Governing intimacyIntimacy is personal. It is also, therefore, political. This commonplace insight has received renewed attention over the past decade in a growing strand of anglophone scholarship on liberalism and subjectivity
Recent genealogies of the self-governing liberal subject have placed a renewed emphasis on the sphere of intimacy for its production. A critical narrative has emerged whereby liberal constructions of`appropriate' intimacy as an autonomous sphere serves to actively disavow the racialisation and sexualisation of the liberal subject as white and heterosexual. At the same time, its constitutive outside, the nonwhite and the nonheternormative, positively require explanation to shore up its boundaries. Yet these widespread complementary assumptions miss places and times, such as the Progressive-era US, in which mainstream discourse has interrogated the liberal subject and has explicitly examined its heterosexual whiteness, while it has also strategically underexplained its others. Writings of Progressive figures such as Jane Addams and Louise de Koven Bowen on the productive regulation of intimacy, particularly marriage and prostitution, are put in conversation with current accounts of these issues. In doing so, the assumption of the liberal subject's invisibility to itself is problematised on an empirical basis, and the reification of distinctions between race and sexualityöeven as their contingent production is being explainedöis problematised at a theoretical level.
Abstract:Using the example of the WWI-US Commission on Training Camp Activities, I argue that racialized biopolitical projects entail multiple, specific spatio-temporalities that seek to enact different racial futures within and between racial categories. What I call 'victorious whiteness', 'infinite whiteness' and 'static blackness' assembled by the CTCA, and an 'advancing blackness' pursued by black elites in opposition, interacted in a complex topology of early 20 th -century efforts to protect trainee soldiers from venereal disease, and efforts to prevent racial violence, both of which endangered the war effort and thus the future of the white nation. This counters a tendency in much current literature on racial biopolitics to assert a stark binary between and homogeneity within the facilitation of white futurity and black risk failure within individual biopolitical projects.
The ways in which Native American communities as well as American society at large are constituted today are in no small part the legacies of the Indian reform era, a period of time spanning the 1880s and 1890s during which the assimilation of Native people and their spaces into the American polity became an explicit project of US governance. This civilizing mission, however, was a double moment in American history, for not only was it intended to reconstitute ‘Indians’ as American citizens through the force of law - it also enabled a certain claim to innocence on the part of American society. In this paper, I explore ways in which the cant of conquest was transformed into the ‘gift’ of civilization through the arguments of reformers, including their appropriations of Native testimony. ‘Indians’ started to become ‘Native Americans’, citizens equal before (US) law in an ostensibly liberal polity, yet this assertion of Native equality was made on the terms of white reformers which erased colonialism from American political discourse.
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