Biopolitical Disaster by Jennifer L. Lawrence Sarah Marie Wiebe & Marie Wiebe Sarah

Author:Jennifer L. Lawrence,Sarah Marie Wiebe & Marie Wiebe, Sarah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

8 Emergency life and indigenous resistance

Seeing biopolitical disaster through the prism of political ecology

Sarah Marie Wiebe

Legislative performances including the introduction of anti-terrorism legislation such as Bill C-51 in Canada produce and categorize threatening subjects, demarcate populations and obscure mundane, banal encounters with everyday insecurity. Across numerous communities within Canada, marginalized citizens encounter insecure and terrifying situations, which make the exceptionalism of terror increasingly the norm (Butler 2004). This chapter suggests that examining biopolitical disaster from a political ecology lens prompts an investigation of terror’s geopolitical context, an examination of terror’s kinetic biopolitical affects, and a crucial discursive reframing of what constitutes terror given the grounded realities for communities struggling with “slow violence” (Nixon 2011). To examine the problem of biopolitical disaster, in this chapter I aim to advance the study of environmental politics in theory, method and practice and ask: what world do we fear and what world do we advocate? Building on existing critical environmental security and geopolitics literature, I develop a prismatic political ecology lens to the problem of biopolitical disaster (Dalby 2002; Salter and Mutlu 2013; Schnurr and Swatuk 2012). To do so, I discuss three sites in Canada rendered insecure due to their environmentally compromised location: Attawapiskat, Aamjiwnaang and Pacheedaht, where Indigenous citizens live in environments rendered insecure due to external forces which adversely affect the lifeblood of their communities. These lived realities compel us to think differently about the affective effects of everyday disaster.

Physical bodies interact with political bodies in numerous ways. The “body” – of populations and of individuals – has long been a subject for debate and critical interrogation within feminist theory. It continues to be the focus of analysis for biopolitical scholars who examine power relations between individual and social bodies (Brown 1995, 1988; Butler 1990, 1993, 1997; Haraway 1988; Orsini 2007; Rose 2007; Wiebe 2012, 2016). Within studies of environmental politics and environmental political theory, too often these debates have been “body blind” (Gabrielson and Parady 2010; Hobson 2013). This analysis reveals how in fact it is difficult – perhaps impossible – to make a distinction between physical/political body. Indeed, the body is a critical site of political formation. So then how can we examine environmental politics from a prismatic political ecology approach? What unique methodological tools does this lens offer the study of biopolitics and slow violence?

Jane Bennett’s well-known claim that we must seriously consider the vibrancy of matter, which challenges any neat separation between human and more-than-human life, holds considerable weight in the unfolding analysis (2010). Sometimes the vibrancy of this matter is toxic, warranting further political inquiry. This chapter develops new insights for theorists and practitioners interested in the fields of political ecology and environmental justice. I begin by discussing the kinetic power of terror as a biopolitical disaster from a prismatic political ecology approach. Subsequently, I apply this lens to three sites, and provide visibility to the visceral, corporeal affects of everyday disaster on the physical landscape of the body. Three Indigenous communities come into view here:

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