Traditionally, Euroamerican cultures have considered that human status was conferred at the conclusion to childbirth. However, in contemporary Euroamerican biomedicine, law and politics, the living subject is often claimed to pre-exist birth. In this fascinating book Lorna Weir argues that the displacement of birth as the threshold of the living

Over the last hundred years, pregnancy and childbirth has become increasingly safe – yet it is still a site of risk, and a contested ground on which health professionals and pregnant women both face high costs of error. In this context, all those involved in managing pregnancy and birth are

This collection brings together contributions from both established scholars and researchers working at the forefront of biopolitical theory, gendered and sexualised governance and the politics of race and migration.

Edited and contributed to by a collection of eminent international scholars in the field, this is the first book to explore the gendered aspects of risk. It analyzes what is currently known and identifies some of the new directions and challenges for research and theory that emerge from thinking of

Within the liberal tradition, the physical body has been treated as a focus of rights discussion and a source of economic and democratic value; it needs protection but it is also one's dominion, tool, and property, and thus something over which we should be able to exercise free will. However,