The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century by Kyla Schuller (review)

At the core of liberal democracy is the idea of feeling and, in particular, a civilized person's right to feel. But what the logic of justice and rights conceals with relation to feeling is, in fact, a hidden mandate: the capacity to feel is taken as evidence of cultivation and fitness for participation in liberal democracy, and not merely as a privilege to be enjoyed under it. In The Biopolitics of Feeling, Kyla Schuller examines the connections between feeling and democratic fitness through the logic of what she calls impressibility. This term derives from the idea of the impression, or the process by which "a living body is acted on by the animate and inanimate objects of its environment" (6). By extension, Schuller defines impressibility as "the capacity of a substance to receive impressions from external objects that thereby change its characteristics" (7). That is to say, impressibility describes the extent to which a subject may be considered emotionally malleable and thus a fit candidate for the feelings that may be imposed upon it by its liberal democratic society.

Schuller argues in favor of viewing impressibility as the nineteenth-century version of (or precursor to) affect, a term with which gender studies scholars are already well acquainted (10). Sara Ahmed, one of several critics who helped establish the field of affect theory, observes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) that an impression amounts to "an affect that leaves its mark or trace" (6). Schuller, in favoring impressibility over affect, seeks to renovate the study of gender in nineteenth-century America by showing how the discourses of biology and genetics developed during that era under the auspices of biopower. This last term she borrows from Michel Foucault to explain "how bodies were understood to bind together into the organic phenomenon of population" (8). The word organic is used here disingenuously, as Schuller sets out to prove, vis-à-vis Foucault, how there is nothing inherently organic or natural about how biopower went about "turning humans into a species and making biology their history" in nineteenth-century America (11).

Accordingly, scientific (and pseudo-scientific) thinking becomes the target of Schuller's critique, especially as it relates to the formation of lasting ideas about the nature of race and gender that persist and remain in play throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Biopolitics of Feeling tracks a process of accumulation by which assumptions about impressibility and sentiment became the basis for judging individuals' fitness for democratic inclusion and for controlling populations as a whole. That process begins with a discussion of the so-called American School of Evolution—a group of nineteenth-century biologists and affiliated scholars who challenged some of Charles Darwin's key evolutionary theories—and of sentimentalism's function as a "technology of species, race, and sex differentiation" (32). It culminates a few chapters later in an analysis of "the ongoing legacy of impressibility within social construction theory and epigenetics," taking stock all the while of how some scholars' championing of social constructionism over biological discourse has damaged contemporary understandings of both race and gender (33). To this end, Schuller argues that scholars' efforts to view race, for instance, as a social construct is a project built upon neoliberal foundations: "racial belonging as a primarily social construct can easily be recruited to naturalize neoliberal racial capitalism" (205). In a similar way, Schuller critiques feminist critics' overreliance on social constructionism, observing how it descends historically from the logic of impressibility and fitness. As Schuller sees it, "social construction theories recapitulate, rather than interrogate, the grounds of difference claims initially elaborated within the gradual deployment of biopower over the course of the nineteenth century" (206). That is to say, rather than furthering the aims of the feminist movement, constructionism returns us to the nineteenth century, recalling the ways that subjects were required to...