Feminism, Biopower and Gender: Testosterone, The Pill and Micro-Political Warfare

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The body no longer inhabits disciplinary spaces but is inhabited by them. The biomolecular and organic structure of the body is the last hiding place of these biopolitical systems of control. This moment contains all the horror and exaltation of the body’s political potential.  

Paul Preciado – Testo Junkie 

TESTOGEL 50mg is a transparent or slightly opalescent and colorless gel packaged in 5-gram sachets. It contains testosterone, a naturally secreted male hormone. This drug is recommended for illnesses related to a deficiency of testosterone. Before beginning a treatment with TESTOGEL, a definiceny in testosterone must be established by a series of clinical signs (decline of secondary sexual characteristics, changes in physical constitution, asthenia, a decrease in libido, erectile dysfunction, etc.) This drug has been prescribed to you for your own use and must not be given to others. 

Attention: TESTOGEL should not be used by women. 

In his article ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Gilles Deleuze reconfigures Foucault’s notion of disciplinary societies. Written in 1990, Deleuze had seen a change in the structures of power that Foucault had spent a career analysing within the framework of the nation-state. Deleuze’s analysis of these changes is far from sympathetic – a charge that is frequently levied against Foucault after his series of lectures in 1979, titled The Birth of Biopolitics. Borrowing his terminology from the schizophrenic worlds of writer William S. Burroughs, Michael Hardt observes how in Deleuze’s ‘Societies of Control’, “the structured tunnels of the mole are replaced by the infinite undulations of the snake.”2 Everywhere he looked, Deleuze had seen the historical enclosures of discipline in flux. The walls that had previously partitioned the social body were dissolved; the institutions that had hitherto regulated its control and surveillance, embodied. 

Looking to the recent work of Paul B. Preciado – in particular, the seminal work of auto- theory, Testo Junkie – I will elaborate on ideas concerning the contemporary formulation of societies of control with regards to Foucault’s analysis of state biopower. As we shall see, this manoeuvre will first require an appropriation of Foucauldian biopower through a bio- politicisation of gender. Further, following Preciado, we will analyse the molecularisation of biopower within the bio-politicisation of gender that emerged in the new post-war sexual apparatus. Finally, I will consider the implications of a molecular form of biopower for the agency of micro-political warfare. For this, I will turn to the work of Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, paying particular attention to their conception of a Body without Organs and the molecular, intensive nature of different subject-becomings and the (non)production of identity. 

Anatomo-politics: the historical emergence of biopower 

According to Michel Foucault, the emergence of the nation-state in the ruins of Medieval Europe came with an ironic twist. The death of the Machiavellian prince ushered the way for a new governmentality of bureaucratic control. Enlightenment-born social sciences saw a rapid proliferation of disciplines, institutions and architectures across every aspect of the social body. And as the world’s newly formed nations entered into a nascent world economy, the new technologies of social organisation entered parturition. The forgoing charge of despotic rule – the “right to take life or let live”3 – was inverted, reappropriated and injected into the new modifications of power integral to emergent disciplinary societies. In this movement, the legislative and absolute power of the sovereign was superseded by technologies of power engendered through disciplinary enclosures: “The code they come to define is not that of law but that of normalization.”4 And for Foucault, this normalisation enacted a total codification of the human body – a Gestell, or Bergsonian ‘mechanisation’ of the body’s corporeality. So much so, that not even Borges could have envisioned such an enveloping cartography: a mapping and machination of entire populations, soldering each of their joints to the machine of social organisation, extracting a surplus from each of its individual units; an “anatomo-politics of the human body”,5 engineered in each case to limit the body’s novelty and affect, localising and standardising its specific potentialities. 

By registering and correcting the social body, not only were the population utilised and made productive, but a segregation and social stratification was instrumentalised for an efficiency of power present at every level of social relation. This was articulated through a multiplicity of “minor processes [which] gradually produce the blueprint for a more general method”6 of subjective interpellation and surveillance.     

A self-regulation of the body – through the body. However, the refrain and consignment of disciplinary societies did not exist alone as the new form of governing power in capitalist relations. Alongside the emergence of disciplinary enclosures Foucault distinguished a more general principle of modern regulatory control, one that was necessary for the accumulation of resources and wealth at the nation- state level: the management and production of the labour of labour-power per se: life. 

