Written and recorded by Kendall Chan
I Who Have Never Known Men: Feminist Resistance Meets Futuristic Biopolitics
By Kendall Chan
This video essay gave me a chance to explore the themes of our course through one of my favorite passions: literature. Over the past year or so, I’ve become especially interested in feminist science fiction and dystopia, which uses alternate worlds and futures not to ignore or escape from gendered questions, but to confront and interrogate how gender can structure regimes of life. Classic feminist dystopian novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin often tackle current anxieties surrounding reproductive rights, exploring what present bodily control and state restrictions may look like if taken to a frightening extreme in a near-future, or set in a world where supernatural powers infuse women’s bodies with higher stakes. I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman, addresses a topic that many forget has feminist stakes: incarceration and isolation. Globally, women make up a small percentage of the total prison population. In addition to this, gendered norms cast prisons as a highly masculinized space of power and violence, a site designed for and appropriate for men only. However, over the last decade, international rates of female incarceration has grown exponentially, even as the UN has adopted measures to develop alternatives to imprisoning women offenders (Summers 2021). And imprisoning women has its own distinct implications, effects, and issues that are of feminist concern.
Harpman explores the gendered dynamics of imprisonment to great effect. The fact that the forty prisoners are all women is never forgotten and is central to their experiences, from the way that they handle menstruation in the absence of period products, to the ways they form community once they are freed from their cage. Her dystopian imagining is not far off from the realities of many women prisoners around the world, whose menstruation practices become a challenge and vulnerability while imprisoned (Francis 2017; Bobel and Fahs 2020).
This ominous mystery, at the heart of the novel, captures so much about the gendered nature of state control and biopolitics. Outside of the prison of Harpman’s novel, which perhaps looks quite similar to the society we live in today, women serve a crucial function of upholding society through labors productive, reproductive, and emotive. These functions, which all contribute to the ongoing maintenance and production of a population, are of extreme state-building interest, which is why the labor participation and reproductive rights of women are so heavily contested by governments. Women’s role as producers and protectors of the nation’s domestic heart is so important that the narrator questions the purpose of their lives in captivity, unable to understand why a powerful entity would spend such resources to cut them off from their feminized roles in society. One way this conundrum might be explained is through a real life example of the imprisonment of suffragettes in early 20th century Britain. Hundreds of women were imprisoned in Holloway for demanding the right to vote and, faced with brutal conditions, went on hunger strikes as a mode of protest. Prison authorities responded by force-feeding women, which mirrors an instance in Harpman’s novel where a woman attempts to starve herself but is “harassed” by guards until she yields (Davies 2018; Harpman 1995, 27). Why did the British government spend resources and effort detaining hundreds of women, even going so far as to force-feed prisoners to keep them alive in detention? Though their incarceration disrupted their gendered roles and value as domestic producers and caretakers, their suffrage activism also posed a threat to the stability of British home life and gender roles, thus necessitating imprisonment. Gender is thus a defining factor shaping the state’s implementation of biopolitics, and the paradoxical dilemma that arises from female imprisonment.
However, like the women in Harpman’s novel, this bodily vulnerability can also be interpreted as a site of creative resistance and resilience. While the forty women in I Who Have Never Known Men fashion themselves period products due to the denial of a basic hygienic necessity, other prisoners around the world have taken the opportunity to smuggle in pads, refused to allow their captors to see them bleed, or even used their menstrual blood as a form of protest (Shwaikh forthcoming).
The theme of bodily resistance and weaponization of life in the face of incarceration is repeatedly drawn on throughout the book. The narrator’s decision to continuously stare at a single guard in order to make him uncomfortable and afraid displays both a version of sumud, a steadfastness in which a prisoner practices a behavior alternative to or subversive of expectations, and a way in which she is able to re-appropriate her body, traditionally considered fragile and weak, and use it as a site of resistance and opposition to the power exerted by the guard over her existence. It is even more explicit when the narrator describes turning her body into a clock, or literally making her heartbeat into a tool that tracks the time, as a way to contend the artificially imposed schedule that administers her life. Through the protagonist’s discovery of her heartbeat as a way to keep track of “true” time, Harpman illustrates both Foucault’s notion of biopolitics– showing how an authority may exercise an all-encompassing control over the administration of life– and a way to resist it, by returning to the power of one’s own body.
Through the genre of science fiction, Harpman is able to develop the gendered aspects of biopolitics. The women wonder to what end they are being kept alive. Forbidden from attempting suicide, they are in fact forced to stay alive by an unknown authority. The narrator ponders, “In their previous lives, the women had worked, borne children and made love. All I knew was that these things were greatly valued. What use were we here?” (Harpman 1995, 23).
I chose the video essay format because I thought it was important to verbalize my analysis and read aloud the powerful quotes from Harpman’s book. I also wanted to connect the strong imagery in the novel to a visual display, which is why my analysis is accompanied by selected works of feminist art that I feel capture the visceral, emotive tone of the work. The visual images are mostly from female artists and evoke desolation, isolation, captivity, the body, suffering, and resistance. Along with illustrating the main points of my argument, the selected art shows that the feminist themes of Harpman’s book are replicated in various mediums and time periods, by women around the world.