Embodied Power

Demystifying Disembodied Politics

Mary Hawkesworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138667297
• eBook ISBN: 9781317212515
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Embodied Power explores dimensions of politics seldom addressed in political science, illuminating state practices that produce hierarchically-organized groups through racialized gendering—despite guarantees of formal equality. Challenging disembodied accounts of citizenship, the book traces how modern science and law produce race, gender, and sexuality as purportedly natural characteristics, masking their political genesis. Taking the United States as a case study, Hawkesworth demonstrates how diverse laws and policies concerning civil and political rights, education, housing, and welfare, immigration and securitization, policing and criminal justice create finely honed hierarchies of difference that structure the life prospects of men and women of particular races and ethnicities within and across borders. In addition to documenting the continuing operation of embodied power across diverse policy terrains, the book investigates complex ways of seeing that render raced-gendered relations of domination and subordination invisible. From common assumptions about individualism and colorblind perception to disciplinary norms such as methodological individualism, methodological nationalism, and abstract universalism, problematic presuppositions sustain mistaken notions concerning formal equality and legal neutrality that allow state practices of racialized gendering to escape detection with profound consequences for the life prospects of privileged and marginalized groups. Through sustained critique of these flawed suppositions, Embodied Power challenges central beliefs about the nature of power, the scope of state action, and the practice of liberal democracy and identifies alternative theoretical frameworks that make racialized-gendering visible and actionable.

Key Features:

• Demonstrates how understandings of politics change when the experiences of men and women of diverse classes, races, and ethnicities are placed at the center of analysis.
• Explains why race-neutral and gender-neutral policies fail to eliminate entrenched inequalities.
• Shows how accredited methods in political science (and the social sciences more generally) mask state practices that create and sustain racial and gender inequality.
• Traces how mistaken notions of biological determinism have diverted attention from political processes of racialization, gendering, and sexualization.
• Argues that the intersecting categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality are essential to all subfields of political science if contemporary power is to be studied systematically.

1EMBODIED POWER

DOI: 10.4324/9781315618968-1

Ignorance is not just a black space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well.

(Thomas Pynchon 1984, 15)

Politics in the 21st-century United States has deviated rather dramatically from established notions about rule of law, stable institutions, and predictable outcomes of conventional practices. In the first presidential election of the new millennium, for example, the winner was determined not by a plurality of votes or by the Electoral College but by the U.S. Supreme Court, an institution bound by the Constitution and judicial precedent not to decide “political” questions. The polling results from Florida, which generated Bush v. Gore (531 U.S. 98 [2000]) were tied to voting lists riddled with errors and mistaken entries that purged more than 12,000 qualified Black voters from registration rolls during the 2000 election cycle. If the fates of the most powerful political actors in the nation were affected by embodied power, so too were the fates of some of the least advantaged members of the polity. Federal welfare legislation passed in 1996, which replaced welfare entitlements (AFDC) with “Temporary Assistance to Needy Families” (TANF), allowed states to severely restrict poor women citizens’ autonomy, privacy rights, reproductive freedom, and bodily integrity, subjecting them to unwaged labor (“workfare”), interrogation about their sexual histories, and mandatory paternity identification through genetic testing (Smith 2004). In the aftermath of the terrorist bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, more than 5,000 men – predominantly Muslims and Arabs – were held in detention, many in solitary confinement for 23 hours per day, subjected to recurrent strip searches without being charged with a crime and without having access to legal counsel (Sampaio 2015). Beyond the borders of the United States, “detainees,” held in “black sites” without being formally charged, were subjected to brutal interrogation techniques condoned by the CIA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice – techniques designed to “feminize” and “dehumanize” by destroying personality, individuality, agency, and resistance (Kaufman-Osborn 2005). “Sovereign citizens,” proclaiming themselves contemporary “Minute Men,” patrolled the increasingly militarized southern border of the United States as vigilante and state “securitization” measures operated to bar Latino/as from undocumented entry. To protect its citizens from “perceived” threats, 23 US states passed “stand-your-ground laws” that allow use of deadly force in “self-defense” without the duty to retreat, laws that inspired the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, and subsequently sustained the acquittal of his murderer. Recent deaths of multiple Black men while in police custody, which were captured on videotape and circulated on social media, put a spotlight on extrajudicial violence and raised important questions about the conversion of misdemeanor offenses into crimes punished by death. In the aftermath of political unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, on the first anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, armed white vigilantes, who called themselves “Oath Keepers,” began patrolling the streets of this majority-Black community.

