When PhDs get sexy... or bring sexy back. Or something.

Yes, Halloween is over, but we can get ready for next year! Am I right?!?

Thanks to this Salon article for highlighting some of the best responses. But there are so many more on Amazon's product page such as:

"DIPLOMA INCLUDED?!?! Why the hell did I put myself through ten years of grad school!! Lesson learned."

"Sleeves are too short & have no stripes. Costume does not feature a hood. This is a "sexy BA" at best."

"As a lady PhD student, let me say how much of a relief it is to see them accurately describe what we wear every day. I don't care if it isn't proper PPE, how else will we find husbands if not for our degree in sexy? Bravo to Delicious costumes for supporting women's education in letting us know that we're only as smart as our skirts are short."

When someone next asks where the profession is going, I think the answer is now incredibly clear. Your thoughts?

Power Exercised Through Knowledge

Foucault: 4
Kates: 1
Liu: .5
Kindley: 0

Just sayin'  

Four out of Five Kates Agree: The Period is False

In “Against the Period,” Joshua Kates explicates Althusser’s concepts about rupture and historiography. According to Althusser--as read through Kates--a singular, distinct rupture occurred within the past that has since changed the way in which history happens. This rupture is ongoing because it has not yet been identified and studied by scholars, but when it is identified, it will form a new basis of knowledge and thought:

 “That rupture in the conception of history and becoming, described in the foregoing, proves to propagate itself further, bringing into question the very organization and operation of all cognition. That is, the reformulation of historiography contemplated above entails not just new knowledge but potentially a new kind of knowledge, triggering a potentially still greater discontinuity in the possibilities of knowledge and understanding themselves.” (Kates 147) 

Kates argues that this rupture--although its origin, cause, nature, and effects are unidentified--has influenced all knowledge and understanding since its inception. No matter how new, in-depth, or nuanced theories of historiography may be, they cannot adequately function as studies of historiography because they are inherently unable to incorporate Althusser’s rupture. This explains Kates title, “Against the Period”: in the face of such an influential, unpredictable rupture, such periods as Early Modern, Long Eighteenth-Century, Modernism, and others, seem naive at best, and “a tale told by an idiot” at worst.

Our primary texts, Gallathea and Frankenstein, are both conventionally viewed as being firmly embedded in their respective “periods” of literary history, typifying their historical and cultural moments in their form, content, and approach. In fact, scholars of Gallathea often emphasize how dangerous it is to attempt to analyze the play outside of its historical period: this is not a play about modern gender reassignment surgery, and Gallathea and Phyllida should not be seen as English drama’s first lesbian/trans* couple (especially in the wake of such scholarship as Foucault’s History of Sexuality). In contrast, some scholars position Frankenstein as a candidate for the first science fiction novel, thus marking its period as the originating point of a new genre. In other words, critics have wedded Gallathea to its historical moment because of its affinity with other early modern dramas and differentiation from later works, whereas they have bound Frankenstein to its historical moment because of the ways in which the novel locates the origination point of the genre of science fiction in Romanticism, thus (arguably) marking Romanticism as an origin of a new genre. In both cases, and for opposing reasons, these texts have been burdened with identification within and through a “period” that therefore seems somewhat circularly defined.

We find it interesting to think about "The Period" in terms of its use(ful/less)ness in discussing, say, how ideas about the “laws” of nature--the boundaries of possibility and acceptability--might have shifted between the Early Modern and Romantic periods in Britain. We can interpret this as a change over time in strategies for encountering and making sense of the “rupture” that Kates posits above. Certainly both texts feature drastic and sudden changes in “realities” that previously appeared static and stable.  We can play with the idea of period as a tool for looking at that change and/or as an obstacle to understanding the shift as organic, gradual, and contingent. It’s also interesting to think about the implications of both our texts adapting/appropriating earlier stories and how/whether that complicates "Period" and this idea of an evolving approach to the rupture. We feel like we don't have a solid answer either way as to whether periodization (as Kates discusses it) is generally a help or a hindrance in this endeavor, but we think that's ok. Ultimately we find that “period” should not serve as a concrete delineation between different spirits of the age and that it is far more helpful to consider periodization as a reflection of the changing ways in which writers have explored and “battled” with the rupture throughout time.

Jessica and Averyl out

*mic drop*

"I've got the Power!"...or do I? by Briana, Sally, and Rebecca

When we first began brainstorming for our collaborative post, we were interested in combining a look at Foucault’s theories about power and an attempt at a small digital humanities project of the type Liu describes.  Not having a powerful program to analyze the words of our texts, we were interested in finding digital copies, searching for the word “power,” and analyzing how often and in what contexts it was used.  That idea fell through with the recognition that Rebecca’s text was not readily available in digital form, so we reverted to looking at our texts by hand.  We decided we would each choose one obvious way that “power” is exerted in our texts, write briefly about it, then come together to see what conclusions, if any, would could draw about how power works across the texts.  We conclude with some general questions about the text and its implications.  

