Biopolitics, Techno-Orientalism, and the Asian American community
Michel Foucault’s revolutionary concepts of biopolitics and biopower has be applied in a variety of fields, ranging from medical anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and critical race studies, to understand how power, sovereignty and authority and enacted in modern day politics. Yet, there is only a recent application of this concept to Asian American studies. In this article, I will explore the ways in which biopolitics operate to create a unique racialization of Asian Americans. In combining the concepts of biopolitics and techno-Orientalism, I would like to examine how Asian Americans are uniquely racialized to uphold white supremacy, and in some instance, deliberated othered for the advancement of American capitalism. Building off of Michelle Huang’s film essay “Inhuman Figures”, I would like to examine how Asian Americans are deliberately constructed as either thoughtless, productive, capitalistic machines, aliens incapable of assimilating into the American, and thus “right” way of life, or mindless clones of one another.
In Rachel Lee’s book The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies, the author details the ways in which biopolitics and biopower operate on Asian and Asian American bodies. Lee describes biopolitics as a more top down managerial process, one that is particularly interested in “the size and quality of the population; reproduction and human sexuality; conjugal parental and familial relations; health and disease; birth and death.” (Lee 5). Through the management of these processes, biopolitics allows the sociopolitical status quo to be upheld. In relation to Asian America, biopolitics is involved in the larger cultural understanding of Asians as microbe carriers, to the global fragmentation and division of labor, and even the understanding of Asian Americans as model minorities. These ideas can be understood also in the context of techno-Orientalism, as described and articulated by Roh et al, as the erasure of the bios of Asians contributes to the ability for their labor to be devalued and exploited more easily. (Roh et al, 4). Through the biopolitics of the west, Asian and Asian Americans can be understood as foreign aliens or replaceable robots. The deliberate making of Asian Americans as thoughtless, productive, capitalistic machines is done through the removal of their humanity and characterization of them as “Other”.
Within the field of medical anthropology, Anne Fadiman’s 1997 book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is well known, well respected, and seen as a groundbreaking novel in the documentation of the cultural clashes that occur within the American biomedical system. However, this book is not just a simple representation of the “clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos” (Fadiman), but an example of how biopolitics operates to oppress and police Asian bodies. The book details the experience of Lia Lee, a Hmong American toddler first taken to the Merced County Medical Hospital when she was just a few months old to be treated for epilepsy. In the chapters that follow, the tense relationship between her physicians, lead primarily by Neil Ernst, a primary care physician, and her family is captured. The central conflict of the book seems to be the clashing of Lia’s parents, who are skeptical and at times outright refuse biomedical treatment for her seizures, and the physicians who endlessly try to convert and assimilate them into the philosophies of biomedicine. Yet, “Fadiman’s even-handed portrait” as Rachel Lee describes, not only documents how biopower operates to police and manage Asian bodies, but in doing so construes Asians as ostensibly alien.
Biopolitics first operate in Fadiman’s novel as a way to police and manage Asian bodies. When the Lee family first move to America, they are faced with a variety of biopolitical structures in the form of birth certificates in order to obtain resident alien documents. The Lee family who does not remember their birthdays by specific dates, are forced to make up dates to put on documents and sign them into effect, effectively so the American state can keep track of them. These events are all happening within the space of the medical clinic, illustrating how an institution that seems so sterile, pragmatic, and objective can still become theaters of oppression and control. When Lia grows older and her epilepsy starts to appear, the biomedical system then becomes the main avenue through which they are policed. To address the symptoms of Lia’s condition, the Lee family is given strict instruction to administer a variety of medications each with its own unique schedule and dosage. By the time Lia could walk, her medications included up to fourteen each with a different schedule and administration instruction. To Foua and Nao Kao, the mother and father of Lia, who neither spoke English nor read it, it was at times impossible to keep track of. In addition, the ways in which they were expected to administer the medication was unfathomable to them, yet to the physicians who prescribed them, it seemed as if these parents were either “very stupid or a loonybird” for not restraining their daughter or forcing medication down her throat (Fadiman 47). This conflict erupted into a custody battle when the physicians described it as “poor parental compliance…obviously under the realm of child abuse, specifically child neglect” (Fadiman 58). The Superior Court of the State of North Carolina immediately responded and took custody of Lia. This demonstrates how biopower, specifically a lack of adherence to biomedicine, resulted in the physical policing of the Lee family. Thus, illustrating how biopower operates to further oppress Asian and Asian Americans. The Lee family, who had to flee their home country ravaged by American foreign policy, stay in Thai refugee camps, relocate to California, fully assimilate to the American way of life, is further policed when they attempt to obtain care for their daughter. This phenomenon parallels what Lee describes