Each of these examples involves a form of embodied power that does not fit well with conceptions of politics advanced within the discipline of political science. Whether invoking the classical Aristotelian conception of participating in the activities of ruling and being ruled, a Weberian conception of rational-legal bureaucratic decision-making, a new institutionalist focus on the official institutions of state, a pluralist emphasis on interest accommodation, a functionalist understanding of the central challenges of political systems (e.g., state building, nation building, participation, allocation of values, redistribution, systems integration), or a sustained examination of “political behavior,” political science offers an abstract account of equal citizens, and a disembodied account of politics in which race, gender, ethnicity, nationality and sexuality play no central political role. Although overt instances of racist or sexist oppression may on occasion be acknowledged, they are treated as anomalies that reveal nothing about politics or political power per se. Adhering to liberal assumptions about equal citizenship, national belonging, human rights embedded in national constitutions and international conventions, and exercises of power circumscribed by law, disembodied politics pays no heed to scripted practices of subordination associated with racialization and gendering.

The central thesis of this book is that inattention to embodied power severely limits contemporary understandings of the political. Disembodied politics fails to account for mechanisms of power that operate epistemically and ontologically, shaping perceptions, understandings, ways of being and ways of interacting with others. Indeed, disembodied politics renders invisible state policies and practices that create particular raced-gendered-sexualized identities situated in relations of domination and subordination. Through criteria for citizenship and naturalization, census categories, manifold classification systems created by statute and bureaucratic decisions, state practices of policing, surveillance and securitization, distributive and redistributive policies, health and employment regulations, states engage in racialization and gendering, creating forms of inequality “written on the body,” producing women and men as members of particular races, classes, ethnicities, nationalities, and sexualities. The state does far more than “manage” a diverse population, its produces group identities in and through exclusionary political processes and substantive policies.

Embodied power refers to the production of hierarchically organized groups through racialization and gendering, and to practices that situate raced-classed-sexed individuals within particular groups, which profoundly affects the kinds of public persona and political action possible for them. Racialization and gendering simultaneously create the dominant and the subordinate by means of laws, norms, policies, and practices that categorize, separate, assign places in the social order, and seep into individual consciousness in ways that try to ensure the individual knows his/her place.

Embodied power is manifested in multiple ways:

