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How a Critical Biopolitical Studies Lens Alters the Questions We Ask vis-Ă -vis Race
Jane Takagi-Little, the heroine of Ruth Ozekiâs novel My Year of Meats (1998), produces documentary infomercials that sell âthe American way of lifeââthat is, the daily intake of beef, chicken, or porkâto Japanese housewives. Working for a U.S. livestock conglomerate called Beef-Ex, Jane includes minority races, lesbians, immigrants, the disabled, and untraditional families in these televisual features of representative Americans who lovingly cook with meat, thereby undermining the Japanese equation of Americans with robust Anglo-Saxons and white ethnics. Yet when she finds herself interviewing a family living on a cattle ranch and injecting their livestock with hormones in order to make ends meet, she has an âAha!â moment. Is making more multicultural the social, political, and economic spheres of American life the most important work to be done in pursuing social justice?
The head cattle rancher, Gale, explains how maximizing profits means shortening fattening times by accelerating growth through hormone injections. This process restricts cattle movement, requiring antibiotics because the close quarters breed disease, and also leads to aborting heifers âwhen they get accidental bred [because] you canât have pregnant heifers in a feedlot. All they do is eat, eat, eat, and never gainâ (263). As the vulnerable human face of these feedlot practices, Galeâs five-year-old niece, unintentionally exposed to the hormone Lutalyse, has grown fully mature breasts on her small body. While this five-year-oldâs altered life cycle qua reproductive precocity appears treatable, Ozeki drives home the tragic stakes of these chemical contaminations in Janeâs own struggles with a prior exposure to synthesized estrogen while in utero. Her mother took diethylstilbestrol (DES) while pregnantâprescribed by her midwestern doctor to prevent miscarriage in this âdelicateâ Japanese lady (156)âresulting in Janeâs own malformed uterus and infertility. Ozekiâs readers also learn that Janeâs father has died of cancer because his work in postnuclear Japan exposed him to lingering environmental radiation after the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings.
Within this storyline, Ozekiâs protagonist changes. She begins to perceive politics as encompassing more than democratic, more-inclusive cultural representation. Politics also includes the terrain of biology and ecologyâof health, diet, and environment as they affect the reproduction and vitality of the population. Jane finds herself steeped in the biopolitical. Her documentary infomercials end up altering the bodily habits and life course of a Japanese housewife named Akiko, with Jane effectively molding Akikoâs anatomy and desires. Her research on the efficiencies of the cattle industry, achieved through abortifacients and other hormone injections, doubles as research on her own (embryonic) medical history, with biopolitics here pointing to the entanglement of various populationsâlivestock and humans, cows and women.1
Broadly speaking, Asian American texts have been valuable to a revisionist U.S. literary canon precisely because of their testament to the active racial exclusion of Asians. Belying the promise of color-blind political equality, this exclusion occurs through legal bars to immigration, educational segregation, labor stratification also known as âglass ceilings,â criminalization as enemy aliens and spies, and social and psychic wounding through harmful stereotypes. The fields of postcolonial, world, and U.S. literatures have yet to theorize Asian American cultural production in a sustained manner for what it tells us about biopolitics, modern modes of governmentality, and the somaticization of social and political traumas. This first chapter begins that process by considering how a critical biopolitical studies approach shifts the critical aims and insights afforded by Asian American cultural production. In the next section, I will define biopowerâclarifying its relation to anatomopolitics, biopolitics, and necropoliticsâbefore mapping the critical interactions between Asian American cultural production and a critical biopolitical studies framework.
