The Desired Colonized Body Foucault and Race by Ann Laura Stoler - The FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE

2017-6-6 # HISTORY /// The Desired Colonized Body: Foucault and Race by Ann Laura Stoler - THE FUNAMBULIST
lt and Race by Ann Laura Stoler - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE
# HISTORY /// THE DESIRED

COLONIZED BODY:
FOUCAULT AND RACE BY
ANN LAURA STOLER
https://thefunambulist.net/history/history-the-desired-colonized-body-foucault-and-race-by-ann-laura-stoler 1/10
2017-6-6 # HISTORY /// The Desired Colonized Body: Foucault and Race by Ann Laura Stoler - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE
Race and the Education of Desire (Duke University Press, 1995) by Ann Laura Stoler constitutes an articulation of
Michel Foucaults 1976-1984 History of Sexuality with the knowledge gathered by post-colonial studies. As Stoler
recognizes herself in the books epilogue, we always blame Foucault for not having make his work exhaustive (see my
own past blame!), but it belongs to us to construct works after his own. In the specific case of this book, Stoler starts by
considering what Foucault has written and said about colonialism and racism, which is not as prominent in his work as
other notions have been (like pasteurism or governmentality).
The essence of Foucaults work on sexuality is that we tend too often to have a reading of the normative processes at
work in sex based on the idea that sexuality is being repressed. This reading can be partially explained by the
importance of Sigmund Freuds work that favors such interpretation. Foucault, on the other hand, sees in sexuality a
biopolitical governmentality at work and the expression of various relationships of power as recalls Stoler in the
beginning of her book:
"
For Foucault, sexuality is not opposed to and subversive power. On the contrary,
sexuality is a dense transfer point: of power, charged with instrumentality
(HS:103). Thus, far from being repressed in [nineteenth-century] society
[sexuality] was constantly aroused (HS:148). [] At the heart of his enquiry are
neither sexual practices nor the moral codes that have given rise to them.
Foucaults questions are of a very different order. Why has there been such a
protracted search for the truth about sex? Why should an identification and
assessment of our real and hidden selves be sought in our sexual desires,
fantasies, and behavior? []
His answer is one that reconceives both the notion of power and how sexuality is
tied to it. For Foucault, the history of sexuality is defined, not as a Freudian
account of Victorian prudery would have it, by injunctions against talk about sex
and specific sexual couplings in the bourgeois family, but by patterned
discursive incitements and stimulations that facilitated the penetration of social
and self-disciplinary regimes into the most intimate of modern life. (Ann Laura
Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucaults History of Sexuality and the
Colonial Order of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995, 3.)
Foucault traces a distinct discourse of sexuality appearing in the early

eighteenth century and a completely new technology of sex by its end
(HS:116). This new technology expanded along the three axes of pedagogy,
medicine, and demography that made sex not only a secular concern but a
concern of the state as well.sex became a matter that required the social body
as a whole, and virtually all of its individuals to place themselves under
surveillance. When sex became a police matter (HS:24), the administrative
concerns of the state became riveted not on a people, but on a population as
an economic and political problem. It is that moment when governments began