• Categories of race and sex produce “group” membership. Women and men from diverse cultures, traditions, and regions, who may have little if anything in common, are deemed “the same” by virtue of their placement within one category. For example, hundreds of ethnic groups in South Asia, the Caribbean, and in South, Central, and North America were subsumed under the rubric “Indian” in the context of colonization. From 1882 through 1965, the Asian Exclusion Acts homogenized half the world's population into one – “Asian” – category, a group excluded from immigration and naturalization in the United States.
• Racist and sexist ideas provide rationales for and legitimate practices of state-sanctioned oppression. For example, the African slave trade, the conversion of indentured servitude to chattel slavery, the exploitation of indigenous labor through encomiendas, and extermination of indigenous peoples were integral to European colonization of the “new world” in the 16th through 19th centuries. Just as declarations about the rights of Afghan women, and the feminization of Muslim men at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were integral to the “War on Terror.”
• Racist and sexist practices require and produce performances of servility, subservience, and subjection. As Frantz Fanon (1952) demonstrated in Black Skin, White Masks, scripted practices of subordination associated with colonialism were often internalized by the colonized, resulting not only in the conviction of inferiority, but internalized self-hatred – a phenomenon familiar to racialized and sexual minorities in contemporary nations.
• Racialization is integral to war-making through the construction of “the enemy” and the partition of the world into stable nation-states and “peripheral” zones in which proxy wars exacerbate local conflicts. Both the depiction of these so-called peripheral wars and accounts of their causes (boundary disputes, irredentist claims, ethnic and tribal divisions, religious clashes, local war lords, rogue states) depend upon and re-inscribe racial hierarchies. The extreme violence – expulsion of populations, seizure of land, rape, ethnic cleansing, and genocide – involved in wars in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Darfur make the dynamics and consequences of racialization and gendering visible. Situating these horrors in a discourse of “failed states,” however, masks the role of racialization and gendering in these conflicts, appealing instead to a civilized/barbaric binary that rests upon racist presuppositions.
• Gendered racialization produces modes of invisibility and hypervisibility. As white men are positioned as the unmarked norm – the citizen, the humanitarian, the cosmopolitan – their race becomes invisible. By contrast, black women are made hyper-visible in relation to putative welfare dependency and black men are criminalized both in terms of popular expectations and in terms of police surveillance.
• Racialized gendering also eclipses individuality as “whites” are positioned in stark opposition to “Blacks” and “men” to “women.” Commonalities and idiosyncrasies, privileges and constraints, are occluded as dichotomous categorization masks intricate relations of co-constitution and complex differentiation within and across races and genders.

Embodied power may also engender mobilizations by the marginalized to contest imposed identities and unwarranted constraints on freedom, and to disrupt conventions that do psychic damage as well as impairing economic, social, and political survival. As decades of struggle against apartheid in South Africa, for civil rights in the USA, and to create a Muslim Ummah (community) in multiple Middle East and North African states demonstrate, mass mobilization, grassroots protest, and violent confrontation are triggered by oppressive practices associated with racialization and gendering. Contestations over dominant social beliefs and values, entrenched or recently cultivated prejudices and hatreds, as well as modes of social organization that concentrate privilege and disadvantage on different sectors of the population can generate transformed self-understandings and social relations. Consciousness raising, dis-identification from hegemonic norms, construction of collective identities and allegiances, and, sometimes, armed conflict can be manifestations of embodied power – when those who have been marginalized struggle to craft new identities and new polities, freed from stigma and insult.

Whether examined in historical context or in contemporary affairs, embodied power manifests in state action and in political mobilization against raced-gendered practices of the state. Racialization and gendering are apparent in domestic policy (e.g., education, health, social services, criminal justice, military recruitment, securitization, immigration) and in international relations (e.g., characterizations of “rogue” states and “humanitarian” interventions, distributions of foreign aid and development initiatives, operations of state terror, and armed insurrections). The mechanisms of embodied power are diverse. They include stereotyping and construction of target populations; differential treatment, marginalization, and exclusion of particular racialized groups; silencing; withholding epistemic authority and political recognition; surveillance; detention; death and collective extermination. Given its pervasive presence, why is embodied power so neglected by the discipline of political science?

In their fascinating work Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (2008, 2) suggest that “ignorance has a history and a complex political and sexual geography.” Far from being a “natural absence or a void where knowledge has not yet spread,” “unknowing” is produced and maintained in diverse settings. Proctor and Schiebinger advocate the study of ignorance and the development of tools for understanding how and why various forms of knowing “have not come to be” or have disappeared, or have been delayed or neglected. And they emphasize that in contrast to deliberate efforts to suppress information through secrecy or the destruction of documents, unknowing is often inadvertent, the result of adherence to unquestioned tradition or a “culturopolitical selectivity,” which relegates some things to the realm of the invisible, illegible, or unintelligible.

