“Science Fiction And Biopolitics” by Sherryl Vint: Summary and Critique

Introduction: “Science Fiction And Biopolitics” by Sherryl Vint

Table of Contents

“Science Fiction and Biopolitics” by Sherryl Vint first appeared in Science Fiction Film and Television in 2011 (Volume 4, Issue 2, pp. 161–172), published by Liverpool University Press. In this foundational article, Vint explores the convergence of speculative fiction and biopolitical theory, drawing heavily on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower—a mode of governance where life itself becomes the central object of political control. Vint argues that in contemporary technoculture, science fiction (sf) is uniquely positioned to interrogate and reflect the complex entanglements of life, power, and neoliberal governance. By examining examples from contemporary cinema such as Splice, 28 Days Later, and Daybreakers, Vint demonstrates how sf articulates the tensions of a world in which biotechnology, market capitalism, and state surveillance merge to govern the biological and social bodies of the population. Vint also expands the discussion through reference to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life, Susan Squier’s “liminal lives,” and Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s biocapital, illustrating how sf narratives mediate anxieties about identity, commodification, and the erosion of humanist boundaries in the era of the bioeconomy. The article is significant in literary theory for showing how sf serves not merely as fantasy or escapism, but as a critical discourse that participates in shaping and critiquing biopolitical imaginaries. It reframes sf as a genre that operates within the cultural and political economy, and as a theoretical apparatus through which we can analyze the material realities of our present and possible futures.

Summary of “Science Fiction And Biopolitics” by Sherryl Vint

🧬 1. Biopolitics and the Colonisation of Life

Vint draws from Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower, which governs both the individual body and the population as a whole.
Modern technoculture sees governance increasingly shaped by speculative and biological discourses.

“Under biopolitics, life itself becomes the object of political governance” (Vint, 2011, p. 161).
Examples: Embryonic stem cells and ‘brain dead’ patients challenge classical definitions of life and death.

🦠 2. Epidemics and Imagined Biological Threats

Public health crises (e.g., avian flu, H1N1) are framed within speculative narratives (e.g., zombie apocalypses).

Biopolitics merges state control, media, and popular sf imagery.
“Epidemics… conflate the management of borders, disease vectors… with speculative fantasies about invader species and zombie plagues” (p. 161).

🔬 3. The Rise of the Biocultural Era

Biology becomes not just a science of life but a cultural system of meaning.
Sarah Franklin’s concept of the biocultural underlines how science is embedded in social categories like gender and race.

“Biology has become a science of engineering” (p. 162).

⚖️ 4. From Sovereignty to Biopower

Traditional sovereignty focused on the right “to take life or let live”; biopolitics now governs by the right “to make live or to let die” (Foucault, 2003, p. 241).
The “state of exception” (Agamben) becomes normalized—state violence is pre-authorized under permanent threat scenarios.
“The more you kill, the more you foster life” (Vint, p. 163).

🧪 5. Biopolitics in Capitalist Governance

Life becomes commodified through biocapitalism and bioeconomics.
Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980) and Moore v. Regents of UC (1990) enable patenting and ownership of life forms.
“Life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation” (Cooper, 2008, p. 19).

🩸 6. The Tissue Economy and Human Commodification

Human body fragments like foreskins or stem cells are sold in commercial markets.

“Tissue economies” (Waldby & Mitchell, 2006) blur the line between personhood and property.
Disadvantaged populations, like the unemployed in Andhra Pradesh, are drawn into clinical trials as expendable experimental subjects (Sunder Rajan, 2006, p. 96).

🧟 7. Liminal Lives and Speculative Fiction

Susan Squier’s liminal lives illustrate the ambiguous status of biological fragments (e.g., cell lines).

Vampires and zombies are no longer supernatural but metaphorical: “figures of genetic mutation and viral contamination” (Vint, p. 165).

📈 8. Biocapital and Speculative Surplus

Genomic science operates on market speculation, not actual goods.
“Hype is reality” (Sunder Rajan, 2006, p. 116); biology is valuable not as life but as projected financial potential.
“Biocapital… transmuted into speculative surplus value” (Cooper, 2008, p. 148).

🧠 9. Societies of Control and Neurochemical Citizenship

Gilles Deleuze’s shift from “enclosures” to “controls” aligns with market and biopolitical logic.
Medical surveillance and personalized medicine function within a biopolitical economy.
“Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 6).

People become “somatic individuals” shaped by biology rather than inner psychology (Rose, 2006, p. 188).

