Governing Health, Family and Religion: The Biopolitics of Genetic Counselling and Religious Family Formations

RELI-GENE is an interdisciplinary project which examines minorities’ attitudes towards genetic counselling and reproductive options in the case of inherited genetic recessive disorders and analyses how healthcare policies govern communities’ family formations. It focuses on close-knit religious minorities that emphasise consanguineous and endogamous marriages to strengthen communal bonds to provide a sense of solidarity and of safeguarding lineage and purity. Current scholarship focuses predominantly on single national contexts, specific healthcare policies and individual religious communities, neglecting comparable perspectives. RELI-GENE specifically analyses how transnational spaces serve as strategies to navigate and bypass national healthcare policies and legal restrictions related to marriage and reproductive practices. The project adds a new conceptual framework to understanding (a) the broader implications of directive, nondirective and mandatory genetic counselling within diverse national healthcare systems; (b) communities’ own use of biopolitics to construct discourses around lineage and purity; (c) how individuals respond to both state policies and to the religio-cultural norms and expectations within their communities.RELI-GENE offers a perspectival shift on the governmentality and biopolitics of family formation by1. examining the different forms of power in state-led biopolitics in Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Sweden and Germany and their respective healthcare systems, 2. exploring communities and their transnational links which for religious, cultural and political reasons manifest a biopolitics of purity and examining how these communities construct lineage-oriented narratives to counter their minority status or sense of persecution and marginalisation,3. analysing how individuals respond to state policies but also to the religio-cultural traditions of their communities, and how they engage in various forms of self-governing.