In a sense, Embodied Power: Demystifying Disembodied Politics is an exercise in agnotology, an effort to explain why pervasive practices of racialization and gendering remain unrecognized and unstudied in the context of mainstream political science.¹ I suggest that certain disciplinary assumptions about the nature of politics and the requirements for scientific study of the political world have rendered embodied power particularly difficult to perceive. A way of seeing embodiment as pre-political, a way of naturalizing the nation-state, and a way of privileging institutional analysis and methodological individualism contribute to a way of not seeing processes of racialization and gendering as integral to state enactments of embodied power. Reworking Pynchon's insight in the epigraph to this chapter, one might say that ignorance is indeed a “black spot” on the discipline's mental map, which excludes certain kinds of evidence, and privileges particular kinds of explanation, thereby rendering embodied power beyond the threshold of visibility. Indeed, processes of racialization and gendering developed over the past five centuries under the auspices of “science” have been embedded in law, custom, accredited knowledge, and diverse social practices, lending coherence to forms of unknowing that continue to haunt political science in particular and public life more generally.

As Banu Bargu (2015) has noted, political thinkers from Hobbes to Foucault have contributed to discourses that conceal the state's recourse to embodied power. Bargu suggests that political analysts “abstract from the materiality of human bodies, transform relations of force between bodies into a formal discourse of rights and obligations, and fail to attend to the material agency of subjugation insofar as it constitutes subjects” (Bargu 2015, 12). This “disembodiment” shifts attention away from bodies toward a conception of “legal persons” (12). Indeed, “decorporealization” erases the bodies of individuals who are incorporated into “the body politic” as abstract, rights-bearing juridical subjects. Decorporealization also “erases actual conflict that lies at the foundations of sovereignty, eliminat[ing] the historical reality of war, elid[ing] history” (13).

Contemporary political science replicates the decorporealization characteristic of modern political thought, contributing to the erasure of embodied power in historical practices and ongoing social and political conflicts. Later chapters explore various mechanics of erasure, tracing the construction of raced and gendered bodies as biological entities to the long eighteenth century. By attributing relations of superiority and inferiority to nature, proponents of empirical scientific inquiry and modern political thinkers position racial and gendered hierarchies beyond the reach of the state. To the extent that race and gender are construed as biologically given, whether as individual attributes or population characteristics, racialization and gendering are effectively removed from the realm of the political. But as Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate, the de-politicization of embodiment coincided with the expansion of European empires through brutal conquest, labor exploitation and enslavement and the emergence of new republics that barred women from political participation. As the blatant violence of conquest, colonization, and dispossession of indigenous people by settler societies was rendered invisible, a peculiar inversion of causality surfaced in political analyses. The colonized, enslaved, and disenfranchised – the raced and the gendered – were said to be responsible for their own condition. Their physical subjugation was attributed not to defeat by European colonizers or laws declaring them subordinate or dependent, but to their inherent inferiority. Characterized as childlike, primitive, or savage, lacking the discipline required for self-governance, those deemed less than fully human were condemned to paternalist rule “for their own good.”

In recent decades, several innovative approaches to the study of politics have helped to make visible processes of racialization, gendering, and sexualization long neglected by mainstream political science. Critical race theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, post-occidental theory, and the theorization of intersectionality advanced by Black feminist scholars and feminist scholars of color offer analytical frameworks that foreground the centrality of racialization and gendering in political life. Moreover, they identify patterns of unknowing, misrecognition, and inverted notions of causality that erase embodied power. The central tenets of these innovative approaches are sketched in the next section.

Alternative Frameworks

Intersectionality

Theorizing embodied power is one of the most distinctive contributions of the concept of intersectionality developed by Black feminist theorists (Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Roberts 1999, 2011; Hancock 2007a, 2007b, 2011, 2016; Simien 2007; Alexander-Floyd 2012; Cooper 2016). Intersectionality challenges the presumption of “sexual dimorphism” – the belief that there are two and only two sexes; the notion that race is a biological phenomenon; and the view that sexual desire follows automatically from possession of particular male and female genitalia. Rather than acquiescing...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Embodied Power
• 2 Conceptual Practices of Power
• 3 The Science and Politics of Bodies
• 4 From Race and Sex to Racialization, Gendering, and Sexualization
• 5 Ways of Seeing, Modes of Being
• 6 Revisioning Power, Reclaiming Politics
• Bibliography
• Index