🎬 10. Case Study: Daybreakers and Biopolitical Allegory

The film Daybreakers (2009) is used to illustrate biopolitical themes in popular culture:
- A world run by vampires symbolizes commodified biology.
- Human blood becomes a scarce resource; state and market merge in governance.

“Vampires… live as normalised, bourgeois subjects” (Vint, p. 167).
The plot critiques overproduction and the logic of biocapital: excessive consumption leads to societal collapse.
Subversive message: “The return to humanity is thus experienced as threat rather than cure” (p. 170).

📚 11. SF as Critical Discourse

Science fiction does not merely reflect biopolitical realities—it shapes them.

Squier argues sf can “pre-date and… enable [the body’s] biomedical transformation” (Squier, 2004, p. 170).
Vint insists sf can also critique and intervene in neoliberal biopolitical futures.

📖 12. Broader Literary Engagements

Additional essays in the journal issue extend Vint’s arguments:
- 🧟 Canavan on zombies as images of neoliberal overconsumption.
- 🌐 Cover on Star Trek’s portrayal of liberalism and biopolitical security.
- 🧬 Vinci on identity modulation in Dollhouse.
- 🤰 Trimble on racialized reproduction in Children of Men.

🔚 Conclusion: SF and the Challenges of Biopolitical Modernity

Science fiction is uniquely suited to articulate, critique, and reimagine the logics of biopolitics.
It helps expose how life, death, identity, and economic viability are now governed within a neoliberal biosecurity regime.

Theoretical Terms/Concepts in “Science Fiction And Biopolitics” by Sherryl Vint

📘 Term/Concept	📖 Explanation & Context (with citations from Vint, 2011)
🧬 Biopower / Biopolitics	Coined by Michel Foucault, biopower refers to the governance of bodies and populations through biological regulation rather than sovereign authority. It operates on two levels: the disciplined individual and the managed population (p. 161). “Life itself becomes the object of political governance” (p. 161).
🧠 Liminal Lives (Susan Squier)	Refers to biological entities (e.g., stem cells, cell lines) that exist between definitions of human and non-human. They are “not easily categorized as either person or thing” (p. 165). SF helps explore their ethical and ontological ambiguity.
🏥 Thanatopolitics (Agamben, Esposito)	The political logic where some lives are allowed to die to protect others. In Daybreakers, subsiders are “class four blood deprived citizens,” exterminated in the name of public health (p. 169).
⚖️ State of Exception (Agamben)	A permanent crisis mode in which normal legal protections are suspended to secure the population. “Hyper-security vigilance becomes naturalised” (p. 162).
🧪 Biocapital / Biocapitalism (Cooper, Sunder Rajan)	The commodification of life processes through biotech and genomics industries. Biological materials like genes are transformed into “speculative surplus value” (p. 166; Cooper, p. 148).
🩸 Tissue Economy (Waldby & Mitchell)	Describes how biological materials like blood and embryos circulate as commodities. Vint notes that human waste tissues are sold to biotech firms, contrasting with “gift economy” models (p. 164–165).
💹 Speculative Surplus Value (Cooper)	Refers to the economic value assigned to biological materials based on their projected future utility (e.g., anticipated therapies), not their current use (p. 166).
🔄 Societies of Control (Deleuze)	A shift from disciplinary enclosures (schools, prisons) to continuous modulation and surveillance. “Enclosures are molds… controls are a modulation” (Deleuze, p. 4; cited p. 166).
🧬 Neurochemical Citizenship (Rose)	A form of identity in which individuals understand and govern themselves based on biological attributes—especially brain chemistry (p. 167).
🧑‍💼 Homo Oeconomicus / Self as Enterprise (Foucault)	The neoliberal subject is seen as an entrepreneur of the self, optimizing health, productivity, and risk—“encouraged to manage oneself as an enterprise” (p. 164).

Contribution of “Science Fiction And Biopolitics” by Sherryl Vint to Literary Theory/Theories

🧠 1. Biopolitical Literary Criticism (Foucauldian Theory)

Vint brings Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower into dialogue with science fiction, establishing sf as a privileged genre for exploring life managed by governance.
She examines how narratives embody the shift “from the right to take life or let live to the right to make live and let die” (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, qtd. in Vint, 2011, p. 163).
“Science fiction allows us to grasp the paradoxes of this biopolitical regime by imagining the speculative consequences of managing life” (p. 162).

This positions sf not merely as entertainment but as a site of theoretical intervention.