Like disciplinary mechanisms, these mechanisms are designed to maximize and extract forces, but they work in very different ways. Unlike disciplines, they no longer train individuals by working at the level of the body itself. [...] It is therefore not a matter of taking the individual at the level of individuality but, on the contrary, of using overall mechanisms and acting in such a way as to achieve overall states of equilibration or regularity; it is, in a word, a matter of taking control of life and the biological processes of man- as-species and of ensuring that they are not disciplined, but regularized.7 

The emergence of ‘biopolitics’ – or the intervention of state power into the processes and functions of life itself – has multiple genealogies. For Foucault, biopolitical mechanisms assert themselves under the new “specificity and plurality of the state”8 particular to the political philosophy of Raison d’État.9 For later, post-Foucauldian political theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, the logic of biopower and the notion of ‘bare life’ has existed ever since the dawn of antiquity.10 Whilst for the Autonomist feminist historian Silvia Federici, biopower emerges in the radically gendered context of the Witch hunts, of which occurred simultaneously “with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, [and] the beginning of the slave trade.”11 What is agreed, is that the emergence and sustainability of capitalist nations relies fundamentally on a formulation of power structures rooted in the biopolitical management of the population. This bio-economy of power relations – de-individuated, yet entirely personal – sublated previous epistemologies of political subjectivity with a system of aggregation, patterns and probability. The bio- politicization of politics, or for Foucault, political economy tout court, transformed the subject of right within the theory of sovereignty into the ‘man’ of the art of governance of population. The extent to which we can say, there is no political economy without population. No capitalism, without biopolitics.

1 Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013): 79.
2 Micheal Hardt, ‘The Global Society of Control’, in Discourse Vol.20 No.3 (Fall 1998): 139. 
3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin Books, 1990): 136.
4 Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures,’ in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994): 44.
5 History of Sexuality, 139.
6 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1991): 138- 9.
7 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (London: Penguin Books, 2004): 246-7.
8 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 5.
9 As Foucault observes, the prosperity and consolidation of European nations depended on an “external self-limitation”i of state-power. Superseding the theology of imperialism was a mutually constituted assurance of inter-state competition; nation-states aimed to protect themselves from the dialectical tension of empire and death typified in the Roman quest for global hegemony. However, the population crises of the Medieval Ages and the early 17th Century posed a significant threat to the early development of nation-states. A combination of war, famine and plague had decimated European populations, hindering the necessary processes of accumulation integral to Raison d’État (reason of State). The progress of the embryonic capitalist states therefore depended on what Eli Hecksher called “an almost fanatical desire to increase population.”ii This power, which in contrast to the ‘subtractive’ regimes of power that had previously existed under the rule of sanguinity, now emerged as a generative force. It took an active interest in the lives of its people, their biological and psychological processes. Replacing the absolute power of the monarch, was according to Foucault, a new technicity of power: exerting control not through bloody repression, but through the production, regulation and engineering of the socio-biological body of the population.

i Birth of Biopolitics, 6.
ii Eli Hecksher quoted in Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2009): 88.

10 Such as in the demarcations between politically recognised (bios) and bare forms of life (zoe); ‘the camp’ is Agamben’s most vivid contemporary example of this.

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Biometrics, Phenotypes and Hong Kong Cleanup

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

Written in 1975, Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punishment was a vivid genealogy of the emergence of newer, more insidious forms of power. His eminent analysis of the Panopticon, its mechanisation and emergent ideology are as relevant today as they were forty years ago. Over the last few years we have been seeing an unprecedented level of surveillance and data-harvesting enacted on civilians at the hands of both private companies and the state — their agendas and operations not always mutually exclusive. The revelations engendered by Edward Snowden’s dissent in 2013 have been followed by story after story of developments in surveillance-based technologies and the scale of their implementation in our daily, routine existence. These interferences haven taken the form of ‘convenient’ personalised marketing adverts and much darker forms of psychological profiling and voter modelling — as was seen with the case of AggregrateIQ and Cambridge Analytics in the recent US election and EU referendum.

However, as many theorists have noted, even Foucault’s notion of a disciplinary society has been rapidly outmoded. As Paul Preciado states, “The body no longer inhabits disciplinary spaces but is inhabited by them. The biomolecular and organic structure of the body is the last hiding place of these biopolitical systems of control.”[1] In particular to surveillance technologies, the face has long been a historical tool for the taxonomisation and oppression of different peoples; from race, to psychiatry, to criminality, the face has been the object from which to identify and shackle certain physical appearances to pre-determined psychological traits, degeneracies and social corruptions. As Deleuze would go as far as to say, “The despot-god has never hidden his face, far from it: he makes himself one, or even several.” [2]

An example of Francois Galton’s 19th century criminal physiognomies.

