Notes for 7 January 2016

LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Winter 2016

• Admin intro, etc.
  • Does anyone need a syllabus?
  • The presentation assignment is available online. I apologize for the URL typo that made it unavailable for a day and a half. Here is a printed copy.
  • Please introduce yourselves! (You'll note that I delayed this from last time.)
  • Let's divvy up presentations. (Note: schedule is now on the course home page.)
• Moving on to Lemke ...
  • What are the divergent meanings of the word biopolitics?
  • What historical forces are at play in this type of analysis? How do you see questions of biopolitics shaping twentieth-century history?
  • What do you take current political debates about this word to be? What issues are at stake in the U.S. right now?
  • What does this have to do with gender? What about sex?
• Looking at Cane...
  • What are ways in which women's lives in the story are structured by biology?
  • By race? By gender?
  • What about men's lives?
  • Some places to talk about:
    • How is Karintha's life structured by the desire of the men around her? How does their desire affect the possibilities that she has in her own life?(the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon: 5).
    • Becky's one Negro son: 8)
      • Miscegenation as murder: 9 (the part of a man that says things to the likes of that had told itself that if there was a Becky, that Becky was now dead; also [same page] no room for Becky)
    • How about Carma's gender-transgressive job and strength? Her place in a narrative that is the crudest melodrama (15, 16)? Her identity and actions in relation to the assumption of domestic abuse as a prevalent social practice? The word hysterical (15)?
    • What about Louisa in Blood-Burning Moon? How is her life structured by gender and race? By the narrative of being the object of a contest?
      • What are the differences in kinds of possibilities that are different between Bob and Tom? How does race affect these possibilities? (e.g., Tom's black balanced, and pulled against, the white of Stone, she she thought of him: 39)
      • What about possession and economics? (e.g.: the silk stockings she must have gotten from him; She's my gal: 41)
      • Equality and violence: 43.
      • The impossibility of explanation: 39–40, 42, 44
      • Status and race: 45
    • What about the intelligibility of race in Bona and Paul? (95, 98, 103)
      • One is not responsible for fascination (104)
• Today's whiteboard snapshots
  • Tentative presentation schedule
  • Things biopolitics has meant
  • Contemporary biopolitical issues