🦾 2. Posthumanism and Liminal Subjectivity

Vint contributes to posthumanist literary theory by analyzing bodies that blur boundaries between human and nonhuman.
Uses Susan Squier’s term liminal lives to explore figures like stem cells and cloned organisms that “cannot comfortably be sorted into either category” of human or object (p. 165).

In texts like Daybreakers, the posthuman subject becomes a metaphor for the commodified and mutable body under biopolitical regimes.

📉 3. Marxist Literary Criticism / Neoliberal Capital Critique

Engages Marxist-inflected critiques of capitalist accumulation in the biotech era, especially Melinda Cooper’s and Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s work on biocapital.
Vint shows how sf dramatizes the “economy of delirium” where life becomes “speculative surplus value” (Cooper, qtd. p. 166).

“The speculative fantasies of biocapital are informed by—and inform—the speculative imaginings of sf” (p. 166).
The genre thus serves as a diagnostic tool for neoliberalism’s commodification of life itself.

🧪 4. Science and Technology Studies (STS) in Literature

Vint integrates STS approaches to explore how sf mediates public understanding of technoscience.

She notes how sf enables reflection on biotechnological promises and fears: IVF, stem cell ethics, pandemics, etc.
“We live in an era in which the speculative and the material are so entwined that neither can be understood in isolation” (p. 161).

🛡️ 5. Security and Surveillance Theory

Through Foucault’s and Agamben’s notions of security and the state of exception, Vint reads sf worlds (e.g., Daybreakers) as dramatizations of biopolitical surveillance.

“Hyper-security vigilance becomes naturalised ‘to ensure that there are no procedural hindrances to state violence if it is deemed necessary’” (Gerlach et al., qtd. p. 162).
Demonstrates sf’s utility in theorizing biosecurity regimes and racialized control under neoliberal governance.

🧬 6. Feminist and Reproductive Theory

Vint references issues like IVF, “designer babies,” and gendered reproductive biopolitics, tying into feminist theory of the body.

Films such as Splice and Children of Men reveal the politics of reproductive control and bioengineering.
The biocultural view from Sarah Franklin shows “the inseparability of the new biologies from the meaning systems they both reproduce and depend upon” (Franklin, qtd. p. 162).

🧠 7. Genre Theory / SF as Critical Discourse

Challenges traditional readings of sf as fantasy or escapism, reasserting its epistemological and political utility.

“SF is not fantasy, but documentary” (Squier, qtd. p. 172), and also critical—it “can also critique and challenge this reality” (p. 172).
This reframing makes sf central to contemporary literary and cultural theory.

📚 8. Literary Criticism as World-Building Analysis

Vint argues that sf’s value lies in its capacity to build speculative worlds that expose and interrogate our own.

Daybreakers illustrates how biopolitical logics of governance, consumption, and identity are mapped into fictional societies.
“SF is a genre of world-building and hence a tool to help us deconstruct the world that neoliberalism has built” (p. 171).

🔄 9. Interdisciplinary Literary Criticism

The essay exemplifies cross-disciplinary literary analysis, drawing from philosophy, politics, economics, and science.

This method makes a significant meta-theoretical contribution, modeling how literary studies can be methodologically enriched by Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Cooper, etc.

Examples of Critiques Through “Science Fiction And Biopolitics” by Sherryl Vint

🎬📚 Work	🧩 Biopolitical Critique through Sherryl Vint (2011)
🧬 Splice (2009, dir. Vincenzo Natali)	– Explores anxieties about artificial reproduction and bioengineering. – Demonstrates how speculative fiction reflects ethical dilemmas of IVF, cloning, and ‘designer babies’. – Vint notes it as part of sf’s role in visualizing “the complicated parenting of IVF and other assistive reproductive technologies” (p. 162).
🧟 28 Days Later (2002, dir. Danny Boyle)	– Symbolizes viral biopolitics: how the state reacts to and controls disease outbreaks. – Highlights racialized and militarized containment practices in the name of public health. – According to Vint, the film “conflates the spectre of bioterrorism… with narratives about virulent disease” (p. 162).
🧛 Daybreakers (2009, dir. Peter & Michael Spierig)	– Central to Vint’s argument about biocapital and the commodification of life. – Imagines a society where human blood is a depleted commodity and humans are farmed, representing the extreme logic of bioeconomics. – Vint writes that the film “dramatizes a powerful fantasy of breaking out of the modulated subjectivity of societies of control” (p. 171).
👶 Children of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón)	– Analyzed via Sarah Trimble in Vint’s article as a critique of racialized reproductive politics. – Kee’s fertility and Blackness are commodified as hope for humanity, reflecting postcolonial and gendered biopolitics. – Trimble, as cited by Vint, “reveals a continuity between the neoliberal biopolitical order and a previous capitalist period of colonial accumulation” (p. 172).

