Biopolitical Revival: Love, Care, and Subject (Re)formation Inside the Chicago Recovery Alliance

The harm reduction movement in the United States began as a subversive grassroots effort to provide clean needles to drug users during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. By the late 1990s, harm reduction nonprofit organizations cropped up and started to earn a significant amount of funding from some states and municipalities. Many scholars have argued that these government-funded harm reduction organizations are mere co-optations of a radical movement by the state for its biopolitical ends. This thesis pushes against this scholarly bent, arguing that harm reductionists are engaged in biopolitical revival, a fraught attempt to recover a fading biopolitics by configuring radically new ways of thinking about care, love, and the self. Their politics are acutely responsive to the demands of the current moment – one in which 20th century biopolitics is fading, and something far more sinister threatens to take its place