Biopolitical Power
During my junior year of college, I wrote an essay “Sex and Sexuality as Mechanisms of Biopolitical Power: The Progressive and Natural Regulation and Elimination of Unproductive Bodies?” for my final project in my LGBT course “Sex Histories in the West” with Professor Melissa Autumn White. In this course I studied the genealogy of sex histories in the West in order to understand the state's evolving power over sex and bodies. For my final essay, I decided to investigate biopolitics which is the investment of the state in the population's body. I was very interested in this topic because there are many ways that the state wields power over people, and it is important to recognize how and why bodies become subjects to this power. Under capitalism, society depends on "productive" bodies to participate in the economy and to reproduce more productive bodies that will also participate in the economy. Bodies that are viewed as unproductive to society usually belong to marginalized persons. For example, doctors only encourage mothers to abort their fetuses when there is a probability that the baby will have a disability: people with disabilities are often deemed unproductive in capitalist society, and therefore, the solution is to reduce their birth rates. Although this is entirely problematic, society raises us to believe that such a phenomenon is progressive because bodily "defects" are unnatural.
I argue that the state’s operation of power centers on bodies as a biopolitical means of regulating or eliminating the population of marginalized persons whose bodies are unproductive, under the guise of its naturality and progressiveness. This essay encompasses my intersectional field of focus for my Women’s Studies major because it explores the treatment of bodies that intersect across race, class, sex, gender, sexuality, and disability. The construction of my claims draw on the knowledge that I have acquired through various philosophy, LGBT, and Women’s Studies courses.
Emotions
During my junior year of college, I also wrote an essay "Emotions as an Epistemological Vehicle for Marginalized Voices Being Heard" in the course "Philosophy and Contemporary Issues: Philosophy and Feminism" with Professor Karen Frost-Arnold. Throughout this course we explored what oppression is and how it affects the lives of oppressed people. This focus raised questions about ourselves, culture, and fundamental assumptions of traditional Western philosophy. Many interesting discussions and debates arose, but I was most fascinated with the epistemological discourse on oppression. I wanted to investigate what knowledge is and how the social sphere impacts what we can know and how we can know it. Therefore, I chose to write a paper examining what knowledge is and how women are discredited as knowers. My essay engages Alison Jaggar's “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology," which is a literary piece about the myth of dispassionate investigation: the misunderstanding that true knowledge must be objective and free of emotion. I draw on Jaggar's analysis of the myth of dispassionate investigation in order to demonstrate why Dr. Christine Blasey Forde had to testify against Brett Kavanaugh in a certain way in order to be credited as a knower. I also explain how and why emotions can be used as important sites of knowledge production.
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