Volume-XII, Issue-V, September 2026 |
Productive Bodies of ‘Biocapital’: Analysing the Technologies of Gender and Politics in Ninni Holmqvist’s the Unit (2006) Prithiga G, Research Scholar, Dept. of English, Pondicherry University, Kalapat, Pondicherry, India |
Received: 11.09.2026 | Accepted: 19.09.2026 | Published Online: 30.09.2026 | Page No: 216-227 | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.12.issue.05W.386 | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
Late capitalism and globalisation have taken an interest in human bodies to the next level of power and political play. The concept of ‘biocapital’ by Kaushik Sundar Rajan critically reads, compares, and challenges the processes of utilitarian and disproportional extraction of value from bodily consumption of the gendered and biological aspects of bodies in the postgenomic life. It demonstrates the dematerialising, commodifying, and patenting of the material body in the advanced world of biotechnology and life sciences. As an extended argument about the body and biocapitalism, the study discusses how the bodies of reproduction are being reduced to mere procreative machines, and the valorisation of their uses and abuses in the dystopian setting. The study qualitatively deciphers the politics of reproduction and marriage alongside the consumption of gendered bodies under technologised systems of oppression. The textual examination of Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit (2006) is an alert to contemporary societal upheavals. In which the author explored techno-political reinstallation of conventional stratification of gender and political identities. And how it reinforces the mobility of socio-political roles such as stable jobs, childbirth and familial bonds. These conformist and compulsory reproductions are a new way to conceptualise the bodies of both women, men and queer in the global market. The study critically analyses the recognised pattern of utilitarian consumption, revealing a network of systems of control operating through automation. A process that revises the logic for politics and power dynamics at the intersection of women, technology, and capitalism. As Donna Haraway’s framework insists on destabilising the co-production of these three prime sectors, Anne Balsamo’s and Jemima Repo’s revisions of gendered bodies identify the situated values of both bodies and gender in the structured analysis. This suggests that an individual's body in contemporary society is forcibly embedded in codified cybernetics of control to legalise the logic of the ‘biomarket’. Hence, it presupposes that globalisation and modernism revise biocapitalism, thereby redefining the value of gendered bodies and their positions in the global market. | ||
Keywords: Biocapitalism, gendered bodies, reproduction, techno-political conceptualisation and utilitarian consumption. |