Giving Up the Only Biopower We Ever Had, by Katherine and Cassie

In his lecture, Foucault makes a distinction between two new techniques of power that emerge in order to “make society into a machine of production.” The first is anatomo-politics, which he describes as disciplinary: this is a way of exercising power on each individual’s behavior by methods of surveillance and training of the individual body. The second is bio-politics, which treats the population rather than the individual: it serves to gather information and enact large-scale changes such as sanitation and public health laws. Bio-politics treats the population as a group of individuals held together by biological processes and laws.

When Foucault argues that anatamo-politics is about the “surveillance of individuals” in order to monitor things like adolescent sexuality, and bio-politics is often concerned with “knowing how to cajole people to produce more babies,” he is gesturing toward an idea of sex that is specifically normative and generative. Though he says “sex is the lever” that moves us from discipline to regulation, he is not referring to a capacious sense of sex or sexual activity. Here, sex is a foundational part of the “machine…for producing other individuals” (7).

The lever between Foucault’s two technologies is more precisely reproductive sex, then—the controlling of adolescent sex is designed to curb sex-as-pleasure in pre-productive bodies—and both discipline and regulation are enabled by the reproductive function. This argument does not, however, mesh easily with Foucault’s avowed sense of the opposition between the two.

Without looking beyond “The Mesh of Power” and deeper into Foucault’s work, it is merely a question, but could it be that Foucault’s too-easy use of sex “as a lever” relies on the idea of the (biological) naturalness of women’s reproductive functions? Could it be that ideas such as motherhood, the family, and sex as necessarily reproductive are serving as assumptions underlying the “biological” nature of the population?

This claim is informed by Darwin’s concept of natural selection and by the idea of “species” which mirrors “population” but on a grander scale. It would be impossible to have ideas like “a population’s general state of health” without believing in a sort of population-level ideal of health, of performance, etc. In other words, from a broadly statistical perspective, all the members of a population have more or less the same bodily trajectory, the same capacities, and so on. In other words, the scientific point of view that enables the treatment of a group of human beings as a population is one that imagines that on a biological level, we are more or less determined to carry out certain functions in a more or less deterministic way.

Both of our texts, published around the same time Foucault first delivered this lecture, suggest a different framework for thinking about the relationship of sex and reproduction in anatamo- and bio-politics. Both texts are early feminist SF, and each speculates on the role of reproduction, sex, and motherhood in society. More particularly, each one questions the naturalness -- or the necessity -- of women’s roles in these reproductive functions. As we will see, Woman on the Edge of Time dissociates the sexual from the reproductive altogether, a thought experiment which results from the idea that equality in public life can only be achieved by severing the ties between anatomical difference and identity.

“Heat Death of the Universe,” however, takes a less dramatic approach to the same issue. Using the ideas of species and evolution to speculate on the  supposed “naturalness” of maternity, maternal instincts, and motherhood more generally, it allows us to examine the interplay between anatomo-politics and bio-politics around reproduction. Is motherhood a population-level property to be regulated as a “natural” characteristic of the human life cycle? Or is it a capacity or skill of individual bodies, to be honed, disciplined, and surveilled in order to train it into some ideal form? In “Heat Death,” Sarah Boyle, an unhappy mother and housewife who “is never quite sure how many children she has” describes the role of instincts, evolution, and species in mutually conflicting ways that throw into question the “naturalness” of the “mother’s instinct.”

In one of the numbered entries that make up “Heat Death,” there is a discussion of species survival, which interestingly mirrors Woman on the Edge of Time. “How fortunate for the species… that children are as ingratiating as we know them. Otherwise they would soon be salted off for the leeches they are,” Sarah thinks, considering reproduction as a “cowardly investment in immortality” and preferring a fantasized future in which “the race would extinguish itself in a fair sweet flowering, the last generations' massive achievement in the arts and pursuits of high civilization. The finest women would have their tubes tied off at the age of twelve, or perhaps refrain altogether from the Act of Love.” What is not present in this thinking is any naturalization of maternal instinct: children happen to be ingratiating, which distracts women from the fact that they could seek immortality or transcendence by means other than reproduction. Their “interests would be bent to a refining and perfecting of each febrile sense, each fluid hour,” and this “fair sweet flowering,” however soon exhausted, would be in many ways preferable to the “patchy and too often disappointing vegetables of one’s own womb.”

This passage throws the naturalness of reproductive urges into question, suggesting that motherhood is only one among several ways that women could be “productive,” and that it is in many ways the least reliable one. By analogizing children to vegetables, and comparing them (patchy and too often disappointing) to a “fair sweet flowering” of “massive achievements in the arts and … high civilization,” the text suggests that while children are necessary for a sort of species-level “sustenance,” that does not imply that women prefer producing them to some higher form of gardening.

Another moment in the text questions the idea of instinct from another direction.

Bath time. Observing the nakedness of children, pink and slippery as seals, squealing as seals, now the splashing, grunting and smacking of cherry flesh on raspberry flesh reverberate in the pearl tiled steamy cubicle. […] All well-fed naked children appear edible, Sarah's teeth hum in her head with memory of bloody feastings, prehistory. Young humans appear too like the young of other species for smugness, and the comparison is not even in their favor, they are much the most peeled and unsupple of those young.

