Ladelle McWhorter

Most feminist theorists over the last forty years have held that a basic tenet of feminism is that women as a group are oppressed. The concept of oppression has never had a very broad meaning in liberal discourse, however, and with the rise of neo-liberalism since 1980 it has even less currency in public debate. This article argues that, while we may still believe women are oppressed, for pragmatic purposes Michel Foucault’s concept of practices of freedom is a more effective way to characterize feminist theory and politics

In his 1979 lecture series now translated as The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault suggests that there is an important relationship between neoliberalism and the cluster of phenomena he had previously named “biopower.” The relationship between these two apparently very different forms of governmentality is not obvious, however, and Foucault does not explicate it. The question has become a pressing one for feminists because it underlies a set of issues surrounding the emerging field of “reprogenetics.” Feminists have been highly critical of invasive reproductive technologies for decades, viewing them as demeaning to and dangerous for women's bodies and as staunchly traditional in their reinforcement of gender roles and of maternity as female desire and destiny. Reprogeneticists accuse feminists of hypocrisy in seeking to curtail the widest technically possible range of “procreative choice.” This essay traces some ways in which reprogenetics may be interpreted as a biopolitical formation as well as a neoliberal formation and suggests how the two seemingly antithetical types of phenomena might actually be overlapping and mutually reinforcing—perhaps opening the way for a more effective feminist critique

On the morning of February 11, 2015, the lead editorial in the New York Times was entitled “Lynching as Racial Terrorism.” I took great pleasure in it. I did not actually read the editorial. What gave me pleasure was the title, which affirmed the analytic and genealogical position I took on lynching in my last book: Lynching in the early twentieth century in this country, I argued, was a technique not of sovereign power but of disciplinary power; its exercise was decentralized, and its terrifying effects were felt in the bodies of entire populations who regulated their conduct accordingly—such is terrorism...

In “Society Must Be Defended” Foucault examines 17th century race war discourse not so much in order to understand 20th century racism or concepts of race but primarily because it constitutes an historical example of an attempt to think power without a head or king. This essay examines his account of race war discourse and the sources he used to construct it. It then takes issue with his claim that early race war discourse can be separated from 18th and 19th century racisms. Finally, it returns to the question of power and argues that the effect of the 1976 lecture series was to dislodge the sovereign model of power but also the model of power as war

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Normalization and the Welfare StateLadelle McWhorterIn Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America, I argued that as race was absorbed into biology in the nineteenth century, it was recast from a morphological typology to a function of physiological and evolutionary development (McWhorter 2009b). Racial difference became a sign of developmental difference. Racial groups represented stages of human evolution, and raced individuals were to be disciplined and managed in accordance with developmental norms.Twentieth-century race was therefore a category and tool of normalization; to be raced was to be located at a particular point along a developmental curve. Some races were thought to be more or less arrested in their development, while others were merely retarded, and theorists disagreed at times about which were which. But they all agreed that the most highly developed race was the Nordic or the Anglo-Saxon. Anglo-Saxons were the norm for modern human beings— anatomically, physiologically, intellectually, and morally. There were other white races whose status was debated (Mediterraneans and Ashkenazi Jews, for example), and there were disputes over the evolutionary status of Chinese, Hindus, and Mexicans. But most theorists agreed that at the very bottom of the developmental scale we should place Celts, Negroes, and American Indians. These peoples were savages, primitives. They should be trained to the extent possible to contribute to the society that had already superseded them, but their proper destiny was to pass away into extinction as humanity advanced.These evolutionary stragglers, along with the evolutionary throwbacks that appeared sometimes among whites, were considered dangerous for two main reasons. First, a great many of them were expensive. They were shiftless, often incompetent, and frequently lawless. Because of them, it was necessary to [End Page 39] maintain police forces, prisons, poorhouses, and asylums. They were a drain on the economic advance of society, which affected its educational and technological advance and ultimately its evolutionary advance as well. Second, because they had primitive sexual urges unrestrained by reason as well as heritable defects and diseases, they threatened the bloodlines of more advanced human beings. In short, they posed a risk for the ongoing evolutionary advancement of the entire Human Race. To protect the Race, it was necessary to contain these primitives, savages, and throwbacks and to reduce their numbers through careful management of their sexuality. This, I argued in the book, was racism’s cutting edge in the early twentieth century.Since publishing the book, I have done some work on the changes in practices of racism in the wake of the Biological Synthesis—that is, the unification of biology and genetics that occurred in the 1930s through the efforts of renowned scientists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr (McWhorter 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). As I discussed in that work, by 1950, evolutionary biology was less a study of species development than it was a study of the effects of evolutionary forces acting on and within populations. Correlatively, racial practices shifted toward management of statistically delineated populations or ethnic groups. Theorists and policymakers recognized that not all members of a given population have the same genes, meaning that old-style racism (which assumed, for example, that all Negroes were stupid) was false; some Negroes might be quite brilliant, in fact. It was not The Negro who was stupid but the population of Negroes in the aggregate that was measurably stupider than the population of Anglo-Saxons. Accordingly, normalization now occurred at the level of the population. Disciplinary practices designed for cultivating the capacities of groups of individuals were altered or replaced to focus on groups as groups, as aggregates. The point was to shift the statistical norm of the population rather than to alter the bodies or behavior of each and every individual. I have argued elsewhere (McWhorter 2009a, 5) that this merger of disciplinary normalization and population management constitutes the full flowering of what Foucault calls biopower (Foucault 1978, 140).When Lisa Guenther invited me to speak at the plenary on “Re-thinking Whiteness” that took place at the fifth annual meeting of philoSOPHIA at Vanderbilt University, she explained that although many presenters offer polished papers, it has been a...

Queer defies categorization and resists preset developmental trajectories. Practices of queering identities emerged near the end of the twentieth century as ways of resisting normalizing networks of power/knowledge. But how effective are queer practices at resisting networks of power/knowledge (including disciplines) that are not primarily normalizing in their functioning? This essay raises that question in light of expanding neoliberal discourses and institutions which, in some quarters at least, themselves undermine normalized identities in favor of a proliferation of personal styles susceptible to governance through market forces. Special attention is given to Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics in this analysis