Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century

Kyla Schuller's The Biopolitics of Feeling reveals how biopower developed in the US through the forgotten, multiethnic sciences of impressibility, challenging prevailing interpretations of biopower and literary cultures. She 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.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 296 pages
Publication date: 22 December 2017
Publisher: Duke University Press

Kyla Schuller's book, "The Biopolitics of Feeling," explores the forgotten, multiethnic sciences of impressibility, which allowed individuals to be transformed by their environment and experiences. Through analyses of evolutionary theories, gynecological sciences, abolitionist poetry, feminist tracts, child welfare reforms, and black uplift movements, Schuller uncovers 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.

Weight: 448g
Dimension: 153 x 229 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780822369530