Research

Feminist conceptualizations of backlash have understandably and appropriately centered on women’s experiences, drawing attention to efforts that would, as Susan Faludi noted in 1991, “retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women.” In this essay, I reengage the concept to ask what we might learn if our point of departure was informed by the experience of blackness. I suggest that rather than positioning backlash as a reactionary response to any perceived gains, centering race allows us to theorize backlash as a condition of modernity. Instead of conceptualizing backlash as a punitive but potentially rectifiable kink, I suggest that backlash-as-condition is an inherent systemic feature that compels us to reimagine the very system that is itself dependent on backlash for its survival and proper functioning.

At what age do girls gain the maturity to make sexual choices? This question provokes especially vexed debates in India, where early marriage is a widespread practice. India has served as a focal problem site in NGO campaigns and intergovernmental conferences setting age standards for sexual maturity. Over the last century, the country shifted the legal age of marriage from twelve, among the lowest in the world, to eighteen, at the high end of the global spectrum.

Ashwini Tambe illuminates the ideas that shaped such shifts: how the concept of adolescence as a sheltered phase led to delaying both marriage and legal adulthood; how the imperative of population control influenced laws on marriage age; and how imperial moral hierarchies between nations provoked defensive postures within India. Tambe's transnational feminist approach to legal history shows how intergovernmental debates influenced Indian laws and how expert discourses in India changed UN terminology about girls. Ultimately, the well-meaning focus on child marriage became tethered less to the well-being of girls themselves and more to parents' interests, population control targets, and the preservation of national reputation.

Analyzing myriad technologies, from sex robots and military drones to sharing-economy platforms, Atanasoski and Vora show how liberal structures of antiblackness, settler colonialism, and patriarchy are fundamental to human---machine interactions, as well as the very definition of the human. While these new technologies and engineering projects promise a revolutionary new future, they replicate and reinforce racialized and gendered ideas about devalued work, exploitation, dispossession, and capitalist accumulation. Yet, even as engineers design robots to be more perfect versions of the human—more rational killers, more efficient workers, and tireless companions—the potential exists to develop alternative modes of engineering and technological development in ways that refuse the racial and colonial logics that maintain social hierarchies and inequality.

With the election of Barack Obama, the idea that American society had become postracial—that is, race was no longer a main factor in influencing and structuring people's lives—took hold in public consciousness, increasingly accepted by many. The contributors to Racism Postrace examine the concept of postrace and its powerful history and allure, showing how proclamations of a postracial society further normalize racism and obscure structural antiblackness.

This essay analyzes the current epidemic of school shootings and anti-black police violence in conjunction with the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968. These two cultural moments— set fifty years apart— are each rooted in the broader discourse of white masculinity in crisis and the insurgence of American nationalism which have intensified during times of great cultural change. In both periods, the impetus to pass gun control legislation is motivated not by the ongoing protests against gun violence facing black Americans, but by a handful of significant events that targeted predominantly white citizens, symbolized by the assassination of President Kennedy in the 1960s and the students of Stoneman Douglas today.

Connecting the real-life patenting of genes to the fictional patenting of the human genome in the TV series Orphan Black, I demonstrate how the neoliberal shift towards privatization is reframing the question of private property, specifically what Donna Dickenson refers to as “property in the body.” While the modern legal subject had ownership over its body, the meeting of eugenic science and intellectual property law today begs the question: to whom does the body and its self-reproducing parts belong? In a departure from the distinction Melinda Cooper draws between the germ and stem cell line, I contend that the 2013 Myriad Genetics Supreme Court Case has created an ideological loophole towards patenting “life itself” and Orphan Black provides an explanatory tool for how the modern legal system is structured by corporate pressures and a mode of legal interpretation that privileges private property rights. My argument unfolds via an examination of Orphan Black’s Leda (female) and Castor (male) clones’ synthetic DNA on three levels: as the object of an intellectual property patent, a mechanism of surplus life and sterility, and a sexually-transmitted virus or bioweapon. By investigating the differences in how the Ledas and Castors are affected by—and affect others through— their synthetic biology, we gain real-world insight into how cultural understandings of gender and sexuality are shaping the development of new scientific technologies and their adjudication in the courtroom. In its entirety, this essay reveals how the larger projects of neoliberalism, capitalism, and advanced scientific technologies are molding the eugenic project as it reemerges as 21st century genetic engineering.

This essay appears in the book Sisterhood, Science, and Surveillance in Orphan Black: Critical Essays edited by Jane Brennan Croft and Alyson R Buckman.

Digital humanities is an amorphous and contested field, network, discourse, or discipline. Lothian argues that it is best understood as a fandom—and that there is much to learn from attending to processes and practices of scholarly field formation through lenses developed by fan theorists, practitioners, and scholars. This approach positions digital humanities as operating in excess of institutional logics, treating the affects and conflicts that accompany discussions of digital scholarship as sites of knowledge production in themselves. The article show how the lessons of media fandom's subcultural knowledge production can apply to digital humanities' scholarly networks, calling attention to gendered and racialized power dynamics. Operating both within and in critique of academic digital humanities, the collective movement of #transformDH demonstrates how critical fandom might operate as a methodology for a transformative digital humanities whose goals and ethics do not rely on academic disciplines and institutions.

Narratives of possible futures provide frameworks through which we understand our present, but the discourse of “the” future has never been a singular one. Imagined futures have often been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures offers a counterhistory of works that have sought—with varying degrees of success—to speculate otherwise. Examining speculative texts from the 1890s to the 2010s, from Samuel R. Delany to Sense8, Lothian considers the ways in which early feminist utopias and dystopias, Afrofuturist fiction, and queer science fiction media have insisted that the future can and must deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly restrictive hopes for redemption.

In an essay titled “The Virtual Anthropologist,” written in 1997, Kath Weston highlights the hybrid position of the native ethnographer in academia. Although the hard labor of researching on the field is illuminated in the writing of the ethnographer, the writing itself does not account for the labor of composing those sentences. On the other hand, if the researcher is native, that is, her field is where her home is, then research itself does not count as labor.¹ If the queer studying queers is in a geographical location that she calls home, then she is automatically interpellated as the insider. She already has all the data. Hence, how is her fieldwork serious research? So, where does one locate the labors of the native ethnographer? In the writing or in the research? Weston writes provocatively, “. . . her work will remain suspect, subject to inspection on the grounds of authenticity rather than intellectual argument or acumen.”

By Ruth Enid Zambrana, professor and interim chair of women’s studies, director of the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

"Toxic Ivory Towers," seeks to document the professional work experiences of underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in U.S. higher education, and simultaneously address the social and economic inequalities in their life course trajectory. Ruth Enid Zambrana finds that despite the changing demographics of the nation, the percentages of Black and Hispanic faculty have increased only slightly, while the percentages obtaining tenure and earning promotion to full professor have remained relatively stagnant. Toxic Ivory Towers is the first book to take a look at the institutional factors impacting the ability of URM faculty to be successful at their jobs, and to flourish in academia. The book captures not only how various dimensions of identity inequality are expressed in the academy and how these social statuses influence the health and well-being of URM faculty, but also how institutional policies and practices can be used to transform the culture of an institution to increase rates of retention and promotion so URM faculty can thrive.