Introduction:BiologizingCulture/CulturingBiology 13
American Cultural Studies that might have a potential relevance for the
investigations undertaken below. Instead, I will explore how this
discipline––understood as "interdisciplinary academic endeavor to gain
systematic knowledge about American society and culture.. ." (Fluck
andClaviezix)––canbeusefullyinvolvedinaprojectthatmakesupthe
central concern of this book: to trace the ways in which in the United
States of America the cultural has become—or always been—suffused
with thebiological.Suchaprojectwouldbegrievously myopicifitdid
notreflectonthegivenmaterialsocialconditionsintheUnitedStatesat
anygivenpointofanalysis.
TheU.S.areoneofthefewcountriesthatcanclaimtohaveawhole
academicdiscipline,AmericanStudies,foritsown,"aninstitutionalized
projectwhosedisciplinaryhistorywouldkeepthelostsynthesisaliveas
origin, as the founding principle" (Pease and Wiegman 15). My project
engages this field at a particular moment of its disciplinary
conversations,whentheimpactofnewsocialmovementsandtheglobal
involvementsoftheUnitedStateshavecausedrenewedreflectionabout
the codes and "modes of national belonging" (Pease, "Exceptionalism"
108) and the methodological protocols to describe them. Biology and
matters biological in their various shapes and forms are, I will argue,
pervasive and powerful signifiers for what "America" means in a given
context and involvingawidevariety ofissues.Seen throughthelensof
American studies, biology, especially the biology of the human body,
appearsasanintensegeneratorofculturalpracticesandproblemsinUS
society and culture. In past and present, signifiers grounded in biology
have been powerful but somewhat neglected tools for negotiating and
encodingprotocolsofnationalidentityandbelonging,ofteninwaysthat
were taken as "natural" because they were biological. Media-ting the
meaning of the great object A of the discipline, biology and matters
biological, materializes (in a very literal sense of that word) identities
and connectivities (including undesirable ones) and makes visible who
in a specific historical constellation can be counted among the "we"
addressed in that embracing foundational phrase "we, the people of the
United States." As Priscilla Wald argued in her 2011 Presidential
AddresstotheAmericanStudiesAssociation,
[q]uestions about the fundamental nature of the human emerged from
these [societal] innovations and transformations and formed the