Beatriz Preciado 1. The crip movements refute the medical deiniton of disability and have developed aalarge critique of the cultural and political technique of body normalization, and of the procenses of dabling, which arived swith modernity and indturalzation. Crip hoory ito debility erode what queer theory isto LOBT studies, See Robert, McRae, (rip Thor: Cultural Signs of Qucernen and Disabil (New York: New ‘York University Pres, 2006). Architecture as a Practice of Biopolitical Disobedience Apart from a few remarkable exceptions, architects have con- tinued these past 20 years to ignore the epistemological trans- formations and the critical turn taking place in contemporary queer, transgender, and crip movements,’ and, indulged by the most dramatic amount of capital flowing between Dubai and Prada and the People’s Republic of China since World War have acted as if the ongoing transformation of sexual and somatic politics were just a minor detail within a new peak of architectural production at the global scale. As a result of this negation, feminist and queer architectural practices are today. still posed in terms of female architects or discussed in shy or embarrassing debates around the more or less “out” character of the practices of Philip Johnson or Paul Rudolph. ‘What is the relationship between gender and sexual politics and architectural practices and discourses today? Can there be an architectural practice of gender and sexual disruption? Is it possible to think of architecture as a practice of gender and sexual resistance within contemporary global capitalism? Or ‘more generally, what is the place of architecture in what Walter Benjamin called “the tradition of the oppressed?” To start addressing these questions, let me take a detour to draw out the relationship between architecture and the modern political history of the body and sexuality with the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, before returning to contemporary sexual and somatic micropolitical movements. ARCHITECTURE AS BIOPOLITICAL TECHNIQUE If we look at architectural practices from the perspective of antagonism, or more precisely, of gender and sexual-political struggles, a map emerges of architecture functioning as a nor~ malizing, genderizing, and racializing force. In thinking about the transformations of European society at the end of the 18th century, Foucault described the transition from what he called a sovereign society toward a disciplinary society. At the dawn of the French Revolution and the climax of colonialism, he noted, amINS A. Kromminen, Grvscomasris, 2009, COURTESY ARJECT.DE / GALLERY Woursraspren. 2. Michel Foucault, Miser dela sexuait 1 ‘Lavolot de ser [The Binary of Sexual ‘The Will o Knowledge] (Pars Gallimard, 1976), 136-19; Michel Foucale, Naerance dela binplitiqe, Cour a Cllige de France, 43978-1979 [The Birth of Biopoliis} (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004). 5 Fora viral history of hysteria, see (Georges Didi-Huberman, Zrenon of _Hyitra: Charest andthe Pbtorapbic “eongrapy ofthe Slptrtre Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), anew form of power that calculates life technologically ~ in terms of population, health, and national interest — displaced a prior form of power that decided and ritualized death. Foucault called this new, diffuse set of political and cultural dispositife for regulating life biopower. Biopower overflows the legal and punitive spheres to become a force that penetrates and constitutes the body of the modern individual. It no longer behaves as a coercive law or negative mandate, but becomes versatile and responsive. It isa friendly power that takes the form of an art for governing life. As a general political technology, 19th-century biopower morphed into disciplinary architectures (prisons, barracks, schools, hospitals), scientific texts, tables of statistics, demographic calculus, employment options, and public hygiene. Foucault underlined the centrality of sex and sexuality in the modern art of governing life during this period. While only the male body sexuality was recognized for its onto- logical and anatomic existence in the sovereign regime, biopoli- tics introduced sexual difference as anatomic inscription and transformed the uterus and interior of the body into new areas of political management. Within this new biopolitical regime, dominated by the strict continuity between sexuality and repro- duction, the “masturbator,” the “homosexual,” and the “sexual invert” became pathological identities to be clinically treated and normalized. The feminine body's hysterization, children’s sexual pedagogy, regulation of procreative conduct, and psy- chiatrization of the pervert’s pleasures were, for Foucault, the axes of this project, which he distinguished, not without irony, as a process of the “modernization of sexuality” The sexual-political devices that developed with the new aesthetics of sexual difference and sexual identities were mechanical, semiotic, and architectural techniques to natural- ize sex. They included the Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy, treatises on maximizing the natural resources of population growth, judiciary texts on the penalization of transvestism and sodomy, handcuffs to restrain the hands of masturbating girls to their beds, iron ankle spreaders to separate the legs of hysterics, sil- ver films to engrave photographic images of the dilated anuses of passive homosexuals, and straitjackets to hold the indomi- table bodies of masculine women.} These apparatuses took the form of a biopolitical architecture external to the body and comprised systems with a firm command of orthopedic politics and disciplinary exoskeletons. The model for these techniques of subjectivation, according to Foucault, could be Jeremy Bentham’s prison-factory (particularly panopticism), the asylum, or military barracks. The devices of sexual-political m2 Log 254: cemedttdes de Rechercher de Formato aston 5:The work of CERT enh opi produced clecive back in we edons Recht osc csl Lr machen d ator (erg de hip mode) eee nares subjectivation were inevitably interlinked with the netlike expansion of gender and race-segregated institutions, as well as the development of the heterosexual domestic architectural regime during the 19th century. These extensive, intensive, and, moreover, intimate architectural forms include a redefini- tion of private and public spaces, the management of sexual commerce, from street hygenics and women’s confinement, to gynecological devices and sexual orthopedic inventions (the corset, the speculum, the medical vibrator), as well as new media techniques of control and representation (photography, film, incipient pornography) and the massive development of psychological techniques for introspection and confession. In his meticulous analyses of the 19th-century asylum and prison, Foucault argues that disciplinary architectures do not fanction as shelters for a given subject, but rather as biopoliti- cal technologies that produce (through spatial distribution and surveillance) the gendered, sexual, and racial subjects who inhabit and use them. During the 1970s, Foucault, together with the French research group CERFI,* gathered around the journal Rechercher to redefine 19th-century architecture as, part of the “governmental techniques for managing the life of the population,” techniques that work through the control of epidemics in the city — eliminating waste, cleaning streets, separating the normal and the pathological - and the manage- ment of natality, but also through control of the circulation of organic fluids — water, blood, milk, and semen ~ and the strategic assemblage of organs — hands, eyes, penises, vaginas, mouths. In terms of a theory of architecture, Foucault invites us to move from an anamorphic model of interpreting the re- lationship berween the body and architecture, to a biopolitical model where architecture is understood as a political artifact to construct and produce the body rather than a mimetic system. of representation. CERFI’s research on the birth of the modern hospital in France is probably one of the most explicit examples of the study of architecture as governmental technique. The architecture of the hospital (distributing spaces to prevent con- tamination, circulate air, separate different kinds of sickness and bodies, and to watch and control the sick) is for Foucault the spatialization of medical knowledge and power. As Bruno Fortier argues, normative architectural typologies derive from. the definition of the hospital asa rational machine to produce climatic, demographic, hygenic, medical, and statistical knowl- edge.’ Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and CERFI understood architecture neither as form nor as tectonics, but rather as a biopolitical technology of power and subjectivation: a wy Log.2s