Of Political Economy, Biopolitics & Kayanmata: Sexual Economies, Celebrity Influencers, and Digitality

Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains." Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What free man/woman/non-binaries? What binds them, and to what are they bound? Whom are they bound to? How do they navigate liberty and bondage? (double bind or capture). In today's world, we all want to be integrated into the global economy, but what are the complexities and compelling ideas of our interpolation into an asymmetric system of power, particularly within the matrix of technology, with regard to Kayanmata?

I began my presentation by exploring definitions of political economy as Marx and Hegel think of it and its critique centering on the European sites of early Marxist focus. Then I examine how race complicates Marxism by touching on "Black Jacobins," as C.L.R James calls them, people who think of exploitation and oppositional consciousness within the context of Black Diasporan( I know Weheliye caution against such terms as African Diaspora /African/American). Then, I touch briefly on Third World scholars (not geographic)(Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, A.G Frank, Walter Rodney, Claude Ake, and more) and others thinking about global exploitation and expropriation.

Where does political economy take us when technology and biopolitics meet? More so, within the context of biopolitics, as Foucault, Agamben (Bare life), and Mbembe (Necropolitics) think it? Or like Alexandra Weheliye and Naminata Diabate, when race, gender, and sexualities come in. If biopolitics is simply the politics of population control (panopticon as per Focualt), whether the population is prisons, medicine, sexuality, and governmentality or others, what happens when the political economy, biopolitics, and technology meet? Technology is undoubtedly challenging, changing, and creating new complexities around how we do everything, particularly life in modernity. What are the contradictory/compelling ways to think about life in the modern world? How do we see Kanyanmata and celebrity influencers in the technological disruption/creative Chao? Is there a death of distinction between Media Old vs. New Media? I grounded my presentation in the works of my mentor/sponsor, Prof Saheed Aderinto, on Sexual Economics/Sexual History. Particularly his book "When Sex Threatened the State.". The following chapters were practical.

• Introduction: Sex and Sexuality in African Colonial Encounter

• Chapter 4: The sexual scourge of imperial order. Race and the Medicalization of Sex and Colonial Security

• Chapter 5: Sexualized Laws, Criminalized Bodies: Anti-prostitution law and the making of a New Socio-Sexual Order

• Chapter 6: Men, Masculinities, and the Politics of Sexual Control

Kayanmata is a Hausa word –a northern Nigerian language translated as women's things. It is often a herbal mixture used for various purposes, from sex sweetener, vaginal tightening, sexual enhancement, and to gain sexual prowess, as well as a charm and spell to make women endearing to their lovers to secure financial gains. Social media influencers have brought Kayanmata discretely used sexual accouterments and spiritual repertoires in conservative northern Nigeria from margin to center. The core argument is that media, economics, and biopolitics have converged in ways that create subjectivity, subversion, resistance, and agency in ways that open new pathways of thinking about politics, life, gender, and sexuality within our modern world and also create complications around rights, privacy, control, surveillance, patent and intellectual property. As such, we can no longer sit or build fences around our research. Disciplinary boundaries have collapsed like the Berlin wall, with multidisciplinary standing as the "last man" to borrow from Francis Fukuyama. The melting point is the Trinity of Power, Politics, and Popular Culture. Where do we find the political economy/biopolitics in the media?

My case study was Regina Daniels and Hauma Mohammed ( Jaruma). Where do capitalist consumerist culture and political and technological panopticon( biopolitics) meet with Kayanmata? Kayanmata meets, and all concepts used collide at the junction where the attempt to escape control, regulation, and surveillance meets with technology that was supposed to be liberating and democratic and further subsumes the subject into another realm of power with no territory of its own but is subject to another sovereign power. It is a matrix of freedom and capture, liberation and subjectivity ( you can say what is on your mind on Facebook, but there is a "community" standard that will send you to Mark Jail(Prison).

Where Power, Politics, and Popular Media Meet?

1. power /censorship: "community standards" of Facebook and Instagram. The debates on public health that emanate from privileging Western medicine/repertories over Indigenous(Kayanmata)

2. Market forces /Algorithm: operates through ads ( your information is collected, and the targeted ad meets your search history).

3. The extension of capitalist consumerist logic to indigenous products and items.

4. The appropriation and expropriation of marginalized products and practices and interpolating them into consumerist products (different but similar to cultural appropriation) with dire implications for the local economy of the women who made them. (Reflect on how corporate textiles took over indigenous cloth making (disarticulation of the economy).

5. The displacement of "subaltern" producers by "big names." relationship of exploitation, how these products are repacked and sold.

6. Regulation, surveillance, control/policing (Twitter ban, the agreement between sovereign power (state) and big technological giants.

7. When Jaruma was arrested for a bailable offense, as legal experts said. Power, politics, and popular media meet here not necessarily on the court of opinion in social media but under sovereign law.

Thematic Focus of my past, present, and future research P3

• Power

• Politics

• Popular Music/Culture

An excerpt of the presentation was delivered at a seminar for Ph.D. Students in Political Economy of the Media & Other Mass Communication Theories at Caleb University, Nigeria. 11/10/2022

Posted on Facebook on  October 11, 2022.

I do not own the copyright to this image. Kindly email oyin2010@gmail.com for credit.