Killing the Idealistic Dreams of Young Activists

One of the common contemporary methods of interpreting Gallathea is as a forerunner of the modern gay rights movement, or even more boldly, as proof that some of our modern concerns about gender, sexuality, and trans* bodies have always already been present in literature. While I believe that there is enough evidence in Gallathea to support an argument along these lines, I am wary of this kind of heady interpretation because it can lead to undergraduate students thinking that it is okay to dismiss cultural and historical influences before they have mastered them. I do not believe that new historicism is the answer to all early modern literary criticism, but in my experience, undergraduates who fail to learn the value of cultural and historical influence on early modern texts cannot develop the skills to eventually move on from new historicist readings to other schools of criticisms.

The teaching idea that I am sharing would hypothetically be taught to an undergraduate English literature course. I find Armstrong's Foucaldian analysis in "Gender Must Be Defended" to be the best argument by which to teach undergraduates about the problems of reading modern culture onto early modern texts (even though Armstrong focuses entirely on 19th-century works, which disproves my concern for historical accuracy, but let's pretend that didn't happen.... and in fact, it might be helpful to look at these Victorian novels because odds are more undergraduates have read them than have read Gallathea). After a lengthy analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Armstrong says that "being an individual and having a gender amount to pretty much the same thing. As the heroines of sensation fiction demonstrate, the minute one leaves the protection of the household, she ceases to be a 'woman' and loses the protection and support owed a gendered body" (544). While Gallathea and Phillida's escape to the forest and donning of masculine attire may seem thrilling and powerful to modern students who enjoy breaking down gender barriers and binaries, Armstrong's article would interpret their forest adventures differently. Gallathea and Phillida are not self-empowered by their ambiguously-gendered bodies, instead, they lead to both girls' anxieties about their relationship to the "youth" they see before them, and fear that they will eventually be discovered and sacrificed or murdered anyway. The forest is not a green world in which they can escape from society and live outside gendered constraints, rather gender becomes even more important while in the forest because it is so maddeningly ambiguous, and the girls begin to obsess over it.

Armstrong again analyzes Jane Eyre to prove an important point about gender and society:

Readers are fond of noting that Brontë cuts Rochester down to size and feminizes him before she can imaginatively incorporate him into a traditional household. Readers do not tend to notice, however, that this move virtually condemns to death anyone who cannot enter their charmed circle. If, as Foucault suggests, the biopolitical turn translates class warfare into a matter of biological difference, then it follows that the masculine protection of traditional femininity produces the negative femininity that identifies certain people as those who can be allowed to die. (545-46)

From this perspective, the gods' promise to change one of the girls into a man at the end of the play is not an early modern imagining of the transgender body as much as it is a way of imaginatively reinforcing society's values and maintaining the status quo of class warfare. The main plot of Gallathea does not feature your typical upper/middle/lower class warfare, but the relationship between humans and the gods may suffice as a form of class warfare. The conflict between humans and gods led to the demand of a sacrifice, which, like Jane Eyre, is based on a gendered, biological difference: only beautiful, virginal young women can be sacrificed to Neptune. The language of the play sexualizes these virgins in such a way that it is difficult to call them children, and yet their virgin status makes it impossible to call them wives. Because of their liminal existence outside of these two traditional roles of femininity, they are categorized as "those who can be allowed to die."

The marriage between Gallathea and Phillida, then, is the logical conclusion of such biopolitical powers at play. Because the plot cannot allow for their deaths, they must be assimilated into what Armstrong calls the "charmed circle" of the traditional household. Like Jane Eyre's assimilation of Rochester, the assimilation of Gallathea and Phillida requires imagination and creativity. But as radical as Neptune's promise of a change in sex may appear to modern audiences, it is actually the most conservative option available. By incorporating Gallathea and Phillida into a heteronormative union, Lyly reinforces social constructs of marriage, gender, and class.

The moral of the story? If you want to start a cultural revolution and bust up the status quo, don't look to early modern comedies for inspiration, kids. They almost always disappoint.

