Dear readers,

After reading what everyone else has said this week, I was a little speechless. I don't know why it all had the tenor to me of a sort of whirlwindy high-school-yearbook-on-graduation-day, but it did. I felt that same maudlin sense of "but what can I write to encompass for posterity how important all of this was?!?!?!"

How can ENL 200 really be ending? I feel like we've just gotten some kind of rhythm going, and if we did this for one more semester we'd emerge as some sort of superhero team. Once we were all trained up, each of our special powers would contribute to our collective ability to save the planet.

EARTH! WATER! WIND! FIRE! ... HEART!

Deep breath. Ok, I'm going to have to pull out of this nostalgic (and slightly premature) nose-dive for now; just know you all are loved. Here is what I learned from re-reading my posts.

(1) I was doing better than I thought I was.

As a recovering perfectionist, I definitely recall a troubling sense of fraudulence each time I pressed the 'submit' button. So I was surprised to re-read my own posts and discover that, on the whole, they weren't as bad as I remembered. Certainly there were "areas for growth," but at the same time (and at risk of looking down, cartoon-like, to see that I've been scurrying along across what I've only just realized is impossibly empty space) I was doing it! We were all doing it, and by 'it' I mean writing things that for the most part read like passable scholarship in this field. Well, with the exception of Rebecca's brilliant emoji post (and the other new media experiments enacted in this blog), but I think that's a promising direction for a new academic frontier.

While a little back-patting is always pleasant, that's not exactly what I learned here. I think the more important part of this realization is that it is possible to do experiments in writing even before you think you have something reasonable to say. You never know what will happen when you decide to mash together this article and this short story until you try, or at least that was my experience. Some of the most tenuous, questionable, and problematic transitions I made (along the lines of "but I’d like to end by using my primary text, chock full of 'thought experiments,' to try to literalize some parts of Flusser’s more abstract reasoning") actually sounded more or less ok in retrospect. Which makes me think I've been devoting way too much mental energy to worrying that some referee might step in and yellow card me for "insufficient self-evidence of connection between ideas." If you can articulate it, there's a good chance you can write it down without penalty.

(2) The best experiments were with other people.

I really liked working through ideas with you all. I especially noticed this in doing the collaborative posts, but also in class and with the online comments. At least for me, the experience of writing something with Cassie and Sophia felt organic, totally engaging, and sort of magical: 1 + 1 suddenly equaled three, and I loved seeing where our thinking ended up from where it started. I hope I'll figure out a way to do more collaborative or semi-collaborative work with my peers, despite co-authoring things apparently not being a great idea.

(3) Okay, I know I'm supposed to mention specific post(s). Come to think of it, I did notice as I was re-reading that a lot of my posts had this kind of an argument:

"This person uses science or some kind of epistemological truth-holder to say x. They are misusing the truth-holding (sciencey, mappy, structuralist, enlightenmenty) discourse as a blunt weapon when really it's a fine instrument, as we can illuminate by putting all this in conversation with my primary text." 

Given that, I was surprised that one of my favorite posts was about how to read Chen's Toxic Animacies and/as science fiction. This post was about sharing through pedagogy, and NOT about poking holes in people's use of science. I'd like to expand my repertoire of generous readings like this one, and not always be grouchily stalking around like a science-security-guard. That said, and in complete contradiction to it, the post that stood out to me most was my first one. Rusty prose aside, my Chakrabarty takedown was actually kind of awesome, and I'll have to find an opportunity to recycle it one day.

Justice Pits Belief Against Reason: We Disagree

We both really liked the Justice article—the ways in which it critiques how criticism operates, in particular—and we were therefore surprised when our discussion led us to a critique of an underlying assumption that Justice makes in his argument. In talking about the role of belief systems in our texts, we explored how, as Justice says, “doubting and investigating the miraculous begin almost simultaneously with believing it” (Justice 19). Justice encourages us to break out of an assumption that belief is separate from other modes of “cognitive experience,” by drawing upon Aquinas’ model of faith in which “the formulary of belief is not that which goes without saying, the plush carpet of presupposition, but that which has to be said, and then said again, because saying it provokes reactive intellectual energy” (Justice 13).

