Special Topics:

Catalog description

The Reproductive Unit: We will look at some of the history of the ideal of the nuclear family, as socio-bio-economic-affective and reproductive unit. We will consider the moral/ideological justifications for this unit and the measures taken by states and other apparatuses to promote it, however unsustainable it may be, and to interdict it, however sustaining it may be (measures that include state surveillance, management and dissolution of families or other support systems that don’t fulfill the functions this unit is meant to fulfill). We will consider the way class war, colonial war, race war, the wars against women, queer and crip people are carried out through interventions in biological in reproduction, including eugenics and population/workforce management through birth control, coerced sterilization, “one child” policies, sex-selection (now legal only in the US), and adoption as well as efforts to control pregnant people through rape, restrictions on pregnancy termination and IVF, among other measures. We will also consider the way the reproductive unit has been supplemented by paid surrogates, wet nurses and other caregivers. Course materials will include sentimental, utopian and “monstrous” representations of families as well as critical writing about reproduction in its various forms by authors and artists such as: Thomas Robert Malthus; Jonathan Swift; Jade Sasser; Michel Foucault; Francis Galton; Mary Shelly; Silvia Federici; Edward Steichen; Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Jennifer Morgan; Hortense J. Spillers; Ana Maria García; Lourdes Portillo; Rita Laura Segato; Mary Pat Brady; Jennie Livingston and her many coauthors; Mark Rifkin; Joseph M. Pierce; Tsai Ming-liang; Rey Chow; W. E. B. Du Bois; Octavia Butler; Rachel Carson; Heather Davis; Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos; Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and perhaps some horror films from the 1970s.