It’s Thanksgiving, at least in the US. Originally, I had planned to do a post about feminized digital labor specifically related to “holiday” preparation, but I spent all my time finishing up another project for my own blog–a holiday weekend longread about a new academic book on, among other things, race/gender/sexuality and posthumanisms. One of the main things my post tries to do is work through the way the book distinguishes between the kinds of posthumanisms that actually do anti-racist, feminist work, and the kinds of posthumanisms that merely reinforce and strengthen white supremacist patriarchy.

Because this is Cyborgology, after all, at least some of y’all are probably interested in posthuman theory. So, I thought I’d share with y’all the post I put up on Its Her Factory. It’s definitely about theory, and it’s about an academic book, but, I think it’s accessible enough and grounded enough to be of interest to at least some of the Cyborgology audience. Here’s the introduction to that post, which you can find in full here:

“Habeas viscus” is Alexander Weheliye’s term for the queerly racialized mobilities activated by the erstwhile immobilization of “exceptional” populations (populations that, in his terms, are neither the fully human nor the not-quite-human, but the absolutely non-human). “Exceptional” populations are the ones filtered out of a biopolitically healthy society. Seen as individually and collectively incapable of reform or adaptation, of currently or potentially embodying the dynamism and flexibility that are thought to characterize neoliberalism’s healthy, successful subjects, exceptional populations are subjected to various techniques–like surveillance, quarantine (e.g., in the PIC), debt–that produce the material, social immobility they claim to manage.

For example, the editorial choices in the Hollaback! Project’s “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” video render black and Latino men exceptions to post-feminist MRWaSP society. The video claims to document the extensive but mundane nature of misogynist street harassment that (otherwise privileged white) women face while in public. However, as many critics noted, the video does not depict any white male perpetrators. It thus presents men of color as solely responsible for (white) women’s street harassment, as embodying a “backwards” masculinity that is out of synch with post-feminist society. This video contributes to the stereotype that “urban” men of color–poor and working-class black and Latino men–are both will not and cannot adapt to keep pace with contemporary social norms and mores…that they drag “us” down and hold “us” back. (“Us” here being the “healthy” and/or treatable portions of the population.) The mobility of thusly racialized, gendered, sexualized bodies on city streets and the unrestricted transmission of their speech in public space thus appears to be something that prevents society from moving forward. In order to keep society healthy, their excessive mobility must be reigned in. Producing the immobility it claims to manage, the video reinforces the idea that poor and working-class black and Latino men are psychologically and culturally inflexible.

On top of this psychological and cultural immobility, the video has been interpreted as evidence that the criminal justice system ought to more intensively restrict the social and material mobility of “urban” black and Latino men. In response to the video, the New York Times published a roundtable on the question “Do We Need A Law Against Catcalling?” As many feminists pointed out, because of the already racist structure of the Prison Industrial Complex, carceral solutions such as this one would further intensify the already extensive and excessive immobilization of poor and working-class black and Latino men.

So, the politics of exception produces “bare life” as immobile, inflexible, rigid, the opposite of “vibrant” matter. If biopolitical MRWaSP optimizes the life, the ‘vibrancy’ of the human or not-quite-human populations, it dampens and masks the vibes emanating from exceptional, non-human populations. Weheilye’s point is, to be a bit reductive, this: queer perceptual practices such as habeas viscus can tune into the “exceptional” vibes that hegemonic institutions mask from (mostly) human perception. Though white European thinkers tend to present exceptional populations as non-vibrant, as absolutely dead (e.g., Agamben’s Muselmann), it is more accurate to think of them as queerly un-dead, as emitting signal that conventionally-tuned ears can’t recognize. Whereas lots of white feminist materialists want to grant agency and “voice” to Modernity’s not-quite-human others, to integrate legibly ‘vibrant’ matter into a more mobile concept of (post)humanity, Weheliye draws our attention to the “anti-matter” force of the flesh/habeas viscus, to the ways of not-being (human) and not-living (biopolitically) that exceptional populations have practiced for centuries (if not millennia).