Sense and Sexuality: Foucault, Wojnarowicz, And Biopower‪.‬

Since its initial appearance in The History of Sexuality Volume One, Michel Foucault's concept of biopower has indeed taken on a bios of its own. (1) Ubiquitous in recent academic analyses of the contemporary socio-political landscape, the concept and its kin (biopolitics, governmentality) find their most provocative--though, as I hope to show, misguided--articulation in the collaborative work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (The Labor of Dionysius, Empire, and Multitude). (2) Shifting Foucault's focus from population and social management to labor, globalization, and sovereignty, these authors conceive of biopolitics in economic terms, detailing the consequences of the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist labor practices. Significantly, whereas Foucault designates sexuality the principal apparatus in the functioning of biopower, Hardt and Negri argue that sexuality in the post-Fordist era is no longer the privileged site of biopolitical control: when human affect, language, and cooperation are subsumed into the productive processes of capital, the gestures, expressions, and movements--indeed, the very flesh--of the social body become commodities. Their thesis raises a number of pressing questions that bear on the future of sexuality studies: Has sexuality itself been totally subsumed into the productive processes of postmodern capital? Is Foucault's "deployment of sexuality" too blunt an analytical tool to understand biopower in post-Fordism? Indeed, is sexuality any longer a productive category for social analysis at all? Although such questions are not the primary focus of this paper (my aim here is far more modest), they take on quite different meanings in the face of AIDS--a subject that receives no serious discussion in Hardt and Negri's work. If, as I argue, AIDS is understood as a primary locus of biopolitical struggle, sexuality simply cannot be ignored or subsumed into a generalized concept of bios. Even a cursory glance at the focus and scope of recent HIV-prevention research reveals that the "life" valorized in biopower continues to turn on that most stubborn of discursive constructions: the homo/heterosexual binary. A 2006 study by the US National Institutes of Health concerning male circumcision as an HIV-preventative for men engaging in "heterosexual intercourse," for example, appears more invested in naturalizing the homo/hetero binary than in disseminating accurate and practical HIV-prevention information. (3) Although AIDS education campaigns have attempted for decades to distinguish high-risk behavior from high-risk groups and identity-specific sexual behavior from corporeal acts ("gay sex" vs. vaginal, anal, oral sex, etc.), the very use of the phrase "heterosexual intercourse" in the NIH press release, as I will demonstrate, reveals the persistence of heteronormative assumptions and objectives in contemporary AIDS research and funding.