Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women

brown university spring 2009 Pembroke Center for teaching and research on women Markets and Bodies in Gender, Modern China, and the Transnational Perspective Kay B. Warren, Charles B. Tillinghast Jr. ’32 Transnational Humanities Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology, will lead the March 13, 2009 2009-2010 Pembroke Seminar. The seminar will look at global flows of people and technology that involve reimagining the body and transforming what it means to be human. It aims to trace patterns of global flows, and responses—international and local—to the ten- sions and uncertainties they unleash, seeking to understand the changing ways bodies are com- modified and the individual experiences and ide- ological constructions of these processes. Schol- ars will explore sites of anxiety that arise when innovations in global labor markets and biotech- nologies appear to push ahead of the law. How are these sites moralized and politicized? How are international norms and regulatory strate- gies formulated to define rapidly moving cur- rents of change? This inquiry calls for a variety of disciplinary perspectives and case studies from different parts of the world. Since these innovations are occurring in con- Hank Randall texts of neoliberal regimes of governance, we will consider policies that have the effect of projecting personal responsibility, self-regula- tion, and choice onto individuals as rational Hank Randall actors, which creates routinized sites of moni- (L-R) Amy Dooling of Connecticut College, Haiping H. Yan of Cornell University, Rey Chow of Brown University, Gail toring and intervention. What is obscured in Hershatter of University of California, Santa Cruz, Lingzhen Wang of Brown University, Zheng Wang of University of the focus on decontexualized individual bodies Michigan, and Chengzhou He of Nanjing University. – the migrant, the trafficking victim, the con- sumer of one’s own genetic information? When In conjunction with the Nanjing-Brown dramatically changed their views of the do local narratives reassert the primacy of the Joint Program in Gender Studies and the relationship of Chinese women to the social and economic contexts of people’s lives Humanities, the Pembroke Center, along revolution, shifting from a fascinated and their wider communities? Looking at mar- with East Asian Studies and the Cogut admiration of women’s elevated status in kets as particular historicized innovations Center for the Humanities, sponsored a socialist China in the early 1970s to a whose complex social and political fields medi- series of lectures and a colloquium on pronouncement of the failure of the ate their development, we will examine two dis- the question of gender in modern China. feminist cause in the Chinese commu- tinctive domains of markets and bodies: the nist revolution of the mid-1980s. This simultaneous recruitment and deterrence of While twentieth-century China has long radical change in perception has spurred migrant labor across borders and regions; and been described as a century of revolu- many questions. Was there a the simultaneous normalization and rejection of tion, Western feminist scholars of China human bodies with the global circulation of have, over the past twenty years quite Continued on page 4 public health and biotechnological regimes. For more information, please visit our website at www.pembrokecenter.org. Postdoctoral Fellows Hank Randall Hank Randall Hank Randall Hank Randall Sandy Alexandre Jason Lindquist Astrid Schrader Lisa Uddin Nancy L. Buc Carol G. Lederer Artemis A.W. and Martha Pembroke Center Postdoctoral Fellow Postdoctoral Fellow Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow Postdoctoral Fellow Ph.D. in English, Ph.D. in English Literature and Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, Ph.D. in Visual and University of Virginia, 2007 Victorian Studies, University of California, Cultural Studies, Indiana University, 2008 Santa Cruz, 2008 University of Rochester, 2008 Project: “The Lynching Project: “Tropical Surfeit, Project: “Responsibility and Project: “Race, Gender, Diaspora: The Strange Fruits the Observing Subject, the Politics of Temporality in and Species in American of Violence” and the Text, 1773–1871” Toxic Microbiology” Zoo Renewal” Alexandre’s project analyzes Lindquist considers the rela- Schrader asks how one might Uddin examines the racial how what she calls “the ecol- tionships between the scien- think differently about and gendered dynamics ogy of lynching violence” nec- tific travel narrative and a vari- responsibility in scientific involved in the representation essarily informs the ways in ety of other European practices. Based on a compar- of animals. Focusing on U.S. which black-American artists representational