The Bartleby Archetype and Escaping Power, by Tom and Sophia

In “The Mesh of Power,” Foucault asks, “Why do we always conceive of power as law and prohibition, why this privilege?” (Foucault 3). He introduces “an analysis of power that would not simply be a negative, juridical idea of power, but rather, the idea of a technology of power” (Foucault 2). We are going to focus on the first technology of power that he describes, that of discipline, which for Foucault is “absolutely not saying, ‘you must not,’ but rather essentially obtaining a better performance, a better production and a better productivity” (6). By looking at “Bartleby the Scrivener” and its role in By the Sea, we want to explore in what ways Bartleby as an archetype establishes or symbolizes a technique of escaping power and how this technique interacts with the development of discipline.

The narrator in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a lawyer with a firm on Wall Street, praises Bartleby for his discipline, which he believes will impact other workers at his firm. In the brief job interview that the narrator recounts with Bartleby, few words are exchanged and none are remembered, but the impression is long lasting. “A motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold...I can see that figure now--pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby” (Melville 15). The traits which the lawyer emphasizes here — neatness, respectability, and sadness — are in contrast to his description of his other clerks, Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut, each of whom are adequate at their jobs, but have an indelible flaw. Turkey is a drinker, Nippers affected by anxious tendencies, and Ginger Nut, a twelve-year-old boy, is simply the clerk who fetches the other clerks lunch: together they lack the productivity the lawyer desires for his office. The lawyer hopes that bringing in Bartleby will have what Foucault refers to as a norming effect, increasing the productivity of the other workers without imposing actual prohibitions on them. “I engaged him,” he says, “glad to have among my corps of copyists a man so singularly sedate an aspect, which I thought might operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey and the fiery one of Nippers” (Melville 15).  

Here we begin to see the emergence of a technique of escaping the power of discipline: the appearance of discipline and the use of this appearance to infiltrate the apparatus. Without his important first impression, Bartleby would not have been hired by the lawyer and entered into a position where his refusal would have consequences. Let’s look at the first instance of this refusal and try to develop a view of this as an archetype. The narrator summons Bartleby to his desk to review some legal copy with the “natural expectancy of instant compliance” as his boss (Melville 17). But without moving from his desk, Bartleby “in a singularly mild, firm voice” says “‘I would prefer not to’” (Melville 17). From this brief exchange, we can make several observations. First, the surprise of the refusal hinges on an expectation. The lawyer’s assumption that Bartleby will automatically respond to his request is connected to his position as a boss and the subservience he commands from his other workers. This subservience is immediate and verbal, the clerks frequently addressing him with words like “‘With submission, sir’” at the beginning or end of their sentences (Melville 9). The tone of the refusal is unemotional but “firm.” Bartleby’s lack of emotion was initially a reason for his hiring, but here it proves effective when turned against the order of the boss, stunning him into silence. Bartleby makes no move to come towards the lawyer, but with his words, he remains still at his desk. The refusal comes as an individual response. In describing the duties of his clerks, the lawyer talks about their frequent collaboration. However, in asserting “I would prefer not to” Bartleby is effectively separating his labor from his fellow workers. But is he really refusing? Bartleby’s response works because the lawyer does nothing to compel him against his preference, but it implies that it is not an outright refusal, that he could be compelled to do the task. This creates an intense sensation of anger in the lawyer. He thinks, “Doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises,” but instead he calls on Nippers to do the work for him, leaving Bartleby alone (Melville 18). Bartleby’s technique works by operating within the framework of discipline — Bartleby’s deferential tone; that he stays at his desk, in the position to do the work, even though he won’t produce — at the same time that it deviates from the norm on the individual level.

“Bartleby the Scrivener” crops up throughout By the Sea, at first subtly within the narration (Saleh describes how Rachel, his asylum case worker, wants him to buy a telephone, “but I prefer not to” [Gurnah 41]). Later, Saleh reveals to Rachel that he does in fact speak English and she asks him why he hadn’t said so: “‘I preferred not to,’ I said, glancing at the brick wall through the window opposite me” (Gurnah 65). Thus begins the novel’s Bartleby motif, in which Saleh positions himself as a type of “Bartleby” and he, Rachel, and Latif repeatedly discuss the story and their varying interpretations of it. Saleh tells Latif that “for some reason I was reminded of it when I arrived here” (Gurnah 158). One sees this explicitly when the brick wall out the window of Rachel’s legal office reminds Saleh of the imagery in the story, but it also applies more generally to his situation as a refugee, to his enmeshment in a system of power whose actors do not know or care to understand his backstory. Upon his arrival in England, Saleh is not punished or told “you must not”; rather, he is disciplined, expected to present himself as the “right” type of refugee who could be a productive member of British society were he granted asylum, to conform to “the principle of the norm” (Foucault 15). He writes, “I feel defeated by the overbearing weight of the nuances that place and describe everything I might say, as if a place already exists for them and a meaning has already been given to them before I utter them” (Gurnah 68).

