Changing practices in contemporary biosciences and biotechnology have altered definitions and understandings of what we call “life”—what we mean by this term, what constitutes life, and how human and nonhuman others experience life. This chapter explores the shifting definitions of life within the biosciences, and beyond—which have emerged due to specific bioscientific/biotech advancements and changing political-economic imperatives and governing logics that have emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. Increasingly, now, life as we know it has come to be manipulated, customized, optimized, maximized, and commodified. The chapter considers how life is increasingly technologized, how life is now understood as an ‘open dynamism,’ how life is something now viewed as subject to self-governance, and how life has become a domain of biovalue. While concepts of life and life-making strategies might have altered, historic inequities have not receded but are instead re-secured and often exacerbated.

Posthumanist scholarship has challenged and critiqued some of the conventional understandings of Foucauldian biopolitics. The question of the posthuman goes beyond the focus on anti-humanism and is posed within the reconfiguration of life itself: how can life be governed when the boundaries of life are shifting, when inanimate, nonhuman, and posthuman forms and their novel ontologies have entered the specter of qualified life? This question is heightened in the age of the Anthropocene, where the destruction of the natural world is evidenced by the burden humans have put on natural resources, land, soil, waters, air, and nonhuman life, including plants and microbes. In this essay, I distinguish four different scholarly engagements with the posthuman and the biopolitical—capital, law, relational-material, environmental—that push the analytics of a Foucauldian biopolitics to its boundaries, and that lay bare the limits and tensions of biopolitics arising within these areas of study.