Biopower

(upbeat music) - Thank you for listening to Feminist Keywords. I'm your host, Karma Jabbos. I am the Bobby and Sherry Patton professor of Mexican-American and Latino-Latino Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the recent Book The Borders of AIDS, Race, Quarantine, and Resistance. I'm a member of the Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, which includes Kila Musana-Tompkins, R&A Zura, Amy Bong, myself, Moshana Gumman, and Amber Jamila Musher. For this episode, my guest is Kila Musana-Tompkins, professor of English and gender and women studies at Mona College. She is the author of the 2012 book, Racial Indigestion, Eating Bodies in the 19th century, and she served as the Managing Editor for Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies. Professor Tompkins is the author of the Biopower Entry, and I'm excited to talk to her today. Professor Tompkins, welcome to Feminist As Fuck. - Thanks, Karma. - So I guess I want to just get to know you a little bit. So if you tell us a little more about who you are, including what your pronouns are, and tell us something that you really care about. - Well, my name is Kila. Before I went to graduate school, I worked in the Domestic Violence Movement. I worked in Women's Shelters for about four years, and I was also a journalist in the gang Lesbian Press in Canada, especially for a newspaper called Extra. And I care, I guess I've been a feminist for a very long time, maybe my whole life, and I write about, and I care a lot about food in particular, but I also write about race, and I also write about gender and sexuality and art. And I guess the thing I really care about and write about most of all is bodies, and how people experience their bodies, and how our experience of our bodies is shaped by the world. - Building on that something that you study is the body, and might you say a little bit more about how you study the body? - So my first book, for instance, I looked at literature and art and advertising, and also medical writing in the 19th century to think about how eating became a kind of politically supercharged activity. So for instance, I looked at a lot of images of African Americans enslaved African Americans as edible objects, especially children, and I asked myself what it meant to think about a country where an African American child could be portrayed as an edible object, and what that says about race in America, especially in the 19th century, but continuing on until today, and what that says about whiteness, why whiteness as a historical experience would desire to devour blackness in those ways. And so I used like images in art, visual images in advertising, and then also images in literature to think about why that was a representation, like an image or an idea that came up over and over again. And from that, I started to think about why eating was a way of talking about race, and about how being prescribed certain ways to eat is very closely linked to how we think about how a person is made into a racial subject, or the subject, or belongs to a particular racial demographic. - Yeah, I mean, this is fascinating, and I wish we had more time to dig into these questions, 'cause I think people are gonna be really interested, and hopefully it'll just mean they'll go out and get your book and learn more there. So it seems to me that it's very clear that one of the places that you do your feminism is in your scholarship, but where else do you do your feminism? - I mean, I did a lot of activist work through my teens and through my 20s. I ran my college, my university's Women's Center, York University, which is the oldest women's center in Canada. I did a lot of work on abortion rights. I did a lot of anti-racism work, and then I did a lot of shelter work, and then I really decided I was a writer above anything else, and then I became a professor. So I feel like I do my feminist work in the classroom now that I get to talk to students about the world, and I get to talk to students about feminism, and about gender and race, and what it's like because I teach in the United States, although I'm not originally American, but what it's like to live in the United States right now through thinking through the lens of feminist theory and feminist practice and feminist writings. And then I guess the other thing I do is I write. I do more public facing writing. I have a sub-stack where I talk about academia. It's called Professor Tompkins is Out of Order, and I blab on Twitter all the time. And then finally, I think this book is an example of my political work, which is working with our collective to try to create a textbook that people will read, hopefully not just in classes, but also out in the world and with each other, and talk to each other about some of these words that we think are important to the major debates in feminism and in sexuality studies and in gender studies. - What's one of your favorite classes that you'd like to teach? - I love teaching feminist theory. Feminist theory is really hard to read. It's trying to make new ideas by looking at objects and experiences and phenomena or history in the world, trying to create or abstract or abstract generalizations from large body of data or a large bunch of examples. So I like teaching theory because you have a lot of like, oh shit moments when you're reading it with students 'cause it's so hard because it's a very specialized kind of academic thing, but it's also so much of the theory that seems so specialized is actually about everyday life. So bridging that gap between this highly specialized, like really speculative language, which is trying to, in some ways, like rip the curtain from in front of our eyes or take something that we experience every day and explain it in new words or help us understand it more deeply. That's really kind of my favorite kind of teaching. So I teach feminist theory or I have been teaching feminist theory most years and that's been a really important class for me. - Well, I think it's an important class across the board and I think hopefully our book will be used in a lot of these feminist theory classes. And while we're on the subject of the book and theory, let's talk a little bit about your keywords. So you wrote the bio-power entry. Will you tell us a little bit about where your