Saleh references “Bartleby” to resist this discipline, to refuse to produce what is expected of him by “preferring not to.” But in doing so, he deploys an archetype and again speaks words that already have a meaning attached to them. Saleh convinces Rachel to read the story, and she does not love it as Saleh and Latif do: “Too much gloom and resignation in it, she thought, and the symbolism was oppressive … Too much self-pity for all her liking” (Gurnah 168). Her interpretation is not necessarily to be taken at face value, especially coming from someone who, although she is trying to help Saleh, is neglecting to learn about his past, who is perhaps not aware of the oppressive system — in Zanzibar but also as a refugee in England — from which he is attempting to escape. However, this causes Saleh to reconsider his own interpretation of what he and Latif agree is “a beautiful story” (Gurnah 65, 156).

In the final pages of the novel, Saleh takes his first trip to London to stay with Latif. Echoing By the Sea’s first “Bartleby” reference, Latif encourages Saleh to buy a telephone: “‘I have no urge to do so,’ I said, and saw him smile. I thought I knew what he was thinking. He would have preferred me to say, I prefer not to. But I had been thinking of what Rachel had said, and thought I would read ‘Bartleby’ again before speaking his words as the utterings of an admired desperado” (Gurnah 244). Saleh rephrases his refusal, retaining the sense that he has no desire to produce what is expected of him by societal norms, but destabilizing his position as a “Bartleby,” sidestepping the technique of escaping power that he has until now been deploying. This raises the question: Is Bartleby’s technique necessarily a good thing? What consequences does using this technique have on the bodies of “Bartlebys”? Saleh may have realized that he’s pigeonholed himself by citing the “I would prefer not to,” that Latif and Rachel each read him in a particular way based on their personal interpretations of the story. By calling into question Bartleby’s status as “an admired desperado,” Saleh raises an even more fundamental question. There seems to be an underlying assumption that Bartleby’s technique of escaping power is successful, but does it really work?

A menage à trois with Foucault, Maisie, and Fanny

Today we sat down with Fanny Hill and Maisie Beale to talk about their texts in light of Michel Foucault’s “The Mesh of Power.” What follows is a real, unadulterated look at the behind-the-scene dynamics in What Maisie Knew and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

Bethany Q & Jess K: Foucault says that “Delinquency is useful.” Discuss how you see that in your text.

Maisie B: My parents, Ida and Beale, my step parents Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude, even Mrs. Wix who claims to be wholly committed to my happiness, are ultimately driven by an intense desire to transgress societal bounds to experience bodily pleasure, both the visceral feeling of satisfied emotion and also baser pleasures that as an adolescent I still know little about. You know, Foucault says, “In any case, the politics of sex will install itself within this whole politics of life that will become so important in the 19th century” (7). My mother embodies the delinquency of extramarital sex, a taboo in the 19th century and an intricate part of why my text is so deliciously naughty; she is often in a “violent splendour...like that of some gorgeous idol described in a story-book” (53). This causes her, however, to “break out into questions as to what had passed at the other house between that horrible woman and Sir Claude” (53) among other odd behaviors, and this delinquency, her inability to extricate her emotions from her drive for pleasure, causes her to become the villain of the text. I slowly but surely lose all desire to be with her, and you, my readers, follow suit.

Fanny H: Michel talks about prostitution in his presentation, though he focuses much more on pimps than what happened on the streets and brothels of London in the 1740s. The madame or bawd was a bigger menace for women like me. Acting out delinquency allowed me to become rich. And we don’t have room here to talk about the delinquency of people who kept my banned text in print or illustrated it with such graphic images.

But delinquency also let me get revenge. Mr. H— had his way with my maid Hannah about seven months into our relationship (68). As I say in my book, “my pride alone was hurt, my heart not.” Maybe I should have made him pay for his “stooping to such a coarse morsel” financially, but I decided to pay him back in “the same coin” (70). Mr. H— had just taken Will into his service, a young country boy with eyes that were “naturally wanton” and often carried messages between the two of us (70). Lucky me Will had a “not the play-thing of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a may-pole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ’d, it must have belong’d to a young giant” (72). Unluckily Mr. H— discovered us in much a similar position as I’d seen him with Hannah; even though I explained to him that it was his own behavior I’d taken as a model, he still broke off our relationship (86). So breaking the rules was useful in the short term, but had longer repercussions than I intended at the time.

