by Kyla Schuller
about Kyla Schuller
Kyla Schuller (she/her) is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century and The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism.
Biopolitics
In 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets to protest the police forces and private citizens who kill Black people yet receive no penalty of any kind. The movement directly names and confronts a signature aspect of the United States government: that it treats Black people as disposable _bodies_ valuable only for the labor which may be extracted from them and who thus can be killed with impunity by its agents. The movement fights back by valuing Black _lives_ and holding police forces and private citizens accountable for murder. By emphasizing _lives_ over _bodies_, Black Lives Matter’s name exposes these assumptions, which have been baked for centuries into the history of the United States. The wish to expose and contest the state’s self-granted right to kill people of color animates like-minded left-leaning projects such as Black Trans Lives Matter and Native Lives Matter. Cops too, have formed their own campaign by adopting this language. The slogan “Blue Lives Matter” identifies police, rather than the people they kill, as the true victims of violence. But this last parallelism is false. It is true that police are wounded and killed in the line of duty. But in contrast to...
Woman
In 1995, home in Northern California during my first year of college, I sat on my parents’ sofa flipping through one of the house’s most treasured possessions: a set of red-and-gold 1984 _World Book_ encyclopedias. I was in the middle of the _W_ volume when an entry labeled “_Woman_” gave me pause. “A woman can have many roles in society,” the entry opened, “including doctor, secretary, or homemaker.” Several pages followed, illustrated with black-and-white stock photographs of women performing various occupations. Sensing something was amiss, I returned to the shelf and pulled the _M_ volume. Under the header “_Man_,” only three short words appeared: “See ‘_Human Being_.’” It was an early moment of feminist awakening. Here, faced with allegedly impartial knowledge, I finally confronted a dynamic I had been studiously repressing below the surface of my own consciousness. Euro-American culture positioned “woman” as an object to be studied and defined while positioning “man” as the universal human subject. Woman was a role in society; man was society itself. Woman as a concept in the West carries the weight of centuries of Othering. “Woman” figures as the muse, the natural, the object, the body, the question, while man is the writer,...