The bio-politics of bodies politic: nature and intertextuality in classic US geopolitical discourse

This paper is a discourse analysis of classic US geopolitical texts which appropriate metaphors of the body to describe the state and its defense. While critical political geographers have demonstrated the role of naturalist epistemologies in classic geopolitics, I contribute to critical geopolitics literature by further examining the discursive economy of naturalism within which US geopolitical discourse is embedded. More specifically, I employ the concept of intertextuality, as theorized by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes in the 1960s, as a key analytical tool. In doing so, I argue that invocations of the ‘body politic’ in 20th century geopolitical texts are a version of bio-politics informed by a proliferating bio-medical discourse over a similar time period. I furthermore argue that such metaphors serve to naturalize territorialized national identities and create a spatial abstraction of a nationalized self in opposition to foreign ‘others,’ a discursive strategy used frequently to justify militaristic state policies. This paper, then, also adds to literature on militarism and the environment by further analyzing the discursive construction of the state in relation to an essentialized, abstracted nature.

Kolson SchlosserEmail: