LAUSR

The common denominator for this cluster of three articles is an exploration of the nexus between biopolitics and national identities. Of course, biopolitics is just one possible conceptual approach to the study of nationalism and nation-building; yet, as this collection of papers demonstrates, it might be instrumental for uncovering certain aspects of national identities that are not visible from other research perspectives. What biopolitics can tell us is that national identity making necessarily implies disciplinary practices of controlling and regulating human lives as a precondition for aggregating a population into a single collective body. The concept of biopolitics might help us to grasp the political as "something that occurs when bodies come together and relate to one another" (Puumala 2013, 952). Biopolitical theorizing is particularly illuminating for studying identities in flux and national narratives in a state of transformation that need some anchoring and fixing in nodal points beyond traditional ideological divides. The application of biopolitical instruments usually serves to stabilize the dispersed identities through grounding them in bodily discourses concerned with managing lives through nutrition, medicine, reproductive behavior, demographic policies, food security, and so forth. Despite their seeming ideological neutrality, these issues might easily tum into manipulative tools by the state and, contrary to initial expectations, produce strong ideological impulses. The three articles collected in this cluster claim, from very different research perspectives, that biopolitical instruments of power are indispensable components of discourses and practices of making and shaping national identities, whether they be exemplified by cultural production in the fashion industry, by practices of inclusion or exclusion of outsiders such as refugees, or by newly contrived ideologies of biopolitical conservatism with evident imperial tones in places such as Russia. In these and other cases, biopolitics is used as an analytical tool to detect and discern a strong totalizing platform for national identity-building projects, including practices of exclusion (Oliwniak 2011, 51) that do not necessarily fit in the liberal understanding of politics. Originally, biopolitics was understood as a concept denoting a peculiar mode of making collective identities (communities) through "normalization," that is to say, hegemonic struggles over producing an understanding of what body-related practices of population management ought to be considered as consensually accepted and welcomed, and what can be contested and bracketed off as detrimental for body politic. In this sense, biopolitics