Kyla Wazana Tompkins

So Moved: Texture, Sensation, Biopolitics follows a set of lively material and affective forms - gelatinousness, fermentation, rawness, and intoxication - in order to link the biopolitical ordering of objects and populations to proprioceptic, that is, sensationally felt, aesthetic categories. Centering on the entry of these biochemical properties into U.S. law, with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Narcotics Bill of 1914, this project theorizes the connection between the legal and scientific taxonomizing of these categories and the concomitant re-organization of human life into populations variously deemed deserving of life or premature death. So Moved argues that movement – that is, the spatial unfolding of each of these materials in time - provides an analytic frame from which to inquire into their affiliation with different aesthetic-affective forms that are in turn deployed to guard the boundaries of deserving citizenship.