Introduction

In this special issue, the contributors argue that plasticity, the capacity of living systems to generate and take on new forms, is a central axis of biopolitical governance. While plasticity has a specific meaning in the life sciences, conceptually it has infused a broad range of theoretical, material, and scientific idioms for describing the malleability of a given body or system. Each of these conceptions of plasticity provides an account of malleability that, seemingly inexhaustible in its disorganizing qualities, has sometimes been framed as a resource for the disruption of normalizing systems of power. The articles in this special issue show that, by contrast, plasticity does not resist but is actually enlisted by state power through biopolitics. “The Biopolitics of Plasticity” investigates how race and state power actually depend on and enlist malleability and formlessness to govern living populations and individuals. By unevenly distributing the capacity of corporeal malleability, plasticity functions as a key logic underpinning the modern notion of racial difference. The issue’s introduction proposes a critical reckoning with the racial politics of this important concept to ask new questions about how to understand the organic malleability of the body and such categories as race, sex, gender, and sexuality.