and calculations. With enough effort, it urges us, we should be able to divest from that enabling belief, and instead follow models for a regenerative politics, committing instead to reproductive justice as an infrastructure of regeneration." - Kalindi Vora (Somatosphere)

• Acknowledgments  viiIntroduction. Bottles and Curves  1Arc 1. Phantasmagrams of Population and Economy1. Economy as Atmosphere  172. Demographic Transitions  353. Averted Birth  474. Dreaming Technoscience  55Arc II. Reproducing Infrastructures5. Infrastructures of Counting and Affect  596. Continuous Incitement  737. Experimental Exuberance  788. Dying, Not Dying, Not Being Born  959. Experimental Otherwise  105Arc III. Investable Life10. Invest in a Girl  11311. Exhausting Data  12512. Unaligned Feeling  133Coda. Distributed Reproduction  135Notes  147Bibliography  179Index  211