“U.S. troops were involved in the massive slaughter of Asians. In the name of protecting Americans’ thriving way of life (the surplus comforts provided by democratic capitalism), the United States justified its outright necropolitics — its (assisted) killing of purported Communist sympathizers within nonaligned nations, so as to prevent the latter from falling, in domino fashion, to Soviet control. The orphaning of Asian populations resulting from these wars also meant that further biopolitical effects would follow — the thriving traffic in Korean adoptees to the United States being one such effect, with Korean mothers feeling compelled to give their children up for a putative better life following the “imperative to live.” –(Lee 5)
Biopolitics also operate in this specific context as a way to portray the family as foreign, unassimilable aliens. The spiritual healing methods that the Lee family prefers is understood not with cultural nuance nor understanding, but an almost voyeuristic fascination with the seemingly mystic and mythical rituals of these foreign mountain peoples of the Far East. In medical notes, the language barrier is described as “unobtainable”, “unsolvable communication problems”, or “untranslatable”. The language difference is not understood as a result of an inaccessible medical system, or the violent foreign policies of Cold War United States, but instead a character trait of the family that marks them as ostensibly alien, foreign, and other. This view of these “foreign” aliens were not only met with dehumanizing fascination, but also extreme violence. Some of the doctors felt that their Hmong patients were too difficult to deal with for not resigning and submitting themselves to the treatments of the hospital, and went so far to even say “the patient should be shot in the head” (63). The sheer violence in reaction to the “foreign” demonstrates how biopower operates within the clinic as an extension of US military violence. Instead of this clear racial hierarchy and the white supremacy that unlined these sentiments, the author Fadiman simply presents this conflict as the clashing of two cultures. Yet, the erasure of why these two cultures were even posed against each other is erased and not addressed, shifting a burden of blame on to the already vulnerable Hmong community. This itself is a working of biopolitics, that seek to control and oppress through the management of the body, health, and illness.
Ling Ma’s Severance is an interesting novel to analyze in the context of biopolitics in succession to Anne Fadiman’s book, because of the author Ling Ma’s positionality, which combined with the themes of the novel, acts as a clear outline of how Asian and Asian American bodies are utilized for capitalistic production, and subjugated for the sake of “public health” in the 21st century. In the novel, the Chinese-American protagonist Candace works for a book manufacturing company and oversees the production process overseas. She explicitly recognizes what her job entails, that in visiting the factory in Guangzhou producing their company’s version of the Bible, they “manufacture the emblematic text to propagate your country’s Euro-American ideologies, and for this, for this important task, you and your clients negotiate aggressively over pennies per unit cost, demand that we deliver early with each printing, and undercut the value of the labor year after year” (Ma 84). This quote demonstrates the themes of techno-Orientalism that intersects with biopolitics to create a unique understanding of Asian and Asian American labor. Asian labor, specifically in manufacturing, is understood as cheap and replaceable, because it was done by cheap and replaceable people. This is a sentiment that the Chinese American protagonist recognizes herself, yet with a certain level of detachment and resignation. Through the perspective of Candace, we can see how Asian bodies are at once replaceable robots, but also carriers of disease, both of which can be managed via biopolitics.
Through analysis of two very different books from two very different genres, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and Severance, I hope the theories laid out in the first half was demonstrated in tangible pathways. In the current COVID-19 pandemic we are experiencing, understanding how biopolitics operate in the Asian American community is extremely important. The threads that connect the emergence of yellow peril and the surge of anti-Asian hate and xenophobia is connected through America’s biopolitical attempts to manage the bodies and physicalities of Asian and Asian Americans. The oppression of Asian Americans is directly tied to attempts to paint Asian Americans as aliens bearing diseases that need to be erased, sanitized, and eradicated. In addition, even within the medical clinic, the identity of Asian is irrevocably tied with the identities of “alien” and “foreign” as illustrated by Fadiman’s book. Thus, it is imperative to have an understanding of how Foucault’s theory of biopolitics applies to Asian American studies for the sake of liberation and justice.
Works Cited
Fadiman, Anne. “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures”. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 1997.
Huang, Michelle N. “Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit.” American Literature, vol. 93, no. 3, Sept. 2021, pp. 497–523. Silverchair, https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361293.
Huang, Michelle, director. Inhuman Figures. Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, 2022, https://smithsonianapa.org/inhuman-figures.
Lee, Rachel C. “How a Critical Biopolitical Studies Lens Alters the Questions We Ask Vis-à-Vis Race.” The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America, NYU Press, 2014. University Press Scholarship, https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479817719.003.0002.
Ma, Ling. “Severance”. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2018.
Roh, David S., et al. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. Rutgers University Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unc/detail.action?docID=3565206.