Briana:

In Silas Marner, the efficiency of officially recognized forms of power is put deliberately into question, as they comically fail to fulfill their stated goals, then gradually stop even trying.  After Silas returns home one day to find that a bag of gold, his life savings and the thing he literally lived for, has been stolen, he rushes to the local tavern to report it missing.  The action that follows is ridiculous as the entire town scrambles to determine who could have robbed him.  Officially, the constables are in charge of the case, but in reality, “the whole village…was occupied in gathering and discussing news about it” (59).  After a few false leads and wild speculation, the general consensus is that a passing peddler (whom, after some suggestive prompting, many characters can “definitely” remember as being suspicious and wearing wild earrings) is the culprit.  But with no proof, and no peddler, the constables have to drop the case.

It is not until many chapters later that the truth (which the readers have known all along) is revealed in an apparently random occurrence.  Godfrey Cass drains the local Stone Pits and the body of his brother, who had disappeared mysteriously sixteen years ago, is found among the rocks, clutching a bag of gold.  Silas, having symbolically replaced the gold with the golden-haired Eppie he’d raised as his daughter, is finally “free” to reclaim the money.  The recovery is to be understood by the characters and the readers as an act of God.  The characters in the story have no real power—either the officially appointed constables or the others who attempt to usurp their jobs.  Instead, only God has power.  Notably, it is not the prohibitive “Thou shalt not” power of the Ten Commandments, the type of juridicial rules that Foucault would argue is too often associated with a definition of “power,” (4) but rather a productive power that seeks Silas’s moral good as its goal.

Sally:

“Powers,” as Michel Foucault describes in “The Mesh of Power,” are present in Pale Horse, Pale Rider in many guises, although the word ‘power’ itself never appears in the text (and this I know from a failed attempt at channeling this week’s digital humanities geniuses.) Foucault says:

A society is not a unitary body, in which one and only one power is exercised. Society is in reality the juxtaposition, the link, the coordination and also the hierarchy of different powers that nevertheless remain in their specificity. Marx places great emphasis, for example, on the simultaneously specific and relatively autonomous—in some sense impervious—character of the de facto power the boss exercises in a workshop, compared to the juridical kind of power that exists in the rest of society. Thus, the existence of regions of power. Society is an archipelago of different powers (4?).

The concept of an “archipelago of different powers” intrigues me. I examined Pale Horse, Pale Rider to see where different powers are portrayed. Two seem noteworthy. First, of course, is governmental power. One of the themes of this novel concerns subversive activity, an activity that the US government incessantly attempts to control and/or quash. Overtly, subversion hovers over the country in 1918, because the US was still entrenched in the last stages of WWI. The Espionage Act of 1917 put the country on high alert for any enemies–real or imagined—in their midst. Patriotism was expected and both cajoled and conscripted as proof of non-subversive behavior. Protagonist Miranda and her beau Adam attend a ‘long and dreary play’, prolonged by a different kind of intermission:

When the curtain rose for the third act, the third act did not take place at once. There was instead disclosed a backdrop almost covered with an American flag […] Before it posed a local dollar-a-year man, now doing his bit as a Liberty Bond salesman. […] Miranda tried not to listen, but she heard. These vile Huns—glorious Belleau Wood—our keyword is Sacrifice—Martyred Belgium—give till it hurts […] The audience rose and sang, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” (Porter 175).

Liberty Bonds and their promise of “war with a happy ending” were a sign of the overt institutional power at work during the war. Covertly, however, the country was being terrorized by a subversive element more dangerous than any traitor and saboteur. This ‘element’ rode in under the guise of “just the flu” and viciously silenced almost 700,000 Americans before finally riding off. Influenza proved to be a power that wielded total control over society. People sought to dissipate this power by halting its spread--this included socially isolating, shunning, and quarantining anyone with flu symptoms. But there was no ‘silver bullet’ to stop this disease; with impunity, it overpowered individuals, robbing them of control over their bodies and, in many cases, their minds.

I would characterize influenza as one of Marx’s de facto powers: in 1918, it was specific, autonomous, and definitely impervious to any other power. US society had a lot to deal with during the end months of the Great War; the unique power of influenza did not make life any easier.

