위험한 인구, 초포식자들과 마녀들: 푸코의 계보학적 방법론으로 분석한 <13번째 수정헌법>과 <세일럼의 남서쪽: 샌안토니오 포 이야기>의 생명정치

초록

This study examines two contemporary documentary films—Ava DuVernay’s 13th (2016) and Deborah Esquenazi’s Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four (2016)—through Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and genealogical method. While the films address different sites of power, from racialized mass incarceration to the criminalization of queer Latina women under child-protection discourse, both reveal how modern power governs life, produces “danger,” and legitimizes social death through ostensibly neutral institutions. 13th exposes a racialized, disciplinary biopolitics in which Black populations are cast as dangerous and converted into economic resources within the prison-industrial complex, including via organizations such as ALEC. By contrast, Southwest of Salem foregrounds a micropolitical biopolitical regime in which neoliberal languages of safety, family, and child protection translate queer women’s bodies, intimacies, and practices of care into juridical risk, producing “truth” through moral panic, expert authority, and legal procedure. Drawing on genealogy, this study argues that contemporary biopolitics is not a single logic but a set of differentiated strategies across race, gender, sexuality, and class. It also shows how cinema can operate as a critical cultural practice that makes visible the historical contingency of seemingly natural power relations—what Foucault termed a critical ontology of the present—thereby opening space for counter-discourse and alternative forms of life under biopolitical conditions.

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