JK & BQ: How does the commodification of pleasure play out in your respective texts and how does pleasure tie into your exercise of power?

Fanny H: There was Mr. Barvile who liked to be whipped and whip others; he paid me well to wield the lash and be lashed in return (143). After our time together Mrs. Cole (who ran the best, most collective-feeling, brothel in London) knew I was a girl “after her own heart, afraid of nothing” (153). Then I had clients like the old man who wanted to brush my hair and sometimes put kid gloves on my hands, but nothing else.

Pleasure’s a dangerous thing. But after toying around with women in my innocence, I knew that having a man with a “large engine” was key to my sexual and economic happiness. It’s why I was so excited when Charles came back into my life. But that’s another story.

Maisie B: It is hard for me to be completely aware of my intent, or in other words try to decipher what kind of specific pleasure I derive from being with Sir Claude. I do know that my intense desire to have Sir Claude all to myself causes me to manipulate the situation whenever I see him. Because he loves me and is also conflicted about how he loves me (am I his child? his “old woman” as he likes to call me, wise beyond my years? A commodity to use in his ongoing battle with my mother and two governesses?), I use this to my advantage. I even once thought I had won – Sir Claude and I spent the day together when he asked me to give up Mrs. Wix to live with him and Mrs. Beale, but he for a moment was clearly desirous of giving me everything I wanted in the world; namely, to be only with him. We almost left forever together for Paris, and “it was the most extraordinary thing in the world.” In that moment I had the most excruciatingly pleasurable experience when I thought I had won, and when my hopes were promptly dashed, I knew I “had fallen back to earth [and] the odd thing was that in [my] fall [my] fear too had been dashed down and broken. It was gone” (252). In that moment I gave Sir Claude an ultimatum – I would give up Mrs. Wix if he would give up Mrs. Beale. But I played my hand wrong.

BQ & JK: Foucault posits that power is a restrictive and negative force in Western society. How is power a driving force in your text? Is it a “mesh” as described by Foucault?

Maisie B: When my parents initially were divorced, I became a pawn in their quest for power over each other. Not knowing any better, I acted as a shuttle for their negativity as I relayed nasty messages to one and then the other, back and forth again and again until I became exhausted by my inability to decipher their intent. This certainly had the unintended effect of causing in me “a feeling of danger.” Desirous of control, I realized I had an “inner self” capable of “concealment” (James 13). In retrospect, I can see that my parents were trying to exercise their power over me and each other by constantly surveilling this untenable situation. I suddenly refused to facilitate this power struggle: I determined that I “would forget everything...would repeat nothing, and when, as a tribute to the successful application of [my] system [they] began to [call me] a little idiot, [I] tasted a pleasure altogether new…[I] spoiled their fun, but [I] practically added to [my] own” (13).

You also asked if it’s a mesh? Yes, absolutely, my parents were trapped in a society dictating that they love me and one another according to the ‘perfect family model,’ but my mother was never an angel. When that paradigm collapsed, I became a pawn in their army, but one who wasn’t trained and so learned to deploy my weapons with the utmost subtlety. And so, they gave up on me. Was it the right choice? I still can’t say.   

Fanny H: Power is everything. Even a hymen is powerful in my story. I pretended to be a virgin after going to Mrs. Cole’s brothel and got much more money from that night than I would if he thought I was already deflowered. That man thought that I was not touched, only pure, and got more satisfaction from the knowledge that he was ruining girls than I think he did from the actual act of penetration. How’s that for power and pleasure working together?

But those are just happy memories. The power I lacked when coming to London as a country innocent wasn’t as pleasant; it led me to accept a job with Mrs. Brown that wasn’t at all what she promised. A terrible old man paid 50 guineas to take my maidenhead but couldn’t get it up – then I ran off with Charles. So there’s obviously lots of power with sex and money in my story. At the end the fact that I’m rich allows me to marry Charles; he’d lost all his money but still had his status as a gentleman. Now we’re just a happy family with kids and I’m the picture of a virtuous wife. Even I can’t see all the strands that make up the mesh of our power.

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.