Mahinur Aksehir (Manisa Celal Bayar University, Turquie)
“The Myth of Ideal Beauty as a Form of Biopolitics in Jeanette Winterson’s Novels”
Discutante : Mathilde Bertrand
One of the most widely-discussed and elusive concepts of Michel Foucault, biopolitics has been the focus of a wide variety of scientific disciplines from anthropology to political sciences. Biopolitics can simply be defined as the ways in which the political structures work in elusive ways to organize and control life through forms of power the Foucault labels as biopower. Even the relatively personal aspects of life are kept under control by these forms of biopower from health and birth rates to population diversity as discussed by various studies that are conducted in the field of biopolitics. One of the most influencial fields of operation for biopolitics, on the other hand, is the fashion industry. Supported by Guy Debord's theory on 'The Societies of the Spectacle', this paper aims to discuss the post-apocalyptic community represented in Winterson's The Stone Gods. This community is marked by an extreme obsession about the looks and perplexing applications of DNA modification and genetic fixing which can be interpreted in the light of Debord's theory of the society of the spectacle as a societal structure founded on Foucault's concept of biopolitics.
Assist Prof. Mahinur Aksehir is currently working as a lecturer at Manisa Celal Bayar University. She has received her PhD from Ege University with her dissertation on John Fowles and the Menippean Satire. Her fields of interest are the contemporary novel, women's literature and satire.