The biopolitics of feeling : race, sex, and science in the nineteenth century
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The biopolitics of feeling : race, sex, and science in the nineteenth century
（Anima / a series edited by Mel Y. Chen and Jasbir K. Puar）
Duke University Press, 2018
- : pbk. : alk. paper
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [247]-269) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In The Biopolitics of Feeling Kyla Schuller unearths the forgotten, multiethnic sciences of impressibility-the capacity to be transformed by one's environment and experiences-to uncover how biopower developed in the United States. Schuller challenges prevalent interpretations of biopower and literary cultures to reveal how biopower emerged within the discourses and practices of sentimentalism. Through analyses of evolutionary theories, gynecological sciences, abolitionist poetry and other literary texts, feminist tracts, child welfare reforms, and black uplift movements, Schuller excavates a vast apparatus that regulated the capacity of sensory and emotional feeling in an attempt to shape the evolution of the national population. Her historical and theoretical work exposes the overlooked role of sex difference in population management and the optimization of life, illuminating how models of binary sex function as one of the key mechanisms of racializing power. Schuller thereby overturns long-accepted frameworks of the nature of race and sex difference, offers key corrective insights to modern debates surrounding the equation of racism with determinism and the liberatory potential of ideas about the plasticity of the body, and reframes contemporary notions of sentiment, affect, sexuality, evolution, and heredity.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Sentimental Biopower 1
1. Taxonomies of Feeling: Sensation and Sentiment in Evolutionary Race Science 35
2. Body as Text, Race as Palimpsest: Frances E. W. Harper and Black Feminist Biopolitics 68
3. Vaginal Impressions: Gyno-neurology and the Racial Origins of Sexual Difference 100
4. Incremental Life: Biophilanthropy and the Child Migrants of the Lower East Side 134
5. From Impressibility to Interactionism: W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Eugenics, and the Struggle against Genetic Determinisms 172
Epilogue. The Afterlives of Impressibility 205
Notes 215
Bibliography 247
Index 271
by "Nielsen BookData"