By applying this model of faith solely to the question of miracles (i.e. events that occur for supernatural rather than natural reasons), Justice might be selling Aquinas and Augustine’s reading of human perception short. We realized that Justice’s model assumes the givenness of a person who experiences the world as an Enlightenment subject of reason. Doubt must be a part of and simultaneous to belief because reason tells us that miracles are likely not believable. Justice penetrates the opacity of the medieval believing subject—whom criticism has frozen “into an idiot deadpan behind which either of two extreme possibilities might lie: they must speak either in a cynical and nearly sociopathic detachment from the truth-content of their words, or in a nearly delusional bondage to interests they do not even recognize as the source of those words” (Justice 11). But he does so by locating doubt within their belief system, implying that medieval subjects have trouble believing (as we ourselves do, or would) because of the self-evidence of natural law. We are not accusing Justice of anachronistically inserting an Enlightenment subjectivity into too early an era, which would fall directly into the trap Justice is warning us against: namely, assuming that medieval mindsets are inherently impenetrable to us. Rather, the protagonists in our texts reveal to us the belief systems under which we operate in the contemporary moment; these characters want to think and behave as rational, Enlightenment subjects, but they remain in the orbit of belief systems. It is not simply that belief is an act of will over an otherwise rational intellect. It seems, at least in our texts, that belief is as built-in as rationality; the mind struggles rather to distinguish between and reconcile the two.

Is it really the case that we (21st-century scholars) can’t identify with the perceptual account of belief? Answering that question is complicated by our own systems of belief and knowing, which adhere faithfully (at least in part) to a world characterizable by a scientific framework. Thus, when Sarah Boyle, protagonist of “Heat Death of the Universe,” begins to meditate upon the “second law of thermodynamics,” which “can be interpreted to mean that the ENTROPY of a closed system tends towards a maximum and that its available ENERGY tends towards a minimum,” the reader is free to interpret this as a factual clarification. Never mind that Boyle’s own perceptual experience provides her with little evidence that “a time must finally come when the Universe ‘unwinds’ itself, no energy being available for use,” nor that the imagery this brings to mind is far more reminiscent of the apocalyptics of medieval manuscripts than of anything that might correspond to our “reality”: “She thinks of the Heat Death of the Universe. A logarithmic of those late summer days, endless as the Irish serpent twisting through jewelled manuscripts forever, tail in mouth, the heat pressing, bloating, doing violence” (Zoline 3).

In fact, the more we discussed the role of knowledge systems reflected in “Heat Death,” the more we realized that Sarah Boyle is seeking the sense of security or certainty that a “factual” account of her life might supply, but in doing so she is really operating on religious and mythological registers as much as she is reflecting facts about the world. Drawing from her religious “texts,” namely “children's dictionaries, encyclopedias, ABCs and all reference books,” which leave her “transfixed and comforted at their simulacra of a complete listing and ordering,” Sarah writes notes to herself around the house.

[On the] lid of the diaper bin she has written in Blushing Pink Nitetime lipstick a phrase to ward off fumey ammoniac despair. "The nitrogen cycle is the vital round of organic and inorganic exchange on earth. The sweet breath of the Universe." On the wall by the washing machine are Yin and Yang signs, mandalas, and the words, "Many young wives feel trapped. It is a contemporary sociological phenomenon which may be explained in part by a gap between changing living patterns and the accommodation of social services to these patterns." (Zoline 3)

This passage’s blending of magico-religious (“to ward off … she has written” or the use of buddhist iconography) and the factual/authoritative is symptomatic of the story as a whole. By seeking to participate in the “factual” world by gleaning meaning from it or considering herself a part of it, Sarah cannot help but slip between the banal and the miraculous, the workings of her own perceptual world and the workings of a world which exceeds her and which must be taken upon faith or authority.

A glance at the world of Sarah Boyle shows how this blending of belief and fact operates within the framework of Enlightenment reason, but in By the Sea, this picture is complicated. The protagonists of the novel must negotiate a Western standard of rationality alongside a  postcolonial heritage that seems to function similarly to medieval culture as seen by Western critics: that is, Western colonizers relate colonized subjects to mysticism and an immature historic past.

