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In The Biopolitics of Feeling Kyla Schuller unearths the forgotten, multiethnic sciences of impressibility-the capacity to be transformed by one's environment and experiences-to uncover how biopower developed in the United States. Schuller challenges prevalent interpretations of biopower and literary cultures to reveal how biopower emerged within the discourses and practices of sentimentalism. Through analyses of evolutionary theories, gynecological sciences, abolitionist poetry and other literary texts, feminist tracts, child welfare reforms, and black uplift movements, Schuller excavates a vast apparatus that regulated the capacity of sensory and emotional feeling in an attempt to shape the evolution of the national population. Her historical and theoretical work exposes the overlooked role of sex difference in population management and the optimization of life, illuminating how models of binary sex function as one of the key mechanisms of racializing power. Schuller thereby overturns long-accepted frameworks of the nature of race and sex difference, offers key corrective insights to modern debates surrounding the equation of racism with determinism and the liberatory potential of ideas about the plasticity of the body, and reframes contemporary notions of sentiment, affect, sexuality, evolution, and heredity.
In The Biopolitics of Feeling Kyla Schuller unearths the forgotten, multiethnic sciences of impressibility-the capacity to be transformed by one's environment and experiences-to uncover how biopower developed in the United States. Schuller challenges prevalent interpretations of biopower and literary cultures to reveal how biopower emerged within the discourses and practices of sentimentalism. Through analyses of evolutionary theories, gynecological sciences, abolitionist poetry and other literary texts, feminist tracts, child welfare reforms, and black uplift movements, Schuller excavates a vast apparatus that regulated the capacity of sensory and emotional feeling in an attempt to shape the evolution of the national population. Her historical and theoretical work exposes the overlooked role of sex difference in population management and the optimization of life, illuminating how models of binary sex function as one of the key mechanisms of racializing power. Schuller thereby overturns long-accepted frameworks of the nature of race and sex difference, offers key corrective insights to modern debates surrounding the equation of racism with determinism and the liberatory potential of ideas about the plasticity of the body, and reframes contemporary notions of sentiment, affect, sexuality, evolution, and heredity.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Sentimental Biopower 1
1. Taxonomies of Feeling: Sensation and Sentiment in Evolutionary
Race Science 35
2. Body as Text, Race as Palimpsest: Frances E. W. Harper and Black
Feminist Biopolitics 68
3. Vaginal Impressions: Gyno-neurology and the Racial Origins of
Sexual Difference 100
4. Incremental Life: Biophilanthropy and the Child Migrants of the
Lower East Side 134
5. From Impressibility to Interactionism: W. E. B. Du Bois, Black
Eugenics, and the Struggle against Genetic Determinisms
172
Epilogue. The Afterlives of Impressibility 205
Notes 215
Bibliography 247
Index 271
Kyla Schuller is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
"[Schuller's] terminology here may act as a springboard for
additional theorizations of race. . . . An ambitious, conscientious
history."
*Cultural Studies*
"The importance of this book to nineteenth-century studies cannot
be understated: it fundamentally rewrites the history of
sentimentalism, an affective and cultural formation that dominated
norms of comportment and embodiment across the period. . . . "
*American Quarterly*
"The Biopolitics of Feeling takes a refreshingly head-on approach
to the historical entanglement of race and sex in the United
States. . . Stunningly convincing . . . Readers will find an
abundant resource of theoretically informed readings of postbellum
and Progressive Era science and literature throughout the study,
but they will be also unable to ignore Schuller’s urgent warning
about feminism’s embeddedness in the machinations of biopower."
*Catalyst*
"Impressibility and sentimentalism combine in this book to form a
rubric assessing a broad and fascinating archive. . . . Schuller
offers a broad view of how nineteenth-century Americans were given
repeated exposure to the logic of impressibility and affective
fitness, to the point where both became unconscious components of
civic life."
*Legacy*
"An impressive synthesis of historical and theoretical work. . . .
A well-documented critique of society and valuable contribution to
scholarship on biopolitics that addresses persistent issues that
can spark intellectual discussions. The book would be useful for
scholars across disciplines such as Philosophy, Health Studies,
Critical Race Studies, Ethnic Studies and Women, Gender and
Sexuality Studies."
*Journal of International Women's Studies*
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