epithalamion

video with eponymous poem by Paula Claire (2022)

This video traces implications of the influential and pernicious politics of sentiment. As Kyla Schuller has written, sentimentalism positions the feelings of White bodies as central and foundational to liberal democracy. Sentimental discourse approaches feeling as a way to bind White bodies together, a technique of power crucial for Euro-American nation-states since the late eighteenth century. Sentimentalism provided a framework which, for Schuller, understands “civilized bodies as receptive to their milieu and able to discipline their sensory susceptibility” in contradistinction to primitive bodies, who were “deemed to be impulsive and insensate, incapable of evolutionary change.” On the ground, sentimentalism necessitates what Schuller calls “sensorial discipline,” an “imperative placed on the civilized races, especially its female members and those aspiring to civilization and citizenship, to learn to master their sensory impulses and thus direct the development of themselves and their descendents,” which would become an important antecedent to 20th century eugenics.

The video excavates the politics of sentiment across a wide variety of practices from the late 18th century to the present, with a particular focus on US settler-imperialism. As Schuller’s study has demonstrated, sentiment is not only an aesthetics but is rather a necropolitics, one which came to underwrite the most horrendous violence of the US 19th century: slavery, race science, assimilation camps (“residential schools”), and more. The video’s montage excavates sentimental politics as they move across historically White compartmentalizations such as public/private, emotion/science, aesthetic/political, metropole/frontier, mundane/violent, and more.

While sentimentalism provided frameworks for distinguishing civilized and primitive, it did not guarantee the stability of civilization. The concept of binary sex emerged for precisely this purpose, to stabilize the vulnerability inherent in sensation and emotion: sentimental woman was counterbalanced by rational man. In this way, sex difference functions as a measure in service of racial necropower, with binary sex being understood as achievement and marker of civilization. In the video, the reading of Paula Claire’s 1971 poem thematizes the role of state-sanctioned, cisnormative, heteronormative marriage in anchoring sentimental necropower. An epithalamion is a poem written to celebrate a marriage. More specifically, it is written for the bride on her way to the marital chamber, that is, on her way to an act that binds binary sexes together, and thereby simultaneously stabilizes the home and the nation.