keyword comes from and who uses it? - So yeah, bio-power is like one of those $100 theory words that really tries to explain a phenomenon that we all experience in our life. So as the word says, it's a theory of power. So it's a word that was originally coined by a French philosopher named Michel Foucault who was a gay man writing in the 1960s and '70s and early '80s in France. And then he also taught a number of times in the United States and other places as well. And his most famous book is a book called The History of Sexuality. And that's where he first lays out most clearly this theory of what he calls bio-power. And most simply, bio-power explains the phenomenon that he says happened in the 18th and 19th century when the way that nation states try to manage the life of their population happens by managing their biological lives very simply. So bio for the biological power for how power works. It's something we take for granted. So for instance, one important institution in the work of this new 19th century phenomenon called bio-power would be medicine in the 14th, 15th, 16th century in Europe and also in the colonies in the Americas and elsewhere. Medicine was kind of disorganized. It had its own philosophy. They often thought of it as art in certain ways. But in science was very closely affiliated with art. But in the 19th century, it became a discipline that started, for instance, regulating who had access to birth control, who had access to information about abortion and information about birth control. And medicine became a profession that was regulated by the state. So that would be an example of what Foucault would call bio-power. That previous to that, there were doctors and there was a king and a king. And there were nation states or there were like principalities or colonies, but nobody was really running medicine as a kind of state or national project. But in the 19th century, medicine becomes one way that people's biological lives are actually managed by powers that are professionalized that regulate their access to their own bodies. So I think in what you just said for many listeners, it will be pretty clear why this is a central concept for gender and sexuality studies. But I'd like to ask you to talk a little bit about that in more particular terms, how this term has circulated within the field itself. Biopower and Foucault's writing, particularly in the history of sexuality, is a kind of foundational moment for instance, for sexuality studies, which is also sometimes known as queer theory or queer studies, Foucault made the argument that there was no such thing as a homosexual until the 19th century. There were people who engaged in homosexual acts. So for instance, like sawdame was a crime, anal sex was a crime, lesbianism was on the books as a crime in some place, but was just like completely invisible as a crime in other , right? So like there were sins and there were crimes, but in the 19th century, with the rise of medicine and then also with the rise of psychoanalysis, then psychology and then also another discipline called sexology. What used to be a thing that certain people did that was sinful, but that they could be forgiven if they atoned or were punished or whatever actually became like an identity. So Foucault's argument in the history of sexuality is that the homosexual is a historical invention. And that's really hard to wrap our heads around and like when I teach the history of sexuality, my students like freak out because it is still so revolutionary to us that what we think of as our deepest, truest self, so for instance, people come out, right, or they say when did you know, did you always know, were you part of a demographic that we would call like lesbian gay, LGBTQIA youth, did you come out in your thirties, right? That idea that our identity and our sexuality are the same thing is actually a historical phenomenon. And this is still like a really radical notion because we like to think of ourselves as owning that knowledge as it being organic to ourselves. But Foucault says, no, this is like actually a modern invention. And part of what bio power did historically, so bio power changes over time, but what bio power does in the 19th century is it classifies productive citizens and unproductive citizens. It classifies normal people and abnormal or deviant people. Normal people are heterosexual, able bodied, productive, working, reproducing heterosexual units. Abnormal people are not productive. They are not producing children. They are not working steadily. They are engaging in sexual activity that does not lead to having children. So part of the rise of the organization of bio power in the 19th century is the production of criminal classes of deviant people as opposed to people who simply regularly and occasionally indulged in terrible carnal activities. Now if you had anal sex or you were caught engaging in anal sex or sawdemy, you were now a homosexual. So that's sort of how Foucault and the idea of bio power became really important to queer theory because it became part of the history of telling the story of how certain sexualities were born, were as a class of people, were rendered criminal, were punished, were tortured, were driven into hiding. So bio power is sort of one way or Foucault's theory of bio power is one way of explaining that history. So we've talked a lot about the 19th century and how Foucault was naming the way that states become invested in producing particular identities in order to manage them. And so if we bring it up more to the contemporary era, how would you fill in the blank of today? Bio power describes X. Here's an example of how bio power is working today. You can think about the panic around trans children. Conservatives are freaking out that there are groups of people whose ideas and experiences of their bodies, of what would be pleasurable to them, of how they want to live, exceeds what they, these conservatives or these bodies of people, consider to be normal. And so bio power continues to work in that the state continues to intervene into our biological lives. Our experiences of our bodies, our experience of our sexualities, and continues to try to regulate that. What's interesting is that in Foucault's story, medicine and science are very invested in tax-onymizing what's normal and