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Author:

Schuller, Kyla, 1977- author.

Title:

The biopolitics of feeling : race, sex, and science in the nineteenth century / Kyla Schuller.

Publisher:

Duke University Press,

Copyright Date:

2018

Description:

xi, 282 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Subject:

Sentimentalism in literature--History--19th century.
Emotions in literature--History--19th century.
Eugenics in literature--History--19th century.
Sex role--History--19th century.
Literature and science--United States--History--19th century.
Emotions in literature.
Eugenics in literature.
Literature and science.
Sentimentalism in literature.
Sex role.
United States.
1800-1899
History.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents:

Introduction: Sentimental biopower -- Taxonomies of feeling: sensation and sentiment in evolutionary race science -- Body as text, race as palimpsest: Frances E.W. Harper and black feminist biopolitics -- Vaginal impressions: gyno-neurology and the racial origins of sexual difference -- Incremental life: biophilanthropy and the child migrants of the lower east side -- From impressibility to interactionism: W.E.B. du Bois, black eugenics, and the struggle -- Against genetic determinisms -- Epilogue: The afterlives of impressibility.

Summary:

"[This book] 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. [The author] 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, [the author] excavates a vast apparatus that regulated the capacity of sensory and emotional feeling in an attempt to shape the evolution of the national population. [The author's] 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. [The author] 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."-- Back cover.

Series:

Anima

ISBN:

0822369532
9780822369530
0822369230
9780822369233

OCLC:

(OCoLC)978523618

LCCN:

2017025273

Locations:

USUX851 -- Iowa State University - Parks Library (Ames)

PLAX964 -- Luther College - Preus Library (Decorah)

OVUX522 -- University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City)