The Biopolitics of Disability: A Critique of the Neoliberal England of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Abstract

This article investigates the biopolitics of disability in the ablenationalist England of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go and examines how a neoliberal society urges its citizens to depend on market-based private medical management to be able-bodied individuals in order to fully participate in society. It also analyses the lives of clones who reside at Hailsham, a boarding school, as well as those of the non-cloned human beings living in the community outside Hailsham to illustrate the Agambenian ideologies of zoē and bios. The less explored and less debated sections of the novel, such as the fictional state of England, the institutions that produce and raise human clones like Hailsham, and the society of non-cloned human beings who are waiting for organ transplantation, are examined to exemplify how ablenationalism and able-disabled become strategies for inclusion in a neoliberal society of Ishiguro’s fictional England, thus problematising the ableist notion of inclusion as presented in Never Let Me Go.