Criticism Against “Science Fiction And Biopolitics” by Sherryl Vint

🔍 1. Overreliance on Foucauldian Framework

Vint’s essay is deeply grounded in Foucault’s concepts of biopower and biopolitics, which may limit alternative theoretical perspectives (e.g., affect theory, decolonial theory, or indigenous epistemologies).
Critics might argue that this Eurocentric philosophical lens overlooks more diverse cultural frameworks for understanding embodiment and governance.

📉 2. Emphasis on Dystopia May Overshadow Resistance

The analysis tends to emphasize biopolitical control and oppression, with limited attention to narratives or readings of resistance, subversion, or autonomy within sf worlds.
This might reinforce a deterministic view of biopolitics where subjects are only ever passive objects of power.

🧛 3. Overinterpretation of Daybreakers

The detailed analysis of Daybreakers is insightful but may overextend its biopolitical symbolism.

Some might view the film’s camp and genre conventions (vampires, action tropes) as undermining its theoretical seriousness, making it a weak central example for such a complex theoretical argument.

🌍 4. Limited Global Perspective

Vint’s case studies and examples primarily come from Western Anglophone media, with little engagement with non-Western or transnational science fiction traditions.
The global scope of biopolitical governance (e.g., in the Global South, refugee biopolitics, pandemic geopolitics) is not fully explored.

📚 5. Ambiguity Between Theory and Textual Analysis

The article sometimes prioritizes theory over close literary or cinematic reading, making the sf examples feel instrumentalized rather than deeply analyzed in literary terms.
Critics might argue that it treats science fiction texts more as illustrations than as autonomous aesthetic objects.

🧠 6. SF’s Critical Power Assumed Rather Than Proved

While Vint claims that science fiction can “critique and challenge” biopolitics, she does not fully explore how or whether audiences engage critically with these texts.

The piece might overstate sf’s subversive power without accounting for how biopolitical narratives can also reinforce hegemonic ideologies.

Representative Quotations from “Science Fiction And Biopolitics” by Sherryl Vint with Explanation

🔖 Quotation	💡 Explanation
📌 “Under biopolitics, life itself becomes the object of political governance, and political governance becomes the practice of steering the biological life of individuals and species.” (p. 161)	Vint articulates the core concept of biopolitics: modern governance centers on controlling biological life at both individual and population levels.
🔬 “We live in an era in which the speculative and the material are so entwined that neither can be understood in isolation.” (p. 161)	Highlights how science fiction and technoscience are mutually constitutive—imaginative narratives influence and reflect material scientific developments.
🧫 “The speculative fantasies of biocapital are informed by – and inform – the speculative imaginings of sf.” (p. 166)	Science fiction and biotechnology finance share speculative logic—both project imagined futures to generate current value.
🧟 “Epidemics and their attendant panics…conflate the management of borders, disease vectors and agriculture trade with speculative fantasies about invader species and zombie plagues.” (p. 161)	Demonstrates how real biosecurity fears are transfigured into genre tropes like zombies and alien viruses in SF.
🧬 “Liminal subjects are entities such as embryonic stem cell genetic material that cannot comfortably be sorted into either category of ‘thing’ or ‘human subject.’” (p. 165)	Introduces the concept of “liminal lives”—bioentities that challenge binary classifications of person vs. object.
💰 “Biopolitics is becoming a discourse of bioeconomics.” (p. 164)	Argues that biology itself is increasingly interpreted through economic value, turning life into a market category.
🩸 “The world is in crisis because of the decreasing supply of humans.” (Daybreakers, p. 168)	SF narrative (Daybreakers) allegorizes the commodification of life via a blood economy, paralleling real-world bioeconomic systems.
🚨 “The ‘state of exception’ becomes normalised and continual.” (p. 162)	Cites Agamben to describe how crisis governance becomes permanent, blurring legal and biological governance.
📉 “Desire is no longer disciplined by a prohibitive law… but instead channelled to respond to a reality in such a way that this response cancels out the reality.” (p. 166)	Explains how biopolitical power now works through modulation—channeling behavior instead of repressing it outright.
🎥 “SF can also critique and challenge this reality…a tool to help us deconstruct the world that neoliberalism has built.” (p. 172)	Celebrates SF’s potential as a critical genre capable of diagnosing and resisting neoliberal and biopolitical structures.