W2D2: Securing the future: Power and Population Regeneration

In “Entry Denied: A History of U.S. Immigration Control” Eithne Luibhéid reveals historical attempts at shaping populations via policing of immigrant women’s bodies and sexualities. Building upon the premise that “heterosexuality is ‘necessary to the state’s ability to constitute and imagine itself” (Luibhéid, 3) Luibhéid demonstrates strategies both lawful and social employed by the American government over a broad span of its history and development in producing “an exclusionary sexual order that was integrally tied to gender, race, and class inequalities” (Luibhéid, 3). While many of these policies were justified within law and discussion as attempts to protect American citizens from drains on social welfare, thereby protecting and reifying the neoliberal state, in effect, and in unstated intention, these laws both “constructed women’s sexuality not just as heterosexual but also as procreative within a patriarchal framework. Consequently, they reified women’s sexuality as a form of property that men owned” (Luibhéid, 3) and safeguarded hegemonies against the possibility of stranger intimacy developing under conditions of displacement and in the absence of “familial structure” that tends to bring individuals into communities, raise consciousness of “societies” as opposed to “individuals and families” and result in undesirable consequences like collective action. This tension between state and displaced person is also demonstrated in recent history by Fassin’s story of the little boy whose community of care could not exist legally because it did not fit the structure of a heterosexual, biological, white, French family. 

Foucault’s framework of abnormals including the human monster and the individual to be corrected comes into play here as nation states have had to expand their definitions of nationality, acceptability, and particularly whiteness. Fassin gives one example of the individual to be corrected in “the result of the waiver system… that through heterosexual marriage to a patriotic American man, a woman’s past association with prostitution could become reconciled with the narrative of the nation as moral and respectable” (Luibhéid, 22). As adoption of multiculturalism spurred by capitalist and neocolonial expansion has necessitated incorporation of foreign bodies into national identities, these identities have been rearticulated as, in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “her heart, her values and her mind” (Fassin, 508). The state project of repopulating citizens then shifts from racially to ideologically based standards of inclusion and exclusion. 

Race and class are still very much at play here with “Welfare Reform in 1996, which extended the attack that began with poor undocumented women’s pregnancy to also include childbearing and rearing by poor and/or minority U.S. women” (Luibhéid, 27), and can be seen in clearly classed and racialized inequities in birth control, abortion, prenatal care, and infant mortality statistics. However, since 1996 the expression of which bodies are “genetically inferior” and which have “more intelligence” has transfigured itself. As is explained in, ““Monster, Terrorist, Fag” by Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai, “the absence of a concretized external other once embodied by the Soviet Union and other Communist states marks the prime setting for targeting internal others for expulsion or Normalization” (Puar and Rai, 136). Using similar rhetoric to the French’s invokement of gender inequality as a defense of Islamophobia, American liberals within the category of the “coastal elites” have thusly codified an identity in opposition to middle and southern Americans. 

By distancing themselves from these “backwards” and “prejudiced” populations, they have constructed themselves as “modern” and “tolerant,” even as they continue to benefit from the labor and resources associated with these Othered populations. After Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016, I saw multiple op-eds and humor pieces comparing the state of American politics “today” to the fictional world of a 2006 film called Idiocracy. A google search done earlier this evening revealed that articles touting this film for its predictions of the “current situation” of the United States are still being written and have expanded the scope beyond attempts to decipher what were for many Americans, surprising election results, into attempts to make sense of the American governments inadequacies in pandemic response. The plot of the film consists of a time travel device by which a “regular Joe” of 2006 is transported 500 years into the future only to discover that the country he knew has devolved from democracy to idiocracy. I use devolved here specifically to mean “de-evolved” because the implication of the film is that as birth rates fell among wealthy educated white people and remained consistent (due to inequitable access to birth control) among less desirable citizens whose greater fertility has resulted in the total dominance of their inferior genetic offspring, leading to general chaos, and importantly, food scarcity (due within the film, to the peoples’ decision to water their crops with Gatorade). 

The threat that “overpopulation” poses to “cultural, political, and economic hegemony in the face of changing demographics” (Luibhéid, 27) holds a long historical precedent, and has historically weaponized fear of scarcity, particularly scarcity of natural resources to regenerate itself. This tension is explored via satire in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” written in 1729 and is observable in current conversations about whether it is ethical to have children in the face of impending climate collapse. This rhetoric obfuscates the direct relationship between capitalist interests and environmental devastation. Foregoing having children may be the single biggest action one can take to minimize their carbon footprint, but the carbon footprint model is exploitative, ineffective, and unsustainable. It is encouraged by large polluting companies particularly because it creates an immobilizing hopelessness among those who attempt to follow it. The unsustainability of this approach is demonstrated in recent Marvel films Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, where climate change is reversed by the murder of half the world’s population, a solution which is presented as immoral and unsustainable but to which, unsurprisingly considering the films’ major funders, no alternative solution is suggested. By placing this responsibility on the individual, the irresponsible Other is constructed. By constructing southern and middle Americans as “monsters” American liberalism fashions American youth, broadly, as the individual to be corrected, concordant with the assertion that “the monster is also to be differentiated from the individual to be corrected on the basis of whether power operates on it or through it” (Puar and Rai, 119). 

This great power and responsibility falls, temporarily, on the bodies of American women who are told that to produce a child is both their doom and salvation as the power of mothering in developing a “normal” psyche in subsequent generations (lest their children turn terrorist (Puar and Rai, 122-124)) and imparting liberal, democratic, American values in the regenerating population can, under this framework, only be achieved via (the “correct”) women’s bodies, minds, and child-rearing labor