Fungible Bodies and Control Societies: Decolonial Feminist Political Economy

• In Event: Decolonizing Biopolitical Imaginaries: From Life Itself and the Earth to Globalization and the Nation

Abstract

For Gilles Deleuze, our moment is not described by disciplinary biopolitics. Instead, bodies circulate through “societies of control,” the manifold quantifications that optimize and capture bodily capacities and render individual persons “dividual” statistical points. This paper proposes a decolonial feminist approach through the work of Sylvia Wynter. I argue the control thesis, and its enthusiastic uptake in feminist theory, is haunted by histories of colonialism and slavery wherein the fungibility of humans emerged as a political technology. Finally, I argue that reading political economy through racial and sexual difference (crucially, both together) generates alternative imaginaries of convivial exchange.

Presenter

• Max Hantel, Dartmouth College