Biopolitics and Utopia

An Interdisciplinary Reader

P. Stapleton, A. Byers, P. Stapleton, A. Byers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137514752
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This interdisciplinary reader offers a fascinating exploration of the intersection of biopolitics and utopia by employing a range of theoretical approaches. Each essay provides a unique application of the two concepts to topics spanning the social sciences and humanities.

PART I

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CHAPTER 1

American Bodies in a Time of War: The Militarized Body as a Utopian Space and Biopolitical Project for the State

Andrew Byers

Introduction: Biopolitics and American Politics

Contemporary American politics is, in many ways, biopolitics. The body itself, along with a host of imagined possibilities for it, lies at the center of many political struggles. It has become politicized, normalized, regulated, and controlled through technologies of surveillance and intervention. The American state has become increasingly interested in the regulation of human bodies in the areas of reproduction and health, highlighting the complex ways in which the state and society—the body politic—interact with the bodies of its citizens.¹ While we may think of this as a relatively recent development, the US government has conceived of the bodies of its citizens as a kind of biopolitical project, and as sites of intervention, throughout much of the twentieth century, first under the guidance of influential moral reformers during the First World War, and, beginning in the 1940s, as part of the creation of a national security state.² The 1940–41 discovery that half of all American men aged between 18 and 45 were medically unfit for military service ignited a debate about the health of the nation, involving discourses of the body among civilian and military leaders, physicians, educators, and fitness advocates lasting from 1940 to the 1960s. The Cold War brought renewed concerns when similar numbers of Korean and Vietnam War draftees were rejected for military service. The rapid rise of Soviet athletes in the Olympics and other international athletic competitions in the 1950s raised fears of a “muscle gap,” which, according to at least some health and fitness advocates, might be as dangerous as the perceived missile gap.³ The American body had always been imagined as strong, fit, and hardy, but this image was threatened when the true state of the health of American citizens was revealed, sparking concerns that Americans were growing soft, weak, flabby, and unfit. Even more alarmingly, the very health of the nation, and its continued ability to defend itself and battle its enemies abroad, seemed to many observers to also be endangered.⁴

Acknowledging the influence of Michel Foucault on our thinking about the body, Elizabeth Grosz notes that “power is inscribed on and by bodies through modes of social supervision and discipline as well as self-regulation.”⁵ We see this multipronged program to inscribe a regime of national fitness on American bodies through each of these means. Foucault’s “docile bodies,” pliable as objects of intervention and training, eventually function not just through external regulation and supervision, but are also increasingly made malleable and adapted via self-regulation and self-control; these eventually become not just docile bodies, but also docile wills, desires, and minds.⁶ The inculcation of self-directed fitness goals is particularly relevant to the mid-century American case because of ongoing concerns that an overtly state-mandated fitness regime would meet resistance and be perceived as “un-American” due to its perceived intrusions into individual freedoms.

Foucault asserted that power does not simply “say no”—though at times it may indeed prohibit—but is instead productive, “engendering contextually-specific ways of knowing, being, feeling, acting, desiring . . . giv[ing] us our identities rather than denying them, distorting them, or taking them from us.”⁷ This kind of productive power works because it persuades individuals to take action and engage in new and modified behaviors, convincing them that doing so is in their best interest; self-surveillance becomes an important mechanism, particularly as a lighter mode of governance within a liberal democracy.⁸ Governmental interventions via legal requirements and state mandates could run the risk of engendering resistance by citizens living in a society where they are not used to obvious, heavy-handed interventions by the state in intimate matters and identity formation. This is made evident in US government efforts that, with the cooperation of the medical profession and physical education community, sought to engender, via cooperative and voluntary means, an entirely new American identity and conception of the body, that of a healthy, physically fit body capable of serving the nation militarily or otherwise in a time of war, or during the Cold War, in a perpetual state of almost-war. This kind of biopolitical program marries several utopian impulses: a bodily utopia, a utopian conception of American citizenship, and a utopia of the newly reconstituted American nation. In the minds of the advocates of such an American utopia, the three were inextricably bound, with a rejuvenation of American bodies leading almost inevitably to transformation in American notions of citizenship and nation.

The bodies under discussion here are not simply the sites of intervention by an intrusive welfare state, as had been seen previously when social reformers and government officials sought to exercise their expanded reach and regulate the body to promote particular moral or hygienic visions in the early decades of the twentieth century. The bodies under discussion here are, in fact, sites of intervention by a growing national security state, beginning with World War II and continuing into the Cold War, that was less interested in endorsing a particular moral vision than in advocating a new, fit American body as demonstration of a strong, powerful, militarized American body politic that would be capable of defending the nation and aggressively asserting its interests against fascist or communist opponents.

While aspects of this debate centered on fears of what had become of American masculinity, concerns broadened to encompass fears about the physiques of the nation as a whole, to include not just men of military age, but women and children as well. The youth of America became an area of particular concern—and a site of tremendous interest for an imagined reconstruction—when it was demonstrated in 1953 that nearly 60 percent of American children could not meet minimum fitness standards.⁹ Just as the US military had a massive pool of new recruits that it could modify and adapt to its own needs virtually at will, so too did schoolchildren provide a source of malleable bodies. National advertising campaigns, physicians, and the new group of fitness “experts” could urge the civilian parents of these children to get in shape, for their own good and the good of the nation, but such urgings could not readily be enforced in the home. Children, like military conscripts, represented a captive audience at school, however, where they could be made subject to direct intervention by teachers, coaches, doctors, and government officials. It is no coincidence that some of the most effective, and longest running, government programs designed to encourage physical fitness have targeted children.

World War II

But concerns about the fitness of American children came later; in the lead-up to American intervention in World War II, it was adult men of military age who initially represented the greatest immediate cause for concern. The nation’s first peacetime draft, which began in 1940, offered public officials, physicians and health experts, physical fitness professionals, and other interested parties the opportunity to intervene in the lives—and bodies—of a growing pool of Americans as a means of resculpting the bodies of not just soldiers during wartime but also American citizens long after war’s end. The American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation’s National Preparedness Committee asserted that the purpose of

the nation is not merely to prepare to make war, it is to live before, during, and after. Many of the war-like virtues such as physical courage, stamina, cooperation, endurance, and faith in leaders are desirable traits in people at all times. Hence, plans for physical and social fitness must see beyond the immediate needs of combatant forces—important as these are—to the needs of youth in relation to national life.¹⁰

This vision of wartime opportunity to reshape the health of the nation in a postwar American society would capture the imagination of utopian-minded fitness advocates for the duration of the war.

As part of its effort to assess and induct large numbers of able-bodied men beginning in 1940 with the introduction of the draft, the army created an elaborate sorting and screening system for draftees. From October 1940 through the end of the war, Selective Service registered 49 million American men aged between 18 and 45...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Actions
• Part II   Speculations
• Part III   Reactions
• Part IV   Reflections
• List of Contributors
• Index