“Biopower Below And Before The Individual” By Kyla Schuller: Summary and Critique

1. Context and Publication

• Published in 2016 in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Schuller’s essay reviews three key works: Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, Rachel C. Lee’s The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s Racial Indigestion.
• Frames discussion through the lens of Foucauldian biopolitics, expanding the theory to subindividual processes.

2. Case Study: Alan Turing and Biopower

• Turing’s story exemplifies three vectors of biopower:
  • Emergence of the homosexual as a medical-juridical subject
  • Population governance through risk calculation
  • Hormone circulation as securitization tactic (Schuller 630).
• “Turing… became a participant in another key development in biopower—the invention of medicalized gender” (Schuller 630).
• His coerced estrogen treatment demonstrates state control at the molecular level.

3. Introduction of “Force” as Third Biopolitical Entity

• Beyond individual and population, Schuller identifies “force” as:
  • “Affects, molecules, morsels, organs, microbes… hormones… particles and intensities” circulating through bodies and milieus (Schuller 631).
• Force mediates material flows shaping gender and racial difference via extraction and traffic of biological elements.
• Example: estrogen in Turing’s body as a politically regulated flow.

4. Rachel C. Lee’s Contribution

• Proposes “the tripartite scales of biosociality—the scale of the person, the scale of the microbe, and the scale of the population” (30).
• Challenges both essentialist racial biology and rigid social-constructionist models in Asian American studies.
• Shows how fragmented bodies generate “micro-scale risk factors as the new markers of difference” (57).
• Literature and performance art demonstrate human-microbe interdependence as resistance to rigid humanism.

5. Paul B. Preciado’s Pharmacopornographic Power

• Describes a new biopolitical regime where capitalism operates through “miniaturization” of control at the molecular level (79).
• Coined term “techno-gender”, framing gender as “a biotech industrial artifact” (101).
• Critiques neoliberalism as extracting “orgasmic force” (70) for profit and subject formation.
• Criticized for marginalizing race as a central structuring element of biopower.

6. Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s Queer Alimentarity

• Positions eating as a longstanding biopolitical practice regulating racial formation and national identity.
• “Eating as a trope and technology of racial formation” links consumption with the consolidation of white political subjectivity (2).
• Portrays black bodies as analogized to food, feeding into “the libidinal logic of American racism” (90).
• The eroticized mouth functions as a site where sexuality, race, and national identity intersect.

7. Shared Scholarly Intervention

• All three works push biopolitical theory below and before the individual, focusing on consumable, penetrant, dispersible, and absorbable forms of power (Schuller 636).
• Challenges literary and cultural theory to track flows of force that shape race, gender, and sexuality at molecular, affective, and subhuman levels.

🧬 Queer Theory

• Expansion of Foucauldian Biopolitics
  • Introduces “force” as a third vector of biopower, moving analysis beyond the individual and population.
  • Positions subindividual flows—“affects, molecules, morsels, organs, microbes… hormones”—as central to understanding embodiment (Schuller, 631).
• Queer-Feminist Intervention
  • Engages with Preciado’s pharmacopornographic power and Lee’s tripartite biosociality to examine how bodies are fragmented and reassembled across race, gender, and sexuality.
  • Demonstrates how queer cultural production can resist the stability of “modern personhood” (Schuller, 632).

🌈 Feminist Theory

• Critique and Redefinition of Gender
  • Engages Preciado’s reframing of gender as “techno-gender”—“a biotech industrial artifact” rather than a natural or liberatory category (Preciado, 101; Schuller, 633).
  • Highlights historical contingencies of gender through mid-20th-century hormonal interventions (e.g., Turing’s estrogen treatment).
• Intersection with Science Studies
  • Brings feminist science studies (e.g., Myra Hird, Elizabeth Wilson) into dialogue with literary analysis, emphasizing the politics of reproduction and bodily fragmentation at the cellular level (Schuller, 632).

🧪 Critical Race Theory

• Subindividual Circuits and Racial Formation
  • Draws on Rachel C. Lee’s argument that race is reconfigured through “micro-scale risk factors” and bodily fragments, updating earlier frameworks of racial difference (Lee, 57; Schuller, 632).
• Challenge to Social Constructionist Models
  • Argues for a model of “biological personhood… multiform and distributed” that integrates materiality into racial analysis (Lee, 15; Schuller, 632).

📚 Posthumanism

• Beyond Human-Centered Analysis
  • Uses Lee’s vision of the human as “an ecology of networked plant-machine-protocist-and-animal symbionts” to critique humanist subjectivity (Lee, 49; Schuller, 632).
  • Positions literary and performance art as spaces to imagine multispecies entanglements and molecular politics.

🍽️ Cultural Materialism

• Consumption as Biopolitical Practice
  • Via Tompkins, links 19th-century eating cultures to racial and sexual politics—“eating as a trope and technology of racial formation” (Tompkins, 2; Schuller, 635).
  • Reads food, appetite, and ingestion as political technologies that regulate race, nation, and desire.

⚖️ Historiography of Biopolitics

• Bridging Historical Periods
  • Connects 19th-century anatomo-politics of eating (Tompkins) with 21st-century molecular governance (Preciado), showing biopower’s continuity and transformation.
• Literary Studies as Biopolitical Archive
  • Positions novels, performance art, comedy, and dance as critical sites where molecular and affective flows are narrated, staged, and contested.

🎯 Overextension of the Concept of “Force”

• The idea of force as a third vector of biopower is compelling but lacks precise operational definition, making it difficult to apply systematically across literary texts.
• Risks becoming a catch-all category for any subindividual element—molecules, affects, microbes—without clear methodological boundaries.

⚖️ Limited Engagement with Race in Preciado’s Framework

• While Schuller critiques Preciado for sidelining race, her own synthesis does not fully theorize how “force” specifically interacts with racialization beyond citing Lee and Tompkins.
• The racial dimension remains more descriptive than analytical in her expansion of biopower.

📚 Potential Dilution of Literary Analysis

• The review’s heavy engagement with theory sometimes overshadows close readings of literary works themselves.
• Literary examples are often mediated through the books under review rather than through direct, detailed textual analysis.

🔄 Fragmentation of Theoretical Threads

• Bringing together Preciado, Lee, and Tompkins creates a rich interdisciplinary dialogue, but the result can feel overburdened by competing frameworks, reducing theoretical cohesion.
• At times, the argument risks becoming a comparative literature review rather than a unified theoretical intervention.

🧪 Underdeveloped Application to Historical Continuities

• While Schuller traces connections between 19th-century alimentary politics and 21st-century molecular governance, the historical transitions are asserted rather than fully demonstrated.
• Needs more sustained evidence to link past and present regimes of biopower.