Slave to the Body : Black Bodies, White No-Bodies and the Regulative Dualism of Body-Politics in the Old South,9780820460260

Slave to the Body : Black Bodies, White No-Bodies and the Regulative Dualism of Body-Politics in the Old South

by Schroeder, Lars

ISBN13: 9780820460260

ISBN10: 0820460265

Format: Paperback

Pub. Date: 2003-01-01

Publisher(s): Peter Lang Pub Inc

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Author Biography

Lars Schroeder studied History, English and American Studies in Germany and in the United States. He received his M.A. in American Studies from Purdue University, Indiana, USA and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Hamburg, Germany. He works as a journalist and editor in Berlin

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 17
Theory	p. 35
Rejected Theories: Essentialism and Marxism as Inadequate Foundations of Body History	p. 35
Explaining Foucault: Concepts of Corporeality and Power	p. 38
Making Bodies: The Constitutive Effects of Power	p. 38
Controlling Bodies: Interested Knowledge and the Regulative Effect of Power	p. 40
Problemizing Foucault	p. 42
The Imperfectness of Foucauldian Foundations: The Impossibility of Theoretical Purity	p. 42
Anonymous Power: Neglecting Gender, Race, and Class	p. 43
Feminizing Foucault: Feminist Theory as a Modifier of Foucauldian Structuralism	p. 45
Reproaches of Nihilism: Materiality and the Subject	p. 47
French Feminist Criticism: Reproaches of Linguistic Monism, or, Denying the "Real" Body?	p. 48
Taking the Body Seriously: Reclaiming the Authenticity of Postmodern Corporeality	p. 49
"If Everything is Discourse, What About the Body?"	p. 49
"If Gender [as well as Race] is Constructed, Then Who Is Doing The Constructing?"	p. 50
Beyond Language: The Body as Effect of History	p. 52
The Constitutive Effect of Discourse: Body-Making in the Old South	p. 57
The Medical Body	p. 57
"Useful Bodies": Medical Readings of Corporal Matter	p. 59
The Dead Body as Medical Text: Southern Blacks as Objects of Dissection and Display	p. 59
The Living Body as Medical Text: Southern Blacks as Objects of Experimentation and Display	p. 62
The Female Body as Medical Text: Understanding Reproduction	p. 68
Racial Difference and the Gynecological Gaze: Underneath the Blanket?	p. 72
Writing Difference: The Medical Making of Black Hyper-Bodies and White No-Bodies	p. 73
Simple Bodies: Black "Sturdiness" and "Stupidity"	p. 74
Writing the Working Machine: Physiology and the Black Body as "Seat of Labor"	p. 76
Not of the Same Stock: Polygenesis and the American School	p. 77
Claiming Separate Origin: Anatomic Distinctiveness of the Races	p. 79
Scientific Truth, Beauty, and the Beasts: Classical Whiteness vs. the Grotesque Black Body	p. 82
Measuring Minds: Cranology and Racist Claims for Intellectual Difference	p. 85
The Sick Body: Disease as a Race-Transcending Equalizer of Corporealities?	p. 87
Reminders of the Flesh: Sickness and the Upper-Class White Body	p. 88
The Absence of Equality: White Patients and Black Sick Bodies	p. 91
The White Somatic Condition: Elevating the Soul over the Body	p. 92
Avoiding the Body-Reminder: Prophylactic Environmental Discourse	p. 95
Antebellum Medical Ideologies: The Treatment of the Sick Body	p. 100
Galenian Medicine: Highlighting the Surface Body	p. 100
The End of Heroic Medicine: From the Inflicted Body to Soft Remedies	p. 101
Entering the Body: New Drugs and the Declining Significance of the Surface Body	p. 104
Paying the Price for White Cure: The Continuity of Black Embodiment	p. 107
Anesthesia and Corporal Perception: New Dimensions in Body Mapping	p. 109
Anesthetic Beginnings: Pain Killers and the Sedated Body	p. 110
