Books
The Living from the Dead: Disaffirming Biopolitics (2023)
Stuart J. Murray
Penn State University Press
Arguing that biopower can be fully exposed only through an analysis of those whom society has “let die,” this book employs a series of transdisciplinary case studies to uncover the structural and rhetorical conditions through which biopower works. These case studies include the concept of “sacrifice” in the “war” against COVID-19, where emergent cultures of pandemic “resistance” are explored alongside suicide bombings and military suicides; the California mass hunger strikes of 2013; legal cases involving “preventable” and “untimely” childhood deaths, exposing the irreconcilable claims of anti-vaxxers and Indigenous peoples; and the videorecording of the death of a disabled Black man. Murray demonstrates that active resistance to biopower inevitably reproduces tropes of “making live” and “letting die.” His counter to this fact is a critical stance of disaffirmation, one in which death disrupts the politics of life itself.
In a society that aims above all to safeguard life, how might we reckon with ethical responsibility when we are complicit in sacrificial economies that produce and tolerate death as a necessity of life?
Review in Philosophy & Rhetoric [PDF]
Review in Law, Culture and the Humanities [PDF]
Review in Rhetoric Review [PDF]
Radical Sex Between Men: Assembling Desiring‑Machines (2018)
Edited by Dave Holmes, Stuart J. Murray & Thomas Foth
Routledge
Bringing together theory and public health practice, this interdisciplinary collection analyses three forms of nonconventional or radical sexualities: bareback sex, BDSM practices, and public sex. Drawing together the latest empirical research from Brazil, Canada, Spain, and the USA, it mobilizes queer theory and poststructuralism, engaging the work of theorists such as Bataille, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault, among others. While the collection contributes to current research in gender and sexuality studies, it does so distinctly in the context of empirical investigations and discourses on critical public health.
“Risky” and “extreme” moves, criminal intimacies, politics, and praxiologies contest the presumption of social and sexological origins or norms, and that challenge the conception of sexual deviance as a measurable or observable distance from orthodox or “normal” sex epitomized in heteronormative ReproSex, conservative sex, the missionary position.
The Ethics of Care: Moral Knowledge, Communication, and the Art of Caregiving (2016)
Edited by Alan Blum & Stuart J. Murray
Routledge
Beginning with a focus on the ethical foundations of caregiving in health and expanding towards problems of ethics and justice implicated in a range of issues, this book develops and expands the notion of care itself and its connection to practice.
Organized around the themes of culture as a restraint on caregiving in different social contexts and situations, innovative methods in healthcare, and the way in which culture works to position care as part of a rhetorical approach to dependency, responsibility, and justice, The Ethics of Care presents case studies examining institutional responses to end-of-life issues, the notion of informed consent, biomedicine, indigenous rights and postcolonialism in care and theoretical approaches to the concept of care.
Caregiving cannot be conceived along the lines of communicative action, for the social expressions of desire and action—care and giving—are far from transparent or self-evident, rational or objective; moreover, caregiving is an interaction between individuals who are often differentially positioned, with unequal or sometimes inexpressible needs.
Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare: Challenging the Principle of Autonomy in Bioethics (2009)
Edited by Stuart J. Murray & Dave Holmes
Ashgate Publishing / Routledge
Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare argues that traditional modes of bioethics are proving incommensurable with burgeoning biotechnologies and consequently, emerging subjectivities. Drawn from diverse disciplines, this volume works toward a new mode of discourse in bioethics, offering a critique of the current norms and constraints under which Western healthcare operates. The contributions imagine new, less paternalistic, terms by which bioethics might proceed—terms that do not resort to exclusively Western models of liberal humanism or to the logic of neoliberal economies. It is argued that in this way, we can begin to develop an ethical vocabulary that does justice to the challenges of our age. Bringing together theorists, practitioners and clinicians to present a wide variety of related disciplinary concerns and perspectives on bioethics, this volume challenges the underlying assumptions that continue to hold sway in the ethics of medicine and health sciences.