28 RüdigerKunow
haveoftenresortedtosuchtypesorstereotypesinordertosubsequently
deconstruct them in the course of their narratives: Melville's "Black
Guinea"(inTheConfidence-Man,discussedatmorelengthbelowinthe
argument on "Spectral Disabilities'' or Babo "the faithful Fellow" (in
"BenitoCereno")areexamplesofthisprocess.Thisisnotsotosaythat
literatureortheartsingeneralwerethesolerepositoriesofanti-racistor
anti-sexistthought.
Attributions based on biological, hence allegedly "natural,"
specificities have in the context of race and gender generated
collectivities of social and cultural—but also economic—Otherness,
ratifying the powerof someto dispose of others. The widespread social
and cultural praxis of highlighting biological heterogeneity and
difference has in dialectical fashion also produced social and cultural
sameness among the persons thus designated. Racial and gendered
stereotypes unfold their persuasive power by arguing that all African
Americans or all women are somehow the same and point to or rely on
biological "evidence." In this fashion race and gender (like age and
disability)formwhatIrisMarionYounghascalled"apassiveunity,one
that does not arise from the individuals... but rather positions them
through the material organization" of biological deviation from a
purportednorm("Gender"733).
Race and gender in their current conceptual form have been
systematized and normatively charged in the context of EuroAmerican
modernity.^20 Duringthisprocess,biologyhasfunctioned—"naturally"as
it were—as a supporting actor in the drama of Enlightenment thinking
and the new "scientific" knowledges produced in its wake. The
progressive medicalization of the human body, new techniques of
measuring and data about susceptibilities to diseases, the emerging
social sciences with "scientific" evidence for deviant behavior have all
contributed to consolidating the biological components of race and
gender. Especially the history of the uses of both concepts warrants the
distrust articulated by critical theory against the systematizing and
(^20) Lisa Lowe provides an example illustrating to what absurd lengths this
systematizing drive went: an eighteenth-century topographer, de Saint-Mérys,
came up with a schema which distinguished eleven racial categories unfolding
into 110 combinations from absolutely white to absolutely black (qtd. in L.
Lowe32).