The Biosecurity Individual: A Cultural Critique of the Intersection Between Health, Security, and Identity

Discoveries in biomedicine and biotechnology, especially in diagnostics, have made prevention and (self)surveillance increasingly important in the context of health practices. Frederike Offizier offers a cultural critique of the intersection between health, security and identity, and explores how the focus on risk and security changes our understanding of health and transforms our relationship to our bodies. Analyzing a wide variety of texts, from life writing to fiction, she offers a critical intervention on how this shift in the medical gaze produces new paradigms of difference and new biomedically facilitated identities: biosecurity individuals.

Frederike Offizier works as a lecturer and researcher in the American studies department at Universität Potsdam, where she also completed her PhD with the project »Help Yourself, So Help You Science«. Part of her research was conducted as a fulbright scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her MA thesis »DeComposing the Self« was awarded the Hans-Jürgen-Bachorski-Preis. Her research focuses on biocultural studies, affect theory, performance studies, ecocriticism, and disaster narratives.