A Southern Invention: Anesthesia and the Unfelt Flesh	p. 112
Mapping Perception: Reading the Anesthetic Body	p. 115
The "Calculus of Suffering": Race, Gender, and the Body in Pain	p. 118
The Sexual Body	p. 123
Re-Writing the Sexual Body: The Medicalization of the Erotic Flesh	p. 123
Penal Sickness: Predicting the Consequences of Erotic Embodiment	p. 125
The Sexual Body Erased: Replacing the Erotic With Disease	p. 127
The Maternal Substitute: From the Sexual Body to the Reproductive Body	p. 131
The Physiology of Reproduction: Motherhood and the Absence of Pleasure-Spots	p. 131
Approaching the Postmodern: Southern Visions of Artificial Reproduction	p. 134
The Soul Gardener: Moral Duties of Social Reproduction	p. 137
The Decline of the "Natural": The Medicalization of Childbirth	p. 139
Cultural Writings of Absent Sexuality: Southern Moral Discourse and Denials of the White Flesh	p. 142
The Making of the Perverse: Sex as a Mental Passion	p. 142
Male White Sexual Bodies: The Spermatic Economy	p. 148
The Moral Double Standard: Social Niches for Bodily Pleasure	p. 152
African Eroticism in the White Mind: The Making of Black Sexual Bodies	p. 156
"By Night as Well as Day": Eroticizing Female Black Nudity	p. 156
Well Endowed No-Men: Black Male Omnipotence in the Absence of Manhood	p. 160
The Disciplined Body	p. 167
The Socio-Cultural Concern for the Interior Body: The Supremacy of Absence	p. 167
"A Passion Dangerous to Health and Morals": The Southern Anti-Dancing Crusade	p. 167
Moral Politics of Manly Restraint: The Southern Temperance Movement	p. 169
Acting Out Emotions: War and Sports as Male Preserves of Legitimate Embodiment?	p. 173
The Religious Body: Soul Over Matter?	p. 178
Of Useless Containers and Precious Souls: The Devaluation of the Flesh	p. 178
Southern Salvation Theories: Doctrinal Indifference to the Body of Sin	p. 179
The Black Religious Body: Scriptual Legitimations of Slavery	p. 182
Sinners, Souls, and the Politics of Salvation: The Southern Debate on the Black Soul	p. 183
Uncommon Calls for Fleshlessness: Religious Quests for Black Restraint	p. 189
Bodies That Do Not Matter: Taking the Pride out of Black Corporeality	p. 193
Meaningless Tropes: The Irrelevance of the Muscular and the Aesthetic	p. 194
The Uselessness of Suffering: Bodiless Salvation	p. 196
Bodies Despite a Soul: Disembodied Happiness as a Postmortem Privilege	p. 201
The Impossibility of Transcending the Flesh: Bodiless Bodies	p. 202
The Mirroring Body	p. 207
A Culinary Homo Duplex: Food Discourse and the Concern for Visibile Desires	p. 207
Feeding the Exterior Body: Upper-Class Displays of Cultural Experience	p. 209
Eating like Pigs or Starving Like Dogs: Hungers of the Black Flesh	p. 213
Black Bodies and White Culture: Edible Labor and Aristocratic Dining	p. 216
Manners and Etiquette: The White Cultural Politics of Bodiless Representation	p. 217
Beauty and the Fashionable Body: Consumerist Confirmations of Purity & Class	p. 218
Spiritual Beauty: The Beautiful Soul	p. 219
A Physiological Hierarchy of Beauty: Expressive Organs of the Soul	p. 221
Of Virgin Mothers and Angels: Allegoric Bodies as Archetypes of Pure Beauty	p. 224
Surface Beauty: The Beautiful (No-)Body	p. 226
Squeezing Away Body Matter: Tight Lacing	p. 228
Cloaking the Body: Masking Corporeality	p. 230
Deconstructing the Body: Cultural Encodings of the Flesh	p. 231
Uneasy Bodies: Deconstruction, Compensation, and the Mock Soul	p. 233
Souls and Minds vs. The Body: The Southern Crusade Against Surface Beauty	p. 234
Unthinkable Aesthetics: Southern Body Talk and the Exclusion of Black Beauty	p. 242
Male White Fashion: The Unmaking of Individual Corporality	p. 246
The White Fashionable No-Man: The Dandy's Body	p. 246