Today, the face has not escaped this oppressive history. The evolution of facial recognition systems in recent years has come at the forefront of anti-terror legislation and rhetoric, the latest in a long line of attacks of civil liberties in the name of security and defence; and all across the world it seems, from the Zapatistas to Anonymous, and from black bloc to Pussy Riot, movements are emerging that reject the face as a political tool — as the former declares, “In order for them to see us, we covered our faces; so that they would call us by name, we gave up our names; we bet the present to have a future; and to live . . . we died.”

Artists throughout the years have approached the issue of the face in different ways, from Arthur Elsenaar’s electro-facial choreographies, to the British-Jamaican collective Mongrel’s ethno-racialized composite portraits. Yet the recent developments in biometric pattern recognition has inspired a new wave of artistic responses to the contemporary political and technological problems that they bring.

Tony Oursler is one of these artists. With an oeuvre that is teeming with uncanny images of xeno-physiognomies, spliced and hybridized with screens, alien pigments and modulated voice tones, Oursler presents human identity through the alienating lens of the biometric systems themselves. His portraits are an unsettling account of the inhumanness of these modes of representation, and the troubling effects they have on modern psychology. His anonymous magnified cyborgs drone of ‘natural selection’ and ‘normative association’, they murmur of being hacked, short-circuited, recoded, and warn that “now you’re only a clown for the machine.” His smaller, diluted abstracts focus heavier on their biometric nodes and latticework, pushing the dehumanising effects of these technologies to the extreme. In an interesting work as part of his 2015 solo-show, template/variant/friend/stranger, one projection infinitely shuffles between 150 algorithmically produced Eigen model-faces, beautifully displaying the sinister uncanniness of these nonhuman projections.

Installation view of template/variant/friend/stranger by Tony Oursler.

Similarly, the work of Heather Dewey-Hagborg explores the possibility of artificially producing — or reproducing — the human face. Her works are based on current genomic research and forensic DNA phenotyping. In both her projects Strangers Visions (2012–13) and Probably Chelsea(2017), Hagborg uses a process of molecular photofitting to algorithmically produce the suspected facial images of people’s DNA. Her project Stranger Visions, as well as producing a facial reconstruction of the DNA she harvested from chewed gum, loose strands of hair and cigarette butts, also detailed a list of personal attributes to the individual, using “statistical predictions about what these individuals looked and acted like, what kind of health conditions they had, and even what their last names were.”

Her later work, Probably Chelsea, uses the DNA of Chelsea Manning to produce thirty radically different facial probabilities, which seem to traverse both race, ethnicity and gender, drawing attention to the ‘molecular solidarity’ we all share, and the impossibility of prescribing to a notion of biologically inscribed identities, especially in an age soon to engage in far more common forms of genetic surveillance, such as the somewhat comical Hong Kong Cleanup’s ‘Face of Litter’ campaign in 2015.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Probably Chelsea (2017)

One project that has become symbolic of queer and anti-biometric protest, however, is artist-theorist Zach Blas’ iconic Facial Weaponisation Suite (2011–14). Using aggregated data from different facial sets, including queer men (a riposte to several scientific studies conducted in 2007 which claimed to be able to correctly infer sexual orientation from facial images), non-white participants and surveys looking at both anti-veil legislation in France and security technologies at the US-Mexico border control, Blas uses 3D modelling software to creative ‘collective’ masks that evade facial recognition systems. The amorphous masks lack any recognisable human features, and politically resound with the formerly mentioned movements that reject the face and the current forms of identitarian political representation that it subtly -and not so subtly- enforces. The strikingly aesthetic objects make poignant the interlaced nature of visibility and power, technological surveillance and mass protest, biometrics and defacement. Combined, these three artists force us to consider again the insidious nature technology and power, but also new possibilities of collective dissent. They question how best to face — or not to face — the future of our high-tech societies of control.

Zach Blas, Facial Weaponisation Suite (2011–14)

[1] Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
(New York: The Feminist Press, 2013): 79.

[2] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005): 115.