abnormal and that continues to be true across the 20th and the 21st century. What's interesting now is that you have these sort of like rabid conservatives and people spreading hate and people kind of producing fear around, for instance, trans children or the other, I think, a hot button topic would be like abortion and women's access to controlling their reproduction. But now actually science and medicine or like the majority of science and medicine is actually saying wait, actually trans people are entitled to this, actually it's not moral panic and actually abortion is a healthcare issue. So I think the way that the question of sexuality and gender and women's rights are still hyper focused on bodies and sexualities is an example of how we continue to live in a biopolitical world. And it seems to me that the state still has this investment in managing life no matter and it will turn to where it needs to go. And so if it's no longer that it's helpful to the state to turn to medicine or psychology to provide its justification for how it wants to manage life, then it will turn elsewhere. Does that seem fair to you or is that off base? No, I think that's right. Some contemporary ideas around bio power that have changed are, for instance, like in the 19th century through the mid 20th, you know, and late 20th century people thought of bio power as disciplining, creating normal bodies. Now one way that we could actually start to rethink bio power which is in some ways a broadly feminist issue but really an issue of like how the state runs its security or how the world creates security is like what another philosopher has been called checkpoint biopolitics which is that for instance, like when I check out at Whole Foods now, because yes, I am that bougie professor, like now Amazon is inviting me to give my palm to scan so that I can check out. And so now actually like our biometrics are increasingly, our own like DNA information, our fingerprints, our retinal scans, our palm prints are more and more part of like this kind of large checkpoint networked security apparatus. So that would be like a different way, not so much about gender and sexuality but about how our biological lives are part of a kind of larger, securitizing apparatus. So that's different than the 19th century. So one thing to say is that bio power continues to be disciplining and bodies and sexualities continue to be hot button issues, especially when people want to produce more panics, especially when people want to control women and people that they think are deviant and or threats to them. But the other part of bio power is that our biology is actually accessed by the state and the police, for instance, in more invasive and my new ways. Yeah, which is really terrifying when people hopefully really start to think about it. So you've given us a lot here to think about a lot of different ways to understand this term. I guess I'm interested to know though, are there any ways that this term gets misused, warnings you want to give us about how not to think about the term bio power? You know, like Foucault's original theory is complex, it has a lot of pieces, something that's really developed in important ways are out of our critiques of Foucault, like so for instance, Foucault, like thought about bio power as a kind of shift in power in the 19th century is shift in how scientific information was disarmed and so on and so forth. But he didn't really think a lot about women or gender differentials. He thought a lot about gay men, and he thought a lot about mental illness in the asylum. He thought a lot about prisons, but questions that are relevant that feminists think about, for instance, the intersection of gender and race, that that was not really something that he was particularly interested in, but Biopower is not racially neutral. That Biopower is about often like that the normal, that normal sexuality and that normal gender, binarisms, what are called normal, or what are used to make us feel that we're not normal and deviant, is actually highly racialized. That whiteness is attached to normal gender, so called normative gender embodiment, and that also that the theory of Biopower, like the history of this birth of a kind of, of like the penetration of power into our biological lives, emerges at the same time as the height of realism and colonialism, and that it's worked out on and against indigenous peoples by imposing certain forms of heterosexuality and certain ideas of what is normative gender embodiment, of family structures, that it's worked out by rendering whiteness as the ideal of gender normativity and blackness as never able to be normatively gendered. So Biopower is not just a gender, a concept attached to gender and sexuality, it's deeply wedded, and this is work that has come out of the thinking of intersectional feminism, of indigenous feminism and of black feminism, it's raced and gendered at the same time. It produces race-gendered sexed bodies, or ideas about race-gendered sex bodies. And so using Biopower in a racially neutral way, without thinking about how it's implicated in the histories of colonialism, in the history of enslavement, and racial capitalism is sort of not adequate to its history. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I think that's actually going to bring us to the end of our time together. But Professor Tompkins, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you, Karma. This was amazing. Awesome. I'd like to again remind you that our guest today was Kila Wazana, Tompkins Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Pomona College and author of the Biopower Entry. I would also like to thank Professor Karen Tonksen at the University of Southern California for spearheading this podcast series and audio engineer Alison Holley for producing this podcast. This podcast is made possible by the consortium for gender, sexuality, race, and popular culture. A faculty-led initiative at the University of Southern California's Doran's Life College that brings together researchers exploring shifts in gender, race, and sexuality in popular culture. I'll also translate that research for the public square. I've been your host, Karma Chavez. Thanks for listening to Feminist As Fuck, the audio companion to key words for gender and sexuality studies.