Pastoral Governmentality and Necropolitics
A certain enigmatic imprecision characterizes the terms âbiopoliticsâ and âbiopower,â an imprecision deriving from Michel Foucaultâs ongoing endeavor to refine these ideas.2 Foucault distinguishes modern biopower from the favored technique of sovereign power in the ancien regime. Whereas the sovereign displays his spectacular power by way of âmurderous splendorâ (e.g., the gruesome public execution of enemies and offending subjects by tearing their bodies asunder), modern biopower operates by way of âdistributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise and hierarchizeââthat is, to document, rank, and make visible subject bodies, rather than display itself spectacularly in its power to execute at will.3 The techniques of modern biopower shift from gruesome spectacle toward a statistical aggregating and comparing of populations, together with disciplinary procedures aimed at individuals enacted to increase health, well-being, and vitality.4 This biopower normalizes certain desires, âthe historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life.â5 In those who have extended Foucaultâs schema, biopower is sometimes used as an umbrella term for two kinds of manifestations of power, a disciplinary âanatomo-politics of the human bodyâ and a regulatory âbiopolitics of the population.â6 But sometimes âbiopoliticalâ simply stands as the adjectival form of biopower (a point to which I return).7
According to Nikolas Rose, a pastoral eugenics, policed by citizens and not the state, characterizes biopower in âadvanced liberalâ societies.8 Rose describes this style of governance as interpersonal decision making,
not organized or administered by âthe stateâ [but taking] place in a plural and contested field traversed by . . . ethics committees . . . researchers . . . employers and insurers . . . biotech companies [and] self-help organizations. . . . Best [described as] relational . . . [this pastoral mode] works through . . . the affects and ethics of the guider [and] the guided. . . . These new pastors of the soma espouse the ethical principles of informed consent, autonomy, voluntary action and choice, and non-directiveness.9
For Rose, the prenatal consultâwhere one is given information on genetic-risk profiles and never coerced overtly into making eugenic rather than dysgenic decisionsâepitomizes the pastoral quality that pressures the living to conform to ideals of optimized health and well-being.
As background for understanding how Asian American literary authors respond to and reflect upon this form of governmentality, let me briefly draw upon historical and ethnographic narratives to review how Asian Americans and Asians subject to U.S. imperialism have been regulated by biopower. Focusing on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Asian immigration to the United States, historians Joan Trauner and Nayan Shah elucidate the overt medical scapegoating of the Chinese. The labeling of these immigrants as carriers of smallpox and tuberculosis justified quarantines, invasive inspections of living spaces, and calls for the wholesale razing of the âpestilentâ dens of Chinatown. According to Alexandra Minna Stern, the graphic images of âcontagion and constitutional malaiseâ initially associated with Chinese menâportraits of them as effeminate, enervated, or âspotted with suppurating pustules [and] ugly lesionsââspread their biopolitical effects to other Asian communities:10
Medicine and public health molded the adaptation of Asian immigrants to the West, from the health inspections and psychological exams they endured on Angel Island to the antiprostitution and antivice campaigns waged by Progressives in Chinatowns or the public hygiene angles of the Americanization campaigns that were promoted from inside and outside of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino communities.11
While Stern privileges the immigrant paradigm in limning the specific ways biopower shapes successive waves of Asians to America, historian Claire J. Kim looks at imperial archives from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries reporting on the medical circuits through which the Philippines and Hawaiâi came under official U.S. rule. According to Kim, Asian and Pacific Islander bodies became subjected to American biopolitical schemes not simply as immigrants biomedically assessed, sanitized, and clinically normed as they landed on American shores but as tropical subjects never having traveled from their archipelagic homes but targeted for âsavingâ by American philanthropic institutions aimed at improving global health (see also Warwick Anderson). Through âpaternalistic missions to save colonial lives endangered by . . . infectious disease,â12 American medical men associated with the Rockefeller Foundationâs International Health Commission turned U.S. extraterritorial possessions such as the Philippines and Hawaiâi (other extant U.S. territories include Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) into living laboratories for the devising of ânovelâ techniques for epidemic control.13 Such advanced biopolitical techniques would then make their modernizing way back to the metropole.
C. Kim notes as well the historiographical revisions demanded by such a critical biopolitical studies lens. Histories by Asian Americanists of Hawaiâi and other tropical territories formerly colonized or administered by the U.S. understandably focus on labor history, since the large Asian immigrant presence in these islands emerged through plantation ownersâ importing of Asiatic labor (Yun, Jung). Noting, however, that âlabor history in Hawaiâi . . . has tended to overlook matters of reproducing family, sexuality, and gender as central features of the plantation regime in favor of attention to the contradictory formations of race and class that often divided workers,â C. Kim argues that a âcritical inter-imperial frameworkâ (one congruent with what I call a critical biopolitical studies approach) remains a necessary intervention:
Sugar plantation laborers were constantly subjected to underlying gendered and sexual protocols that were tied to policies of U.S. settler colonialism and efficient agricultural production. Access to sexual reproduction and family formation was also crucial to the ethnic and racial hierarchy in Hawaiâi after its adoption of U.S. immigration and naturalization laws in 1900, classifying Asians as aliens ineligible for citizenship.14
Writing as well on the nonidyllic history of the mostly colored, poly-ethnic workforce on Hawaiâiâs plantations, literary scholar Stephen J. Sumida notes that âsince native Hawaiâians were grievously diminished in number by exposure to disease foreign to them before the arrival of Captain Cook and his crew in 1778,â white plantation owners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought in Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Koreansâpresumptive âcognate racesâ to the Kanaka Maoli of Hawaiâiââpeoples both to labor on the plantations and to repopulate the islandsâ (Sumida 133). A critical biopolitical studies framework, in short, shows the inseparability of the erotic (and the reproductive), the environmental, the epidemiological, and the economic, suggesting as well that literacy in key concepts refined by scholarship in feminist/gender studies and queer theory remains necessary to a robust critical biopolitical studies.