The idea of evolution is evoked here as a mother considers eating her own offspring, her “teeth hum in her head with the memory of bloody feastings, prehistory.” In other words, it seems that Sarah is convinced that the instinct to eat babies is one that she inherited, perhaps in place of or at least alongside the instinct to nurture them. So how “natural” indeed is mothering? It seems, at least in this text, that the human organism is far more a creature of plasticity than of pre-determined traits: we evolved over time to be capable of many things, and our exposure to a stimulus does not necessarily guarantee that we will always respond the same way. Motherhood may not be instinctive in the ways that we expect it to be-- and it may not be more instinctive than the instinct to produce art, or to devour meat. Zoline suggests that the idea of motherhood as “natural” is not an assumption that can be safely made by biopolitical power (operating on the population). Motherhood is rather an operation of anatomo-politics, through the regulation of which instincts, which species-level phenomena, are “natural” and which are “abnormal.”

Zoline’s treatment of the too-easy conflation of sex, reproduction, and maternity suggests that the idea of “natural reproductivity” serves as a disciplinary apparatus at the same time that it ‘simplifies’ the species, reducing the legibility of differences or contradictions both within and between individuals.

Altogether a pessimistic text, “Heat Death” does not offer a resolution to these tensions as Woman on the Edge of Time will.  But a historical note helps to explain both texts’ questioning of mothering and reproductive “nature.” Zoline’s “Heat Death” is first published in 1967, six years after the first birth control pill is offered to women, and Woman on the Edge of Time comes in 1976, when women have been availing themselves of this option for more than a decade. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Woman on the Edge of Time takes a more radical and more successful approach to thinking past the association of reproduction and sex, and does so on an anatomical level. Whereas the protagonist of “Heat Death” fantasizes that “women would have their tubes tied off at the age of twelve, or perhaps refrain altogether from the Act of Love,” Woman’s utopian future pulls apart the association between sex and reproduction completely, ultimately looping back around to challenge what Foucault calls “sex” in the first place.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, when Foucault argues that bio-politics exists “in opposition to the anatomo-politics” (7) that disciplines at the level of individual bodies, then, he is ignoring the fact that the tacit definition of sex he uses is always already reproductive. In effect, he differentiates between discipline and regulation with sex as the juncture while also using the unifying assumption of sex-as-reproductive to power both technologies. Woman on the Edge of Time deals directly with this issue by refusing to accept either the explicit opposition or the implicit association.

Early in Woman, for example, the protagonist Connie speaks to a person from Mattapoisett (the utopian village) and stumbles over the untranslatable concept of prostitution. Her main misstep in the explanation is trying to link the existence of the person in front of her to an assumption of sex having happened.

“‘But people do go to bed, I guess?’…‘I suppose since you’re alive and got born, they must still do that little thing, when they aren’t too busy with their computers.’” (Piercy 56)

The future utopian person, Luciente, immediately resists the conflation of the terms.

“‘Two statements don’t follow.’… ‘Fasure [sic] we couple. Not for money, not for a living. For love, for pleasure, for relief, out of habit, out of curiosity and lust.’” (Piercy 56)

No real explanation of how it’s possible to comprehend sex without regard to reproduction is given until later in the text, when Connie is exposed to the surreal “brooder” in which embryos are grown.

“‘It was part of women’s long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal.’” (Piercy 97)

In this utopian future, the assumed connection between sex and reproduction that enables the system of anatamo-politics can be overturned only at the level of anatomy—with the implication being that the uterus has been bred out of women or merely stripped of its generative function and left as an appendix-like relic of past use. By creating a literal “machine of production” through which future individuals are created and denying sex any reproductive capacity, Mattapoisett embraces a sort of open sexual atmosphere that refuses to be disciplined by Foucault’s idea of sex-based surveillance.

This is borne out in their attitude toward adolescent sex as well. When Connie and a few people from Mattpoisett witness a “boy and a girl six or seven…seriously engaged in an attempt to have sex together,” Connie is livid that the others simply pull away to give the children privacy rather than stopping them (Piercy 130). She equates it to a dangerous, deviant act like playing with knives, but the others consider it simply part of their collective, self-policing education: “‘Mostly they learn sex from each other. …If a child is rough, the other children deal with that. …We don’t find coupling bad unless it involves pain or is not invited’” (Piercy 130-31). They have no sex-based anatamo-politics because there is no normative notion of sex.

This resistance to the reproductive sex that drives Foucault’s technologies of power is also reflected in Woman on the same evolutionary scale shown in “Heath Death of the Universe.” One of the villagers from Mattapoisett explains the diversity of their civilization to Connie in those terms:

“‘…decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we don’t want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness.’” (Piercy 96)

This is at once a refusal of the type of control of the population implicit in Foucault’s bio-politics (cajoling people to have more babies inevitably means cajoling the “right kind” of people to have more babies) and an extrapolation of that control. In Mattapoisett, a child is only begun in the brooder as a replacement when a member of that community dies, and the new child is a mixture of the utmost genetic diversity without the “negative genes” that cause disease, etc. (Piercy 318). Separating sex from reproduction and thus from that specific function in both individual bodies and populations allows this utopian future to live out a kind of genetic fantasy where the bio-political and anatomo-political are in a free-floating relationship not obviously tied to anything. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist at all in Piercy’s utopia, however, as there’s still a “council” or governing body that meets to decide things like whether “as a kind of living memorial, [a dead person’s] exact genetic mix is given to a new baby” (Piercy 318), and there’s no real indication given of how the children produced by the brooder are randomized to resist eugenic situations.

Though the approaches are distinct, you can see here that both of our texts push against the opposition Foucault claims exists between anatamo- and bio-politics, and both offer a kind of late 1960s/early 1970s feminist reconfiguration of the assumptions in his argument and the broader, gendered milieu. Ultimately, both works, contextualized as they are by the advent of birth control and its undeniable anatomizing of women’s sex, seem to yearn for a de-anatomization of female bodies, and a fantasy or future of non-uterine possibility.