“What I Am Is Defined by Who I Am”: Resistance in Bio-Power
Weeks ago, we had touched on Foucault’s ideas of bio-power, but I feel it is only this week that these ideas are being played out, in primary sources and fiction. The last time I talked about bio-power was in relation to WWI and the “Keeping Fit to Fight” campaigns that promoted safer sexual activity in order to prevent the spreading of venereal diseases. However, the other agenda of these campaigns was to prevent soldiers from having sexual relations with “loose women,” who were thought to be the main carriers of disease, and preserving the family structure. HIV/AIDS draws many social parallels, which Kathy Peiss points out in Major Problems: venereal diseases were “wages of sin” and AIDS was God punishing homosexuals (445). Just as VD was a whore’s disease, AIDS was a gay disease.
Bio-power allows society to control life by monitoring sex, which I was first reminded of in Document 5 “Policing Public Sex in a Gay Theater, 1995”. The Department of Health issues a restraining order, a closing order and that the owners pay severe penalties for allowing high risk sexual activities to go on in the Hollywood Twin Theater. The second time I found this idea most prominent, even more so, was in Document 6 “Cleveland’s Black Community Responds to AIDS, 1998.” In an astounding finding, but maybe not, the African-American community knows the dangers of unprotected sex with the rise of AIDS, but do nothing to change their behavior–some because of “a mistrust of the medical community” and some because AIDS is a government-manufactured disease invented to wipe them out (458)! In both cases resistance in power-relations is in play, as the government attempts to control the population through law, medicine or education, the people or communities resist by ignoring scientia sexualis and taking reign of their own bio-power.
A primary example of resistance to bio-power is Roy Cohn of Kushner’s Angels in America. In Part I, when Roy is told he has AIDS by his doctor, Henry, Roy is very resistant to not only to the disease and its medical terminology, but mostly the stigma that is associated with that type of labeling–namely, that he is a homosexual. He does not deny that he has sex with men, but he does resist the label of homosexual, interestingly referring to himself as a “heterosexual man, who fucks around with guys” (Kushner, 52). Later, Roy constantly refers to law as an “organ” and makes a lot of references to biology, namely intestines and meat, regarding politics (72-74). The idea of bio-power is a literal manifestation for Roy and he resists its constrictions just as he manipulates for his own gain. Roy does not reject himself, for he okay with admitting that he sleeps with men, but Roy does reject the labels that come with those actions. By rejecting those social constructions Roy takes power over not only society, but most importantly, himself. As Roy puts it, “what I am is defined by who I am” (52).
Tags: bio-power, HIV/AIDS, homosexuality, power relations, resistance