Toward the end of By the Sea, Latif comes to Saleh’s apartment to hear about Saleh’s backstory. Their pasts and their family histories are deeply interconnected—most importantly, Saleh took possession of Latif’s family’s house, and now he has come to Britain using Latif’s father’s name and passport. The novel gives the two protagonists’ competing, but not mutually exclusive, accounts of what happened in their pasts. The characters seem to privilege the truth that can be imparted by rational knowledge over their culture’s traditional mode of Islamic storytelling. Latif in particular, who is an English professor in London, introduced by Rachel to Saleh as “an expert on your area” (Gurnah 65), makes the association of Zanzibari religious and folkloric traditions with a historic past that is inaccessible, or at least incomprehensible, to the rational Western subject. The following comments that Latif makes to Saleh imply that he perhaps looks at his “nativity,” his childhood, as being “native” in that other sense:

“I think I imagined you as a kind of relic, a metaphor of my nativity, and that I would come and examine you while you sat still and dissembling, fuming ineffectually like a jinn raised from infernal depths. Do you mind me talking to you like this?”
“If you have to,” I said. “Which jinn do you have in mind? Which jinn sitting still and dissembling, fuming ineffectually?”
“Do you mean which story?” he asked, smiling, frowning, trying to tease out a memory. “I can’t remember. I have an image.”
“Horned? Does the jinn in the image have a horn? One horn in the middle of a huge forehead? … ‘Qamar Zaman,’” I said, “That story has the stillest, shiftiest jinn in the whole A Thousand and One Nights. With a horn in the middle of his forehead. My favourite jinn, an utter grotesque, which is how you imagined me.”
“No, no, definitely not ‘Qamar Zaman,’” he said. “I know that story very well.”
“Well, which, then? You’re the expert.” (Gurnah 169–170)

In this game of chicken, Latif realizes that he doesn’t want the jinn he was thinking of to be a particular jinn, because that demonstrates that he has been thinking on the level of mythology. By denying the specificity of “Qamar Zaman” and saying “I know that story very well,” he calls upon his status as literary scholar, as if his knowledge of English literature means he has rationally studied and critiqued the stories of his childhood. But he has already admitted that he had an image of the jinn he’d pictured Saleh as, and Saleh’s ironic appropriation of Rachel’s term for Latif as an “expert” calls into question Latif’s distance from this folklore. He wants to think of himself as a rational subject, trying to find the truth of what happened, but he finds himself operating within the traditional belief system of storytelling and jinns.

In conclusion, we recall the moment in Justice’s article where Christina of Markyate has a vision that the abbot wore the wrong color the day before—this is so extraordinarily miraculous that her supporters realize they hadn’t actually believed in miracles before then. The abbot discovers that “what he has used as a convenient heuristic premise is actually the rudest fact: it is not as if she can see him; she just can see him. He thereby learns to believe what he believes” (Justice 17). In addition to this being a truly delightful moment, it seems clear that the medieval believers Justice describes are not merely Enlightenment doubters overcoming their rationality with the force of will. Rather, it seems that they can’t necessarily tell the difference between believing and knowing, or faith and reasoning. We think our characters (and humans in general) have this problem too.

"Lethal sweetness socks tots": animating theory, animating a cereal box

Probably what I've outlined below is too ambitious, even for advanced undergraduates-- I welcome y'alls input on that.

If I wanted to teach Mel Chen’s "Toxic Animacies", I think the first thing I would have to do is spend some time discussing the points in the article that I think would be difficult for an undergraduate reader: namely, Chen’s prose is dense, and several of her lines of argumentation push at the boundaries of what we expect to see in an article. 

I think it’s worth it to try to show students how to be patient with texts like this. For me, this involves reading them with the kind of critical eye we bring to science fiction (or any fiction), rather than asking if the world described in theory matches up with our experience. In other words, I think that (from a pedagogical perspective) it would be useful to treat theory as requiring a readerly logic of “what if?” rather than one of “what is?"

So instead of starting with the Chen piece, I would start with “Heat Death of the Universe” and a discussion of genre. 

• This short story has actually been the source of a lot of debate about genre: it was published in a science fiction magazine, but the SF community is split on whether it is SF or not. What do you guys think?

I've seen this particular question asked in classes before. It tends to create interesting debates about genre.

