114 P -
(Re)Production, Biocapital, and the Racial Politics of Women's Health in the Americas]
Friday, June 2, 2017: 1:45 PM-3:15 PM
BRESL 217 (Hofstra University)
Chair:
Jennifer L Morgan, New York University
Comment:
Jennifer L Morgan, New York University
Session Abstract
This panel makes the claim that to understand the privileged position of Science (with a capital “S”) in shaping contemporary knowledge production, we must interrogate its dual historical emergence with the Atlantic slave trade, settler colonialism, and chattel slavery. Our panel asks the question, “what sociopolitical and biohistorical rationales have coded the black woman as a producer (laborer) of ‘scientific’ knowledge?” Our respective papers direct studies of science and society to pay substantive attention to the ways in which science is intertwined with state violence and regimes that control the production, reproduction, surveillance, containment, exchange, and consumption of black women’s bodies. The papers presented in the panel focus on particular signal moments within the genealogy of slavery and medicine in the Americas--including chattel slavery, the Civil Rights and black insurgency era, and the contemporary--and draw on black feminist critiques to think through the continuities between the past and the present. We argue that scientific knowledge production is bound by temporalities of misery and is compelled to bear witness to (even in its disavowal of) the histories of slavery and (re)production. We offer speculative readings on the ways in which novel scientific gazes upon black women require a radical reworking of how we understand biocapital in relation to older regimes of biopolitics, and how the bioeconomy both reshapes and recycles notions of race/gender and labor in generating what and how we “know.”
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