Tackling a more recent instance of medical policing involving a restructuring of intimate relations, Anne Fadimanâs The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) reports on a Hmong familyâs frustrating encounter in the 1980s with the Merced County Medical Hospital while seeking treatment for their toddler Liaâs epilepsy. Because they misunderstood the regimen and objected to the side effects, Liaâs parents failed to administer the prescribed anticonvulsants to their daughter, prompting physician Neil Ernst to put Lia in foster care. While genuine concern prompts Ernstâs call to Child Protective Services, he also wants the proud and superstitious Hmong to admit that Western medicine knows some things better than they. Here we see how a well-intentioned, pastoral mode of medical authority colludes with bans on immigration, xenophobia, and the criminalization of Asian groups. As another doctor attending to Lia puts it, â[Liaâs parents] seemed to accept things that to me were major catastrophes as part of the normal flow of life. For them, the crisis was the treatment, not the epilepsyâ (Fadiman 53). Fadimanâs even-handed portrait limns this tragedy as both biomedical (the recurrence in Lia of ostensibly preventable grand mal seizures) and familial (the wresting of the child from her doting parents). A quintessential portrait of the refugee-immigrant experience of a part-benevolent, part-tyrannical system of biopower, the narrative stresses a sorrowful mix of clashing protocols of care, with no clear or single blameworthy agent.
While Rose stresses the pastoral quality of modern anatomopolitics, others such as Mbembe and Chow (both mentioned in the introduction), as well as Malcolm Bull and Rosi Braidotti, would regard an overemphasis on biopowerâs emotional circuits, its pastoral ârelationalâ mechanisms, as having the potential to mystify the violence at the core of contemporary biopower. To them, ânecropoliticsâ is merely the flip side of biopower. As Chow puts it, the ideological mandate to live and thrive âgives justification to even the most aggressive and oppressive mechanisms of interference and control in the name of helping the human species increase its chances of survival.â15 According to Jodi Kim, the period Americans call the Cold War (1947â1991) illuminates this point. While this era saw the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a guarded but technically âpeacefulâ standoff, âhot warsâ raged in Asiaâin Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laosâin which U.S. troops were involved in the massive slaughter of Asians. In the name of protecting Americansâ thriving way of life (the surplus comforts provided by democratic capitalism), the United States justified its outright necropoliticsâits (assisted) killing of purported Communist sympathizers within nonaligned nations, so as to prevent the latter from falling, in domino fashion, to Soviet control. The orphaning of Asian populations resulting from these wars also meant that further biopolitical effects would followâthe thriving traffic in Korean adoptees to the United States being one such effect, with Korean mothers feeling compelled to give their children up for a putative better life following the âimperative to live.â
As we can see, some critical confusion characterizes biopower and biopolitics partly because, while Foucault first differentiated these termsâmaking biopolitics and anatomopolitics subsets of biopowerâthe terms âbiopowerâ and âbiopoliticsâ are often collapsed in usage. As distinct from âanatomopolitics,â âbiopoliticsâ refers to a more top-down managerial perspective employing a calculative logic in assessing population-aggregates comparatively, with particular scrutiny paid to âthe size and quality of the population; reproduction and human sexuality; conjugal parental and familial relations; health and disease; birth and death.â16 Because of its emphasis on aggregates, biopolitics more easily harmonizes with sociological analyses focused on ârace.â At the same time, literary accounts, especially if thickly described (to borrow a term from ethnographic fieldwork), owe much of their richness to the scale of anatomopoliticsâreferring to the corporeal entrainment of individual bodies and âthe subjectivizing processes [whereby the individual shapes her] notions of the self and how [she] should want to behave.â17 Focusing on the radical feminist health movements of the 1970s, STS scholar Michelle Murphy specifies these subjectivizing, anatomopolitical processes as learned âprocedural scriptsâ establishing âprotocolsâ on â âhow toâ do somethingâ (2012, 25). While Foucault stresses the spread of these protocols as a tactic furthering the docility of bodies, Murphy emphasizes that grassroots groups also disseminate such know-how, so as to challenge professional cliniciansâ monopoly on scientific knowledge and tool-use. Anatomopo...