modes. In ative analysis of experiments zoos of the 1960s and 1970s, think about black urbanization particular, he argues for the involved in an ongoing scien- she traces the simultaneous while reappraising the popu- emergence of a distinctive tific-political controversy over turns during that period to larity of the pastoral idyll in “rhetoric of excess” in the the toxicity of a fish-killing wildlife conservation, on the American literature and cul- tropical travel narrative, its microorganism, Schrader’s one hand, and urban and sub- ture. Alexandre’s work dispersion into fiction and project looks at how criteria urban development, on the addresses some of the follow- poetry, and its eventual effect for what counts as evidence other. Looking at the National ing questions: What does it on constructions of the ideal for or against toxicity get built Zoo and the San Diego Zoo, ultimately mean that “strange Victorian observer. Lindquist into scientific experiments. Uddin studies the ways zoo fruits” are unnatural to the concludes that the writing of Taking seriously that science designers, directors, and pro- (American) natural environ- travelers such as Alexander is a material practice to which moters struggled to construct ment? For blackness, even as von Humboldt, Charles Dar- not only humans contribute, naturalistic displays of breed- it is re-imagined as so many win, and Harriet Martineau Schrader proposes a notion of ing wildlife as displays of nor- fruit, is still dubbed influenced British thinking on responsibility that is attentive mative civic life. She asks “strange”—is indeed alien to a range of topics from aesthet- to multiple “histories” and how and to what extent pastoral accouterments. What ics to gender to imperial and “agencies,” and that under- endangered zoo animals ideologies do these fruits ulti- colonial relations. In scientific pins objectivity in science became surrogates in the mately help to fortify in their circles, in particular, encoun- rather than interfering with it. mid-twentieth-century pro- very uselessness as fruits— ters with an overwhelming Moving beyond the investiga- duction of American white- indeed, by their dying? What multitude of unfamiliar tion of how social values influ- ness, and considers the impli- role has the invocation of details became ritualized, ence the production of scien- cations for posthumanist American pastoral ideology encoded in the scientific tific facts, Schrader’s project theory and practice. played in shaming lynching process by John Tyndall and highlights the ways ethical apologists? Alexandre is also at others as a necessary prelimi- and political concerns become work on a second book proj- nary to scientific insight. necessarily part of the objec- ect, Race against Time, which tive referent in scientific looks at the ways we might experimentation as soon as transform our understanding more-than-human agencies of “race” if we examine how are taken into account. the very practice of race changes with age—both bio- graphically and generationally. 2 • pembroke center Pembroke Seminar Visions of Nature: Constructing the Cultural Other Leslie Bostrom, Chesler-Mallow Senior Faculty Research Fel- ture, humans represent their relationships with nature. Nature low and Associate Professor of Visual Art, is the director can be a kind of dark mirror, reflecting back one’s desires and of the 2008– 09 Pembroke Seminar. This year’s seminar, fears, loaded with contradictions and colonial yearnings. Peo- “Visions of Nature: Constructing the Cultural Other,” explores ple consume it and attempt to control it, yet revere it and representations of nature cross culturally and historically. attempt to preserve it. The seminar explores the ways such Those in the West have an uneasy and contradictory relation- ambivalences have driven Western scientific thinking as well ship with the natural world, being of it as animals yet simulta- as its social and cultural aspirations. In doing so, it looks at neously observing, consuming, and attempting to control it. what is particularly “Western” about Western nature. Through the visual arts and popular media, through science, For a full seminar description, please visit: literature, and philosophy, through landscaping and architec- www.pembrokecenter.org 2008-2009 Pembroke Center Lectures Hank Randall Donna Goodnow Hank Randall Ursula Heise Stefan Helmreich Lorraine Daston Associate Professor of English and Associate Professor of Anthropology Director Director of the Program in Modern Massachusetts Institute of Technology Max Planck Institute Thought and Literature “Alien Ocean: Life at Sea” for the History of Science Stanford University Visiting Professor of Social “The Surrealist Microscope” March 17, 2009 Thought and History University of Chicago February 10,

Load more