Bodies: Community and Identity

As this era ushers in a hyper-individualized technological paradigm promising targeted and precise information for law and medicine, the science underpinning these new techniques is, ironically, based on knowledge of populations. This chapter analyzes the shifting biolegalities of populations and communities by exploring, the collectivization of biological suspects in forensic and immigration practice, the making of biological populations for health justice, and the biological consolidation of identity and rights as forms of citizenship and nation building. First, we discuss the biolegal intervention by which forensic science produces “suspect populations.” Second, we examine the emergence of precision and race-based medicine, which constructs new communities based on biological markers. Third, we take up the way emerging postgenomic knowledge further complicates identity, contributing to new forms of biological citizenship. In all these cases, biolegal constructions help determine one’s belonging and reconfigure one’s relation toward rights, civic identity, community, and the nation-state.