I’d spend a couple of minutes on how science fiction is defined at various points by various theorists:

• a sort of ‘predictive’ logic of SF (beginning with the early pulps)
• which was reframed by New Worlds (the magazine in which this story appears): editor M. Moorcock tries to move from intensive engagement with technology, the future, and “outer space” to an engagement with speculative approaches to “inner space.” 
• Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement”: 
• meaning that it deals with unfamiliar/strange objects, situations, and locations (estrangement), 
• but it is possible to approach these instances of “strange newness” using a cognitive approach, making sense of the relationship between them and the “real world”

Then I’d ask what aspects of Zoline's short story are speculative, in the sense of creating estrangement and cognition. I'd take a few responses before moving on, once I got a sense that students understood the concepts outlined above.

Transitioning to ‘Toxic Animacies,’ I would encourage students to think of this piece of theory in a similar way— what kind of world would we have to imagine for the theory to make more sense? As I was saying before, I feel like there are parts in Chen's piece that use complex language and are hard to parse, and then other parts that may be easier to understand but might be either emotionally uncomfortable or hard to believe.

Two such moments, at least for me, are:

(1) The section in which Chen riffs on the idea of "black children licking the peeling walls of their unmaintained dwellings" and the (unrepresentable, but surely there?) image of a little white boy licking Thomas the Tank Engine, “playing improperly with the phallic toy” (270-1). For me at least, this was a tiny bit unconvincing, if deliciously controversial. I have never envisioned either of these scenes!

In discussing this with students, I would try to guide them to the idea of looking at this image as a stylistic device. The the idea of interpenetration, permeability, and radical vulnerability to others (and the assault on traditional white masculinity this implies) seems to hold up even if we don't buy the queerness of licking Thomas the Tank Engine. 

• “If this were a kind of science fictional representation, we wouldn’t say 'I’ve never seen a two-headed alien in real life’, and stop there. We would ask what the author is DOING with the two-headed alien— why are they depicting it, rather than ‘is it possible?’. Instead of asking if it’s plausible, lets ask what Chen is trying to represent with this image."

(2) This might lead us into the section in which Chen writes personally about her experiences with multiple chemical sensitivity. Here I think it would be good to give students time to express their responses to Chen’s description of intoxication and vulnerability. 

• Who among us has never used scented laundry detergent, deodorant, cigarettes or skin cream? How should we feel addressed by this section of the paper? I for one feel guilt and anxiety about being toxic, which threatens to slide into frustration and anger at her “sensitivity” to me.

• What kind of world does Chen live in, and what does it draw her attention to? Her experiences may seem “estranged” from our own (or maybe not?), but they DO let us see the “real world” differently.

Finally, time permitting, I would bring us back to “Heat Death,” and ask students if we can find scenes that help us understand what Chen means by ‘animacy.’ She writes that while "animacy has no single definition," part of it is "a quality of agency, sentience, or liveness." She encourages us to "ask not 'who is alive, or dead,' but 'what is animate, or inanimate, or less animate'; relationally, we can ask about the possibilities of the interobjective, above and beyond the intersubjective” (280). 

As a candidate passage for finding “animacy” in “Heat Death,” (should students be less than forthcoming), I would turn to the description of a box of frosted flakes which participates in the kind of narratives of toxicity Chen describes. I’ve included an image of the passage below, instead of a big block of text, so I can pretend this entry is shorter than it would be otherwise.

I wish I could conduct a detailed close reading of this passage for you all now, but I’m really pushing myself to stop at two pages, for all of our sakes. So suffice it to say that I think the way that the box is designed to “appeal” to children begins to bleed over into a sort of animacy. The box undergoes a transformation here from being “appealing,” (i.e. having properties of classical sculpture) to launching a series of appeals, a “blatted” discourse with the children (to which they enthusiastically respond). And then there is this maternal paranoia about why the cereal box is so communicative: Sarah already hears "the decay set in upon the little white milk teeth, the bony whine of the dentist's drill,” and fears the cereal must cause a “special cruel cancer in children.”

 (animating a box of frosted flakes, p.1 )

 (a special, cruel cancer p.2)

There's more than enough here for chewing through some of the Chen, though admittedly it diminishes her point about differential risk exposure: I'd have to bring that up specifically, perhaps by noting the brilliant moment where she talks about the NY Times' assumption that cheap McDonalds toys certainly may be toxic, expensive trains should not be. 

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.