As Michel Foucault and his followers point out, Western medicine has operated as a biopolitical technology that enables states to regulate bodies through the clinical gaze, authority, and preventive practice. Thus, inevitably, medicine has been deeply implicated in the context of war—not only providing remedies, but also playing a major role in enlisting healthy soldiers and securing their health, contributing to developing the most lethal methods and weapons for devastating human bodies and psyches, and operating as a disciplinary tool of regulating war refugees’ health through the preventive practice of hygiene control. This panel explores this illicit intimacy between medicine and war in which biopower plays out over bodies placed in hierarchies of racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, and class lines. With a 12-minute presentation, each panelist examines diverse biopolitical aspects of war through their analyses of literary genres of life writings (Chacón), novels (Kase and Sackur), and poetry (Parrish).

Heather Chacón is the first presenter. Her paper, “The Future Will not be Sentimentalized: Black Nurses and the U.S. Civil War,” examines writings by women who served as nurses in the U.S. Civil War; women including Susie King Taylor, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Luisa May Alcott, and Sarah Emma Edmonds. The Civil War era collapsed the formerly well-guarded social categories; the binaries such as enslaved and free, civilian and soldier, and men’s and women’s work grew clouded. Chacón explores the significance of such fluctuation of categories played out in venues of healing—hospitals, field hospitals, and navy floating hospitals. Chacón pays particular attention to the contrast between sentimentalized and sensationalized accounts of white nurses and those by Black nurses, the latter of which are more realistic and pragmatic. Chacón argues how the practice of nursing helped Black women imagine the post-war futures of Black communities.

Yasuko Kase’s paper “Beyond Medicalization: Indigenous Healing and Modern Military Medicine in Darcy Tamayose’s Odori” turns to the interactive tension between indigenous healing practices and modern wartime biopolitics in Okinawan Canadian writer Darcy Tamayose’s first novel Odori. The novel’s central focus is the wartime experience of Okinawan Canadian twin sisters who are exposed to the Battle of Okinawa, a World War II pacific theater battle fought in the Okinawan islands. While the younger sister survives the war, the elder sister, who is recruited as student nurse to attend to wounded Japanese soldiers, is ultimately enforced to die by the order of the Japanese Imperial Army. Kase focuses on Tamayose’s incorporation of Okinawan myth with historical references to the battle in exploring how the practice of Okinawan indigenous medicine intervenes in modern wartime biopolitics, which designates who should survive and who should be left die in the most desperate moments.

Michael Sackur’s “Most Likely Shit: The Fecopoetical Imagination in Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage” focuses on the interrelationship between humanism and biomedicine in the context of post-colonial warfare in Sri Lanka, as depicted in Arudpragasam’s 2016 novel. The novel is set in a refugee camp in Sri Lanka’s northeast in the last days of the Sri Lankan Civil War that spanned 1983-2009. It uncovers how the war-ridden landscapes and locations, including a chaotic hospital in the refugee camp, were all connected with the channels of human waste. Sackur argues that fecopoetic imagination evoked though the literal and figurative networks of excrement facilitates critical engagement with the links and tensions between the resilient lifeworld of microbes and bacteria, which survives the war, the dividuated human state under the strict regulation of state biopolitics, and the atomized society produced through ethno-nationalistic divisions.

Our last presenter is Melissa Parrish. Her paper, “A Researchable Lyric: Claudia Rankine’s Coalitional Attachments in the Era of Homeland Security,” examines the expanded power and pre-emptive reach of the post-9/11 U.S. national security state through analysis of Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Rankine’s “American Lyric” interweaves personal narration, historical citations, and images of medical instructions and advertisements, and police violence. Using this multimodal citational style, Rankine shows how contemporary security discourse disciplines people into inert objects to be managed, with chilling effects on their health. Parrish argues that Rankine interrupts a highly regulated and monetized security industry to ask how it makes humans “lonely”—or, how it limits the understanding of crisis as an occasion for relating to the lives of others. Parrish explores Rankine’s lyric poem as a “collective and researchable” space that makes the act of mourning a historical and collective act, and makes both individual and collective care possible.