Affirmative Biopolitics and a Grassroots, Non-Profit Social Center for Rural Quechua Girls in Cusco, Peru

In this Paper I engage with the term ‘affirmative biopolitics’ as some geographers (Hannah 2011; Rutherford and Rutherford 2013) have recently proposed. The attempt of pursuing an affirmative biopolitics is in part inspired by Rosi Braidotti (2007, 2013), who has offered critiques of versions of biopolitics – e.g., Agamben’s biopolitics as a fixation on Thanatos and a limited interpretation of ‘Thanatos-politics’ – and calls for thinking with a generative force of life (zoe) as well as sociopolitical alternatives to necro-political governmentality. My own empirical study is on a grassroots, non-profit social center for rural Quechua girls in Cusco city in the Peruvian Andes. This takes me to consider how relatively immanent and affirmative social and educational interventions in propelling marginalized young lives towards a contextually defined good life (bios) can constitute a form of ‘non-innocent’ affirmative biopolitics that is meaningful for feminists. Theoretically, I offer some attempt at such biopolitics through other feminist and queer work — in specific, Pheng Cheah’s (2007) reading of Foucault’s ‘infrapower’ and Lauren Berlant’s (2011) reading of affect and biopolitics. In the empirical analysis, I show how Quechua girls in their rural-to-urban life-making and life-building, respond to the center’s interventions in relation to domestic labor, tourism and hospitality work, self-development, and aspiration. The focus is on how the center biopoliticizes their lives in an infrastructural and affective manner, embedding them within while transforming the processes of gendered mobilities, work professionalization, neoliberalism, and tourism. The case reveals how solidarity and empowerment work with marginalized girls can become highly entangled with and articulated through caring, effective, and affective education for work/life that ‘affirms’ changing modes of (re)production in and beyond places like Cusco.