Rebecca:

From the moment protagonist Dr. Norton Perina arrives on Ivu’ivu, he finds himself immersed in Foucault’s ethnology of prohibition from the seemingly benign to the ultimately devastating:  he must eat spam though he doesn’t want to; he must leave the opa’ivu’eke (the magical turtles) alone, but he destroys them.  After later publishing his discovery that consuming the opa’ivu’eke’s flesh possesses the power to extend life to potential immortality, pharmaceutical companies from the West devours the island for its riches, leaving the turtles extinct and the landscape decimated.  While extracting its resources, the Westerners supplant the environment with modern infrastructure and other mechanisms of power.  Starting with building a runway, the gradual introduction and integration of Western culture on the island engenders increasingly destructive effects--language acquisition, religious conversion, disease, alcoholism, pollution, extinction of indigenous plants and animals, and the near extinction of the indigenous people.  When much of the adult population had perished or become otherwise incapacitated, Norton begins adopting dozens of children from the island over a period of over 15 years.  As it is Norton’s discovery that undoubtedly catalyzes the island’s decline, he never expresses guilt over its desecration but instead accepts to take the children back to the US and raise them.  These remainders of a near extinct civilization become material representations of its former existence. Perina’s choices mimic Foucault’s conclusions in “The Mesh of Power” through materiality:

“Life now becomes [...] an object of power. Life and the body.  Previously, there had only been subjects, juridical subjects from whom we could collect goods, and life too, moreover.  Now, there are bodies and populations.  Power becomes materialist” (11).  

Dr. Perina reinforces his power over the life of the island and its people through his choice to adopt these children, as they would likely have not survived otherwise. Nevertheless, since Foucault’s society is “an archipelago of different powers,” Norton’s power does not remain uncontested.  In the scene in which Norton adopts the child that will evitably upend his life, he enters into a materialist exchange that embodies Foucault’s ethnology of prohibition.  Many years after Ivu’ivu’s decline, a man approaches Norton just as he is about to get on a plane to leave the island and begs him to take his son. When Norton refuses, he implores, “you take him!”  After realizing this man bears a striking resemblance to young man he had met in his initial visit years earlier, Norton finds himself incapable of saying no, and accepts.  As he is trying to leave, the man then demands, “You must give me something for him! [...] I must have something for him!”  Norton gives him the only items he has on him, a penknife and some pistachios; the man happily accepts and triumphantly runs away. Norton concludes, “he had not wanted the boy, but the boy was also his only possession, his only thing to sell or trade” (382).   This commodification of bodies is further complicated later in the text when Dr. Perina is convicted of sexually abusing this boy.  Although Norton’s reputation is tarnished from the accusations and his imprisonment, he serves his time and moves to an undisclosed location to live the rest of his life peacefully.  Despite momentarily experiencing punishment by power’s societal mechanisms, Dr. Perina ultimately slips through its mesh.

Conclusions:

It is probably impossible to find a novel that does not contain at least some power issues, whether overt or covert, institutional or de facto, benevolent or hostile. All three of our novels wound power in and out of the narrative, allowing it to both influence and direct the protagonists. Silas Marner, Miranda, and Dr. Perina each absorb and react to the power structure in which they find themselves in ways unique to both the novels’ settings and the authors’ whims. Foucault says:

I believe that we must now free ourselves from this juridical conception of power—this conception of power derived from the law and sovereign, from the rule and prohibition—if we wish to proceed towards an analysis of the real functioning of power, rather than its mere representation (4?)

Juridical power is present, but in the background, of all our protagonists’ situations. Rather, it is the de facto power—that power wielded by unexpected players--that takes front and center in these novels: Silas is at the mercy of incompetent fellow citizens; Miranda endures the trauma of disease that rules, and devastates, her world; Dr. Perina experiences the overwhelming disaster that Nature can invoke when someone messes with the ecosystem.

Questions:

Foucault talks about the technology of power and how the procedures can be perfected (6?), but all our novels seem to showcase people whose own power is ineffective or gets out of their control.  Does this mean they did not actually have power, or that their power was not far enough along in its “development?”

We are also interested in Foucault’s admission that productive power in some ways incorporates prohibition (so, in the army example, armies strives to create powerful fighting forces, but this also results in a system where the army tells soldiers what they can and cannot do).  So how is Foucault’s vision of power really different from a prohibitive one?  In that it has a goal and is not just enforcing rules for the sake of it?

Also, and perhaps unrelated, what are the limitations of Foucault’s seemingly heteronormative view of sex as a machine of [re]production?  

And finally, when one thinks about power and sex, one naturally then, of course, thinks of English department graduate students :).  So:  what de facto powers are at work in our lives as students? And, how does that affect how we experience our education at UC Davis?

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.