to enumerate legitimate and illegitimate births, frequency of illnesses, patterns
of diet and habitationthe effects of unmarried life or of the prohibitions
(HS:25). This policing of sex was not a matter of enforcing a taboo so much
as it was an apparatus for the ordered maximization of collective and individual
forces (HS:24-25). (Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire:
Foucaults History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995, 39.)
"
The regime of biopolitics discussed at length on this blog consists in the administrative management of bodies life. It
therefore implies that the mechanisms that (re)produce life are being under tight control. Foucault goes as far as
evoking this control as a technological one that organize the monitoring of behaviors and associations in the domain of
sexuality. Despite Foucaults relative silence about it, one can indeed recognize that the colonial condition that fully
unfolds itself through the absoluteness of administration, might present itself as the paradigm of such biopolitics of
sexuality, whether it organizes the demographics and behaviors of the colonized society. Stoler thus evokes the policies
undertook by the Dutch colonial authorities in the East Indies (now Indonesia) as a quintessential example of such
control:
"
The self-affirmation of white, middle-class colonials thus embodied a set of
fundamental tensions between a culture of whiteness that cordoned itself off
from the native world and a set of domestic arrangements and class distinctions
among Europeans that produced cultural hybridities and sympathies that
repeatedly transgressed these distinctions. The family, as Foucault warns us,
should not be seen as a haven from the sexualities of a dangerous outside
world, but as the site of their production. Colonial authorities knew it only too
well. They were obsessed with moral, sexual, and racial affronts to European
identity in Indische households, but also in full-blooded Dutch homes.
Housekeeping guides, medical manuals, and pedagogic journals produced in
the nineteenth-century Indies and the Netherlands reiterated such dangers in
many forms. Nor should it be surprising that this barrage of advice on
contaminations intensifies as germ theory develops and biomedicine begins its
triumphs. (Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucaults History
of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham: Duke University Press,
1995, 112.)
"
The colonial state exacerbates many racial and social relations within current Western societies. Each body is
recognized as either colonizer or colonized. This binary scheme does not mean that normative processes are not at
work in the colonial condition; what it manifests is the existence of two legislation applied to two types of recognizable
bodies, where two different sets of normative processes are operative. Sexuality brings however a certain complexity in
this binary scheme as many bodies emerged through interracial relationships, thus creating hybrids that, according to
Stoler, were attributed an ambiguous status. This mtissage, despite the colonial relationship of power that triggered it,
is interesting as it produces bodies and therefore lives that cannot be systematically categorized within the
colonial binary scheme. It is easy to understand that such (reproductive) interracial relationships were therefore not
encouraged by the administrative authorities, hence the emphasis on racist biological discourses. It is interesting to
learn for example that the colonial bodies living on the colonized land were regarded as inferior by the colonial bodies
living on European land, as the former are in potential (sexual) contact with the colonized bodies by the latter. There is
thus the development of an internal set of hierarchies that corresponds to the normative processes evoked above.
Similarly, colonialism creates a hierarchy of proletariat that Chris Marker does not miss to observe in Le Joli Mai (1962):
the lowest proletariat in a colonizing country always has a sub-proletariat from the colonized country.
Nowadays, most colonized nations have liberated themselves from colonialism, and many of the colonized bodies
progeny are now living on European land. The normative processes at work are applied in the same way for all bodies,
separating them all by a different degree to the norm, and placing them into categories accordingly. The biopolitical
organization of sexuality described by Foucault is still operating, but rather than being designed by a form of colonial
state, it is now developed by capitalism for which commodity and sexuality are entangled to form what Beatriz Preciado
calls pharmaco-pornographic society. (see past article).
LATEST ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE
SIGN-UP TO THE MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Name*
Email*
SIGN-UP
FORTHCOMING LECTURES & PRESENTATIONS

- 05/11/2017 11AM BANGKOK: Lecture at Chulalongkorn University
- 05/24/2017 7PM ZURICH: Funambulist event at Architekturforum. More here.
- 06/01/2017 PULA, Croatia
- 06/03/2017 4PM PARIS: Launch of Tumultes "Decolonial Pluralism"
- 10/06/2017 LIBSON: Conference at the Triennale
LATEST PODCAST
TheFunambulistPodcast
CRYSTALMARIEFLEMING///Blackness,MemorializationofSlavery,andRacialDenialsinFrance
Cookie policy
CATEGORIES
Select Category
TAG CLOUD

The Desired Colonized Body Foucault and Race by Ann Laura Stoler - The FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE

Transféré par

Informations du document

Description originale:

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

The Desired Colonized Body Foucault and Race by Ann Laura Stoler - The FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

2017-6-6 # HISTORY /// The Desired Colonized Body: Foucault and Race by Ann Laura Stoler - THE FUNAMBULIST

lt and Race by Ann Laura Stoler - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE

# HISTORY /// THE DESIRED

other notions have been (like pasteurism or governmentality).

beginning of her book:

Foucault traces a distinct discourse of sexuality appearing in the early

an economic and political problem. It is that moment when governments began

calls pharmaco-pornographic society. (see past article).

LATEST ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE

SIGN-UP TO THE MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

FORTHCOMING LECTURES & PRESENTATIONS

- 05/24/2017 7PM ZURICH: Funambulist event at Architekturforum. More here.

- 06/01/2017 PULA, Croatia

- 06/03/2017 4PM PARIS: Launch of Tumultes "Decolonial Pluralism"

- 10/06/2017 LIBSON: Conference at the Triennale

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi