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

Published Durham : Duke University Press, 2018 ©2018

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 282 pages) Series Anima ANIMA (Duke University Press) 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 In The Biopolitics of Feeling Kyla Schuller 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. Schuller 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, Schuller excavates 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 Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on January 03, 2018) 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 SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General. SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory Emotions in literature Eugenics in literature Literature and science Sentimentalism in literature Sex role United States Genre/Form History Form Electronic book LC no. 2017043095 ISBN 9780822372356 0822372355

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