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Abstract
In this article I explore the genealogy of the modern politics of reproduction. My claim is that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a political-epistemic regime emerged that came to function as a kind of matrix for subsequent projects of regulating and intervening in processes of reproduction. In particular, I show how this regime was constituted through the three interrelated biopolitical problematics of ‘population’, ‘race', and ‘gender’. In the first part, I reconstruct articulations of the concept of reproduction with regard to ideas about the contingency and regularity of reproductive processes that played an important role for the formation of strategies of ‘improving’ the population. The next section shows that the notion of reproduction was constitutive for the formulation of the genealogical concept of race, and that it was closely intertwined with the political regulation of global reproductive relations. Third, I analyse how the concept of reproduction from the late eighteenth century on was enmeshed with ideas of sexual complementarity. Sexual reproduction, I argue, was one of the main reference points on which cultural and social assumptions about the modern order of the family, based on the parental heterosexual couple, relied. In the final part of the article I argue that rethinking biopolitics from the perspective of the politics of reproduction is crucial for understanding synchronic and diachronic entanglements of contemporary politics of reproduction that otherwise often remain unnoticed.
Acknowledgements
I thank Thomas Lemke for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Susanne Lettow, Dr. phil. habil., is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Free University Berlin. She is currently working on a book with the title “Genealogy and Beloning. Concepts of Reproduction, Decent and Kinship in German Naturphilosophie”.
Notes
1. According to Rayna Rapp, the development of reproductive technologies and the biosciences has revealed the social importance of reproduction. ‘As the use of new biomedical technologies to assist or “manage” reproduction has become more routinized, … their potential to complicate received ideas and practices has become the source of widespread … concern’ (Rapp Citation2001, 469). As a consequence, ‘the formerly “invisible centrality” of reproduction to social life has become ever more visible’ in both public discourse and social theory (Rapp Citation2001, 469). This, in my view, should not be understood as a techno-deterministic statement but as indicating the fact that the use of reproductive technologies is part of a transformation of social relations of reproduction that during the past few decades has been accompanied by an increased social and political awareness of issues of reproduction.
2. I mainly draw on literature from history of science and cultural history, including brief analyses of some main authors who shaped the debates in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
3. When Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans Jörg Rheinberger introduced the concept of ‘epistemic space’ with regard to the history of heredity, they stressed that they intended to reconstruct the history not of a concept, theory, or discipline but of a ‘knowledge regime’ that exhibits an ‘internal conceptual dynamics’ and involves various forms of knowledge that depend on ‘practices and institutions’ (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger Citation2007, 13–14). To highlight the fact that the epistemic space of reproduction is deeply enmeshed with political projects and strategies, I use the term ‘political-epistemic regime’.
4. I also do not subscribe to Clarke's contention that the ‘“immense will to knowledge” of Western science in terms of investigating reproduction was actually relatively quiescent until well into the twentieth century’ (Clarke Citation1998, 18). For Clarke, the history of the reproductive sciences begins in the early twentieth century when ‘a nucleus of reproductive … problems was then increasingly addressed by researchers in sufficient mutual communication and interaction for reproductive science to be identified as a distinct social world’ (Clarke Citation1998, 7). However, this process of formation of a scientific discipline did not emerge out of a sudden transition but was related to earlier developments and epistemic transformations that can be traced back in time to the mid-eighteenth century, as I show in this article.
5. For the German context see Susanne Schultz (Citation2012).
6. During recent years, some scholars such as the Cambridge-based research group ‘Generation to reproduction' and the German interdisciplinary network ‘Economies of reproduction. Interdisciplinary research on the past and present of human reproduction 1750–2010' have started to explore the longue durée history of reproduction and contributed to a genealogy of the modern politics of reproduction. Cf. Hopwood and Fleming (Citationforthcoming); Bock von Wülfingen et al. (Citation2015). Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's (Citation2007) history of the ‘knowledge regime’ of heredity is also a main source of inspiration. My article draws on this corpus of research.
7. ‘Since the late medieval period,’ Müller-Wille explains, ‘physicians had sporadically referred to diseases that were restricted to particular families as “hereditary diseases”’ (Müller-Wille Citation2014, 219). However, diseases in general ‘were identified with the states of individual bodies that were elicited by a variety of incidentally or periodically recurring factors … [Thus] there was little room for a conception of diseases, let alone bodily properties in general, that in any literal sense could be seen as being passed down or transmitted from parent to offspring’ (Müller-Wille Citation2014, 219–20).
8. Political and philosophical speculations about human breeding have of course a much longer history. In the eighteenth century, however, they first emerged at the centre of scientific disputes over generation (see Davidson Citation2009; Eigen Figal Citation2008).
9. Here and throughout, all translations are my own unless otherwise attributed.
10. For a more detailed account, see Lettow (Citationforthcoming).
11. ‘It was in the anthropological writings of Immanuel Kant that conceptions of heredity first began to acquire a specific biological meaning’ (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger Citation2007, 17). With regard to the history of the race discourse, Kant's definition proved to be of utmost importance because he was the first to formulate a proto-biological concept of race that overcame the weaknesses of climate theory. For a detailed account of Kant's theory of race, see Bernasconi (Citation2002) and Lagier (Citation2004).
12. In fact, Kant distinguished between several forms of differences that he called ‘races’ (Rassen), ‘variations’ (Spielarten), ‘varieties’ (Varietäten), and ‘special stock’ (Schläge). According to Kant these terms referred to different modes of hereditary transmission, contingent and less contingent ones. His main subject in all the three essays that he devoted to the issue is the concept of race.
13. On the notion of sexual complementarity as formulated by French naturalists and philosophers, see Honegger (Citation1991, 126–68); on the radicalization of gender hierarchies in the context of German Naturphilosophie and anthropological discourse, see Honegger (Citation1991, 168 ff.) and Reill (Citation2014, 217–36).
14. On the differences between Schelling's and Hegel's accounts of sexual polarity, see Stone (Citation2014).
15. In Latin America, for example, ‘Ecuador has developed an oocyte market featuring “light-skinned” vendors, servicing neighboring countries, and in Southeast Asia, Vietnamese women sell oocytes to intending parents in Thailand’ (Cooper and Waldby Citation2014, 64). In Europe, oocyte markets are mainly established in Eastern European countries and frequented by consumers from Western Europe.
16. Alison Bashford argues that the ‘world population’ became an object of transnational political management only in the early twentieth century, ‘when the old political economy of population combined with (1) the new geopolitics of a closed world, (2) post-Darwinian focus on interdependent organisms in space, (3) the new biology of generational breeding’ (Bashford Citation2014, 13). However, she also notes that Malthus had earlier constituted the problem as one of ‘planetary scale, something that was picked up by scholars in the 1920s’ (Bashford Citation2014, 4).
17. For a rough sketch of the transformations of concepts and practices of reproduction from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, see Bock von Wülfingen et al. (Citation2015).