The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America

Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Rachel C. Lee

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479821525
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Customs & Traditions
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural Studies The Exquisite Corpse ofAsian America addresses this central question: if race has been settled as a legal or socialconstruction and not as biological fact, why do Asian American artists,authors, and performers continue to scrutinize their body parts? Engagingnovels, poetry, theater, and new media from both the U.S. andinternationally—such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s science fiction novel Never Let MeGo or Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and exhibits like that of BodyWorlds in which many of the bodies on display originated from Chinese prisons—RachelC. Lee teases out the preoccupation with human fragments and posthumanecologies in the context of Asian American cultural production and theory. Sheunpacks how the designation of “Asian American” itself is a mental constructthat is paradoxically linked to the biological body. Through chapters that each use a body part as springboard forreading Asian American texts, Lee inaugurates a new avenue of research onbiosociality and biopolitics within Asian American criticism, focused on theliterary and cultural understandings of pastoral governmentality, the divergentscales of embodiment, and the queer (cross)species being of racial subjects.She establishes an intellectual alliance and methodological synergy betweenAsian American studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), biocultures,medical humanities, and femiqueer approaches to family formation, carework,affect, and ethics. In pursuing an Asian Americanist critique concerned withspeculative and real changes to human biologies, she both produces innovationwithin the field and demonstrates the urgency of that critique to otherdisciplines.

1

How a Critical Biopolitical Studies Lens Alters the Questions We Ask vis-à-vis Race

Jane Takagi-Little, the heroine of Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats (1998), produces documentary infomercials that sell “the American way of life”—that is, the daily intake of beef, chicken, or pork—to 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 “Aha!” 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 “when they get accidental bred [because] you can’t have pregnant heifers in a feedlot. All they do is eat, eat, eat, and never gain” (263). As the vulnerable human face of these feedlot practices, Gale’s five-year-old niece, unintentionally exposed to the hormone Lutalyse, has grown fully mature breasts on her small body. While this five-year-old’s altered life cycle qua reproductive precocity appears treatable, Ozeki drives home the tragic stakes of these chemical contaminations in Jane’s own struggles with a prior exposure to synthesized estrogen while in utero. Her mother took diethylstilbestrol (DES) while pregnant—prescribed by her midwestern doctor to prevent miscarriage in this “delicate” Japanese lady (156)—resulting in Jane’s own malformed uterus and infertility. Ozeki’s readers also learn that Jane’s 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, Ozeki’s protagonist changes. She begins to perceive politics as encompassing more than democratic, more-inclusive cultural representation. Politics also includes the terrain of biology and ecology—of 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 Akiko’s 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 populations—livestock 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 “glass ceilings,” 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 biopower—clarifying its relation to anatomopolitics, biopolitics, and necropolitics—before 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 “biopolitics” and “biopower,” an imprecision deriving from Michel Foucault’s 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 “murderous splendor” (e.g., the gruesome public execution of enemies and offending subjects by tearing their bodies asunder), modern biopower operates by way of “distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise and hierarchize”—that 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, “the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life.”⁵ In those who have extended Foucault’s schema, biopower is sometimes used as an umbrella term for two kinds of manifestations of power, a disciplinary “anatomo-politics of the human body” and a regulatory “biopolitics of the population.”⁶ But sometimes “biopolitical” 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 “advanced liberal” societies.⁸ Rose describes this style of governance as interpersonal decision making,

not organized or administered by “the state” [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 consult—where one is given information on genetic-risk profiles and never coerced overtly into making eugenic rather than dysgenic decisions—epitomizes 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 “pestilent” dens of Chinatown. According to Alexandra Minna Stern, the graphic images of “contagion and constitutional malaise” initially associated with Chinese men—portraits of them as effeminate, enervated, or “spotted with suppurating pustules [and] ugly lesions”—spread 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 Hawai’i 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 “saving” by American philanthropic institutions aimed at improving global health (see also Warwick Anderson). Through “paternalistic missions to save colonial lives endangered by . . . infectious disease,”¹² American medical men associated with the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Commission turned U.S. extraterritorial possessions such as the Philippines and Hawai’i (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 “novel” 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 Hawai’i 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 owners’ importing of Asiatic labor (Yun, Jung). Noting, however, that “labor history in Hawai’i . . . 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,” C. Kim argues that a “critical inter-imperial framework” (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 Hawai’i 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 Hawai’i’s plantations, literary scholar Stephen J. Sumida notes that “since native Hawai’ians were grievously diminished in number by exposure to disease foreign to them before the arrival of Captain Cook and his crew in 1778,” white plantation owners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought in Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Koreans—presumptive “cognate races” to the Kanaka Maoli of Hawai’i—“peoples both to labor on the plantations and to repopulate the islands” (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 Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) reports on a Hmong family’s frustrating encounter in the 1980s with the Merced County Medical Hospital while seeking treatment for their toddler Lia’s epilepsy. Because they misunderstood the regimen and objected to the side effects, Lia’s parents failed to administer the prescribed anticonvulsants to their daughter, prompting physician Neil Ernst to put Lia in foster care. While genuine concern prompts Ernst’s 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, “[Lia’s 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 epilepsy” (Fadiman 53). Fadiman’s 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 biopower’s emotional circuits, its pastoral “relational” mechanisms, as having the potential to mystify the violence at the core of contemporary biopower. To them, “necropolitics” is merely the flip side of biopower. As Chow puts it, the ideological mandate to live and thrive “gives 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.”¹⁵ According to Jodi Kim, the period Americans call the Cold War (1947–1991) illuminates this point. While this era saw the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a guarded but technically “peaceful” standoff, “hot wars” raged in Asia—in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—in which U.S. troops were involved in the massive slaughter of Asians. In the name of protecting Americans’ thriving way of life (the surplus comforts provided by democratic capitalism), the United States justified its outright necropolitics—its (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 follow—the 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 “imperative to live.”

As we can see, some critical confusion characterizes biopower and biopolitics partly because, while Foucault first differentiated these terms—making biopolitics and anatomopolitics subsets of biopower—the terms “biopower” and “biopolitics” are often collapsed in usage. As distinct from “anatomopolitics,” “biopolitics” refers to a more top-down managerial perspective employing a calculative logic in assessing population-aggregates comparatively, with particular scrutiny paid to “the size and quality of the population; reproduction and human sexuality; conjugal parental and familial relations; health and disease; birth and death.”¹⁶ Because of its emphasis on aggregates, biopolitics more easily harmonizes with sociological analyses focused on “race.” 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 anatomopolitics—referring to the corporeal entrainment of individual bodies and “the subjectivizing processes [whereby the individual shapes her] notions of the self and how [she] should want to behave.”¹⁷ Focusing on the radical feminist health movements of the 1970s, STS scholar Michelle Murphy specifies these subjectivizing, anatomopolitical processes as learned “procedural scripts” establishing “protocols” on “ ‘how to’ do something” (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 clinicians’ monopoly on scientific knowledge and tool-use. Anatomopo...