AUTUMN 2017
CHID 250: Queering the Race to Reproduction (Jey Saung)
This course aims to question and “queer” reproduction, typically thought of as a heterosexual, biogenetic, and “natural” process. We will learn about the many different ways in which reproduction is taken up through various queer family-building strategies. These could include utilizing sperm/egg donors, surrogacy, and adoption. Particularly, we will be examining how questions of gender, race and class are taken up in the deployment of strategies. The race and class disparities often seen in who can afford to take up these family-building strategies as well as who is providing the labor (e.g. surrogates hired in the Global South) complicate the queering of these strategies. Furthermore, we will explore the implications of future technologies spectacularized in the popular science news, such as merging two eggs to form a blastocyst and uterine transplants. How are we imagining queer reproductive futures?
WINTER 2018
CHID 480: Racialized Reproduction and Biopolitics of the State (Jey Saung)
Historically, the U.S. has been deeply implicated in strategies of racialized population control tactics. This course will trace these biopolitical histories by examining power as emergent in Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Through this understanding of biopower, we will then analyze how it operates in various moments. These include the development of the field of gynecology, the development of the birth control pill, and national histories of forced sterilizations. This course will also analyze state policing of sexuality through legislation such as age of consent laws, abstinence-only sex education policies, and currently proposed anti-abortion bills throughout the nation. Through these moments of overt state interventions into reproduction, we can begin to understand the role (and identities) of the (un)desirable citizen.
SPRING 2018
CHID 250: Race, Reproduction, and Sexuality (Logan O'Laughlin & Jey Saung)
This co-taught course contextualizes fertility discourses, reproductive technologies, and nuclear family tropes with the historical and ongoing violence against women of color. We read selections from foundational texts such as Angela Davis’ Women, Race, and Class, Dorothy Robert’s Killing the Black Body, Moraga and Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back anthology, and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality through the lens of biological reproduction in order to broaden analyses of the biopolitics of reproduction. In addition to grounding the coursework in theory, we attend to the following case studies: the development of birth control in the U.S., the Tuskegee Syphilis Project, the deployment of Agent Orange as a tool of colonialism, and the forced sterilization of transgender people prior to gender affirming surgery.