The Biopolitics of Feeling
eBook - PDF

The Biopolitics of Feeling

Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Biopolitics of Feeling

Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access The Biopolitics of Feeling by Kyla Schuller in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Social History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
fig. 1.1. 
“Edward 
Drinker 
Cope 
in 
His 
Study.” 
Image 
#104670, 
American 
Museum 
of 
Natural 
History 
Library.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction: Sentimental Biopower
  5. 1. Taxonomies of Feeling: Sensation and Sentiment in Evolutionary Race Science
  6. 2. Body as Text, Race as Palimpsest: Frances E. W. Harper and Black Feminist Biopolitics
  7. 3. Vaginal Impressions: Gyno-neurology and the Racial Origins of Sexual Difference
  8. 4. Incremental Life: Biophilanthropy and the Child Migrants of the Lower East Side
  9. 5. From Impressibility to Interactionism: W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Eugenics, and the Struggle against Genetic Determinisms
  10. Epilogue: The Afterlives of Impressibility
  11. Notes
  12. Bibliography
  13. Index