Racial Plasticity and the Formlessness of Refusal: HeLa Cells and Synthetic Hormones at the Limit

• In Event: I Object: Making the Difference of Minoritarian Dissent Matter

Abstract

This paper challenges the ascendancy of “plasticity” as an object and keyword in recent critical theory by staging a genealogical confrontation between two of its medicalized and racialized forms in the mid twentieth century: the blackness of HeLA cell strains and the abstract whiteness of synthetic endocrine hormone therapies. While a celebratory new materialist or neuroscientific mood has claimed in plasticity’s capacity to take on and produce form a model for agential action that disrupts the sovereign subject or human, the histories of its racial forms cast doubt on those recuperative gestures. The technical aims of both HeLa cells and synthetic hormones name biopolitical attempts by medicine at cultivating the lively morphology of growing systems towards racialized and sexed teleologies that rely on the disavowal of the personhood of black, women’s, and children’s bodies. Yet it turns out that the biological plasticity of the body solicited by both branches of medicine also engenders radically inhuman instances of partial indifference to claims of ownership and instrumentalization.

What is at stake in the desubjectivating study of plasticity’s racial genealogy is an ethics of refusal that would address the violent effects of medicine while also affirming the erstwhile negative ontological and epistemological position of racial plasticity as a properly non-object. Plasticity, in some dimension, refuses to cooperate with medicine, with the production of knowledge, and with any corollary moral subject. If recuperation is foreclosed, this paper asks what forms of ethical dissent and creativity plasticity might be opened up for thinking differently about the precise operations and vulnerabilities of biopolitics.

Author

• Julian Gill-Peterson, University of Pittsburgh