Bodies, Bio-power and Bio-politics

The Body:

            Black...child...endangered...species. A physical marking, a stage of life, an existential threat, part of a larger group who have real, concrete individual and collective needs that must be addressed. These few categories, Foucault would argue, are all examples of the expressions of power interacting at the level of the body. Indeed, Foucault argues that in the transition from what he calls the Classical period to the period that brought with it the age of enlightenment, the rise of capitalism and the human sciences the concept of power transitioned from the right of a sovereign to either make die or let live to an expression of power whose aim is to administer and maintain life.

            Black...child...endangered...species. The child in the picture above, if I understand Foucault correctly, exists in the midst of a multiplicity of forces—a multitude of power relations—that are continuously categorizing, ordering, naming, placing and managing him from birth. He is not a vague theoretical concept—nor is he the object of a top-down exercise of power. He is affected in his physical form by the expressions of power in the society into which he was born and exerts forces—expresses power—himself. From the moment he enters into a family, he will begin to be affected by the discipline Foucault says characterizes the power expressed on, in and through bodies. By rituals of repetition, spatial placement, arrangement of resources and countless other effects, he will be trained to be efficient and useful, yet docile. In school, he will be on a rigid time schedule and will repeat the same routine every day for years, but not before he has submitted to medical testing and manipulation, been registered and verified.

            Before he is six years old, he will have been examined and scrutinized in more ways than he can count. When he enters kindergarten, before he is taught to spell his own name, he will be taught to sit, stand, line up, walk and stop on command. And if he does not comply with the norms established, then he will move through a series of procedures that will further investigate, measure and categorize him in attempts to produce a normal response until, ultimately, if he does not comply with the norms, he will participate in the system of strict disciplinary activity that is the penal system. It is not the fact that he is a subject of the law that makes this possible, but that he is an embodied being on and in whom the relations of power in his society are at work. His body is, “directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (173).

The disciplining of the body takes many forms

Let's look again at the original picture, shall we?

Only the child's picture is shown, but the statement in the picture serves to implicate Black women as abnormal, endangering factors to their own children. This child has made it into the world safely, but—if we believe this picture—many do not. In a society whose collective aim is now to manage and promote life, an entire group of women are implicated in the destruction of life. If the above description of the first years of the child's life is (as I hope it is) an accurate description of the expressions of disciplinary power relations on the body, what is happening to Black women in this picture opens us to the concepts of bio-power and bio-politics.

           

Bio-Power and Bio-Politics:

            The reason this little baby can be investigated and examined as thoroughly as he can is because of the advancements of the sciences during 19^th century. Foucault—in line with his understanding of knowledge/power—understands the specialization of the sciences to have contributed to the powers of surveillance and categorization. Along with the disciplines' power to control the productive capacity and docility of bodies, advances in medical knowledge increased the power to extend and enhance life. With the advancement of the sciences, the body and all of its functions and needs and interests are presumed to be “knowable” and with this new knowledge comes a new form of power relation—bio-power. Bio-power, according to Foucault:

evolved in two basic forms…the first to be formed, it seems—centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integrations into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body (261-262).

This form of bio-power is what we see in the conditioning of the baby by ritual and social norming. The training of his body from childhood to perform in the ways that are acceptable and fruitful to his society. We can clearly imagine the baby in physical form and the forces that will seek to train his body. Most of us have been children in this country. We can estimate some of the ways in which power will invest his little body without much difficulty, however, when we consider the second form of bio-power, the picture this picture becomes both clearer and more complicated.

The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: the bio-politics of the population (262).

            The above is not just a picture and a fact. It is an argument in a bio-political discourse. Why is the Black child an endangered species? Because some statistics show that Black women are more likely to abort their fetuses than white women and other minorities. Demography—the statistical study of populations—is one of the many tools through which bio-politics organizes living beings in a living world. Because the sciences produced the knowledge that Black women abort fetuses more often than white women (statistics that others question and challenge), and because bio-power is expressed in the administering of life, it is no surprise that a movement toward mitigating what may be considered by some to be the ritual destruction of life was born to address this issue. It would be easy for someone like with me—someone with a strictly pro-reproductive rights/justice orientation—to dismiss these billboards as products of flawed ideology or attempts at top down control of Black women, but Foulcault calls me to consider this a little more deeply.

        If power is productive and discourse constitutes realities—then the “endangered Black child” is no matter of abstraction, but a reality—produced by power/knowledge—that must now be managed. The creation of the endangered Black child also implicates other bodies in its situation. If the Black child is in danger of being aborted because statistics tell us so, then there are implications that point to the Black woman. If she—in a world of power relations that seek to manage life—is making the decision to stop life, then her own life must be inspected, investigated and categorized in order to situate it in terms abnormal vs. normal. This particular billboard (as have many images of the Black woman in Western discursive practices) seems to seek to categorize her as abnormal. It does not say why—it only needs to produce an endangered child in order to point—through the web of the discourse that surrounds the “proper” functioning of a woman and a mother—to an abnormal mother.

            Luckily, Foucault reminds us, power is no longer the possession of any one person or group. So even as statistics produce knowledge about Black female bodies that seems to imply abnormality and permit punitive action, other forms of knowledge/power express themselves within the same bio-political discourse to challenge those forces. When this particular expression of the bio-political discourse that seems to classify Black women as dangerous and irresponsible—abnormal—reared its head in 2010 it immediately attracted attention and encountered opposition in the form of other bio-political powers. The statistics that supported the argument were investigated more closely and new knowledge was produced. Several groups of people who had been operating independently of each other combined their knowledge/power to create a new, concrete reality—an organization AND a movement called Trust Black Women.

Trust Black Women—in response to the messages deployed by these billboards and other tactics—utilizes medical knowledge, psychology, sociology, economics, urban anthropology, political advocacy and the arts in order to express the relations of power found in the lived experiences of women as decision-makers. Their use of all of the tools of as many of the sciences available to them in order to help categorize the Black female population differently from the way it has been categorized in the picture above is a bio-political strategy—seeking to address the lived existence of a population in the midst of political forces that are ever changing and influencing it.



"Sapphire" angry and overbearing



Questions for reflection/discussion:

1) Where and how do you see Bio-political strategies expressed in each of the presidential candidates' main messages. (The birth control debate is TOO easy!!!)

2) I mentioned before that discursive practices surrounding Black women's bodies in the West have often categorized them as abnormal. To the righ are three of the images that have been used to do so. How do you think biopolitics plays itself out in the deployment of such images? Which one of these is most likely to create an "endangered" Black child?



3) What other bio-political discourses are important to you and why?

"Mammy" asexual and safe



"Jezebel" sexually available and dangerous