Abstract
Reviewed by: Eva Hoffmann, Whitman College, USA
What can the history of the last 200 years of biopolitics tell us about current struggles for social and racial justice? How does biopolitics overlap with bifurcated debates around biological determinism versus cultural construction in regard to race, sexuality and species? What possibilities and pitfalls do new scientific insights such as epigenetics and neuroplasticity introduce to our understanding of cultural and biological processes? And how do these processes shape individual and collective bodies and minds in racialised and sexualised ways? In The Biopolitics of Feeling, Kyla Schuller traces the lineage of American biopower back to the almost forgotten history of impressibility science in the nineteenth century – the notion of malleability of individual and collective bodies as hereditary matter throughout evolution. The discourse around impressibility, Schuller argues, is imbricated with sentimental biopower, which constructs and mobilises sexual and racial differences to render bodies as evolutionarily (un)fit for the population of the modern nation state.
The first four chapters of The Biopolitics of Feeling are firmly rooted within the science and literature of the nineteenth century and lay out how discourses of impressibility or sentimental biopower served as a framework to classify bodies as susceptible to evolutionary progress. Schuller investigates and reevaluates documents regarding evolutionary theories by the ‘American School of Evolution’, abolitionist poetry by Frances Harper, gynaecological science by Dr Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Mary Walker and child welfare programmes known as ‘the orphan trains’. Lamarck, not Darwin, Schuller points out, provided the foundation for popular and scientific understandings of evolution. Accordingly, the receptivity to impressions and the regulatory faculty of feelings were viewed as achievements of the civilised that will be passed on to future generations as hereditary traits. In the logic of sentimental biopower, non-white bodies are insufficiently impressible, whereas the female body is prone to excessive sentiment. Racial and sexual differences are hence constructed as relational categories to guarantee the homeostasis of the population and to safeguard the position of the white Man. Heteronormativity relegates sentiment and feeling to the female sphere and at the same time manifests and secures Man’s position of power through his access to rationality and control over his emotions. Schuller’s fifth and last chapter brings the reader into the twentieth century as it is dedicated to W. E. B. Du Bois and his involvement with the eugenic politics of the “Negro Project” as both a continuation and a decisive break with the legacy of sentimental biopower in the nineteenth century.
Schuller’s argument is complex and rich, and her archival work meticulous. She asks her readers more than once to suspend dearly held beliefs – most jarringly when she traces the lineage of contemporary theories of new materialism back to sentimental biopower in the nineteenth century and cautions feminist theory to engage with new materialism’s racist legacy. Yet, her warning against new materialism’s impetus that ‘generally articulates the liveliness of matter as both a novel and liberatory idea’ (p. 212) strikes me as, indeed, a too general critique. Here, Schuller’s argument would have benefitted from a more nuanced engagement with the rich and diverse field of affect theory and new materialism in feminist and queer theory. Moreover, her writing in The Biopolitics of Feeling feels at times convoluted and overly complicated, and I found myself getting lost in her numerous footnotes that often do the heavy lifting and provide much-needed background that the main text does not deliver. The fact that all five chapters – albeit each providing a distinct field of inquiry – tend to repeat her main argument(s) is, in Schuller’s case, a helpful tool for the reader that helps to navigate her complex argument and writing.
The Biopolitics of Feeling is most unsettling in moments when Schuller unearths the biopolitical and capitalistic agenda behind welfare organisations, such as the so-called orphan trains. She illustrates how mobilised sentimental settlement rhetoric was employed to separate migrant children from their families in the Lower Eastside and transport them to rural farms, where hard labour and often emotional, physical and sexual abuse awaited them. The images of notes that desperate parents sewed into their children’s’ clothes are haunting – not least at a moment when news about the separation of and violence against migrant families sanctioned and executed by the US state are ubiquitous again. Schuller’s book is so important because it tells these stories that are otherwise lost, and because she places them in a direct lineage to our current debates of racial and sexual differences as either culturally constructed or biologically determined. They are both, she argues, leaving the reader with a stark warning that biopolitics can – and will – deploy the very aspects that feminist, queer and anti-racist scholarship might deem as liberatory, empowering and just.