Public Bodies: The Fashion of Men Condoned	p. 248
Concluding Body Making: Southern Hierarchy of Embodiment Summarized	p. 253
Southern White Body-Texts and Their Body-Political Function	p. 255
Foucauldian Foundations: The Power Knowledge Effect and the Regulative Effect of Discourse	p. 255
The White No-Body in the Antebellum South: Abscence as Social Function	p. 256
The Medical Body	p. 257
The Sexual Body	p. 261
The Disciplined Body	p. 269
The Mirroring Body	p. 277
From Body-Talk to Social Practice: The Body-Politics of Corporal Absentiism	p. 285
Regulative Awareness: Southern Body-Texts as Acknowledged Tools of Social Control	p. 287
The Infrastructure of Body-Politics: Institutions, Disciplines and Micropowers	p. 291
The Medical Body	p. 292
The Sexual Body	p. 294
The Disciplined Body	p. 295
The Mirroring Body	p. 298
Regulative Fleshlessness in Southern Body-Political Practice: Did it Really Work?	p. 300
The Medical Body	p. 300
The Sexual Body	p. 306
The Disciplined Body	p. 317
The Mirroring Body	p. 322
Naming White Body Politics: "Bio-Politics" as a Modern Affair of the Soul	p. 337
Southern Texts of Blackness and Their Body-Political Function	p. 341
White Tropes of Fleshy Blackness: The Function of Black Hypercorporeality	p. 341
The Medical Body	p. 341
The Sexual Body	p. 346
The Mirroring Body	p. 349
Functional Bodies and Dysfunctional Modes of Control: The Black Flesh and the Failure of Bio-Political Regulation	p. 351
The Apologetic Function of Discourse: Body-Texts and the Non-Regulative Intention	p. 356
The Black Body and Religion: An Attempt at Bio-Political Control	p. 359
From the Fear of God to the Panoptic State: The Contolling Gaze Enters the Black Subject	p. 362
Socio-Religious Micropowers: Spreading the Regulative Doctrines of Christianity	p. 366
Black Bodiless Regulation Rejected: The Failure of the Bio-Political Experiment	p. 367
Reasons for Failure: The Lack of Micropwers, Supremacy of Labor, Dysfunctional Body-Texts, and Fears of Equality	p. 371
The Afflicted Black Body as The Medium of Regulation: Pre-Modern Power in a Modern World	p. 381
Prohibitive Politics of Supression: Despotic Subjections of the Black Flesh	p. 382
The Medical Body	p. 382
The Sexual Body	p. 388
The Disciplined Body	p. 397
The Mirroring Body	p. 400
The Savage Spectacle: The Black Penal Body as a Stage for Power Display	p. 409
Restoring Asymmetry: The Meaning of Corporal Infliction	p. 412
Inescapeable Texts: The Body as Lasting Sign	p. 415
The Declining Importance of the Flesh: Penal Reform in America	p. 417
Calls for Bodilessness: The Crusade for Penal Disembodiment	p. 417
Mind over Matter: Southern Penal Reform and the Change of Objective	p. 429
Outside Southern Penal Reform: Black Bodies in Pain	p. 434
Perpetuating Racial Hierarchies of Embodiment: Penal Reform, Black Bodies, White Souls	p. 439
The Body-Political Ineffectiveness of Despotic Embodiment	p. 443
Paying The Prize for Anachronism: The Problems of Pre-Modern Subjugation	p. 443
Politics of Disallowance: The Inefficiency of Despotic Control	p. 443
The Impossibility of Omnipresent Surveillance: Absent Technologies of Power	p. 445
Animalizing the "Civilized": Pre-Modern Power and the Dangers to White Claims for Superiority	p. 447
Expensive Bodies: Economic and Social Costs of Physical Regulation	p. 454
The Cost of Life: The Black Body as the Seat of Physical Resistance	p. 457
No Future: Sensing the Breakdown of Despotism	p. 462
Conclusion	p. 471
Epilogue: Cyborgs, Love Machines, and the Social Realities of Body-Visions	p. 483
Less Embodied Minds: Moral Treatment of the White "Insane" in the Old South	p. 489
Bibliography	p. 493
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.